< Doctor Who < Headscratchers
Doctor Who/Headscratchers/Series 6
A Christmas Carol
- In Christmas Carol, Kazran is obviously meant to be an expy of Scrooge, but for the love of Time Lords, 'casually committing manslaughter on four thousand people on a whim because I don't give a shit' is not the same as 'being a grumpy greedy dick of a businessman, but ultimately it is MY money at the end of the day and I have a right to choose how to spend it'. Scrooge is more of a Lawful Evil/True Neutral while Kazran is just stupid. What did he think was going to happen? The President would go 'Oh, so you let four thousand people die at a whim. No biggie, you still up for that poker night? Kkthxbai.'? The whole thing seems like one goddamn political suicide.
- Kazran doesn't give a shit what happens to the President or what the President does next. The President might be in control of whatever political institutions exist on that world, but Kazran—and only Kazran—controls the goddamn sky. It's made pretty clear that the President, whatever their role publicly might be, is in fact just a figurehead in practice and it's Kazran who really calls the shots ("I don't make the rules here. Oh, wait a minute -- yes, I do."). In that case, why would he care about the ineffective threats or ruined political career of some ineffective toady when there's another just like him ready to take his place?
- But what about all these really pissed off people back on Earth? They never show the extend of power that Kazran has but if it mostly comes down to 'herp derp, I can make the fish go away with clouds, look how mean I am', I doubt having Earth's pissed off fleet at his doorstep declaring war is something Kazran could handle.
- Again—Kazran simply doesn't give a shit. He says as much to the Doctor -- "I don't profit from it. I just don't care." He's a True Neutral in the worst sense, because he literally has no interest in how his actions affect other people (although there's a bit of spite in there as well; he's miserable, so the rest of the world has to be miserable as well). 4003 people die because he didn't lift a finger to stop it, what does he care? Thousands die because Earth invades in retaliation, what does he care? Nothing. Although it's also worth pointing out that unless the Earth forces were to nuke the entire planet from orbit and kill every living thing below—which, 4003 lives aside, would still be a bit of an overreaction (think the US and the UK dropping every nuke they had on Libya after the Lockerbie crash, it'd be fairly similar) -- the only way they'd be able to reach the planet's surface is via the sky. The extremely turbulent, fog-covered, starship-destroying, making-pretty-much-everything-that-flies-into-it-crash sky. That Kazran personally controls. It wasn't just because of the fish that they were so desperate to get him to clear it.
- It's not that Kazran IS Scrooge, it's that the Doctor, being the kind of guy he is, decided "Hey, Dickens just gave me an idea". Also, not acting is only arguably murder a good chunk of the time, and if there's anyone who can get out of a sentence it's Kazran Sardik.
- Kazran doesn't give a shit what happens to the President or what the President does next. The President might be in control of whatever political institutions exist on that world, but Kazran—and only Kazran—controls the goddamn sky. It's made pretty clear that the President, whatever their role publicly might be, is in fact just a figurehead in practice and it's Kazran who really calls the shots ("I don't make the rules here. Oh, wait a minute -- yes, I do."). In that case, why would he care about the ineffective threats or ruined political career of some ineffective toady when there's another just like him ready to take his place?
- In Christmas Carol, Why would the machine suddenly refuse to work? I don't buy the whole 'oh you're now a completely different person so the machine will no longer work'.He's still the same person in terms of his DNA and the likes and given how he only turned nice in the last two minutes, does the machine come with a built in 'being-a-bitter-dick-o-meter' that assesses his jerkass-levels and only grants him access if they're sufficient? I'm currently picturing Kazran spending years upon year, waking up happily and desperately trying to use the machine until he's so grumpy and pissed off with it that it lets him on.
- I personally thought the implication was that Kazran by the end has become such a different person to the man his father originally entrusted the machine to that, in the revised history, his father never entrusted the machine to him in the first place; he might have inherited everything else, but the machine was off-limits just to spite him.
- But the whole point of the second half of the story was that he remained as bitter as ever and nothing was really changed aside from the fact his bitterness came from a different source. Unless you mean when the youngKaz saw the oldKaz, but then was the machine running all this time? Dammit, Moffat, stop revising bits of history as it suits you! D:
- Hate to say it, because it's a total cliche now, but I think Timey-Wimey Ball comes into play here. Old!Kazran is indeed still a miserable prick after the Doctor interferes in his life—until the Doctor brings Young!Kazran to the future to see exactly what a miserable prick Old!Kazran has become; from that point, so my own interpretation of the scene goes, Young!Kazran resolves to never become said miserable old prick come what may, resulting in Old!Kazran now having a generally slightly sunnier disposition (hence his agreeing to help the Doctor and his willingness to allow Abigail out of the pod and spend the last day of her life with him, etc). This, however (I think, anyway—and I may be getting into Wild Mass Guessing a bit her, bit seems to fit with how the episode plays out) creates a third timeline, and whereas in the previous two timelines Teenage!Kazran's increasing miserable prickishness was one of the things that convinced his father to allow him access to the sky-controlling machine thing, in the third timeline Teenage!Kazran's slightly sunnier disposition would probably put him at further odds with his father, who wouldn't allow him access to the machine on those basis. It seems to me that it's just taken a bit longer for Old!Kazran's memories to catch up to this new timeline, hence why he thinks he can still control the machine where in fact he can't.
- I have to say, though, I do like the idea that the machine intentionally makes Kazran as pissed off as it can before it lets him on, though.
- I thought isomorphic controls meant that it responded to his brainwaves. If he thinks differently, it might treat him as a different person.
- Seconded. It's all about brainwaves, not DNA. So conversely, if Kazran had always been a nice guy and the machine was programmed according to those brainwaves, and then later he became a terrible dick, then the machine would stop responding. It's not that you have to have a certain level of dickishness; it's that you have to be reasonably similar to what you used to be. It makes even more sense if you figure that the machine is actually slowly recalibrating itself with each use; so the question is "are you relatively similar to yourself from yesterday?". Kazran's change of heart was very dramatic (well, from our perspective anyway) so it threw off the machine.
- The problem with writing it all off as Timey-Wimey Ball is that even if you believe that the past changed so Kazran was never given control of the machine and he was only somehow still able to use it because he had become so much like his father that it fooled the machine... is that none of this would have happened in the first place if Kazran hadn't have been able to manipulate the machine so as to keep the storm going! And if he never had the ability to control the skies - presumably stopping the storm so various trading ships relating to his businesses COULD get through - then he wouldn't have so much power and wealth as to be able to tell The President FECK OFF! when he asks Kazran if he wouldn't mind, terribly, NOT letting those people die.
- As suggested above, though, the timeline is probably taking a bit of time to reassert itself after a series of quite drastic changes.
- I personally thought the implication was that Kazran by the end has become such a different person to the man his father originally entrusted the machine to that, in the revised history, his father never entrusted the machine to him in the first place; he might have inherited everything else, but the machine was off-limits just to spite him.
- In Christmas Carol - the lack of big time-devouring monsters and the universe collapsing on itself due to old Kazran and young Kazran touching. ?_? Wibbly wobbly, timey wimey, yes I know.
- Plus, I get the feeling that 'heartwarming and en masse audience pleasing moment' trounced 'pedantic continuity adherence' in Steven Moffat's mind.
- In Father's Day, I had always thought the Reapers happened because Rose changed her own past. The Doctor has several times mentioned that crossing your OWN time stream in the TARDIS is a very bad idea. So the reason why the Reapers came into existance was because she went and saved her dad, changing her own time stream. Holding her babyself later was just a bump to their power levels. So Kazran touched Kazran, it still wouldn't completely change his time stream. Now, if they had gone back further and had Kazran help make his father nice, that on the other hand...
- In Christmas Carol - The Doctor violates numerous Laws of Time with no apparent ill-effect. As mentioned above, he allows two versions of the same person from different points in time to meet and nearly touch, with narry a Reaper showing up as in Fathers Day. But the real kicker is that, as in The Waters of Mars, The Doctor alters several peoples established personal timelines and tries to significantly change history. Granting that The Doctor is working to save a lot more lives here than then (4000+ vs. 1) and that the stakes, while being personal, are not as wholy selfish as Ten's desire to save Captain Adelaide vs. Elven's trying to save Rory, Amy AND the rest of the people on their ship. The principle is the same. Apart from everything he does to Kazran, he certainly changes things for Abigail AND Abigail's family, who did get to see her for one Christmas Eve.
- It's particularly jarring when you consider that Eleven should be particularly sensitive to this kind of trickery after what Ten did AND what he personally had to deal with regarding the cracks in the universe.
- Of course, since this is now the universe reconstructed from Amy's memories, ARE the Laws of Time still the same?
- Also conisder that unlike the "The Waters of Mars", this apparently was not a fixed point in time. He didn't hesistate during the Silurian two parter to try to alter the timeline either. I think that as long as it's not a corner stone of the time line, he has not trouble causing changes. Also, Amy and Rory were in danger.
- Exactly. Yuri and Mia were also saved and, unlike Adelaide, didn't kill themselves to try and minimize Ten's changes. Unless the crashing of that ship or the death of at least one of the people on board would change the course of history like Adelaide's death did, the Doctor had no reason to allow it to happen. Really, if trying to save lives might alter history every time the Doctor does anything, he really might as well not bother doing ANYTHING for fear of makingi everything worse.
- Of course, since this is now the universe reconstructed from Amy's memories, ARE the Laws of Time still the same?
- Further...and this cannot be said enough, the Reapers only come as a last ditch effort to correct a massive paradox that there is no other way to clear up, the "because there were 2 copies of us there" reason he gave was not that it CAUSED the paradox, just that it made it far far easier for it to occur, and two different copies of the same person touching does not do anything other then cause a shock between them sometimes, Rose touching her baby self was only bad because they were already in the middle of a gaping wound in time so what was normally not a big deal was made into one.
- You can actually see the reverse argument of this in "The Big Bang" when Amy is able to meet her younger self without repercussions because the universe was ending anyway.
- It's particularly jarring when you consider that Eleven should be particularly sensitive to this kind of trickery after what Ten did AND what he personally had to deal with regarding the cracks in the universe.
- Abigail's illness bothered me on several levels. First, because she never thought to ask The Doctor if he could cure her or take her someplace where she might find a cure for her condition after he spent several days apparently showing her the wonders of the universe. Second, because after she tells Kazran about it, HE never thinks to ask The Doctor if he might know of a way to save Abigail, suddenly becoming all bitter and cool as he realizes the woman he loves only has one day left to live. And finally, because The Doctor can't put two and two together as to why a girl in cryogenic storage might have a timer on her icebox. Particularly when, after he introduces himself as The Doctor, she asks if he is one of her doctors... and no clarification is asked for or given as to why she might be excited by the idea that a doctor would have let her out of cryogenic suspension! I know Eleven is a little dense... but come on!
- It's worth remembering that we don't know exactly what her condition is; even in the Doctor Who universe, presumably not everything has some magical miracle cure-all waiting for it, and if you're at the stage where you only have eight-to-one day left to live it's perhaps fair to say that even if a cure existed, the illness has probably progressed to such a stage where it would be a moot point anyway. It seems that Abigail has come to terms with her. It's possible that the Doctor has realized on some level at least why the pod has a timer but has decided not to press the matter and spoil the mood, particularly since he's only expecting this to be a one-off event anyway (and in later trips they seem quite packed, so he might not have time to raise the issue). Abigail also seems to have made her peace with her impending death, so it's possible that she simply might not think to ask. As for Kazran—he's just had his heart broken, and he's got plenty of guilt issues to work through now. He's not thinking clearly.
- Um... anyone remember New Earth? With that hospital, where they'd found cures for every disease known to man? Admittedly the nurses had gone a bit far, but why couldn't the Doctor take Abigail there?
- Diseases die off, mutate and get replaced by brand new ones. Presumably, the one Abigail had didn't exist in any shape or form in the year 5 billion.
- Plus, given that the nurses had indeed 'gone a bit far', I wouldn't be surprised if the hospital was shut down. Not to mention that New Earth was completely decimated by the Bliss virus not long after, meaning that their medical facilities were probably not as good as they once had been.
- Six years is hardly "immediately after" the events of "New Earth", but yeah, I'm sure the Doctor doesn't want his hands dirty.
- Being a bit pedantic here, but who said 'immediately' after? Six years probably counts as 'not long after' (which is the actual wording), relatively speaking.
- Point, but, the Bliss virus was an entirely new strain that killed in minutes. It's true that cat nuns also treated fast-acting diseases, but even they couldn't take care of an entire planet even if the Bliss virus was pre-existing.
- The point was more that post-Bliss, as with any post-apocalyptic society New Earth which had been drastically depopulated and the survivors forced to survive in an underground motorway for decades, was probably struggling to get by a bit and probably didn't have such flash facilities that could cure absolutely everything as they had had pre-apocalypse, not that the cat-nurses were somehow responsible for Bliss spreading (although, since the hospital was presumably shut down this probably didn't help matters).
- The hospital in New Earth that operated by cynically giving fatal diseases to a multitude of poor, innocent clones and watching their torment to find a cure for them? The one that would probably have meant that Abigail's fatal disease would have been deliberately given to someone else to find a cure for it, who would no doubt have died horribly as a result? Can't think why the Doctor wouldn't want to go back there again for medical treatment...
- Say Abigail had that disease that turned her into stone. The cat nurses had a cure for that. Sure, they had to test it on innocent people grown specifically for that purpose. On the other hand, the Doctor couldn't go back and stop that from happening. The people were already given the disease and the cats already found the cure. What good would the Doctor not using that cure do? It wouldn't make the lives of the people exposed to find the cure any better. Besides, that disease was also cured further into the future (hence the Doctor's surprise that they had a cure ALREADY, not that one existed at all) so presumably at some point Abigail's disease would have been cured somewhere at some time. Of course, if she only had a little over a week to live at the start and he might not have realized it right away it could have been too late to save her.
- Because the Doctor by this point now knows what's been happening there and that by going back to that particular hospital, even if he goes before the events of "New Earth" or between the events of "New Earth" and "Gridlock", he's in a way tacitly supporting and perpetuating what those nurses are / were doing—which is, make no mistake, medical torture (regardless of the potential aims or benefits, deliberately infecting someone who has not given consent to see what happens, even if you're deriving a cure from it, is abhorrent). Okay, maybe not using any cure derived there on principle isn't going to help Abigail, but then it's easy to stand by a principle when nothing's at stake (and let's face, do you honestly think Abigail would want that cure if she knew where it came from? Would she want to be cured knowing that her cure was the result of someone else's suffering?). Going further in time to where a cure had been developed independently, yeah, there's a case that the Doctor can do that—but the specific question being raised and addressed is why doesn't the Doctor go to the hospital in "New Earth", and there's a clear moral and ethical reason why he wouldn't go there.
- Not really. The Doctor can't really change what happened their any sooner or he'd be changing his own past and bad things happen then. It's already ending on a certain date. Going in, say, on the day before he showed up with Rose, getting a cure, and leaving isn't enabling or supporting them. If he's really willing to let someone die that he could easily save for no other reason than because he's too morally superior to use advances in medicine that were discovered in less-than-ethical ways (which is how some advances were made IRL) then that's not admirable, it's sanctimonious and the people that he's letting die so he doesn't have to feel a litle awkward morally deserve better. Remember, it's not like he's letting the hospital continue. He ALREADY shut it down on a certain date and saving or not saving Abigail or whoever else in the future will not affect the fate of the hospital, the nurses, or the human experiments at all.
- This isn't about simply not being able to shut the hospital down earlier, and isn't (entirely) about moral righteousness, abstractness or sanctimoniousness; this is about the very real fact that if the Doctor takes someone to that particular hospital, he's going to be directly responsible for enabling the horrific and unnecessary suffering of an innocent. And the Doctor will do this knowing full well that he's directly enabling the horrific and unnecessary suffering of an innocent. This isn't abstract, this isn't a case of indirectly using a cure years after it was found by questionable means here; he knows full well that if he takes Abigail to that hospital, those nurses will directly infect some poor bastard with Abigail's disease in order to find a cure for it. If you really think the Doctor of all people is going to be willing to do this (it's in his name for crying out loud) and is a hypocrite for not doing so, then we have very different ideas about who exactly the Doctor is; sometimes, the ends really don't justify the means. More to the point (which I can't help but notice you didn't address earlier) -- do you think that Abigail, who is the important person here, would want to be cured knowing that her suffering was only relieved at the cost of directly enabling someone else's suffering? As for sanctimoniousness, at the risk of Godwinning the conversation it's worth noting that to this very day there's questions about whether or not it's appropriate to use techniques and knowledge derived from human experimentation in Nazi concentration camps knowing where it came from and who suffered in order to discover it.
- I think the point of our disagreement is this: your last post indicated that you don't think the cats already had a cure for Abigail's disease and so the people would be further infected in order to cure her. I think it's likely that Abigail's disease was already cured by that point since they've managed to cure so much else. If the cure was already found by infecting those people completely independent of Abigail showing up or not then I don't see how making use of a cure already found is enabling it. I wasn't suggesting that the Doctor asks them to find a cure. If the cats didn't have a cure for the disease yet then the Doctor could go further into the future when the universe did have a cure. We know specifically that the disease that turned people to stone had a cure already found so if Abigail had that disease then taking a cure for Abigail would not be further hurting anyone. What happened to the humans the cats experimented on was horrible but I think that continuing to use the cures (at least until the Bliss virus decimates the planet) will allow some good to come out of what happened to those people as it will continue to save lives for a few years. It doesn't make what happened to those people acceptable or worth it but rejecting the cures that could save so many because of how they were discovered would just make all the suffering that they went through in the process of finding the cures pointless.
- I think your position is made a lot clearer to me as well; certainly, it would be less morally iffy for the Doctor to go to that hospital if they'd already cured Abigail's illness. But even so, I think the simple knowledge he has of what had happened there would make him a bit reluctant to go back there anyway; sort of like you'd be a bit reluctant to go to a hospital where someone you knew previously had died due to negligence or malpractice—they might have cleaned up their act, but there's still that reminder (not a perfect analogy, granted). Maybe not logical, but then, the Doctor's not really a logical guy. Plus, we don't know exactly how long they've been doing the whole 'infecting clones' thing—could be they've had the system going since the hospital opened and finding the cure would involve that, in which case it becomes morally iffy again.
- Although really, given just how far in the future New Earth is, it's likely that Abigail's disease was cured, eradicated, and completely forgotten about, and that reintroducing it now would be like taking a smallpox patient from the 15th century to a modern hospital—you'd be just as likely to cause a fresh outbreak as cure your patient.
- If the TARDIS protects against that then there's nothing to worry about and if it doesn't then all companions have a chance of picking up or accidentally spreading a disease from a different time period. It might also be possible to get the cure for Abigail without her having to actually physically show up and there's no indication that Abigail's disease was contagious.
- Fair enough on the re-infection risk, but that sill leaves the possibility (likelihood, really) that Abigail's disease simply doesn't exist by then.
- A different question about Abigail's disease from Christmas Carol: What was it? It had zero shown symptoms. She didn't have so much as a cough or a sniffle. How could it be that the people on the planet knew so much about the disease that they could count down to the precise DAY you would die from it without a cure? Heck, with no symptoms, how did she get diagnosed in the first place? It really seemed like Abigail was given the disease for no reason beyond "To create drama." I'd buy incurable, or precise knowledge of time of death, but incurable with a precise knowledge of the time of death and no symptoms only hours before she's allegedly going to die? That's just a cheap cop out.
