Doctor Who/Fridge

Old Series + The TV Movie

Fridge Brilliance

• When I watched the Classic Who serial State of Decay for the first time, I thought it was silly that the vampires looked so much like something out of a Hammer Horror film. But then I thought about it later, and realised that it made perfect sense - they were originally astronauts from earth, and had deliberately modeled themselves (and the whole set-up of the village and the tower) on their own perception of vampires.
• In my British Lit class, our teacher was telling us about physiognomy, the belief that you can determine someone's personality by looking at their facial features. The first thing I thought of was the Fourth Doctor in Robot, when he looked in the mirror just after regenerating and said, "As for the physiognomy..." I started to think, "He used the wrong word! He should have said physiology!" But before I even finished the thought, it hit me—he didn't make a mistake. He said exactly what he meant to say. He was looking at his new facial features to try to figure out who he was.
• Doctor Who is just full of Fridge Brilliance in many of their stories. A great example would be the Classic Who serial Ghost Light. Watching it for the first time, I could see that there was a lot going on that almost made sense and almost clicked... until I watched it a second time. Then it finally clicked. Really, the entire serial is a commentary upon evolution in general, as well as a massive tribute to the era that brought up the theory - the Victorian Era. And if this wasn't enough, the entire story is disguised as a freaking alien invasion told with the tropes of a Victorian-era horror story... and finally, we have a story that also has the companion Ace dealing with her past and moving on with her life, as the entire theme of the story is also about change in general! It's just such a shame that this serial almost doesn't make sense without multiple viewings or seeing the documentary and commentary attached to the DVD release...
• There are a crapload of blatant Milestone Redo elements in "Remembrance of the Daleks"—the presence of the Coal Hill School and Foreman junkyard, Ace finding Susan's book on the French Revolution, and so forth—but there's a marvelously subtle one when Ace, talking to a new friend, expresses confusion over the monetary system because she's in 1963 so it's pre-decimalisation. Susan, in "An Unearthly Child", gives a wrong answer in class because she's forgotten decimalisation hasn't happened yet. Not particularly profound, but I couldn't help but chuckle when I noticed the connection.
• Fridge Horror: In "The Time Monster", Stu retains his 25 year-old consciousness when he gets superaged into an Octogenerian. Which means that Sgt. Benton also retains his adult consciousness when he gets deaged into a baby! No wonder he won't eat the marmalade sandwiches mashed up in cold tea.
• In "The Happiness Patrol", the Doctor defeats a Cold Sniper by talking to him. At first, this seems like he used some kind of psychic powers. However, it was not, it was reverse psychology. The gunman was used to killing from a distance; to picking off abstract forms through his scope without ever thinking of them as people. He'd never had to look someone in the eye while he was killing them, and the Doctor knew it and used that against him. When he was confronted with the fact that he was killing people, he could no longer bring himself to do it, and thus stood down.
• In the Doctor Who movie the seventh Doctor is forced to land when the escaped Master sabotages his TARDIS. When he steps out of the TARDIS, he ends up in the middle of a gang war and is gunned down on the spot. Remember what was wrong with the TARDIS? The screen said "critical timing malfunction". In other words, bad timing. The reason the Doctor isn't killed every time he first sets his foot on a new planet is because his ship is programmed to have good timing.
• The makers of the Classic series always seemed to squick out at the actual relationship between Susan and the Doctor. If he was her grandfather in the usual sense of the word, that would mean that the Doctor had, at some point, been a breeder. But think...If a Time Lord reproduces once each time they regenerate, it would not take long for Gallifrey to become a horribly overpopulated planet (even if Time Lords have only twelve regenerations.) Thus, it would make sense for Time Lords to lose their reproductive drive (or at least, become sterile) as part of the regeneration process. Thus, the First Doctor had at least one child, but the Second and other Subsequent Doctors wouldn't. Assuming, of course, that regeneration is a manifestation of Time Lord super science and not inherent to all life on Gallifrey (you'd have to stomp on that Gallifreyan cockroach several times to kill it.) And this way, I can keep my mind free of Looms.
  • Alternatively, a planet-full of people who were near-immortal even before they could regenerate to renew their lives would naturally develop less of a drive to propagate the species anyway, because they would naturally last longer anyway. This might also explain why the Doctor has been, if not necessarily sexually active, then at least a bit more interested or capable of forming romantic / sexual bonds with other people; since he's the last Time Lord, there's more of a subconscious drive to breed.
• A classic series one for y'all; the end of "The Hand of Fear", where the Fourth Doctor leaves Sarah back on Earth rather than taking her to Gallifrey, makes a lot more sense when you remember that the last time the Doctor introduced humans to his fellow Time Lords (albeit unwillingly), their response was to wipe their minds of all the adventures they'd had together and dump them back home where they wouldn't remember him. Upon having to return to Gallifrey, the Doctor didn't want Sarah to suffer the same fate as Jamie and Zoe, and so decided to leave her behind. Which adds increased poignancy to their final conversation:

Sarah: Don't forget me.
The Doctor: Oh, Sarah. Don't you forget me.

• The character of Zoe Heriot seems like human Zeerust—who would bother training a human to be a walking computer? But when you consider how often advanced computers go insane and attempt to destroy humanity, it makes sense that people would want a human backup, just in case.
  • Judging by what she does to the computer in "The Invasion", it's possible she was engineered as a weapon against advanced computers.
• Fridge Horror: The Doctor dropped his teenage granddaughter in a war zone with the first man she fell for and never came back for her. Think about that for a moment. The question of would've happened if things didn't work out with David is only the tip of the iceberg for how horrible this seems if you really stop and think about it for more than two seconds.

The Expanded Universe

• In the Expanded Universe, it's revealed that the Daleks' name for the Doctor is actually the Ka Faraq Gatri, roughly translated as "The Bringer of Darkness". That strikes me as being every bit as poetical as "The Oncoming Storm"...which turns out to be what the Draconians call him. When I first saw the episode, I thought, "There's no excuse for this, as RTD wrote one of the New Adventures himself, and it was in the NAs that the latter name was established. Then I considered how the Doctor in the new series is very much aware of his own press and uses it to his own advantage ("Look me up" from "Forest of the Dead" being an excellent example). But this is the 9th Doctor, who has some issues with doing the heroic thing at times and has a tendency towards ensuring "it's gone just a bit wrong" by his actions. I took this as the Doctor knowing about his own press, trying to make it work for him for the first time - and getting it wrong, in front of an audience of companions who don't know any better (Rose using this phrase for him in "Girl in the Fireplace" later) and Daleks who are so debased from their origins that they don't know any better, either. Hell, they're being confronted by their version of the Devil - this isn't the time when one of them will speak up and say, "Er, um, don't you mean we refer to you as the Bringer of Darkness, Doc?" Even if Daleks did such silly things. It's an insight into the flawed character of the 9th Doctor - and a bit of foreshadowing that he's about to get it wrong again...
  • Actually depends on your POV. In the novel for Remembrance of the Daleks (written by the same guy who wrote the episodes, and just including expanded info they couldn't shoot), Ka Faraq Gatri means Destroyer of worlds. Oncoming Storm suddenly sounds like the nice version...
  • I always saw The Oncoming Storm as the perfect name for the Doctor's dark side. When he's the Valeyard, trying to save one of his Companions or beyond angry, he doesn't care who gets in his way. Storms are forces of nature. They don't care what's in thefir way, either.

New Series

Fridge Brilliance

• This just struck me re-watching Day of the Moon: When the Doctor walks into the Silence base/ship, he quickly mentions having seen something like it before, but abandoned, and he wonders why that is. He's referring to the ship from The Lodger from the previous series. The one that was/will be abandoned because of what he is about to/has done to the Silence. Timey-Wimey Ball indeed.
• Watching The Doctor Wife I thought, wow, what's with the Ood always being taken over, then it hit me they've been lobotomized meaning probably it's really easy for forces like the House or Satan to take them over rather then species with their entire brain intact. Also giving these Oods bonus Woobie points not only being lobotomized, but Mind Raped and then killed, no wonder the Doctor feels bad for not being able to save him.
• One of my favorite elements of the recent Doctor Who (never saw the old one) is the habit of taking seemingly innocuous things and giving them meaning. Weeping Angels-the statues everywhere. In Family of Blood, he imprisons one antagonist in the mirrors, and so every time you see something move in the mirror, it's her. -Paladin852
• This is also why the name John Smith is a commonly-used generic name. THE DOCTOR USES IT ALL THE TIME! (Literally, all the time.) Therefore, there may be very few men by that name, but the Doctor is a "John Smith" who does something important, public, and/or memorable often enough that it is a well-known name.
  • Also, (albeit from the Old Series) Sarah Jane Smith, who introduces herself by full name travels with the Doctor for quite a while, so by the same token her name is heard a lot throughout history, and probably mis-remembered as the "Sarah" part breaks the similarity between the male version and so is generally forgotten.
• In The End of Time, the Doctor freaks out when he realizes that the machine can heal entire planets, with only a small pause of growing horror. Why? Because he's had this problem before...
• In The Pandorica Opens, The Pandorica is obviously a reference to Pandora's Box (see below.) And what was left in the box after the evils of the world left it? Hope.-Lillium
• Rewatching "Let's Kill Hitler", I realized something. In "Time of the Angels", River told The Doctor that she'd learned to pilot the TARDIS from the best, and that he wasn't there that day. Well, in a sense, he wasn't, because in "Let's Kill Hitler", he was busy dying.
  • Also from "Let's Kill Hitler", Mel spent a lot of time at Amy's House, brainwashed by the Silence. Which means she was in regular psychic contact with Prisoner Zero who could then taunt The Doctor about the Silence's plans.
    • Which brings up an interesting idea; perhaps it wasn't a coincidence that the first Crack appeared at Amy's house, leading to pretty much all the events of Season 5. I mean, what are the odds that it just happened to occur at a location where an agent of the Silence spent much of her time?
  • Another one from "Let's Kill Hitler", the reason Hitler is speaking English instead of German is that the TARDIS translates, but why didn't it translate "Führer" to "leader" when Hitler said it? Becuase Hitler had a twisted view of what it meant to be "the Führer", which is why the TARDIS failed to pick it up as being translatable.
• According to NASA and Neil Armstrong, the original line written and spoken for the moon landing was "One small step for A man, one giant leap for mankind." However, the "a" was supposedly lost due to a glitch in the transmission...
• I remember, the first time watching "The Girl in the Fireplace"... near the end, after the Doctor smashes all those time windows, he tells it that it's going to "die". Specifically, he uses the line "I'm not winding you up." At the time, I didn't think much of it... now flash forward two or three years, to me watching the episode again, to that same line. Suddenly, it hit me, the absolutely brilliant double meaning in that sentence: I didn't think much of "winding you up" because it registered as a way to keep such a mechanical device running, but then I remembered... "winding you up" is also British slang for "playing a joke on you". Mind: blown.
• Why does Amy survive her trip into the Pandorica? Because its the ultimate prison that doesn't let you escape by dying, which is important if you're trying to imprison a Time Lord who could regenerate and blow the entire apparatus apart.
• After regenerating into the Eleventh Doctor, The Doctor tries an apple and then tells Amy that he "hates apples. Apples are rubbish." Well, of course, an apple a day keeps The Doctor away.
• At the end of Blink, Sally gives the Doctor a folder with pictures of the Weeping Angels in. We later find out that the image of an Angel becomes one. The first message Sally found from the Doctor was on the wall of the old house where the Angels were hiding. The Doctor went to the house to write the message, like the documents told him he had to, and while he was there the Angels became real and displaced him and Martha.
  • In Blink the Angels never move on screen. Not once do we see a moving angel. Why not? Because WE, THE AUDIENCE, can see them!
• Also, what do you think happens when the light in the basement where the angels are stuck staring at each-other finally gives-out?
  • The Angels can see in the dark.
• In Daleks in Manhattan the Doctor is struck buy gamma lightening and his DNA is transferred to the "human Daleks". At the time all I could think was that's not how DNA works! Latter I was thinking about regeneration in which energy changes DNA and I realized that is how Time Lord DNA works.
• This technically fits both Classic and Revived series'. As shown in "A Good Man Goes To War", it is revealed that the Doctor is someone who is drawn to do evil deep down, but is resisting it by being good. This lends credence to the argument that the Master is someone who drawn to do good deep down, but is resisting it by being evil. And actually, this is reinforced primarily by how they treat each other when they encounter each other time and time again: the Doctor attempts to save, but ultimately kills the Master, while the Master always attempts to kill the Doctor, but ultimately saves him.

