Doctor Who/Headscratchers/Series 5

The Eleventh Hour

• The Tardis has a library, presumably massive. Who wrote the books? Unless he gets a massive truckload delivered every time there's a redesign, the books must be grown from scratch with the rest of the interior, but how does the Tardis know what words to put there?
  • Presumably it pulls them from time and space - maybe it's a spatially shifted, out of sync copy of The Library from Forest of the Dead, or some other sort of technobabble. Or maybe it's a library that's always been there - time travel, remember? He got the books from the future as and early Doctor, and then the Tardis just moves it around.
    • Exactly. The authors wrote them, just like tailors made the clothing in his closet and and factories made the jelly babies in his pockets. The TARDIS is a building that keeps getting remodeled from inside the walls, not everything in it is a part of it. If that were true, the companions would all be either assimilated, stripped naked the next time the Doctor changed the desktop theme, or not let in in the first place.
  • Maybe they're all the books he's collected over his life? 900-odd years, he's had plenty of time to build up a sizable collection.
  • It might be hooked into L-space, and the books just sort of "leak" in?
  • I'm curious as to when the Doctor actually got the time to read them in all of his travels. The word "library" conveys a ton of books. The way he travels around, I wouldn't think it would leave him with much time to enjoy them, unless he read all them before his travels. I noticed Eleven being able to read just by flipping through a book and tells River Song that, "It was a bit boring in the middle."
    • When Nine first showed up at Rose's house, he picked up a book, flipped through it, and said something about a sad ending. He can just read a book in passing whenever he wants, so how would he NOT have time to read? I think you sort of answered your own question!
    • It depends on the kind of library. Remember in Cluedo/Clue, Dr. Black/Mr. Boddy has a library in his house. Some homes have personal libraries, which can be an office or den with a few bookshelves and a few hundred books, which are easy to read in a normal lifetime.
    • In "Castrovalva" the Fifth Doctor lamented that although he loves books he didn't have much opportunity to read. He could be a bit of a collector; someone who scoops up books he thinks look interesting but never gets around to reading.
  • Wouldn't being able to flip through them give him time? Plus, even if Time Lords don't sleep (I can't remember if this was confirmed in canon or not), the companions do.
  • Don't forget - the TARDIS isn't just his 'car' it's his home.
    • Does that make the TARDIS essentially a time-travelling caravan?
    • Sports car. The vortex manipulator is the caravan.
      • Actually, I believe they use the term "Space Hopper."
    • You are asking when the man with the time machine finds time to read. Presumably, whenever he feels like reading for a bit, he can park the TARDIS somewhere/when boring and read for a while, until he wants to do something else. We just don't see that because it wouldn't make good telly.

• When the Doctor needs help from all those alien experts, he sends them the solution to the Fermat equation proof of Fermat's last theorem, schematics for FTL Travel with a joke, and other such stuff. Why not just say "Hi, I'm the Doctor"? Should really be all the credentials he needs, especially in an alien-expert conference. (Also, how exactly can you trace a virus back to the system it was programmed on?)
  • They're not alien experts, they're space experts; and even if they know The Doctor he might not be believed since it's a new form of the Doctor.
    • In that case, new question. Why the heck isn't there a conference of all the alien experts when every single device on the planet is receiving a message from a big alien eye? As for being-the-Doctor evidence, uh... he's got psychic paper? Somewhat weak, but UNIT didn't have trouble recognising Ten, right?
      • There probably was an alien-expert conference. And as most people involved would work for secret organizations, the Doctor didn't need that one - he wanted the one with people in the public eye, who could more easily get the virus to spread - Patrick Moore, for one.
      • The paper might not work on them since the six people all on screen have very high IQs and UNIT recognisized Ten since his last companion at the time worked for UNIT
        • Also, they weren't all UNIT.
  • To address the note about the virus—as I understand it, it wasn't so much tracing the system it was programmed on as it's point of origin—even if it spreads like wildfire, it still presumably has to originate somewhere, and the advanced tech in the starships is presumably capable of following the progression of the virus back to it's starting point.
  • The episode said nothing about alien experts. They were in a meeting because of the sun acting strangely, not the Atraxi's message.

• When we see Rory taking a picture of the man with the dog, there's a close-up on his nurse badge. It is written on the badge that he worked at the hospital since 1990, which is of course impossible because he would have been what - 2? 3 years old?
  • Wibbly wobbly, timey wimey? Alternately, he's like an even better version of Doogie Howser, M.D..
    • Moffat has stated it's an error that went uncaught
    • Or the episode isn't set when we think it is...
    • You... no! If Moffat genuinely said that was an error, then no. Did you not see the camera phone that he was holding right above the badge? Or the laptop elsewhere? Just... no.
    • Cracks in the universe.
    • Sounds like in-universe Rory's badge had a typo and Rory...being Rory (or at least the impression I get of him) didn't ever get it corrected.
    • It says employed since 1990. He could have been born at any time before that. But as for the laptop and picture phone... no clue. Just a plot hole, I expect.
    • Any time? Amy was established in "The Big Bang" as being born in 1989, with several episodes clearly placing the final scenes of "The Eleventh Hour" as 20 years after 1990 (and the Prisoner Zero scenes 2 years before). It's clear that the production intent was that it was the birth date, given that they're probably about the same age. (His slightly-older actor, for the record would have turned 8 in 1990)
  • What year does the beginning of this episode take place in? It picks up immediately where "End of Time" left off, which was explicitly in 2005. In the opening shots the TARDIS is seen flying past the London Eye, which was opened in 2000, which corroborates it being 2005. But when he finally lands in Amelia's yard, it's suddenly 1996 (2010 – 14 years)?

• Why did the Doctor feel the need to scare the shit out of the Atraxi? Need I remind you that without their help, Prisoner 0 wouldn't have been recaptured, and I think it was their 20 minute time limit that put pressure on the prisoner, and stopped it from making rash moves (such as killing the Doctor and Amy out in the open)I also got the impression that Prisoner 0 was stronger fare than what was usual on Doctor Who, without Alien assisstance, I don't see how the Doctor could've handled it otherwise, with earth technology. One more thing, the Atraxi weren't thugs like the Judoon, who didn't know anything about the plasmavore, leading it to extremes it wouldn't normally have gone too, these guys seem like official police who knew the capabilites of the prisoner, and were acting accordingly. I know 6 billion is a lot of people, but in the grand scheme of things, who knows what Prisoner 0 would've done if it escaped. This is clearly a case where the Doctor's bias towards humans shines through.
  • Because it was awesome, funny, and because the Atraxi had apparently violated the laws of the Shadow Proclamation, so it wasn't "just" six billion people, but a question if intergalactic law. The time limit was really putting pressure on the Doctor, not Prisoner Zero. Recall that P-0 knew that it couldn't escape anyway, and wanted the whole planet to burn along with it: shorter time limit equals less hiding necessary before the planet burns.
    • He even said, "What? Did you think no one was paying attention?" - I'm sure members that enforce the Shadow Proclamation would be very interested to know what they just attempted. I doubt that the Doctor would have hesitated to report it if the Atraxi just up and left without meeting him.
  • Also, the next time they decide to wipe out the entire planet because of one lifeform on it, The Doctor might not be present. He didn't want them coming back period.
    • Seriously—remember when the 456 came back and the Doctor wasn't here to help!
    • Also, they were going to burn us all just to get rid of one prisoner. Consider burning down an entire secondary school full of kids because there's one escaped convinct inside the building, times that by six billion, couple it with a twenty minute time limit, and you're getting somewhere. Maybe Prisoner Zero is dangerous (and really, he didn't seem particularly Dalek level dangerous to me on a galactic level), but that's still pretty damned extremeist behaviour. I don't know about anyone else, but I'd be pretty hacked off if somebody tried to do that to me.
  • Not to mention in this regeneration the Doctor seems a bit crazy and overdramatic.
  • Considering that Eleven is slowly subjected to Break the Cutie across Series 5, this move against the Atraxi represents the most honest show of confidence that Eleven ever displayed. He probably did it because he cared about Earth, and didn't want the Atraxi messing with it ever again.
    • Just in this Regeneration? A good eighty percent of them were crazy and overdramatic! In retrospect, One seems to have been the only generation with a very strong sense of subtlety...
  • Fridge logic just set in - the Doctor jumped through all kinds of hoops to point the Atraxi at prisoner zero... but later it's show he's capable of TELEPHONING them. What. I'm sorry, what? What!?
    • He didn't have the time to do it when Prisoner Zero was still on the scene. He was too busy keeping P0 occupied long enough to do it.
    • And he wasn't able to trace the Atraxi signal until they gave him one by beaming up Prisoner Zero.
    • Except that he was clearly able to contact the Atraxi beforehand, since he sends them an MMS with all those photographs of Prisoner Zero - well before the Atraxi do anything.
    • The way that he "contacts" them is actually far from straightforward—he basically writes a computer virus on the phone, sends it out to get the Atraxi's attention, and lets them trace it back to its source in the phone, where the pictures are. Not exactly the kind of setup where you could ring them with a friendly tip.
    • It does sound like the Doctor couldn't contact them until they'd traced the phone. Which is like not being able to phone someone until they phone you, and then you save the incoming number on your mobile. Also, consider that it's possible to withold your number from somebody.

• After the TARDIS crash lands sideways, the Doctor has to climb out with a rope. Um, doesn't the TARDIS have artificial gravity, as shown in every single other episode?
  • Yes, but the artificial gravity was set to true vertical, not "TARDIS vertical" because it was... you know.. malfunctioning?
    • Think about it this way. What we're seeing as the familiar blue Police Box is just a perception filter (Chameleon Circuit). If you remove that, you'd see whatever the TARDIS actually looks like. The inside of the TARDIS is fixed just like any other ship, so I would think it should crash in the same manner.
  • The TARDIS was exploding all over the place at the end of the previous episode and the beginning of this one, and it locked itself to undergo repairs. Not to mention, wasn't there smoke billowing from it?
    • The bits of it that control said locking down were then probably broken as well. We heard the cloister bell after all, that's usually a sign that things are going pretty pear shaped. Also, it was funny.
  • House did it. Somehow.
• Why do so many people seem to instantly recognize the Doctor as Amy's Raggedy Doctor? Little Amelia was the only one who ever saw him. Anybody else would've only had a second-hand description or some drawings from a seven-year-old girl. Not to mention, you'd think their first thoughts would be "Hey, he kind of looks like that Raggedy Doctor Amy always used to talk about" as opposed to instantly jumping to the conclusion that her imaginary friend with the magical time-traveling box was real after all just because they see a guy who matches his description.
  • You kinda answered your own question. She made drawings, dolls, and any number of other things that looked like him. You don't really see a guy running around in a torn up suit everyday (especially in Leadworth), so his appearance would at least make them take notice of him, and then they'd make the association. If they saw a guy who looked exactly like Amy's 'friend', the easiest conclusion to come to is that he was real after all, and that maybe Amy's imagination made her exaggerate the part about the magic box.

The Beast Below

• In 'The Beast Below" if the star whale was the last of its kind, and using it was their only hope, implying that they had no means of space travel on a large scale, how did Scotland, which was on another ship, escape? Or the rest of the world for that matter? Secondly, if the whale was moving, the glasses would have moved too! And if it wasn't moving, there would be no point torturing it. And finally, how did a being manage to evolve, on it's own, FTL travel?! Or manage to reach the Earth exactly when they needed its help?
  • I'll take a shot at answering this:
    • Scotland (and the rest of the world) built their own space ships using traditional methods only for the rest of the UK to find there was no fuel left. The bigger countries such as America could well have taken a lot of said fuel, and also realized they needed to build faster due to having a lot more people to carry. They may have started decades before Britain. Who's to say England wasn't just slow because they were in some kind of... Unsinkable Titanic mode?
    • I think the Doctor was checking to see if the vibrated because of the engines, which they didn't, the whale must move in a way that doesn't cause that much vibration.
      • I think it's something to do with scale. I may be failing physics forever here, but consider the earth - we barely feel the earth rotatng mainly because it's so big. Starship UK is the size of... well, the UK, not as big as earth but still pretty large, and the starwhale is just one big large "engine" in itself. Whereas they would need a lot of much smaller and a lot less fluid engines to do the same job, which would make more vibrations. Hm... how much does a whale move while swimming through the oceans?
    • When was it said it evolved? I must have missed that, as for why it came when they needed help, it was because the children were screaming for help, and it came for them.
    • It was never said that it had FTL travel, only that could travel between stars, considered that it was longed lived (it had 300+ years, and no one seemed worried that could die from old age before they journey would end) it could very well travel at a fraction of lightspeed and still be usefull as the ship "engine".
  • I got the impression that the UK spaceship had conventional engines to start with, then they broke down, and the space whale came to help.
    • I think the Earth was burning and that's why they were crying.
  • I was of the impression that their data was not 100%reliable, meaning that their "legend" of it coming to them as it did was a bit of column a and a bit of column b, but I digress...

• In 'The Beast Below', how did The Doctor not know about the secret of Starship UK? Wouldn't he know about it since he's visited points in the timeline past this episode?
  • Take a look in the episode again, is a Police State from Hell, they kill anyone that protests and feed it to the goddam thing, they covered up, probably even said that the whale was never tortured.
    • The truth gets out sometime in the year 3295 and The Doctor has been in times past that one, he should know about the whale at the very least and maybe even the whole truth. That's not even counting the fact he's in space and should be able to see under the Starship UK
      • Well, for not being able to see under, I assumed that they had built around it somehow to block it from outside view and then at the end once it was revealed, the wall around it was removed. Something like that.
    • I assumed that there were various clues that clued him into there being a police state.
      • • Alternately, the whale itself might have used its tentacle things to shake off anything unnecessary surrounding it.
  • More conventional answer... it's time travel! Time is in flux. Yes, that happened in 3295, but when he went to, say, Utopia, it hadn't happened in 3295 yet. The Doctor's timeline is manifold and everchanging. In the same way that beneath Utah in 2012, the Daleks hadn't invaded London in 2007 yet. Time hadn't taken that form yet. It's how the Doctor's timeline has always been shown to work. The Doctor bumps into a lot of things he doesn't know about, and he doesn't know about every single event in history until he visits them. He wouldn't have thought it odd that things he didn't know about were happening in a time period he hadn't visited. Besides which, I'm sure that before the Doctor changed events, the whale was never exposed. They voted to forget. They wouldn't even have hushed it up... they chose to hush it themselves.
    • Note that the Dalek from "Dalek" was found on the Ascension Islands (I think) in the early 1960s, long before any of their invasions anyway.
  • Hey, here's a thought: The Doctor is not omniscient. Just because you live in America (or England, or wherever you live) does not mean that you automatically know every single point in history of any import. The Doctor goes to a lot of times and places, and he just doesn't stop at every point in time and ask, "And how does (plot point) relate to (any one of the many enemies that I have)?" Plus, an event that might be important at one point in time may be forgotten later. For example, George Washington is known as the Father of our Country (US troper, here) and that he fought in the Revolutionary War. However, it's not as widely spread that he fought for the British in the French and Indian War before that. So what may be important at one time may not stick in the minds of people forever. Also, people don't just blurt out random historical information randomly. The Doctor knows lots of things, but... well, he's not perfect.
    • Thank you! I was just about to post this myself. Why do people expect the Doctor to know every last detail about whatever is currently the past?
    • To be fair, while I agree fully with the above it's usually because the Doctor often does seem to know everything, or at least makes a big deal of acting as if he does. It makes the occasions where he apparently doesn't seem a bit more glaring.

• A little thing from "The Beast Below"- In Amy's anvilicious bit about the doctor in the end- how did she know he was "very old"? Did I miss something? She only just learned that he isn't human...
  • He mentions that he's 900 years old, like, every episode.
    • Once again, she didn't even realise he's alien, just a time travelling madman she's known since she was seven.
  • Liz 10 Mentioned him as a legend, higher alien MO, hair of an idiot. In fairness, he is a time traveler, but longevity is implied too.
    • Basically yeah, she guessed. She knew he was a legend from Liz, and already knew he could travel in time. She correlated what she knew about him with what she knew about the starwhale, noticed a pattern and Bob's your uncle. It's not impossible to work out the whole picture from a few puzzle pieces, and Amy just seems to have that kind of intuitive nature when she stops to think about things.

• Starship UK again: why did the Doctor assume something was wrong because the engines weren't running? It's a spaceship. Unless it was changing direction or slowing down, its engines wouldn't need to be running (see Space Friction). I would assume life support etc. but as the absence of vibration is caused by the star whale, presumably it's only the ship's thrust that the Doctor was concerned with.
  • Could be that you're trying to apply more real world physics here than the show honestly cared about. Very rarely do you get a science fiction show which displays the environment and physics of space entirely accurately. Shouldn't there at least have been engines for steering?
  • It might also be standard practice to keep engines running in case some space debris big enough to overcome any shielding is spotted as on a collision course with the ship. Or simply because the engines normally used take a long time to power up - without power, your ship can't do anything except keep in the same direction at the same speed.
  • Because in a ship that size, I refuse to believe they wouldn't at least have the engines idling. Might the vibration slowly move you off course? Yep, but you can correct for that, and it's better to have correct your course than risk having to wait for your engines to power up to make an emergency maneuver.
  • Even if we decide to apply real-world physics (which the show constantly ignores), it's perfectly plausible that normal engines would be active and firing in normal flight. With such a long distance between stars, why wouldn't you just keep accelerating to cut down on travel time? Many of our conceptual ideas for getting to Alpha Centauri involve accelerating constantly until you reach the halfway point, and then decelerating constantly until you get to your destination. Assuming you've got enough fuel to do it that way (see: ion drives), it's the fastest way to get where you're going.