- It's implied that the freezing process has kept her symptoms at bay.
- In "The Christmas Carol," why does the Doctor take Kazran and Abigail to all of Earth's greatest spectacles? In Old!Kazran's pictures, we see that he took them to the Egyptian pyramids, the Eiffel Tower- and later, of course, Frank Sinatra's home. They're from the future. On a different planet. Why would they ever care about what's amazing on Earth?
- Two reasons. One, Earth is the planet the Doctor knows best next to Galifrey, so he's naturally going to be able to know more good suggestions for it than for anywhere else. Two, they're humans, the descendents of a colony. They'll want to see their ancestral home for the same reasons that a third-generation American is naturally going to want to visit The Old Country- to see where they came from and get a sense of their own past.
- Do we know that they're human? They could be from one of the many many identical-looking races that don't happen to be from Earth. And furthermore, I don't think you can say that someone whose family has been in a new location for generations is naturally' going to be particularly interested in where their family used to be from centuries ago.
- Given that people on their planet are singing Christmas carols (which are what give the Doctor the idea to "Scrooge" Kazran), I'd say that it's quite likely that their world is an Earth colony, so yeah, they're probably human.
- It's a colony of Earth-humans. When Kazran narrates at the beginning, he says "back on Earth, we called this Christmas".
- Perhaps he simply thought they'd be cool things to show off to them regardless? Like, "hey guys, I know someone who's throwing a really good party, you wanna go?" or "I've been to this place loads of times, it's really cool, you have to see it!" Plus, it's time travel. Even for an alien on a different planet, going back centuries to a different planet has to be pretty awesome regardless of where you end up; we don't start complaining about human companions being psyched to end up on a different planet, after all, and by this logic they shouldn't care because it's not like it's their world or anything.
- Do we know that they're human? They could be from one of the many many identical-looking races that don't happen to be from Earth. And furthermore, I don't think you can say that someone whose family has been in a new location for generations is naturally' going to be particularly interested in where their family used to be from centuries ago.
- Two reasons. One, Earth is the planet the Doctor knows best next to Galifrey, so he's naturally going to be able to know more good suggestions for it than for anywhere else. Two, they're humans, the descendents of a colony. They'll want to see their ancestral home for the same reasons that a third-generation American is naturally going to want to visit The Old Country- to see where they came from and get a sense of their own past.
- It's a Christmas episode so it mostly just runs on Rule of Funny, but there's a major bit of Forgotten Phlebotinum here. It's established at the end of "The Satan Pit" that the TARDIS has a tractor beam and can implicitly counteract gravity. Couldn't the Doctor have just towed the ship safely to the ground, or back into space for that matter? It almost seems like he risked thousands of lives just to teach a grumpy old man a lesson.
- Traditionally, the excuse for Forgotten equipment/item/weapon is the fact that the TARDIS is a second hand piece of junk that constantly breaks down... and actually it's a very good one. Not even Time Lord technology could reliably last a thousand years with shoddy maintenance.
- Didn't the Doctor say he couldn't lock on to the ship for whatever reason?
- Yeah, I have a problem with Kazran already; The Doctor has dealt with less-worse people in rather karmic ways. This man-who is willing to let 4000+ people die-is someone who SHOULD be bringing down the entire known wrath of the Time Lord, abusive parent or no. Because this man is total shit.
- At the beginning, Kazran clearly is very much about to bring down the wrath of the Time Lord on himself; it's only when he hesitates to hurt the young boy that the Doctor sees there's a spark of something that can be redeemed within Kazran, and so decides on a different course of action than the "destructive wrath" approach. Hey, it's Christmas, after all. Remember, the whole point of the episode is the Doctor trying to turn Kazran into someone who isn't a total shit.
Space/Time
- When is this supposed to happen? If the presumption is that Amy's question at the beginning of Space is pregnancy related (i.e., she knows she's pregnant and wants to ask about time-heads), then we're already at the absolute minimum a week into her pregnancy (barring access to some sort of future/Time Lord instant pregnancy detector that the Doctor somehow can't know about). If we are to assume Space & Time occur just after Christmas Carol and then the Doctor drops them back on Earth right after, we're then faced with a two month time skip to Impossible Astronaut. Amy would have to work pretty damn hard to hide the symptoms of a pregnancy for two months considering her stickly build and the fact that her husband's a professional nurse. And that's just on the smallest feasible time scale, it's just as possible that much more time elapsed than what is assumed above. Oh, and flying to Utah would only exacerbate her symptoms, unless they took a boat. She certainly can't be a ganger tat early, as has been speculated, since she still believes herself to be pregnant at that point.
- Well, as stated in "The Almost People", by "The Impossible Astronaut", Amy had been kidnapped by the Silence shortly before the events of the episode. Amy's however many months gone on Demon's Run, but un-pregnant in a Ganger body in Utah. Probably doesn't explain everything, but clears a few issues up, particularly the "symptoms" part.
The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon
- Why did Rory think a Viking Funeral was the proper way to cremate the Doctor? He’s Rory the Roman. Romans cremated their dead on land.
- Because he saw the boat there.
- Better than having a Doctor-body bonfire on the side of lake and having to pick up ashes of ex-Doctor. I actually figured the Doctor had the boat left there for that reason.
- The Doctor we see is actually the Teselecta with the Doctor inside. He set up the boat there on purpose (and gave the old!Canton Delaware III some gasoline) to suggest cremation over water. Assuming that the boat also burned and eventually sank, this made for a nice escape route for the Teselecta. Once it was underwater, it probably waited around for awhile, transformed into another form, and eventually exited the lake.
- I thought the Teselecta was controlled solely by the Doctor at that point, so he could just leave the Teselecta, which is a robot afterall, to burn. And since it wasn't controlled by its original controllers (I think they just made another) it wasn't possible to have it escape and anyway, I think the robot being destroyed was what fooled the universe.
- Actually, it wasn't destroyed. I think "The Wedding of River Song" established it was "barely singed".
- What happened in the following three months between The Impossible Astronaut and Day of the Moon? Somehow they escape the warehouse, running away from the Astronaut Girl and a bunch of pissed off Silents then suddenly Canton is pretending to hunt them down...why? They have goddamn Nixon still on their side, but somehow they still need to hide from FBI?
- Deception, my dear friend. By the end of The Impossible Astronaut, The Doctor probably had an inkling of what they were up against. He then needed confirmation and investigate the scale of the problem. How best to do this without The Silence realising? By having Canton arrest the TARDIS crew so it looked as though The Silence were still in control of the entire situation.
- A bigger question is why did the Silence arrange this FBI manhunt (because honestly, who else would have started it?) when they could have gone after our heroes personally with much greater efficiency, and just how did Canton manage to put himself in charge of the operation? Nixon might be the answer, but it wouldn't have hurt to show at least a bit of these preparations in a flashback.
- The same answering poster here. What I meant is that The Doctor asked Canton to pretend to arrest them. As in, The Doctor using Canton as HIS FBI plant to arrest Tardis crew. (So no, The Silence were not involved in the arrests. At all.) As for Canton being in charge, yes it could have been Nixon and it could have been shown better. As for why the Silence did not involve themselves better - they probably had no idea that they were actually dealing with The Doctor in the flesh, and thought of the Tardis crew as a pesky group of humans underserving of their attention (what with their mind-edit ability).
- But you just essentially said that the Silence couldn't give a flying fuck about any of this personally because they can make the TARDIS crew forget about them anyway. And if they don't give a fuck, why bother with the fake manhunt? I like the whole idea as a plot point, but the whole INSTANT DRAMA COLD OPENING PLOT TWISTS IN TV SERIES really needed a single line or two worth of context to explain things a little. A quick flashback of Silence hypnotizing Area 51/FBI into a Doctor manhunt frenzy and Doctor quickly planning around it by framing Canton as the top agent would've made it feel less like 'He's inexplicably evil. Nevermind, he's not really. What was the point of the whole thing again?'.
- The Silence had NOTHING to do with any of the arrests, period. The Doctor asked Canton to mobilise the FBI against the TARDIS crew. Canton pulled this off with authority from Nixon, presumably.
- If the Silence had nothing to do with it, then why bother with anything? The whole plan involves everybody running around, sighting the Silents here and there, and eventually being reunited in the Tardis. But they could have done all of that without bothering to get themselves arrested etc.. Just escape from the warehouse in the previous episode, get to the TARDIS, and hop around for a couple of months doing investigations.
- The Doctor needed a Silent inside a perfect prison, so presumably he just acted alien inside Area 51; and since he needs Team TARDIS with him, he makes Canton bring Amy and Rory the only way they would be allowed to get inside Area 51.
- It doesn't make sense to say that Amy and Rory would never be allowed in Area 51 unless they were captured; they had Nixon as their ally. Nixon could just let them in.
- Ah, but why did Amy and Rory need to get to Area 51 in the first place? Because the Doctor was playing prisoner. Why was he doing that? To fake out the Silence. This was all to fool them and if Nixon was openly on their side then the Silence wouldn't be fooled. Nixon only reveals himself much, much later when the plan is already in motion.
- Canton only managed to shoot a Silent at the very end and Amy, Rory, and the Doctor weren't armed. It seems unlikely that the Doctor's plan hinged on capturing a Silent and thus he needed to spend three months getting the prison built.
- It doesn't make sense to say that Amy and Rory would never be allowed in Area 51 unless they were captured; they had Nixon as their ally. Nixon could just let them in.
- Deception, my dear friend. By the end of The Impossible Astronaut, The Doctor probably had an inkling of what they were up against. He then needed confirmation and investigate the scale of the problem. How best to do this without The Silence realising? By having Canton arrest the TARDIS crew so it looked as though The Silence were still in control of the entire situation.
- We don't know that the Doctor planned on having a Silent captured and didn't just take advantage of the fact that Canton shot one. Canton was the only one with any method of capturing one at all and if he hadn't happened to get a chance to shoot one would the Doctor just give up? I doubt it. He already had the image from Amy's phone he could use in the broadcast with a voice-over about killing the Silence.
- Why did Amy tally up the Silence on her face (in the orphanage)? She can't see the marks there - they'd be useless!
- Also, how exactly did she know where the markings were? The fifth line of all those tally marks were all perfectly in place with the first set of four, she would have had to use a mirror of some sort. Bear in mind, she couldn't look away from the Silents.
- Perhaps she saw some Silence in the reflection of a mirror or window and tallied them using her reflection.
- She needed to keep her eyes on The Silence as she was making the tally; hence on her face since she could not look away without forgetting.
- But it's not like she had runout of room on her hands/arms by that point.
- She turned around to face the window and noticed the marks on her face (the Silence were behind her on the ceiling) so it's probable that she looked up, saw them, and decided to mark her face and turn around immediately after knowing that although she would immediately forget, she would instantly see her reflection and know that they were there.
- The stuff the A51 guys used to make a prison for the Doctor was 'dwarf-star alloy.' It's 1969 and man is just landing on the moon, how have they gotten anything from a dwarf star?
- The stuff the Area 51 guys were using. It was probably the remains of the Roswell crash. After all, it would survive even if absolutely everything else got turned to ash.
- It's also possible that the Doctor somehow slipped the material to the U.S. military at an earlier time, in the guise of a crash, for example.
- Depending on how classic Who broadcast date related to when the episodes were set, it's conceivable that the Doctor (as portrayed by John Pertwee) was already a consultant with UNIT in the time Day of the Moon was set. He could have 'consulted' with Area 51.
- Regardless of the impossibilities of reconciling the "UNIT dating controversy", that would basically make the Third Doctor's earliest full-time consulting with UNIT at least five months in the past relative to the broadcast of season 7, seeing as the 3-month "manhunt" was between April and July 1969. But ignoring that, the Doctor's hardly visited America that frequently, and the last time we saw him at Area 51 in the 50s in the 2009 animated special Dreamland, they weren't exactly on good terms.
- The Silents have been meddling in human civilization for thousands of years. The Doctor has been meddling in human civilization for thousands of years. So how is it that this is the first time that the Doctor has taken enough notice of them to do something about them? Certainly, he would have seen them in passing and forgotten, like everyone else, but there had to be other important events that both were involved in.
- Wibbly wobbly, timey-wimey. They only just took over the human race in this time-stream, thus they didn't exist before Series 5, like the fact that the time cracks didn't exist before series 5, and bad wolf didnt exist before series 1. Discount all of the stories not set on earth over the past series.
- Or they were staying the hell away from the Doctor. There aren't that many of them, and the Doctor would forget them. It was only when they started actively interfering that he noticed.
- The Silence by their very nature is very good at discouraging people taking an active interest in them. It took the Doctor being sent mysterious marked envelopes from himself (...probably) to take a proper look into something they were involved in. Otherwise, the Silence probably makes a point of not doing anything that would draw his (or anyones) direct attention.
- Don't forget that the Silents have been implicated in the destruction of the TARDIS, thus causing the cracks in the universe and eventually leading to Big Bang 2 to set everything straight. It's possible (perhaps even likely), that the Silents were a very minor race in the original timeline; they arranged the whole sequence of events leading up to Big Bang 2 because they knew (somehow) that the new timeline created by this event would involve the Silents as major players. Thus, the Doctor never encountered the Silents in any episodes prior to "The Big Bang" because that was a different timeline-ish-thing and the Silents literally weren't on Earth at all. That doesn't completely answer the question, but it's a start.
- You do realize we have no solid evidence that the Silents are responsible for the TARDIS explosion. "And Silence will fall" could be referring to their own defeat. Which may be a very bad thing for the universe as a whole.
- As of "The Wedding of River Song", we now know that "Silence will fall" refers the death of the Doctor, in order to ensure that he does not answer the Question at some point in the future. So it refers to the goal of the Silents, not their defeat. And while we can't be sure the Silents caused the TARDIS explosion, they're the most likely candidate. (After all, nearly every other villain of the show was trying to prevent the explosion by putting the Doctor in the Pandorica.)
- True but it is a future Doctor who knows how this will all work out who sends them to 1969 in the first place (is it a stable time loop or from his perspective were the Silence never dealt with?). Hopefully, he wouldn't send his past self to really screw things up for everybody. And also, the fact that the Silent honestly seems to think that it would be in humanity's best interest to kill any Silence they ever meet the moment they met them certainly doesn't point to them being good guys.
- You do realize we have no solid evidence that the Silents are responsible for the TARDIS explosion. "And Silence will fall" could be referring to their own defeat. Which may be a very bad thing for the universe as a whole.
- The whole manhunt thing still doesn't make sense. Were the rest of Canton's team aware of the subterfuge? If not, how the hell did Canton get away with fake-shooting everyone? Was he supposed to just be firing blanks, and then Amy and Rory just played dead? Because honestly, you don't have to be a trained FBI agent to spot the difference between someone being really shot and someone who was just faking a hit. ASSUMING that the gang all knew that they were only being fake manhunted, which the episode never makes clear if they do - sure, Amy seems pretty au fait by the time she pops out the body bag, but she and Rory seemed to genuinely believe they were to be killed at the start, and River chose to dive out of a sky scraper window with no guarantee she'd be saved rather than take part in the plan she (presumably?) already agreed to... More basically, we're not even told why this charade is going on in the first place, Nixon has apparently been kept in the loop and onside from the beginning, so why are they suddenly on the lamb from the FBI? If its all a complex ploy to get inside a dwarf star alloy cell, (which, I assume comes from the Roswell crash, but it'd be nice if they'd've actually said that, rather than just pulling it out of nowhere), then why couldn't the Doctor just request that, and save himself months of being strapped to a chair?
- Rule of Drama? That's all I can think of honestly, as you raise good points.
- There are a lot of odd things in Day of the Moon, just like the manhunt. Did anyone else feel like Impossible Astronaut and Day of the Moon really ought to have had another episode separating them. Where the Doctor and co. escape from the warehouse Cliff Hanger, come to realize the Silence are out there, and spend the episode trying to figure them out, then maybe get betrayed, when the Silence reveal their ability to command humans, forcing the Doctor to get himself captured so the others can escape.
- I thought the implication was, basically, that there was a "middle" part of The Impossible Astronaut/the Day of the Moon, and we and all the characters involved forgot about it.
- There are a lot of odd things in Day of the Moon, just like the manhunt. Did anyone else feel like Impossible Astronaut and Day of the Moon really ought to have had another episode separating them. Where the Doctor and co. escape from the warehouse Cliff Hanger, come to realize the Silence are out there, and spend the episode trying to figure them out, then maybe get betrayed, when the Silence reveal their ability to command humans, forcing the Doctor to get himself captured so the others can escape.
- Rule of Drama? That's all I can think of honestly, as you raise good points.
- My little query, mainly from people who have maybe heard rumours from later episodes - is that it for the Silence? I hope not, their whole concept makes them cracking villains.
- Nope. And it looks like they're having involvement in series 7 too.
- Shouldn't the "Kill Us All" recording inserted into the moon landing pulled off a stable timeloop for Rory and Amy (and probably the Doctor)? They would have seen the footage before this adventure.
- It was more like they saw the original moon landing footage when they saw it for the first time, as did the Tenth Doctor and Martha when they went back to 1969.
- The way it was worded, the Tenth Doctor and Martha likely went to see Neil Armstrong land while not meddling in their own timestream rather than watch the footage.
- Another worrying detail: the Silent filmed by Canton spoke English, so the "instruction" was broadcast in English. And not everybody on Earth who has seen the footage of Armstrong understands English... It's even worse if the Silent spoke *another* language, that was being translated for us by the TARDIS.
- The Doctor hooked it up to the TARDIS translator. It's not exactly a complicated message.
- Regarding the original question, one of the effects of the Silence is that information about them is forgotten over time, presumably including instructions such as this one. It's unlikely that none of the four time travellers had seen the Moon landing footage before, but quite possible that they hadn't seen it in the last few years.
- It was more like they saw the original moon landing footage when they saw it for the first time, as did the Tenth Doctor and Martha when they went back to 1969.
- The Silence can shoot lightning from their hands which, as we've seen, can make a human being explode. If we all tried to kill them on sight, wouldn't it result in more human deaths than Silence deaths?
- Maybe, maybe not. It's heavily implied the Silence are outnumbered, so even if each one manages to kill ten humans, they'll get wiped out. The dead humans will be filed under missing persons. Also, we've seen that they don't use the lightning thing very often, which leads me to believe they can't use it very often. But that's spiraling into WMG.
- It looks like they need to use up a lot of electrical energy and it's rather slow. Or was that just me?
- Only armed humans would be able to kill them and they've shown themselves to be more durable than humans. A few may die but they'll quickly catch onto the fact that humans attack them now and stop going near humans.
- But they haven't been shown to be more durable than humans. Canton shot that one once and immediately got it medical attention. Humans can survive that much, and when you factor in that he didn't know where any of its vital organs were, it makes more sense.
- It depends a bit on Silent psychology. Maybe the Doctor figures that the Silents will just bug out rather than stand and fight. After all, their whole shtick depends on secrecy.
- Maybe, maybe not. It's heavily implied the Silence are outnumbered, so even if each one manages to kill ten humans, they'll get wiped out. The dead humans will be filed under missing persons. Also, we've seen that they don't use the lightning thing very often, which leads me to believe they can't use it very often. But that's spiraling into WMG.