Fridge Horror

• The Doctor having a laser on his screwdriver isn't the most comforting thought considering the last person we saw having one.
• Doctor Who: We all know the Doctor was forced to kill The Time Lords to save the universe, but if you believe there were also non Time Lord Gallifreyans, this becomes much worse: some of them not wanting anything to do with them, forced in to a war that had nothing to do with them the were all killed by the Doctor too and yet the Doctor, for all his guilt about killing his fellow Time Lords, has yet to give them a single mention; what measure is non-Time Lord much Doctor?
  • In Series 3 it's revealed that The Doctor refuels the TARDIS at the dimensional rift in Cardiff but according to the Word of God the rift is now permanently closed do to the events in The Big Bang. So unless there another way to refuel this means that the TARDIS will eventually run out of power.
  • Since the TARDIS travels in time as well as space, the Doctor can easily take it to Cardiff at a point in time before the rift was closed to refuel.
  • Considering he didn't discover the Cardiff rift until his ninth life, that's pretty damn unlikely. It's not like that's the only dimensional rift in the universe, and even if it was there are probably lots of other ways of refueling the TARDIS.
• The Weeping Angels of Doctor Who are bad enough on their own, but consider the 'happy' ending of "Blink". The Angels are trapped because they're all stuck looking at each other. In the basement of an unmaintained building. Lit by one single lightbulb. Which has been shown to leave the basement in total darkness when it's burned out...
  • They can probably see in the dark. Their species' entire shtick is moving when they can't be seen, so being nocturnal to some degree seems likely.
  • And now, with "The Time of Angels" it's worse... much much MUCH worse. Because what they establish is that the Angels not only can do everything we've seen, but they can also somehow reach through any image made of themselves. "Anything that shows the image of an Angel becomes one". Anyone who heard that line was currently watching the Angel on their TV/computer screen. Even more terrifying than that is that staring at a Weeping Angel for too long burns their image into your mind, ultimately turning you into one of them. So do the math: take your eyes off of them for a nanosecond, they've got you. Keep your eye on them for too long, they've got you. You're doomed no matter what. Had the ones Eleven, Amy, and River came across not been in a state of near-death, they would have been dead and gone within minutes.
    • I thought Amy only got the Angel in her mind because she stared into its eyes. The others in the episode looked at the statues for just as long but since the Doctor had read in the book that you had to avoid the eyes no one else made Amy's mistake. Now, people without access to that book would still probably meet the Angel's eyes but the Doctor and company would know better.
  • At the end of "Blink," Sally Sparrow is shown with several photos of Weeping Angels.
    • Fridge Brilliance: She gave the photos to the Doctor along with the transcript and everything else. The photos become the Weeping Angels who displaced the Doctor and Martha in the first place. Stable Time Loop.
    • On a semi related note, how many Whovians out there have tonnes of merchandise about the house? How many of those are Weeping Angels? Now, remember that an image of an angel becomes itself an angel...
    • "Blink" has a good Fridge Horror moment after watching "The Time of Angels", and finding out that the angels now snap necks. In "Blink", after Sally realizes both of them are not looking at the statue, they turn to see the angels with claws grasping at their throat. Sending Sally to the past wouldn't help them - the key would just be sent with her. They were planning to snap her neck.
      • Another occurs when you realize that in "Blink" they are only ever shown as statues even when none of the characters are looking at them. There are two possibilities: they could JUST HAPPEN to be seen by something like a squirrel OR it's because we as part of the audience are watching them. Meta indeed.
  • "The End of Time" has its own moment of Fridge Horror at the end of Part One, when The Master turns every human on Earth into himself. Now, granted, that particular scene came across as pure Narm, but just think for a second about Sarah Jane, Luke, Rani, and Clyde, not to mention Gwen & Rhys, plus Martha & Mickey, and... well, you get the idea. And what happened to all the pregnant women and their unborn babies? And lessened a bit, but if Obama was also affected, who's there to say a version of YOU in that world wasn't also?
    • Gwen was pregnant at the time. Fortunately, Miracle Day revealed that her baby survived the incident just fine. (Or at least, it was fine after Rassilon undid the damage the Master had caused. It still doesn't explain what might have happened the first time around, though...)
    • Not to mention that the Doctor implies that all the dead humans in their graves are also turned into copies of the Master, think for a moment, given that the machine is meant to heal things, what if it brought the copies back to life underground, even worse if they are still alive after the Time Lords turned them back into humans.
    • Also, what happened to the people knocked out by Donna when she was having her memory flashes? Did they survive? Did Donna unwillingly kill some of her own neighbors?
  • Last of the Time Lords is generally pretty horrific what with Earth being decimated, and all the awful things that happen to the cast... but it was in retrospect that Jack's fate became easily one of the most horrific: for a start his entire team gets sent on a "Wild Goose Chase" to the Himalayas where they no doubt all died of exposure while losing their limbs to frostbite, and then I realized that the Master now has on hand a test subject whom he can't possibly finish off completely. He gets to kill him again. And again. And again. And has probably done so in every horrible, disturbing and painful way he can possibly come up with for the last 365 days. That Jack can still joke about it is a bloody miracle.
    • Something else to add to Jack's fate during that year: The way the Master left him tied up probably led to him repeatedly suffocating and dying from suspension trauma each day.
  • An episode during the First Doctor's run saw the Doctor leaving his Time Lord granddaughter, Susan, on earth because she fell in love with a human. This episode was produced before the nature of the Time Lords was known to the audience (or writers for that matter). Taking into account Time Lord's long lifespans one realizes that Susan will almost certainly outlive her husband as well as her increasingly diluted descendants, essentially dooming her to witness the deaths of her children, grand-children, etc.
  • YMMV - remember the fact that the Doctor is the last of his own kind, so Susan some how finding out the Time Lords where going in to war wanting to help her own kind she help them of course she end up dying when Gallifrey burned.
    • Unless she chose not to regenerate.
    • Also at any point she could have used a fob watch to make herself human. What happens to this consciousness when the human body dies however is completely up in the air.
  • Another one about the Weeping Angels. In "The Big Bang", everyone gets back because the cracks in time close. Now, with that said... remember how the Angels were defeated? Oh, yeah.
    • It's not quite as bad as all that, since the Angels only hijacked the Byzantium in order to gain access to the energy from the Crack. So now that it doesn't exist, all the Angels in the Maze of the Dead are still dormant. That first Angel is still out there somewhere, of course.
  • The TARDIS is alive. Bearing this in mind, the Master taking a blowtorch to it to convert it into a Paradox Machine in "The Sound of Drums" and it exploding at every point in space and time simultaneously in "The Big Bang" suddenly become even worse.
  • Also, the TARDIS spends the entirety of "The Lodger" trying to materialize and failing. That must hurt. And the Doctor is psychically linked to the TARDIS... how much of her pain does he feel?
  • The sound the TARDIS makes is caused by the Doctor driving with the parking brake on. Imagine what would eventually happen if you drove your car everywhere with its parking brake engaged... and imagine the equivalent happening with an incredibly powerful time machine.
  • Pay close attention to the end of The Waters of Mars. The Doctor sees Ood Sigma standing in the snow, and believes that it's his time to die. The next we see him is in the TARDIS. Listen closely: just barely audible above the music, the cloister bell is ringing! Was the Doctor about to take a page out of Adelaide's playbook and kill himself for what he may have though to be the greater good? At the very last moment in the episode, he says No, flips a switch, the bell stops, and the screen cuts to black. May double as Fridge Brilliance.
    • The Waters of Mars contains all kinds of Fridge Horror. Watch the climactic sequence. The robot drives through a torrent of Martian water on its way to the TARDIS. When the TARDIS materializes back on Earth, that same robot rolls out of it... intoF a snowstorm. And that's not even the worst part. Suppose a drop of Martian water rolled off the robot while it was in the TARDIS? The TARDIS that goes flying hither and yon across the universe? Water is patient. Is the Doctor unwittingly sowing the seeds of death on every world he visits?
  • So, in "The Big Bang", River Song got her Crowning Moment of Awesome when she made a Dalek beg for mercy. Right - awesome for River. Except - the Doctor has committed genocide against the Daleks more than once. And yet this Dalek is still convinced that the Doctor or his associates will show mercy. When said Dalek realizes who it is dealing with, it starts screaming for mercy. Which begs the question - what in the hell did River do??
    • It's been hinted that she had KILLED THE DOCTOR. If I were a Dalek, I'd beg too.
    • FB in FB here. The Doctor committed genocide several times, yes. However, he chooses Companions because they have traits he doesn't see in himself (mercy, compassion, etc). The Dalek doesn't believe River will show mercy because the Doctor is merciful - it thinks she's merciful because the Doctor's Companions are merciful.
  • The 2010 Christmas Special finishes with Abigail saving the day by singing to stabilize the crashing ship and allowing it to land safely. It's a beautiful, gorgeous, soaring song--but listen to the lyrics, and notice how often the word 'silence' comes up...
    • The Doctor befriends Vincent. Vincent has a vision of the TARDIS exploding. Vincent commits suicide. The Doctor weds Marilyn. Marilyn is left by the Doctor. Marilyn... What the Hell, Hero??
    • That party took place in 1952, fully 10 years before she died. She even got married again after this point (twice). It's doubtful that the Doctor (who she knew for all of a few hours) was a factor in her death.
    • Although he could be partially blamed for a couple of divorces and affairs? I can imagine the fanfiction.
  • Here's an example from Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead. Vashta Nerada live in the air. Your lungs are full of air. Your lungs are dark. They're inside you.
    • The same could be said for any orifice. Depending on how wriggly they are. Oh God.
  • The ending of Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead. Everybody Lives and the Library reopens. Even the people who died end up saved to the hard drive. But wait - the Vashta Nerada are still there too.
    • Vashta Nerada gave them a day to leave, and they were leaving. Library wasn't reopening.
    • When you think about it, so far, Vashta Nerada is only time Doctor said "Run. Just Run." and when you consider Doctor have defeated all kinds of horrors in universe including Daleks...
    • Vashta Nerada are fish in the air. They were intelligent enough to communicate through a dead person's suit and co-ordinated enough to move it. Yet, they're apparantly microscopic and so not visible to Human/Time Lord eyes, and they're fast enough to strip a human's flesh within a moment. I challenge you to come up with a way to fight that. Daleks are at least touchable and slow.
  • In the same episodes - all those people who lived lives in the hard drive (just because Donna's was choppy, doesn't mean everyone else's was - they had a lot more time). And they're suddenly yanked out and separated from everyone they've known and loved and thrown back into a world they may or may not remember. Families broken up, children no longer exist to them...
  • The little girl who was hooked up to the Dalek battle computer in "Remembrance of the Daleks". There is no way that was good for her sanity.
  • Here's one from the Doctor Who movie ("The Enemy Within"): remember how the Seventh Doctor was begging Grace not to operate? Remember how he "woke up" during surgery? Well, because they have two hearts, Time Lords also have a respiratory bypass system; in other words, any anesthetic you give them isn't going to last very long-- and neither are any painkillers...
  • In "The Eleventh Hour" the Doctor asks the Atraxi a question: "Are the peoples of this world guilty of any crime by the laws of the Atraxi?" Answer: "No." Given the history of this planet, our rapes, murders, pogroms, Inquisitions... what kind of beings must they be if the human race hasn't broken any of their laws, and what sort of insanely unthinkable being must Prisoner Zero have been to warrant the Atraxi's death penalty?
    • I assumed that the laws of the Atraxi only covered crimes committed against the Atraxi. Everything else is Somebody Else's Problem.
  • In "The Beast Below", Amy and the Doctor are at one point in the mouth of the Star Whale. They end up covered in sick and pieces of food. That's all well and disgusting, but what did they say the whale ate? Citizens of limited value? Yeah, just think about that.
    • For what it's worth all the organic trash probably goes down there too. So unless someone has been eaten recently, all of the debris could just be food scraps.
    • Consider a government where people are killed if they happen to disagree with official policy. There's no way this can be called a republic, or even a constitutional monarchy.
  • In The Impossible Astronaut, River insists that the Doctor's remains be incinerated, because a Time Lord's body is so incredible that there are whole empires that would destroy earth to get their hands on even a single cell. Jack had an entire hand sitting on his desk for a year. Considering the somewhat sporadic competence of the Torchwood team, let's count ourselves lucky that this news apparently never got out.
    • And with that in mind, rememeber what happens in The Black Spot, The Siren has a tissue sample taken from the Doctor...
      • Rule number one: the Doctor always lies. This can be emphasised by the fact that his REAL reason he wanted to be burnt was He had to complete the "Schroedinger's Cat Scenario" of his witnessed death, or else a major time focus would never exist, etc. etc. This isn't to say that the above are incorrect, but rather everything the Doctor says needs to be taken with a grain of salt.
  • While we're on the subject of "The Impossible Astronaut" and "Day of the Moon", let's take a moment to consider The Silence. They've been controlling Earth for almost all of recorded history, influencing events through their post-hypnotic suggestions, How many atrocities are they responsible for? And, almost worse, how many good things did they give us to suit their own ends?
  • The doctor and company just influenced all of the humanity to committee genocide. Yeah that race was evil, but that was still pretty dark.
    • Humanity never committed genocide against the Silence. For one thing, they're a religious order, not a species. For another thing, they're clearly shown in the far future. All The Doctor, and by extension humanity, did was get them off the Earth.
    • And we're only assuming they're entirely evil. The Silence were a complex, highly intelligent race, and as such, were probably individuals. We know nothing about their politics or motivations, beyond a couple random individuals who may or may not represent the entire species as a whole. Any innocent Silents would have been perfectly justified in defensive action, which brings up another question. How many people are vaporized in self-defense whenever the original copy of the moon landing is played? The Doctor has transformed the original unedited video clip into a cursed mysterious artifact, always longer than it actually seems for no apparent reason, and when you view it,there is a chance that you or people around you disappear forever.
    • The Silence is not a species it is a religious order. A religious order that humans where part of, obviously not all humans are Silence so this unnamed species probably aren't all Silence either; But they are now commended because group of them where.
    • For that matter, their very presence on Earth up to 1969. They've always been there. Whose to say they weren't following Ian and Barbara around in "An Unearthly Child"?
      • They were around during "An Unearthly Child", the wounded Silent in "Day of the Moon" states that they have been there Since the wheel and the fire, the latter being exactly what the Doctor presented to the primitive humans during his first televised adventure....
      • You are using the past tense, and think that's the scary bit? The Doctor's a timetraveller! Every time he travels further into the past than 1969, he's in a world dominated by Silence, and won't even remember if he's surrounded by them.
    • Speaking of which - Doctor make all humans kill every member of Silence they see on sight. Once you lose eye contact with one of them, you completely forget about them. So that means that many of them are probably left where they were killed, roting on the streets, bars, maybe even in private houses.
    • In "Victory of The Daleks", the Doctor asks Amy to confirm that the Daleks are evil, because she must have encountered them when they attacked the Earth, presumably in The Stolen Earth. However, she has no idea. Consider how often the Earth is attacked by alien threats, yet most folks seem ignorant of any extra-terrestrial contact. Now, ask yourself, why would the Silence, who can easily make people forget such events, want humanity not to know anything about other aliens?
      • Wrong. The reason she couldn't remember if was because the time rifts erased a lot of things, including those daleks. It has nothing to do with the Silence.
    • Something else to think about: the Arc Words in Season 5 were "Silence will fall". Everywhere they went, all the aliens they met, all of them were terrified of the Silence falling. The Doctor took all of two episodes to topple the Silent's empire in Season 6. The Silents have fallen. Were they really the universe-threatening menace that was approaching? Or is it something else that's coming, now that the Silence are out of the picture?
    • In "A Good Man Goes To War", it's revealed that traveling in the TARDIS can result in human offspring with Time Lord qualities. So what happens when companions start having children? One episode of Torchwood even proved that Martha's whole immune system has mutated.
    • In the above mentioned episode, we learn River Song's identity - she is the daughter of Amy and Rory, having been conceived in the TARDIS and stolen by Madame Korvarian, to be a weapon against the Doctor. Yeah, let that sink in. This means not only that Amy and Rory will never get to raise their child, but the kid was manipulated and raised by Madam Korvarian and The Silence. Who will quite possible kill the future love of her life. In front of her parents. And herself. Not to mention, River's death may be necessary for her very conception. Ladies and gentlemen, River Song, Fridge Horror incarnate. And Steven Moffat likely planned this out from the beginning.
    • This may very well be the worst bit of Fridge Horror ever: In Journey's End, the Daleks or, more accurately, Davros creats a device known as the Reality Bomb, which has one simple purpose: Disintegrate all matter in the universe into sub-atomic nothingness, including, by way of the Medusa Cascade, all alternate realities. Now, considering how the concept of alternate realities works, wouldn't that mean that there's a reality where the Reality Bomb went off? Sweet dreams.
  • In "The God Complex", it's revealed that the Minotaur feeds not on fear, but on faith, torturing the hotel's inhabitants until they fall back on whatever they believe will save them. When the Minotaur came for Amy, it was because of her faith in the Doctor. Her faith that he would come back for her. That he would save her. That he would save the day, like he always does. She was almost taken because of the same thing that the viewers believe throughout the series. Steven Moffat, yet again you've doomed us all.
  • In "The Wedding of River Song", it's revealed that the reason everything is happening at once is because of River's refusal to kill the Doctor during a fixed point in time. The Doctor explains that time is disintegrating because of this, and that everything would pretty much suffer unspeakable agony before coming undone. He then asks River Was It Really Worth It?, along with wondering if her suffering will be worth more than that of everyone else's, and the answer? "Yes". Keep in mind, this means every universe we've seen, every companion we've come to know and love, every side-character, every future companion will likely die screaming. It also includes River's parents. That's right, River was willing to torture everyone in the universe to death in order to get what she wanted. The kicker? It worked. Luckily, the Doctor finds a way out of it, but the most punishment River receives for such a heinous act is being stuck in a Cardboard Prison.
  • A more minor one compared to the examples above, but in "The Girl who Waited", Rory angrily shouts at the doctor that it isn't fair For him to chose which Amy to take as the doctor is forcing Rory to be like him. A few seconds later while talking to Older Amy all he can say is "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry"
  • One I'm surprised hasn't been mentioned yet. Think of every episode of the series, ever. Every event The Doctor prevented or saved. Now, think of what would have occurred any time The Doctor had not been there at that moment.
• In Torchwood, it's repeatedly established that there is nothing but blackness and horror after death—no afterlife per se, but the dead are still aware enough to feel something, and it isn't good. This is fitting in Torchwood, which is much darker than its parent show. However, they're still set in the same universe. Which means that every character who's ever died on Doctor Who is now suffering in the darkness forever. -distantsun
• Several people have mentioned that the Doctor has been running all of his life. What is chasing him?

Tenth Doctor Era

• A rather small one. It's been implied that the Doctor was an outcast and lonely as a child on Gallifrey. He apparently performed poorly in numerous classes and didn't even have proper training to control the TARDIS. After the Time War, nearly every Time Lord he ever knew was dead. He likes going on about how he's so clever, with that cheeky grin of his. Of course he'd constantly being going on about how clever and intelligent he is. After all those years of being considered the lonely outcast idiot of Gallifrey, as one of the only ones left, he now finally feels intelligent in comparison to the rest of the universe's inhabitants. In the midst of all that tragedy and loss, he's finally not an inferior being any longer. Looking back on the Time War, it's the only good thing to come from the entire ordeal. In his more insistent and angry moments, it can be him gloating not just about himself, but the intelligence of the Time Lords as a race, him defending their honor and reputation as (so he believes) its last living representative.
• In the episode Tooth and Claw we are introduced to a group of monks that in the opening sequence for the episode whip off their robes and proceed to use faux shaolin martial arts to take over the Torchwood estate. All well and good until you realize these monks are supposed to be cloistered christian monks, not far eastern buddhist monks that study martial arts. Just because they are both called 'monks' doesn't mean they're the same thing! Did the UK happen to have an ancient order of ninjas hiding in its society? If so, why don't we hear more about the Britjas after this episode?
  • Christianity had warrior monks too, the Knights Templar being the most well known example.
  • And on that note, where do the britjas run off during the third act? The last we see of them is surrounding the house waiting for the werewolf to infect the queen. They just kind of vanish when the werewolf dies.
• In the episode school reunion, the krillitanes are established to be vulnerable to high pitched sounds thanks to their bat-like nature. Which, one would imagine, would make a device like the SONIC screwdriver rather useful in a fight against them. Yet this never seems to occur to any of the characters.
• This one occurred to me the moment I first watched "Blink," a process which involved significant amounts of pausing and typing up my Thoughts. I have felt the need to share it with every single Whovian I've ever spoken to since. (Actually, I had a good dozen moments of Fridge Brilliance watching that episode, but I'll start with the big one.) See, pretty much everybody thinks the Weeping Angels are the scariest of all the Who villains... but they don't freak me out at all. Why? The Weeping Angels cannot exist.
  • And I shall now clarify, since it is kind of a dropped bomb. See, you can apply logic pretty easily to most of the aliens and other such creatures in Doctor Who to explain, at least to an extent, their existence. Try to apply logic to the Angels. Their entire schtick is that they quantum lock when eyes are laid upon them. Now think on this: is there ever a time at which you are not looking at yourself? Perhaps you aren't, directly, but the tip of your nose or your hands or your hair are always lingering at the corner of your vision. The Angels should, technically, be in a permanent state of quantum lock. It is impossible for them to ever exist outside of that quantum locked state.
    • Then what about the decayed Weeping Angels that don't have anything of themselves always in their vision?
      • Also, from what I've seen, it doesn't seem like a Weeping Angel seeing itself would freeze itself. Think about it: they don't turn to stone when they put their hands over their eyes, do they? Otherwise, the whole point of putting their hands over their eyes would be worthless.
  • AND, just to give you even more of a Mind Screw, the same logic can be applied to the Silence in order to reach the opposite conclusion. There was a moment during which I thought the Silence couldn't exist because if they ever looked away from each other they would forget their entire existence/purpose/etc., but then I realized a split second later that the reason this doesn't happen is because, again, they always have a view of themselves.—Amanda Vega
    • No they don't. They have no noses, therefore there's nothing of themselves that are always in their vision.
    • Yes they do. See those massively huge great sweeping cheekbones/eyesocket rims they've got? Their eyes are so sunken into those things they must have no peripheral vision.
    • Seeing as they cover their own eyes with their hands to avoid seeing each other, they are probably immune to their own sight. Also, Doctor Who thrives on "Psudo-science"; a lot of the stuff they say sounds good, but occasionally defies the laws of physics themselves, and mostly is just plain false.
• Oh, and like I said, "Blink" had a lot of revelations for me. The other major one? Angels feed on energy. Time energy is the most powerful, obviously, and therefore the preferred 'prey' for them. However, energy is also what fires all the reactions in our brains/synapses/whatever (I'm not a scientist!). The Angels don't have to wait for their predators, i.e. the humans, who also happen to be their prey, to blink in order to move closer. They could just as easily feed off of the energy given off by all the humans, which is what a smart predator would do (and there are a few hints of this sort of thing going on in "Flesh and Stone"/"The Time of Angels"). Why wait until darkness of some kind renders a human or other entity to strike upon it? Feed off all of the energy they're giving off, which strengthens an Angel and weakens a human, thus making it far easier to ultimately strike upon the human and displace them in time! Basically, the Angels are not only logically impossible, but also really, really, really stupid as predators, and even if the logic worked they should have died off ages ago due to their sheer inability to function as intelligent predatory creatures. -- Amanda Vega (again)
  • Not to wet on your fire or anything, but you're wrong on both counts, for reasons very obviously detailed in the show. A) The Angels are creatures of the abstract. They feed on potential energy. The electro-chemical firings of the human brain is better described as actualized energy, if anything. The reason they send you into the past is to feed on the energy of the days you would have lived. The reason they could feed on the cracks were because they could draw on the potential energy of the entire universe. And B) the reason they can exist is because they obviously CAN look at their own bodies, just not themselves. Think about it.
    • This was an inconsistency between Blink and The Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone. The angels in Blink fed off potential energy. The angels in the next series fed off the radiation leaking from the Byzantium. The Fridge Horror here is that the Angels in Blink were actually safer and nicer than the ones in Flesh and Stone.
    • Maybe they can feed off both kinds of energy, but the ones from Blink are just the Weeping Angel equivalent of vegetarians or something.
• Another problem with the Weeping Angels: Wouldn't it be possible to alternate blinking with the left and right eye so the Angel would always be visible to one of them?
  • I thought of that too, and I tried it. It's pretty difficult to keep it up for any length of time.
• The reason River Song didn't seem to notice that the 10th Doctor wasn't a Doctor that knew her at first - he knew that she was going to die every time he met her after this. When they compare notes he simply never mentions the Library because he knows she won't have done it yet. So, when she goes to the Library and meets him there, she assumes that it's new to both of them. She only asks if they've done the Bizantium and the Pandorica to verify that.
  • Well of course the library would be new to both of them. If the Doctor had done it before then he wouldn't be back there doing it again. Every single adventure that River and the Doctor has is new to both of them regardless of when in their respective time streams it falls.
  • There's another with this meeting that just now struck me, and part of why the Doctor cares for her despite her violent ways: she's the only companion he's had that can truly know him as he's known the rest. She's the only one that not only deeply cares for him, but who effectively can experience the pain of loss of their time together by simply outliving it while knowing it's inevitable and preordained.
• The Doctor beating the Master in Series 3 is a victory for humanism over nihilism, by the way.
  • The episodes The Sound of Drums and Last of the Time Lords in season 3, had me seriously off -piste, with the Master saying: "That's your answer, prayer?" in an equally incredulous tone, until I watched it all for the 3rd time (on DVD), and realised that, yay, it really does make sense, with the Archangel Network, and the Doctor having had a year to insinuate himself into it, while being Gollum in a bird-cage... Plus which, there are Moments Of Awesome everywhere, and some lines that are simply unforgettable : "If I told you who they really are Doctor, your hearts would break"!
    • Add this to the fact that for all it's thrown about being overly messianic, it's not just an ass pull with the Doctor going all Crystal Dragon Jesus on us to save humanity - he was saved by humans first. I find it rather appealing that rather than just be expected to be ingratiated and humbled by this Messianic figure who saved our souls (which is an issue in some interpretations of religion that has always bugged me, and may have led to the some of the less than flattering interpretations of this episode), we actually had to save him before he could do anything. Essentially, humanity saved themselves
      • Now go back to the very beginning of the original series and see what a bastard the First Doctor was before his time with his human companions brought his goodness out. The Doctor's exile (and who knows what other circumstances) had made him a bitter misanthrope. Humans saved him from that and in doing so, created humanity's greatest protector.
  • I've always loved it for reasons already stated, but someone on Gallifrey Base pointed out the true symbolism of the Doctor floating above the Master. It's the latter's greatest fear as visualized by the Keller Machine in his second story "The Mind of Evil" - the Doctor mocking him as he cowers in impotent rage - made real.
    • And considering the Doctor isn't mocking the Master, it gives the line "I guess you don't know me so well" a little extra punch.
    • And of course, the foreshadowing from right at the start of the season. Martha and the Doctor meet Shakespeare, and discuss how 'the right word, in the right place, at the right time' can do anything. What happens at the end of that season? Never let it be said that Davies couldn't foreshadow.
• The obvious Rose parallels in Smith and Jones, like the close-up shot of the Doctor grabbing Martha's hand for example. I thought they were out of place and that Martha should have her own beginning that doesn't just weirdly compare Martha to Rose. Then I realized that the parallels emphasize the way the Doctor feels about her - he does think of her as a Rose-replacement for at least the first half of season three, and it's likely that the parallels are supposed to make the audience uncomfortable, purposefully comparing apples and oranges.
• I was reading this very site going over the episodes involving Rose Tyler's stint as a time deity, and it hit me that the reason the Doctor lands where and when something bad is going to happen each episode is because the TARDIS knows he was there and then from information gathered from the Time Vortex! This is why it seems there are so many times in which the Doctor ends up off course from his intended destination. I didn't know if this belonged just here or in Wild Mass Guessing so I placed it in both.
  • Confirmed as of "The Doctor's Wife". She says that she always takes the Doctor where he needs to go.
• Like many, I wondered why in "The End of the World" the designers of Space Platform One would put an essential emergency override switch behind a giant fan over a long walkway; an obvious No OSHA Compliance Contrivance. Then, it struck me—earlier, the Doctor notes that the people tend to talk of Space Platforms as they did with the Titanic—namely, words like 'unsinkable' tend to be raised, with the Doctor archly mentioning that last time he was on a ship called that, he ended up "clinging to an iceberg". As well as an obvious 'disaster' reference-point, one of the things that made the Titanic such a notorious tragedy was that it didn't have enough lifeboats on board for everyone on the ship (although it actually did have more than the regulations required at the time) and spare lifeboats that turned out to be essential were tucked away in awkward-to-reach places because it was assumed with all of its safety features that they would never be needed; even if the ship did flounder, it would survive long enough for help to arrive. Far from just being another danger contrivance, the safety switch is intended as a reflection of that same arrogance; the designers have provided a safety feature, but they've dumped it in an inconvenient, awkward-to-reach place because, erroneously and arrogantly, they assume that no one will ever need to use it.
• I was hit by the Fridge Logic: "If the stars in Rose's universe are going out, doesn't that mean we're already screwed?" Then I remembered, yeah, it's a show about Time Travel.
  • And then, as I was reading this, I remembered in the "The Pandorica Opens"/"The Big Bang" the stars go out. So, the crack in the wall was effecting more than one reality and Rose missed the timing.
    • And even more fridge brilliance - what's left of the world in "The Pandorica Opens" is held together by hope and stories. The stars disappear constellation by constellation rather than by distance, because of the stories associated with them.
• In Parting of the Ways, when Rose absorbs the power of the Time Vortex, the TARDIS is shown flying into the future. When it does so, the TARDIS remains upright, stays reasonably centered relative to the screen, and has a fast lateral spin. While it certainly adds to the urgency of the scene, it also demonstrates Rose's temporary omnipotence in that she can fly the TARDIS much better than the Doctor can.
  • In fairness, she was controlling the TARDIS directly, whereas the Doctor uses the console controls, which were never intended to be operated by only a single pair of hands.
  • Also he leaves the hand brake on
    • He likes the sound.
• In The End of Time, Rassilon's plan is completely ridiculous and destructive even by the standards of what he intends to accomplish. But then I realised that this is the whole point--the other Time Lords are too scared of that metal glove of his to suggest anything saner.
  • In The End of Time, Part Two, the newly regenerated Eleventh Doctor's frantic checking of body parts and waving of fingers seems ridiculous and silly at first (especially after Tennant's rather emotional exit). But think about it. The cause of Ten's death was severe radiation poisoning. What is one of the results of radiation poisoning in humans (if not to the parent, then almost certainly to any children born after exposure)? Malformation and mutation. Eleven has technically just been born, so it's possible that his fears about having regenerated without the necessary parts are quite well founded...
  • A bit in "The End of Time" that gets a fair amount of criticism is when the Doctor starts ranting at Wilf, angry that he has to sacrifice himself to save someone "not remotely important". Then it hit me—Russell T Davies has spent five seasons writing the Doctor as The Messiah. It's only natural that he'd have his moment of weakness and fear (and oh yes, Ten is not just angry in that scene, he is flat fucking terrified) before his Heroic Sacrifice.
    • Alternatively, the Doctor is briefly angry at his own predictable, heroic nature. As soon as he realises that Wilf is stuck in the booth and will require a Heroic Sacrifice to be save, the Doctor knows that he's going to do it. He doesn't need to think about it or even make a decision. That rant is the Doctor being angry at himself, wishing that on this occasion he wasn't the hero, wasn't the kind of person who'd sacrifice himself for someone else, and that just for once he could do as the villains do and simply walk away. Then is angry at himself for condemning himself to death without a second thought.
  • If you look at that scene from another point of view: What is Ten? An old man in a magic box. What killed him? An old man in a nuclear box. Perhaps it wasn't constructed that way but it seemed like after everything he did he ended up taking himself too seriously. So he faces The Master and Rassilon and gets rid of them both, but then he has to face himself; and he can't win.
  • The four-beat rhythm that's been driving The Master mad since childhood and is part of the Time Lords' escape plan not only matches the heartbeat of a Time Lord, but the Doctor Who theme song as well.
  • "He will knock four times."
    • Even more fridge brilliance - Where does the title/intro take place? In the time vortex. which is where The Master got the rythm from. That is some serious foreshadowing
    • Depends on which intro. Sometimes it's three beats, sometimes it's five, sometimes it's four with a different rhythm.
    • Basing it on the intro from those episodes, the above troper is correct. Freema Agyeman said in an interview that she had been practicing the tapping on her own whilst learning her script, and was corrected by RTD at the first table read (she'd been doing more of a onetwo-one-one beat or something, not the onetwothreefour). She asked why it mattered, because it was still four beats, and he patiently explained that yes, it was four beats, but it wasn't the theme tune. She then laughingly went on to explain how much trouble she had filming the scene where Martha is tapping on the couch arm, because as soon as she stopped concentrating on the tapping and concentrated on delivering her lines instead, she started automatically tapping the beat she'd originally learnt the lines with. You'll notice most of that scene cuts between her face and her fingers - she wasn't able to do a whole take doing the tapping and speaking at the same time.
• In "The Age Of Steel" it always bugged me why the Cyber Controller was so emotional, but then it hit me:^[1] Emotions are necessary to make decisions. Logic can give you what will lead to what, but in order to decide, you need programming for this exact event (all but impossible to make work consistently), generalized programming (which gives you a chance to react completely wrong—and gives your enemies something to manipulate), or, yep, one or more with emotions. In other words: the leader. This also makes sense of a later Cybermen episode with the Cyber King. Or shall we call her a queen? The King stays human-looking and overrides the emotional controls. An intentional failsafe, perhaps?
  • Not to mention, Lumic wanted to be converted-for the most part, he was perfectly willing. For the rest,emotion needed to be removed to stop them going insane from the trauma, and what they'd become. Lumic would've had months to mentally prepare himself, so his emotions wouldn't need to be repressed.
• The significance of "Midnight" hit me some time after I watched it: The Ultimate Evil Monster of the Week is a nameless creature. It learns to simulate an identity. Those with identities, names to be precise except for Dee Dee are subverted by it in its quest to kill the Doctor. In the end, it's the nameless Hostess who sees through its deception. I found this subversion of Nominal Importance powerfully symbolic.
  • Oh, man, that's brilliant. Remember also that nobody believes the Doctor when he tells them his usual fake name (people are always going on about what his actual name is, but here none of the names he could give are accepted.
  • In fact, that almost refers back to "Forest of the Dead." Miss Evangelista said that the two things you must be to see absolute truth are to be brilliant and unloved. In a sense, the Hostess was unloved (no one even knew her name) and she was the one who saw the truth.
  • Also in "Midnight," the closing line, "No, don't do that. Really... Don't" initially seems like just another use of one of Ten's many recurring lines. Then you realize the real emotional weight behind it.