• In "The Beast Below", the reasoning that the beast doesn't hurt children, so it's really a good guy. Remember the Doctor's speech in Boom Town about how a killer doesn't cease to be a killer because it spares the cute ones so that it could live with itself? Yes, the Doctor himself didn't make Amy's statement this time, but the audience is obviously supposed to accept both of these lines of reasoning as correct, and they contradict.
  • The space whale came to Earth specifically because it wanted to help the children. It wouldn't make its sacrifice and its pain go to waste by eating them.
  • Do we have any evidence of any active maliciousness on the whale's part anyway? True, it's implied it did eat dissidents, but that could probably be justified along the lines that it would starve to death otherwise, and one could say that's more an act of evil on the part of those feeding the dissidents to it. Considering that it still seems happy to transport Starship UK despite being tortured out of it for centuries, it would seem that the whale is really a good guy. it hardly seems fair to complain about the space whale being presented as a good guy when, well, it does good things.
  • Not to mention that, any similarities between them notwithstanding, Doctor Nine and Doctor Eleven are substantially different people. And even Doctor Nine forgave Slitheen-Margaret enough to give her a second chance in the end.
    • You're all missing the point. It's what is proved by the fact that the bad guy spares someone. The Slitheen story says "sparing children doesn't prove she's a good guy". The Beast Below says "sparing children proves it's a good guy". Whether the character is later forgiven or proven to be a good guy for other reasons doesn't affect this. And whether the two Doctors are different is also irrelevant—it's not the Doctor contradicting himself (In The Beast Below it wasn't even the Doctor who said it, it was Amy), it's the stories giving contradictory lectures.
      • But it wasn't saying that, all that this really implied was that the Starwhale wasn't blaming the kids for the sins of their parents. It knew the children weren't a part of it's pain -the children were unaware of the Starwhale until they become adults. Once they're old enough to vote, they became aware of it's suffering and chose to ignore it: they were no longer innocents in it's mind. Also, we're talking about a show with decades of continuity and many different writers, of course there are going to be contradictory messages sometimes. At least that suggests they're not set into one certain moral truth above all others.
      • On the contrary; with the greatest of respect, from where I'm sitting it seems to be you who is missing the point. The moral of the discussion in the earlier story is not just "sparing children doesn't prove Margaret the Slitheen is a good guy", it's "sparing one person doesn't automatically prove you're a good guy when you have a lengthy list of evil actions to your name to begin with". Margaret the Slitheen was clearly shown and proved to be a ruthless, vicious murderess who killed people, wore their skins and joked about it before her whole supposed Heel Face Turn, and it's clearly suggested that she had a fairly lengthy list of evil actions to her name before this. The crux of the Doctor's argument was that saving one person does not automatically negate her past misdeeds or suddenly make her 'good' -- it's just her way of trying to convince herself that she's changed. Indeed, the fact that she was still planning to blow up Cardiff to get a ride off the planet (thus presumably killing the person she 'spared' anyway) suggests that she hadn't really reformed in any serious way at all. The whale, on the other hand, had done nothing to suggest that it's an 'evil' creature at all, plenty to suggest that it is a benevolent creature, and no one—not even the humans—even suggests that it is in any way evil; indeed, the whole point of the episode is that the humans are so consumed with their guilt at what they feel they have to do to an innocent creature in order to survive that they are either happy to wipe their own minds clean to forget about it or—in what is suggested to be the rarer option—risk the destruction of their entire society to prevent it. It is the society that has captured and enslaved the whale that is clearly presented to be evil, not the whale itself. The stories are not contradictory because the whale was never presented as the 'bad guy' at all, and was clearly and demonstrably presented the good guy, whereas Margaret the Slitheen was clearly presented as the bad guy from the start.
      • That's not true. The space whale was first presented in a way that it could plausibly be at least hostile. "Doesn't hurt children" implies "does hurt adults".
      • It's also ultimately presented in a way that it's treatment is a dark and shameful secret; the whole point of the voting booths is that the people are presented with the 'truth' of Starship UK, which is so horrible that they either choose to forget it or risk the destruction of their entire society in outrage. Considering that this truth is pretty clearly the torture of the space whale, this is not exactly how you'd react or present it if the whale was supposed to be viewed as a hostile, malevolent threat. Liz Ten's speech to herself pretty much admits that from the perspective of the humans, the whale was just going about it's thing when they captured it and hooked it up to a torture machine; if they'd wanted to even give the slightest hint that the whale was a threat or an enemy, why didn't they claim it was attacking them? The whole treatment of the whale once we learn of it's existence is framed in terms that what's happening to it is clearly an outrage and an atrocity; again, hardly how it would be presented if we were truly supposed to see the whale even partially as a malevolent entity. And frankly, if the whale does eat or harm the adults, then considering it's the adults who have hooked it's brain up to a torture machine and are zapping it every few minutes then I think a little hostility is pretty justified under those circumstances; if I was being tortured and I had the chance to get even with the people I saw as being my torturers, I probably would—they're the ones who are at wrong in that situation, not me. In fact, the very fact that the whale doesn't take further revenge barring this ultimately supports the view that it's not a malevolent threat. We do get a few scary moments with the whale, truth, but on the whole the story makes it fairly clear even before this that it's the humans who are being the evil ones in this situation, not the whale.
      • There's also the fact that the Star Whale isn't asking for human sacrifices, that the idea to use the Star Whale as a means of executing dissidents is entirely the idea of the human parasites. The Star Whale could, in all likelihood, be sustained with whatever food source the humans have been using for themselves, but instead it is left hungry.

• Why couldn't the Doctor free the space whale and then take everyone to their destination in the Tardis? Maybe it'd take a couple of trips, but the city wasn't in danger of blowing up or anything.
  • This entry itself is a just bugs me: The TARDIS can pull PLANETS back to their locations, so why not just tow it with the ship? You guys think too small...
    • Tow it where? Did they have any specific destination? Besides, it can pull them, but not necessarily FAST, so that sounds like a very boring way for the Doctor to spend a few decades.
    • Not necessarily fast? It once towed a ship out of a black hole in "The Satan Pit". Though the planet pulling thing apparently couldn't be pulled off by the Doctor and a single companion alone.
    • And to answer both things: The reason why he wouldn't tow/transport the residents is because he's still not 100% there yet. It's how long after he's "stopped cooking?" How would you feel after severe trauma, and being told that you now have to save the city you lived in with no information whatsoever? You wouldn't be fully up to par, either.
  • Because it was made clear that the space whale was perfectly happy to carry Starship UK (as evidenced by the fact that it didn't immediately shrug the city off when the power was turned off); it just didn't need to be tortured to do so. Plus, even with a time machine, getting what essentially amounts to the entire population of Great Britain into the TARDIS would take some marshalling.
    • It wasn't necessary by the end of the story when he knew the space whale was happy to carry everyone, but it should have been an option in the middle of the story, before he knew this.
    • Maybe so, but to be fair from a storytelling point of view it's not exactly an option with a great deal of excitement or complexity behind it; "come on, everyone in Britain, line up to board the TARDIS!"—not incredibly exciting. Plus, it leads them open to the 'well, why don't they just do that every week?" accusation. Methinks that Willing Suspension of Disbelief is probably necessary for this one.
    • Furthermore, marshalling everyone into the TARDIS will still take some time and resources. And let's face it, few people are going to be convinced by the "hey, everyone, I'm going to fit the entire population of Starship UK into my little blue box and take everyone to safety!" argument. And in the Humans Are the Real Monsters frame of mind the Doctor's in when he learns what they're doing to the space whale anyway, he probably doesn't want them in his TARDIS, and why would he?
    • Sooo overall, it was (or at least implied) that the whale was physically connected to the Starship, and that to choose abdicate would have freed it, therefore allowing the structures which had since built up around and on top of it to fall apart without any supporting structure? Or at the very least, the whale would get REALLY understandably pissy, say "screw this" and throw them off probably damaging the country's infrastructure in the process?
    • If he did tow them elsewhere, he might be interfering with the natural course of Human History and wouldn't take the chance unless they were in real danger. He seems to allow Humans to progress at whatever pace... seeing as he knows they've made it to the end of the Universe just fine (witnessed by Ten).
    • So he'd rather lobotomize a creature and give up the name 'Doctor' rather than interfere with history even though he interferes with history on a daily basis?
      • There's a difference between the small interferences he does and such a huge departure as that would have been. And who knows? Perhaps the starship was a fixed point in history and the Doctor just never mentioned it. The wiggle room came from how the ship would be powered, from a creature in pain, a creature lobotomized, or (as Amy discovered) a creature willing.

• And how come the Doctor never saw the space whale in the first place? Just because the camera angles fooled us doesn't mean they're the only camera angles he sees.
  • The TARDIS clearly appears above Starship UK when the Doctor first encounters the place, and there's that sort of skirt-thing underneath the buildings which provides foundation and obscures the whale until you get underneath it (the one with the Union Jack painted on it). He probably couldn't see it from that angle.
  • The whale was actually inside the ship at the start. It broke open the bottom bit at the end.
    • ...when Amy pressed the button.

• Ok, so the Star Whale came to help voluntarily, and wanted to save the children. But after being tortued for 300 years, isn't the least bit pissed off? No matter how well intentioned I might be, if someone tortured me for three centuries, I'd ditch them as fast as I could. Especially considering all the children the whale came to save eventually grew up and tortured it.
  • Even so, it would kill millions of innocents who had nothing to do with the torturing, so, lesser of two evils? Plus, how exactly could the star whale ditch them when the Starship UK is built around it?
    • It's pretty big—a bit of sustained thrashing, it could probably shake the city off, or at least damage it sufficiently to render it all but uninhabitable.
  • I'm thinking that just shaking off the ship would do significant damage to the whale. Not only was part of its brain exposed, but its tentacle things were threaded all over the ship "like roots". If having pieces of the ship tear off didn't kill the whale, it would at least hurt like hell and do permanent damage. It was probably just biding its time til someone, somehow turned off the equipment and/or realized its true intentions. Hopefully once they found a new place to live, they could dismantle the ship without hurting the whale and let it go on its way, maybe with a nice fruit basket as a way of saying, "Sorry for the centuries of unnecessary torture."
  • Bear in mind this is a living creature that travels presumably interstellar distances without going insane from boredom. Who knows how it perceives time? 300 years might not be all that long if it takes you 500 to reach your closest neighbour.
  • It's implied to have still eaten adults. So yeah, it would've been a little ticked. Not on the Doctor's level, but still a bit pissed.

• The Beast Below - if the space whale was friendly from the start, and moves faster when it's not being tortured, why did they begin torturing it?
  • They didn't know it was friendly, they just caught it and build their houses on it and then started shagging its brain.
  • Shagging its brain? Mind Rape? Umm... I don't get it.
  • This is Series Fnarg after all. Everything is a double entendre.
    • Still a non-sequitur. Just because it involved neural passageways does not make the whale's torture Mind Rape. At all.
    • We're being a bit over-literal and bound to our own terminology here, guys and / or girls; I suspect the earlier Troper was simply stating that the people of Starship UK were metaphorically 'shagging' the space whale's brain by sending massive bolts of electricity through it -- 'shagging' in this case presumably being used as a slightly more polite way of saying 'fucking' as in 'fucking up' or 'fucking around with'. It's not necessarily a direct suggestion of Mind Rape as the trope-page defines it.

• In "The Beast Below", the Doctor and Amy escape the space whale by being vomited out of its mouth. But at the end of the episode, it shows that the space whale is almost wholly in space, mouth included, with the Starship UK perched on its back. Shouldn't the Doctor have been vomited into space?
  • I think that it was being force-fed, and its mouth constrained while it was imprisoned. It's reasonable to assume its mouth was freed when the restraints were removed.
  • It's also possible that the people had crafted a new feeding hole on the creature, and sealed its mouth shut.
  • The space whale was wholly inside the ship at the start of the episode. It broke open the bottom part at the end.

• "The Beast Below": Okay, they wiped Liz's memory regularly to ensure she wouldn't find out her reign was longer than she thought. But what about everyone else on the ship? Wouldn't she find out the truth immediately after talking to them? What about historical archives? Who was supposed to reign before her in the faked history? And how come nobody but the Doctor found out that the engines weren't running? It's not like they've even bothered to conceal that fact.
  • For question 1: How often would the Queen talk to anyone outside of a fairly small (and easily controlled) circle of people? Historical records can be faked and forged; the previous monarch is the one who reigned before Liz, but they just keep changing the dates. In any case, it's implied she's only fairly recently started to go on her little excursions, which implies that it happens in a circular fashion: Liz gets her mind wiped, thinks everything's okay, but starts to notice certain suspicious things (of which those mentioned above—in previous iterations—could easily be part), starts investigating to find out what's going on, finds out the truth, gets mind-wiped and forgets it all again. Wash, rinse, repeat.
    • Question 1: Every couple of years, once a citizen reaches the age of twelve, they are eligible to vote. The message Amy Pond saw is played for them, and they choose to 'Protest', or 'Forget'. Assumedly, forgetting resets their memories to the beginning of Queen Liz Ten's reign. As for records and documents, The Winders are probably charged with doctoring the written and recorded history so that it falls in accordance with the established façade.
      • The voting booth erases only the memory of the information they receive in the voting booth.
  • For question 2: The people of Starship Britain live in a grungy police state where they disappear if they start poking their noses in places where it shouldn't be poked. They've long since learnt not to ask awkward questions like that (along with awkward questions like "hey, how come the Queen doesn't age?", come to that). The Doctor finds out because he doesn't care whether the questions he's asking are awkward.

• Yet another for The Beast Below. Why did they keep the whale for all those years (at least two centuries)? Was it really so impossible to either build or buy engines or even just build a new ship? They considered this important enough to allow every citizen to vote on it and give the queen final say on it and they won't explore alternative means of transportation? With that kind of mindset what's going to happen to them when the whale eventually dies?
  • They did explore different methods of travel, but ran out of time while the sun was you know, exploding. I got the feeling all the other countries had taken all the useful fuel and the majority of the building materials. They had to get off Earth and boom, there was the Star Whale. As for finding alternate methods of travel while they were in space, imagine constructing engines big enough to support and steer the ship, and installing them without the population knowing, while hurtling through space at a million miles an hour. Space is massive, too. It's completely possible that they could have been travelling for two hundred, three hundred years and not come across a habitable planet or one they could trade with/buy materials from. As for when the whale dies, Newton's First Law says an object in motion will remain in motion until an outside force (ie, gravity) acts upon it. The ship would keep going, with the dead whale under it until they went into orbit around something or crashed.
    • If they attempted to build engines there wouldn't be any need to keep it a secret anyway. Additionally if the whale does die then they're stuck in space without any ability to maneuver. Admittedly space is so large and they're so small that it probably won't be a problem but that seems like an unnecessary risk to take. Of course I also have to note that the Doctor didn't think to offer technical assistance.
    • Immortality, or at least ages up into the quadruple digits is confirmed as being possible in the Who!Verse, with the Time Lords, Jack, the Racnoss and the suchlike. The Star Whale should last a couple hundred more years, enough time for the humans to find a new planet.
    • They weren't searching for a new planet, the plan was go into space, drift around for enough time that the Earth becomes habitable again, return to Earth.

• A sillier complaint, but why do the computer screen and the computer voice show two different ages?

Victory of the Daleks

• 'Victory of the Daleks': A gravity bubble? That goes from being blueprints to fully functional in about half an hour? That lets Spitfires fly in the vacuum of space? And fire lasery things rather than bullets?
  • There are spitfires in space what other explanation do you need?
    • Not buying it. You cannot meaningfully explain a plot hole (which could be cut off safely—these Spitfires did little to advance the plot, and their existence in WWII Britain should have drastically changed history) by naming a trope. I can accept omnicidal talking pepper cans, but these insta-converted planes make no logical sense, even by Doctor Who standards, and break immersion.
      • Their presence doesn't affect WWII history because the Doctor gets rid of them and the blueprints at the end; he explicitly says so. Churchill's not happy about it.
      • Plus, there's only three Spitfires which have been fitted out, and two get blown up in the upper atmosphere. Which leaves one to be dismantled.
      • Because they are writing what THEY want to see - Confidential after "Day of the Moon" notes a lot of people got into acting/writing/camera etc because as kids they wanted to 'do' Doctor Who. If you are my age you grew up as a small boy in a country which showed a war film at least once a month during the 70's, you had Airfix models, and COMMANDO comic was staple reading material. Then you got Star Wars. Basically Rusty, Moff and the other middle-age blokes at the meeting went "Spitfires in space? HELL YES". Doesn't have to make sense, it's just allowing us everything we wanted 35 years ago. And we would have got away with it if it wasn't for you meddlin' kids!
  • Bracewell's connected up to the Dalek mainframe; it's how he's able to come up with all those brilliant ideas that attracted the British government to him. He's drawn up the blueprints for the gravity bubble before the episode starts (and possibly has prototypes) -- the Doctor takes note of them when they first meet. Presumably the Daleks have figured out a way of cobbling them together from WWII-era technology, which Bracewell takes advantage of.
    • I'm pretty sure he did explicitly say "they're only prototypes." Not only did he have Dalek technology, he WAS Dalek technology, and he'd produced plenty of it. He'd never tested it because he had human memories and feelings, but he had stuff in the vaults. Then it would've been as easy as... well, putting a spitfire in a prototype bubble. Not to say that my belief wasn't properly suspended, but still. It makes objective sense.
      • Indeed; the exact words were "it's theoretically possible", which could mean any number of things. Already built? Already fitted? Already on the Spitfires that were in the air at that very moment? The third option seems very likely as explanations go.
    • Also, I feel like the Doctor could have pulled off some jiggery-pokery to get them working.
    • And, we're talking WW 2. My Grandad (who built aircraft) used to tell stories of them flying bombers down to the airfields with the engineers finishing building the aircraft while in flight. If the Spitfires were in a state that could reach space, they'd have flown them.