- In Day of the Moon, why would Amy say that Rory fell out of the sky? Sure, it's a figure of speech, but wouldn't you avoid using it as a figure of speech when you know someone who LITERALLY fell out of the sky? There's no way she could have thought that saying that wouldn't cause any confusion. Also, a smaller complaint: that sort of language implies that Rory entered her life suddenly and it was love at first sight or something when I recall Rory saying something about Amy making him dress up as the Doctor when they were kids, which means they've known each other for a long time, making it unlikely he just popped into her life one day and swept her off her feet. Basically, her word choice isn't necessarily incorrect or anything like that, but it is so poorly-selected that it just seems awkward.
- I think Amy can be cut a little slack for awkward phrasing when she was kidnapped, terrified, and sobbing. Who knows what the Silence were doing to her then? If she HAD thought that it might cause confusion, she would have clarified. It's not like she was trying to make Rory and the Doctor wonder who she was talking about, after all. I disagree with Amy saying that Rory 'fell out of the sky' and made her boring life interesting meant a love-at-first-sight situation. As you said, it could have very easily been referring to the Doctor and she certainly did not fall in love with him at seven. She might have met him suddenly and he was the only one willing to humor her about the Doctor so she had a friend and her life got more interesting.
- I guess that this is a very good figure of speech if you account for the fact she'd spent most of her time thinking that he was gay, so knowing that he was available for her in a romantic way was a total surprise, as it's shown in Let's Kill Hitler, so that's kind of dropping from the sky, in a way
- After they hijack the moon footage and create the "you should kill us all on sight" command, there's clips of random people about to attack the Silents. One of these clips is a guard in the White House, who pulls his gun on a Silent standing in plain view in the hallway. My question: Why isn't that Silent already dead? Even without hypnotic commands, somebody is going to look in that direction at some point and scream bloody murder. That's going to cause other people to look in that direction and raise the alarm, and probably fire their weapons. Sure, if any individual looks away he'll lose his memory. But it only takes that one initial scream to get everyone's attention, and from that point on you can figure that there will always (or at least often) be at least one guy looking at the Silent. (Even if they don't figure out the memory thing; I'm just talking statistical odds here)
- This is a stretch, but maybe everyone in the room had previously been given hypnotic commands not to look in that direction or something.
- What was up with the beginning of "Impossible Astronaut"? Why would the Doctor need to "get their attention" by making random alterations to history? Do Amy and Rory regularly re-read history books just to see if anything has changed from the last time they read them? And how would the Doctor make sure that only Amy and Rory noticed the changes, and also that no-one noticed before the date that episode takes place in?
- He didn't have to get their attention. He was just having fun popping up in places that they didn't expect and if he told them he'd do that, it could be just a game. From their perspective, nothing really changed. It always happened that way, he was always in the movie, he was always in the history book. Though, like you said, they might not have done research on historical Doctor-ish figures until they got back. And what if other people noticed before Amy and Rory did? What difference would that make? Presumably, for the cut with the Doctor waving to the camera wearing a fez to end up in the movie, it had to be worked out with somebody.
- I'm confused as to what happened when the Doctor's gang entered the TARDIS, and Canton saw the hologram Silent. First, why did the Doctor make the hologram appear? If it was to explain the post-hypnotic message thing, then how did HE figure that out? Also, when Canton first saw the holographic Silent, why did they all look away from it, and why did the Doctor tell him to straighten his bowtie?
- Straightening the bowtie was clearly to prove the hypnosis theory. He probably guessed that the Silents, being parasites no one could remember, must have some way of influencing human behavior and his guess was correct. He had three months to think about it, after all. He likely made the hologram appear first to see if anyone could remember it and then to test his hypnosis theory. I'm not sure what you mean by 'why did they all look away from it.' Canton was the only one facing the direction that the hologram appeared in.
- OP here. What I meant by that was, when Canton first saw the holographic Silent, and it was recorded, you can clearly hear River's voice. Presumably, along with The Doctor and River, Amy and Rory were looking. Even if Canton turned away, shouldn't the others still be looking at, or if they also followed the Doctor's order, be scrambeling to fix his bowtie?
- Presumably they looked away first.
- Someone asked how exact an image of an angel needs to be before it becomes an angel. The same question applies to an image of a Silent and the amnesia effect. The TARDIS' holographic projector, Amy's camera phone and a black-and-white TV screen all did the trick. But what about a text saying "it had a big ugly head and a business suit"? Would you forget reading it? Because of the gap between The Impossible Astronaut and Day of the Moon, they never really explained how the protagonists got to remember a few basic things about their new enemy. I feel cheated.
- According to the Doctor, all information relating to them will gradually fade, but depending on the person's memory and how often they're reminded, it varies. The Doctor remembered his plan the entire 3 months, even on his own, whereas Canton forgot as he was unable to have someone remind him. As long as the team stays in communication, to keep each others memory sharp, you could assumedly keep the details indefinitely. But that wouldn't be practical for the average person, which is another reason why the Silence are so effective.
- I think it's a sliding scale, based on how directly something is related to the Silence. So the visual image of a Silent slips from your memory instantly, but the general idea of "There is an alien race called the Silence" can hang in your memory for much longer before it eventually fades. It also helps if you're intentionally trying to remember them (unlike that woman in the bathroom), and it helps if you send yourself reminders (like making marks on your arm) etc. etc.
- I assumed that they literally actually forget about the creatures every time they stop looking at them, but they don't forget the plans made whilst facing them. Thus the Doctor forgets what he's fighting when they arent in the room, but he still knows that he's fighting something he's just vague on the details and only remembers them when he's facing them again.
- That makes a lot of sense really. The Doctor, of course, is pretty clever, so if he found himself locked in a prison, with a vague idea of some enemy he was fighting, the first thing he'd think to himself was, "So, they affect memory" and hang on to any memories about them or a plan to defeat them with a bear-grip.
- I had kind of figured that they made the plans when not looking at the silence. All it really takes is one of them looking at the silence and talking about them to someone who isn't looking at them, and then getting filled in when they look away. Okay maybe strategic planning while a silence is standing right there is not the best of ideas, but images of them have the same effect and team TARDIS does in fact have an image of the silence in Amy's phone.
- That makes a lot of sense really. The Doctor, of course, is pretty clever, so if he found himself locked in a prison, with a vague idea of some enemy he was fighting, the first thing he'd think to himself was, "So, they affect memory" and hang on to any memories about them or a plan to defeat them with a bear-grip.
- I kind of have always assumed it needs to be an image OF the actual Angel/Silent, not an artistic rendering. In other words, a captured image from a camera of some sort... after all, there's a big difference between "this is what my brain and body working together can imitate from what I've seen" (which btw would be pretty hard with either of those creatures, as Angels would move in between glances back up to draw them, and the Silent would be forgotten when you looked down to draw) and "visually captured from the light bouncing off the actual creature". The hologram is obviously copied directly from a camera picture (I believe it was Amy's camera phone), thus why it works. A verbal description is quite a different matter, though I suspect the Silents have long instructed people not to remember ever seeing them, so people have not historically remembered enough to describe them.
- According to the Doctor, all information relating to them will gradually fade, but depending on the person's memory and how often they're reminded, it varies. The Doctor remembered his plan the entire 3 months, even on his own, whereas Canton forgot as he was unable to have someone remind him. As long as the team stays in communication, to keep each others memory sharp, you could assumedly keep the details indefinitely. But that wouldn't be practical for the average person, which is another reason why the Silence are so effective.
- A single cell of a Time Lord's body is dangerous in the wrong hands - since when? Surely the Doctor must sometimes shed blood or flakes of skin. He even lost a whole hand and it didn't seem to matter.
- Except that time it was used to make a new Doctor and give Donna knowledge the Doctor had. The only reason it wasn't that bad was because Jack retrieved it in time.
- Well first of all, shed skin cells are usually long dead and dried out, so that might not be as useful (though blood? Yeah). In the meantime, it IS possible apparently to slip "Time Lord DNA" into other genomes - as happened to Melody Pond/River Song, though this turned out to have been an accident due to her conception happening within the Time Vortex; though arguably, this isn't genuinely transferred directly from a Time Lord, so much as it is the same mutations -likely from the same environmental trigger - that make a Time Lord most distinct from a human. They even initially thought that that was deliberate modification by the baddies. Presumably, having a sample of Time Lord blood, assuming you knew what it was and knew advanced enough science to do it, could indeed allow you to modify a genome to allow for say, regeneration. And heck, given the evil Time Lords we've seen (The Rani, The Master, etc.), we do in fact know that an ability like regeneration is dangerous in the wrong hands. Secondly, though, we now know that that version of River was a future version of River who was well aware of what was going on and how it was supposed to turn out. She even notes, after The Reveal of this, what it was like having to pretend she didn't know it was herself in the astronaut suit - and it's this scene that she also reveals to Amy that The Doctor did, in fact, fake his own death, meaning that she knows he's still alive and was simply going along with his plan to fake it. Which means, folks, that that phrase she uttered was an excuse to destroy the evidence that The Doctor was still alive.
- The whole 'genocide' thing does seem rather unlike the Doctor. It's possible that he assumed most of them would make it off the planet or just that the writers were so caught up in making it a triumphant moment that they forgot his personality.
- The Doctor has committed genocide before so I don't think that's particularly out of character. The Doctor also doesn't have many options here. With the hologram of the Silent the Doctor could experiment with orders and since fighting the Silence would be infinitely easier if they could remember them, I think it's safe to assume they tried that and it didn't work. With no way to make people remember the Silence and having decided that it's unacceptable to let the Silence continue to do whatever they want with humanity, what else is the Doctor supposed to do? He makes Earth an unattractive option for the next few decades as every time a Silent is seen by a human it will be attacked and risks death. Just the same, it doesn't seem like it would be a genocide. All things considered, the Silent Delaware shot at point-blank range wasn't that injured and if a gun won't kill them in one blow, what chance do lesser weapons have? And how many people will just happen to have a gun when they first see a Silen? Maybe a few will be injured or killed but the Silence can kill humans far easier and once they catch onto what's happening, they will stay out of sight. As for putting the humans at risk, some may die (but they were dying anyway. Why did that woman in the bathroom with Amy have to die? It wasn't like she could tell anyone what she saw) but the Silence don't have any reason to kill large numbers of humans.
- Guns sometimes aren't 100% fatal, even in the DWU. It's still extremely incapacitating, unlike, say, that alien mother in the Torchwood episode "Something Borrowed".
- The Doctor has committed genocide before so I don't think that's particularly out of character. The Doctor also doesn't have many options here. With the hologram of the Silent the Doctor could experiment with orders and since fighting the Silence would be infinitely easier if they could remember them, I think it's safe to assume they tried that and it didn't work. With no way to make people remember the Silence and having decided that it's unacceptable to let the Silence continue to do whatever they want with humanity, what else is the Doctor supposed to do? He makes Earth an unattractive option for the next few decades as every time a Silent is seen by a human it will be attacked and risks death. Just the same, it doesn't seem like it would be a genocide. All things considered, the Silent Delaware shot at point-blank range wasn't that injured and if a gun won't kill them in one blow, what chance do lesser weapons have? And how many people will just happen to have a gun when they first see a Silen? Maybe a few will be injured or killed but the Silence can kill humans far easier and once they catch onto what's happening, they will stay out of sight. As for putting the humans at risk, some may die (but they were dying anyway. Why did that woman in the bathroom with Amy have to die? It wasn't like she could tell anyone what she saw) but the Silence don't have any reason to kill large numbers of humans.
- At the end of 'Day of the Moon' humans start killing the Silence, but what happens then? If dead Silences lose their memory erasing powers then there should be alien corpses inexplicably turning up all over the planet, but if they don't then anyone who enters a room in which a Silence was killed should forget what they did in there, which would get pretty noticeable after a while.
- It's 1969. With all the LSD going around, I doubt anybody would notice the discrepancies until long after the bodies decay or are disposed of.
- It's possible that the bodies decay pretty rapidly.
- Would the moon plan really work? Everyone gets a psychic signal to kill the Silents on sight. Then a second or two later they see a Silent, and supposedly they try to kill it via the hypnotic suggestion. (Though, heck, there are people who wouldn't need hypnotic suggestion to shoot something as menacing as a Silent, but I digress.) What happens if the now-targeted Silent says "Don't kill me"? Wouldn't his command override the preceding command?
- The hypnotic commands don't seem to extend to outright mind control, we never see them command someone and get an effect before the subject turns away. It looks like it's more a case that even after the memory is erased the instructions remain on a subconscious level. People see the Moon landing footage and subconsciously remember that they should kill the Silence if they ever see them again, but any "Don't kill me" command wouldn't take effect until after the human had looked away. Also, when you're actively trying to kill someone you probably aren't going to be particularly receptive to their orders.
- Do the hypnotic commands actually work while you're still looking at a Silent? Because the FBI guy heard the words "You should kill us all on sight" and didn't respond by killing the Silent. I got the impression that the hypnotic bit only kicks in after you've stopped looking at the Silent. But if that's the case, then "You should kill us all on sight" is a worthless command because it only techincally activates "on sight", but looking at a Silent deactivates all commands in the first place! (Or maybe it's more specific to each command, and a command only works after you've forgotten where it came from?)
- When the Silent was talking to Canton "You should kill us all on sight" was being used as a taunt - humans should kill the Silence on sight, but they won't do it because they can't remember that they even exist. The message sent out at the end had undergone some mild Quote Mining to make it into a command.
- It's also likely that he would kill any Silent on sight if he saw one after the Doctor had turned the taunt into a hypnotic command. What bugs me more, and I posted about this on the Fridge Logic entry for The Impossible Astronaut, is why Amy doesn't kill the one she sees by the van in 2011.
- There's the 'time is in flux and it didn't happen yet' explanation and the 'Amy hadn't seen the moon landing footage before' explanation.
The Curse of the Black Spot
- Ok, I have a pretty big plot hole that I can't believe no-one has seen so far. How the heck does Rory drown (if he is a plastic automaton?)
- He isn't an Auton anymore. When the universe was rebooted, he was rebooted in his original body, just with the duplicate's memories partially copied over (partially because they aren't there all the time).
- Why do all the characters just stand there like morons whenever anyone other than Rory is walking towards the siren. The captain even lets his son get taken because he stands gawping like a moron for about five seconds and then decides to try and save him.
- Yeah, I thought it was a bit odd when Amy was doing her best to hold Rory back while the pirates didn't even try to help their shipmates. My best guess would be that it's happened so many times they've just given up on trying. As for the captain, I think he was just frozen in horror, which, while not the most practical reaction, is a legitimate one.
- The Pirates probably don't really care for one another, see how easily that one abandoned the others in the magazine? At first it was two of them planning on leaving Amy, Rory and Toby to die, but as soon as one gets cut the other basically says "sucks for you" and takes off.
- Simply not caring wouldn't cover it; simple logic says that the more people survive, the better the ship's chance of eventually getting away is. They have every reason to try and save their shipmates. The pirates planning the mutiny couldn't have been thinking straight; they believed they could get the ship home all by themselves?
- It seemed like everyone was entranced by the Siren, though she only took one injured person at a time; everyone else simply fell slightly under her spell, for easier pickings. Of course, once they see the first pirate go up in smoke, the Doc and co manage to shake it off long enough to get Rory (who the Siren was focused on) out of there.
- Because they were terrified of what, to them, was a powerful demon. Not everyone is capable of being terrified of something but cheerfully braving it anyway.
- Simply not caring wouldn't cover it; simple logic says that the more people survive, the better the ship's chance of eventually getting away is. They have every reason to try and save their shipmates. The pirates planning the mutiny couldn't have been thinking straight; they believed they could get the ship home all by themselves?
- The Pirates probably don't really care for one another, see how easily that one abandoned the others in the magazine? At first it was two of them planning on leaving Amy, Rory and Toby to die, but as soon as one gets cut the other basically says "sucks for you" and takes off.
- It didn't really make sense, but it needed to happen so the audience could see what would happen if Rory was unrestrained.
- Yeah, I thought it was a bit odd when Amy was doing her best to hold Rory back while the pirates didn't even try to help their shipmates. My best guess would be that it's happened so many times they've just given up on trying. As for the captain, I think he was just frozen in horror, which, while not the most practical reaction, is a legitimate one.
- What happened to the pirate who was locked in with Amy, Rory and Toby? If the Siren got him, Amy's even more impressive than her swashbuckling skills would lead us to believe; she found and got rid of the source of the reflection while simultaneously restraining both Rory and Toby...
- Murdered by the editing room. This episode was scheduled to come out in the second half of the year, but Steven Moffat decided it needed changing. Thus, it is suspected some rash cutting was made to get a finished episode, and nobody noticed. Everyone makes mistakes, I guess.
- Moffat decided it fit better in the first block. The only major changing was likely a removal of the "April 22, 2011, Lake Silencio" graphic or something similar.
- Murdered by the editing room. This episode was scheduled to come out in the second half of the year, but Steven Moffat decided it needed changing. Thus, it is suspected some rash cutting was made to get a finished episode, and nobody noticed. Everyone makes mistakes, I guess.
- Okay, so the pirates are all getting a second chance In Space. Fine. And the captain can figure out how to pilot the spaceship... fine, I'll suspend my disbelief there. Which leaves just one question: how are they going to navigate? Even if they manage to correlate the stars in the ship's database with the stars they used to navigate by... how do they know which ones are inhabited? And if they somehow figure that out, how are they going to figure out which inhabitants are on the level? What's to prevent the captain from, say deciding that Skaro sounds like a lovely place to spend a week? (Okay, yeah, Skaro doesn't exist anymore, unless it does, unless... the point still stands.)
- The Doctor hooked them up a permanent TARDIS translator (probably just for that one language, it would be easier) and they read the manual.
- 'Which inhabitants are on the level'? They're pirates; they probably assume that no one is entirely on the level as a default.
- Why weren't the Doctor, Amy and the captain transported to sickbay like the others? As far as we know, the crewmembers were no more in need of immediate medical attention than these three.
- The "injury" to get them taken by the Siren was just a prick on the finger. It cleared up before they were able to be hooked up to the ship. Everyone else (except the boy who had Typhoid Fever) had wounds that would last for a while without medical care.
- That's iffy. The first guy had a very small cut, and he was still taken to sick bay. And if the Siren really is a hospital-AI-thing, then presumably she only picks up people who are heading to sick bay. It should be that (a) if you're sick, she takes you to the ship and treats you, or (b) if you're not sick, she leaves you alone. There's no reason for there to be a third category of sick-enough-to-take-you-to-the-ship-but-not-sick-enough-to-actually-put-you-in-sick-bay. The Doctor got really lucky there.
- Maybe there was no more room for them? The Siren had been picking up everyone with a scratch for some time by then without releasing anyone; perhaps all of the beds were taken, so there was nowhere to put them.
- I had the same question. A friend of mine says that there weren't anymore beds open (because the Siren had been picking up EVERYONE with an injury, no matter how small, for some time now), so that's probably the reason- but I haven't personally checked or anything.
- What was up with the can't-leave-the-alien-ship thing? Rory got a minor cut and then he was drowning, and then he got picked up. But when we remove him from sick bay, suddenly he's drowning again? Does the water suddenly re-enter his lungs somehow? Was the water there the whole time but somehow it wasn't affecting him? (And if there was water in his lungs, how did he manage to talk?) How is it that the Siren can keep him alive, but apparently her curative effect has No Ontological Inertia? It would make some sense if he needed regular doses of some medicine that only the Siren could provide, but it's not like Rory needs antibiotics; he was just drowning.