Doctor: Molto bene.
Donna: Molto bene.

• • After a friend of mine who was in the middle of a DW binge posted a status update on Facebook to the effect that "Midnight" scared her more than anything the Moff had ever written, ever, I spent a while severely overthinking it, and why it messes with both us and the Doctor as bad as it does. A lot of what I decided would be better filed under an analysis of the Deconstruction aspect (which I don't really want to detail right now), but one particular thing I noticed is how devoted the episode is to turning the Doctor's own weapons against him. He likes to break rules and regulations just for the hell of it, and often catches out Man Behind the Man-style villains this way. So, because he's interested in what's going on, he talks the drivers into opening the viewport against regulations. He doesn't learn a thing, and the front of the bus gets ripped off shortly afterward. Your basic Doctor Who Monster of the Week winds up losing because the Doctor works out its plan or weaknesses and uses those to defeat it. So, because he knows a lot about aliens, he tries to figure out what this one is, and this display of incredible knowledge, inhuman intelligence, and comfortable familiarity with the weird alienates him from the other passengers. And, most significantly of all: His voice. He's highly charismatic and good at taking charge of a situation: just by sheer force of personality, he can convince people to cooperate with him and do what he wants. So, naturally, he tries to talk to the alien, and when it starts copying him keeps testing to figure out what it's doing and trying to convince it that he can help it if it just lets him know what it needs. The consequence of his pleas and rapidfire babbling? It steals his voice. He knows what's happening to him, but not why, and he has no way of warning others, instead being forced to condemn himself by mimicking the monster's words as it convinces the rest of the passengers to kill him. It would be bad enough for anyone else, but for the Doctor? For someone whose entire life consists of using his knowledge and people skills to best advantage? To him, that's probably one of the single most horrifying feelings he could ever experience.
  • Inspired by the original comment while re-watching: The creature is looking for isolated people. The entire episode revolves around that. First scene? The Doctor and Donna parting—she wants to sunbathe. Then, the hostess kicks off the annoying stuff, and the Doctor stops it. Skye and he smile at each other about it. The Doctor talks to people, but he doesn't really know anyone. Mechanic and driver die off-screen, no one knew them. Who does the monster go after? The woman whom no one knows—in fact, the first question after she's caught is, "What's her name?" The hostess answers. The Doctor comes over and tries to help her, and she repeats everyone. Then the hostess suggests that she should be thrown out^[2] The Doctor asks if they could really kill someone, and the hostess is the first to say, "Yes." When the Doctor finally gets caught, and the creature gets everyone to kill him. Then the hostess is the one who saves the day. Now read that back over. Footnotes aside, I have just given an in-depth summary without mentioning anyone who was both on the ship and knew someone else on the ship.
• If you go back over the previous episodes of newWho after seeing Journey's End, you can really see a lot of seemingly disparate details come together for Rusty's out-with-a-bang. That's not the key point I want to raise, though. Remember how Nine couldn't go through with using the Delta Wave to kill the people on Earth and the Daleks? Then Remember how it was not Ten but the half-human "10.5" who wiped out the Daleks in Journey's End. Some fans hold the theory that "half-human" Eight regenerated into Nine when he wiped out the Daleks and Time Lords in the final battle of the Time War. Maybe I am overthinking this and/or giving Rusty too much credit, but there is a clear common thread: A Dalek empire, at the supposed height of its power, taken out by a half-human, half-Time Lord because of the human having enough bastardry/pragmatism to Shoot the Dog where the Time Lord shies from doing so. A subtle Discontinuity Nod? I think so!
• Upon rewatching the entire series on a DW binge, something hit me on Rassilon's 'The Madman and his Savior' speech in 'The End of Time Part 1', referring to Future events regarding The Doctor and the Master. I realised that everything he said was interchangeable between the two the characters, Rassilon said ' 'The Madman sat in his empire of dust and ash, little knowing of the the glory he would achieve'. The Doctor has an 'empire of dust and ash', in the sense that he has lost almost everything, and what does the Doctor become known as throughout Series 5 and 6: The Madman in a Box. The 'glory he would achieve' refers to the fact that The Doctor finally gets to be happy once more during the following seasons. Rassilon continues with 'While his savior looked upon the wilderness in the hope of changing his inevitable fate'. Due his messed up resurrection, The Master's life force was slowly dissipating, meaning that he too would soon regenerate, hence the ' inevitable fate'. As for the 'savior' part, what does the Master do in his final scene in the episode? That's right He saves the Doctor.
• I had watched Human Nature/ Family of Blood probably 4 or 5 times (choking up at the war memorial scene every time) before I twigged that the allegory attacking the school was an army of straw men.
• Something I keep having to correct every time I see it; in "The Fires of Pompeii", the TARDIS doesn't translate the Doctor's and Donna's Latin into contemporary Celtic. It translates it into modern Welsh.
  • It hit me that in A.D. 79, Chiswick wouldn't be inhabited by Normans or Anglo-Saxons, so what would people be speaking there? Celtic.
  • If speaking English sounds like Latin, and speaking Latin sounds like the closest thing to English around, then it would sound like Celtic to the Romans, who probably don't speak anything but Latin or maybe Greek. In fact, it's entirely possible that if the Romans heard real modern English, they might say it sounded like Celtic or another barbarian language.
    • The Romans didn't speak Latin. At least, not the Latin we know and get taught. They spoke a more slang version. Just a point.
• A possible explanation I came across for the Jack is the Face of Boe issue: The one big problem she saw with it (well the one big problem which can't be explained away by Who soft science anyway) was that Boe died, whereas Jack seemingly can't. Then she realised that Jack's immortality comes from his having a direct connection to the Vortex - the source of all of time. The Doctor is immediately repulsed by Jack's "wrongness", but think about it - The Doctor sees the Vortex in his head all the time, and it's seemingly endless. If he's looking at the Vortex via Jack, then Jack, equally, will seem endless. But even time itself has an end, and it's not impossible that Jack's immortality can be broken.
  • A second possible explanation: Jack started out as a normal, albeit incredibly horny, human, but Bad Wolf, being something of a god, made it so that he would eventually change species (?) and become the Face of Boe - specifically so the Doctor can interact with him. Stable Time Loop ahoy!
  • Related subject, but inspired by something completely different written on the site: Jack has to have died (has to die if he wasn't the Face of Boe). If he is to never have died, the universe would be completely full of him despite being infinite (unless of course he turned into some sort of energy being or the like that lived outside of time, restarted the universe when it collapsed, etc.). Since he can travel in time, and has an infinite amount of time to fill, then Jack would show up more than two or three times in the Doctor's personal timeline, he'd have enough time to not only spend it insulting (or shagging) every being in existence at least once, but enough time to spend their entire life with them, and still have eternity left over.
  • Jack Harkness mentioned that he can age, albiet very slowly. The cat nuns mentioned the Face Of Boe is dying of the one thing they cannot cure-age. The one thing that can kill Harkness, even though it would take billions of years.
  • Jack can die for good of old age. But why at that particular time, namely on new earth shortly after the old earth got fried. Then it struck me. Rose wanted Jack to live and never see him die within her own timespan. So Jack had to outlive her even when she travels through time. And when was the latest point in time Rose has been at: The Day the Earth got fried. He died shortly thereafter.
• When watching 'Journey's End', I was one of many frustrated by Donna's fate - not only because she was a lovely character and we didn't want to lose her, but also because of the WAY she went out. Everyone I know would rather Donna have died with her memories intact than continue living without them, as the shrill, self-hating person she once was. At first, I thought it was just RTD chickening out on killing a companion for yet another occasion. Fridge Brilliance set in once I realised that, not only was losing Donna to amnesia much more depressing, it was THE WHOLE POINT! Not only has Donna lost all that experience which deepened her as a person - she is now living a new life, day in and out, without any real meaning to it (at least until the events of The End of Time). It becomes even deeper however, once you realise WHY the Doctor's companions rarely die - it's for the SAME reason as that! Think about it - what would hurt the Doctor more, seeing a person he cares about die, or them leaving him/being torn away from him? The latter, because it also lends credit to why he never visits his companions - it's far too painful. He is content to know that they are alive, but he never tries to see them because the pain of parting is even more unbearable. Look at Jamie and Zoe - both of them were enriched by their experiences, but the Time Lords wiped their memories, essentially doing the same to them that the Doctor would later do to Donna. Then look at Rose - she is alive, and she is well, but as of Doomsday she and the Doctor will have to live every day of their lives, knowing they can never see the other again. The companions who DID die in the series( Adric, Sara Kingdom and Katarina) were all around for a shorter length of time, but still have gut-wrenching deaths. The ones who have the deepest impact on the Doctor - and he on them - are wrenched from him in the most heart-breaking ways imaginable. RTD, SM and the other writers are bastards who love to deliberately tear our hearts apart as much as they can - and I bloody well LOVE them for it!
• Everyone expected the Tenth Doctor to meet his end against Rassillon, or the Master, or another big enemy, even the Doctor himself. But it just emphasizes RTD's theme, running throughout the series (e.g. "Father's Day", "Last of the Time Lords", "Journey's End") is that the big flashy alien enemies who seem significant are just window dressing for the normal human characters who are really the most important things in the universe.
• The Doctor is using psychic paper and it shows him as Queen Vicky's protector when he hands it to her. He's surprised; I figured it was just some malfunction or he'd done it absently, just another title that he hadn't really thought through—because "Protector of the Queen" sounds really good, so it could be reflex. Then I saw Captain Jack and Rose have a conversation about how you can't let your mind wander when using psychic paper, or whatever you're thinking will pop up on the paper. After rewatching that previous episode, I realized that he thinks of himself as such a protector of humanity that, yes, that was just what popped up on the paper—and we never see it, so it could just have been "Protector" or something similarly vague. And her reacting oddly to that could be because he didn't mention it, or because it was vaguer than she was used to.
  • It was pretty clear to this troper that, as it's been established the really smart people can do, Victoria simply saw through the psychic paper and, intrigued by this weirdo in a trenchcoat, thought up a quick lie to keep him around. For what kind of assassin would be running around on the Scottish moors with a "wee naked child".
• Guess who. In "The Sound of Drums," there was a line that bothered me so much that I rewound to make sure the Doctor had actually said that. When the Master is shot and says, "It's always the women," the Doctor says, "I didn't see her." This felt... weird, and I couldn't quite put my finger on why. I figured it was just because it seemed so much not a reaction to the previous statement; it felt like the Doctor was ignoring the other last Time Lord, who was dying in his arms, and that was rather out of character. Then I realized: The Doctor is trying to convince both himself and the Master that it wasn't his fault. And he's failing. The ending hurts more now.--User:Red Wren
• The Pandorica is a minor one. Not its function—that was awesome from the beginning. But rather the name. When we first hear the name in the Eleventh Hour, it obviously references Pandora's Box. Later, we find out that its a prison—again, obvious. Then we find out that Pandora's Box was Amy's favorite story. The Evil Alliance of Evil either made an error (unlikely, considering their accuracy with all the other details) or just thought it was funny.
  • More likely they had the Silents implant the idea in Amy's mind when she was a child, because that's not creepy at all.
  • Bit clever as well. Only seems like a mistake on their part, but it was done on purpose - the more problems the Doctor has to contend with at once, the more able his enemies become. Such as having the time to properly open the Pandorica before the Doctor breaks it open (and it being useless).
• A minor but noticeable revelation for New Earth, where the last scene had Cassandra cradling her future self's arms as she desperately pleaded for everybody else to help. But then you notice that a good chunk of the crowd just seems to be running off instead of doing anything, while everybody else just stands there, meaning the reason why no one called Cassandra beautiful any more, and her eventual fall from grace, was because she just happened to show mercy for the sickly. That turned her from a bit of a joke villain, to a rather tragic character to me.
• The Master's enjoyment of "I Can't Decide" in Last of the Time Lords says a fair amount about his state of mind. Aside from the obvious subtext of being unable to decide whether or not to just kill the Doctor, it also shows that he wouldn't trust the Doctor to stay dead (Oh, I could bury you alive/But you might crawl out with a knife/And kill me when I'm sleeping) and slightly implies that he's suffering from extreme emotional problems, to say the least (My heart feels dead inside/It's cold and hard and petrified). It's certainly made this troper view him slightly more sympathetically, even if he is still a raving psychopath. The Time Lords are bastards for what they did to him.
  • Surely the most relevant line of all is "I won't deny I'm gonna miss you when you're gone."
• Back in series three of the new run, I noticed that the Doctor had ended the Time War with an odd ratio: countless Daleks survived, but the only other Time Lord, the Master, had to go to great lengths to do so, and the Doctor wasn't even aware he'd survived their last encounter. The thought was then that the Doctor was either a terrible shot, wiping out what was left of his own people and missing the Daleks in droves, or that he hit exactly who he was aiming for. While End of Time makes it clear that he did indeed end the Time Lords intentionally, and the damages to the Daleks were largely collateral, but evidence of this shows up as early as the Ninth Doctor. His reactions to finding a surviving Dalek are rage tempered by fear, then understanding and sympathy; if he were truly coming across the last survivor of the species that exterminated his people, now helpless, it's unlikely he'd have taunted the dalek as he did (he did not do so in similar circumstances in Boomtown), possibly even just delivering a wordless Mercy Kill. Instead he rants, raves, and gloats—the latter especially uncharaceristic of the Doctor against a helpless foe, but making more sense now that his Survivor Guilt now has a point of hate other than himself. Likewise, his intending parting comment to Rose was to encourage her to live her life well. She decides the best way to do that is to save him, too—when the Tenth Doctor refers to the final act of the time war being one of life, he meant his as much as Jack's.
• Also in series three, many fans wondered why the Time Lords would resurrect the Master of all people as an ally in the Time War, being that he's frequently colluded with the Daleks and tried to off the Time Lords himself on multiple occasions, far from being a perfect warrior for them. End of Time makes this no clearer, as it takes place for the Time Lords after the Master's fled, and Rassilon doesn't deduce a means to escape until then. Then it hit me: the Time Lords of old were rather stuffy, stodgy folks who were eminently predictable and prone to avoiding conflict. The Master wasn't, and they were desperate enough to go to him. They weren't looking for a perfect warrior as another combatant, but as someone to emulate: someone who'd be able to match the Daleks not just in strategy, but in capability. The horrors the Doctor recounts to the Master as occurring after the Master fled would have been after the Master decided the Time Lords had already lost, after all, and the Doctor considers them so monstrous that he killed the race to stop them. Abandoned by their monster, the Time Lords chose to become monsters themselves.
  • Another interpretation; the Time Lords are trapped in the Time Lock and they need the Master alive and outside to break out. Rassilon not only sends the Drums back through the Vortex but the idea to the Time Lords to ressurect him, knowing full well that the Master's self-preservation instinct would help him survive the Time War. The Master wasn't a soldier, he was a way out. - Aspiring Crazy Cat Lady
  • The Master could also have been a backup plan: They brought in The Doctor because he is good at winning, they brought in The Master because he is good at surviving losing.
• The Doctor and Rose's relationship never made much sense to me, and in fact downright pissed me off until I took the circumstances into account. The Doctor has just come off of a massive war, lost his entire race, and has every reason to be angsty and depressed, doubting his own judgment and feeling rather lonely. And then he returns to Earth, probably for the first time since the Time War, and god knows how long it lasted. He dashes about, acts all cool and cryptic, takes out the obvious bad guys, and meets a girl, whom he promptly whisks away on a series of adventures. It's just like old times! And since Rose is his first companion since the war—as I rather doubt the Doctor would be willing to pull others into such heated battle—she represents an escape from the hardship of the war and a return to his old adventuring ways, getting to play the hero and having little reason to be all that upset. And then fate takes her away from him simply because she loses her grip. He's back to square one—he's lonely, and has once again lost someone he cares about, and it was the person that to him represented things getting better. This doesn't quite explain his treatment of Martha, but thinking of everything she represented to him might easily lead him to hold her in such high regard.
  • I'm also not much of a Rose fan, but I did eventually decide on an interpretation of his obsession that makes her feel like less of a Relationship Sue to me. As mentioned, he just came out of the Time War. He's had to commit multiple genocides, including that of his own species, murdering all the friends and family he ever had. As established later in Series Fnarg, most of the universe is absolutely terrified of him, regarding him as an incomprehensible and utterly alien Complete Monster who brings death, destruction and chaos in his wake. At this point? He's probably wondering if they're right. Then all of a sudden he stops by his pet planet for yet another round of his battle with everything ever and runs into this girl who has no idea who he is. To her, he's not the Lonely God or the Oncoming Storm or the Bringer of Darkness, he's just a mysterious weirdo with big ears and a leather jacket. And Rose practically makes reaching out and befriending random people into a superpower. Basically, he latched onto Rose because it's the first time in a long time someone's treated him like a person; she gave a lifeline back from total isolation. The fact that she dragged him back from the abyss and he knows it leads him to obsess over her, even though really, anyone who had managed to connect to him at that time and that place in his life could have helped him much the same.
    • I personally believe that the Doctor's relationship with Rose was totally platonic on his end. Rose is literally the first human he encounters after the Time War and Nine seems to use her as a model from which to re-learn human behavior. When Rose flirts with the Doctor and indulges her crush on him, the Doctor sees this a just normal human behavior, how two close friends act, which leads him to accidentally sending Martha mixed messages during Season Three.
• The plot of "Rise of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel" seems to follow a pretty standard action movie-ish plot, and thanks to our heroes, everything works out in the end. But then you take a moment to think, and realise- this is probably what happened on Mondas to the original Cybermen, except there was nobody around to save the day, and no one ever thought to look back upon it.
• Something that took forever for me to realise: Lady Cassandra is a cyborg, the skin graft and brain-in-a-jar being cybernetic components. ~ Old Man Ho Oh
• OK, it isn't much, but the Dalek in the New Doctor Who episode "Dalek" must have even more of a reason to destroy humanity due to its absorbing the the Internet. Why? It's simple - Rule 34.