• In 'Victory of the Daleks', how did the daleks not realise that destroying earth would create great one giant paradox? If the daleks had destroyed the earth at this point, then it wouldn't have been there for them to steal in "Stolen earth", meaning that Donna wouldn't have been their to foil their plans, leading to most of them getting destroyed and the one ship getting away. However, if that happened, they wouldn't have gone back in time, making it impossible for them to create those five daleks, or create the human bomb to... Oh no, I've gone crosseyed.
  • Wibbley Wobbley Timey Wimey The daleks (especially these superior ones) would've considered that, but also remember that in the whoniverse, time is in flux, most episodes revolve around things that didn't happen,the universe compensates to maintain the changes. Only certain events (events that Timelords and Daleks can sense) are fixed. This was probably a fluxing event, giving Daleks the OK.
  • sorry, refuse to belive in Wibbley Wobbley Timey Wimey in this case. If bringing one guy back to life in Fathers day causes the reapers to appear and attempt to fix things, then destroying the entire human race has got to screw the universe over seven ways to one.
    • Actually, in that case, the time stream was weakened because of the prescense of two versions of the Doctor and Rose, one is a very prominent time lord, integral to keeping the universe in order, the other was significant because of the powerful "Bad Wolf" phenomena surrounding her. Also, the Doctor existed twice, and Rose existed THREE times in the same moment in time there. That's got to have complicated things a bit.
  • The Daleks didn't actually want to destroy the Earth this time; the whole 'Bracewell is a bomb!' thing was just a backup plan to ensure that the Doctor wouldn't interfere with their escape. They knew full well that given the choice between saving the Earth and destroying the Daleks, he'd choose saving the Earth—the timeline was never at risk because the Daleks played the Doctor like a balalaika and exploited his love for the planet.
  • They're Daleks—since when have they given two shits about keeping the timeline on the straight and narrow?
    • 'Remembrance of the Daleks - "Even the Daleks, ruthless as they are, would think twice before making so incalculable a change to the timeline." And he was referring to an eighties tape deck in the sixties, not wiping out a planet.
      • "Thinking twice" just means they'd pause for thought, not that they wouldn't do it if they thought it was worth their while. Which they clearly did in this case.
    • Since they refused to kill Adelaide in the flashback in Waters of Mars specifically because she was a fixed point and couldn't die too soon. And of course destroying humanity in World War II would have wiped Adelaide.
      • Of course, to be fair, those same Daleks were planning to wipe out Adelaide by extension when they wiped out all of reality, so obviously keeping the timeline straight wasn't that big a deal to them. Destroying the entirety of reality would also have wiped out Adelaide, let's face it.
    • And as the seventh Doctor said in Remembrance of the Daleks: "The Daleks have a mothership up there capable of eradicating this planet from space. But even they, ruthless though they are, would thing twice before making such a radical alteration to the timeline."
      • Being slightly pedantic here, but "thinking twice" about something doesn't mean they wouldn't do it anyway if they thought it was worth their while.
  • Also remember that Amy didn't remember the whole stole the earth thing, because, as we find out, it never happened because of the cracks, so they wouldn't consider preventing it a paradox, since they didn't happen. As for how could they exist then if they escaped from the stole the earth thing, due to the cracks, not many things involving them makes sense: you know, Angels not existing, but no news of Octavian being alive, the stuff with penguins in Big Bang, etc. We don't even know what happened to Donna if the eath-stoling never happened, so the paradox thing is not that big a problem.

• In 'Victory of the Daleks' Why didn't the Daleks program that scientist to follow their orders, thereby ordering him to order them, this means that when their plan starts, they'll have a minion on site, who can sabotage any human resistance they might encounter. At least deactivate him, and not risk him using the plans YOU gave him to attack. Idiots!
  • 'Order him to order them' sounds like it's getting a little bit into Logic Bomb territory. In any case, why would they need a minion who can sabotage human resistance when they've got inside that scientist a bomb which can destroy the entire planet, thus removing human resistance permanently? And ultimately, don't knock it; the Dalek plan worked.
  • Besides, doesn't The Doctor say something about uploading memories onto Bracewell? Meaning that the Daleks didn't create a computer that acted human, but put a human's thoughts in an Android.

• Again from "Victory of the Daleks": it's stated that the events of "Journey's End" never happened, through Amy not remembering it. Then three Daleks and one of Davros' old battleships show up claiming that their "one ship survived" the destruction of the Dalek fleet that never happened and didn't exist. Um...
  • Maybe the events of Journey's End never happened for Amy? The crack in space and time ate up her memories, not the events themselves.
    • No, see, I think this is the very nature of the cracks in time: there's a natural and an unnatural way to change the timeline: the cracks are UNnatural. They're erasing things in a way which doesn't make sense. If we are to believe that time is in constant flux, then surely thing are happening and unhappening all the time, without causing any damage -the timeline just reshapes itself accordingly. But the Cracks in space are a sign that something has damaged the time line itself. Events, things, even people, vanish into the cracks, but the events and experiences surrounding those things do not unhappen as well, or adjust as they normally would. Let's use the Battle of Canary Warf as an example: according to Amy in "Victory of the Daleks", it now never happened... but I bet that Ianto Jones was still a member of Torchwood Three after his girlfriend was halfway cyber converted, and that Rose was still in the alternate unvierse (which she wouldn't have been if that battle unhappened in a natural way) and so on. If people who were directly involved in the Canary Wharf battle actually stopped to think about their lives (if Ianto Jones stopped and wondered why he was in Torchwood three, etc) then they'd realise that their lives quite literally didn't make sense. Also recall that at the end of The Pandorica Opens, River found a photograph of Amy with Rory, who at this point should have never even existed. This implies to me that there are great big chunks being ripped out of the timeline but leaving other bits behind. Like it's a quilt being unravelled thread by thread until it falls apart... It's all a bit like what goes down in Terry Pratchett's Thief of Time, really. This is further expanded upon in The Big Bang where we still that the whole universe has vanished to such an extent, that humans have created a bunch of strange myths, such a the Nile Penguins, just trying to explain how the remaining pieces of their universe fit together.
      • In addition to this, Amy exists - but her parents don't, and never did. Clearly bits can be left behind.
  • The events are wiped out by the cracks, but their effects aren't. It's like how at the end of the angels two parter, they erase all the angels, but are still on the planet even though the only reason they were on the planet is because of the angels.

• This is arguable and I'm probably not thinking straight but, the Daleks in "Victory of the Daleks" were survivors from Davros' fleet in series 4, right? That means they were created from Kaled (Davros) DNA (that ribcage, damn), rather than human-amalgams like in series 1. Why isn't that "pure" Dalek again?
  • Hadn't Davros used human meat to fill out the daleks, each using as a sort of seed the DNA from one of the cells from in his chest? Genetically pure dalek, but synthesized from a large amount of human and a miniscule amount of kaled.
  • No, I don't recall that... the Daleks were already around when they stole the Earth and the only other known survivor is Dalek Caan and (I think) the Dalek Supreme. You're not confusing it with the Dalek Emperor's Daleks in "The Parting of the Ways" are you?
    • If you're talking to the first reply, probably, apart from the 1 cell=1 dalek bit. If you're talking to the original entry, I don't know, that's why I wrote the first reply.
    • I was referring to the first reply. What human meat (at least in "The Stolen Earth" anyway)?
      • None, probably. I meant that yes, you're probably right and I had confused the two. Sorry.
        • I need to rewatch the episode, it's been a long time, but didn't Davros even give a little comment on how, unlike before, they were now true Daleks for this reason?
        • Original poster here, that's kind of what I was getting at.
  • I believe the Daleks that are revived here are part of the original group of Daleks created by Davros - i.e. the ones which turned on their creator and attempted to kill him because he was not a pure Dalek. This is because while Davros was the father of the Dalek race, he never personally underwent the process that took forcibly evolved his species (the Kaleds) into the Daleks. So there is a fair chance that the original Daleks would see any Dalek created from Davros' unenhanced cells as "impure".
  • My personal theory (been a while seen watching this episode, though) is that the British Daleks were escapees from the void (remember all the 'barriers between universes breaking down' last season?) who came across a wrecked Time War saucer (with the Progenitor thing inside). They weren't accepted because their DNA was stained with 'void stuff'
  • It's entirely possible that the Progenitor was designed to reject Davros' DNA from activating it to avoid another Dalek Civil War (Resurrection, Revelation and Remembrance of the Daleks all featured this war)
  • And in my WMG you can see that I guessed that the Daleks in this episode are from "Parting of the Ways"

• In Victory of the Daleks, a single Time War Dalek shoots down several very fast planes mid-flight with perfect accuracy, later, as The Doctor is fleeing from the Paradigm Daleks they miss him, all five of them. How?
  • My personal guess is that since they've only just been generated from the Progenitor Device a few minutes before, their weapons systems and aim are still a bit off with moving targets. Plus, the Doctor's got fairly hefty Plot Armor, what with being the main character and all.

• In "Victory of the Daleks", why does the Doctor let Bracewell go as opposed to, say taking him to a distant time and place where his Oblivion Continuum can't hurt anyone? Compassion is one thing, and Bracewell clearly has a mind of his own, but if he's still around whenever the Daleks come back (not improbable, given that he probably wasn't designed to age since his use was likely a short-term affair), they find their Oblivion Continuum bomb alive and well. Couldn't the Doctor have relocated him, or at least taken him to a time when the locals knew how to neutralize him?
  • He's already diffused the Oblivion Continuum inside Bracewell, Bracewell's shown he can overcome and break away from Dalek conditioning and he already has a life of sorts where he is—why not let him live a happy life there?
• Which Daleks were these? A couple of these posters seem to imply they hopped straight out of the Time War, which I suppose was possible while Gallifrey was in the sky, but the Progenitor would definitely recognize the pure-blood Time War Daleks. So, no. All the wikis I've seen assume they're from The Stolen Earth, and I suppose Davros-nipple Daleks wouldn't register for the Progenitor unit (which is arguable, since aren't ALL Daleks originally grown from Davros' species?), but the end of that finale had the human Doctor specifically engineer a universe-sized blast to annihilate anything Dalek...and then, what? They cloaked and followed the Earth back across the galaxy as the Doctor towed it, then emergency jumped back in time? I think not. That's a little hard to imagine. The last option I can think of is that they are from Parting of the Ways, the human Daleks that were all "DO NOT BLASPHEME" to the Emperor. Obviously, they wouldn't register as Dalek, and they've got the benefit of location, but it's a little odd that Rose would let them go...Or, and this is one hell of a longshot, they could be Void Daleks from the prison ship who found or built a ship. Being soaked in Void Stuff might screw with the Progenitor's scan. Anyway, all of these are a little far-fetched, each with a serious flaw. Please advise.
  • It's unlikely that converting humans into Daleks in "The Parting of the Ways" was the very first time the Daleks ever hit on the idea of converting other species into Daleks, and during the Time War they would no doubt had to have found some way of keeping up numbers (since the first thing that any forces would do would be to try and take out their breeding factories or wherever-it-is Daleks come from); it doesn't seem unlikely that, eventually, many if not all of the Daleks who fought in the Time War were, genetically speaking, a hodgepodge of different species converted into Daleks. As such, no matter when they came from in terms of the new series Dalek stories, any Time War era Dalek could conceivably be considered genetically unacceptable to a pre-Time War Dalek on this basis. Furthermore, most of the 1980s Dalek serials essentially had the Daleks splitting into civil wars over even very minor genetic differences; whether a Dalek is classified as 'pure' Dalek seems to depend very much on the Dalek that is doing the classifying.

• If the Progenitor was going to get fussy about the purity of Dalek DNA, why wasn't it similarly fussy about the Doctor's testimony? This was the Daleks' first encounter with the Eleventh Doctor, meaning they'd never heard his voice before. So how did they recognize him?
  • The Daleks know that all of the Time Lords but the Doctor is dead so perhaps the progenitor just scans the Doctor and realizes that he's a Time Lord and thus must be the Doctor. Of course, I don't get why the Progenitor was so concerned about the fact that those Daleks weren't "pure" considering that the new Daleks predictably killed the impure ones.
    • Did they even do a DNA scan? From what I remember, it was all voice recognition.
    • In "Doomsday," when the Daleks are talking to the Cybermen, one of them recognizes the Doctor as "Enemy." No complex scans, no special voice identification, and Ten had never met these Daleks before. They came straight from the Time War. They are clearly capable of identifying time lords in some fashion.
  • Simple—they're clearly operating in a time, place and era where the local population has no any reason nor has ever had any reason to have even heard of a Dalek, much less suspect or claim that the things operating as 'Ironsides' are anything other than what they claim to be. So when some strange guy comes along out of nowhere and not only recognises them immediately but then starts ranting about how they're everything he despises and the worst things in the universe before calling them by their name, it's a fairly safe bet that this isn't the postman they're dealing with. Furthermore, they probably found out about Churchill's knowledge of the Doctor and insinuated themselves into his inner circle precisely to increase the odds that he'd summon the Doctor along.
  • The Daleks also have time travel capability as well, so there's a good chance that this wasn't the first time they'd met the Eleventh Doctor, even though it was the first time the Eleventh Doctor had met them. That, or they've gradually accrued a database of what the Doctor looks like in his different incarnations.

• The Daleks tell the Doctor to call off the attack on their ship, or else they'll blow up Bracewell and destroy the Earth. The Doctor calls off the attack...and then runs to disarm Bracewell. Why does he go to disarm Bracewell? Because he figured that the Daleks wouldn't keep their end of the bargain. But wait, if the Doctor knew that the Daleks wouldn't keep their end of the bargain, why did he agree to it in the first place?
  • I guess he figured that there was a chance they'd keep their end of the bargain. It was a high enough chance that he was willing to call off the attack, but a low enough chance that he decided to go disarm Bracewell, just in case.

• If Bracewell's about to explode, shouldn't the Doctor drag him to the TARDIS and take him to an uninhabited world somewhere? Obviously it all worked out in the end, but he didn't know in advance that Bracewell would disarm.
  • Taking Bracewell to the TARDIS increases the chance that he'll explode while still inside the TARDIS. As later episodes show, the destruction of the TARDIS means bad things for the universe.

• If the events of Journey's End never happened(something that is still erased, even after the universe is rebooted), what happened to Donna Noble? Or Rose? Or 10.5 Doctor?! Yeah, erasing people via cracks leaves remainders, but what happens when an event is retgoned? Especially after the reboot. Does Rose Tyler still remember due to being time travellers? Does his Time Lord biology allow Handy Doctor to exist? Do the effect of the cracks spread to other universes(asides from the Total Event Collapse)? And is Donna still afflicted with the Meta Crisis?
  • ** I don't think there's any evidence that everything erased didn't come back. After all, Amy doesn't know anything about countless planets and yet somehow when everything was rebooted, they came back. The Doctor was the one who really rebooted the universe by flying the Pandorica into the exploding TARDIS and he most certainly remembered those events he was a part of.
  • Even if only everyone's memory of Journey's End was wiped but the physical consequences of it (Donna's memory loss, metacrisis Doctor, Mickey coming back to the original universe, etc) still remained, it would still pose a problem for Waters of Mars. Adelaide was inspired to go into space thanks to her memory of the Dalek invasion in Journey's End. If Adelaide never went to space, then she never died on Bowie Base One, thus wiping out a fixed point in time that would result in the whole of human space travel history collapsing. Yet the Doctor and Amy meet future space-faring humans in the very next episode.

• "The cracks erased such-and-such event" is thrown around a lot as an explanation for the Cyber-King and the Dalek invasion not being remembered. But how exactly can they erase an event? Erasing a person I understand (even if they're not perfect...), but you can't just translate that to an entire event. When a person is erased, they're said to have never existed. But if we say the same about, say, the Cyber-King invasion, then what happens to all the Cybermen? What happened to Davros and the Daleks from Journey's End? If the events were 'erased', then logically they would still be around and could just... well, carry out said invasions, so erasing the events would have no effect. So how can the event itself be erased?
  • An event can be eaten if the catalyst for that event was eaten. The Cybermen in the new series are all from the parallel world or off-planet so if the Cyber King never existed it wouldn't have been a big deal. Since the Doctor theorized that the cybermen in 1851 were ones that escaped being trapped in the void by going back in time, all them never existing meant was that there were a few less 'ghosts.' To prevent 'Journey's End', all you have to do is erase Dalek Caan and no one could have saved Davros from the Time War so there was no new Dalek fleet.

• Bracewell basically invented human space travel. Why doesn't this seem to have any bearing on the space race?
  • I assume that he dismantled them for the sake of not breaking the timeline, with the dismantling either occurring after the reappearance of Danny Boy in "A Good Man Goes to War", or it was simply a one-shot rebuilt for the debt owed for the Doctor. It could also be a Reed Richards Is Useless effect, with Bracewell being the only person on Earth able to replicate the design.
  • He's also lost contact with the Dalek ship and thus, presumably, the Dalek mainframe which was feeding him all of his brilliant and revolutionary ideas. Chances are, while he's still probably quite a brilliant fellow without them, he no longer has the same ability to come up with or construct his devices.
  • Also, note what Bracewell is going to do at the end of the episode; he's going to find and meet up with the woman he loves (according to his memories at least). After his experiences and the realization that it led to—one which almost led him to kill himself, after all—he probably isn't much interested in science or inventing things on that scale anymore, and who can blame him, really?

The Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone

• In Flesh and Stone, why did they need the bodies? It was stated that they were snapping necks because they needed bodies. They took Bob's mind/voice very quickly, and so it probably wasn't for that, and the eye thing didn't seem to be much of a conversion, and more just an attack method. Though the line about knocking Amy out implied control was at least possible. But even then, they never did anything with them, and already had an army, so what would seven or so more angels that take time to incubate add? And their plain was to drain the crack]] and so they wouldn't need numbers anyway. I suppose it could be something that will come up later, but it really seems odd it wasn't mentioned again.
  • My theory: In Blink the Doctor explained that the 'sending you back in time' thing was a way for the Weeping Angels to feed on your potential energy. In The Time of Angels, he claims the ones encountered on Earth were 'scavengers' who were barely squeaking by, and observes that the ones on Alfava Metraxis were feeding on the energy of the ship's drive core (and, as we later find out, on the Crack). They are also Complete Monsters who prey on people For the Evulz. In short: they snapped Bob's neck for his voice. Everyone else, they killed straight out because they didn't need to feed on them, they just liked killing people. On the other hand, is it actually established they snapped Octavian's neck instead of killing him in their usual fashion?
  • They're fast, of course they mean they were using Bob. And they used the same snapping sound that happened before Bob went. You can't show necks snapping at 6pm on a Saturday night.
  • They were all staring straight ahead? Wasn't they all standing shoulder to shoulder?
    • Most of the time they were, but I know when they were around the crack they did. I was under the impression they were kind of caught in the moment, and just arranged it so that, even if they looked at one another, they could unstick if they moved in the right order.
    • Most of them were eyeless only about half an hour ago. Perhaps they're technically blind, still?
    • At least for human vision, periphery vision isn't always perfect. The end of Blink was the only time they were looking straight at each other.
    • An other possible explanation is that most of them HADN'T avoided looking at each other. Look at how many thousands of angels there were in that cavern, but how few of them overall actually came after the cast? Maybe a lot of the others HAD accidentally looked at each other over the years (most of the statues weren't covering their faces) and the ones that went after the Doctor and co were just the ones who were lucky enough not to make that mistake. I can't imagine that angels generally spend time in large groupslike that since they know how much easier it is for them to paralyse themselves if they do, but were forced to in this regard in order to feed. Part of the gauntlet the cast had to run was that they didn't know which angels had frozen themselves and which hadn't.