- The Siren didn't understand human biology, so it just put him in stasis. For the cuts, that was an easy fix, and even if it couldn't repair that there would be no trouble taking them out of stasis.
- So the kid has to stay because if he doesn't then his Typhoid Fever will come back. (See the above point) The captain stays because he wants to do right by his son. All the other pirates...also stay? They just had minor cuts; they could've gone home and lived alright. Is it implied that only some of them remain on the ship?
- Possibly the med bay was just a temporary solution to keep the person alive until real help could be gotten. She healed up those she could and those she couldn't she'd keep in statis until they could. It'd explain the Typhoid Fever and drowning since she'd have no way to treat either permanently without taking them off of support.
- I think they just thought exploring the universe sounded cooler than living on a ship. They're unlikely to have massive ties back home, if they decided to become pirates in the first place.
- Am I the only one who thinks Amy has become a massive hypocrite? Now I do like her, excluding the obvious reasons, but Amy's reaction to a smitten Rory smelled of Double Standard. First off, it's a Siren. Secondly, the man spent almost 1900 years protecting you in when the universe was almost non-existent-I think he deserves to be pervy for once. Finally, you're one to talk-I saw you checking out the Doctor (though this is Matt Smith we're talking about) and your future self. Yet you chastise him for this and thinking about your self-flirting (and by the way, both Ponds are literally the same person). What am I supposed to take from this? Women can be perverts, yet guys will be called out for it? Yeah, I'm starting to like you for only one reason. And I don't want that.
- I don't think it's as bad as all that. I mean, was Amy really being serious about being upset that Rory wanted a threesome with his wife and...his wife a few minutes into the future? I doubt it. And Amy didn't fly off the deep end about the Siren either. She didn't yell at him or make him sleep on the couch; she just reminded him of what he said since he didn't remember. Since the Siren was very pretty, Amy (even realizing he's under her influence) was just a little insecure that he might have really thought she was prettier than Amy was. And even that's not overly narcissistic of Amy and her needing to be the most gorgeous creature ever because it's a perfectly natural response to your SO telling you that someone is more attractive than you. You may think or know that it's true but it doesn't make it hurt less. I just think it was smart of Amy to address the issue with Rory instead of letting it fester and get blown out of proprtion later. She reminded him of what he said and he did what he could to allay her insecurities.
- During the episode, "Curse Of The Black Spot", the Doctor realises that reflections are how the Siren travels. To prevent it, he starts smashing up many various windows and mirrors. However, wouldn't this increase the problem by making more entrances, which could also get on someone's clothes and be carried around?
- Presumably the reflections have to be large enough. At least the size of the crown.
- Pretty minor one, but when The Doctor says that the the alien crew were killed by human bacteria, he says that the bacteria came from 'our planet'. Those are his exact words. Now, I know he's fond of the little blue marble, the third rock from the sun, good old Terra Firma, and he may want to adopt/be adopted by it since his own planet... ahem... went missing, but come on - the papers haven't even been signed, Doctor! This isn't your planet! Considering what happened to his last planet, I'm not sure I want him thinking of this one as his.
- Not sure which episode, but I'm sure that Ten has said that he adopted Earth as a new home after he lost his old one.
- I think that was in "Voyage of the Damned", yeah.
- Why wouldn't you want him thinking of Earth as his home? You say 'considering what happened to his last planet', but that's hardly analogous. Gallifrey being his home had nothing to do with why he destroyed it, so his simply calling Earth his home bears no risk of him destroying it too. Besides, he's earned an honorary citizenship several times over, as far as I'm concerned.
- Not sure which episode, but I'm sure that Ten has said that he adopted Earth as a new home after he lost his old one.
- We all know that Rory is a nurse, and presumably the Doctor has learnt some human first aid over his long life. So why is the CPR in this episode so horribly botched? And why doesn't the doctor offer to take over once Amy stops?
- Real CPR also has quite a large chance of breaking the person's ribs and Health and Safety were probably excessively worried about this.
- If the producers can create fake alien invasions, I'm sure they can fake the CPR too. (Use a dummy maybe, I don't know.) But they didn't bother with that, perhaps because they were trying to save money.
- You never actually see it performed on camera—you just see Amy moving around, and then kissing him. But, hoo boy, did she ever get it wrong. It's not a surprise he wasn't resuscitating, because all she was doing was beating on his chest and breathing into him.
- Real CPR also has quite a large chance of breaking the person's ribs and Health and Safety were probably excessively worried about this.
- How is it possible that the Captain immediately recognizes the boy in the barrel as his son when all the dialogue seems to imply they've never met before?
The Doctor's Wife
- When House is messing with the heroes and removes all the air from the TARDIS, the Doctor speaks and we hear his words. That is not how sound works.
- He can't have removed all the air or Rory and Amy, at least, would have suffocated. He was probably just slowly getting rid of it so as to make them uncomfortable and - if not persuaded to stop - give them a slower, more "entertaining" death.
- The Doctor has a respitory bypass system, which allows him to go without air. Alternatively, he has very big lungs. A few seconds without air won't kill you.
- His lungs are bigger on the inside.
- Also I'm fairly sure House didn't have a Mouth in the first place, it seemed more like a psychic thing which wouldn't need air either way.
- The long-dead Rory that Amy finds wrote "Kill/Hate/Die Amy" all over the hallway. The red parts I can see how (Blood) but unless he was carrying a can of spray paint when he got trapped how did he write the black parts?
- It was a hallucination so it didn't have to make perfect sense, though if you want a better answer Rory might still have been carrying the pen from Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon.
- Even if he didn't, it's hardly the biggest leap of narrative logic to suggest that he might have had or found a black pen at some point in the decades he was supposedly trapped in that section of the TARDIS.
- At one point, Sexy is getting on the Doctor's case for not opening the doors of the TARDIS the right way - the sign on the door says pull to open, and he pushes. Wouldn't this have more to do with the way the hinges are placed on the door than it does with the Doctor being contrary on purpose?
- Presumably the door can open either way.
- Fun fact: The sign on the door doesn't talk about the door, it talks about the little box that contains the telephone.
- Sexy is an 11 dimensional matrix. House flew the naked Tardis. House must be an 11D matrix.
- Sexy is an 11 dimensional matrix capable of traveling through time and space practically without limitation. House flew a box through a rift. I see nothing in the episode to indicate that he could have used the TARDIS in the same way Sexy could. He just needed an intact ship to travel through the rift back to the normal universe, and he'd eaten all the others.
- Sexy only took on the form of a police box after she and the Doctor stole each other. If she was being literal when she described herself as being "a museum piece" when the Doctor first saw her, what did her exterior shell look like at the time? She would have been on display as a TARDIS, and a TARDIS is meant to disguise itself to blend in with its surroundings. So what does something with no fixed shape look like when it's supposed to look like itself?
- A literal museum artifact?
- A TARDIS on display in a museum would naturally be disguised as the display plaque describing said TARDIS to the museum patrons. Saves on plaques that way.
- If I remember correctly, one of the comics shows them as boring-looking pastel-coloured cubes.
- The type-40 TARDIS the Doctor uses was an outdated model when the Doctor was young, making her older than dirt. Sexy was just using an expression to remind everyone of how old she is, not trying to imply that she was literally in a museum.
- I would agree that the museum comment was metaphorical. It's been said before that she was 'in the shop' getting fixed when the Doctor stole her, but assuming she was in her default state at the time, she would've looked like a long white rectangular...thing (which is what defaulted ones looked like when they were seen briefly in the classic series).
- As the Doctor gets to talk directly to the Tardis for the first time ever, why didn't he ask her what made her explode at the end of the last series?
- I do believe the Silence blew it up. If not, he's too busy saying "HOLY RASSILON IT'S THE TARDIS IT'S MY TARDIS WAIT UNTIL I TELL THE MASTER oh wait he's dead..."
- Didn't he already put two and two together back in the opening episodes?
- There's no concrete evidence that Sexy knows who or what blew her up. Not to mention that she wouldn't be comfortable with talking about it. At all.
- I think she probably does assuming that she was blown up from the inside or the explosion was cuased by something anywhere near her. Of course, she's not very good at keeping time linear so perhaps it didn't occur to her that she needed to tell that information.
The Rebel Flesh / The Almost People
- This was very confusing to me. Do the workers actually KNOW when they are in their Gangers? Because it seems impossible for them to know. Also, what if someone in their Ganger went up and wrenched their "true" body away from the harness? Which body would they have then?
- Of course they know when they're possessing their gangers. They only use gangers when they're doing dangerous work and if they weren't in the gangers, they wouldn't go deal with the acid. Presumably there is some sort of machine they use to transfer their conciousness'. Perhaps when the bodies are moved out of the harness then the connection is snapped.
- Presumably? Wasn't the machine shown in this story?
- I think in normal circumstances, if a ganger grabbed its "real" body out of the harness, then the ganger would turn into goop and the "real" body would wake up.
- Of course they know when they're possessing their gangers. They only use gangers when they're doing dangerous work and if they weren't in the gangers, they wouldn't go deal with the acid. Presumably there is some sort of machine they use to transfer their conciousness'. Perhaps when the bodies are moved out of the harness then the connection is snapped.
- Alright... are the Gangers supposed to be inclined towards evil or what? Because at one point the men said that, but then proceeded to declare war themselves, which I thought was supposed to be demonstrating that they were wrong, and that both sides were capable of evil, which would be keeping with usual Doctor Who spirit. But... I'm not buying how quickly Ganger!Jennifer went from "help me, I'm so scared", to "kill them all!". Sure, one of her fellow Gangers had just been killed, but... it just seemed so sudden.
- Unlike the other Gangers she remembers all the other times she was "decomissioned". Seeing Human!Cleaves kill one of them confirms her belief that the humans will easily not second guess killing them all.
- Jennifer stroke me as the kind of person who acs nice because are weak and cowardly and want others to protect them, but give them a little power so they can feel strong, and they'll turn into the worst jerks you can think of. Remember she said something like "the little girl got strong" as if saying "I'm not weak anymore, beware me".
- In The Rebel Flesh, if the acid is so incredibly corrosive, why do they use Gangers that are so susceptible to it? Why not use metal droids that resist the acid? Seems awfully inefficient to me. And why do these Gangers need entire personalities just to do maintenance work?
- Presumably, they don't need personalities. They only have personalities because they are regularly being possessed by their original.
- I would presume that either technology hasn't advanced to drones that could resist the acid, or if it is they can't afford it. Or maybe the work is too delicate and unpredictable to programme a robot to do it? Also, the Gangers weren't supposed to have personalities; they're supposed to just be mindless machines who are controlled by the workers. They're not pre-programmed.
- We already have machines that are precise enough for the work. Cost might be a factor but it seems strange that it's cheaper in the future to make the Gangers than a machine.
- My biggest confusion was this: why are they mining acid in the first place? What is it used for?
- Really stubborn stains? Fighting aliens?
- There are all sorts of products that depend on dangerous raw materials. Imagine if you had never heard of coal and you saw a coal mine. It seems bizarre by itself, but it all makes sense once you know what the coal is used for. Presumably the acid is used for something, but the episode didn't have time to explain it.
- If it is so easy for Gangers to clone themselves(after cloning herself, Ganger!Jennifer seemed just fine), why didn't they just create a clone army of themselves? (i.e one Ganger creates a clone, then the clone creates another clone, and so on).
- I think that would have just created a bigger identity crisis for the reasonable sane gangers. After all, with just the one ganger they could kill their original selves and steal their life. What would they do with three or four copies of themself? They couldn't just get rid of them unless they were crazy like Jennifer who didn't actually need more than one clone to accomplish her plan.
- Perhaps their minds degrade the more they clone themselves, or the longer they stay in Ganger bodies? It would explain Jennifer turning into the horse-demon thing.
- Maybe they were just running low on the raw Flesh-stuff needed to create new gangers.
- The entire point of Ganger!Jennifer's "revolution" was that humans were mistreating The Flesh. She then proceeds to KILL ANOTHER FLESH, WHICH IS CLEARLY IN PAIN AND IS SUFFERING. I mean, really?
- She is unstable and it was for her own personal good so she's fine with that.
- Soldiers will inevitably die in a revolution. Ganger!Ganger!Jennifer presumably believed in the revolution herself and must have known how the plan was supposed to go, it's possible that she agreed to sacrifice her life for the greater good.
- That was the point. It was supposed to show how the Gangers, especially Jennifer, were no better than the humans they despised.
- Never seen an hypocrite before? Don't worry, you'll get used to them in time.
- Where does Ganger!Jennifer get the extra Flesh required to create all those eyes on the walls?
- There doesn't seem to be any desperate shortage of Flesh, all those eyes probably need less than just one ganger.
- I thought it was her own Flesh...she was sort of drawing on the walls with it.
- So... The entire two-parter is spent practically hammering the Stock Aesop that "clones are people too", from the Doctor's mouth no less, and then... after giving the surviving Gangers their happy ending, he just disintegrates Amy like that? Did. He. Learn. Nothing?
- The circumstances were different - the Gangers in the episode had gained sentience only after being separated during the solar storm. Before then they were, for the most part, remote-controlled fleshy suits (Ganger!Jenny went bonkers because she kept the residual memory of being burnt all those times...which I imagine would be unpleasant). Amy was somehow linked to that one and when the Doctor "glooped" her, her consciousness went straight back into her own body (notice how it switched to her "awakening" right after). They was no separate Ganger!Amy, just Amy linked and controlling a flesh suit (like the engineers had been doing for ages until that one freak occurance).
- I like this. Doctor says Tardis energy stabilizes the Gangers and then shoots Amy anyway. That theory fits Amy Ganger being different from the other Gangers. But it don't explain the pile of left-over Jennifers being still conscious.
- The Doctor said they had only visited the island in the first place so he could see The Flesh in its early stages, or something along those lines. Maybe in the future they were able to refine it so it really was just a piece of machinery that didn't feel pain, and the Doctor knew this much about the timeline of the stuff?
- Since they're clearly still using the technology and I don't think we're supposed to assume that Cleaves and the other guy failed, it does seem like they got rid of the ethical dilemma by not creating sentient flesh anymore.
- The circumstances were different - the Gangers in the episode had gained sentience only after being separated during the solar storm. Before then they were, for the most part, remote-controlled fleshy suits (Ganger!Jenny went bonkers because she kept the residual memory of being burnt all those times...which I imagine would be unpleasant). Amy was somehow linked to that one and when the Doctor "glooped" her, her consciousness went straight back into her own body (notice how it switched to her "awakening" right after). They was no separate Ganger!Amy, just Amy linked and controlling a flesh suit (like the engineers had been doing for ages until that one freak occurance).
- The death of Ganger!Ganger!Jenny. Why would the Gangers and the victim herself go along with that plan?
- Perhaps both of them decided on the plan, borth intending to be the victor rather than the victim...but thanks to luck of the draw, one of the Gangers (maybe the original Ganger, maybe not) got out-leveraged and falls into the acid.
- In an insane way, it makes sense.
- Perhaps both of them decided on the plan, borth intending to be the victor rather than the victim...but thanks to luck of the draw, one of the Gangers (maybe the original Ganger, maybe not) got out-leveraged and falls into the acid.
- So... from Rory's point of view, Jennifer had just killed her Ganger? Apparently because she had no other option, but it could also be seen as demonstrating how little humans think of Gangers (apparently what they wanted him to think). Either way... wasn't he a little bit suspicious that she then began preaching the evils of the treatment of Gangers to him? If she didn't care about Gangers, then why would she do this? Even if she was sympathetic, would someone who had just had to fight her Ganger to the death then immediately run to show him how badly treated they were? It would have been perfectly understandable for the human Jennifer to feel that Gangers didn't deserve saving after her experience, at least for a short while immediately afterwards. Rory comes across as incredibly dumb for not suspecting something was wrong.
- There's a difference between killing someone in self-defence and sentencing them to an And I Must Scream for who knows how long.
- I know that, and I'm not saying Jennifer couldn't have been sympathetic if she had been the human one, after some thought on the matter. But as an immediate reaction to being attacked by one... if someone attacks you your first thought isn't usually to feel sorry for them.
- Speak for yourself. Besides, she could have already been feeling bad then been forced to kill. It could have been a kind of 'we need to kill them to survive, then we need to stop what we're doing to them' thing.
- Was it immediate? She didn't seem to feel sorry for the she killed and some time had passed before they came upon the still-conscious rotting gangers which is a pretty horrifying sight.
- I got the impression she was being quite open about the fact she had deliberately led Rory to the Gangers. In any case, although it may be conceivable that someone could be that forgiving, I still think it should have seemed suspicious to Rory.
- I know that, and I'm not saying Jennifer couldn't have been sympathetic if she had been the human one, after some thought on the matter. But as an immediate reaction to being attacked by one... if someone attacks you your first thought isn't usually to feel sorry for them.
- There's a difference between killing someone in self-defence and sentencing them to an And I Must Scream for who knows how long.
- Why did Ganger!Doctor and Ganger!Cleaves need to die? Couldn't the Doctor take Ganger!Jen out just fine?
- I think Ganger!Cleaves accepted that her continued existance would cause all kinds of issues; the Gangers have the same family memories as the originals, and if there were two of them that would have been an extremely difficult situation. Ganger!Cleaves probably realised it wouldn't be fair to force that on her family, and decided to make a Heroic Sacrifice instead. Also, they don't know just how successful they'll be in convincing the world, and at least where there's only the Ganger left they can pretend to be the original if things don't work out. As for Ganger!Doctor... no I don't think the Doctor could take out Ganger!Jen. That's why they had to blow the place up in the first place. So someone did have to stay behind to hold the door.
- And yet the ganger Doctor appeared to kill ganger Jennifer by popping her with the power of his sonic screwdriver.
- Exactly. There was NOTHING done that normal!Doctor couldn't have done. So my headscratcher stands: Why the sacrifice?
- They couldn't stop the island from exploding, so whoever stayed was going to be killed in the explosion. Really, though, no one needed to stay. In the time it took them to discuss the issue, they could have all gotten on the Tardis and gotten away.
- Exactly. There was NOTHING done that normal!Doctor couldn't have done. So my headscratcher stands: Why the sacrifice?
- This assumes that going goopy and being dead are the same thing. Real Doctor mentions something about Ganger Doctor being able to maintain his molecular memory, so I got the impression that, given their new understanding of the Flesh, being reduced to goop doesn't necessarily kill you. He seems more excited to dissolve, rather than even a tiny bit scared, so they might even have been saving themselves, rather than dying, although this is more WMG.
- Identity issues etc. are hardly good reasons to get yourself killed when there were options available to keep everybody alive. In fact, Jennifer didn't even seem to be pushing on that door very hard; it looked they could've just made a run for the TARDIS and survived. (This is especially obvious when Ganger!Doctor takes a moment to hug Amy, and Jennifer doesn't make any particular progress in his absence) But anyway, yeah, Normal!Doctor should've been able to zap Jennifer all by himself.
- And yet the ganger Doctor appeared to kill ganger Jennifer by popping her with the power of his sonic screwdriver.