Dalek: My brain is impaired! It needs antiseptic solution!

Gotta wonder...:

• When first I saw Blink, I thought, "You could just wink." But then I realised, many many months after The Time of Angels and Flesh and Stone, that winking blinds you to any Angels that might be advancing from that side... And it has been established that the image of an Angel becomes itself an Angel; cameras have no peripheral vision. Oh Crap.
  • That, and have you ever tried winking instead of blinking? It's actually really hard to do.
• Another one from the above troper. This troper was perplexed with Jenny's survival at the end of The Doctor's Daughter. She'd thought Jenny regenerated when that time essence came out of her mouth. Naturally, this troper is a NuWho fan, but it finally dawned on her after discussing the Doctor's apparent disabled regeneration in Let's Kill Hitler via poison. Jenny survived because she was, technically, within the first 15 hours of regeneration. The generation machine, built to give birth to fully grown humans taken from a sample, may have not known how to handle Time Lord DNA, especially the Doctor's (which was made to regenerate instead of rejuvenating as a punishment from the Time Lords). Since regenerating changes the cells in the Time Lord's body, Jenny would not only be considered the Doctor's daughter but as another one of his regenerations. Hence, her surviving was not regenerating without change as this troper originally thought but actually her body healing because Jenny was still within her first 15 hours of birth/regeneration.
• Fridge Brilliance regarding The Doctor's Daughter. When The Doctor is telling the human army commander that genocide and peace are not the same thing, he says (roughly) "When you get a new dictionary, look up genocide. There'll be a picture of me there, and under it it'll say 'Over My Dead Body!'" While the point he was making was that they shouldn't do it, there's another reason the definition of "genocide" might have a picture of the Doctor next to it...
• Some Fridge Brilliance regarding the Weeping Angels. Why do they take the form of garden statuary in the first place? Because they're such a familiar sight that people won't look at them twice.
• Donna is pretty much a grown-up Lauren from The Catherine Tate Show, with more depth, a different accent, not as smart, and exactly the same attitude. That is, always making little jabs at people to create an emotional distance from her, though Donna does it because she doesn't like to get hurt. Also, Donna is a lot more capable of making proper friends, being nice to people, and empathizing than Lauren.
• It seemed weird to me that the Simm!Master seemed a lot more psychopathic than previous incarnations, (that I know of, admittedly I haven't watched a great deal of Classic Who.) But the Doctor mentions a sort of species psychic link, in that a Time Lord can always hear another. The Master's mind used to be buffered by hearing all of them, but now there's only the Doctor and the Drums. This is why they feature predominantly in New Who; they sound much louder than they used to be.
  • Why were the drums never mentioned in Classic Who? Simple, since Classic Who was before the Time War, there was no need for Rassilon to have planted the drumbeat in the Master.
• The Master being onslaughted with the sound of drums his entire life makes some of the less... Sane... schemes of his previous incarnations make a lot more sense. Time Flight? The Drums were especially loud that day.
• Listen to the musical score entitled "Gallifrey At War", which plays during "End of Time Part 2" as we see the ruins of Gallifrey on the final day of the Time War and the Time Lord High Council convening. Obviously, the song is a more somber rendition of "This Is Gallifrey, Our Childhood Our Home". But consider this: the original "This Is Gallifrey", which plays every time the Doctor reminisces about the planet and its people (and during the Master's death and funeral, when he becomes "the last one left"), reflects how the Doctor chooses to remember things; it's beautiful, grandiose and sad—because that's how the Doctor wants to remember Gallifrey (which is what any shell-shocked survivor in his situation would do when they recalled their lost home). "At War", on the other hand, is dark, desolate, and angry—because that's how things actually were on Gallifrey towards the end.
  • Also notice this: unlike "Our Childhood, Our Home", the orchestration for "At War" has no real end. Makes you wonder about the Time War, doesn't it...?
• I've heard arguments that Ten's ranting at Wilf in 'The End of Time' and his last words were a less than heroic way to go out. But Ten had been fairly well defined as honestly wanting to stay in that incarnation by that point - this is the same incarnation who kept his severed hand in the control room of the TARDIS and siphoned off the regeneration energy into it when he nearly died. Ten had been doing everything he could to avoid his actual death, because he wanted to stay Ten as long as he could. Even if it's not necessarily 'heroic,' it's true to the character.
  • And, going to the above comments about how the previous incarnation influences the next one, Nine's last words are about how he wanted to do all these things and didn't get the chance. So his next incarnation is one who wants to stick around as long as he can and do them.
• Fridge Horror from "Silence in the Library"/"Forest of the Dead": River closes out the episode with the voiceover:

River: "Some days, nobody dies at all. Now and then, every once in a very long while, every day in a million days, when the wind stands fair and the Doctor comes to call...everybody lives."

• • • Yeah, for some value of "lives" that encompasses having all the flesh stripped from their skeletons and then has their brains uploaded into a computer on a planet infested with flesh-scavenging shadows which no human will ever come to visit again. Where they then get to stay, just the half-dozen or so of them...forever. That's a real happy ending, that is.
    • Life is what you make of it, regardless of the circumstances.
      • That's a lovely thought but not very realistic. If you're in a horrible situation, like being stuck in a dull and manipulative computer program for all eternity, there's really only so much you can make of it and trying to look on the bright side won't change how horrible your fate is.
      • DULL??? They are 'trapped' as it were inside the greatest library ever. Millenia of history; the literature of millions of worlds; the latest in science and technology all theirs to explore. A Universe of knowledge and dreams... they'll never come to the end of it. Sounds pretty darn wonderful to me.
    • They're not whole people like the others who were "saved" in the library, they're all data ghosts. Miss Evangelista was improperly uploaded and the obvious changes were to her face and her intelligence - it's the intelligence which is important here. Her entire personality changes - how do we know this is still Miss Evangelista and not some aspect of the computer using her memories and distorted appearance to communicate with Donna? Something is left of the whole team, sure, the data ghosts were saved, but they're not really the same people anymore. They're like programs - like Doctor Moon or the non-CAL children.
    • Her "intelligence" is intact insofar as her personality is concerned, and as much as that sort of thing can be preserved via computer. What has changed is that her "intelligence" as an expression of her cognitive processing power has been increased significantly.
• Fridge Horror from "Love and Monsters", when you realize that given the thickness of the paving stone girlfriend and their love life, she either has a mouth like the inside of a Tardis or the lead is such that it explains the whole episode in retrospect.
• Fridge Brilliance AND Horror - In the episode Family of Blood in the third series, the Doctor disguises himself as the human John Smith. In the end though, he changes back to himself, but offers Joan to come along with him, saying that everything John Smith is and was - he's capable of that too. So, what did John Smith do? He fell in love with a human, misunderstood and judged, cared and teached, despaired and cried and briefly contemplated to sacrifice the rest of the world to keep on living himself, but decided not to and killed himself. John Smith was basically both Foreshadowing and one big Lampshade hanging on Ten's life.
• I just had a realization relating to something that always bugged me about the Weeping Angels, namely that in their first appearance they merely send people back in time, but later they are shown to kill without reason. In Blink, the Angel is starving, so getting time energy is more important than anything else. But when they have all the energy they need, of course they're going to kill people. Why? Because when people are around, they turn to stone, making any potential viewer a threat. If that's not a recipe for an Omnicidal Maniac, what is?
  • Also consider that they have been shown sending people back in time, but not space. Depending on how far back they can send a person, they'd just be sending a huge road block to themselves earlier on in the timeline.
    • London to Hull may not be all that far by road, but it is a pretty long distance when you consider the movement of the Earth through space along its orbit over the decades. Even without the orbital wrinkle, it's still some travel in space as well as time.
• So a lot of people harp on Ten for being really arrogant and especially devolving into his A God Am I/Time Lord Victorious persona from the 2009 Specials. I usually think people over exaggerate his arrogance (he's not that way all the time) but there is a subtle reason why he does act that way at times (where previous Doctors may have behaved less so). In "Utopia," Ten tells Jack about Rose/Bad Wolf resurrecting him. He says that no one was ever meant to have the power of the Time Vortex in them. "If a Time Lord did he'd become a god. A vengeful god." Nine takes the power of the Vortex into him to save Rose, which causes his regeneration. Ten was formed from the power of the Vortex, so perhaps some of that remains in him, making the Time Lord Victorious side of himself come out more and more.
• Martha and Mickey getting together. I never really thought about it that much - but then it hit me. Martha and Mickey were the two main people who were negatively affected by Rose and indirectly the Doctor - Mickey suffered constant rejection and harsh treatment by Rose; Martha suffered the same from the Doctor and indirectly by Rose. I think it's a beautiful and fitting ending for the two people who had their lives screwed up by the same person ended up happy and together. (It seems like I'm being a bit harsh on Rose here, but it still makes sense.)
  • Or to put it in a less positive light: Martha and Mickey were the ones not good enough for Ten and Rose and their blissful love so they eventually turned to the other reject from that couple.
  • Or to put it in a way which is less judgmental either way; Mickey and Martha could share the experience of having loved someone who, ultimately for whatever reason, was unable to love them back.
  • Hey kids, remember what Martha's first episode was called? Smith and Jones? That Smith may have been the Doctor's "John Smith" back then, but even in her very last appearance Martha's battling alien crime, this time with her husband Mickey Smith. Don't known if it was intentional or not, but this troper was surprised by this connection. Martha may have moved on from the Doctor, and Mickey with Rose, but the Smith and Jones team still lives on.
• A big theme from the Tenth Doctor's run was what happened when The Doctor wasn't there to do his job. Now look back on the episode Midnight, and think of how much easier things would have been for the Doctor if he had someone who knew him, or some sort of friend on that bus. It's showing what happens when the companion aren't there to do their job, a nice contrast to what's been shown and what's to come.
• Fridge Brilliance: At first when I watched the part of Journey's End where Ten says 10.5 is too dangerous to be left alone because he killed the Daleks, I thought "Hold it Mister High and Mighty. You've done just as bad." Then, it occurred to me. The Doctor almost never travels alone. When he does, bad things happen (See The Waters of Mars). The Doctor is likely aware of this. Ten wasn't saying 10.5 is depraved and a maniac or anything; he's just saying that 10.5 is as dangerous as he is, and that like the Doctor, 10.5 needs companions to keep him sane and moral. They both needs someone there to "stop them". --ncfan.
  • Of course, he still banishes 10.5 and Rose to another dimension to get rid of him.
• The Weeping Angels are like a total inversion of many monsters in mythology. Just think about it- there are a lot of creatures (e.g. basilisks, Medusa, cockatrices, etc.) where you can't look at them or look them in the eyes, or you will turn to stone. With the Weeping Angels, you always have to be watching them. Also, when you look at a Weeping Angel, they are the ones who turn to stone, not you.
  • Sort of played straight in Flesh and Stone, where you learn that you can't look into their eyes anyway.
• I always wondered why Jack overshot his destination with the Vortex Manipulator. Then it hit me: he's worried and confused as to why the Doctor left him there, so he does what any person with a time travelling device would do: aim for the early twenty-first century. Which is all very well and good; except he forgot that the Vortex Manipulator does not work as a teleport. It only did that from Utopia onwards. Seeing as there was no Satellite Five in the early 21st century, he probably ended up in 1869 as a failsafe on the Manipulator's part - take him to a time period where the Earth was in that position. Scottv2
  • Depending on your frame of reference, the Earth is either not moving at all, in which case he should still end up in space where Satellite Five used to be (Which actually oughtn't be a problem for Jack), or it is orbiting the Sun at 30 km/s (108,000 km/h), itself orbiting the centre of the galaxy at 251 km/s (903,600 km/h), itself moving at some 600 km/s (2,160,000 km/h): in which case he'll end up trillions of kilometres away from Earth. Either way, the failsafe wouldn't help.
• Fridge Logic: Wasn't Martha engaged to that guy she met in The Last of the Time Lords? Why did she end up marrying Mickey in The End of Time?
  • Not every engaged couple makes it to the altar. Martha got engaged pretty quickly, too. Things must have just not worked out, possibly because she coulnd't share her alien experiences with him or because she went after him largely because of his actions in the Year That Never War.
  • Between the time of Martha's engagement to a man with a tendency towards Heroic Sacrifice and her marraige to Mickey there was a Dalek invasion. Do the math.
  • Davies said that Milligan was the rebound guy. Remember how her telling Donna and the Doctor about him focused on ways he reminded her of the Doctor? By the time she's on her honeymoon with Mickey in Children of Earth, it's been a year since Journey's End, plenty of time for her to break up with Tom and get together with Mickey.
    • I also want to point out the fact that "Milligan" is really, REALLY close to a "mulligan", or a retry, as it were...
    • It's been a year for the Doctor. But it's a time travel show. Who knows how long it's been from her point of view.
    • It can't have been too long - maybe Martha broke up with Tom between the Sontaran episodes and the finale episodes, or maybe it was after Journey's End, but either way, once they're back on earth, they're back in the normal timestream. When Torchwood pop up in The Stolen Earth, it is made explicitly clear that the episodes take place after series 2 of Torchwood because reference is made to the deaths of Tosh and Owen. It's not known how much time passes between Journey's End and Day One of Children Of Earth, but it can't be more than a year or so, since they tend to try and keep the stories reasonably present-day and they haven't replaced Tosh or Owen yet. The clip of the Doctor saying goodbye to Martha and Mickey probably took place much later in their timestream, because they are already married and having adventures again, but in Children of Earth, Martha's absence is explained as her being on her honeymoon. There IS time for them to get together, but it's not much - especially when you realise Martha didn't know Mickey before Journey's End, so it's not like she had any more time with him than she did with Tom. Still seems a bit Pair the Spares to me.
  • We don't know how much time passed in between Martha breaking it off with Tom Milligan and marrying Mickey. It could be several years for all we know. There was no context for it in the scene when the Doctor saved their lives.
• The Master being pulled to the resurrection because of the heartbeat of a Time Lord. Now, what did Donna hear after the Tenth Doctor siphoned his regeneration energy into his hand? A heartbeat of a Time Lord metacrisis; calling to her from the future and converging all timelines on her.
• From Forest of the Dead: At the end, when the Doctor turns off the gravity platform and leaps into space, I kept wondering why he didn't splatter all over the ground at the bottom. Just today I realized why it works: He's falling all the way to the center of the planet! And at the center of the planet, there is no gravity. (Presumably there's artificial gravity in the data core chamber itself.) The Doctor would hit terminal velocity, and then as gravity diminished on the way down, air resistance would gradually decelerate him. Bloody brilliant. (On the other hand, this creates some Fridge Logic issues of its own—specifically, even at a generous calculation of terminal velocity, it would take over twenty-four hours to fall that far.)
  • I thought that was the point of the Doctor using the Sonic Screwdriver as he entered the gravity platform, to increase the gravity to pull himself down the tunnel even faster than normal terminal velocity. He then exits the tunnel, not using the screwdriver, implying that the lack of gravity closer to the core was sufficient to slow him down.
• It's long been established that Omega and Rassilon laid the foundation for all of Time Lord Society. When Omega fell into the antimatter universe he ended up becomming a being of pure consciousness and living as a god in his own empty universe. Skip ahead a billion years, and what was Rassilon's ultimate plan to end the Time War? To destroy all reality and in the process turn the Time Lords into beings of pure consciousness living as gods in their own empty universe. How fitting. "The Final Sanction" would be more appropriately named "The Omega Sanction".
• In New Earth, Cassandra mentions that she chose her favorite pattern for the clone. I wondered why would a woman like Cassandra prefer that particular outlandish pattern, but on my second viewing of the episode, it occurred to me that she preferred the appearance of the last man to call her beautiful.
• A mix of Fridge Horror and Fridge Brilliance: In Blink, we know that The Doctor and Martha ended up getting sent back in time due to a Weeping Angel. However, it's never explained how this exactly happened. We learn in The Time of the Angels/Flesh and Stone that anything that holds the image of an angel becomes an angel. The Doctor and Martha haven't met Sally yet at the end of the episode, where she ends up giving them a picture of a Weeping Angel. Makes sense?
• When re-watching the Impossible Planet and The Satan Pit, I noticed that as the characters go into the ventilation system, the captain talks to them as if he is consoling children. Indeed, they are even being forced to crawl in the tunnels. The Bible emphasizes becoming like a child to enter the kingdom of heaven, and Rose, Toby, and Danny were called a child, virgin, and boy respectively by the Beast. This opened my mind to more religious issues in these episodes, such as man being given dominion over the animals (the Ood's sole purpose is to serve and they are referred to as livestock) and much more. A legitimate analysis could be written on this story arc!
• The Doctor's Time Lord Victorious breakdown in The Waters of Mars is a reaction to the end of The Planet of the Dead, where he is told that his song is ending soon. The entire point of saving Adelaide was to prove to himself that he could change fixed points and therefore save himself. Hence his horrified reaction when he discovers that he can't - he's not just horrified at his arrogance, it has sunk in he will die soon.
• I was re-reading a Doctor Who wiki a bit, and I noticed that the Toclafane (from The Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords were originally conceived as an alternate to the Daleks in case they couldn't be used in the new series. And then it hit me: future humanity had basically become Daleks. Granted, they were Daleks on medication, but still just as deadly and cruel. No wonder the revelation broke the Doctor's heart. Also consider the Daleks made from humans and the human/Dalek hybrid seen in previous episodes - it's almost like a sort of subtle foreshadowing.
• One of the most haunting Tenth era novels, The Eyeless, has a brutal and brilliant bit of Fridge Brilliance. The Doctor crashes on a planet After the End where the few hundred remaining survivors have set up a system for exactly how many children each citizen must have in order for the society to survive long term. While this is required for their species to avoid extinction, many are unhappy with it; particularly Alsa, an angry thirteen year old girl who understandably doesn't want to spend her life as a birthing factory. Alsa later goes on to make a deal with the "villains" of the book: an alien race who are ruthlessly logical and comprehend everything in terms of statistical odds. For example, they figure a way out of a situation where sacrificing several of them would statistically lead to success: they're guaranteed to succeed if they're willing to sacrifice several of them. They're quite willing to go along with it, treating everything as a statistic, but Alsa can't bring herself to risk not being one of those who survive: she's obviously comparing the brutal logic of the aliens to her society's demand of her to have children, and a comparison can' be drawn (though the race struggling to survive is much less brutal about it). The whole book is a deconstruction and examination of free will, what you should do when sacrificing your will leads to a greater good, what happens when logic is devoid of compassion. Where exactly should the lines be drawn? The book gives no clear answer.
  • It's also quite easy to imagine this book taking place just before or after Ten's 'Time Lord Victorious' phase, as he deliberately breaks the rules and moves Alsa further on in her own world's timeline - so she doesn't have to bare children for her species survival. This has disturbing implications, and is the first time we see him cheating time.