• In The Time Of Angels, it's revealed that the image of an Angel becomes an Angel. First, thanks for the additional nightmares. Second, remember the information Sally hands the Doctor in Blink? There was a photograph of the Angels in that envelope. Also, Sally definitely looked at an Angel's eyes during Blink.
  • Perhaps since the angels were scavengers they didn't have the energy to do such things.
    • Yeah, but the Angels in The Time Of Angels/Flesh and Stone are also quite clearly scavengers. That's why they needed to release the radiation from the ship's reactor and all that stuff. They're severely lacking in energy, seemingly even more so than those in Blink - they don't even LOOK like Angels!
    • ...except for the whole part where the radiation from the ship massively fed them, turning them into an unstoppable army, which was the entire point of the episodes and the crash into the Aplan temple.
    • If I recall correctly, the angels in the Maze of the dead were scavengers, the one on the Byzantium (whose image was taken and who got into Amy's head) was a normal, healthy angel that was on a rescue mission to help the other ones. So it's possible that that one had enough energy to create another Angel.
    • Yes, but by the beginning of "Flesh and Stone", they became as healthy as Angel Bob. The "Blink" angels were far weaker.
  • The real solution is likely more something along the lines of a change to the canon than an in-universe explanation, but that's not as fun, is it? I recall seeing at least two pictures of the angel in the packet. The Doctor didn't look at them when he received them so they are perfectly capable of escaping as soon as they are unsupervised long enough. Rather than mess with the Doctor again (after all, he's not somebody to be trifled with), they'd probably just bide their time. Which means there's still at least two angels out there somewhere, since 2007. Makes the warning at the end of the episode a little bit more potent, don't you think?
  • Guys, the thing is, the whole point of the episode is that the doctor has been sent back in time by the angels. At the end of the episode, Sally gives the Doctor the photos of the angels (which, as images of angels, are angels, of course). We don't see the point in the Doctor's future where he gets sent back in time by angels. I think it's pretty reasonable to assume that those photos DID become legit angels, and that's how the Doctor got into the whole mess in the first place.
    • I'm pretty sure he said that he and Martha were actually fighting the real Angels when they got displaced. Hmm.
    • And at the start of Time of Angels, The Doctor seems pretty surprised at the whole 'image of an Angel becomes an angel' thing, surely he'd remember something like that if an Angel came out of a piece of paper and trapped him the past for who knows how long?
    • Maybe he didn't realise that the Angels he and Martha ended up fighting had come out of the photo paper? Because if he'd been looking at the photos when they came out, the Angels would have been trapped in them.
    • In other words, it is entirely possible that there were four pictures of angels in that packet, the Doctor took it to Wester Drumlins and let it out of his sight for a few minutes, which was enough time for them to escape and become the angels that showed up in "Blink".
  • In any case, the pictures may have been destroyed when the crack ate the Angels.
    • Why would it have been? Photos have been shown to remain behind even after a crack eats the subject (Amy's Rory picture) and they weren't pictures of the Angels of Season 5 anyway but of the Season 3 Angels who are trapped in a basement and though they may have been erased when everything else was, the Doctor brought it all back.
      • Alternatively, The Doctor is actually responsible for the Angels in the Maze, and the first angels in the Planet were taken by him when he visited the Aplans for a nice dinner with their architect, through Sally's pictures, that were in the TARDIS. I like this alternative, makes a good Head Canon.

• The Angels, being quantum-locked, turn to stone while observed. Why must that observation be looking at them? There are other ways to observe things, which should also petrify the Angels. And when Amelia is walking past them in the forest, they turn to stone even though she's not observing them. Since Blink clearly establishes they cannot control their transformation ability, they should not have been petrified by Amelia's fictional gaze.
  • Actually, having thought a little more, I realise they were being observed - specifically, via the proximity gadget in Amelia's radio. The Angels only become able to move once she loses the radio. Thus, the Doctor was wrong - the Angels weren't freezing because they thought she could see, but because she was definitely observing them. The part with moving stone doesn't really make any sense, but is perhaps a separate and not-yet-explained attribute the Angels possess.
  • Whee, additional plot hole based on this particular issue! Specifically, when Father Octavian is grabbed from behind by an Angel. The Doctor's looking at the Angel, and it freezes into stone. But Father Octavian is TOUCHING the Angel, which is definitely a form of observation. So that particular Angel should have remained frozen indefinitely.
    • Wait so how is this any different from the OTHER times the angels killed in "The Time of Angels"/"Flesh and Stone"? (i.e. Bob) Not to mention, wouldn't the above mean they take stone form before they have a chance to displace people through time?
    • Presumably the time-displacement thing can occur the instant the victim is touched, even as the Angel is petrified. As for killing all the others, not sure. Maybe they used a stick to knock out the victims first, or some such thing.
    • ...which, as I stated further above, would mean that Octavian would have been time displaced and therefore would not have been able to talk to the Doctor.
    • It was explicitly stated that the angels were feeding off the time crack, so presumably they weren't "hungry" and didn't see a need to time-displace Octavian.
    • Precisely no time-displacement occurs in The Time Of Angels / Flesh And Stone. Perhaps the Angels must make a conscious decision to time-displace people - they still seem capable of thought while petrified, and presumably could "activate" their powers that way.
    • About the "time-displacement thing can occur the instant the victim is touched" thing, it's established in Blink that the Angels can move pretty fast. So if one wants to kill you and you observe it at the last minute, then what? What happens when you get hit by an insanely fast block of stone? (Er, I don't actually want to know)
      • If you're quick enough, the quantum-lock will prevent the stone from hitting you.
      • Actually, I don't think they turn to stone at all- when "quantum-locked", they have been frozen in time and space. Thus, there is no super-fast block of stone because the Angels are frozen in three-dimensional space, and can't leave the exact position that they're in. This also deals with the Fridge Logic about smashing them while made of stone, or someone moving the four Angels that were frozen in Blink- they can't be smashed while frozen in time, because change requires time, and they can't be moved because that would change their spatial coordinantes. *Fan Wanks*
        • This theory is completely destroyed by the fact that the frozen Angels at the end of Flesh and Stone fell into the crack when the gravity changed.
          • While hurt, the theory lives on in the implication that the crack rips up and eats time and space. The Angels might have had the reality under their feet ripped away, but survived due to their status as "complicated space-time events" for a second or two. The idea of a complicated spacetime event surviving the cracks longer than the surrounding reality is cemented when the canonically really complicated space-time event known as The Doctor reaches into a much smaller crack with his hand- given that he was much more complicated than an individual Angel (and that the crack was smaller), he could enter the crack itself, though only briefly. Wheeeeeeee! This belongs in WMG!
          • Except they fell because the gravity failed, not due to the crack expanding.

• How about this? When the Angels aren't being observed by the characters in Doctor Who, yet they've turned to stone... WE'RE seeing them! So it's somewhat breaking the fourth wall?
  • Yes it is.

• The Time of Angel/Flesh and Stone: So basically, the Weeping Angels are the most dangerous alien race... well period. They become stone when you look at them, and if you so much as blink, you either get insta-neck snapped, or sent back a few decades. Taking pictures of them is useless for more than one reason( hey, is that photo looking at meaaaaaarrrrrggggghhhhhh!!!), and the only way to stop them ensures that if you do it long enough, you have to walk with you eyes closed for the rest of your life. Now they are most cheatingest cheaters in cheatersville without a doubt,..... but if their completely like stone when you look at them, why not just shoot them in their face Brigadier Style? Because last I heard, bullets beat stone, even if it's only stone when you're looking. So I ask: Why not just shoot them? It might actually work. Sorry if this is too long.
  • An Angel's image is it's power. The opposite might be true as well. Just like they lose human shape as they get weaker, it may be impossible to break or deface them so long as they're at full power.
  • Point Taken. If a fully powered angel can make the lights go out, or prevent you from turning off a T.V with an image on it, then making Guns useless at full strength might be par for the course, although it might still be possible to light the smug bastards up when they're not at full strength, but you need to be aware of what your dealing with, and most won't realize the angels are real until it's too late. Damn, Moffat may have created something even more dangerous than the Daleks, and thats quite the feat.
  • Remember that scene where they shoot at the angels to slow them down? Notice how no mention is ever made of the bullets doing anything. The above theories are correct, Angels are bullet-proof.
    • Makes sense. Everything in Doctor Who is Immune to Bullets...... Bloody Cheaters. It's just that every the Daleks can be destroyed with the right weapons. The Bastards must have some weakness, since you can't really on being lucky enough to get them to look at each other. All enemies in in the series do.
    • The Vashta Nerada don't.
    • The Angels may be immune to bullets, but are they immune to, say, hammers? Hydraulic presses? Nukes? They turn to stone, not unobtainium.
    • Weren't they powered by radiation from the Byzantium?
    • I had considered that, but I wasn't sure if it would work. They might make the Hydraulic Press malfunction, and as for the Hammer, well we won't know for sure until someone tries. With all the powers the Angels have, being vunerable to a simple hammer would be short sighted. They might very well be made of Unobtainium that looks like stone. That's a little off topic though. My real point is that no one has tried attacking the angels when they were clearly visible (no lights to turn off like in Flesh and Stone) and you had any weapon (like a gun). Would it work? Who knows?
    • My interpretation is that the statue is only the form the Angel appears to be in when it's quantum locked, not the actual Angel itself. Essentially, you can't kill a stone because a piece of stone isn't alive; you can break it apart, but that's not the same as killing it. It just adopts a 'new' form when you're not looking. Essentially, if a builder or something took a hammer to an Angel, my guess is that when they turned their back and turned around again, the Angel would be reformed into the original shape if it was sufficiently powered up. They might need a lot of energy to do so, but they could; just look at the Angel army in "Time Of Angels"; they'd clearly been falling apart for some time, but with the energy from the ship's engines they were able to reconstruct themselves, presumably with all the stone that was littered around the caves.
    • Actually, I don't think they turn to stone at all- when "quantum-locked", they have been frozen in time and space. This deals with the Fridge Logic about smashing them while made of stone, or someone moving the four Angels that were frozen in Blink- they can't be smashed while frozen in time, because change requires time. See an above JBM for arguments and rebuttals. *Fan Wanks*
      • OK, so maybe they aren't immune to bullets, it's just that if you can see them, they're quantum locked and therefore not vulnerable. So what might work is tripwires attached to the triggers of guns. The guns would fire without any living being observing the Angels.
    • I eventually realized that the clerics weren't firing on the Angels to damage them, but instead to illuminate them with the muzzle flash of their rifles allowing the angels to be seen.
    • Here's a thought; the radiation from the Byzantium was a power source for the Angels, right? It was healing them. It was powerful enough to start turning decrepit and rotting statues into fully intact angels. So maybe the bullets did damage them, just not enough to counter the Healing Factor they effectively had while bathing in the radiation.

• Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone. Okay. We KNOW that the Weeping Angels we see inside the caves are weakened/starving. That is why they appear to be very vaguely defined statues/stone lumps when we first see them but they gradually become more refined as they absorb energy from the spaceship. Given that the Weeping Angels are an interstellar menace apparently spoken of in the legends of many worlds... why is it that the weeping angels all have a uniform, human shape? Since their entire method of feeding is dependent on stealth and nobody seeing them coming, wouldn't non-humanoid species become suspicious if they suddenly see a stone statue of a human appear out of nowhere? I suppose it is possible they reshape to resemble the closest sentient life-form or they have some kind of perception filter that makes them look like a statue of the same kind of creature they are stalking.
  • What would the Aplans have done exactly with something that can't be killed?
  • Humanoid? You're seeing humanoid but I'm not. Think about it. No digestive system (or at least not one that uses any sort of matter), no respiritory system, massive sharp teeth that they don't actually use, eyes that probably aren't actually eyes, wings that aren't actually wings, if you look at their biology, they're quite strange and inhuman. The reason they have two arms, two legs and one head is the same reason pretty much every Doctor Who alien does. Coincidence.
    • Don't forget robes that actually appear to be part of them.
  • The 'statue' could be just the image the Angel takes to blend in as well as defence. Presumably it adopts a humanoid form when dealing with humanoids and an alternative form when dealing with non-humanoids.
    • Alternately, they may be similar to Galactus, in that they appear in a form familiar to whatever species is looking at them.
  • First off, a lot of species have a vaguely humanoid shape. Second, yeah, so the Angels may raise more suspicion among non-humanoid species. That just means that they don't feed on non-humanoid species very often.
    • • Alternately, they might just "hide" in shapes that lead species to praise them, angels are religious figures - the other statues shown in Blink are godesses, or patriotic images. They may be programmed to hide as something that will gather people's beliefs, such as religions, nations, etc. So, in the case of non-humanoid races, they'd still blend in.

• Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone. Okay, so we know that River is a prisoner out on parole to deal with the angel problem. We also know that which falls through the cracks ceases to exist, and nobody remembers it. The angels are dealt with by sending them through the crack. The Doctor explicitly states that they never existed, now, and the three of them only remember them because they're time travelers. How the hell is River going to explain to her jailers that they sent her out to take care of a threat that they no longer recall? Even if they buy that, why on earth does she think she'll be able to get a pardon from it, particularly since none of the clerics survived to corroborate her story?
  • Well, Christian, Angelo and Bob weren't sucked into the crack, so they probably have records of sending them out on the mission. And River may contact the doctor for witness testimony.
    • They'll have a record of sending them out on a mission, when the threat that caused that mission to be sent out now never existed? I want that hard drive. Fair enough point on calling the Doctor, though, assuming they know who he is and will trust him.
      • Yeah, that's essentially just how the cracks behave - they erase people and events but not the things and reactions surrounding those people and events. Holes in time, not rewritten timeline. The harddrive still exists.
      • Agreed. People are erased, and the memory of them gone, but the effect they had is still there. Otherwise when Rory was erased the entire earth should have been retroactively destroyed, since it was his taking pictures with his phone that prevented the Atraxi from destroying it to kill Prisoner Zero. And when the Doctor was erased, we'd be looking at another Doctor Who/Recap/S30/E11 Turn Left scenario. Amy herself should never have been born if her parents weren't. The Doctor explicitly says that things are left behind (faces in photographs, half-eaten meals, luggage), so even an erased person leaves a mark on history.

• At the end of "Blink", Sally Sparrow is shown holding photos of the angels. "The image of an angel IS an angel." So...... She's dead now right?
  • I think that was explained that the Earth Angels were scavengers barely getting by, so had little strength to take image, while the one aboard the Byzantium]] was more powerful. Not to mention, the photos would have been taken twelve months before.
  • Evolution, motherfucker, do you understand the concept of it? It's very extremely unlikely that the Angels on twenty-first century Earth work exactly the same way as the Angels that are possibly GALAXIES away from Earth, millenia later. It's like saying that an arctic hare and a jackrabbit are exactly the same thing, and have to work exactly the same way, in every detail.
  • Plus, she gave everything—including the photos of the Angels to the Doctor. Ever wondered how the Doctor and Martha ended up back in 1969 in the first place... ?