- I think Ganger!Cleaves accepted that her continued existance would cause all kinds of issues; the Gangers have the same family memories as the originals, and if there were two of them that would have been an extremely difficult situation. Ganger!Cleaves probably realised it wouldn't be fair to force that on her family, and decided to make a Heroic Sacrifice instead. Also, they don't know just how successful they'll be in convincing the world, and at least where there's only the Ganger left they can pretend to be the original if things don't work out. As for Ganger!Doctor... no I don't think the Doctor could take out Ganger!Jen. That's why they had to blow the place up in the first place. So someone did have to stay behind to hold the door.
- Okay, so the Schroedinger's Pregnancy was because it was a non-pregnant ganger of a pregnant woman! Of course! And the ganger must have been created after the pregnancy occured, otherwise ganger Amy would be pregnant instead! So, wouldn't the ganger copy of a pregnant woman be a pregnant ganger? It copies everything identically, right down to the clothes, right?
- Maybe they only created a ganger out of Amy's DNA and didn't use the baby's. The technology used in Rebel Flesh was said to be an early version so as it advanced maybe they could make distinctions.
- I figure that gangers aren't designed to go through the process of pregnancy. Pregnancy is a complex process that eventually results in a whole new person being created, and maybe the Flesh can't handle that. Besides, gangers are created to be workers, right? Why would a worker need to be pregnant on the job?
- It seems to me it would be obvious why: Ganger!Amy was copied from a version of Amy early in her pregnancy, so of course, the body wouldn't look particularly pregnant. In the meantime, though, the consciousness came from a brain that, while it was certainly not aware of it at the time, was housed in a pregnant body. So, on some level, it was saying to itself/the Ganger body, "I'm pregnant!". Remember, pregnancy does release certain hormones; that is in fact how we normally test for it in blood or urine. IIRC, the X-ray type view the TARDIS showed him never showed an ultrasound of the alleged baby, merely an anatomical view of the belly and wavering positive/negative pregnancy results? To me, that could easily come from wobbly hormones. Or else the Ganger body was just seriously confused about the exact details of the body it was supposed to imitate, which is the simpler and may well be the better explanation. As somebody else noted above me, it doesn't seem likely that the Flesh technology was ever intended for anything other than being worker-controlled drones for dangerous activities, so it wouldn't be surprising if there were unexpected hiccups in the tech resulting from it being used on someone it was never intended to be used on.
- Probably a really pedantic Headscratcher but did the flesh copy the sonic screwdriver as well? There didn't seem to be a shortage of them near the end of the episode. How many does the Doctor have? (Eleven has already busted one in Christmas carol and just allowed another to be lost with Ganger!Doctor in the explosion).
- In "The Eleventh Hour" we see that the TARDIS is capable of generating a new screwdriver for the Doctor pretty much from scratch (not surprising given the size and versitility of the thing). Who's to say he didn't learn his lesson from previous experience (i.e. losing his screwdriver in "Eleventh Hour") and start keeping a few spares?
- I'm prepared for this to be explained or at least noted in the start of the next episode, but if the two Doctors swapped shoes then wouldn't that mean that the Doctor just glooped his shoes off whilst glooping Ganger!Amy? Those shoes were made from flesh after all.
- The Doctor-ganger was the same kind of ganger that the others were and thus his shoes stabalized when in the TARDIS. Amy was a different kind of ganger and she dissolved because the Doctor cut the link between her and Amy.
- And even if the shoes did dissolve, its not like he's in the middle of a tense situation involving walking over broken glass or something. He can just get new shoes.
- Speaking of gloopified shoes, why did Amy's clothes melt? Did whoever made her Ganger also make Flesh copies of the entire wardrobe, so she'd be guaranteed to be wearing Flesh clothes every day?
- Look back through the series; she is wearing (almost) the same clothes every episode. Same shirt, anyway. Another theory is the mining station's Flesh was a primitive technology, whereas the Silents' (or whoever's) Flesh may be an advanced version that can deal with changing of clothes.
- What kind of terrible security system allows for ANY human to override the thermostatic controls? Why wouldn't it just be programmed to recognize the humans who actually worked there and were actually authorized to do something like that? I can't think of a good reason why Rory would be able to bypass the controls of such a critical system.
- Simple: they are worried about Cylon Infiltration.
- I'm amazed this one isn't here: when could the Doctor and his ganger have swapped shoes, since neither of them were in a room on their own together (minds out the gutter please) and it was clearly the ganger who caused Amy to panic when he talked about the melting down of the Flesh (unless the Doctor is that good an actor he pretended it, but that would be a HUGE coincidence for him to be right).
- When does he talk about the melting of the flesh? Sorry, this one jumped out of my brain the second it finished. Is it when Amy tells him he's going to die?
- Why didn't Jen just lock Rory in with the other humans to die? He served his use and she clearly doesn't care about him.
- Maybe she just wanted to keep him around in case she needed him again. The plan was for a revolution, you never know when you'll need some human leverage.
A Good Man Goes to War
- Doctor's name means warrior in a different language, how exactly? First off does this mean the Doctor's name is not translated when he goes to non-English speaking places, if so how come on earth the planet he most frequently visits only one language that uses the word "Doctor"; and if The Doctor's name is translated in when he goes to non-English speaking places then how can Doctor mean warrior, then what do the call physician?
- Physician? I don't think what they call their physician is important, just that they have another word for it. It's possible that the Doctor chose the name 'the Doctor' after spending some time in the UK or that he's not actually calling himself 'the Doctor' in English but that's how it translates to English-speakers. It's like if he introduced himself to someone who just spoke Spanish. He'd be "El Médico" because the title he's speaking, whatever the language, means healer. But something happened on Lorna's planet that made them think of him as a fighter instead of a healer. Either it automatically translated his name accordingly or else it translated it to their version of doctor so long ago that when his name came to mean warrior for them the meaning of the word changed.
- Word of God has that our word for doctor (as in physician or man of knowledge) comes from him, from his name. Same happened in Lorna's planet, they got the word from him, but they understood it as being a warrior first. Steven Moffatt, as a good Promoted Fanboy has been waiting to use this idea for ever (it's on one of his posts in Outpost Gallifrey dating the mid-90's). Also, River says that during her speech.
- Physician? I don't think what they call their physician is important, just that they have another word for it. It's possible that the Doctor chose the name 'the Doctor' after spending some time in the UK or that he's not actually calling himself 'the Doctor' in English but that's how it translates to English-speakers. It's like if he introduced himself to someone who just spoke Spanish. He'd be "El Médico" because the title he's speaking, whatever the language, means healer. But something happened on Lorna's planet that made them think of him as a fighter instead of a healer. Either it automatically translated his name accordingly or else it translated it to their version of doctor so long ago that when his name came to mean warrior for them the meaning of the word changed.
- Captain Avery from "The Curse of the Black Spot" stopped Kovarian. Was the alien ship he's piloting in the parallel universe still? If so, how did the Doctor reach him?
- They weren't actually separated by a parallel universe, they were both occupying the same space in a way that the TARDIS can actually cross. It's not like the type of parallel universe that separates the Doctor from Rose, in which bad things might happen if you cross it too often.
- When the Doctor was raising his army, why didn't he hunt out any of his former companions? instead of trusting a Sontaran and the Silurians who lets remember, have been enemies with the Doctor for decades, he could have; asked Jack for help given he's an immortal soldier (wouldn't come in handy against electric sword wielding monks and a squad of pseudo-marines no?), asked Martha who he once claimed he trusts beyond no other and could muster a force of UNIT troops given how both she and the Doctor are still officially UNIT staff, asked Sarah Jane and her crew (yes Real Life Writes the Plot on that front but the point still stands) or any of the other hundred people he should by rights trust far more than two very dangerous former enemies.
- Assuming Demon's Run was in the 52nd Century, the Silurians had owed the Doctor a favor after the millennium of sleep for the moment they could surface again (The Hungry Earth and Cold Blood), as for the disgraced Sontaran nurse, probably only the Doctor gave him the chance to redeem himself if the fleet didn't.
- Regardless of when and where Demon's Run is Vastra's from the 1880s. Over a century before the group in "Cold Blood" start their sleep. She travelled 4000 years in time using what we call a time machine.
- His former companions, at least from his Tenth life, have their own lives and have moved on. They don't have a debt they wish to repay later on, or if they had, they'd used it up when the Earth was stolen by the Daleks. If Amy's kidnapping was in early 21st century Britain, then Martha MIGHT help, but she's made clear that she wants no more TARDIS travel after spending a year on a desolate, Toclafane-invaded Earth. Also, she seems to have parted with UNIT going by her adventures with her new husband in The End of Time. Sarah Jane, Jack and Jo have said similar sentiments about travelling in the TARDIS.
- To try to put it in Doylist terms, though, we're in the same universe as Silurians, Cybermen, Judoon and so forth, no question, but Russell T. Davies' story ended when he handed over the reins, as would his specific characters like Martha.
- Says who? Moffat has stated he'd like to do a story featuring Jack, but scheduling has so far precluded it (let's also remember that Jack first appeared in a story written by Steven Moffat). As for the other RTD era companions, the Doctor probably figures he's put them through enough after "Stolen Earth".
- Says the long goodbye sequence in The End of Time. Also, Russell T Davies still created him, and is in charge of his character as of 2011. And as established in "Utopia", the TARDIS has a strong prejudice against Jack boarding the TARDIS. What are the odds it'll fly off to the end of the universe again?
- Unlikely. Jack got along fine in the TARDIS following the year that never was when the Doctor took him home and when he helped fly the Earth home in Journey's End. The Doctor also invited him to come traveling again and if the TARDIS didn't like that then she'd have let the Doctor know.
- Also says the fact that most show-runners would rather put their own stamp on things rather than continually re-using another show-runner's creations, which probably aren't quite as interesting to them even if they are able to use them. Put simply, Steven Moffat probably decided he'd have more fun creating new characters like Madame Vasta and Jenny and the Sontaran nurse than he would bringing back RTD's stable of characters for yet another go-round. And why shouldn't he? We've already seen Martha, Jack, Rose etc all team up with the Doctor to save the universe; why not bring in some fresh faces?
- According to Word of God, Moffat originally thought of including Jack Harkness in this episode, but the filming of Torchwood: Miracle Day caused conflicts in John Barrowman's schedule.
- This is a problem anytime the Doctor recruits a bunch of allies. He's had so many of them that he should be able to drum up a cast of thousands whenever he puts his mind to it. But of course the producers can't manage to schedule every actor, and even if they could they don't want to drag down the episode with a lot of introductions etc. ("Rory and Amy, this is Martha Jones, and Jack Harkness, and K-9, and Sarah Jane, and the Brigadier, and..."). So he usually winds up with just a few people, typically the ones we've seen in the last couple seasons.
- Of course the above is correct in a meta-sense, but there's not a lot of in-story justification for leaving out some characters. Sure, Martha didn't want to time-travel any more, and doesn't really owe the Doctor anything, and some of the others wouldn't be particularly useful (can't see the Doctor having any reason to look up, say, Adam Mitchell or Tegan), but there's no in-story reason he wouldn't have called on UNIT at least for help. It could easily be an anonymous UNIT squad made up of guys we've never seen before, but why wouldn't he call on UNIT?
- Regarding UNIT, it's been established in previous UNIT appearances that the Doctor isn't very fond of UNIT, at least in it's modern form, so probably doesn't like or trust them enough. It's also been clearly established that the Doctor has a bit of a reluctance to go back and see his old companions, for numerous reasons—they might not be fond of him, he doesn't want to upset their respective apple carts again, and in most cases it's fairly clearly implied that they just went back to living normal lives after leaving the TARDIS—it only seems to be a relative few (and then largely in recent series) who went on to become alien hunters or whatever, so most of them probably wouldn't be much use anyway.
- I understood that the Doctor's original plan was to take over Demon's Run and rescue Amy (and Melody) without spilling any blood. He wouldn't have picked UNIT for this, who would've gone in guns blazing. I'd bet he worked out the plan beforehand, then asked himself who he knew that fitted the roles needed- i.e, Dorium was called up because he knew the base's software (he sold it, in fact).
- Let's Kill Hitler has a possible answer for why he didn't recruit any past companions; he feels he's completely screwed up their lives already. See both Journey's End and The End of Time, Part Two.
- I always assumed that the Doctor didn't want to involve his past companions because, well, it's a "war." The situation is a bad one—lots of potential death and violence and war and fighting. And look at who he does recruit: various aliens of mostly warrior races, who have served as antagonists to him previously. A lot of people owe him debts, but that doesn't mean he's going to call them all in—just the ones he can use in this situation: people with combat experience, who, well, he wouldn't be so broken-hearted about if they died. Rory was the obvious exception because it's not like the Doctor could have told HIM to leave. Even with the hypothetical addition of Jack—Jack is a trusted, immortal ally, but also not the 'good and pure' companion type the Doctor might want to shield from outright warfare. He doesn't mind his companions taking action, but this is still a much different situation than normal for them.
- He also might not think of his companions as people who are in his debt; they're his best friends, his family, and he might not want them to feel beholden to him, particularly after a fair chunk of the recent seasons has precisely been about the Doctor's often-negative effects on the people he's travelled with. Better to call upon people who owe him favours or who he likes but isn't incredibly close to.
- Of course the above is correct in a meta-sense, but there's not a lot of in-story justification for leaving out some characters. Sure, Martha didn't want to time-travel any more, and doesn't really owe the Doctor anything, and some of the others wouldn't be particularly useful (can't see the Doctor having any reason to look up, say, Adam Mitchell or Tegan), but there's no in-story reason he wouldn't have called on UNIT at least for help. It could easily be an anonymous UNIT squad made up of guys we've never seen before, but why wouldn't he call on UNIT?
- Assuming Demon's Run was in the 52nd Century, the Silurians had owed the Doctor a favor after the millennium of sleep for the moment they could surface again (The Hungry Earth and Cold Blood), as for the disgraced Sontaran nurse, probably only the Doctor gave him the chance to redeem himself if the fleet didn't.
- River's appearances in this episode confuse me. So Rory goes to see her in the Stormcage, but she tells him she can't come to the battle until the end, because she knows the Doctor's future and that's how it played out. Thus implying that she's already done that event. So how did the River that appeared at the end of the episode know where to go, and indeed how did she know to go? It can't be because Rory told her, otherwise she would be redoing something she's already done. So how did she know about it?
- Wasn't there a huge battle, preceded by a "message" to the Cybermen? Also, she visits them in reverse order (more or less), so she'd probably be given a message to do so further back in her timestream.
- Well she WAS there....as a baby. Her being raised to be the ultimate weapon against the Doctor would probably include being told the stuff about what happened around her birth, the events at Demon's run and such. The Doctor could have then told her, as part of a self sustaining paradox, as he knew she needed to be there for them to have that meeting where her identity is revealed and him to then be able to go off and help her.
- Just because she knows what will happen doesn't mean she has personally experienced it. She could have been told about it by an older Doctor or whoever who had already experienced it. So she knows that she shows up at the end, and then she shows up at the end to make sure it all happens according to what she was told. She doesn't show up any earlier because then she might change her own timeline.
- Also it might be due to the Blinovitch limitation effect and she literally couldn't be there until the very end since she was already there, or else she might have caused damage or summoned reapers (she is a Time Lady after all)
- But there were two Rivers in "The Impossible Astronaut", weren't there? Possibly in both 1969 as well as 2011, depending on how you interpret what the Tesalecta people said in "Let's Kill Hitler". And simply meeting your past self is not cause for summoning Reapers. Watch Father's Day again.
- Hang on; if the soldiers of The Church considered The Doctor an ally during the Crash of the Byzantium, what's with the change of attitude all of a sudden? Regardless of whichever event took place chronolocically first (in a linear sense, not The Doctor sense), In order for both episodes to stay true some drastic change must have happened. Why? How? Or is it still up in the winds?
- The soldiers of Crash of Byzantium wear subtly different insignia. They have the 'omega' symbol, but not the angel wings underneath. They may not actually be the same denomination.
- I'm thinking that it's either going to be explained in the next episode where they stop considering him an enemy, or that it was just that one leader fearmongering his soldiers against the Doctor.
- The drastic change was the Protestant Reformation in the 16th Century. These Marines are explicitly Roman Catholic they obey the Papal Main-frame and Anglicans are a rare minority. The denomination of the Church Militant in "Byzantium" is not stated, but those Marines have a Protestant feel.
- They do in fact seem wary of the Doctor in "The Time of Angels", asking if he can be trusted.
- The word "Byzantium" gives you a clue: They're the Byzantine Rite of the Catholic Church. As for the headless monks, those who follow the Roman Rite are sticklers for the fact that all members of the ordained priesthood, the pope included, be male, since Jesus was male, and He only chose male apostles. The papal mainframe was referred to as a female, and one of the headless monks spoke with a female voice. Either Moffatt really hates the Church and wants to see them (or us for those of us who are) go down the path of evil, or this isn't the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church. I think if it were to happen at all, it would be due to another schism, but that's my own personal bias.
- I'm not following. Where did it imply ANYWHERE that the spaceship with an Angel (the one whose CCTV footage became another Angel) on board have anything to do with the Byzantine Rite?
- It's probably a reference to the space-ship name; the Byzantium.
- Alright then, when was it said the Byzantium was a spaceship affiliated with the Church?
- If the Church considers the Doctor an ally in the earlier episode, then it's clearly not a particularly trusted one; Octavian certainly seems rather wary of him for most of the episode, and they do get up in each other's faces a few times.
- The Doctor arrived at the Byzantium at River's request, and the clerics explicitly don't trust him much there, but the Angels are at that moment a more immediate concern.
- The Angels two parter would take place chronologically after "A Good Man Goes to War," so even if they are allies (which seems like may not be the case) it just means that something happens between the two episodes we haven't seen yet to turn them around.
- Maybe, but is anyone sure at all about the choronology?
- General questions about the chronology aside, River was pardoned at the end of the Angels two parter, and is in prison in AGMGTW, meaning that logically AGMGTW happens before her pardon (on her tieline, and therefore on the Church's)
- River says that maybe this time she's done enough to earn a pardon but that's not confirmed.
- General questions about the chronology aside, River was pardoned at the end of the Angels two parter, and is in prison in AGMGTW, meaning that logically AGMGTW happens before her pardon (on her tieline, and therefore on the Church's)
- Maybe, but is anyone sure at all about the choronology?
- So, to sum up why everyone is pissed at the Doctor: "Ooh, your name means warrior to us. Your sooo scary." I mean, really, what the hell!? Uh, guys, do you know just WHY he's been taking out monsters left and right? Because they all, every single one, wanted to destroy/enslave/ humanity, all the galaxy, or restart reality in their image. I'm sorry if his dispathing of these threats seems a little superheroish, but the Doctor has NOTHING to feel guilty for.
- "Uh, guys, do you know just WHY he's been taking out monsters left and right?" Well, considering they don't have the benefit of seeing his adventures once a week... no, they probably don't know why he does any of the things he does.
- You're going about your day when a strange and mysterious alien happens upon you, decides he doesn't like what you're doing, unleashes all his power to not only stop you but usually all but wipe you out of existence, and then departs just as mysteriously as he came without really bothering to hang around and see what happens next. Good or not, that's pretty scary stuff.
