It's been a bit of a long day today. On the upside, I got to sleep in. Also on the upside, since our new roof was done on Friday it was totally fine that it's been raining non-stop yesterday and today. For the first time in eight months I am not worried about leaks or rotting wood, because we finally have solid protection. On the downside, my autistic son was adamant about going to Epcot today to visit Alice and Snow White but I knew darn well that neither of them would be out in the rain. He was twitching and shouting and on the verge of a complete meltdown before we compromised and went to the Magic Kingdom instead to visit Tinkerbell since she is indoors. Then we got very lucky and had a rare Snow White visit, which made him very happy indeed. So it all turned out okay, it was just a little stressful along the way.

Oh, and I also watched River Song die today. So let's talk about that.

Forest of the Dead

(TARDIS Data Core recap)

Oh, poor Donna Noble. A significant plot thread in this episode consists of her living a full and happy life inside the virtual reality of The Library's data bank. She meets the perfect man ("Gorgeous and can't speak a word..."), marries him (in the very same wedding dress from her first story The Runaway Bride), and has two adorable children (named Joshua and Ella, after writer Steven Moffat's son Joshua and his son's best friend Ella). It's a lovely life, and the only problem is that none of it is real. It is genuinely heartbreaking when it is all torn away from her.

Back in The Library the Doctor eventually figures out that the Vashta Narada arrived in The Library by way of spores inside the pulp used to make the paper in the books, thus explaining why there are so many of them there. It is also ultimately revealed that CAL, the computer consciousness that runs The Library, was a real little girl who suffered from a terminal illness and who loved books -- and so her father built The Library for her in order to give her some kind of meaningful life. Unfortunately, she cracks under the pressure of all of the 4,022 other minds in the computer with her, all of the people she saved the day the Vashta Narada first swarmed. That leads to a self destruct countdown, which then leads to River Song making the ultimate sacrifice in order to reset the computer and rescue both CAL and all of the other survivors trapped inside the planet's hard drive.

The glimmer of hope in the end is that the Doctor realizes that his future self must have had a specific reason for giving River his sonic screwdriver. It turns out that River's consciousness has been saved to a neural relay embedded in the side of the screwdriver, and she ultimately gets saved to CAL's database along with Proper Dave, Other Dave, Miss Evengelista, and even Donna Noble's two fake children Joshua and Ella. There is a moving final voiceover by River that echoes the "everybody lives" speech from The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances, all of the humans are rescued, the Vashta Narada get the planet to themselves, and everybody lives happy ever after.

Well, except for Donna, who just barely misses seeing her fake husband among the rescued humans (and who tries to call out to her, but his stutter prevents him). Especially knowing what is coming for Donna in the very near future, it's is a truly sad moment.

Steven Moffat really outdid himself with this story. In the space of two hours he takes River Song from an unknown mystery character to a full-blown companion and then kills her off (but not quite really) in a way that really hits the Doctor hard. There are just so many great ideas and fantastic moments  throughout, and it was the strength of all of his stories that made be totally confident when Moffat was named as the new show runner with the next season. I especially like the scene in which the Doctor has his final showdown with the Vashta Narada and scares them into submission by simply asking them to look him up in the library. Great, great moment.

Now I am really looking forward to the next two days, in which the previous three seasons' concept of the Doctor-Lite episode gets morphed into first a Companion-Lite and then a Doctor-Lite story back-to back. And both of them are (to quote the Ninth Doctor) fantastic.

STATS:

Doctor(s): Tenth
Companion(s): Donna Noble, River Song
Episode(s): Forest of the Dead
Steps Walked: 7,576 today, 2,921,440 total
Distance Walked: 4.04 miles today, 1,524.39 miles total
Push-ups Completed: 100 today, 3,014 total
Sit-ups Completed: 0 today, 929 total
Is the Doctor So, So Sorry?: Yesterday it was Proper Dave, and today it was Other Dave. So tragic. A bad day for Daves all around.
Weight: 253.16 lbs (five day moving average), net change -54.14 lbs