• Up until the end of flesh and stone the audience counted as a viewer to determine if the angels could move or not. I even found myself thinking "don't worry Amy, I've got your back." Then suddenly, they start moving when I'm looking right at them! It goes against the established rules for them, and is a little bit annoying.
  • The audience looking at the angels has never been an established rule for when they can't move. We have never seen them move before to add to the effect which may give you the feeling that you count but as far as the Doctor Who universe is concerned, why shouldn't the angels be able to move when Amy can't see and no one else is around? It would be like if a security camera that no one was watching caught an angel moving on film. Before the angel came alive, if somoene tried to watch the tape then they'd see the angel moving because it's just a recording and so is the show. Still, if it makes you feel any better, the angels can cross great distances in the time it takes you to blink. Think of it as them just moving between the frames.
    • Actually, yes, it was established as a rule in blink. Angels were in the background and could only move a little in the brief time a character blocked them from the camera. One of the things that immersed you into that story, and to most of the angels two parter was that the audience counts as an observer. Saying they can move between frames just causes bigger problems with that angel crawling out of the TV screen earlier in the episode. To answer your question, though, the angels should't be able to move because they are being observed by the audience. The angels can't control this ability so it doesn't matter if they should be aware of the observance or not. That was really the brilliance with it.
  • Weren't the lights blinking like crazy when the Angels moved on-camera and pursued Amy? I just assumed they were only moving in the brief moments when the lights were completely off; that's why they were moving so slowly. They actually move super-fast, but they had tiny spans of time in which to move. So...yeah, by that interpretation, the audience still counts as an "observer" in that scene. (Though technically its never been established that observation breaks the fourth wall like that)
    • For part of the episode, yes, but the lights were just fine when Amy tried to bluff her way past the Angels and tripped, thus causing the Angels to realize that she couldn't see them and start to move. But again, why would the Angels be immune to the fourth wall?
    • No, they were following the unofficial rule of audience count as observation. However, they moved between the frames of the show.
      • That just raises further questions with the angel coming out of the TV earlier. If these Angels can move between the frames of the show, then that one should have been able to as well. So should all the ones in blink for that matter. I wish people would stop trying to use this as a justification, I really do.
        • The way I see it, the angel in the TV didn't exist between frames. Thus, he wouldn't have been able to move.
    • We don't know that. That's just the WMG people started believing since we didn't see them move in Blink.
    • Outside of one scene, we don't see them move in "Flesh and Stone", either. So, why do they keep with that confusing nonsense about moving between the frames?
      • The Angels were about to be erased from history. Moving when on-screen is likely only possible in life-or-death situations. After all, the quantum-lock was a defense mechanism. At the time, it was sort of redundant.
  • Well, I assumed that the audience suffered the same fate as Amy: since we, along with her, looked into the eyes of the Angel on the telly, an Angel was in our eyes too. This means that by the time Amy was alone in the forest, the Angel got out from the eyes of the audience and killed them, thus no more breaking the fourth wall was possible. Does that make sense?
    • Not really. People aren't upset because of some imaginary observers called 'the audience.' They were given the impression after Blink that they themselves watching the Angels prevented them from moving. Since an Angel clearly didn't climb out of their eye and killed them and they continued to watch the show, the audience was not murdered by this point in time. Even if it were only an audience of one, that's all it takes.
      • I know that. But after looking into the eyes of the angel, breaking the fourth wall just wouldn't make sense exactly because of what would happen to the "imaginary observers", as you put it. You can't have the ability to stop the angels by looking but immunity against the image-of-angel-is-an-angel thing at the same time. So you can't have the impression of being involved (unless you don't look into their eyes, but why would you want that?). The breaking of the fourth wall cannot be maintained once we know there's an angel in Amy's eyes. Above, I was just suggesting that the programme played with the fourth wall, but I guess I didn't make much sense anyway. But I do think the fourth wall is re-established because of Amy's condition. I also wanted to add that from the point we find out about the angel in Amy's eyes, there isn't an instance when a frozen angel is shown but no-one is around.
• I always thought that the time and space the angels were frozen in was being messed with, and, coupled with the laws of physics screwing up around the cracks allowed the Angels to move.

The Vampires of Venice

• Vampires of Venice. At the end, Rosanna removes some of her clothes. Clothes created by a perception filter and therefore which don't actually exist. Um... wha?
  • Nobody said the non-existent stuff had to remain on her body. Presumably the perception filter has a given range it can project things over.

• Vampires of Venice. Why did the fishpeople need to sink the city? Earth is already 3/4ths ocean,and the Mediterranean already has a bunch of sunken cities. Why target humans for conversion, when presumably that same tech could convert livestock? Remember 10 offering a much more dangerous race (Racnoss) in a similar predicament a deal that would allow their survival. Guess 11 is an even bigger jerk.
  • Some reasons that they wanted to sink the city. Firstly, food. They clearly like eating humans; sinking the city gives them a nice meal. if they wanted to live in the city, then presumably a freshly sunken one is easier to develop than a bunch of ruins that have been under the ocean for hundreds of years. As for targeting humans, for all their sympathetic motives they're clearly not particularly interested in whether the humans live or die, and that goes for whether they get converted or not. Plus, a lot easier to blend into human society as a human than as a suspiciously intelligent cow or something. As for why Eleven didn't offer them the same chance as Ten did, his initial interactions with Rosanna were quite flirty and friendly; he seems to have been building up to making such an offer and testing the waters to see how it would go down, cam to the conclusion that Rosanna wasn't interested in a non-human killing solution and decided not to waste the words

• So, how did the reflected sunlight kill the fish-man, anyway? I mean, a regular amount of sunlight stings, but getting a mirror pointed at him makes him violently explode?
  • I'm not an expert on optics and this bugged me a bit as well, but don't mirrors and glass concentrate the light of the sun? Like how you shouldn't look at the sun directly through a telescope or it'll damage your eyes, or you can use a mirror or a magnifying class to burn ants (if you're of that frame of mind). Fish-man can probably cope sufficiently with a normal amount of sunlight, but a concentrated amount is lethal to him (especially in his exposed form, as he's in when Amy beams him). The better question is where did the beam of sunlight come from in the first place, considering Rosanna's machine has completely blocked out the sun by this point?
    • You would need to use a concave mirror or lens to concentrate the light. For example Solar Furnace Research Facility has a concentrating mirror that can heat 3500 degrees Celsius with 2 square meters of sunlight. It is unlikely that Amy would have a concave mirror at all, let alone one with a long enough focal length to concentrate the light on the fish alien.
    • Possibly a combination of the above "he's in his exposed state" and the fact that she got him directly in the face. Since my other favorite British show is Being Human (UK), I remembered that the vampires on that show aren't explosively allergic to sunlight, but they are sensitive to it, especially their eyes. Maybe having it shined directly into his face created a direct link to his brain?

• Why is Rory so shocked to learn that Amy kissed the Doctor? Does he not know what his fiancee does for a living?
  • She wasn't on the job. I'm sure an actress's husband could justifiably get mad at his wife for kissing someone else off-camera.

Amy's Choice

• Okay, when Amy killed herself and the Doctor, two things confused me: Wouldn't Eleven just regenerate into Twelve? Also, at the speed the car was going, the worst they'd get are bruises and maybe broken bones, not death.
  • I think it falls under 'it was a dream' and 'high speed campervan crashes are very expensive'.
    • The Doctor admits throughout the series (as a whole) that he CAN die despite the Time Lords way of cheating death with Regeneration. If they're injured to a point that causes instant death, Regeneration is more than likely impossible. It's when he's in the process of dying that his Regeneration process starts. The Doctor seems to fall in with the likes of Wolverine and Zombies in which the only way to kill 'em is to remove their heads.
    • Presumably the Doctor, rather than regenerating, can elect simply to die, as with The Master in Last of the Time Lords.

The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood

• Cold Blood. How come the Doctor can stick his hand into a crack in time, but a single strand of Timey Wimey Spaghetti Light from said crack is more than enough to erase Rory from existence? It makes no sense for the Doctor to be completely okay!
  • Sometimes the cracks don't erase anything (Eleventh Hour) or don't do it right away (Flesh and Stone). It wasn't a very bright move, but it worked
  • Plus, Time Lord. Increased resistance / immunity to the effects of things like this is kind of in the job description.
  • Actually You can see in the ep it IS affecting him, and badly - however, he's a far more complex space-time event than Rory was. The crack probably DID begin to erase him, however due to the complexity it would have taken far longer to complete the process, allowing him to fish out the TARDIS remnant.

• Oh, look. Now Rory had to go and get sucked into two places in time and space that should never have touched. So what now? So the events of Vampires in Venice never happened. So Venice is now taken over by fish-people? Also, how many times has Amy kissed\hugged Rory? So now she is hugging nothing? Seriously, this just bugs me.
  • History will paper over the faults now. She won't have been hugging anything. The Doctor and Amy probably went to Venice for some unrelated reason. The person will be erased, the event surrounding them only changed cosmetically. If she thought about it, (which I think she does to an extent) she'd realise things weren't quite right.
  • What happened in the Eleventh Hour now that he's been erased?
    • It still happened it just doesn't make total sense in peoples memories anymore. The cracks create gaps in the timeline. They're essentially ripping events and people out of existence but leaving behind everything connected to those bits: those events now don't make total sense, which is exactly the point, and part of why the cracks are so dangerous -think of it like a tapestry: each event or person is a thread, and the more threads you remove, the less the overall tapestry makes sense and the more likely it is to collapse completely.
    • Alternately, think of a film with a scene missing in the middle (or some of the early Doctor Who serials that have Missing Episodes, which seems appropriate). Scene A happened. Scene C happened. How did we get from one to the other? Dunno, but something happened.
    • History papers over the events. Perhaps some other hospital worker noticed the difference, when they were working the shift that should have belonged to Rory. Maybe Amy's friend Jeff helped out. Maybe tap dancing Cybermen came down from the sky and took Prisoner Zero hostage. We'll probably find out soon, however.
    • Seconding tap-dancing Cybermen.

• Why does the Doctor claim that these humans can speak for humanity? They can't. He's taking the risk that the Silurians find out and react badly (or just use it as an excuse to negate any deal after the fact). Especially bad since the Doctor has enough connections that he can probably contact someone who really does speak for humanity.
  • The Doctor's doing what he always does; making the best with what he's got on hand. He could contact someone who 'speaks for humanity' but this raises the problem of 'who does speak for humanity' in this situation, however. What's the diplomatic strategy for something like this? Granted, it's been established that UNIT handles all extraterrestrial encounters, but technically the Silurians aren't extraterrestrial and they're on British soil, so the British government might raise a valid claim to be in charge; bit of a legal loophole, but then diplomacy and politics thrives on legal loopholes. And, of course, there's the glory and prestige of handling something like this, meaning there's going to be a lot of argument about who gets to be in charge. And then, of course, they're in the middle of the Welsh countryside miles from anywhere, so even if this is sorted out quickly it's going to take some time to get the necessary diplomatic teams there, and the Silurians might get bored and angry and decide to destroy humanity in the meantime anyway. The peace is pretty fragile, so the Doctor's trying to secure it before things collapse utterly.
  • It was a pretty pragmatic choice. UNIT means well, but they are also soldiers who tend to stomp around brandishing guns. That wasn't going to diffuse the tension, particularly with the xenophobic Silurian security forces, who also like to stomp around bandishing guns, and who already feel that the humans have commited an act of war. The humans he had on hand were clearly normal people, they already knew about the drill, and they had the authority to see that it was turned off forever. Who better to say "Sorry, we screwed up, won't happen again."
    • It really wasn't pragmatic. Sure, one of the two negotiators could turn off the drill (for awhile. If it's just their agreement and not official than one day this could change) but that wasn't all the Silurians were after. They wanted to come up to the surface and coexist with the humans. The Doctor took two random people (universe crack in her head or not, no one official is going to think Amy is at all important aside from her traveling with the Doctor) and told them to decide terms of a treaty that would allow the Silurians to share the planet. If this treaty hadn't been sabotaged (and they hadn't all suddenly given up far too easily because of one fanatic) then what would have happened? They would have dropped by the prime minister or parliament or even the UN and tell them to accept these terms for sharing their planet when Amy and the other woman have no experience as negotiators and perhaps the government doesn't want to share the planet no matter what the terms?
    • It's pragmatic in the sense that time is of the essence and, crucially, they're the only ones there. Plus, this is the Doctor we're talking about. The Doctor who not only can sweet talk a camel to cross a desert with no legs, but the Doctor who most governments and militaries (and yes, the UN, which conveniently has that whole paramilitary organization thing he's been closely associated with for years) by this point have to know on some level has saved the planet more times than anyone else in the history of the world. At this point, he tells you something's a good idea and if, you know, you feel like getting on your high horse about it the entire human race might get wiped out, you listen. Plus, when it comes to experience, who else has experience in this kind of thing, government or not? How many peace treaties with subterranean reptile people have most diplomats ever dealt with? They'd probably stand just as much chance of arsing things up as anyone, possibly more since there's a whole ego thing alluded to above to deal with as well.
      • The governments haven't been shown to blindly follow the Doctor and if they don't like sharing their planet at all or under the terms of Amy's treaty then the Doctor endorsing it won't change that. They could very well decide to go to war over it or the Silurians could basically do what they did in canon and wait until humans already share their planet before coming back up since it really makes no difference to them. As for Amy and the other woman being the only ones there...that means nothing if the treaty is ultimately rejected because they aren't approved treaty-makers who know anything about what kinds of things the governments would want.
    • True, they might not blindly follow him, but he has enough connections (through UNIT and Jack's Torchwood, if it's still around) and they have enough experience with the Doctor—plus a history of things getting very bad very quickly when they ignore his advice—to suggest that just dismissing him and his advice out of hand, especially for no better reason than pique at being left out, is probably not going to end well. Plus, there's that whole "we have the potential to completely wipe out human civilization from underneath" bargaining chip that would probably make them think twice before rejecting anything out of hand. You might not fully like their terms, but you don't pick needless fights with people who are in a pretty good position against you, either—especially if someone comes along with mutually acceptable terms for co-existence. As for Amy and Other Woman's treaty, it might not be all-encompassing, but it's a starting point and, since they're the only ones there and the only ones the Silurians are willing to give access or talk to at that point, it's them or no one, really.
  • Also, wasn't the forcefield still on, so that no one could enter or escape?

• In "Flesh and Stone," The Doctor tells Amy that she can still remember the people who went into the crack, because she's a time traveller now. So why does she forget about Rory? That really bugs me.
  • Right after Rory was erased, the Doctor explained that Amy could remember the clerics because she only briefly met them while time travelling, but Rory was a major part of her life so the normal memory erasure still affects her.

• From Cold Blood: Pretty much the whole episode bugged me, but what I can't figure out is why didn't Amy or Mo feel the need to inform the Doctor about the Silurian medic dissecting Mo while he was still conscious and was about to do the same to Amy. I would think (or hope at least) that had he known about that, the Doctor wouldn't have been so friendly to them. If they mention it to him off-screen, he sure didn't show that he cared.
  • He didn't kill them, just studied them. It was creepy but harmless, though the victims wouldn't have known about it at the time.
  • For something so harmless, Mo sure seemed to be in a lot of pain from the procedure. Enough that he could barely warn Amy about it. That scar he has isn't going to go away any time soon, so at minimum the Silurian medic caused unnecessary physical deformation. If nothing else, the psychological trauma of being operated on while conscious will stay with him for who knows how long.
  • It's vivisecting, not dissecting. Perhaps Amy and Mo figure that since A) the Silurians plan to declare war on the human race and will probably win, B) the Doctor is currently open for negotiation, allowing for the survival of the human race, and C) telling the Doctor about something like that would render him no longer open for negotiation, they specifically don't tell him in the hope that the negotiations can go ahead successfully and the human race survive. Of course, the Doctor being the Doctor, he can still win if the negotiations mess up - but winning through simple negotiation would have been so much better.

The Lodger

• Okay, one for "The Lodger", the whole upstairs issue was a TARDIS someone had been trying to make? How did they get the schematics? The Time Lords were always protective over their technology,]because no other race was even close to as good as them at making it. Yet the interior was basically a simplified TARDIS.
  • I don't think it's a TARDIS, at all. I more so think that it's supposed to be that an effective timeship would follow this design for whatever reason, or for the viewer to instantly link it to 'TARDIS', and therefore, 'Timeship'.
    • Yet the Doctor specifically states that it's a 'TARDIS' not just a 'timeship'.
      • Actually, to be specific, he states that it's "someone's attempt to build a TARDIS." It's never been said that only Time Lords can or have built TARDISes—in fact, "The War Games" establishes the opposite.
  • To be absolutely honest, even if this doesn't get addressed in the finale, I'd be utterly amazed if the 'people are building timeships suspiciously like the TARDIS' isn't brought up again down the line.
    • I imagine the Timeship to be something like River's new timedrive. The race that designed it probably didn't have a good grasp of the vortex and secrets of time and space but know enough to make as getting at. Kind of like someone who knows the ingredients to gunpowder, but not the principals. They don't fully grasp why the machine works, but it does, and so it's enough for their purposes.
      • But, the Doctor specifically says it's a TARDIS and not a 'timeship', and has previously distinguished clearly between the two.
        • He may not have been speaking particularly exactly, and just meant that it was a timeship that worked on principles remarkably similar to those of a TARDIS. Also note that the interior may have been basically a simplified TARDIS, but it was a simplified TARDIS that didn't work properly and was set up to run on a completely different power source.
        • Just out of curiosity; when was this distinction made? And what precisely is the distinction? Because it would seem that any distinction would essentially boil down to "A TARDIS is a specific type of timeship."
          • The sixth Doctor special The Two Doctors explicitly states that the Time Lords used to directly interfere whenever another race came close to developing TARDIS like technology - in this case they forced the Second Doctor to find some way to stop it's development. No more Time Lords = Time Lord like technology springing up across the universe. As for the question What is the distinction between a TARDIS and a regular Time Machine remember what that name stands for: Time and Relative Dimensions In Space. Not only is it a time machine but it can travel anywhere in the universe and is capable of travelling the multiverse (albeit at extreme risk). Remember Jack Harkness's Chula Warship from The Empty Child? that thing was probably far closer to what was actually being built on that house.
            • I could be wrong, but aren't TARDIS grown and not built?

• One that bugs me about "The Lodger": Where'd the stairs come from? I'll buy that the perception filter can make people see a second floor that isn't there, but how the hell are there stairs leading up to it? Note that when the ship's disguise fails, the one-story building left behind is perfectly intact.
  • The perception filter just made everyone think the second floor was supposed to be there. The stairs were part of the ship, which was disguised as both the second floor and the way up there. Note that it didn't explode violently, just sort of vanish - it disappeared quite smoothly, and thus didn't cause damage to the building.
    • Except the only way that would have been possible would be if the way up to the ship somehow went through the roof of the real building... and, despite this unknown method of access, somehow left no damage to the roof when the ship imploded.
      • Or the house has an attic with stairs leading up to it? Or stairs leading up to the roof?
        • The attic thing won't work (because you've still got to get from said attic to the ship on the roof)... as to the second: Do bungalows really have that? I can't see anyone needing roof access that much, but...
  • The roof was still there. The ship sort of overrode it - perhaps part of the perception filter handled that. When the ship left, the roof reappeared.