- Taking this further - think about the many horrid little tyrants that run various countries/groups on this planet of ours. Generally speaking, we don't like these people, and rarely shed tears when their lives run their course. But I still think we'd be given pause if suddenly, without warning, we heard stories of a single man appearing out of nowhere and just wiping them out. In, about, a day. Now imagine if this "one man" had been doing this seemingly for all time. Sure, we know the Doctor has got 100% good intent, as do the people who've met him, but the rest of the cosmos (especially those in positions of power - his prime targets) would drop bricks at the mention of his name.
- Yeah, but the weird thing was that River delivered the big speech on this subject. River, of all people, knows that the Doctor has good intentions. But she still seemed to be criticizing him pretty harshly. It sounded like "You're too violent and you're not a healer anymore", when she should've said something like "Many people have mistakenly got the impression that you're a force for evil, when we both know that's not true."
- I got her speech not as "Look at what you did!" but "Look at what these people have seen you do"- she mentions the Gamma Forests, and how the Doctor is so powerful that he actually changed one of their words' meaning. In that sense, she's more criticizing him for losing his way- he started out just as a traveller, but has inadvertently made himself a god. Sort of.
- Let's not forget that some of the aliens that the Doctor fights are, on a universal scale, small-fry. They generally have only been seen threatening the Earth. Yeah, the rest of the universe would be happy that someone is stopping the Daleks, Cybermen and Sontarans. But would they react that way to countless races invading just planet Earth? Guys like the Zygons, Saturines and Silurians just want to rebuild. Plus, the raw power that the Doctor possesses combined with an Omniscient Morality License would definitely make him feared. He's almost godlike, and at times can think of himself as one. Do you want to have the constant threat that he may judge you, or even worse?
- But on the other hand, if the Doctor confines most of his small potato battles to Earth then as long as the other races don't mess with humans than they shouldn't really have much to fear from him.
- Why does the Doctor have a cot with "River Song" written on it in Gallifreyan stored in his TARDIS?
- It was his own cot, or so he thought.
- This really is strange, and the actress who plays River Song kinda tries to explain it in Confidential w/o spoilers (but fails). I'm thinking that the writing on the cot changes depending on the babies that are placed in it or it somehow has writing that tells of all the babies that will be in it. Based on what the actress said in Confidential, I suspect we'll get more insight into this in the next half-season.
- I haven't seen the Confidential, but: the one thing that River told the Doctor, to convince him to trust her, is his name. It's his cot. Maybe it doesn't say River Song at all - when she indicated it, that meant to him that a) she could read Gallifreyan, not translated by the TARDIS and only legible to a Time Lord and b) she's seen it before. The Doctor is clever - he put two and two together and got to four pretty quickly.
- The Doctor already knows she can write Gallifreyan. She's written a message to him (in her personal future) in Old Gallifreyan on the Byzantium's home box.
- The thing that says "River Song" was never the cot, but the prayer leaf. Earlier in the episode the doctor said he understands all languages, even some that the TARDIS isn't translating, so he may well have been able to read it before the translation circuits kicked in, and was able to work her identity out from that.
- The cot did say "River Song" on it, River tried to convince Amy by showing her the cot but gave up when it was clear that it wasn't translating. The prayer leaf also had her name written on it, so that's what she used next.
- No the cot didn't say River Song on it. From where Amy was it looked as if the doctor had read the cot, but he read the prayer leaf inside the cot. when River was talking about translation taking longer with the written word, Amy assumed River meant the cot and tried to read it. The thing you're forgetting is that the doctor speaks Gallifreyan. If it had anything that could make him jump to that conclusion on it, it would have happened when he pulled it out of storage, not at the time the plot demanded. We don't know what it says on it, but since it's his my vote is for The Doctor's real name. That also neatly explains how River knows his real name.
- Why in the world would the cot say River Song on it? The only way that the cot could have her name on it would be if the cot changed names based on who was in it/touching it for identification purposes. Still, that would mean that when River touched it it said 'Melody Pond' not 'River Song' as identifying her as River Song wouldn't clear up who she was.
- The cot did say "River Song" on it, River tried to convince Amy by showing her the cot but gave up when it was clear that it wasn't translating. The prayer leaf also had her name written on it, so that's what she used next.
- Amy was looking at the cot, but River pointed out that it was in Gallifreyan and so, untranslatable. River meant for Amy to look at the prayer leaf.
- Perhaps the cot said Hello Sweetie, first words the Doctor's Parents have written for him.
- Why does River say that the TARDIS can't translate Gallifreyan? The TARDIS is Gallifreyan technology; it seems bizarre that it wouldn't be able to translate the Gallifreyan language.
- Well maybe the writing is the Doctor's name, and names don't exactly translate. And maybe it's made of sounds that don't exist in English. Try translating the name "Bob" into a language that doesn't have a "b" sound or an "o" sound.
- I think you said it. Gallifreyan technology probably can't translate Gallifreyan, which is its native tongue. Can you imagine trying to translate English into English? It didn't translate the Old High Gallifreyan from "Time of the Angels" either. Maybe it assumes that Gallifreyan is the "default" and doesn't bother.
- The Time Lords weren't very fond of interfering with other species (and dragging them across the universe certainly counts) and since only a non-Time Lord would need Gallifreyan translated they probably saw no point in it.
- I think you said it. Gallifreyan technology probably can't translate Gallifreyan, which is its native tongue. Can you imagine trying to translate English into English? It didn't translate the Old High Gallifreyan from "Time of the Angels" either. Maybe it assumes that Gallifreyan is the "default" and doesn't bother.
- It's not that it "can't", I think, so much that it never bothers to. It's stated more than once that it in fact does not translate Gallifreyan (hence why The Doctor always has to translate Gallifreyan writing for his Companions); this is because there was never a reason to program it to do so - only a Time Lord (or, at least, a Gallifreyan) can ostensibly pilot a TARDIS, and they already know their own language; the TARDIS was designed by Time Lords, for Time Lord use. So it didn't translate the writing on the cot (or any of River's little easter egg messages) because they were in the TARDIS' creators' original language, but it did translate the prayer leaf inside the cot, because it wasn't written in Gallifreyan. On a side note, in regards to whose cot it really is, these are my theories:
- Due to his hesitation and awkward stumbling, I feel it's reason enough to believe it may not have been his cot, though obviously, it was at least probably a Gallifreyan child's, given the writing on it... we do know he's said he has had children before, so maybe that's why he's carrying it around in storage, and why he's uncomfortable talking about it - after all, allegedly everyone he ever knew from Gallifrey, including friends and family, is dead or timelocked now. Painful memories there.
- It's got the name of a completely random Gallifreyan or Gallifreyan family on it, because it belongs to the original owners of the TARDIS that, remember, he stole from the workshop it was getting repaired in. If it did belong to the prior owner(s), that would certainly be embarrassing and awkward. "Oh this? Yeah, I... stole it. On account of it was in the TARDIS when I stole that. From somebody who apparently had kids. Oops."
- Alternatively, it is his name after all, but it's understandably weird to be carrying around your own baby cot for no apparent reason, and thus embarrassing and thus his awkwardness, especially since, even though he knows Amy and Rory can't read it, it's still his name, and he doesn't give out his real name, so it would also perhaps come uncomfortably close to revealing something he's for whatever reason never wanted to.
- Well maybe the writing is the Doctor's name, and names don't exactly translate. And maybe it's made of sounds that don't exist in English. Try translating the name "Bob" into a language that doesn't have a "b" sound or an "o" sound.
- How do the Headless Monks eat and breathe, and other science facts? (lalala)
- Just repeat to yourself it's just a show, you should really just relax
- They're zombies??
- Or perhaps they're machines.
- They could only be part machine since they need "recruits."
- Their heads are in the boxes, and control their bodies by remote control. The bodies could be fed by IV, and there could be airholes somewhere under the robes.
- They could only be part machine since they need "recruits."
- Someone in the episode said that the Headless Monks don't register as lifeforms, so maybe they aren't?
- Madame Kovarian is getting away. And then Rory puts his sword to her neck. And then the pirates show up. And then later, she's far away, talking to us via video screen, and she's still got the real baby with her. Did I miss something? When (and how) did she get away?
- The Doctor let her go, running away with the soldiers. The question is how she got the real Melody away. The baby could have been hidden somewhere on her ship, but it would have had to be a place that she was very sure wouldn't be found.
- I figure the ganger Melody was created right after the real Melody was born. Amy never even saw the real one, which was whisked away immediately. The Doctor showed up awhile later.
- When the Family of Blood did nasty things, the Doctor made sure to lock them up. He shouldn't have let Kovarian just get away.
- The Doctor is often unpredictable with regards to the amount of mercy he dishes out. Besides, Kovarian hadn't actually killed anyone, had she?
- Holding Amy prisoner for months on end and secretly replacing her with a ganger so nobody knows for the purpose of stealing her child is still pretty bad.
- The Doctor is often unpredictable with regards to the amount of mercy he dishes out. Besides, Kovarian hadn't actually killed anyone, had she?
- Madame Kovarian has been shown to use flesh avatars. It's quite possible that the Kovarian we see on Demon's Run was a flesh avatar, her actual body being far away(wherever Melody is).
- The Doctor let her go, running away with the soldiers. The question is how she got the real Melody away. The baby could have been hidden somewhere on her ship, but it would have had to be a place that she was very sure wouldn't be found.
- River mentions that the TARDIS translation circuit takes time to kick in for written speech. Has this ever been a problem before? It worked immediately (as far as we could tell) in The Fires of Pompeii. And remember that the TARDIS has been in this location for a good half hour already.
- Rule of Drama.
- For a more thorough explanation, maybe since the TARDIS spends so much time on Earth and has so many Earthlings as companions, it's had infinitely more practice translating Earth based languages, similar to English speakers in the US and UK having an easier time translating Spanish and French than, say, Japanese or Thai.
- Rule of Drama.
- Amy is able to read River's name thanks to the TARDIS translation circuit. But by this point, the TARDIS is already gone. How is it still translating? It's not even like the TARDIS had previously translated the thing and Amy just remembered what it said; it's explicitly stated that the translation hadn't kicked in yet until that moment at the end.
- The Doctor has created superphones that can send calls through space and time, maybe he developed the superphone technology from the TARDIS's ability to translate for companions through space and time. Or, Option B, the TARDIS translation has a lingering effect long after a companion stops travelling (possibly that "residual background radiation" that they continually mention). This would go the extra mile and explain why Sarah Jane was still able to speak with aliens even decades after her travels were over.
- We'd really better hope that this is the case, or a number of companions are going to be in serious trouble.
- While it does explain how time-displaced companions communicate with the civilisations they settled with, it doesn't that of Sarah Jane's friends who don't meet the Doctor until SJA series 3 (as well as Maria, who has never even seen the TARDIS) and freely talk with aliens as well.
- Journey's End seems to show that the translation wears off when a companion spends time away from the TARDIS, since Martha hears people (and Daleks) speaking German, rather than hearing it translated into English.
- The Doctor has created superphones that can send calls through space and time, maybe he developed the superphone technology from the TARDIS's ability to translate for companions through space and time. Or, Option B, the TARDIS translation has a lingering effect long after a companion stops travelling (possibly that "residual background radiation" that they continually mention). This would go the extra mile and explain why Sarah Jane was still able to speak with aliens even decades after her travels were over.
- The black commander guy makes it very clear that they intend to kill the Doctor. Then the Doctor shows up and the commander pulls his gun (followed shortly by all the other soldiers). Why doesn't he just shoot the Doctor?
- They thought he would regenerate?
- If it didn't occur to them to shoot him again before he regenerates, then they still could have shot him again after regeneration and keep shooting him until he runs out of regenerations. If they thought that he had an infinite number of regenerations or that it would be impossible to kill him no matter how immediately fatal a head wound or something would be, then there really isn't much of a point in them trying to kill the Doctor. And even if they did believe that, why not try anyway? Were they trying to conserve ammo or something?
- Perhaps, despite what they chant at one point, they ARE fools.
- Remember to them the Doctor is a legend, he shaped their language their entire reason for existing is because of him, they may have been training for years but he was being confronted by the person who was to them the living definition of powerful.
- If it didn't occur to them to shoot him again before he regenerates, then they still could have shot him again after regeneration and keep shooting him until he runs out of regenerations. If they thought that he had an infinite number of regenerations or that it would be impossible to kill him no matter how immediately fatal a head wound or something would be, then there really isn't much of a point in them trying to kill the Doctor. And even if they did believe that, why not try anyway? Were they trying to conserve ammo or something?
- They thought he would regenerate?
- The Doctor goes off in the TARDIS, leaving everyone stranded at Demons Run. How does he expect them to get back home?
- Maybe he just plans to pick them up later?
- River has a vortex manipulator, that's how she got there. The Doctor tells her to get everyone home.
- Why does the Doctor go off by himself in the TARDIS? I can see why he wouldn't take River, Amy and Rory along (they need time to get re-acquainted), but why not take that Silurian army along with him?
- The same reasons he doesn't take an army with him everywhere he goes. He doesn't always need one, he's concerned they might get hurt, he's concerned they might hurt others, and there's no guarantee they'd want to help anyway. Maybe by this point they feel that they've paid their debt.
- You want an army? The Doctor's the equivalent of one.
- Couldn't Lorna think of any better way to meet the Doctor than to join an organization that seeks to kill the Doctor? That's like joining the Axis Forces because you want to meet Winston Churchill.
- Maybe she couldn't afford to buy a ship or whatever, and the church-military was the only spacefaring option available to her. Maybe she planned to defect at some point but she hadn't gotten around to that yet.
- How the heck does an entire language not have a word for pond? Even if the only water in the forest is the river, there must be rain from time to time, or else there wouldn't be a forest or a river to begin with. And I doubt it could rain in the forest without there being a few puddles, which are much closer to ponds than rivers. Puddle Song? Or, if they use the same word for all water, wouldn't it be Water Song?
- A puddle isn't that much like a pond, a puddle is just a pool of water left after the rain while a pond (like a river) is a more permanent body of water that most likely contains plant and animal life. Also, since a direct translation was not possible she may have just chosen the word she liked best out of all the reasonably close words - in English at least "River" sounds like a better name than "Puddle". They probably have more than one word that could substitute for "Melody" too, but "Song" sounded better than the words for "Music" or "Tune".
- What's more, there are a lot of things and concepts that are difficult or impossible to translate to English. Shadenfreude, Crag, Rendezvous. Also, the Ancient Greeks thought the Ocean was just a giant river that wrapped around the earth several times like a giant ribbon. They probably have lakes and ponds and oceans (rivers eventually empty somewhere), but they don't think of them as inherently distinct things, just "the beginning of the river" and "the end of the river." I keep thinking about how the English language has a word for light red with "pink," but not light blue.
- When you don't have a concept, you don't have a word for it. One thing we always hear is that "saudade" is a word that only exists in portuguese (the closer translation would be "missing someone/something", but it doesn't quite convey the idea in the word, that goes beoyond the idea of something not being around - and funny thing, it is the best way to describe what Amy was feeling when Rory was erased from time, or the Doctor), the same way, there isn't a expression or word in portuguese that means the same as "take for granted". Not everything can be translated straight away. Also, considering we have many words to describe the same things (or things whose meaning is close to others) was something developed because back in the primitive tribes one couldn't speak the name of someone who was deceased (other for a while, or forever, it depends on the group), one could say that they don't have a word for "pond" because it's banned, forbidden, and ultimately forgotten. Same goes for Melody. (Anyway, you'd be amazed at the amount of things that can't be translated straight to English because the language doesn't have a close match).
- How was any of the events at Demon's run a trap for the Doctor? They decoyed him, they didn't trap him.
- Well if those soldiers had bothered to shoot the Doctor when they had the chance, it would've been an excellent trap.
- How was it a trap? They kidnapped someone close to him to lead him there, hoping to catch him as he came to save her. They did not count on the Doctor being clever enough to take them all out. Remember, this is still early days for the Silence—they haven't even made the Lake Silencio plan yet. Kovarian, however, is cleverer than the clerics and has a plan B--if the Doctor defeats the clerics, prevent him from communicating with his friends and escape with the real Melody. Their first plan is to try and kill him at Demon's Run. If that doesn't work, they will raise Melody to do the deed. Basically, it's a bunch of little traps created to eventually trap the Doctor in a position for him to be killed.
- The Silurian Woman says "Demons Run is ours without a drop of blood spilled", but this doesn't seem to be the case. Surely, the victory can be said to be achieved with a fairly minimum of loss of life, but at least one headless monk and a few marines had been killed by that time when The Doctor tricked them into shooting at each other inmediatly before the "we are not fools" thing. And maybe we should also count the soldier that she stung with her long tongue, we have seen those thing to be venomous before, although maybe he was given later the antidote or something. So, pretty bloodless for a battle? Sure. Not a single drop of blood? Now, thats a little exagerated.
- Since the headless monks are, well, headless for the purpose of making them more effective fighters and don't register as lifeforms, "killing" them probably doesn't count. There is no reason to assume that the Silurian didn't just knock that guy out and perhaps the monks used a nonlethal setting since they seemed to wait before attacking again and let themselves be appeased by the soldiers disarming.
- After the Doctor gives his "Colonel Run Away" speech, he says, "Oh look, I'm angry. That's new." Unless the Doctor has taken up sarcasm, this doesn't make much sense. Granted, he only gets angry when he has a really good reason, but it's happened many times before, given the caliber of people/aliens/things he's had to deal with.
- "Unless the Doctor has taken up sarcasm,"!? What? He's used it before, quite often. The Eleventh may even be prone to it, now that I stop and think about it, because when I think "The Doctor being sarcastic", the voice I hear first is Matt Smith's. He can be very dismissive/arrogant (quite a bit more so in the Eleventh incarnation compared to the Tenth, though even Ten had those tendencies), as well as jocular, so it shouldn't surprise you that he's also sometimes sarcastic. Seriously, even some of his cranky old man incarnations from Classic, I seem to recall hearing sarcasm from once in a while.
Let's Kill Hitler
- Who was bringing up Mels this whole time? Did Amy or Rory ever meet them? If not, why did no one ever find that suspicious?
- If Kovarian can train and send Mels into Amy's time, I'm assuming she and whoever else she's working with are taking care of her needs. It never did show her outside of school/prison after all.
- What happened to Hitler?
- I guess he just stayed in that cupboard for awhile until someone came and let him out. The real question is why nobody bothered to kill him while they had the chance.
- Killing him seven years early would have changed the entire course of history and that's not always a good thing for people coming back to a future where they might never have been born. Also, River's the only murderer among them and very soon after they arrived they had more pressing concerns.
- Still, it was weird they had a whole episode called Let's Kill Hitler and there's actually very little focus on killing Hitler, discussing Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act, etc.
- I suspect that's the whole point; it's a subversion. Considering that there's an entire trope centred around people going back in time to kill Hitler, wringing their hands about going back in time to kill Hitler, dealing with the (usually bad) consequences of going back in time to kill Hitler, and so forth, one can make the case that it's a little bit... overused. And they very rarely come up with conclusions / solutions to the whole thing which aren't either extremely ambiguous or haven't been raised before. So here, we have the set up of going back in time to kill Hitler... except that's dealt with in five minutes and Hitler gets slugged on the chin and stuffed in a cupboard and forgotten about. Instant undercutting of expectations.
- I'd say fixed point. If the astronauts dying on the first Mars station were important enough to be fixed in time then probably so is Hitler's rise to power and death.
