It's a season finale, and Steven Moffat has elected to make this a single episode affair, so there's a lot to squeeze in. Unfortunately, there's such a jumble of ideas and imagery that it ends up a dissatisfying dog's breakfast of an episode.
One of the problems is that Moffat throws too much into the mix, as the plot involves the whole of history happening at the same instance - thanks to River fracturing Time. She does this by failing to assassinate the Doctor at Lake Silencio, taking us right back to the opening episode of the season.
Before then we have Simon Callow reprising Charles Dickens (from The Unquiet Dead) appearing on Breakfast TV; pterodactyls in Hyde Park; and Roman centurions in chariots stopped at traffic lights.
The episode has a story arc to tie up - though it will still leave threads dangling - and include other elements from the current series and earlier.
For instance we see Ian McNeice's Winston Churchill, first seen in Victory of the Daleks, and he's tended by a physician who is a Silurian. The latter is played by Richard Hope, who was seen as a Silurian scientist in The Hungry Earth / Cold Blood.
The Doctor is locked up in the Tower of London, as he was in his First and Eleventh incarnations, and mentioned by the Third. These came under the reigns of Henry VIII, James I and VI, and Charles II.
A scene had to be written where the Doctor got out of his prison clothes and back into his normal gear as the bowtie was to be used in the wedding ceremony.
From this series, Madam Kovarian is back, as are the Silents.
Silents are seen in water-filled tanks - to stop them using their electrical powers - within an Egyptian pyramid. Moffat got this image from a holiday in Dubai where he saw water tanks built into an ancient structure.
The pyramid is marked as Area 52 - based on the famous Area 51 in Nevada, long associated with crashed UFOs and ET-retrofitted secret aircraft. This had been seen in Day of the Moon.
A lot of what takes place occurs in the time-fractured reality created by River's failure to kill the Doctor - a fixed point in time, as first introduced by RTD to explain why the Doctor can't simply time travel to change big events. They're the new "Blinovitch Limitation Effect" - a famed concept from the Pertwee era.
River's identity had already been explained in the mid-season finale - but her exact relationship with the Doctor was still to be revealed. In her first appearance, she had known the Doctor's name - and it was suggested that the only way she could have known this was if they had married.
This thread is picked up here - as the episode title suggests. However, the ceremony takes place in the fractured timeline, so it's not a very satisfying resolution.
Indeed, the bulk of the episode should not be recalled by any of the main characters as they are alternate versions, and this timeline is corrected when the Doctor engineers a fake assassination. It is the Teselecta (introduced in Let's Kill Hitler) which is shot by River (though the Doctor is hiding inside it. This cheat seems to be enough to meet the conditions of the fixed point, and allows Time to run as normal.
In the opening section we see the Doctor the Doctor seeking out information about the Silence. He takes the data-core from a Dalek - the first appearance by a New Paradigm model since their ill-advised introduction in Series 5. It is the white Supreme, though the lighting of the scene makes it look blue.
The Doctor also meets a character named Gavrok, who resembles a Viking warrior.
He is played by Mark Gatiss, though he opted to be hidden under heavy facial prosthetics and uses a pseudonym - Rondo Hoxton. Gatiss is a huge fan of classic horror movies, and the name derives from Rondo Hatton. This actor suffered from acromegaly - an abnormal bone growth condition, which gave him heavy, misshapen features. His looks lead him to a short-lived movie career in villainous roles, one of which was as the "Hoxton Creeper" in Sherlock Holmes and the Pearl of Death. Despite being killed off, the character of the Creeper appeared in two further films, before Hatton's early death, aged 51, in 1946.
Gavrok leads the Doctor to a transept of the Headless Monks (first mentioned in Time of the Angels - one of their catacombs, full of skulls. Here is found the still living head of Dorium Maldovar, who was introduced in The Pandorica Opens.
The transept was inspired by the Indiana Jones movies.
Nicholas "The Brig" Courtney died earlier in the year, and Moffat elected to have the Brigadier's death acknowledged in the narrative. Everyone in this story wears an eye-patch at one point - a nice nod to Courtney's favourite convention anecdote from the recording of Inferno - a story concerning an alternative universe.
Moffat had planned to show the Doctor reading Knitting For Girls as far back as The Beast Below.
Next time: Doctor Who goes to Narnia...
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