The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang

• How can there be a photograph of Rory in Amy's house, if he was wiped out of existence so that he was never born?
  • The Doctor mentioned earlier in the episode that erasing someone from time would miss a few little things like that, such as the engagement ring and the way Amy eventually gets her memories back.
    • The Doctor gave the impression that only time travelling would leave those things lying about. The ring stayed because it was in the Tardis, and Amy's memories can return because she's travelled in time, but there shouldn't be anything like that involved with the photograph - unless the following episode will reveal something significant about it, ofcourse.
    • "People fall out of the world sometimes, but they always leave traces, little things we can't quite account for. Faces in photographs, luggage, half-eaten meals... rings. Nothing is ever forgotten, not completely." No mention that time travel is necessary for this to happen, and "Nothing is ever forgotten" sounds like an absolute statement rather than something that only applies in specific circumstances.
    • Plus, Amy can bring back things that have been erased, such as her parents, because of her close proximity to the Time Crack. So not everything was erased because she didn't completely forget.
      • I'm sticking with my "the timeline is a tapestry" theory: each person, event, etc is a part of the overall tapestry. The cracks in time essentially remove some of those threads, but the rest of the tapestry stil remains - at least up until a certain point, where you've removed so much that there are fewer threads than there are holes and everything just... falls apart.
  • Okay, so here's a question then: in The Big Bang, Amy's memories of the Doctor come back, pulling the Doctor himself back from non-existence. So when plastic Rory jogged Amy's memories of him, wouldn't the real Rory appear, since the one she was talking to was a fake?
    • You could make a case that she did bring Rory back, in a sense, since the Auton Rory's memories were taken from her and he was notably different from all the other Autons (resisted his programming, remained 'human', remained alive when all the other Autons had been wiped out of existence, etc); she just happened to bring him back inside the body of the Auton duplicate. In any case, real Rory was still dead even before he was wiped from existence, so would still be dead anyway. Alternatively, the universe wasn't rebooting itself then, and everything else Amy brought back—her parents and even the Doctor—were centred around her remembering them when the universe was being rebooted.

• Okay, The Pandorica Opens. Liz10 was the Queen in the 22nd Century. She abdicated at the end of that episode. How is she Queen again in the 52nd Century? Let alone alive? I mean I know they could slow her body clock, but so she'd live... over 3000 years?
  • Or you know, River Song time travelled back to the 22nd century to get the painting. It was probably dust by the 52nd century.
    • No, it specifically said it was still 5145, and River hadn't picked up the Vortex Manipulator yet.
  • I don't think she ever actually abdicated. Sure, the button was labeled Abdicate; that's because pressing it would have killed everyone on the ship including the Queen. Since they didn't actually die, Liz10 kept her position as Queen. And the body-clock slowing thing works really, really well.

• If Cybermen are so functional without human brains - and the 'empty' Cyberhead seems completely functional - why do they even need to assimilate humans in the first place?
  • Wasn't that a scout or a drone? There was an empty Cyberman in "The Age of Steel" IIRC.
  • It didn't seem too functional, it just lurched around trying to find someone else to seal inside it.
  • Indeed, I got the impression that it was operating on repair routines until a new host could be found - the previous one being killed when the Cyberman was decapitated.
  • Maybe Cybermen upgrade people not to increase their numbers, but because they feel it's 'good' for the people. Maybe they can function at least minimally without human brains, but they view that as a waste of a good body.
  • Perhaps the Cyberman armor has some limited abilities without organic components, but require an organic brain to actually function at above the most basic levels
  • Their entire purpose is that they're a bunch of people who have given up their emotions to survive. Functional or not, they still have a destiny to fufill.

• The crowd of aliens was made up of whatever costumes they had lying around, which leads to some Fridge Logic (such as what the Silurians are doing there considering they're not aliens, shouldn't be on Earth during this era and would most likely be inclined to listen to the Doctor, considering they're, you know...not evil).
  • Time travel? Duh?
  • Where should the Silurians be if not on Earth? Waking them isn't that hard if you can detect them.
  • At this point they hadn't met the Doctor, or any alien species for that matter. This, plus the fact the retro-active death of all creation was approaching, would easily get to be part of the Alliance. The Daleks could've just made up a fake history.

• Well, how are the Silurians even THERE? I mean, they appear to be the same "Cold Blood" ones, but they were sealed up for a thousand years.
  • Time travel from 3020 to 102 AD then? And just because the Silurians don't have time travel technology doesn't mean they can't use some provided by the alliance. The cracks are coming from everywhere and everywhen.
  • The Silurians are FROM Earth originally. This means all you had to do is get them to come up out of their hibernation.
  • Most of the aliens there actually could be there you know:
    • Daleks - Timetravel.
    • Cybermen - Mondas cybermen from this point in history, useing space travel.
    • Sontarans - We already know they are fighting a war which had, a few years ago been raging for 40,000 years. This means they pre - date the romans by millenia.
    • Silurians - A group that we didn't know about that lived during that period.
    • Nestene - We don't know how old it is.
    • etc.

• Might be a future plot point - If the Autons were created from Amy's memories, how did Auton Rory come about, considering Amy supposedly doesn't remember Rory?
  • They created it before he got time-nommed?
  • Seems like she does remember him on some level. 'before he was time-nommed' doesn't work, because the TARDIS makes the cracks before Amy meets the Doctor ... ah, screw it, Timey Wimey
  • Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory, similar to how Amy and the Doctor remember the clerics on the Aplan planet. Amy and Rory weren't a major part of the Nestene's life.
  • Simply enough, time-travelling aliens accessed Amy's memories, and still had access to them after they had been retrospectively changed.
  • Easy, the Doctor said it in the episode: they accessed the psychic imprints near Amy's house. Like the ring and the picture, the imprints were not affected by the cracks. Apparently, they only work on brains.
  • Alternatively—and this is a bit of an Epileptic Tree but I'll throw it out there regardless—Rory was an Auton all along.
    • Please clarify. For instance, how would an Auton almost drown (and yes, I am aware that the first entry in The Curse of the Black Spot folder says the opposite), or be a kid in the mid-1990s?
  • According to the Doctor, having slept beside a crack for so many years caused the entire universe to flow through Amy's dreams. As a result, he memory, even just the subconscious memory that made her cry without knowing why, was enough to not only create Autom-Rory, but to bring his actual soul and self into it.

• Why are the Judoon there? They've never been the enemies of the Doctor.
  • They're mercenaries, they could have just been hired for more support.
  • Or maybe they could be there on behalf of the Shadow Proclamation...perhaps the Doctor annoyed them more than he thought in The Stolen Earth...
  • Or you know, they rather fancy not having the universe destroyed. What bugged ME was that hardly ANY of those aliens have Time Travel technology, the only ones that can logically be there are the Daleks and possibly the Cybermen, the rest shouldn't even have MET the Doctor yet!
    • They had an alliance, so any one group with time travel could carry the others. Not to mention, we don't know how far in the future the aliens came from, and they could have eventually got ahold of some.
      • The Judoon etc. have presumably have been around for more than 2000 years as a race. It's entirely plausible that the Daleks found some Judoon, Nestene etc. from 102AD to help out. And it's entirely plausible that the Doctor's been further into these races' pasts (and peeved them off) off-camera...

• Has the Doctor even met the Weevils?
  • While the leaders of the gang are the races that hate the Doctor most, the rest of it comprises anyone who thinks the destruction of the universe is a Bad Thing, and believes the evidence that the Doctor's responsible.
  • This sort of thing is what the Expanded Universe was made for.
  • The Doctor has met the Weevils. He met one in the episode 'Love and Monsters'.
    • That was a Hoix, which also appeared in an episode of Torchwood. This is a Weevil.

• How do all the aliens understand the Doctor when he gives his massive Stonehenge Badass Boast? There are at least a dozen different species gathered there who all speak different languages, so how is the TARDIS circuit handling that? And aren't JUDOON "too thick" to get the circuit? Is there some equivalent of Universe-equivalent English that he's boasting in?
  • It's not unreasonable to assume the aliens have their own universal Translation equipment, as it's quite common sci-fi tech (though one wonders if the Judoon managed to preprogram English this time or if someone did it for them).
  • Since when were the Judoon "too thick"? I've only heard about that idea once, and I seem to recall it being rejected rather than actual canon. Plus, why can't the TARDIS translate that much? This is a machine that can tow planets, travel through space and time, redirect phone calls to thousands of years in the future... so psychic translation for a bunch of species is beyond it why?
    • Yeah, about that.

• So, if the Doctor was erased from the Universe, how does River remember to give the notebook to Amy?
  • River is a time anomaly, which is why it took so long for the universe to erase her. It's possible she kept some memories from the alternate universe somehow. We'll find out more about how she's a time anomaly in the next series.
  • As River points out, she's a complicated event in time and space. Rory died and was erased from time, but not her, just as Amy wasn't erased when her parents were. She remembers, of course, because she wouldn't be River if she didn't, she wouldn't exist if she didn't send Amy the notebook, and The Doctor didn't come back, and pick her parents up for a great Tardis Honeymoon, which caused her Time Head, same way she'd never exist if she hadn't died for The Doctor back in the Library, for he'd never meet her mother, blahblahblah.

• What bugs me the most about 'The Big Bang' is that Amy's alternate timeline created from the Doctor being wiped from history, instead of being a perfect one with her getting married should have instead been Hell. The Doctor has saved the Earth so often that if he had been wiped from history so too would have the entire universe. A few examples: The Doctor ending the Time War by killing off the Time Lords and the Daleks never happened, The Doctor stopping Davros from destroying the multiverse never happened, The Third Doctor stopping the Master from conquering the Earth a dozen times never happened, need I actually continue? there are hundreds of these examples, all of which would have ended everything the very second the Doctor sacrificed himself. Oh, and the excuse that history compensates for the damage is an asspull: someone had to save the Earth on all these occasions - maybe it was the Meddling Monk...
  • Seconded. What makes me laugh is that bloody Star Trek Voyager once worked this out when they had the chance to get a time travelling Romulan to change history for them - until they worked out the little matter of their influence on the Delta Quadrant and the whole extinction of the Ocampa thing.
  • The time cracks remove the memories but not the events. I have no idea how the events took place in the revised universe, but they did without the Doctor. Bear in mind, the only reason the Doctor has been erased is because he's the last thing the cracks have to suck in.
  • One could argue that in some ways the Doctor is at least a trouble magnet; perhaps without him around, most of those things would never have happened in the first place.
  • Doylist explanation; it would probably have been a bit of a depressing waste of time and resources to show the audience this wasteland hellhole for all of five minutes until Amy got around to remembering the Doctor, especially when it would just seem like a bit of a recap of "Turn Left" from only a season and a bit ago. Watsonian explanation: my guess is that Amy subconsciously 'remembered' the Doctor (and consequently his effect on the universe) all through her life, thus preserving the timeline sufficiently until her conscious memory was jogged enough to bring him back fully, whereupon the timeline was established fully, complete with the Doctor's effect on it. It's suggested that even in Universe 2.0 she still had an imaginary friend called the Raggedy Doctor who she believed in vividly enough to prompt her parents / aunt to bring in psychiatrists; this could have been an 'echo' of the Doctor sustaining his presence in the new universe long enough for her to bring him back.
    • I agree with the above explanation, but I also have one of my own: the Doctor was only being erased from the moment he stepped into the cracks onwards, i.e. only his eleventh incarnation. If you look you'll see that most of the dangers to the world in this series took place in the future, so by Amy's wedding wouldn't have happened yet - maybe a few more people were put into comas by Prisoner Zero, Venice sank and Vincent van Gough was eaten, but that hardly a crapsack world makes. Even the Atraxi incinirating the "human residence" only happened because they followed the Doctor to Earth, it might have taken them significanly longer to arrive without him.
    • As someone above mentioned, the Doctor was wiped from living MEMORY, not all of existence. The Time Cracks removed the Doctor from the PRESENT, not the entire timeline of the universe. People simply forgot about him. The same thing happened to Rory.
      • It seems pretty clear that the way the cracks were 'unwinding' the Doctor that he—and by extension his effects on the universe—were being erased.
    • The Pandorica kept Amy alive. It kept her memories alive. When the doctor rewired it, he used those memories to populate universe 2.0. The universe is as Amy remembers it, which is why the Doctor still exists. Season 2010 was not removed from existance at all.
    • You're all missing the most obvious explanation. This is a universe where Earth is literally all that exists. There are no stars in the sky and from the perspective of the people living on this Earth there never have been. No stars, no alien invasions. No aliens, full stop. The Earth is still there only because it's at the eye of the storm, the last thing to be erased.
      • That's before the Doctor reboots the universe, however; the OP is talking about after he does so.
  • New theory (unindenting, this was getting a bit long): The Doctor did exist, in the new recreated timeline. Amy just didn't remember him. When she recreated the universe, it was both from her memories and the universe particles inside the Pandorica, right? So everything that happened in this season did happen, but no-one could remember it - until Amy awoke those memories, and then everyone got it. (That's why Rory realises almost simultaneously.) The Doctor just showed up then to show off.
    • That doesn't match any of the events or explanations thereof: River explicitly says the Doctor will never have existed, and if it was only the memories of him and not his existence that had been erased, he wouldn't have started living in reverse. The Doctor never existed, just like Rory and the stars never existed, but like he said earlier: there's always something left behind, some trace... like the photo of Rory or River's diary. Amy remembers the Doctor, and that makes him exist again.
  • If being erased by the cracks really meant that the people erased never existed, then Amy would have ceased to exist when her parents were erased. The cracks just stop people from existing and remove most memories of them from before that point. There's no reason to assume its any different for the Doctor than for every other example in the season up to this point.
  • Or it could simply be a time paradox; the people swallowed by the cracks are erased and never existed, but they somehow leave an imprint on the universe nevertheless. The cracks are creating multiple time paradoxes and inconsistencies because they're weakening the fabric of space and time as a preemptive result of the TARDIS explosion. Timey-Wimey Ball and all that. It would seem that something clearly happens to them on top of being forgotten, since if they were just forgotten there wouldn't be any need to worry about being 'brought back'; they'd still be there, just no one would recognise them.
  • Maybe the only reason any of these aliens came to Earth was because they heard of its existence from the Doctor constantly visiting it. Let's face it, Earth is situated in the middle of nowhere when it comes to habitable worlds even in the Whoniverse, so maybe these powerful unstoppable races never bothered coming because they literally thought there'd be no value in it. Although, without the Doctor there that might mean the rest of the universe is pretty much buggered.
    • Earth is stated on numerous occasions to be primitive and backwater (at least in The Sarah Jane Adventures), but I don't recall anywhere stating it's "in the middle of nowhere". Wasn't there a race from Alpha Centauri? That's as near a star system as you can get. And that's not even getting into the Martians and Venusians.
  • We had an episode where wiping the Doctor out even just for a small part of his existence causes massive problems because the resto of us can't completely solve the problems he solved. It was called Turn Left. So it really bugged me that this story completely ignored all the implications of wiping the Doctor out of history when we've already seen what that should do.
    • That's the point, though—we've already seen it. Why should the writers and producers want to redo something we've already seen, especially since we've already seen it barely a year and a bit before this episode and we would only be seeing it for five minutes tops until Amy remembered the Doctor again anyway?
  • I always sort of assumed the following: In Turn Left we see what happens after the doctor dies. All of the various things that happened that he would have been able to prevent happen, and effectively send the world to hell. That's not exactly what happens here. The Doctor ceases to exist. Meaning that any of the threats that show up solely because the Doctor's there(the Atraxi, those blokes from The Christmas Invasion) never show. This still leaves the problem of other such threats(the Silurian problem from Cold Blood, for example, which was caused by the humans), but I'm content to go with the troper above me's opinion.
  • I was under the impression that time was still unravelling, I.E. the universe was recreated exactly as it was before the TARDIS exploded (minus the Doctor) and then everything he had done started to be erased, so if Amy had waited a little longer before remembering the Doctor and brining him back we would have resulted in a Turn Left type place.
  • The Cracks are basically paradox generators, (yes this applies to The Doctor in the last episode since they specificly state he'll be trapped behind the cracks). They remove something from existence, but they don't alter history to account for the person/thing not having existed, yet they still never did the things that still happened, etc... Yes it makes no sense, yes there seems to be no way to could work like that, but that's the entire POINT of a paradox.
  • Also note that Amy doesn't remember the Daleks in Victory of the Daleks (And the Doctor specifically mentions the reality bomb thing), so those threats to humanity that the Doctor stopped? They were erased from existence too!
  • You could look at the continued existence of the Earth as we know it as some kind of meta Stable Time Loop, much like the one that allowed the Doctor to tell Rory to release himself from the Pandorica. The Doctor being brought back into existence saved the world a dozen times over, which created the circumstances allowing him to be brought back into existence. Like the Doctor being able to release himself once he released himself, it makes perfect causal sense once it's actually happening, but there's no reason why it should exist in the first place. Except, you know, Wibbly Wobbly Timey Wimey.
  • All in all, despite whatever the Doctor may say, the effects of the cracks are much better understood as almost entirely mental. The victim Disappears Into Light, then memories of that person are shortly thereafter erased from everyone who has lived relatively long with them (or who went with them on the same time-travel trip, or something), via Laser-Guided Amnesia. Hence, people thereafter live with muddled memories that make little sense if they think about them too hard, but they don't, for Perception-Filter-type reasons. (Even if they do think about it, the only way we've actually seen the memory come back is after extended face-to-face interaction, which of course won't normally happen precisely because of the person's erasure.)
  • This is how it works:

Anything that is not in a stable time loop has a point of creation. The Doctor definately DOES exist at the point the TARDIS materialises at the wedding. The Doctor is not in a stable time loop, therefore has a date of birth, and we assume, a date of conception (extrapolated from the fact that Time Lords have a childhood, therefore age to maturity). Therefore from the point he arrives he has had a past in this universe. He wasn't nonexistant, it is just that to close the final crack he had to be outside, wiping his past from this universe. However despite being 'outside' reality, he still had a start point inside this universe, he was not born in the void.

• • Just to summarise, the cracks erase the people but not the events. That's why Rory could be erased, yet evidence of his existence remained. When the Doctor never existed, everything he had ever done was not. The universe wouldn't have made sense, but it still would be there. The moment the Doctor was wished back, it made sense

As soon as he re-enters this reality, his timeline reasserts itself - not because he is a Time Lord, but because he is not in a stable time loop, therefore the Universe demands he has a viable timeline, and not just 'pop' into existence. Therefore Amy wakes on the morning of her wedding with history as it always has been. Amy’s memories at the Wedding Breakfast re-establishes the Doctors existence in this universe, allowing him to come back – It is not a false memory by Amy, he does exist, therefore the he can’t just ‘not exist’ that matter has to be somewhere (1st Law Thermodynamics).