Eleventh Doctor Era

• A Good Man Goes To War always seemed a bit off to me, because anything the Doctor ever did to inspire fear was in response to an even greater threat that couldn't be stopped any other way and it was his enemies who kept pushing him to the extremes he sometimes went to... but then I realized. The cracks in time swallowed several of those threats (the Weeping Angels, several Dalek invasions, the Cyber-King and who knows how many others), but not his response to them, so many of his actions now do seem like unwarranted violence to outside observers, which explains the change in his reputation and the lengths people will go to to stop him.
  • It's simpler than that. The cracks never happened because The Doctor hit the Reset Button at the end of Series Five. However, the military force is allied with Madame Kovarian, who, in turn, is allied with The Silence. And they want to keep The Doctor from ever answering that one particular question. If the Doctor were truly seen by the majority as a dangerous madman, would there have been billions upon billions of replies in "The Wedding of River Song", when River asked for help in saving The Doctor?
• Why did Amy grow up to become a kiss-a-gram? No parents to tell her she couldn't.
• Why does the 11th Doctor hate apples? Because an apple a day keeps the doctor away
  • And Eleven expected that he would love them clearly because Ten had.
    • There are actually a few things at work here: The simplest is, new body, new taste buds, and we mean NEW as in still cooking new, so everything is going to taste horrible because the things eaten were very flavorful (apples are tart, beans sweet, bacon salty, bread and butter oily and dry at the same time, etc.) So what does he end up with? Fish sticks and custard - two of the blander things in the pantry. The next complex thing is the fact that the Doctor knows she is terrified in regards to her wall, so he is doing a "Doctor lies" scenario and keeping her busy long enough for her to calm down enough to tell him what is going on. The threshhold might have been him opting out for the fish sticks and custard, because it a) would gross most people out and b) fascinate a child's fascination. Or finally, it could be a combination of both - he KNEW he needed the fish and custard right off, but diverted her until she was no longer in fear of the crack.
• In "The Pandorica Opens", River finds a photo of Rory in Roman garb in Amy's room. She tells the Doctor that she's found a photo of the centurion, but why wouldn't she already know Rory from their previous adventures in her timeline? Because Rory never existed. Amy din't recognize him, and neither did River, despite already knowing that Amy was her mother.
• A bit of Fridge Brilliance regarding a scene from The Time of Angels. When Amy asks River how she knows how to fly the TARDIS, River says, "I learned from the best." Upon seeing the Doctor's smug expression, she adds, "Too bad you were busy that day. This just seemed like a throwaway line to me; given that River likes messing with the Doctor's head, I figured she was just teasing him, and that it really was him that taught her in the future. But then, in Let's Kill Hitler, River learns to fly the TARDIS from the TARDIS herself. So she really did learn from the best. And to say that the Doctor was busy that day is an understatement, seeing as he was dying at the time.
• In the beginning sequence of A Good Man Goes to War, River tells Rory that she's just come back from celebrating her birthday with the Doctor. This isn't just a throw-away moment to add depth to the relationship between River and the Doctor. On second viewing, the fact that this scene comes shortly after the birth of Melody/River suggests that the frivolous birthday party was another clever bit of Foreshadowing.
• Speaking of TDW, I just realized something that's more of a Brilliance moment for the police force, if it's accurate. Idris scolds the Doctor for always opening her doors inwards, rather than following the sign that says "pull to open". I wondered why the doors on a police box would open out, since it would seem that they'd be easier to open from the inside that way. Seeing as they were at one point meant to keep people inside, this wouldn't make any sense - until you realize that when the doors open out, the hinges are on the outside. Hinges on the inside are much easier for a captive to dismantle.
  • • I had a Fridge Brilliance moment a while ago about the TARDIS, but it's for a different reason: "PULL TO OPEN" refers to the police telephone panel, not the doors. That's why the handles aren't on the same level: one of them belongs to that panel.
• There were a number of things that bugged me about "Victory of the Daleks," one of which being the scene where the Doctor is trying to get Bracewell to feel human emotions to counteract the Dalek bomb on him. At first I didn't understand why the Doctor was trying to use pain and negative emotions which literally leaves Bracewell moaning "Doctor...it hurts..." while Amy had to be the one to think of fighting with The Power of Love. The next day it hit me that, considering everything the Doctor goes through and has been through all his life (always seeing people dying, leaving, oppressed, all the bad blood between him and his own race, being generally lonely most of the time, etc.), it actually makes a lot of sense that he would think of pain before happiness because, in the grand scheme of things, that's what he knows best.
  • Just to pile on some more evidence for your theory, look at Amy's Choice. The Dream Lord is the manifestation of the Doctor's darker nature. The Doctor figure's that out saying, "There's only one person who hates me as much as you do." The Doctor really is just a walking ball of pain and self-loathing.
  • As of Let's Kill Hitler, despite the Rule of Funny the much-anticipated episode contained, the Doctor, dying of poison, initiates the TARDIS Emergency Voice Interface to find a way to save his own life. The Interface takes on a holographic appearance with several templates, assuming his face first and foremost. What does the Doctor say upon seeing his face as the hologram to help him survive the poisoning?

Doctor:No! Give me someone I like.

• • Speaking of, after going back and watching Trial of a Time Lord, I was hit with a bout of Fridge Brilliance concerning the above. The Doctor says that he knows who the Dream Lord is, but doesn't seem to know about the situation with the pollen until the end, when the Dream Lord pulls the TARDIS from the cold star. That's because he doesn't. He knows that the Dream Lord is, in a sense, him, and that he's a personification of all the Doctor's unexpressed darkness, but suspects the Dream Lord to be the Valeyard.
• In Flesh and Stone, when the Doctor tells Amy "remember what I told you when you were seven." Logically, right after the episode finished this troper rushed back to The Eleventh Hour and reviewed every single word he said to her, but nothing clicked. Then it hit him that the Doctor had his jacket, despite having lost it to the angels in the previous scene, and not having it again in the next one.
  • In direct relation to that, I keep being surprised at how no one seems to recall one of the very final scenes in The Eleventh Hour, where the TARDIS materializes in front of a disgruntled Kid!Amy. We never find out what happens next or why the Doctor didn't take Amy with him or anything. Obviously, this will play a part in the finale.
    • Actually, no. That's Amy dreaming - the sound of the TARDIS is what wakes her up. This is referenced in her opening VO in the next episode, when she says 'When I was a little girl, I dreamed of time and space...'
  • Interestingly, when one thinks, in The Eleventh Hour, when young Amy waits for the Doctor, the camera moves to the inside of her house, where a sinister silouhette dashes across the screen. But, it's not Prisoner Zero, it's the Doctor from the finale, leaving a message for Amy!
• There's a bit of brilliance in "Vincent & The Doctor" when Van Gogh, fighting an invisible monster only he can see, an invisible monster that has been haunting him for a long while, kills it with an artist's easel. Now think about the mental illness he's been dealing with in the same episode. (Props to the Television Without Pity recap for pointing this one out to me)
  • The Krafayis is also a metaphor that applies to Eleven. The scene of him running away terrified from the Krafayis in that episode represents Eleven's reaction to his inner demons. He tries is best to get away from them, but they often sneak up on him anyway because he can't see them coming. This is why there are so many perception filters in Series Five. The entire series can be interpreted as an allegory on the dangers of leaving feelings unacknowledged. Steven Moffat seems to think that inner demons are like monsters under a child's bed, or like aliens that have hid themselves with a perception filter.
• When Amy says to Vincent "I'm not the marrying kind" it took a few views to register how this reveals just how big an impact Rory has had on her - from "day before my wedding" to "not the marrying kind". Ka-pow
• This one is for The Big Bang specifically but connects to the rest of season 5: It's quite obvious how important Moffat thinks fairytales really are, and it's never been more obvious than in this episode. Watching the Confidential shows how really silly scenes in the museum were put together in such a way as to represent that the world was fallng apart, and so a lot of history literally made no sense anymore. Displays existed including such fascinating things as the Nile Penguins, for example. One of the few things with any consistency in this slowly dying universe is the myth of the Centurion, Rory, and the Myth of the Pandorica... So many facts have literally vanished from existence that humans can't rely on the continuity of history anymore. So this unvierse is quite literally holding the remaining scraps itself together via the power of story telling.
  • More on the Pandorica/Pandora thing. At first the whole Sealed Evil in a Can thing worked, and making the Doctor into that was kind of cool, but then I thought about it and realized that by placing the Doctor in the Pandorica they were aping the original story perhaps more than they intended. They hadn't trapped the monster. They'd trapped Hope. -hitchopottimus
  • They trapped both the monster and hope. Assuming the Pandorica actually contains Eleven's inner demons (this theory seems likely but has not been confirmed), some of those inner demons are probably sexual attraction to various companions (seen most in Episodes 10-13). Eleven tends to give these companions hope, but Eleven is correct when he notes that romantic involvement with humans is risky. Eleven's "Dark Side", is really a mixed-bag.
  • If the Doctor is the evil, than Amy is hope.
    • Jonn - That's Fridge Brilliance Up to Eleven - The last thing out of Pandora's box was Hope, the last thing out of the Pandorica was Amy. (Eleven went into it to pilot it into the exploding TARDIS, but strictly speaking he never left it, due to the reboot)
    • Especially since some tellings of the story maintain that Hope was the worst of the evils to escape Pandora's box. What Rory went through is a classic example of this version.
      • From a slightly different angle: the myth of Pandora's Box centers around an beautiful, intelligent woman who's curiosity turned out to be her weakness. Beautiful, smart, but impulsively curious, sometimes to her own detriment. Remind you of anyone? And since Amy's memories and identity were the template used by the Alliance to get to the Doctor, that makes her the means by which the Pandorica was orchestrated and opened. So maybe Amy is Pandora. She would however, represent hope to Rory, who stuck with her for almost two thousand years in the hope that he could protect her. Maybe that makes Amy (or even Rory) hope, by association? Maybe this is just another example of how myths merge and blur into one another over time, creating the modern versions of stories which may vary from their older versions: which is exactly what happens in the falling-apart-universe in The Big Bang, where humans have effectively made up a bunch of not-entirely-accurate stories to explain a past they no longer remember.
        • The Doctor being the evil inside Pandora's Box could also have been foreshadowing for the next series, with there being a "war" against him, and the comments about his revenge being something you do not want to receive.
    • Amy could well be hope, given how she's the only one who can save the universe. Seems to me that both Rory and Amelia have Pandora-like roles: he releases the Doctor and traps Amy, while Amelia releases her future self.
• In Big Bang 2, The Doctor is supposed to be trapped on the other side of the universe, deleted form all of histroy, never born. But he was in the time war, which is time locked, so it can't be changed. So he couldn't be deleted.
  • Sort of. It doesn't necessarily mean that the Doctor had to be the one to close the lock, only that they are locked at all. It was reinforced back in "Turn Left" and "Waters of Mars", that it was about the event, but not necessarily about the people or how it arrives at its conclusion. A Doctor that never existed most likely means that it was the Master who created the time lock.
• You know how in "The Christmas Invasion," Prime Minister Harriet Jones says she's not supposed to know about Torchwood? She learned about it back in her first appearance in "Aliens of London," when she read the emergency invasion protocols the Slitheen left lying around.
• It always bugged me that Amy pops out of the box saying "Okay kid, this is where it gets complicated." She sounds very lucid. And then she very woozy for the next few scenes. It finally hit me that that's a direct message from the Doctor "like an ansaphone."
• One from Series Five here. It seemed a bit weird that the Daleks believe that the Doctor would cause the cracks in the fabric of reality by destroying the TARDIS. Then I rewatched Victory Of The Daleks...specifically the bit where he threatens to take them out with the self-destruct button. It makes a lot more sense now. Scottv2
  • And of course, he WAS willing to blow up the TARDIS in that dream.
    • The Doctor willingly blew up Gallifrey and destroyed his own species, planet and the Time War era Daleks. Of course they think he's causing the cracks in reality. How do they know he's not trying to destroy that?
• Another one from Scottv2: Why does the TARDIS send stuff flying around when it comes in to land? It's clearing a space on the floor...
• Anyone else wonder what was up with the ducks (or lack thereof) in the first episode of series 5? Well, consider this: the crack in time was devouring all the Ponds. Augustus Pond, Mrs. Pond, the Pond siblings...the duck pond... Maybe it just got a little carried away?
  • Pond siblings?
  • My interpretation was, being that he's so used to encountering terribly evil alien conspiracies hidden amongst very normal things and that his perceptions have been boosted to supernatural levels, he immediately latches on the slightest discrepancy in his surroundings. After all, a pool of water that everyone thinks is a duck pond even if there's no ducks could in fact be the result of a perception filter, maybe some kind of alien spawning pool or Dalek superweapon, who knows!
    • It doesn't bode well for North America, which is often referred to as "across the pond."
  • Or more simply, it is a Pond missing something. The Doctor hasn't quite figured out what is going on with Amy, being a bit woozy after the regeneration, but his brain are definately making connections.
• In A Christmas Carol Rory is dressed in centurion armor. At first I thought it was a Call Back and a glimpse into Amy and Rory's bedroom life, then I remembered something from The Eleventh Hour, Amy used to make Rory dress as the "Raggedy Doctor". Rory's costume says a lot about his and Amy's relationship.
  • Remember that the reason the centurion Autons exist at all is because Amy was fascinated by the Romans from childhood.
• The Master spreading his medical template across all humanity...it's the same principle as the Chula nanogenes in "The Empty Child" and "The Doctor Dances", but on a grander scale and with radiation.
  • It wasn't exactly fridge brilliance, though—as soon as the cactus person said that the machine "heals entire planets," I had an Oh Crap moment.
• At first I was wondering if the Daleks in "Victory of the Daleks" being genetically inferior and unrecognisable was a plot hole, considering the Daleks that stole the 27 planets were derived from Davros himself. While this still may be the case, the dialogue from the Daleks is worded vaguely enough that they could conceivably have fallen in time from the Game Station in 200,100, where they are unrecognisable hybrids.
  • Or the Progenator was Renagade Dalek tech, while the Davros Daleks where equivalent to Imperials.
  • More likely - They're considered inferior because they're derived from Davros himself, while the Progenerated Daleks are from the original Dalek history, a timeline where the Daleks wiped out Davros, who pretty much universally in the Classic Series was a negative influence on the Daleks, and as such advanced faster (including developing time travel sooner) - The Daleks the Doctor faces now are the same Daleks he faced in his first and second incarnations, and were wiped out except for those five imprints by the Second Doctor. The future the Doctor averted in his fourth incarnation rather than the ones he faced in every Davros appearance.
  • Another possible alternative; consider what the Dalek operation was in "Parting of the Ways" was; basically, making a new Dalek army out of humans. Given how massive the Time War reputedly was, it's highly unlikely that that was the first and only time that the Daleks were forced to take such extreme measures, either during or after; there's a good chance that any Time War / post-Time War era Dalek, wherever those three came from, would not be recognized as a 'pure' Dalek by any Dalek from before that period, because they probably aren't; they've probably been cobbled together from any number of species. This also possibly explains why those three Daleks were so willing to be exterminated by the Progenitor Daleks—as the Ninth Doctor says, "they hate their own flesh" and so by their logic deserve to be exterminated.
    • Except that these weren't actually Daleks and they wouldn't have been even if the Doctor hadn't gotten in the way. These were just human bodies with Dalek mentality and given that they are created by machine, I highly doubt that they would have ever needed to do this before. It was only necessary here because their emergency temporal shift left them without the power to seek out other Daleks and they didn't have the technology to recreate the progenitor.
    • You seem to be confusing "Parting of the Ways" with "Evolution of the Daleks" slightly here; "Evolution" is the one where the 'Dalek mentality' is transferred into human bodies and where the Daleks have temporal-shifted, "Parting of the Ways" has the Dalek Emperor physically converting humans into Daleks.
• Plot-wise, if the Weeping Angels had been covering their faces in the cave in "Flesh and Stone" like we've always seen them do before, it would be a dead give away, but there's another in-universe reason: they can't see. Their eyes are rotted out.
  • Or they gouged them out.
  • Alternatively, it could have been an outcome of the deformation; suddenly they get radiation to feed on, so they begin to reform and the eyes are the last to reform because the last thing they need is to be looked at by each other while they advance on living prey that doesn't count as threat even when they're blind.
  • Or the Aplans took out the eyes after they realized what happens if you look into them. The Aplans were excellent stone-masons, after all, and since they had two heads each they were better equipped to attack the Angels than most other species - two sets of eyes could take turns blinking. Which in turn might explain why the Angels wanted to destroy them in the first place.
• Fridge Horror: The episode The Lodger, taking place in the present day, repeatedly gives the number 6,400,000,26 as the population of the human species. At the time of broadcasting, the actual figure was closer to, if not greater than, 6,700,000,000. The 299,999,974 person difference? That's alien-invasion fatalities and lack-of-birth resulting from said fatalities, so incredibly high due to how invasion-prone this Earth is. Its a rare day when nobody dies before the invasion is stopped, but damn.
  • Or it's the number of people who have been eaten by the crack.
    • Keep in mind: In "The End of Time", the Master had turning every human being, sans Wilf, into himself. I believe he said that there were over 6.7 billion versions of himself. Meaning that you're right, a significant number of people have been completely eradicated from history.
  • Here's another one from "The Lodger". Eleven is behaving more like a Cloudcuckoolander than usual, bordering on Idiot Ball territory. Then I remembered he has a psychic link / bond / whatever to the TARDIS. The TARDIS that was going haywire for the entire episode. Given that he spent the entire episode with the TARDIS screaming in his mind, no wonder he's a little distracted. ~cg12345
  • Speaking of "The Lodger", at the time it just seemed like a mid-season monster of the week episode, with only a tenuous connection to the season's mythology arc. The Doctor's adversary is just a computer on autopilot that self-destructs at the end, not something likely to appear again. That is until "The Impossible Astronaut" where we see a control room identical to the one at the top of the stairs. However, what you probably don't remember is that several times during "The Lodger", Amy stuck alone on the TARDIS seems to talk be aware of someone else there with her, only to seemingly forget it by the next scene. It turns out, the main ability of the Silence is inducing amnesia when not being directly observed. Since most viewers will probably forgot this part of "The Lodger", it means that the memory-blocking ability can effectively break the fourth wall. And in comes the Fridge Horror.
• I've seen a lot of people complaining about how in the Christmas Carol special, someone touching their younger self didn't have the same effects it did in "Father's Day." (Namely, flying killer time monkeys) However, as I see it, this is perfectly reasonable—when Rose touched Baby!Rose in Father's Day, the fabric of reality was already falling apart due to interference with a fixed point in history. It let the Reapers in, but only because they were already there. While Kazran touching Kid!Kazran probably weakened things a little, it wasn't enough to have any significant consequences.
  • The weak point was explicitly described by the Doctor as being caused by the Doctor being there twice, Rose being there three times, and Rose interfearing in her own past. Her touching herself only made things worse.
    • Oh it's so much worse than just that. See, the Bad Wolf meme had clearly already existed. Meaning that every iota of reality that the Bad Wolf entity had affected, during that single moment where Rose's body isn't there and Bad Wolf is acting outside the normal timestream was being impacted by this. If Rose was never born, then every bit of reality that Bad Wolf interacted with is undone, include Captain Jack "The Fact" Harkness. You know, that whole bit about being a fact of reality? Yeah, that means that all the areas he has been, which canonically includes the Face of Boe, are now impacted. Rose undoing her childhood was an event of monumentally catastrophic proportions because of Bad Wolf. Billions of years of history and entire stable time loops are undone. This is the sort of thing that must have happened in The Last Great Time War...
• The Dalek redesign in Series 5 is... less than universally loved. Not too keen on it myself, but I can take it or leave it. Then I read a comment in Doctor Who Magazine that made it click—what could be more deliciously warped than having the most utterly evil things in the entire universe painted in bright, happy primary colors?
  • They're bigger now too, more imposing. This makes them seem more threatening because they're as tall or taller than the other characters.
• Just rewatched "Flesh and Stone". At the end of it, River tells the Doctor that they'll next meet "when the Pandorica opens". The Doctor tells her it's just a fairytale and River laughs and replies "Aren't we all?" They're both right - the Pandorica is a fairytale, about a trickster in a cage. Now who does the Doctor turn out to be, again?
  • Aww hell, thats fridge brilliance/foreshadowing in it's own right! "The Pandorica is just a fairytale." "Aren't we all?" This is a later version of River, who already knows that she, the Doctor, everybody are (or soon will be) just fairytale recreations from Amy's memory! -Edymnion
    • I think that River was lampshading that even earlier on. "I hate good wizards in fairytales. They always turn out to be him." Well played, River. -whothewhatnow
• Upon rewatching 'The Big Bang', I wondered how the Doctor knew that the Pandorica wouldn't let people die, because that would be escaping. Nothing like that is mentioned in 'The Pandorica Opens.' Then it hit me - for the brief stint he was in there, he actually tried it.
  • Um...how? He wasn't in the Pandorica for long, minutes at least, and his arms were tied down. Why would his first reaction be to kill himself?
    • He could have tried to bite through his own tongue. He might have been in there for hours and possibly days. Rory didn't need food or water and we don't know how long he was sitting with Amy in his arms, just not long enough for her to start to decompose. He honestly didn't expect anyone to be able to free him and if Rory hadn't been given the sonic screwdriver by future!Doctor when present!Doctor had it in the Pandorica then the Doctor never would have gotten out. He needn't be in there for too long before realizing that.
    • Regeneration energy is pretty powerful, it did screw up the TARDIS in 'The End of Time.' He might have thought that it could destroy the Pandorica in the same way.
      • But notice the TARDIS doesn't go up in flames the other five times he's regenerated inside it. There were extenuating circumstances, namely the massive amounts of radiation being released with (and presumably reacting to) the regeneration energy.
      • Of course, the other times he's regenerated in the TARDIS he hasn't put it off until literally the last minute which may have something to do with the violence of the regeneration.
  • He wouldn't necessarily have had to try it for himself to figure it out. Being the Doctor trapped in a thing like that, he would have gotten a pretty good idea of its technical capabilities. Or it could have simply been in-universe fridge logic by the Doctor himself ("dying would be escaping, therefore...").
  • As I understand it, complete isolation/sensory deprivation causes a person to lose track of time. Minutes can feel like hours, hours like days...Add the fact that, as far as the Doctor knows, it's never going to end, PLUS the universe is coming to an end around him. Suddenly escape by suicide starts to look a whole lot more appealing.
  • Even without isolation and sensory deprivation—Vincent and the Doctor already showed that the normal passage of less than 24 hours, in a beautiful landscape with two probably fairly amusing people as company and the chance to watch a genius at his craft, drives the Doctor just a little batty. A couple hours locked in a box would be torture.
    • He needn't try to kill himself to know it stopped people from dying. It was Future!Doctor who told Rory to put Amy in the Pandorica, so he's already seen the outcome of putting her in there: she's still alive. Hence his knowing that Rory should put Amy in the box to save her - he already knows it works. It's a time-loop.
• Re-watching The Eleventh Hour, I could never understand why the coma patients suddenly called out for the Doctor, and then didn't move for the rest of the episode. This latest viewing, I saw the scene fade into the Doctor waking up, and realised why: the patients are mentally connected to Amy via Prisoner Zero, and Amy is overwhelmed with shock that the Doctor has reappeared in her life.
• The latest enemy 'The Silence' appear as a tall, thin, pale humanoid with an indeterminate face, wearing a smart business suit, and capable of inducing Laser-Guided Amnesia and a strange sickness. Remind you of anyone?
  • Yes. And it terrifies me.
  • From a distance, they also bear a strong resemblance to the grey aliens that allegedly crashed in Roswell, New Mexico. And where does Part 2 of the episode dealing with the Silence take place? Area 51. Clever.
  • When you first see them, you think "Why are these aliens wearing business suits?" - but oh no, the Silence didn't wear our suits! Thanks to the subliminal programming we modeled our business suits on the look of the Silence!
• I think I've figured out the number one thing that's different between when Steven Moffat is writing and anyone else's stories. Not the Nightmare Fuel, not the clever dialogue—it's that Doctor Who under Moff is, above all else, a show about time travel. Moff episodes are far more likely to involve going back and forth in time during the episode itself and less likely to just use it as a way to get Team TARDIS to wherever the Monster of the Week is. Even the ones that just use it as a setup have characters who are in some fundamental way based on time travel; "The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances" gave us a renegade Time Agent, while "Silence in the Library"/"Forest of the Dead" gave us River Song.
  • Note the title of the episode where River Song is introduced: Silence In the Library. And what does she wear the first time we meet her? Yup—a spacesuit.
    • Note also Forest of the Dead, because the only water in the forest is the river.
• "The Impossible Astronaut" River says that a Time Lords body is a miracle and they should burn the Doctors body because there are whole empires out there who would go to war for a single cell. This is why the Doctor burned the Masters body at the end of "Last of the Time Lords".
  • The Confidential episode for this episode points out that this is the only time in the entire series, to date, when River and the Doctor have actually been in-sync. And then he dies. With that in mind, the choice of Adele's "Rolling in the Deep" elsewhere in the episode when discussing the titular astronaut seems particularly appropriate.

