Should Hillary be chief bridesmaid or Best Man? That was the first problem with Marion's Earth Wedding!

The second was Hillary’s conversation with Kristoph. It made a few people uncomfortable to imagine two mature men talking about ‘love’ between them.

“Never stopped loving you, old man. You know that, don’t you?”
“The feeling is mutual,” Kristoph answered. “But you and I could never really be more than friends.”

Sorry, but if you can’t handle the idea of Hillary the gendermorph, then what the heck are you doing reading any story connected with the Doctor Who franchise? What do you think was going on with Captain Jack Harkness for the past four years? Now go into any Citizens Advice Bureau and look for the big red poster with the words ‘Some People Are Gay. Get Over It.’

Obviously, neither Kristoph nor Hillary are gay, of course. They’re two loving friends. But the same principle applies.

The wedding, of course, was relatively straightforward. What marks it out from the ordinary is Hillary the gendermorph as Best Man, Li Tuo giving Marion away, and the trick with the traffic lights. I remember travelling to Liverpool in my dad’s car when I was young. Sometimes the lights on the East Lancashire Road were green all the way, as if by magic. Sometimes every last one would be red. It was easy to imagine the lights being changed by the power of a Time Lord.

Of course, a key theme of this story is the immortality of a Time Lord compared to a Human. Marion thinks of it when Li talks about his many lovers. She thinks of it again as she makes her marriage vows to Kristoph. And she decides, of course, that she is lucky to marry a man who will cherish her all her life. The sad Highlander scenario of a man outliving the woman he loves never occurs to her.

The honeymoon in Rumania is a throwback to the very first story when Marion and Professor De Leon talked about Dracula! More of that soon!