How did he get back in? Well Ten was always using crack in reality – he burns up a sun to say goodbye to Rose. Eleven knows where he was, so sneaks in there.

• • New Theory: Amy remembers him back into existence. However, he shows up in his sunday best. He was clearly expecting a wedding. He probably was remembered into existence, figured out what Amy was up to at the time, and dressed for the occasion before parking his TARDIS. During the time between existing and parking, he went across the universe and fixed EVERYTHING HE HAD EVER RUN INTO ON EARTH before it had a chance to happen. Most things took at least a few hours, and the Wedding happens no more than, say, five or so hours after Amy wakes up, so he would have time to Materialize and, knowing everything that was going on anyway, fix the problem in just a moment or two, then Dematerialize and get onto the next one. This means that Eleven dealt with every possible threat to the planet in the course of about a day. It's possible that this is the reason the Reapers never showed up: They were too terrified of what Eleven might do to them.
    • But once the Doctor exists again, his previous incarnations took care of everything he had ever run into on Earth so why would Eleven need to concern himself with that? That the enemies he defeated weren't off terrorizing Earth can be explained the same way that River found a picture of Rory in Amy's room while he still didn't exist.
• Why were the Alliance and Pandorica even necessary to begin with? If the Daleks are 'experts at fighting TARDIS' and can clearly destroy them without ending the universe, why didn't they just exterminate the Doctor and destroy the TARDIS themselves?
  • How many times have the Daleks tried to kill the Doctor in the entire series again? And how many times have they failed miserably and gotten utterly pwned in return? Yeah. There's a reason they've applied terms like 'The Oncoming Storm' and 'The Bringer of Darkness' to him in the past. Plus, the whole point of the Alliance is that they don't want the TARDIS to be destroyed, that the destruction of the TARDIS is a very bad thing which will destroy all of reality; not much point in trying to prevent it if you're only going to destroy it yourself.
    • Ignoring the fact that they usually don't win due to never just shooting/exterminating him at the soonest possible opportunity, my point was more that the TARDIS being destroyed should never have been a threat to the Alliance once the Daleks decided to chip in. They've already tried to destroy the Doctor's TARDIS more than once (Parting of the Ways, Journey's End, etc.) and presumably destroyed them by the truckload during the Time War. Whatever it is that causes a TARDIS' destruction to end the universe, the Daleks should know how to either contain it or nullify it entirely. Otherwise they could never combat one safely, and they obviously have if the Doctor himself considers them experts at it.
      • Worth noting that the emphasis is still on 'tried' when discussing the Daleks' efforts to destroy the Doctor's TARDIS and we never actually see them destroy any others (although it is a reasonable assumption) -- for all we know, their successful efforts could still have fractured the universe. However, there's different ways to destroy something with different effects; a firecracker is different to an artillery shell is different to a nuclear bomb. Presumably the way the Daleks managed to destroy TARDISes was an equivalent to an 'artillery shell' and the way the 'silence' was planning to destroy the TARDIS was equivalent to a 'nuclear bomb'. But since we don't even know what the nature of the silence is yet, we don't know how this weapon differed, and it's made fairly clear from the way they automatically blame the Doctor for the destruction of the TARDIS that the Alliance—including the Daleks—aren't even aware that the 'silence' exists, meaning they can hardly be expected to be able to contain or nullify what it is doing. And since the OP explicitly questions why the Alliance is necessary, each of it's members are races that, for whatever reason, have tried to take on the Doctor and failed miserably; safety in numbers, presumably.
      • The alliance is probably worried about a Stable Time Loop - even if they have techniques for destroying TARDISes safely, this is the Doctor they're dealing with. It is entirely possible that when faced with destruction the Doctor would come up with some crazy plan that no previous Time Lord had ever tried in the same circumstances, only this time it backfires and makes the destruction of the TARDIS much worse than expected. Locking him up (and presumably then looking for the TARDIS and trying to disable it in a more controlled setting) is a lot safer.
    • Personally, I'm more surprised the Daleks didn't try to hijack the silence for their own purposes.
    • Err, how? Even the audience currently doesn't know the cause behind the silence.
      • It seems fairly clear, given how the members of the Alliance explicitly blame the Doctor for the destruction of the universe, that the Alliance aren't even aware that the 'silence' exists.
  • It's also possible that the Daleks are quite good at destroying TARDISes that are in working order, and can easily tell that the Doctor's TARDIS is running on spit and prayers. I mean, the thing has nearly imploded, exploded, or been just plain destroyed how many times now? It makes noises it shouldn't make, it's running on power sources TARDISes are not really meant to use, and it's rarely been run by more than one-third, or even one-sixth the optimal crew, which has got to cause undue wear and tear just because if you have to run around to the other side to get to a control, you can't maintain the kind of precision timing you would if you had someone else standing there waiting. I very much doubt that this particular TARDIS is particularly stable or functional, and I don't blame the Daleks for not wanting to take potshots at it.
  • As for why they didn't just kill the Doctor, there's also the possiblity that the Pandorica was intended to be a punishment as well as a prison. Being trapped in a small box where you can't move for all eternity seems like a Fate Worse Than Death. Considering that a good portion of the Alliance hated the Doctor, sticking him in the Pandorica might have been an act of revenge. Plus on the off chance they needed him for something in the future, they could just take him out then lock him back in when they were done.
  • Also, who else would they've thought could make the TARDIS explode? The Time Lords are all dead, and the Daleks didn't want it to blow up. Not to mention that the Doctor is both erratic and suffered a lot. They probably thought he snapped and wanted to end his pain.
  • They don't even have to think he was suicidal. If they know the TARDIS is going to explode and don't know about the Silence then it's a simple matter of, when the TARDIS is being used it explodes for some reason and if the Doctor is out of the picture the TARDIS will never be used again thus it will not explode.

• Why did the Doctor expect that he would be able to read what was written on the universe's oldest cliff, words that no one had ever been able to translate, when he'd already encountered a language too old to be translated in "The Impossible Planet"?
  • Because the words on the cliff on Planet One were written after the start of this Universe. The ones from "The Impossible Planet" predated the Universe, and so the TARDIS was unable to translate them.

• The Dalek in "The Big Bang" says something to the effect of "You are associated with the Doctor. You will not kill." Yet the Daleks already know the Doctor as the great destroyer! What possible justification could a Dalek have for expecting to be spared? And why would one be afraid of death in the first place?
  • In general theough the people associated with the Doctor generally don't kill other species at the first sign of danger. Yes Rose atomised entire fleets, but that was a bit of an unusual circumstance. Okay, it's fair to say killing Daleks is usually at least plan C or D, not the instant one lone Dalek points his gun.
  • It's the Doctor who's the one who's feared, not his companions; they're usually the ones who are getting captured, threatened with death, etc. Most if not all of the Doctor's companions are, in the face of Daleks, comparatively helpless.
  • Besides, even if the Dalek thought that River would kill him, he was begging for mercy there. In which case, he said "You will not kill" in the hope that it might be true.

• For god sake, where the hell are the Reapers? in Father's Day the Doctor states that himself and Rose being there in close proximity makes this a potentially dangerous situation which could result in a paradox - which is proven when Rose saves her dad and touches herself as a baby. Fast forward to the Big Bang where not only do we have two Doctors who have grabbed each other for far longer than Rose grabbed her father, not only do we have two Amy's going about hugging each other, but we have the Doctor constantly using the Time Travel Armband of Plot Convenience - a device that by all rights should be weakening the time continuum around the paradox. The Reapers can't have been wiped from history because it was stated in Father's day they live outside our dimension, which is why they were immune to Rose's paradox. This new timeline the Doctor and Amy find themselves in is also still obeying the laws of physics from the old one - it's just empty - there is no reason why the Reapers shouldn't have been attracted to that museum or barred somehow from coming through.
  • I easily rationalised/Fan Wanked this. The Reapers are DEAD/never existed. Almost the entirety of every universe and reality is GONE.
  • I figured it was because the universe was already done for; come on, it doesn't get much worse than time being erased. The Reapers were probably overcome or just gave up, and Amy touching her younger self was pretty minor compared to everything else that was going on. As for The Doctor... time was already basically gone. And he didn't really cause any paradoxes with the Armband.
  • There was no paradox though. No Paradox=No Reapers.
    • Amy straight-up pats her younger self on the head. That alone is a paradox.
      • Yeah but paradoxes happen all the time in Doctor Who. Rose changing her own past by knocking herself and the Doctor out of the way when she didn't remember that having happened was what made it a big enough paradox to send in the reapers. Touching past selves probably isn't a big enough paradox to send in the reapers normally but since they were already there, it just made the situation worse and strengthened the reapers. It likely wouldn't have been a reaper-worthy paradox if Rose had remembered her past self knocking her over to save her father the first time but since it didn't and she changed her own time stream in such an obvious way...
  • I'm of the opinion that the Reapers have ceased to be/never were and that's why they're not there. However, Amy is standing in front of and talking to her past/alternate timeline self. The Doctor interacts with his past self as well. You call that "no paradox"? In "Father's Day", the reason why Rose invited the Reapers in the first place was by running past herself and interacting with toddler Rose moreso than just changing history, though that presumably had a hand in things as well.
  • The above points probably cover it, but it's also worth noting that strictly speaking, Amy isn't interacting with her past self; she's interacting with an Alternate History / Alternate Universe version of her past self. Little Amelia has by this point grown up in a completely different timeline to Amy and is as such technically a different person, temporally speaking.
  • As someone said above, the Reapers only came to take care of a time paradox so massive the universe couldn't fix it in any other way, two copies of someone from different times interacting won't inherently create a paradox. The Doctor only said having multiple copies together like that weakens the fabric of time, thus making Paradox's easier to create, not that it would instantly create one. Also the cracks seem to specialize in creating paradoxes so paradoxical that not even the universe can see something is wrong and bring out the Reapers to fix them.
  • I say that the death of the universe was such a big paradox-thing that all the reapers were elsewhere trying to fix it, and they were completely overwhelmed. There aren't any reapers on Earth because Earth is the one place that's closest to normal, and thus least in need of fixing.
    • Fix WHAT? Earth IS the universe at that point.
  • I guess that's Lampshaded in Series 6, when Rory says "In fairness, the universe did explode". But the main point in Father's Day is that not only there are two Roses and two Doctors, but also that if she does save her father, she has no reason what-so-ever to be there in the first place, therefore she never saved him, etc.

• In "Flesh and Stone", River Song mentions the Pandorica. That would mean that she remembers how everything went from a cracked universe to a starless universe and then a rebooted universe. So what exactly goes through her head when she sees the big glowing crack in the wall ? From her perspective, she could be back into the cracked universe. This goes beyond timey wimey.
  • Relatedly, if the cracks are now closed, how does the Doctor survive the Crash of the Byzantium?
    • The Doctor was very adamant about Amy remembering her parents in order to bring them back. If the Doctor closing the cracks brought back everyone who was eaten by the cracks except for the Doctor, he might as well not have bothered. This is probably Fridge Horror, actaully. Rory, the Doctor, and Amy's parents can't possibly be the only ones eaten by the cracks pre-Stonehenge but she didn't remember them to bring them back. The Angels were still gotten rid of that way.
  • In the absence of an explanation from canon, I think there are two explanations for Flesh and Stone: (1) In the rebooted universe, the events of Flesh and Stone never happened due to the cracks never existing, the Doctor and his companions retain their memories of the event for some reason (eye of the storm, because they're time travelers or anomalies, echoes, timey-whimey ball, etc.), or (2) Thanks to Amy's memory, the crack events she's experienced happened in the rebooted universe as well, thus the rebooted universe is just like the old one minus Total Event Collapse, and the cracks are just time rifts leaking chronons (Which according to the video game at least can erase things from existence.).

• So with the Time Cracks gone, does that mean that all the things they erased are back as well, the way Rory (the real one), Amy's parents, and even the Doctor himself came back? Do people once again remember the Dalek invasion of 2008? Does that mean we should be once again wondering why the Cyberking was forgotten? Or are there still some things left out?
  • My guess is, anything the writers want to keep comes back, anything the writers would prefer to ignore or override is gone.
    • What does that even mean? Sorry if I'm whining about a Watsonian approach to this but...fuck!
      • It means that if the writers want to write something that overrides previous canon, they have a built-in excuse; "it didn't make it into the rebooted universe." And seriously... chill out, dude. It's not that confusing.
    • What it really boils down to is that, due to some of the events in previous seasons, the population of earth should be very jaded to things like the presence of aliens, Cyberman, attacking Daleks and other assorted whatnot. This can be a permanent scar on the 'Verse, so the whole time erasure thing actually gives them an excuse to make like it all never happened, while the relevant individuals can still remember all the relevant events when needed to. I'm under the impression that the Doctor, Time Lords in general and, for that matter, time travelers in general don't operate on a time line that actually tries to sync with the "real" timeline at all. In other words, the universe's timeline changes but time travelers don't alter their personal timeline to fit. This is probably part of what the Doctor means when he refers to himself as an extremely complex temporal event... he's the sum of a series of possible universes that never happened.

• Two thoughts: (1) In The Pandorica opens, which Cybermen were we dealing with; Cybus or Mondas. They looked like Cybus, but last I checked, those guys didn't have spaceships, plus, aren't they kind of all dead after the events of The Next Doctor?
  • If I heard correctly, they're Mondas Cybermen, but the budget didn't stretch to costumes for them, so the Cybus Cybermen costumes were used instead.
    • Source please.
    • Really? On TV Tropes? Go look it up on the Doctor Who wiki. They'll have a source there.
      • Nope, a quick look at the Doctor Who wiki mentions no such reference apart from a token reference of the discontinuity mentioned in the first bullet, AND they're referred to here, here and in hyperlinks here as Cybus (or in their words "Pete's World") Cybermen. Try again.
        • Try the Doctor Who Confidential of the relevent episodes, though I can't be too sure.
        • I've also read somewhere that Moffat has stated that they were Mondas Cybermen, but I can't remember where.
          • I heard him mention it at a preview screening Q&A for 'The Pandorica Opens', but that wasn't filmed or anything.

• And (2) From the same episode; Where are all the races that don't hate the Doctor? You know, all the people he's saved. You're telling me none of them had a say in the whole universe ending thing? That's none of them thought "Hey, why would the Doctor destroy the universe? He's saved it a bajillion times!" I can understand why The Daleks, The Cybermen, The Sontarans, and others who hate him would gang up on him, since they're of questionable moral fiber, but surely other races have the tech to note the universes decay, and a reason to just ask the Doctor what's going on, so where were they?
  • To be fair, they did show a bunch of allies getting him the message about the TARDIS exploding and the Pandorica opening; not their fault it turned out to be a trap.
    • But those were only his human allies. What about all the alien races the Doctor has befriended, or were they also used by the Legion of Jerks.
    • Well, we still don't know where the evil alliance got their information from. Either it was one of the evil races who figured it out (my money's on the Daleks, they are probably the most advanced), or whoever is actually behind this whole mess ("Silence will fall") tipped them off to use them as Unwitting Pawns. Either way, there was probably an intentional effort not to inform his allies. Imagine you hate the Doctor, and now have evidence that he is going to destroy the universe. You can't trap him on your own, you need allies. Who you gonna call? Not people who will defend or warn him, that's for sure. The Doctor's got plenty of enemies across the universe who'd be tickled pink to finally defeat him, especially if it saves their own hides in the process. No need to invite the good guys, they'll just muck things up.
  • "Only the Doctor can pilot the TARDIS." They know that the TARDIS is the cause of the end, and the Doctor is the only one they know of who could blow up the TARDIS. They may not know why, but the sure as hell know the Doctor is the best lead.

• So, does Rory remember everything of his life as a Auton Roman legionaire wandering across the earth with the Pandorica for a few centuries, because if he remembers all of it.... he must be pretty badass now.
  • A throwaway blink-and-you'll-miss-it line near the end of "The Big Bang" seems to say so. How this works is anyone's guess. The implication seems to be that Rory's soul survived because Amy subconsciously remembered him (or the Auton was created from his memories and was a workable vessel for said soul...)
  • Either "The Impossible Planet" or "Day of the Moon" backs this up too, but also that he buries the memory often.

