Half-Mooning: The Husbands of River Song
What Christmas is all about: Money
The episode starts off on the only type of planet in the universe: one that's already entirely populated with modern-looking humans so may as well be earth, anyway. ... Seriously, "Rings of Akhaten" is the first AND ONLY episode in the ENTIRETY OF NU WHO where the majority of the episode takes place on an alien world that is populated by ACTUAL ALIENS. Every other planet in the series is either uninhabited or already has a significant human presence.
The Doctor shows up and gets dragged off to a flying saucer, where he meets River Song. River needs him to perform brain surgery on her "husband", however it seems like River is the one who's already been lobotomized here. The Doctor repeatedly reveals his identity to her, but she acts like she has no idea who he is. Since she's already in Alex Kingston form, she's obviously already at a point in her timeline where she's met the Doctor, but, nope, she's got the Idiot Ball this episode in order to keep the conflict moving along.
After a snowy opening credits and Alex Kingston finally getting top billing, River continues to fawn over a cyborg emperor while the Doctor gets jealous and makes constant juvenile jealous insults, because everything Moffat has to degenerate into a dick-waving contest.
River pulls the Doctor aside and informs him that she actually just wants the diamond embedded in the emperor's head and is totally on board with killing him to get it. The Doctor is appalled because killing people for selfish reasons is wrong! He again very explicitly informs her that he's the Doctor, but nope, she still doesn't get it, since she's still got the Idiot Ball firmly lodged in her own head.
The emperor gets light of her plan and attacks her with ninja Jawas, but they steal his head and escape with it. The remainder of the cyborg body then decides to employ the head of Moffat's stock "doofus minion" character that he employs in every Christmas special (the elves in last year's special, the mech-suit people in "The Doctor, the Widow, and the Wardrobe"... they're all this same useless character). Because people just being stupid with whimsical music playing over it is funny! That is the theme of this entire episode, really.
However, it turns out the Doctor and River can't escape in the TARDIS because the TARDIS can't leave when someone is both inside and outside it at the same time, so it's a good thing that the Doctor has never been able to fly it around while carrying around a severed head before, like Dorium or Handles.
So, that means the cyborg body can get in and start attacking them, and the Doctor suddenly reverses his stance from the previous episode and decides that even though River can regenerate, dying is bad, so saves her. The two land on a swanky ship and speak to a maitre'd about his children eating their mother, but the maitre'd becomes suspicious when the Doctor says his gastrointestinal tract speaks because that's just weird.
The Doctor and River get a table, and River continues to be an idiot because the plot needs her to be in order to drag out the conflict. The buyer for the diamond shows up, and we have gemstones and metal spheres being traded on an elite black market alien buyer's guild and this is just "Guardians of the Galaxy", isn't it?
River then goes into a lavish, emotional rant straight out of a 14 year-old's fanfiction about how the Doctor has never actually loved her and would never come rescue her because she doesn't mean anything to him and look at how ironic I'm being, do you feel for me yet?
The Doctor finally taps her on the shoulder and is like, "Uh, yeah, hi?", and since this is the dozenth time he's done this it finally clicks this time and River realizes that OMG HE'S THE DOCTOR.
Now that the plot has called for her to no longer have it, River takes her Idiot Ball and places it on the head of the cyborg body so that its stupidity short-circuits it and causes it to explode. They then run to the cockpit and the Doctor exclaims that no one on this ship is worth River's life because killing people for selfish reasons isn't wrong when HE does it! Moffat has a very, very twisted idea of what "love" looks like.
The ship crashes and he and River escape in the TARDIS. Since restaurants have been a theme the past few episodes, they go to another one, this one being the last place mentioned in River's diary before the Library (except didn't Eleven already take her there in one of the shorts? Or was the whole "you keep cancelling" thing supposed to be retconning that?).
The Doctor gives River the screwdriver from the Library and she gets all emotional that this is OMG totally for realsies going to be their last time together, even though she had no such sentiments going into the Library episode.
The episode does end on one sentiment that I can get behind: as long as characters can be happy at all, don't get too worked up if it can't be "forever". "Shipping" fandoms are really bad about this, where they act like any potential future hardship or separation means their ship has "sunk" or isn't "canon" or whatever the term going around these days is. Where never loving at all is better than loving and losing. So what if it's not perfect? So what if it's not eternal? Appreciate what you can get.
(I'm not saying any of this actually applies to the Doctor/River relationship in reality since it has been entirely told rather than shown, but I mean actual well-written relationships, and real life in general)
But, yeah, this episode was... not quite as boring as last year's, and not quite as soul-suckingly terrible as the year before that, but it still wasn't "good" by any stretch. Probably because the Idiot Ball/Plot is one of my most hated tropes ever, or really anything that artificially creates or maintains conflict by making the characters morons. And it speaks to the intelligence level of a writer if the conflict exists because "my heroes are stupid", and the conflict is resolved because "my villain is also stupid". If stupid is, then stupid does.