- So Mels is the grown-up Melody, and she's been brainwashed to kill the Doctor. She meets the Doctor at the crop circle and almost immediately points a gun at him. Why doesn't she shoot him?? (It's even confirmed that the gun is loaded and fully functioning, as she shoots the inside of the TARDIS a moment later.) I get that she wanted to escape from the cops, but she still had a car.
- The Doctor asked her that and she said that it would have been rude when they just met. I think she wanted to meet the Doctor properly and then kill him. She seemed to treat it all like a game anyway.
- Also, looking at it from a realistic standpoint; what would have happened if she'd shot someone in front of the police? They wouldn't have just stood there and let her get in the second shot during regeneration. Amy and Rory, if they'd been able to get over the shock, would probably have also tried to tackle her. Using the lipstick meant that no-one would realise what she'd done until it was too late to save him.
- How did Mels know to find everyone at the crop circle? Did she just follow Rory and Amy without them realizing it (and trailing at a great distance, apparently)? Had Rory and Amy simply told her where they were going, and if so why? Perhaps she time-traveled to the future and saw the news coverage of the crop circle just like the Doctor, but if so how did she do that?
- When Mels arrives, Amy asks "What are you doing here?" and Mels replies "Following you, of course". This is the most explanation we get, but it may well have been that Rory and Amy told Mels where they were going, if not what they were doing. They are best friends, after all.
- If the Doctor's death in Utah is a fixed point in time, how the hell does the Doctor not know? He's supposed to know every single event that is fixed in time, so is it because there are certain limitations like you are not to know a fixed event if it concerns you or is it just Rule #1? Has something like this ever happened in the old series?
- I don't think the Doctor is supposed to know every fixed point in time like an encyclopedia, I think his ability is closer to being able to recognize fixed points when he's placed into them. He didn't seem to know about Jack being a fixed point until he saw him running for the TARDIS. Perhaps when the Doctor reaches Utah he will know that what's happening can't (or shouldn't) be changed.
- When? Jack runs towards the TARDIS right before being abandoned and then again at the end of season three when he jumps on the TARDIS. The Doctor abandoned Jack because he was a fixed point in time (though "I thought you were dead!" would have been a wonderful excuse for doing so) and he left immediately after Rose defeated the Dalek without looking for Jack so he must have either thought Jack was dead or known what he was. But I think a literal fact is different than an event being a fixed point anyway. A fixed point can be changed but the results won't be good while Jack can't be killed permanently no matter what you do.
- I think that, when the Doctor described Jack as being a "fixed point", this isn't the same thing at all as "the Doctor will die on this date" is a "fixed point". In Jack's case, it just means that he's immortal so he's "fixed" in the sense that he's present someplace in every era, which just feels weird to a Time Lord. In the Doctor's case, an event is fixed in time and can't be changed (at least not without drastic consequences). The former just feels odd; only the latter is an actual timey-wimey thing. But anyway, yeah, I think that the Doctor can know if an event is fixed if he goes there personally, and sometimes he can know an event is fixed even if he hasn't been there yet, but he doesn't have a perfect mental list of every fixed point ever. Some points, like his own death, he remains ignorant about for awhile.
- I think somewhere it's explained that the point was artificially created by the S Ilence.
- I don't think the Doctor is supposed to know every fixed point in time like an encyclopedia, I think his ability is closer to being able to recognize fixed points when he's placed into them. He didn't seem to know about Jack being a fixed point until he saw him running for the TARDIS. Perhaps when the Doctor reaches Utah he will know that what's happening can't (or shouldn't) be changed.
- River (temporarily) kills the Doctor with poisoned lipstick (or so implied.). Umm... shouldn't that kill her?
- If she has been trained to be some kind of Doctor-killing superweapon, they might have found some way to make her immune to it. I seem to recall someone who worked with snakes would give himself increasingly large doses of snake venom until he was immune (or at least very resistant) to a snakebite. The same argument could be made for why she doesn't hallucinate because of her other lipstick. Or, to go simpler, she's wearing a layer of non-poisonous lipstick under the poisoned layer to act as a barrier.
- It seemed as though Melody escaped in 1969 at the end of Day of the Moon, regenerated (presumably into the body she grew up in as 'Mels'), and then probably got recaptured by the Silence. So why would they let her grow up with her parents? Or why wouldn't they have at least programmed her better? Maybe they had her hang out with Amy because she'd met the Doctor and would one day meet him again, but it seems like kind of a long time to have her with them, given her total lack of discretion and self-control, and the fact that she seems to know they're her parents. Wouldn't the Silence be afraid that she'd let the cat out of the bag? Her erratic behaviour seems to suggest that only thing they programmed into her was the order to kill the Doctor, which she seemed to have some control over anyway. You'd think that if they wanted to kill the most elusive man in the universe, they wouldn't let her be such a loose cannon. I would think they'd want to program her to be really unassuming and blend in, right up until the moment she met the Doctor, at which point she'd instantly vaporize him. They just seem to have dropped the ball pretty far into their plan, is what I'm saying.
- But they don't care that Mel screws up all her earlier attempts to kill the Doctor; the only thing that matters is that she shoots him in Utah. (Because that one's a "still point in time", which makes it easier to create a "fixed point".) And when it comes to that attempt, they put her in a special spacesuit that forces her to cooperate.
- I've always assumed that the Silence let her grow up with Amy and Rory - if not outright inserting her there - because they knew that Amy would meet the Doctor and would continue to meet the Doctor, thus giving Mels/Melody lots of chances and opportunities to kill him. When she fails to kill him using Amy as the middle-man (to meet him) and then runs away, they force her into the space suit to ensure success.
- I understand why the sight of some of his old companions could cause the doctor guilt but why Rose? He left her with a better job, a brother, a father, and a version of himself that won't leave her. She's doing way better then before she met him.
Night Terrors
- Why was there no mention of Melody at all? Sure, Amy and Rory know she's going to grow into River, but they are not the type to just accept that and forget about the fact their daughter is kidnapped. This was a self-contained episode that could have taken place any time both Rory and Amy were on the TARDIS (except for the obit.), which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but Amy and Rory just going along to answer a child's distress call when their own daughter is out there, missing? Seems unlikely.
- A throwaway line from the Doctor that the call could possibly be from Melody would have been nice. Believable, too, since Melody is certainly special and being able to psychically contact the Doctor would not be a surprise. I like to think that this is what went through the Doctor's head, but he didn't want to get Amy and Rory's hopes up. According to wiki, this was originally going to be episode 4 of the season, they were only able to move it because it was so self-contained. I'd venture a guess that they just changed the screen at the end (The Doctor's obituary) from the Schrodinger's Pregnancy.
- For an in-universe explanation; we don't know how much time has passed. Amy and Rory may have spent ages mourning the loss of the chance to raise their daughter, and thinking about what she's been through. Sure, she should still be in their minds, but they may have accepted that there's nothing they can do to change things now (I imagine changing the life of a person like River Song would be the kind of thing that would have terrible consequences on the timeline, and they've both seen what can happen when time is messed with). Not perfect, but they couldn't mention her in every episode from now on, so it's probably the best thing to assume.
- So, Amy gets attacked by a creepy doll-thing, and she starts morphing into a creepy doll-thing herself, and Rory...just stands there. Isn't this the guy who waited 2000 years at the side of the Pandorica just to give Amy some mild additional protection? And yet now Amy's being attacked right in front of him and all he can do is stand in shock.
- To be fair, seeing your wife being turned into a doll is probably the kind of thing which would send most guys into shock; with the Pandorica he had time to get his head round what had happened, and decide what he wanted to do. Also, Rory is a smart guy. Trying to help Amy would have only got him turned into a doll too, which wouldn't have helped anyone.
The Girl Who Waited
- How exactly does this hospital-thing work? I guess the infected are supposed to go to Red Waterfall and their visitors are supposed to go to Green Anchor. The Waterfall zone somehow prevents you from dying of the plague within one day of your personal time (though I guess it's still one day from the perspective of the Anchor zone?). Anyway, how is communication supposed to work here? Do the visitors look through the time glass to see the patient, but then every so often the patient just zooms forward in age by a couple years? Wouldn't the patient get really really lonely in the interim (which is exactly what happened to Amy)? I mean I know there's entertainment provided, but still...
- Imagine your Mum is dying of cancer. It's fatal and there's nothing they can do, she will definitely die within the week. Instead of her dying, you are told she can be put into a facility where she can live out the rest of her life exploring fantastic and beautiful worlds, with her every need taken care of by robots. Then, at points across her life, you can pop in a visit via the magnifying glass, say hello, check up on her, and watch her live the rest of her life. I imagine the red waterfall timestreams can also crossover, so that patients can interact with each other too. The idea is that the families of patients "visit" the patients across their "lives".
- It still leaves the question of whether all the other patients go half-insane from loneliness like Amy did.
- The other patients would be more willing to tolerate it, since they knew the only other option was death. But yeah, it's possible that some of them are really lonely. (The same happens in real-life hospitals, too.)
- It still leaves the question of whether all the other patients go half-insane from loneliness like Amy did.
- Imagine your Mum is dying of cancer. It's fatal and there's nothing they can do, she will definitely die within the week. Instead of her dying, you are told she can be put into a facility where she can live out the rest of her life exploring fantastic and beautiful worlds, with her every need taken care of by robots. Then, at points across her life, you can pop in a visit via the magnifying glass, say hello, check up on her, and watch her live the rest of her life. I imagine the red waterfall timestreams can also crossover, so that patients can interact with each other too. The idea is that the families of patients "visit" the patients across their "lives".
- If the Green Anchor zone is only meant for visitors, why does a handbot come in and ask Rory "Will you be staying for long?"
- How is that an odd question to ask a visitor? It seems entirely appropriate. Maybe they'd need to know so that they know whether or not to offer them different services or something...
- Amy waits around for a week, but never ate anything because she wasn't hungry. The Doctor explains that this is because her timestream is compressed. Huh? How would the relative speed of time have any impact on her need for food?
- I think the idea was that since in actuality only a day was passing, only the needs of a day would need to be met, no matter how long the person inside experienced. So even though Amy experienced a week, since it was only a few moments really, she didn't get hungry. Yeah... it's confusing.
- This was the only legitimately weird thing about the episode. The point was to eliminate the problem of Amy eating, but it doesn't make any sense (she physically ages but feels no hunger?). It would have made more sense to have the interface just give her meals, hospital/prison style, on a rotating service.
- I don't think that the point was to eliminate hunger. I think they wanted the patient to seem to live through the rest of their lives. I agree that the timestream compression doesn't seem to make any sense at all, though. I believe they make a distinction between "timestream" and time, so timestream would be what people believe is "real time" (a sort of inner time), and time is, well, time (what actually passes). This still doesn't experience the aging bit, though. The only explanation I can think of would be that Amy's life (her "timestream") is sort of sped up, which still wouldn't make sense hunger-wise, since hunger is something you have when you need energy, and not a random thing happening three times a day, but the writer doesn't necessarily need to know this, although he should.
- The answer is very simple: There is no answer, the writers screwed up. They tried to fix a problem that didn't exist (Amy's hunger) with the most absurd solution possible. If they had ignored the problem or just put some unexplained food in there no one would have even noticed; much less have written a Headscratcher about it.
- Alternate theorem: its spacey-wacey.
- The answer is very simple: There is no answer, the writers screwed up. They tried to fix a problem that didn't exist (Amy's hunger) with the most absurd solution possible. If they had ignored the problem or just put some unexplained food in there no one would have even noticed; much less have written a Headscratcher about it.
- I don't think that the point was to eliminate hunger. I think they wanted the patient to seem to live through the rest of their lives. I agree that the timestream compression doesn't seem to make any sense at all, though. I believe they make a distinction between "timestream" and time, so timestream would be what people believe is "real time" (a sort of inner time), and time is, well, time (what actually passes). This still doesn't experience the aging bit, though. The only explanation I can think of would be that Amy's life (her "timestream") is sort of sped up, which still wouldn't make sense hunger-wise, since hunger is something you have when you need energy, and not a random thing happening three times a day, but the writer doesn't necessarily need to know this, although he should.
- How was Old!Amy fatter than regular Amy? She has no food.
- She wasn't fat. Maybe she looked it from certain angles because of the prosthetics and the armor she had on.
- So, if the two versions of Amy can't coexist in the TARDIS, does that mean that the comic relief special based on that is non-canon?
- Different circumstances. Older Amy existing while Younger Amy was rescued before becoming her is an obvious paradox. The Comic Relief special had a messed up Tardis, but no paradoxes, and there was never two of anyone in the same time for very long anyway.
The God Complex
- So, as the Doctor so handily deduces, the thing that all the Minotaur's victims have in common is their faith and, when they see their fears in the hotel room, this somehow leads them to worship the Minotaur (not entirely sure how, I think I missed something there). BUT, my question is thus - Gibbis saw his fear (the Weeping Angels) the first time they hid from the Minotaur, but by the end he's the only one left alive. So why didn't it work on him? He builds his life around worshipping others.
- The others had faith in one thing. Gibbis, as the doctor said, has a sly form of cowardice. They'll readily throw the first thing under the bus they can to save themselves and they bide their time. Hence, his faith in his conquereors would be at best very small, since he knows someone else is just going to come by and take over. A false faith kept him alive throughout the whole thing.
- And to answer how that leads to worshipping the minotaur: The point is that when people are afraid, they fall back on whatever they have the most faith in. Amy's was that the Doctor would save them, and so on. By relying on their faith, they're exposing it to manipulation, where it gets transformed into faith in the minotaur.
- To clarify the above point: the minotaur has some sort of magic power such that if anyone around experiences a deep faith in X, the minotaur can redirect that faith so it's a faith in the minotaur instead. Basically.
- Gibbis' faith is that if he surrenders, he will live. First of all, the Doctor pretty much tells him he can't use his usual tactics this time, and second, surrendering means letting the minotaur kill you. Therefore, Gibbis faith is crushed pretty quickly, and so he isn't compelled to worship the minotaur.
- Aliens always speak English on this show, because the TARDIS can translate anything. So why did the Doctor have to translate the minotaur personally?
- Maybe because the TARDIS had been whisked away somewhere else, and this messed with the translation ability?
- But then how is Gibbis speaking English, when he's an alien?
- Maybe his planet has been conquered so many times that his people have had to learn every language ever. (On second thought...nah, that's a stretch.)
- Perhaps the Minotaur speaks a particular language that the TARDIS can't translate for some reason, but the Doctor happens to know the language personally.
- The Nimon has been imprisoned for so long that it's essentially become a beast of pure id - it hasn't had anything to talk to for possibly centuries. It's probably grunting half-words at the Doctor because that's the best it can do, and linguistically it's not complete enough for the TARDIS to translate, but the Doctor can just barely make sense of it because he's also found himself alone for long periods of time and has a bond with it.
- In The Satan Pit and a couple of other episodes, the Doctor mentions that the TARDIS has difficulty with really old languages... and when the beast is nearly dead the Doctor says that it's a really ancient creature... so it must speak one of those languages the TARDIS has difficulty with. At any rate, the Doctor is savvy enough to repeat the alien's words even when there's no-one else in the room, for the benefit of the viewers.
- Maybe because the TARDIS had been whisked away somewhere else, and this messed with the translation ability?
- Just for clarification (and Paranoia Fuel exploration). If I understand this correctly, The Minotaur is compelled to kill whoever worships it - which, given its unique ability, is anyone with a singular strong faith. It would also seem the victims are somehow rendered defenseless because of their (now converted) faith. Are the above correct? Is so, theoretically speaking if a Crossover happened the Imperium of Mankind is screwed...(Sorry, nasty idea in mind, had to check if I'm getting the gist correct).
- The above is correct.
- Yeah, though the major problem is that in Warhammer horrifying beings from beyond the veil of nightmares attempting to convert you into worshiping them is so incredibly common that I doubt the minotuar would work any better.
- The above is correct.
- What happened to "That which holds the image of an angel becomes itself an angel"?
- Maybe it doesn't work for angel-images created by the hallucinatory process of the God Complex. And besides, the power of "that which holds the image of an angel becomes itself an angel" only seemed to work for the angels of "Flesh and Stone", as there are pictures of angels in "Blink" and they never manifest as angels (so far as we know). So it's possible there are multiple subspecies of angels and the ones we saw in the God Complex were the wrong subspecies.
- Alternatively, the image thing only works when there are genuine angels in close proximity to propagate the effect.
- How does breaking Amy's faith in the Doctor instantly kill the Minotaur? Wouldn't it just try to feed off the Doctor? And what's stoping whoever was sending people to the hotel from just picking up someone else? Also Amy’s faith in the Doctor in general. Shouldn’t the fact that he failed to save her daughter prove that he’s not infallible?
- It's implied that the Doctor doesn't have faith, the Minotaur ran out of power, and they did find Melody... eventually...
- Maybe I’m remembering incorrectly but didn’t the Doctor have a room, meaning he has faith in something. Also the Minotaur died right after losing Amy as a food source, maybe it’s some alien biology thing but if you skip lunch you don’t drop dead.
- The Doctor does have faith in something—and we've already seen it. Remember "The Curse of Fenric"? The Doctor warded off the Haemovores with the ridiculously heartwarming mantra of the names of every companion he'd ever had. Even so, the Minotaur was actively feeding off of Amy at the time. I assumed that if the active food supply was severed, the Minotaur would suddenly be feeding off of a lack of faith—like Subtraction Soup in the Phantom Tollbooth. It would have starved almost immediately.
- It's implied that the Doctor doesn't have faith, the Minotaur ran out of power, and they did find Melody... eventually...
- How did the trapped people understand Gibbis' language before the TARDIS arrived? The translation circuit only works for people close to the (working) TARDIS.
- Either he's experienced in nonverbal communication (to better grovel to those that don't deign learn his language), or he already speaks English (or his species is able to learn new languages very quickly as a method of making groveling easier).
- Why was the God Complex made to appear to be a 1980s hotel? None of the trapped people we saw had any connection to a hotel.
- I think it was mentioned in the episode that it wasn't supposed to be doing that, and only looked like that originally to target a single trapped person, but then, like the TARDIS, it got stuck on that image setting and worked around that.
Closing Time
- So how can it be two hundred years later and the doctor shows no sign of aging despite when the master used his laser screwdriver to age the Doctor about a hundred years and he did look much older.
- Time Lords seem to have some control over how they age. River even made herself get younger over time.
- Rule One: The Doctor lies. I'm of the opinion that the Doctor who gets shot on the beach is not two hundred years older than the Doctor who first meets Amy. And he's actually the Teselecta, anyway. He/it probably lied about his age in the hopes of sewing a bit more confusion, as part of his plan to fake his death and "go quiet" for awhile. That way, he can still show up and do stuff, and people will assume "Oh, this must be the Doctor who isn't eleven-hundred years old yet" rather than thinking "Oh crap, he survived Lake Silencio!"
- He's NOT the Teselecta until after speaking to it...them. In "Closing Time", he's the real Doctor.
- Okay, so a Cyberman knocks the Doctor unconscious, then we get an impairment shot and he's waking up some time later. Why did it not kill him? I know the Doctor said that they didn't need him because he's not "compatible," but they understand what a threat he is- why not kill him (or at least TRY to) while he was unconscious? It could have at least taken him to be restrained somewhere. And how long was the Doctor out for? Assuming it wasn't very long, shouldn't the Cyberman have heard Craig calling for him and heading towards there? It could have waited five seconds for Craig to show up and find the Doctor KO'ed, then dragged Craig off without having to deal with the Doctor. Basically, it could have done a number of things - so why did the Cyberman knock the Doctor unconscious and then just leave?