The scars of your love remind me of us
They keep me thinking that we almost had it all
The scars of your love, they leave me breathless
I can't help feeling
We could have had it all

• • Also from "The Impossible Astronaut", when the Doctor dies, Amy, Rory and River tries to get the Doctor to go to 1969. The Doctor doesn't seem to trust anyone, even Amy. He forces Amy to tell him something that matters so he would trust him. Then it hit me why Amy said Fish Fingers and Custard. She couldn't get the Doctor to trust him with his life, he's already dead!
  • You mean why she didn't say 'I swear on your life you can trust me'? That really doesn't sound like the most reassuring thing to say. After all, if the person in question was untrustworthy, his life could be in danger anyway. And he wasn't dead. Future-doctor was. If the Doctor watches Amy die of old age in her 80s at some point that won't mean that when he comes back and travels with 20-something Amy that she's 'already dead.'
• Another theory about the Pandorica. The legend goes that:

Eleventh Doctor: There was a goblin, or a trickster, or a warrior. A nameless, terrible thing, soaked in the blood of a billion galaxies. The most feared being in all the cosmos. And nothing could stop it, or hold it or reason with it. One day it would just drop out of the sky and tear down your world.
Amy Pond: How did it end up in there?
Eleventh Doctor: You know fairy tales. A good wizard tricked it.
River Song: I hate good wizards in fairy tales; they always turn out to be him.

• • The Doctor did effectively trick himself in. Okay, he meant to trick the Legion Of Super Evil into staying away, but what he did was confirm he was there and waiting for them. He trapped himself. The legend is 100% correct (it just misses out the bit where he tricks himself out of it).
• At first I wondered why Nixon was so laid back in these episodes compared to how he's usually portrayed in media: then came these lines.

Nixon: So we're safe again!
The Doctor: Safe? No, of course you're not safe! There's about another billion things out there just waiting to burn your whole world, but, if you wanna pretend you're safe just so you can sleep at night, okay, you're safe. But you're not really.
Later it hit me: Thanks Doc, you just turned Richard Nixon into the lovable paranoid we all know and love.