The episode starts off on the only type of planet in the universe: one that's already entirely populated with modern-looking humans so may as well be earth, anyway. ... Seriously, "Rings of Akhaten" is the first AND ONLY episode in the ENTIRETY OF NU WHO where the majority of the episode takes place on an alien world that is populated by ACTUAL ALIENS. Every other planet in the series is either uninhabited or already has a significant human presence.
The Doctor shows up and gets dragged off to a flying saucer, where he meets River Song. River needs him to perform brain surgery on her "husband", however it seems like River is the one who's already been lobotomized here. The Doctor repeatedly reveals his identity to her, but she acts like she has no idea who he is. Since she's already in Alex Kingston form, she's obviously already at a point in her timeline where she's met the Doctor, but, nope, she's got the Idiot Ball this episode in order to keep the conflict moving along.
After a snowy opening credits and Alex Kingston finally getting top billing, River continues to fawn over a cyborg emperor while the Doctor gets jealous and makes constant juvenile jealous insults, because everything Moffat has to degenerate into a dick-waving contest.
River pulls the Doctor aside and informs him that she actually just wants the diamond embedded in the emperor's head and is totally on board with killing him to get it. The Doctor is appalled because killing people for selfish reasons is wrong! He again very explicitly informs her that he's the Doctor, but nope, she still doesn't get it, since she's still got the Idiot Ball firmly lodged in her own head.
The emperor gets light of her plan and attacks her with ninja Jawas, but they steal his head and escape with it. The remainder of the cyborg body then decides to employ the head of Moffat's stock "doofus minion" character that he employs in every Christmas special (the elves in last year's special, the mech-suit people in "The Doctor, the Widow, and the Wardrobe"... they're all this same useless character). Because people just being stupid with whimsical music playing over it is funny! That is the theme of this entire episode, really.
However, it turns out the Doctor and River can't escape in the TARDIS because the TARDIS can't leave when someone is both inside and outside it at the same time, so it's a good thing that the Doctor has never been able to fly it around while carrying around a severed head before, like Dorium or Handles.
So, that means the cyborg body can get in and start attacking them, and the Doctor suddenly reverses his stance from the previous episode and decides that even though River can regenerate, dying is bad, so saves her. The two land on a swanky ship and speak to a maitre'd about his children eating their mother, but the maitre'd becomes suspicious when the Doctor says his gastrointestinal tract speaks because that's just weird.
The Doctor and River get a table, and River continues to be an idiot because the plot needs her to be in order to drag out the conflict. The buyer for the diamond shows up, and we have gemstones and metal spheres being traded on an elite black market alien buyer's guild and this is just "Guardians of the Galaxy", isn't it?
River then goes into a lavish, emotional rant straight out of a 14 year-old's fanfiction about how the Doctor has never actually loved her and would never come rescue her because she doesn't mean anything to him and look at how ironic I'm being, do you feel for me yet?
The Doctor finally taps her on the shoulder and is like, "Uh, yeah, hi?", and since this is the dozenth time he's done this it finally clicks this time and River realizes that OMG HE'S THE DOCTOR.
Now that the plot has called for her to no longer have it, River takes her Idiot Ball and places it on the head of the cyborg body so that its stupidity short-circuits it and causes it to explode. They then run to the cockpit and the Doctor exclaims that no one on this ship is worth River's life because killing people for selfish reasons isn't wrong when HE does it! Moffat has a very, very twisted idea of what "love" looks like.
The ship crashes and he and River escape in the TARDIS. Since restaurants have been a theme the past few episodes, they go to another one, this one being the last place mentioned in River's diary before the Library (except didn't Eleven already take her there in one of the shorts? Or was the whole "you keep cancelling" thing supposed to be retconning that?).
The Doctor gives River the screwdriver from the Library and she gets all emotional that this is OMG totally for realsies going to be their last time together, even though she had no such sentiments going into the Library episode.
The episode does end on one sentiment that I can get behind: as long as characters can be happy at all, don't get too worked up if it can't be "forever". "Shipping" fandoms are really bad about this, where they act like any potential future hardship or separation means their ship has "sunk" or isn't "canon" or whatever the term going around these days is. Where never loving at all is better than loving and losing. So what if it's not perfect? So what if it's not eternal? Appreciate what you can get.
(I'm not saying any of this actually applies to the Doctor/River relationship in reality since it has been entirely told rather than shown, but I mean actual well-written relationships, and real life in general)
But, yeah, this episode was... not quite as boring as last year's, and not quite as soul-suckingly terrible as the year before that, but it still wasn't "good" by any stretch. Probably because the Idiot Ball/Plot is one of my most hated tropes ever, or really anything that artificially creates or maintains conflict by making the characters morons. And it speaks to the intelligence level of a writer if the conflict exists because "my heroes are stupid", and the conflict is resolved because "my villain is also stupid". If stupid is, then stupid does.