- My best guess is that the Cyberman broke his arm in the process of punching the Doctor, and went away for repairs. Craig showed up about 10 minutes later.
- It was said that they were scavenging for power, so perhaps he didn't have enough energy to fire a killshot. After all, when they did capture the Doctor they merely restrained him instead of killing him outright and in that time they dragged George away so that'd give Craig enough time to get the doctor out of there before they could come back.
- How did the Doctor know when he was meant to die? Granted he knew the date of the fixed point, but how did he know when it was meant to happen in his personal timeline?
- He didn't. He just was finally faced with the very real idea of him actually dying in his future... but, unlike End of Time Part 2, it wasn't as immediate. You'll notice he then tries to put it off, avoiding going to Lake Silencio at all while he sees the sights of the universe a bit and visits a few old friends, like Craig. It's only when he realizes that one of the friends (the Brigadier) he's most wanted to visit again is dead - and was waiting for him to show up when he died - that he sort of gives up and decides, "to hell with it, it's time." Or, put in simpler terms, he was going through some of the stages of dying - specifically, a combination of Denial (I can just put it off) and Bargaining (the universe won't kill me if I don't go there, right?). He then zooms right into a bit of Depression (I should have visited him sooner/I've wasted time/everyone I love dies), and then some form of Acceptance (I guess it's time). Though he successfully manages to Bargain with his clever plan later, of course.
- About the Brigadier, why does him being dead mean the Doctor can't go see him one last time? He lives in a time machine! Why dosen't he ask when his friend died and then go back a little before that and say goodbye?
- He didn't. He just was finally faced with the very real idea of him actually dying in his future... but, unlike End of Time Part 2, it wasn't as immediate. You'll notice he then tries to put it off, avoiding going to Lake Silencio at all while he sees the sights of the universe a bit and visits a few old friends, like Craig. It's only when he realizes that one of the friends (the Brigadier) he's most wanted to visit again is dead - and was waiting for him to show up when he died - that he sort of gives up and decides, "to hell with it, it's time." Or, put in simpler terms, he was going through some of the stages of dying - specifically, a combination of Denial (I can just put it off) and Bargaining (the universe won't kill me if I don't go there, right?). He then zooms right into a bit of Depression (I should have visited him sooner/I've wasted time/everyone I love dies), and then some form of Acceptance (I guess it's time). Though he successfully manages to Bargain with his clever plan later, of course.
The Wedding of River Song
- Nothing was made of the Doctor's costume changes and seemingly deliberate inconsistent characterization (liking vs. not liking wine, rubik's cubes, and apples) nor of the TARDIS exploding or any of the other little questions that have popped up. Barring Moffat totally forgetting them, that means we have to wait ANOTHER year for answers. I understand the importance of cliffhangers, but at this point it's exhausting.
- Remember though the "future" version of him seen for the first part of The Impossible Astronaut was really the Teselecta and it was THAT which drunk the wine with them. Him being able to drink the wine WAS a clue it wasn't really him there (at least not the "body" we was seeing).
- I've got to admit, the second time I saw a Rubik's Cube I got suspicious. Maybe it was a Red Herring? And I would chalk his new coat (I assume that's what you mean by costume changes) up to them wanting a little more variety. The Doctor often has slightly different versions of his costume du jour, so I doubt it means anything.
- For the record, the coat was added at Matt Smith's request because he kept getting really cold on set. As to why nobody noticed and commented on the new coat, it would be for the same reason nobody seemed to notice or care when the Tenth Doctor changed his suit - do you wear the same outfit 24/7? Most people don't, so they wouldn't expect someone else to either. And unlike his various more questionable choices in fashion - including the goofy headgear River is always shooting off him - there's no Rule of Funny reason to point out the change.
- Fridge Brilliance - I don't remember if we see the Doctor solving the Rubik's Cube. But if I'm correct that we don't, he may have changed the stickers around. He has a tendency to ignore rules, does he not?
- River is sent to jail for killing the Doctor. How does anyone know that she's guilty? There were no witnesses other than her allies.
- There was a Silent there too.
- So the Silents decided to punish River for doing exactly what they wanted her to do?
- The Silents probably just reported the kill to somebody, and eventually it became public knowledge.
- So the Silents decided to punish River for doing exactly what they wanted her to do?
- There's always a chance of somebody observing from space or whatever.
- The Doctor said he wanted to "go quiet" and convince everyone he was dead. He probably told the Teselecta people (the tiny people in the robot) to report that he had died.
- There's probably a Stable Time Loop enforcing all this anyway.
- Remember, the Time Crash was limited just to Earth, at least when it was undone. The massive fleet of allies and friends was still there when things were fixed, as evidenced by the "meteor shower" comment (the "shower" was obviously them entering and exiting the atmosphere). They may not have been there in person, but they were ALL above, watching via sensors and viewscreens. We might not have actually seen them, but there must have been thousands or even millions of witnesses to report and prosecute.
- There was a Silent there too.
- So the big phrase is "Silence will fall when the Question is asked", right? But it's revealed that the Doctor knows a vital secret (specifically, the answer to the question "Doctor Who?"), and the Silents dearly want to prevent the Doctor from answering that question at a specific moment in the future. They want to ensure the Doctor's silence by killing him before the question is asked. So the phrase should really be "Silence will fall, thus preventing the Question from being answered", right? Or maybe "Silence will fall before the Question is asked." That's quite a different statement there.
- Maybe it's a translation issue.
- Actually, Dorian mentioned "Silence must fall would be a better translation." So yes, it is a translation issue.
- Continuing with that, what exactly does it mean for silence to "fall"? Maybe the "fall" of silence only begins with the Doctor's death, and it continuously "falls" thereafter (because the Doctor continues to be silent). So it would still make sense to say "[If we succeed, then] silence will fall when the Question is asked" or "Silence must fall when the question is asked".
- I took the sentence to mean that "Silence must fall [on the Doctor] when the Question is asked.", which would mean that the Doctor must not answer the Question. This could be done by killing him beforehand, so he will stay silent when the question is asked, and no one else knows the answer, so the secret wouldn't become known.
- The answer to the question could be something that inevitably causes utter universe-ending disaster (translated, possibly metaphorically, as 'silence').
- That only works if "silence" has multiple meanings at the same time. The Doctor clearly states that "silence" refers to "my silence; my death".
- He speculates. He said “I never realised...”, so he was wrong at least once. Who's to say he was right the second time? And the thing about translations is that languages rarely translate 'directly', and the nuances of a word can shift very quickly, so even a 'direct' translation is by no means the most accurate. Whatever language the prophesy was originally written in could have many words with differing meanings that someone might translate as 'silence' (assuming it's only been translated once and not through several languages before it reaches the audience).
- How did the Teselecta fake the regeneration energy?
- Holograms, probably. Its not like we have any way of identifying it beyond the visual, and faking visuals are what it does.
- Since The Doctor was the ringleader of the hoax, he probably hacked into it a bit to make the holographic regenerative energy. If the Teselecta Doctor hadn't started regenerating after the first blow, no-one (Amy, Rory, River, Kovarian, the Silence, the viewers at home) would've been convinced.
- Why didn't the Doctor whisper "Look into my eyes" when River came out of Lake Silencio? She would have seen the Doctor and taken the shot. Everything would have been fine.
- He does wink at her, very quickly (it's his left eye, in the scene where the two of them are talking). He's fairly sure he's being watched - we know there's a Silent there, at least, from The Impossible Astronaut. He can't do anything that will give the game away to an observer. And, on top of that - maybe he wants River to think he's dead too, at least at that point. A completely clean start. When the plan changes and he has to do things differently, he's alright with her knowing, but that's not the aim.
- There's no way he can't be sure that the Silence don't have some kind of camera/radio/monitoring device built into the space suit she's wearing, so he can't risk telling her at the lake.
- So, the Doctor and River can't touch, because they're the two points in the timesplosion and them touching will make time keep going. But... they don't touch. The Doctor must have been in the Teselecta since he met it at the start of the episode - he's in it when he goes to his death, and he's in it again at the end when he gets married, and there's not really a gap in between where he could "change". Is this just an "ignore it because it would give the game away" thing?
- Everyone thinks the fixed point is River shooting the Doctor. It's actually River shooting the Teselecta. So it's the Teselecta that she can't touch, not the Doctor.
- So in the wibbly-wobbly world that gets produced by the paradox, time is frozen at 5:02 PM on April 22, 2011. But why is it 5:02 PM in London, when the Doctor died in Utah? Shouldn't it be 12:02 AM in the UK? Time zones obviously still apply, since it's later in the evening in Cairo than it is in Londinium. Or if the Doctor's time of death was always listed in GMT instead of local time, then shouldn't it have been 10:02 AM in Utah, which is far too early in the day considering how the scene was lit? (And who drinks red wine at breakfast, anyway?)
- My best guess is that it's all based on the Doctor's personal perception of time, since it's his lack-of-death that caused the whole mess. So he's thinking to himself "The local time is 5:02PM" and somehow this affects the perceived time in the time-is-a-mess universe.
- On a related note, why is London the capital of the "Holy Roman Empire", when Britain was never even part of that entity, and Winston Churchill was by no means a Hapsburg? I realize history is all a mishmash, which is why the Holy Roman Empire has all the trappings of the original Roman Empire like centurions and a Senate instead of hussars and a Diet, and its emperor is called "Caesar" instead of "Kaiser", but even by Who-standards that's a bit on the London Is The Centre Of The Universe side of things. Lastly, if the wars of the roses are going on at the same time as well, does that mean Emperor Winston I is a Yorkist or a Lancastrian?
- It's possible that the British Empire was merged in with them to form one big super-empire.
- I'd guess he'd side with the Lancastrians, since he's related to them from the Gaunt line. Anyway, no one says that London is The Capital of the Empire, it says it might as well be the capital of the province. Still, being an Emperor doesn't equal being a King, there are/can be Kings and Queens under an Emperor - that was the problem with Bouddicea, for example.
- The Holy Roman Empire didnt have a capital, its capital was just wherever the noble who became emperor lived and Vienna only became the effective capital due to the Hapsburg having a monopoly on the Electors. Foreigners had also been Holy Roman Emperor in the days before the elections where rigged.
- Cars on hot air balloons - how does THAT work?
- In what context?
- The opening scene showing time messed up.
- I don't think they're using both the fuels and the ballons. Anyway, how they GLIDE?
- In what context?
- As chilling as the Silent calling Rory "the man who dies again and again" was, hasn't he only died once or twice for reals? And more importantly, does them knowing make those "deaths" important?
- Rory has died and come back from it more than once. Of course people will know of the Last Centurion. And off the top of my head, he died in 'The Hungry Earth' 2 parter, was erased at the same time, died in 'The Curse of the Black Spot,' sort of died in 'Amy's Choice,' and was thought to have died in 'The Big Bang,' after keeping out of trouble for nearly 2000 years. Moffat's always on about the importance of stories and rumours - he's rumoured to have died and come back from it so many times he's almost as scary as the Doctor. He's even got an awesome title.
- Or more likely (as dying over and over again doesn't really strike fear into enemies), the Silence know all about the different timezones and it's a fun way to dig the knife in.
- The alternate version of Amy remembers the Doctor dying and drew a picture showing she remembers the pirate episode. However since the Alternate time/world was created at the beach shouldn't the alternate version of Amy and Rory be based on the ones there in TIA?
- Only the Doctor and River remain the same. Amy and Rory are just caught in the mish-mash.
- Why is the Teselecta so much better at impersonating people in this episode than it was in "Let's Kill Hitler"? The Doctor doesn't seem to be controlling it himself to give it his mannerisms (since he's in the eye)... Of course, if the Doctor were just standing around talking in robotic monotone it'd be pretty obvious what was going on, but...
- The Teselecta knows exactly what it's doing and is being guided by the Doctor himself. He probably ran to the eye just to wave to River, and then ran back, hence the line about the kiss, "I'll try and make it a good one."
- It was really the spacesuit River was wearing, not River herself who killed the Doctor/robot, wasn't it? So what was the point of raising River to be a superweapon?
- River was raised to kill the Doctor personally and it was destined she would, but as she'd betrayed her programming, they had to force her to do it. Alternatively, they just wanted to hurt her.
- Kovarian etc. went through a long process to create a baby that was partially Time Lord, which they then raised and used to kill the Doctor. I'm guessing that River's Time Lord powers somehow made it easier to make the Doctor's death into a "fixed point", and of course that's necessary if you're going to kill him properly and make sure he stays dead (though the Doctor still gets out of it by using the Teselecta). The fact that Lake Silencio is a "still point" in time was another factor making it easier to create a fixed point. Still, this is speculation on my part, and the episode itself could've done a better job of explaining why they needed River and why they didn't just nuke the whole area. (Though maybe that'll be discussed later.)
- That is brilliant.
- There's a big deal made about how everyone has to wear an Eye Drive to remember the Silence, including the Doctor. So how did he spend the first half of the episode running around the universe to find out about the Silence? Shouldn't he (and Dorium) have forgotten everything about them? They weren't wearing Eye Drives.
- Memories from when you were looking straight at the Silence disappear instantly, but more general information can hang on for longer. It does fade away over time, but the Doctor didn't spend long learning about them (in Closing Time he said he was supposed to die tomorrow) and he was presumably actively trying to remember.
- And any physical records of them, photos, recordings, etc... don't decay and can be used to refresh someone's memory, so it's possable he's got a complete file of everything he can ever remember about them stashed in the TARDIS and checks it/adds to it everytime he comes back in.
- He wasn't looking for information on the species, but on the religious order (which includes many other species that don't make you forget about them when you aren't looking at them).
- Even if the Doctor hides in the shadows to fight the Silence, he'll catch the public eye again eventually. Sure, with Eleven, they would just assume he is from before on his personal timestream when he died, but what about regenerations? Even if they didn't know what order they came in, at some point, someone has to do the math and realize that there are twelve or more Doctors, assuming most Classic series adventures weren't retgoned. In otherwords, no one should think he's dead, at least not for long.
- I was under the impression that the Doctor only wants to hide in the shadows for the time being, and I don't think the Silence will stop yet. And I'm not sure how he could fight the Silence from the shadows, since he's hiding from them, but I guess that's what he wants. But I also think that the Doctor hopes he can beat the Silence in this regeneration, so that shouldn't be a problem, since he only wants the Silence to think he's really dead.
- It also suggests that he—and the production team as a whole—are perhaps going to try and do things a bit more low-key from now on, and make the Doctor less the "Lonely God" of the new series who's built up as this huge, epic Godlike figure striding over the universe like a colossus, and more the slightly mysterious wanderer of the classic series who appears, solves the problem and disappears soon after without calling too much attention to himself. Like, say, the Second or Seventh Doctors (which would be fitting since the Eleventh clearly takes a few cues from them); they did much the same things as the new series Doctors in the sense that they stopped alien invasions and defeated totalitarian dictatorships and such, but stayed a bit more in the background and did things a bit more quietly without calling much attention to themselves while doing so. As for how this will work with future regenerations, the whole point of regeneration is that the Doctor looks different every time; if the people he's dealing with are even aware of or make the link between this guy and the legend, they might just assume he's someone completely different who's taken this name in honour of a long-dead hero. Or the Doctor of 'legend' might have become conflated in people's minds with the Eleventh Doctor.
- So, assuming that the Doctor had his 'Operation Teselecta' plan thought out from the very beginning (or rather, the very end), does that mean that the fixed point in time that River broke wasn't her killing the Doctor, but rather, her breaking the Teselecta? If so, wouldn't the Doctor want to warn her somehow, lest she, you know, defy destiny and destroy time? He probably didn't want to tell her right then, since the Silence were probably watching/listening, but he could send her a message earlier saying something cryptic like, 'When the end comes for me, look deep into my eyes and you'll know everything's going to be okay.' He'd given her limited future information before (like her role in Demon's Run), so couldn't he do it then, knowing full well she'd risk the safety of the entire universe to save his life?
- In her train office, Amy asks the Doctor why he looks older when no one else in Broken Time Land does (probably referring to his long hair and beard). The Doctor tells her that it's because he's the epicenter of the time explosion, so the freeze doesn't effect him. But at that point, he's in the Teselecta. Which can look any way he wants. So why put in the extra effort to make it grow more hair, when not doing so would raise no suspicion? The only explanation I can come up with is that Moffat likes to see Matt Smith all scraggly looking.
- OK, I have 4 questions regarding River in the spacesuit in Utah:
- 1: How come there wasn't a paradox caused by two Rivers in one setting? Or even when Utah River was shooting at Spacesuit River?
- There's no rule that states having two of the same person in one place automatically causes a paradox. You may be thinking of "Father's Day", in which there were three Roses and Two doctors and Rose changed an event from her own history that she wasn't supposed to change and later on she touched the baby version of herself, which gave the Reapers a power boost. But that's different from what we have here. Compare to "A Christmas Carol", in which two Kazrans stand side by side (and even touch) without any threat of paradox. (So basically, paradox rules are inconsistent in the Whoniverse.)
- 2: The Teselecta Doctor tells River she "probably won't remember killing him". Erm, no. She knows she did.
- Hence why he says 'probably'. There's a chance she remembers, and it turns out she does. Easy.
- 3: How the fuck did River drain the weapon energy from the spacesuit? She was forced into it against her will and it was specifically programmed to shoot the Doctor.
- Well obviously the programming wasn't perfect; she used a lot of willpower and overrode the programming.
- 4: What did River do after heading back into the lake after shooting the Teselecta Doctor?
- 1: How come there wasn't a paradox caused by two Rivers in one setting? Or even when Utah River was shooting at Spacesuit River?
- More of a Tear Jerker, but... am I the only one who thought that when the call was made about the Brig that Sarah should have also been called up. All the viewers who watched the old series knew the brig but not a lot of the other viewers. Everyone loved her, and it would have been an amazing moment if he tried to call her after hearing of Stewarts death to cheer himself up and then the news broke.
- Has Sarah Jane been killed off? I realize Lis Sladen died, but I thought it was implied that Sarah Jane was still alive.
- Not to mention series 5 of The Sarah Jane Adventures started two days after this episode.
- To be fair, Lis Sladen had already had a tribute paid to her at the beginning of the series, while Nicholas Courtney hadn't. Why shouldn't he have his own moment? Plus, it would be a bit cruel to essentially have the Doctor (and the viewers) learn of the deaths of two of the people he's ever been closest to within five minutes of each other. Less 'amazing moment', more 'overdoing it a bit', really.
- Has Sarah Jane been killed off? I realize Lis Sladen died, but I thought it was implied that Sarah Jane was still alive.
- So we learn that The Doctor was really inside the Teselecta the whole time, but at the end of The Impossible Astronaut, then-Amy, Rory and River cremated the "Doctor's" body, so...how did the Doctor escape this? My assumption is that the Doctor had the TARDIS shrunk along with him and he evacuated everyone from inside, but I don't know if there's anything to support this.
- It was on a BOAT over a lake. And I'm pretty sure the Doctor established the robot being unharmed.
- The boat was made of wood as well; chances are, it would also catch fire and sink. The Doctor waits until this happens so it extinguishes the flames on the outside of the Teselecta before escaping. Granted, he'd probably get a bit wet, but easy.
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