• • Uhh actually he was pretty paranoid throughout the episode, hence why he called in Canton instead of getting his own people to do it. He gives loads of looks throughout the episodes where he's freaking out, he's already a paranoid mess, tape-recording all his phonecalls etc.
    • Well, calling someone from the outside is a reasonable choice when you get seemingly impossible calls. It's actually a good idea, considering the circumstances. And he started recording all his phonecalls from that point onwards, because the Doctor told him to.
      • Therefore... the phone wiretapping and recording scandal of the Nixon administration was the Doctor's fault!
• Fridge Horror: Every. Stinking thing. About the Silence. Even aside from all the obvious Paranoia Fuel surrounding a monster that you forget the existence of as soon as you look away, there's the fact that they can essentially make you do whatever they want via posthypnotic suggestion. Last time you decided to do something on a whim, can you be sure it was really on a whim? What about the myriad Badass in a Nice Suit Humanoid Abominations that bear an unsettling resemblance to them? How can you be sure that they're not the result of people's residual memories of the Silence? How much of your life have you forgotten, over the years? Have you killed one- or seen one killed- without ever knowing it?
  • The Silence has been on Earth since the dawn of man. They are only seen on-screen when someone else is looking at them. They could easily have been in all previous episodes set on Earth. And who's to say Steven Moffat invented them.
  • Even better -- on the one hand, you're probably too young to have killed one personally (assuming they buggered off shortly afterwards), on the other hand, the memory effects extend to bodies as well -- there could be a decomposing Silent in your house right now.
    • No, there cannot be, because we have been given the way to defeat them. Neither your nor my arms are covered in hash marks or have ever been, so they must have buggered off shortly after the Moon landing.
  • All the strange, random scratch marks that appear for no reason...
• Fridge Logic: The thing that struck me a few days after watching Day of the Moon: Amy, Rory, River, the Doctor... none of them have ever seen video of the moon landing? Because if they had, wouldn't they be post-hypnotically-driven to kill the Silence when they first see them?
  • Timey-Wimey Ball. When they saw it, it was in a timeline where they hadn't spliced that into the moon landing footage. I bet that if they run into our suit-wearing friends again they'll all be under the effect.
    • Don't forget that Amy doesn't remember the events of the previous four series, and the Silence may have a TARDIS of their own. They may well be fighting back.
    • Are we sure that she still doesn't remember? I thought that she just didn't remember because of the cracks which are gone now.
• Fridge Horror: In 'Day of the Moon', those messages in the children's home on the wall? The one's saying 'GET OUT'? Those were written by the guy working there. He kept seeing the Silence and desperately leaving himself messages to escape the house, but then instantly forgetting afterwards.
  • That is nothing... he probably actually managed to leave the place if only a few times. The Silent always get him back. Always
  • Speaking of that guy, the Doctor mentions that repeated memory wipes would fry anyone's brain. How many people with mental illnesses or Alzheimer's are only that way because a Silent decided to continually pop in and out of their line of sight?
• The coalition from The Pandorica Opens never quite made sense to me—even if the Daleks, for instance, thought that the Doctor was a threat to the universe, would paranoid xenophobes like them really join up with other species? Then I saw The Impossible Astronaut and Day of the Moon and realized several things: 1. Assuming, as is heavily implied, that the Silence were the ones that tried to blow up the TARDIS, they definitely would have wanted the one man who knew the TARDIS well enough to stop them out of the way. 2. There was a line somewhere in Day of the Moon that implied that the Silence were not just on Earth, but spread across the entire universe. 3. The Silence can implant post-hypnotic suggestions...
• When I first saw an image of the Silence, I thought that their outfits were imitations of our own clothing. They're not. WE'VE BEEN IMITATING THEIRS.
  • If it even is clothing. If you look closely, it doesn't look much like cloth...
• The Brigadier once said "Just for once, I'd like to meet an alien menace that wasn't immune to bullets." As of Day of the Moon, we discover that he's been meeting them and killing them all his life, just not remembered it
• The appearance of marks on the Doctor's arms in "The Wedding of River Song" even though he's not carrying a marker: it's the Teselecta. The driver can just make marks appear on its arms!
  • I have long chosen to believe that the Doctor's pockets are bigger on the inside. I think it's dangerous to say he's not carrying a pen
• In the "Wedding of River Song", most of my friends and family were annoyed that the Doctor could rewrite a Fixed point of Time by using the Teselecta. But I think here's the brilliant part. The fixed point was for the events at Lake Silencio to occur, but the Doctor NEVER DIED! Every record that declared his death was false! No one realised he survived. The Fixed point was the shooting of the Teselecta! So, it isn't rewriting time, it's following its normal course!
• Fridge Horror: Not for the Doctor Who universe but for ours. By killing the Doctor, Steven Moffat has just essentially ended the series. Since the Doctor won't regenerate, they can't recast him and the show ends as soon as Matt wants to leave. And even if he does want to stay in the part for another twenty, thirty years, the Doctor still can't look much older than he does now. So the series will last, at most, about the leghth of Tom Baker's tenure, give or take. Thanks Moff, thanks alot.
  • What, you seriously think that's going to stick? Moff is a Promoted Fanboy through and through; there's no way he's going to intentionally kill the series forever.
    • Besides, the rest of the two episodes prevented the Doctor's death. It has been established and repeated often that history and events can be rewritten and changed. When the Doctor of 200 years in the future sent the envelopes telling Rory, Amy, River, and his younger self to go back to 1969 and deal with the Silence, he basically was ensuring that they would prevent his death. This is similar to what happened in The Big Bang when the Doctor was hit with a Dalek beam.
    • Also, remember that in "Silence in the Library", River died and was kept partially alive in the spare bit of her space suit. The Doctor was shot by a person in a space suit. Is it not at all possible that River broke herself out and implanted her consciousness into a space suit to go kill the Doctor because she knew she had to do it still? Aaagh! Timey-Wimey Ball.
    • There's no indication that the death has been prevented. But we don't actually know for sure that the Doctor we saw killed on the beach was the Doctor we think he was. In "The Rebel Flesh", the Flesh imprinted on the Doctor and produced the Doctor's ganger, John Smith. While Smith was later killed, the Doctor's last words to him were that it wouldn't necessarily be the end for him, and that his molecular memory would live on. It's entirely possible that the Doctor on the beach was actually another ganger.
    • Better than that, there are clues in the first episode of the season. First episode has Rory reading Amy a passage from the history books about the mysterious man that escapes the Tower of London by flying away in a glowing ball. That struck me as odd until The Doctor's Wife. The second Tardis he built was just the control room, and when it travelled it had... a glowing spherical shield around it. The Doctor that was flying around for those 200 extra years was using the second Tardis, so couldn't have been THE Doctor, who still has his original.
      • There's a great moment in a feature in Doctor Who Magazine, which charted a journey round Britain to show the first episode of series 5 to young children in schools. There was also a Q&A, and one of the questions asked was whether the TARDIS had an "original form" that it takes when not needing to be disguised - i.e. on Galifrey, or just a default setting. Steven Moffat pipes up that he believes the original form of a TARDIS is a white sphere. As they move on, Piers Wenger (Executive Producer) whispers to him: "Is that true?". Moffat leans back and whispers "It is if I write it." Funny throwaway joke, but if he wants to talk about glowing spheres...
• Another "Day of the Moon" comment (if I recall correctly): The Doctor says something about more happening in 1969 than most people remember. When I watched the episode again soon after the first time, Fridge Brilliance kicked in - people don't remember the Silence if they aren't in view, so... ~Azurengar
  • Sudden Fridge Logic: How does the 1100-and-something-year-old Doctor remember the Silence in order to lead to Amy, Rory, River, and the 900-and-something-year-old Doctor going to 1969?
    • Who says it's just the Silence leading him there? We haven't fully seen what happens in that 200-odd years...
• Fridge Brilliance: In "The Doctor's Wife", just when Amy is about to go into a Heroic BSOD after seeing what looks like Rory's corpse, thinking that he'd gone insane and hated her for leaving him alone for so long, the real one shows up and calmly reassures her that her head's just being messed with. How would he know? Because it's been messing with him the same way, but he's managed to shrug it off. After all, what's a little Mind Rape to a man who kept himself sane and loyal for nearly two thousand years.
  • Word of God is he did get messed with to a point - there were versions of the script in which Rory was made to believe that both he and Amy had knives and Amy would kill him - but since he'd be better able to cope than her, they didn't get shown.
• In "The Doctor's Wife", Idris, who has been implanted with the consciousness of the Doctor's TARDIS, kisses the Doctor when she first sees him. While this is understandable considering their connection, to me there was a little bit of Fridge Brilliance behind it; when Rose looked into the heart of the TARDIS, the last thing the Doctor did to get it out of her was to kiss her. So the next time the TARDIS is in a living body, she kisses him back!
• Remember how disgusted The Doctor was over The House creating Uncle and Auntie from dead Time-Lord body parts? From the TARDIS's point of view, that was exactly what The Doctor was doing when he build his make-shift TARDIS
  • She did bring that up with the Doctor when they first got to the TARDIS graveyard about how he saw a way to get back to the TARDIS. Auntie and Uncle were built largely for House's amusement and Time Lords were killed to keep them going. Those TARDIS' were already long-gone and messing with them was the only way to save Amy, Rory, the Doctor, and the TARDIS herself.
• Fridge Logic about the Silence that ISN'T totally horrifying. The Doctor says nobody will forget this incident, so the moon landing will be in everyone's mind. That's fine, but The Silence was speaking English. But the only way it could be transferred was through the Sonic Screwdriver. Which was produced by the TARDIS. Which translates everything. Which means the people watching in other languages saw the Silence ordering them to kill it on sight in their native language, even though they're probably watching it subtitled. Watching something in (to you) gibberish, then seeing a monster order you to kill it in your language, then going back to gibberish. That has to hit home a lot more than a continuity of the language, and probably take greater effect. Although that does lead to a little Fridge Horror for at least most of the users of TV Tropes, because if there ARE any Silence left, wherever they are probably speaks English.
  • Also, because the broadcast was taped while being interrupted by the Silence, the videotape has probably by now been seen by billions of people, consistently reinforce the suggestion of killing the Silence with each view.
• Why do Rory and the Doctor empathise with the Gangers most out of all those present? Because both of them have been in the same situation before with the Tenth Doctor's Meta-crisis and Rory's Auton self.
  • But the Doctor himself didn't experience being the second Doctor like Rory did when he was an auton and he certainly did not react well to a second version of him.
• Fridge Brilliance related to the Silents/Silence naming ambiguity: It doesn't matter, as "Silents" and "Silence" both sound the same when you say them out loud
  • Better yet: All of the aliens who actually say "Silen(ts|ce) will fall" are speaking English—the vampire-fish, Prisoner Zero, and the silent himself. We know this because they've all been seen to have been infiltrating Earth for a while, and have thus picked up the native language; also, Prisoner Zero even said it to Amy, who had never been on the TARDIS, and couldn't have been hearing it translated!
• After watching "The Almost People", I suddenly had a revelation. The reason Amy had always been wearing a flannel shirt since the season began is because she was wearing it when she'd been duplicated. In the previous episode, they said the flesh duplicates people and clothing. Amy's shirt was made of the flesh.
  • I found a screencap site and checked. She was wearing a black dress when kidnapped, and the same dress when rescued. Though the Silents do seem to have helpfully cleaned off the tally marks., this shirt, and (spoilers)again in different lighting. In Ep 3, this outfit. Ep 4, this outfit. Note how Rory has changed. Ep 5, this outfit. She is changing, but she either likes that one shirt or has multiple identical ones. Or it's just Moffat-ing, and this'll be explained later.
    • The Doctor said the technology from the episode was early so perhaps the Amy-Flesh is less more advanced and wouldn't have problems changing clothes regardless of if the ones from the episode can or not.
      • According to the Confidential, Amy's been Flesh since episode 1. Not 2. Then they show her stepping out of the school bus. When she was wearing the red flannel shirt. I am now proper confused. MOFFAAAT!
• Again, after 'The Almost People'... The reason the Doctor was so.. well, for want of a better word, concerned about the Flesh growing - a bit of pregnant Flesh would mess up his scanner, no?
  • The Amy-Flesh wasn't pregnant, though, just experiencing the labor pains of the real pregnant Amy.
    • Also Amy's mistrust of the gangers and Doctor!Ganger wasn't just odd or her obsessive tendencies toward the Doctor... She was being held against her will and forcibly kept unconscious so that the Order of the Silence could get her baby as soon as it was born. She couldn't tell her friends that she was in fact a ganger, but by having an irrational dislike toward the Flesh People perhaps she was hoping to tip them off that something was wrong with her.
  • Here's one that I realized with the whole Gangers episode. At the end it is revealed that the Doctor and Ganger Doctor switched shoes. They look at Amy kindly and say "We needed to know how accurate it was, and to do that, we needed to see us through your eyes." I realized that he needed to see just how accurate the Gangers could be. Could Ganger Amy even fool the closest ones to her, like Rory? The answer was, yes she could.
    • Or it could be subcoubcious trauma of being duplicated against her will, and while she could have been uncouncious when it happend, there's still a link between her body and the Ganger's which means she subcounciously knew that Kovoriam used the Ganger against the Doctor.
• The exchange between The Doctor and The House ("Fear Me, I've killed all of them.") is even more badass when you think about it. The Doctor isn't just flaunting a higher body count, he's delivering a death sentence. The House eats TARDISes. If the Time Lords are all dead, The House will inevitably starve to death eventually. The Doctor killed The House long before the episode began.
• After A Good Man Goes To War, a lot of Series 6, as well as almost anything involving River Song, takes on a measure of Fridge Horror. Since Melody Pond appears to have some Time Lord DNA through prenatal exposure to the Time Vortex, she is the only known possible identity for the little girl who regenerated at the end of Day of the Moon. The same child who probably killed the Doctor on the orders of some unknown villain. Also the same child who grows up to be River Song. This means that: 1. the Doctor is eventually killed by the child of his best friends, and 2. since it happened when she was a child, River has known every time she met the Doctor that she has/does/will kill him.
  • But we don't actually know that River was the one in that spacesuit at the time.
    • True. But it's still a definite possibility, especially since the Doctor tells him/her, "I know it's you."
  • A lighter bit of Fridge Horror, also from Analiza: judging by the size, diversity, and nature of the Doctor Who fandom, how much do you want to bet there are quite a few Rory/River (or even Amy/River) fanfics out there? Fics that have now either become Alternate Universe or very, very Squicky?
  • A retroactive Fridge Horror moment from Torch Lighter: Remember when the Doctor dies in the first episode, and River burns his body because "... there are whole empires who would rip this world apart for a single cell?" She knows that from personal experience... she was raised by one such Empire.
  • Also remember in the Flesh And Stone when The Doctor finds out that River Song is imprisoned because she killed a man, and later when he asks her who, she says she killed the best man she ever knew? Yeah. It's that old. I'm fairly certain at the beginning of that episode when they're comparing timelines she asks if they've done the Headless Monks yet. It was in one episode, I know that for sure, because I distinctly remember how odd it was, and figured it was just Moffat having fun and making random events and stories he never intended to write. Ha. The more I think about it, the more and more obvious it is that Moffat was dropping hints. I mean he named River's mum Amy "Pond"; he had this all worked out.
    • FYI, the museum the Doctor and Amy visit at the start of "Flesh and Stone" is the final resting place of the Order of the Headless Monks.
  • All those scenes of River in the Stormcage? Given what we're just learned about her being raised as a weapon of war, it's entirely possible that Stormcage is actually River's home. The way she casually tells the security to turn off the alarms because she's back and how she treats her incarceration, I'm inclined to believe that she chose to be incarcerated because war and prison is probably all that Melody/River has known since birth.
    • Guess what, Amy and Rory? Your daughter hooked up with your best mate who's almost a millenium old, she's in prison, and she keeps using violence to solve all her problems. Any parent worth their salt would have a conniption.
      • And as of "Let's Kill Hitler", conniptions are being had.
• Ever since Big Bang, Rory is older than the Doctor.
• Little bit of Fridge Brilliance from the YMMV page. Lady Christina is listed as a Designated Hero because she steals artifacts from museums just for kicks, yet is considered a perfect match for the Doctor. Remind me again where he acquired the TARDIS and why?
• Fridge Horror: The Silence have been either wiped out or scared off the planet at this point. The Doctor gave them an epic speech. All well and good. However, the Doctor travels through time. He's sure to go back to Earth before he wiped out the Silence at some point (in fact, he does so in the very next episode). Shouldn't the Silence still be there, on Earth? Just because there won't be any of them left alive on Earth after 1969 doesn't mean that they wouldn't still be around in the past. In fact, that scares me even more because there's a chance that they could find out that the Doctor is about to kill them all (time travel being what it is) and they are clearly powerful enough to detonate the TARDIS. Doesn't this mean that the Silence will come back?
  • Nope! The Silence have been wiped out at all points in time (on Earth at least) because of that single broadcast, remember time can be reshaped and is in a constant flux, therefore even if the Silence did survive, humanity would still end up wiping them out.
    • No one said that the Silence were wiped out in all points of time. The Doctor just told them to leave, he didn't bother getting rid of their past selves on Earth, since that would create many, many problems. That broadcast wouldn't get rid of the past Silents anyway, since no one before 1969 could have seen it. Therefore, yes, there still exist Silents on Earth before 1969.
• In "A Good Man Goes To War", Baby Melody cries at the noise the TARDIS makes, which means River has been nagging The Doctor about it ever since she was a baby!
• The Silence are able to induce amnesia, so you don't remember them if you aren't looking at them. Theoretically, they could exist in Real Life, or at least another alien race with the same abilities. And no-one would know the difference. One could be standing right behind you.
• In Amy's Choice, Rory dies in the dream world. Amy, unable to be in a world where Rory is dead, kills herself. Fridge Horror sets in because Amy had no idea whether it was a dream or not, and was pregnant. That's right, she's willing to not only kill herself, but her unborn child. Even after Rory said "Look after our baby" as his last words. Make your own conclusions, as I think She needs some help.
  • But it's not like she just can't handle his death and so kills herself. She needs to kill herself in one world. Would it be morally superior of her to decide that, even though she feels that Leadworth is a dream, to kill herself on the TARDIS just in case she might really have a baby? Ultimately, it doesn't matter what she picked but if it had mattered then the fact that she was pregnant in one of those universes doesn't make that one any more likely to be real.
• Why is it Rory is always playing second fiddle to Eleven? He's the nurse and the Doctor is, well, the doctor.
  • Any nurse will tell you that it's usually rather the other way around. Which is why, even though Rory may feel like he plays second fiddle to the Doctor, he's always first to Amy.
    • Exactly: the Docotr is the person who you ultimately go to to fix whatever is wrong with you: he's the man who makes people better. But nurses are there with you the whole time, they're a source of reassurance, solace, and also the people who deal with the less attractive, ugly side of medicine. Sounds like The Doctor and Rory to me.
• River killed a good man and a hero to many. A Good Man Went To War.
  • Well, maybe. She hasn't killed anyone but Silence onscreen yet.
    • Ah, but a mysterious person in a spacesuit did kill the Doctor. Melody was in a spacesuit in ep. 1. Melody is River. Therefore, if Melody was in that spacesuit, River killed the Doctor.
• In Bad Wolf, on the walls of the Big Brother House, there are paintings of Dalek Bumps! -- Idris
• Why did Amy needed to concentrate to remember Rory in Cold Blood when she didn't have any problem with The Weeping Angels and the 3 millitary men in Flesh and Stone ? Because she actually wanted to forget her fiancee since she knew from past experience that she can't bear to live without him.
  • The Doctor outright told her, when she asked why she needed to concentrate, that it was because Rory was a big part of her personal timeline and the clerics weren't.
• Why does she thinks that living without Rory would be so horrible that she prefered to kill herself and her unborn baby instead of carrying on without him ? Rory is the only person who was always there for her (and who will always be if I might add).
  • Amy doesn't think decide to kill herself and her unborn baby because she can't bear to live without Rory. She knows that she needs to kill herself in at least one place and she decides that Leadworth ins't real. She wasn't trying to kill herself, she was trying to wake up.
• After meeting The Doctor she became obsessed with him, and of course she was - after all The Doctor is so charismatic he often manages to make the more stubborn adults do what he wants and this was a little scared girl. She didn't have any relatives other than her aunt and said aunt didn't believe her about The Doctor and forced her to go to a sting of shrinks because of her obsession. In the little boring village she grew up in everybody know about The Doctor.
• Now, why would a girl forced to go see a shrink because of her stories of The Doctor talk to everybody about him then look so embarassed when people remind her of it (even with the proof that she was right standing beside her) ? Shouldn't she be triumphant and smug ? She wasn't the one telling everyone that Amelia Pond believed in an imaginary friend, she probably talked about it in school then the other kids gossiped to everyone and their mothers about it. Poor Amy felt alone against everyone else who told her it wasn't real yet she was too stubborn to just forget it. At worse she was alienated and people believed she was crazy. That's when Rory came in the picture, maybe he didn't totally believe that The Doctor was real but he still played with her and listened to her stories. He stayed at her side since childhood. He did what The Doctor didn't do - he stayed. During all this years when people didn't believe her and the crack in her wall was still there. During all this years when she was alone and sometime felt sad for no reasons because she had lost a whole family but couldn't remember, Rory was here for her.
  • The Doctor simply being there isn't necessarily proof that he was real. And the actor's so young that if he were there when she was an adult, people wouldn't generally think that it could be him. It's just as likely that her delusions have been taken to another level and she hired a guy to be the Doctor. But of course, it seemed like she was more embarrassed about the Doctor knowing she was obsessed than about the villagers seeing him.
  • Also, it's possible she's not embarrassed because people thought the Doctor was imaginary; she's embarrassed because the object of her obsession is now finding out just how obsessed she was. In other words, it's not her fellow villagers whose opinion she's worried about. Think being obsessed with a particular rock star as a child, practicing writing "Mrs <Star>" in your diary, covering your room with handmade posters of this star, etc . . . then growing up, moving on a bit, finally meeting that star, and having him walk into your bedroom where you haven't quite gotten around to removing the hand-embroidered "Mr Star's Future Wife" bedspread.... Yeah, you'd be embarrassed too. Especially since she is both furious with the Doctor and, on some level, attempting to impress him.
• Rory is the only person that she trusts. Amy knows she can't trust the Doctor to do the same for her and she knows that she wouldn't survive being left alone after everything with the Doctor again because she's more fragile emotionally than people think. If Rory isn't there for her - if she knows that after the Doctor will abandon her (and she knows he will sooner or later) Rory won't be here for her anymore then she can't carry on.
  • And when you think about it, IRL doctors are just there to make a diagnostic about what is wrong and put a end to it (the crack on the wall) - then they leave you because their jobs is done. Nurses however stay and help you until you're completely safe and healed.
• It did used to bother me that River made a Dalek beg for mercy, then one day I was thinking about it: River might have killed the Doctor - the guy that Daleks are stone cold scared of who stops them every sticking time. The oncoming storm. The Daleks are scared of her cuz she killed the man that The Daleks view as the bogeyman.
• On first watching "Let's Kill Hitler", it bothered me (and the Doctor too) that Amy and Rory had never mentioned their oldest friend Mells before. But the Doctor's mentioning it isn't pure Lampshade Hanging. The Doctor has been away for the summer looking for Melody Pond, according to Amy and Rory. But Mells is a time-traveller too, so there's no reason she should have existed in Amy and Rory's timeline when they last saw the Doctor. However, now she does exist there, having arrived there as a small child sometime around 1996, and now she always was there, in the same way that Amy's parents had always been there during her childhood once the Universe was "mended" at the end of "The Big Bang". The Doctor having been away time-travelling too means his memories haven't been affected by changes to the timeline, in the same way that he could remember the Battle of Canary Wharf and Amy couldn't.
  • Isn't it the events of 'A Stolen Earth'? The Daleks there were there for longer and had much more of a chance to spread.
• Not sure quite where this belongs, as it's a guess I desire a second opinion for. When River gave the Doctor the rest of her regenerations, I don't think she just saved him, I think she might have given him extra. I know TIA complicates things, but this could do something about the thirteen-bodies-or-more? debate.
• Mels WAS at the wedding.
  • Not that she knew that at the time. Mels still skipped the wedding and River showed up years later to bring the Doctor back into existence.
• Fridge horror for weeping angels, the Doctor says that the quantum lock is a defense mechanism, but that defense mechanism is useless for hunting if the prey know about the angels, so it must be a defense mechanism against predators which means that something out there hunts weeping angels.
  • It could also mean that there are creatures in the world that are faster or stronger than the angels and so if the angels tried to hunt them it would end badly for them. Or even someone with a gun might get lucky and take an angel down if it weren't for their ultimate defence. Maybe they wouldn't need it to suvive but they've learned to work around the fact that they can't even look at each other and it's not like prey can watch them forever. I don't think some predator makes the quantum lock necessary as most species manage to get along just fine without being able to turn themselves to stone whenever anything - even things that could never hurt them - looks at them.
• Fridge brilliance for "Night Terrors," the facial proportions and hairstyle on the dolls bears a strong resemblance to George's mother. Which may represent a subconscious awareness that he isn't entirely human, i.e., isn't quite the same as his mother or any of the other people in his life. A feeling of alienation amplified by his fear of rejection turns his mother, the person a little boy ought to feel closest to, into an uncanny creature.
• The focus on 32 minutes in LKH is in reference to the fact that its season 32 of Doctor Who all together.
  • Also concerning the 32 minutes: The cards River/Amy/Rory receive tell them to arrive at 4:30 to the Lake in Utah and the records in LKH says he dies at 5:02. 32 minutes.
    • Bordering on conspiracy theory, but... "minutes" can also refer to records of a meeting. So "you will be dead in 32 minutes" could actually mean "after (season) 32, the minutes (or records) will note that you are dead".
• For The Girl Who Waited: Genre Savvy tropers may spot the Doctor's lie about bringing both Amy's on board the TARDIS, despite the paradox: in The Sound of Drums, the Master had to make massive alterations to the TARDIS to enable it to allow paradoxes. Meaning it could never support one as it is now.
  • Also: when I watched this episode, I found myself wondering how the quarantine that had trapped Amy could have lasted for 36 years. Then I rewatched Gridlock: the last act of the New Earth senate before succumbing to the virus that killed them was to declare New Earth unsafe, thus enabling an automatic quarantine that would lock down the planet for 100 years. If Apalapucia were declared unsafe because of a virus, the same protocols would be put into effect. Odds are, the quarantine had been going on long before and after the Doctor and company came and went.
• Day of the Moon shows the first moon landing, Apollo 11, with the 11th Doctor!
• In The God Complex, Amy's room is Number 7. How old was she when she first met the Doctor?
  • Gibbus is from a species whose Hat is surrendering: they're one of the oldest races in the galaxy by virtue of being conquered and enslaved by just about everyone else. That's why his worst fear is Weeping Angels: they're an enemy that can't be surrendered to.
• For The Girl Who Waited, some Fridge Brilliance crossed with Tear Jerker: the Doctor's heartbroken expression when he realized that he had left Amy to wait again is first seen as immense guilt. But when you know the end of the episode, his grief is him realizing he was going to have to leave her behind.
• Something I realised after watching Let's Kill Hitler. How did Prisoner Zero know about the Silence and why was he a prisoner in the first place? Easy, he was a member of the order.
• Another one from Let's Kill Hitler. When young Melody lived with and grew up with her parents she wasn't just doing so in order to spend time with them. But also in order to make sure that she'd encounter the Doctor at such a time that she'd be able to kill him without accidentally never being born. She was biding her time in order to make sure that she'd encounter the Doctor after the events at Demons Run. That's also why she didn't show up at the wedding. Because if she had her conditioning would've kicked in and she'd have tried to kill him.
• River was taken to kill the Doctor on the day she herself became a Doctor, thus invoking There Can Only Be One. This can be averted when you take into account that she ended up marrying the Doctor--the two Doctors became one. Aww.
• Fridge Horror from The God Complex: The minotaur is in prison, because by its very nature it brainwashes and kills people. If the entire species is like that... how many more hotels are there floating around in space?
• At first, I wondered why, in "The Pandorica Opens", the villains made it so the Doctor couldn't die in said Pandorica: wouldn't it be better to just kill the Doctor?. Then I saw "The Impossible Astronaut", where the Doctor was killed, however used it to warn his past self and companions about the Silence. It makes sense for them to condemn him to And I Must Scream: they don't want him to pull a Thanatos Gambit, which he's clearly capable of doing!
• Fridge Horror from The Wedding of River Song. All of time and space collapse because River decided to try and rewrite a fixed point in time and space. Now, remember what the Doctor was willing to do during The Waters of Mars and tried to rewrite another point. He was willing to risk the same thing happening if he couldn't control time like he thought he could. Thank God for Adelaide's sacrifice.
• In The Wedding of River Song Amy asks the Doctor why he's aged when no one else seems to be doing so. He technobabbles some answer about being a focal point or pole of the disturbance or something. However, River would be the other focal point/pole and clearly hasn't aged. So what gives? Well, after re-watching, the Doctor Is really the shapeshifting robot. He's aged because he's programmed himself to age, because he thinks he SHOULD age. He's just covering up for it with the explanation. -hitchopottimus
  • Alternative explanation: River has access to a haircut, while the tower is sadly lacking in barbers.
• In A Good Man Goes to War, the Doctor is seen to make an army by calling on people who owe him (and from Amy's Choice, we know he's not a big fan of himself, and probably thinks not a lot of others are either, perhaps because he uses intimidation as a solution quite often). In The Wedding of River Song, he hates himself even more and doesn't even ask for help from Amy, Rory and River, while they, along with an entire organization, prove to him that he could've asked for help, not because the people who owe him want to be rid of the possiblity of the Doctor collecting his debt, but because they are grateful. Personally, I think it's a pretty good reconstruction. --Coral 542383
• River confronts a Dalek, and when she tells it her name, it asks for mercy. Because, as we find, she's not only a living weapon, she's killed the Doctor, the Daleks' greatest foe. The enemy of your enemy is going to put an alpha-meson burst through your eyestalk.
• River Song said that the TARDIS told her she is a child of the TARDIS. The momment that she said that something hit me. River Song was more or less part Time Lord. Do to the Time Vortex that came from TARDIS The TARDIS is actully River's mom! And yes this does make River Song has two mother's.
  • Thats kinda creepy actually, since it means that the Doctor is not only a polygamist, but that his second wife, (River) is actually the daughter of his first. (The Tardis/Sexy)
• Fridge Brilliance for the way the Doctor handled The Silence: Why would the good Doctor be willing to sentence The Silence to death if they stayed on earth? Well, think about what happened in finale of the previous season- a whole bunch of his enemies got together to sentence the Doctor to the Pandorica, and there was a giant clusterfuck that ended with Rory as an auton caring for Amy who was basically dead and in the Pandorica for two-thousand years all while River was trapped in a time-loop inside the TARDIS that was exploding and exploding and exploding... Is it any wonder that he wouldn't want any 'villain' around to potentially hurt him or his friends after everything they had already gone through?
• Fridge Brilliance: Why do the characters in The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe only ever refer to him as "Caretaker?" Because so far as the universe knows, the "Doctor" is dead.
• In regards to First Night/Last Night, when the older Doctor shows up, River explains to the current Doctor that he's "taking me to the Singing Towers of Darilluim" While that's a Tear Jerker in itself, it's what she says immedietely afterwards that's signficant: "He's been promising me for ages," which, when you think about it, makes perfect sense. Of course the Doctor keeps putting it off: he's giving himself a bit more time with River before he never sees her again.
• Something else I've noticed; in The Doctor's Wife, the Doctor talks about finding the lost Time Lords, only for Amy to ask 'you want to be forgiven, don't you?'. The Doctor simply replies, 'Don't we all?' So when he goes to Utah to get shot by River, he tells her that she is 'forgiven; always and completely forgiven.' The Doctor's not only relieving River of any guilt, he's letting her move on with her life: be it killing your own race, or shooting your husband, he knows what it's like to carry the guilt of something that was out of your control.
• Some Fridge Horror here. I had seen in the Heartwarming section how Series 5 was the first to have a happy ending, as opposed to the disasters in other endings. And then I saw Series 6 end on a similarly positive note. I also was rather upset at the fact that while the Doctor in the first four series either regenerated or lost a companion, in the case of Series 4 both, we would have the same Doctor and companions for three seasons in a row. And that's when I realized: everyone who travels with the Doctor gets burned in the end. When Amy and Rory leave the show, it will be after they go through worse than they already have.
• Fridge Horror after watching the episode "Utopia". It's the end of the universe and the stars are gone. Why are the stars gone? Because of the crack in Amy's closet.