• Rory spends two thousand years guarding the Pandorica, including dragging it out of at least one fire, yet he when they meet him again, he doesn't look even a bit melted. Also, If the Pandorica is supposed to be a "perfect" prison that won't let you escape even by dying, anything able to harm it should be more than a match for him.
  • Remember that all the while Rory is guarding the Pandorica, the universe is dissapearing piece by piece all around him. I don't think anything human-created between the years 0 and 2010 AD could have harmed the Pandorica, and even when he starts his long wait most of the species in the uvneirse had already been erased: earth just hung around for longer because it was in "the eye of the storm"...
  • Who's to say he's behaving rationally? Besides, in the London Blitz case, he knows that he needs young Amelia to open the box; that could be very hard if it's permanently buried under 20 feet of rubble.
    • More than a match? He's plastic, immortal, and has a gun/hand device that never needs to be reloaded and he's mostly gonna be fighting the occasional loony human that gets too close to the box. And how did he know he needed young Amelia to open the box? For all he knew, he had to wait until 2106 before the box opened, yet it opened in 1996. (and that's a IJBM entry itself. How was that possible?)
    • I thought the Doctor told him that young Amelia's DNA had to open it. Also, are you confusing plastic for wax?
    • And RE: 'it opened in 1996 not 2106' the Doctor was rounding up for emphasis when he said 'two thousand years'. That bit at least isn't that complicated.
  • Did Rory seriously spend 1,835 (106-1941) years in a Centurion armor before he apparently "died" in the Blitz and became a security guard in a museum? And if nothing could get inside the box, then surely he could've gone and had a life of his own (and coming back to check up on the box) rather than spend 24/7 sitting around it.
    • Because he loved her, because he felt guilty for almost killing her, and because if there a even a small chance that something could go wrong, then he was going to make sure it had to go through him first. That is why he watched the Pandorica 24/7. I don't think there's any better reason than that.
  • I found that ludicrous (it also seemed to be a case of Out of Time, Out of Mind). Rory should have asked himself "would Amy want me to spend two millennia looking after her rather than living a life of my own". The only possible answer to this question would be "no".
    • Considering that Rory was the one responsible for making it necessary to put Amy in the Pandorica for two millennia in the first place, I doubt his own conscience would be that kind to him. He's not just protecting Amy (although there is part of that in his motives), but atoning for his own actions, and if that means standing guard over Amy for two millennia to make it right, then that's what he does. I imagine that according to Rory's logic (which is, let's face it, not entirely unreasonably given the circumstances), he doesn't get to have a normal life of his own until he can make sure that Amy's safe and what he did has been undone. And what if he does decide to leave the Pandorica and go and have a life, only to find that when he comes back to it someone has managed to break into it and harm Amy or bugger up all the plan? Yay, more guilt; I'm sure that's exactly what Rory wants or needs.
    • And all of you forgot a few things: this version of Rory is reborn from Amelia's mind, meaning that she has always seen him as loving, trustworty, flighty and LOYAL to her beyond reason. So he as an Auton would focus on these traits, knowing they were what defined him as HER Rory, and help him to continue "being human" through all that time.
  • As for the lack of Rory melting, well, who's to say he didn't get a little scorched? In fact, who's to say he didn't continually acquire new scars, nicks, scorches and scrapes throughout history...right up to the point that plastic was invented. Autons can be made of pretty much any plastic, hence the shop window dummies (and, as Rose suggests, breast implants). It doesn't have to be special alien plastic. Maybe Rory was a wreck but as soon as mankind developed material for replacement parts he taught himself to make repairs. The museum scenes take place in 1996, he's had decades to learn how.
    • And this might even explain why he spent nearly 2000 years wearing the same Roman outfit, but has himself a nice security guard uniform at the museum. That centurion uniform was a part of him (except for the helmet, we saw him remove that), and couldn't be taken off. When he got his hands on more plastic and learned to work with it, he was able to not only repair any damage he had sustained over the years, but finally change his clothes (or at least give himself a normal enough body to wear ordinary clothes over it). And because he was damaged and permanently in Roman dress, that explains why he couldn't do something sensible like get himself an actual job guarding the Pandorica until recently.
    • ...I just got a hilarious mental image of Rory looking like a Ken Doll underneath that uniform. Might explain why he was so loyal to guarding Amy, it's not like he had much else to do on Saturday nights.
    • like half of the Just Bugs Me posts EVER, this one is pretty simple. The Doctor even says it himself: "Anyone can get inside a prison."

• "The Big Bang": the universe got obliterated and all the stars in the universe never existed. Fair enough. So... how do people on Earth know what stars are? Why do they even have a word for them? How can there be "star cults" if stars never existed in the first place?
  • "Echoes of the never were"
  • Technically, they do have one 'star' -- the exploding TARDIS that forms the sun (hey, how are they supposed to know what it really is?) -- so possibly the controversy comes from people arguing that there was once more than one. Alternatively, it could just be one of those complete paradoxes and contradictions—such as dinosaurs in ice and Nile penguins—that characterise this universe and the effect of everything being sucked into a crack—i.e. it's gone, but part of it still lingers around and a shadowy memory of them still exists.
  • The actual reason was explained in the episode. There are stars up until the point where the pandorica shuts the doctor in, therefore there are still stars in works of fiction (paintings, mythology, old stories, literature etc) predating the pandorica opening/shutting in whatever year that happened (was it 100 AD or something?). The star cults formed around the idea that something happened that made the stars dissapear, whereas popular thought in this star-less universe is that the stars never existed.
    • Actually, no. All of the universe was erased from history (not just destroyed; it never existed).
    • Also, and this may just be me not remembering the episode clearly, but where was any of this explained in the episode?
  • Wasn't it just Amy and adults around her using the word? Maybe Amy just came out with it, and as far as everyone else was concerned it wasn't a real word? I can't remember the episode all that clearly, so correct me if someone else did use it as an actual word.
    • Possibly, but the mentioning of 'star cults' suggests that it's not just Amy who believes or mentions them; presumably Richard Dawkins at least also believes in them.
    • Could there be other people who somehow retain some memories, then?
    • Or maybe the people who used to travel with the Doctor remember snippets of him, so they believe in stars.
    • It's unliklely that it's just the people who have travelled with the Doctor who remember the stars. "Star Cults" sounds like more than just a few dozen people, and other than Amy the one specific example of someone who remembers stars is a person who has never met the Doctor onscreen (although if you want to get meta, Richard Dawkins is married to a Time Lord).
  • It's been established that anything erased by a crack is remembered, but only subconsciously. You spend your time having a feeling that something has gone, but you can't fully remember what it was. The existence of the stars was in the back of people's heads, and Star Cultists probably extrapolated their existence from them. The rest of the world probably thought they were just some story that people thought up in their dreams.

• Okay, so in The Big Bang, 11 gives Rory the Sonic Screwdriver, goes back to the present, then realizes "I don't have my screwdriver, I gave it to Rory 2,000 years ago..." then goes back and tells Rory to put it in Amy's pocket. My question is, why did he have to do that? They could have easily had present day Rory hand back the sonic screwdriver quipping, "I've been holding onto it for you." or better yet, have the Doctor take the screwdriver from Rory before he takes himself back to the present!
  • The Doctor does take a sonic screwdriver with him to the present; that's the one he later gives Rory back in the past. Trouble is, once he does that, there's two sonic screwdrivers floating around in the past and none in the present, and I imagine he's a bit wary of materialising where a previous version of himself is just to pick it up from Rory, and if Rory had kept a hold of it, there was a not-unreasonable chance that in two thousand years, the natural process of entropy would mean it would stop working (or be destroyed if something happened to Rory), and thus not be much use to them; keeping it in the Pandorica keeps it, like Amy, in a state of stasis, so it works fine for when the Doctor catches up with them.

• In "The Pandorica Opens," the TARDIS re-routes a call from Churchill to River. If the TARDIS can re-route the signal, that must mean that the TARDIS has access to the signal. And is using it's own transmitters to send it to Stormcage. So why not just have The Doctor answer it?
  • Perhaps the same entity that hijacked the TARDIS and made it blow up has also hijacked the signal and rerouted it for its own nefarious purposes?
    • Alternatively, The Silence was preventing the TARDIS from ringing the Doctor directly and so the TARDIS rerouted to River instead.
• Why go to all the trouble of creating a Pandorica and luring the Doctor to it, and then install some mechanism inside that will keep him alive forever? This just improves the Doctor's chances of getting out again. Why not a box that simply locks him in? Or worse, one that tries to keep its occupant dead instead of alive?
  • Because he could regenerate into something capable of escaping, just because all the Time Lords we've seen were Human Aliens doesn't mean they can't regenerate into something else.
    • Also, during regeneration itself he becomes incredibly powerful. He accidentally trashed the TARDIS when he became 11. Imagine if he could figure out a way to focus his excess regeneration energy into trashing the Pandorica enough to make it open.
  • Because he'd play a Xanatos Gambit, using his death to his advantage. Considering this is what the Future!Doctor is planning, it's not far off. Besides, he's trapped in an And I Must Scream scenario. Not much you can do then.

• Why is the auton that the Nestene made for Rory in "The Pandorica Opens" soooo much more convincing and lifelike (to say nothing of competent) than the one they made for Mickey in "Rose"?
  • The Nestene in Rose only had so long to make the duplicate before Rose came out (and was ridiculously unobservant so apparently the auton didn't need to be more realistic). The Alliance had plenty of time to craft a trap for the Doctor using Amy's memories.
  • Not to mention the first Nestene was just a refugee and probably wouldn't have had the right equipment to make a perfect Auton, unlike the Nestenes that helped with the Pandorica.
    • Isn't the Nestene a single consciousness and the same Time War refugee?

• This may be a bit of a minor grouch, but why was it called the Pandorica? Why not the Stevedorica, or the Super Prison Of Doomy Dooms of Doom or something?
  • Because it was inspired by the myth of Pandora's Box that the Alliance read all about in the book in Amy's room and they were basing everything about the scenario on Amy's interests.
  • Also, "Stevedorica" is a stupid-sounding name.

• "The Pandorica Opens" has this exchange:

River: It's a trap, it has to be. They used Amy to construct a scenario you'd believe, to get close to you.
Doctor: Why? Who'd do that? What for? It doesn't make sense.

Even after having seen that and the subsequent episode, I'm still wondering the same thing. Why did the Nestene (or was it the Alliance as a whole? Or the Silence?) have to draw inspiration from Amy's mind? And wouldn't it make more sense for the Pandorica to inspire the Pandora's Box story (by its being told throughout the universe both before and after Roman Britain) than the other way around? Also, I'm trying to figure out the Alliance's motivations. Is it more that they hope to prevent the Tardis from blowing up and erasing the universe, or that they simply want to keep the universe safe from the Doctor, "a nameless, terrible thing, soaked in the blood of a billion galaxies" (he is something of a Hero with Bad Publicity, after all).

• • The Alliance said that the Doctor was going to destroy the universe so they had to stop him. The Doctor said that they were wrong because it was his TARDIS and they said he was the only one who could control it. I think it's pretty clear that they were worried about preserving their own existence (particularly the Daleks).
  • As the Sontaran general said, "we shall save the universe -- from you!" They clearly view the Doctor as a threat that the universe needs to be protected from. There's also probably a little bit of 'keeping the Doctor away from us' (coupled with a bit of revenge for past slights). And considering the past relationship most of those involved had with the Doctor, they probably didn't need a lot of persuading when someone came up with "hey, you wanna lock the Doctor in an inescapable prison?" at the planning meeting. As for why Amy, Amy has been exposed to the crack from an early age, and it's clearly established that it's had some kind of mental effect on her; her memories are probably the easiest they can access. And the Pandorica? Well, to use the Timey-Wimey Ball cliche again, I thought it was a case of the Alliance were inspired by Amy's memories of the Pandora's Box legend to built the Pandorica, which inspired the Pandora's Box legend, which inspired Amy, who remembered it, and so on—classic Stable Time Loop deal.
    • So I suppose they just added the Romans for fun then, as well as setting it in Britain rather than Greece.
    • Umm, no? They took the Romans (and Rory) from Amy's room in 2010, just like the Pandora's Box legend.
    • And the Pandorica's already been there centuries, apparently, just waiting for the Doctor and co to show up; by the time of the setting of the story, it's already under Stonehenge, which is already ancient; the Doctor and co are just guided there in Roman times. As for the story moving from Britain to Greece, that's what myths do—change and shift based on culture. Most ancient myths and stories are based on pre-existing oral traditions which someone eventually happened to write down—and as with any lengthy oral traditions, the details get mangled. So it's not outside the realm of possibility that the story of the Pandorica was seeded as an oral tradition centuries beforehand, but when someone in Greece eventually heard this story about a mystical box which, when opened, unleashed horrors upon the universe and decided to write it down, they just relocated it to Greece and framed it in Greek religious practices and mythology instead, thus leading to the version we recognise. As for the Romans, the Romans weren't exactly shy about outright stealing Greek mythology, changing it around a bit and passing it off as their own either.

• How did Rory break into The Pandorica with only a Sonic Screwdriver? It is regulary shown on the show that loads of boogstandard doors are screwdriver proof, why not the ultmate prison?
  • Because, as explained at least twice by the show itself, the prison is for keeping things from getting out, not in.
  • Which is really stupid if you think about it, because of course the Doctor still has boatloads of allies/companions/people-he-has-saved-in-the-past that are all outside the Pandorica when it closes, and it's very likely that at least one of them will try to free the Doctor at some point. So yes, it's easier to open the Pandorica from the outside than from the inside, but that doesn't really cut it. The other half of the explanation (just my personal theory here) is that the Doctor-with-a-fez has spent the last 2,000 years learning about the Pandorica, and he's crafted a "Open the Pandorica" program into the Sonic Screwdriver, which he activates just before he hands the screwdriver to Rory.
    • Not really. No one but the Doctor, the Alliance who has ceased to exist by the time Rory gets down there, and Rory once the Doctor tells him knows the Doctor is in there. If any of the former companions had any idea, they'd tell the Doctor. The Doctor doesn't even believe in it until he sees it. Not to mention that there is no guarantee that the other companions/allies still exist at all given how things are falling to pieces. The Doctor also didn't spend 2000 years doing anything. He went straight from Rory to the Amys in the museum in mid-sentence thus making it impossible to speculate that he did something in between. Also, the Doctor was able to start the Pandorica opening but didn't follow through with it because he had to deal with the Alliance. Anyway, why would the Alliance have made it so hard to open the Pandorica anyway? How it was supposed to work was that the Alliance themselves imprisoned the Doctor, the Doctor's one-or-two companions were killed by the Romans, and then they went off and fixed the problem. They just didn't count on Roman!Rory having real!Rory's soul and themselves being erased from existence. And really, if they hadn't never existed then Rory never would have gotten near the Pandorica.
    • Like the Troper above suggests, there's a reason there was a buttload of 'ghosts' of the various alien species that imprisoned the Doctor surrounding the Pandorica; at least some of them were probably intended as guards. You can get into a prison with a key, but you need to get past all the guards first—in theory, anyway, since as mentioned above none of the guards were counting on being wiped from existence immediately after.

• It's been established that Amy Pond's parents didn't just die, but never existed in the first place. Okay, but there's still the question of where she came from. Or more specifically, how the rest of the universe observed her birth. Did she suddenly pop into existence in a hospital? Did she magically appear in her house as a kid? In-universe, by the perspective of those close to her, what physically happened?
  • They don't think about it. They can't think about it unless someone draws their attention to it. Someone asks what happened to Amy's parents, they (like Amy) goes with the default of them being lost. No one but the Doctor would dig deeper and force them to really start thinking and maybe no one but Amy could come to the realization that they have no idea.

• The Pandorica really sucks as the ultimate prison, especially one that was built with containing the Doctor in mind. It can bring the dead back to life, and it can be easily opened by "DNA handprints" of the occupants, which means if someone got a hold of the Doctor's severed hand (I know it was lost and became the Doctor's clone, but its a possibility the Alliance should have considered), then they could probably open it. And of all things it can be opened by the Sonic Screwdriver, the Doctor's signature weapon/tool. You'd think in the very least they would construct a wooden layer inside of it to prevent the Sonic Screwdriver from affecting it. It seems that it does everything EXCEPT keep the Doctor contained: it can transport itself into the sun which means the designers built it to be piloted by its prisoner, which defeats the purpose of a prison. Putting the Doctor under a cement truck and sealing him in a concrete block would be an improvement over the Pandorica as a prison.
  • I think it's safe to say that the Doctor's DNA changes between regenerations so a past version of the Doctor or the severed hand of a former Doctor wouldn't have worked. And since it's supposed to be living tissue of the person trapped, would a severed hand even work? And since the Doctor didn't lose any limbs since regeneration, how do you knwo that the Alliance didn't consider the possibility? And the screwdriver wasn't able to be used by the Doctor inside the Pandorica; Rory had to rescue him. It doesn't matter if this is because the Pandorica can't be opened from the inside or because the Doctor just couldn't reach it with his hands restrained. The Doctor never would have gotten out if it hadn't been for River's vortex manipulator creating a stable time loop, the unexpected and completely unable to be anticipated fact that Rory's auton had a soul, and the fact that the Pandorica's guards had all never existed.
    • The severed hand in "Journey's End" seemed pretty alive to me.

• Was Amy concious during her peroid in the Pandorica? She was nearly dead when she went in, but that doesn't neccesarily mean she didn't "wake up" later on. Also, when little Amy opened the Pandorica, and adult Amy said "this is where it get's complicated," how did she know the plan if she was nearly dead?
  • I think she was, in fact, dead and being in the Pandorica pulled her back from death. I doubt she was conscious or her two thousand years would have been worse than Rory's and we've seen him talk about his memories but no mention of hers. Besides, even if she was conscious she wouldn't be able to see or hear anything from the outside world (as showed by the Doctor being shocked when the Pandorica opened) so she wouldn't have expected her younger self either way. I think her mumbling that this was where it got complicated was her repeating the message the Doctor left with her.

• The TARDIS explodes and destroys the Universe. But during the Time War, Daleks must have shot down many TARDISes and the Universe is still here.
  • Sexy is an obsolete museum piece built before safety code.
    • But the Daleks tried to destroy the TARDIS at the end of season four and yet even though the Doctor was convinced it had been destroyed, he was not surprised the universe hadn't blown up. Perhaps TARDISes can be safely destroyed and whatever made the TARDIS outright explode did it in such a way that it would destroy the universe. Chances are, if the Time Lords were still around the Doctor could have just taken the problem to them and it would be fixed within hours.
    • Apples and oranges. What the Daleks tried to destroy it with was a core consisting of the reality bomb's Z-Neutrino energy. I think it would have just unravelled the TARDIS to atoms and then nothingness rather than blow it up.
      • The point wasn't that the Daleks could blow it up safely, it was that the Daleks seemed to be able to destroy it safely. Even if they did use a reality bomb, it was still destroying it without destroying the entire universe. If there is one way to do that, there are probably others. The Time Lords must have had a way of decommissioning the TARDIS', after all.
      • My understanding was that it was matter of crack powering itself with all the (potentially) infinite mass, arton energy, all that stuff as well as the small singularity it would create, not just tardis boom=universe gone
  • The Daleks planned on plain old breaking the TARDIS apart. When the TARDIS exploded, it self-destructed. Whatever or whoever hacked into the TARDIS pressed the big red button. Of course, that raises the question of why the Time Lords didn't do this to their own TARDISes, so they can Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence.
    • Well if they never existed then they couldn't ascend anywhere, now could they?
      • Does it matter? They destroy the TARDIS safely, then destroy the universe, the universe is gone OR they don't destroy the TARDIS safely, it blows up the universe, the universe is gone. I don't think the Daleks would mind either way.
      • I'm sorry, but what definition of "safely" are you using here? I thought "safely blowing it up" meant WITHOUT causing a total event collapse.