The Doctor

• The tenth doctor is obsessed with Rose. All things considered, this makes sense as out of love, and I took it as that. Then the Master regenerated and specifically mentioned he wanted to be younger—and is promptly not just more physically fit, but mentally so energetic as to be, well, maniacal.^[3] So...that implies that Time Lords can affect their next regeneration to some extent. And what was nine's biggest regret? That he wouldn't get to do all the things he wanted to with Rose. He made someone who would stay with her.
  • And that, in turn, would explain why Romana in the classic series could "try on" different regenerations willy-nilly where the Doctor seemingly cannot. Romana, lest we forget, is a Time Lady with superior academic merits to the Doctor, and so she most likely understands the intricacies of regeneration better than the Doctor, who - as Romana puts it - barely scraped through the Academy. He cannot control his regenerations as well, and so his regenerations mostly comes out as if on shuffle.
    • Technically, each regeneration is a response to the faults of the previous version (or what got them killed):
      • The First Doctor's body was "wearing a bit thin"; so he got himself a newer, younger one, which was what he needed for his types of adventures.
      • The Second Doctor was forced to regenerate, by the Time Lords, so they made him as far away from his old self and as close to a typical Time Lord as they could; as such, the Third Doctor is more typically heroic, a man of action, and (like his former society) somewhat vain.
      • The Third Doctor was too old and stuffy, and his "man of action"-type escapades were getting worse and worse... so he regenerated into a younger, more bohemian figure, who abhors violence (when he can avoid it) and doesn't mind looking shabby with his infinitely-long scarf.
      • The Fourth Doctor didn't know who he was, anymore; he'd grown dark, and old, and his final season had him plagued with doubts about his approach to the Universe; his regeneration, after saving the Universe (which then spited him through his short fall off a tall satellite), transformed him into a younger, even meeker character, much less blustery than he had been, and more relatable to the humans he travelled with so often.
      • The Fifth Doctor had lost nearly everyone, and the troubles and travails of The Caves of Androzani had shown him that his peaceful, meek way of dealing with the Universe wasn't working; after trauma like that, who wouldn't want to become a brash, egotistical, sure-of-himself figure who doesn't take guff with anybody over his decisions (even in fashion!), such as we got with the Sixth Doctor?
      • The Sixth Doctor's bluster had alienated almost everybody from him, so a softening up seemed in order; a quick bump against the TARDIS console transformed him into the Seventh Doctor, who seemed, at first, to be a much lighter figure than his Sixth self had been; slowly, however, he revealed a much darker, more calculating side of himself—perhaps the Universe had been better off with Six?
      • The Seventh Doctor, however he might have calculated, could never have predicted he'd be killed (temporarily) by a gang of street thugs in turn-of-the-century Los Angeles; that weakness, as well as the cold way in which he'd treated enemies, changed entirely when he regenerated into Eight, who went completely spur-of-the-moment and had compassion even for the Master (a trait that would be horrifically exaggerated two regenerations later).
      • The Eight Doctor had destroyed his entire race... what could he do? Regenerate, to make the pain go away; let his next life deal with the consequences. And so he did.
      • The Ninth Doctor had a revelation at the end of his life: He could be happy, even in the face of death! He needed a self with more brash, more bravado, more emotion... and he got it.
      • The Tenth Doctor was afraid of change; all the emotion and brash bravado in the Universe couldn't stop regeneration... but he tried, anyway. He couldn't stand to let go, or to let emotion well out of him; a lesson the Eleventh Doctor took great heed of.
    • On top of that, the Eleventh Doctor realized Ten was far, far too involved with his Companions, making them fall in romantic love with him. Ten was too human. His solution? Love your Companions, for sure...but act like the crazy alien you are. He also knows what's coming up for him-River Song and a serious relationship, be it sexual or not. Eleven also knows this ends with River dying. Hence him being so curious to find out about their adventures - he wants to change it so she won't die.
    • And remember what was relieved in The End of Time. The Master, the Doctor's friend and foe, had the drums put in his head when he was a child. The Doctor couldn't help the Master,so he instinctively helped any other children who were hurt or scared or whatever because of that. So now Smithy goes out of his way to help Amelia Pond, that girl and her brother from the Beast Below, Melody Pond, that kid from Night Terrors, Stormageddon, the three from the 2011 Christmas special...
• After the Doctor regenerated after the time war, he wanted to separate himself as much as possible from his previous "self" who did all those terrible things... Explains the Eight to Nine transition.
• "The Impossible Astronaut" gives us explicit insight into why the Doctor Doesn't Like Guns. It's not that he's a Technical Pacifist; although highly respectful of all forms of life, we've seen him wipe out whole races and manipulate his opponents into annihilating themselves. But every time the Doctor kills someone, it's a conscious decision based on a deliberative moral and ethical process, usually only after exploring every available alternative. Guns promote a mentality that is the antithesis of that process, especially in the hands of a companion who's scared enough to shoot before asking questions. ~ User:AKA Goldfish
  • As mentioned in the Crowning Moment of Funny article, Four basically implies the same thing in The Horns of Nimon.

Sardor: Can you make it work?
Doctor: (ignoring him) Have you noticed how people’s intellectual curiosity declines sharply the moment they start waving guns about?
Sardor: Can you make it work!
Doctor: YES! Oh yes. I can make it work. The question is can we generate power soon enough to take the ship to escape velocity before we fall into a black hole over the event horizon?
Sardor: The what?
Doctor: Shh-shh. You just hold the gun steady. Don’t tax your mind.

• • Alternately: this was originally a kids' show.
  • Yeah, but that's not an excuse to stop thinking.
• YMMV, but I used to think that Doctor giving River the nickname of "Mrs. Robinson" was just a random joke, until it occurred to me while watching Let's Kill Hitler that River was the exact opposite of Mrs. Robinson, and Amy is the real Mrs. Robinson of the lot.
  • Absolute brilliance in the nickname choice. At the surface, the song got a Grammy in 1969: the year of the stories' setting. Next, it is about how governments control its citizens with subtlety; a parrallel to the Silence's methods. To return to the movie character parallel: the Doctor throws out three aliases, and it is River who assumes that he names her Mrs. Robinson due to her regeneration's appearance of "looking more mature" despite her actual age. But, if revealed that he actually meant that moniker for Amy, it lends to the potential of biological progeny between the Doctor and River. And distantly a path of continuation of the series past 13th's death.

Meta

• It's been a Running Gag in discussions of Doctor Who since at least the late sixties that whenever aliens choose to invade the Earth, they inevitably settle on London, or at least the British Isles, to start their invasion, and how ridiculous this is. However, if you think about it, choosing the UK as a starting-off point for your alien invasion actually makes a fair bit of sense. Firstly, it's a fairly small island (or a collection if we count Ireland), thus requiring less overall resources to take it—which, if you have to cross galaxies to launch an invasion, is nothing to sniff at—and, thanks to the ocean, has a natural barrier to make it easier to defend from potential liberators once you've got it while still being close enough to a larger landmass to be able to spread out into once you're ready. It's reasonably geographically stable, meaning that your invasion is unlikely to have to deal with any major natural disasters which will divert resources from your operations for clean-up, with a fairly stable and mild climate (if you don't mind lots of rain). It's a technologically advanced and industrialised nation (but, considering these are galaxy-crossing aliens we're talking about, not necessarily so technologically advanced that they can put up much of a fight) with manufacturing resources / capabilities that can be converted to your purposes. It has a large population that can be converted into slave labour if necessary. Furthermore, the population is largely not militarised and weapons such as firearms are comparatively rare and not largely available to the public, thus making organised resistance outside of the military / police—who are presumably going to be targeted in the first assault—more difficult. It has access to a fairly well-connected communications network which can be used for mind-control / propaganda purposes. As for London, for better or worse it's the capital and in many ways the centre of British government, economics, military and so forth—knock that out, and the country's automatically destabilised. Okay, it might not be perfect, but it makes sense that they keep coming to Britain—frankly, we're kind of lucky that the Doctor likes hanging out there...
• It always bugged me that Earth history is conveniently "fixed", when the Doctor can evidently meddle with other planets all he wants. But it hit me—the Doctor's encounter with Ian and Barbara, and later human companions, changed him forever; anything that disrupts human history risks retconning away those first meetings, thus completely changing who the Doctor is. And given what a Jerkass the Doctor was in those first couple of serials, probably not for the better. Earth history is only a "fixed point" for the Doctor. ...aaand suddenly "you can't change history, Barbara, not one line!" makes a lot more sense.
  • That's explicitly the reason the protagonist isn't allowed to meddle with Earth's past in the original fiction story I'm writing (which is partially inspired by Doctor Who): knocking history off course has a high chance of erasing her own birth.
    • May I ask for the title?
• Fridge Brilliance; The Doctor visited little Amy Pond in 1996. Meanwhile, in real life, 1996 was the year the Doctor Who TV movie was released, when the Doctor appeared again. Think about it; little Amy was shaped (in a way) with that appearance, and so were (hopefully) the people who were kids when that movie came out. That was their first "meeting" with the Doctor, just like Amy.
  • Made even more brilliant when you realise that Amy is pretty explicitly a hardcore Doctor Who fan in companion form. She knows the genre and instinctually accepts it...
  • Not only that, Amy was seven at the time. She was born in 1989 (when Seven's last series was broadcast). Also, the main part of the episode takes place in 2008 (Ten's last full series broadcast), and the end takes place in 2010 (Eleven's first series broadcast). Amy's effectively a bridge between all of the Who incarnations.
• I think I've figured out the number one thing that's different between when Steven Moffat is writing and anyone else's stories. Not the Nightmare Fuel, not the clever dialogue—it's that Doctor Who under Moff is, above all else, a show about time travel. Moff episodes are far more likely to involve going back and forth in time during the episode itself and less likely to just use it as a way to get Team TARDIS to wherever the Monster of the Week is. Even the ones that just use it as a setup have characters who are in some fundamental way based on time travel; "The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances" gave us a renegade Time Agent, while "Silence in the Library"/"Forest of the Dead" gave us River Song.
  • Note the title of the episode where River Song is introduced: Silence In the Library. And what does she wear the first time we meet her? Yup—a spacesuit.
  • And "The Girl in the Fireplace" was of course a time travel episode, but is notable in being one of the few such episodes where the TARDIS isn't the only means of time travel. Also, the Weeping Angels power is time-based, as is their weakness to direct observation. Now that Moffat is show runner, time travel and its associated tropes are the main theme of the show.
• In "The Wedding of River Song", the question, the oldest question in the universe, the one hidden in plain sight, is finally revealed. At first glance, the "oldest question in the universe" hidden in plain sight, the first question ever asked, sounds like, well, the first question an intelligent being ever asked early in time. But it's not. Instead, it's simply "Doctor who?"... the title of the show. Before anyone saw the first seconds of footage of the Doctor on TV, they read that question. It really is the original question! (Unfortunately, it's not the original question actually spoken in the show, which would be "Not gone yet?" from Ian to Barbara in An Unearthly Child. But that wouldn't be nearly as cool of a question.)
  • Better. Why can the question never be answered? Because the show would end.
  • And better yet: one of the most frequent complaints / concerns people have expressed about the show is that we can't find out too much about the Doctor because it destroys the mystery and the allure around him.
• "Just this once, Rose! Everyone lives!" Rule 1: The Doctor lies. Not about the "everyone lives". "Just this once." Every once in a while, the Doctor gets lucky and ... "Everyone lives!". And it's the happiest day in his life.
• Combining "The Wedding of River Song" with "Silence in the Library"/"Forest of the Dead" packs multiple moments: why the Doctor is willing to proceed to "The Fall of the Eleventh", why he spent over two hundred years finding a way past a fixed point, how even knew his ruse would work, and why he was so discombobulated by River's trust password that first meeting in The Library. He is facing the first question, the question that must never be answered, the question he has been "running from all [his] life" - and he has already met someone who knows the answer! As he told River: "There's only one reason I would ever tell anyone my name. There's only one time I could..."
• At the end of "The Wedding of River Song," the Doctor turns and gives the camera a devilish grin while Dorian shouts the one question that must never be answered. Clever little Fourth Wall gag, right? Except the TARDIS can travel to and intercept contact from any point in time and space in any reality. Including realities in which the Doctor is a fictional character in a popular British television franchise that's been running for almost 50 years.
  • So why doesn't he drop in on us for a visit? He prefers the larger audience. He's being extremely clever on TV, and there are more people to stand around looking impressed. That's the point in having you all!
• While watching "Let's Kill Hitler", I wondered why the TARDIS didn't use Idris for the voice interface. I only just realised today - that was probably a sad memory for the TARDIS.
• Doctor Who technobabble has been much maligned, but in this case there's an excuse—the Doctor is explaining advanced four-dimensional science in Gallifreyan, which the TARDIS's telepathic field then attempts to convert to 20th-century English—a feat similar to translating a quantum physics paper into Classical Latin. It's hardly surprising that the result is often something nonsensical like "reduce the polarity of the neutron flow". -- Fleetlord
  • It's "Reverse", not "Reduce"—which makes slightly more sense in the context of "polarity", provided you don't stop to think that a neutron flow can't have polarity, as neutrons are neutrally charged. Unless it's gravitational polarity, indicating something with negative mass; or possibly strong force polarity, but strong force has color charge, so that doesn't seem likely... <And for those of you wondering, yes, all of that actually had a basis in real-world physics terms.>
    • Actually, it is more the fact that, polarity might be an orientation - Everything has a "north" or "south" so the neutrons and the flow they are in is a directional conduit (like using the "right hand rule" in electronics). By pushing a neutron from point A to point B, you might be filling a reservoir, or draining it. Possibly the interaction of the device needs to have more neutrons or less to regulate this control, like a potentiometer is used to dial up and down the resistance of a circuit.

• Fridge Brilliance In all the episodes of Series 5, The Cracks in Time appear at the end (usually, anyway) at the end as the series arc. There is some confusion as to why they become more noticeable when The Doctor leaves. This being the ultimate time travel story, this is because he is heading down the path that ultimately burns them and wipes them from existence, the shining reflects this as he passed them, meaning their fate is getting ever sealed.
• Fridge Horror: where are Amy's parents? She lives alone in a large, family house but has no family, nor ducks in her duck pond - just a reality-eating crack on her wall...
• Fridge Horror: The Doctor can speak "baby". If that's true, and at least one baby is smart enough to refer to himself as "Lord Stormageddon", does this mean that Baby Geniuses is actually right?
• Fridge Brilliance from "Partners in Crime"

The Doctor: "You have..uh..a hatbox?"
Donna: "Planet of Hats, I'm ready!"

Trope reference win!

• I was wondering why, if the Doctor supposedly has a very cold body temperature, no one in series ever bothers to notice or mention it. Then it hit me: it's an in-joke. Doctors always have cold hands.
• Fridge Logic: I just realized while writing fic. Why is the Doctor so obsessed with 20th/21st century England? Who did he literally lock out and abandon in 1960s London? (Hint: go all the way back to the "Dalek Invasion of Earth".) Of course he wants to make sure the Earth in that time period stays relatively safe...
  • In 1960s London that was actually 22nd century London, in fact.
• Season six of the revived series is, in many ways, utterly different to any series of Doctor Who to come before it but the most recent series convinced this Troper that whatever his failures, Steven Moffat is a bloody clever man. The modern series has always commented on the Doctor's flaws and the fear he inspires, but Season Six in particular is all about how people are rebelling against him due to the utter terror he leaves behind in his wake. When you think about it, it's a total, deliberate deconstruction AND reconstruction of what the Doctor is. Amy is supposed to be a deconstruction of all previous companions: a high-speed demonstration, in microcosm, of exactly what the Doctor does to them. Rory too acts as a mouthpiece and demonstration of the rational, logical danger the Doctor poses: he's the damage left behind. And then of course you have at the end, when pretty much everyone the Doctor has ever helped, realising he's in trouble, stands up and offers to help him: an affirmation that yes, all the aforementioned points are true, yes the Doctor is an imperfect bastard who deserved to be called out more—but he is still a hero worth believing in... And just as Jack Harkess too demonstrates, a hero and a monster are often flipsides of the same coin. And next season? Will apparently bring an answer to the question we've all been asking for fifty years: Doctor Who? One possible, final answer to Moffat's deconstruction of the Doctor? I'd like to hope so.
  • Steven Moffat is the king of fridge brilliance! His story has all been leading up to The Question: Doctor Who? In one of his earliest episodes The Girl in the Fireplace, waaaay back in series 2 before he was even the show runner, he has Madame de Pompadour read the Doctor's mind and say, "Doctor Who? It's more than just a secret, isn't it?" FOUR YEARS before making that the driving plot point of the show. Bravo sir. Bravo.

1. ↑ not a child of Psych training, so take this with a grain of salt.
2. ↑ And Didi, the one with the weakest connection and the first exploited one confirms that they could.
3. ↑ Yes, he was already insane, but still. And here it comes, the sound of drums...