[TV] Doctor Who

[Herschel]

And when River says 'you'll know soon' it's a double whammy with time travel.

River freakin' ROCKS!

 

[horacethegrey]

HOLY CRAP.

Brilliant is all I can say. Brilliant. This is the best season finale of the new series of Doctor Who. Steven Moffat should be proud. He's trumped Russell T. Davies in every way. He may have even the late Douglas Adams with this yarn.
Matt, Karen, Arthur and the lovely Alex Kingston were all wonderful.

Looking forward to next year.

 

[Mouseferatu]

What Horace just said. Wow. And also wow.

Some lingering questions...

[sblock]Okay, so the two questions that they obviously/deliberately left hanging were "What's about to change with River?" and "Who blew up the Tardis/was the voice talking about silence falling?" Presumably, these are both going to be major plot points next season.

But there are a couple of other questions I have, and I'm not sure if they were left deliberately, or if I just missed something in all the wibbly-wobbly timey-whimey stuff.

1) Why didn't Amy remember the Daleks in the WWII episode? Nothing about resetting the universe should necessarily have changed her memories, or those of everyone else on the planet, regarding the various alien invasions/events.

2) How did River keep her memory (at least enough to know to deliver the journal)?

Either way, I'm absolutely delighted at the idea of both Rory and Amy being companions for next season. It's about time they got back to having multiple long-term companions. Now if they can just add one down the road who's either an alien, or from a different period of Earth's history, I'll be absolutely ecstatic. But it's going to be all but impossible to wait for the next season. [/sblock]

 

[Remus Lupin]

Dang! Weeks I have to wait for the finale! And I don't even get a new Who next week on BBCA!

 

[Plane Sailing]

What Horace just said. Wow. And also wow.

Some lingering questions...

Regarding your question about Amy - I imagine that it is [sblock]related to the issue about her missing parents - effects on her brain as a result of growing up next to the crack in the universe. One of those tell-tales about Amy Ponds' strangeness.[/sblock]

 

[Mouseferatu]

Regarding your question about Amy - I imagine that it is...

Can't be, though. Or can't be just that. Because...

[sblock]It's not just Amy. In the WWII episode, the Doctor makes a comment about how "It's been happening all around me, and I haven't noticed." He then goes on to reference the giant cyberman rampaging through London (from The Next Doctor), and how nobody remembered/recorded it. IOW, it's not just Amy who's forgotten. The whole world seems to be moving on blithely unaware of at least some of the major alien events from the past few seasons/series.

So something--maybe the cracks, maybe something unknown, maybe just Moffat not liking some of what RTD did --has altered Earth's history, and not just in Amy's mind.[/sblock]

 

[Morrus]

The things were being erased from time at every point in time. I feel they mad eit clear that this wasn't consistend or anything - something might be erased while something else might not, especially since it was happening unevenly across the universe. The Dalek invasion was erased. Amy's parents were erased. Probably a million events we don't care about were erased, too. Ducks in the duck pond ("If it's a duck pond, where are the ducks?"). We saw some things being erased (Rory, the Angels) but things were being erased the whole time.

The whole "time being erased at every point in time" means there's no point in thinking about when things happened. Any event was equally likely to be erased, from a Dalek invasion to Amy's parents, to penguins (thus their disappearance from the museum). The TARDIS didn't explode in that episode, it was exploding at all points in time - for the entire series. And for every previous series, but they didn't reshoot every previous Doctor's episodes to show us.

The Doctor remembers because he's the Doctor. There's a reason the word "Lord" is in "Time Lord" - it's his area of expertise!

 

[Mouseferatu]

The things were being erased from time at every point in time. I feel they mad eit clear that this wasn't consistend or anything - something might be erased while something else might not, especially since it was happening unevenly across the universe. The Dalek invasion was erased. Probably a million events we don't care about were erased, too.

The whole "time being erased at every point in time" means there's no point in thinking about when things happened. Any event was equally likely to be erased, from a Dalek invasion to Amy's parents, to penguins (thus their disappearance from the museum).

[sblock]So Amy, when talking to the Daleks, didn't remember the Daleks, because the Daleks had been erased from reality, but that erasure hadn't yet reached the Daleks in the time period they were currently in, which is why those Daleks could still exist, even though the Daleks had been erased from history.

*brain explodes*

(You forgot to mention the ducks among the list of unimportant things that were erased.)

Edit: Except that you remembered them and added them as I was posting. Thus, in our own little way, emulating the whole question at hand.

Okay, I think I get it, but man, it's a brain-bender. But does that mean that, when they reset everything that the Dalek invasion (and the Cyberman rampaging through London, etc.) went back to having happened, or are they going to find some way to gloss over them, do you think? Because I really got the impression that Moffat was trying to tone down the "alien influence on Earth is now public and well-known" vibe that existed throughout the last few seasons.[/sblock]

 

[Morrus]

(I edited while you posted).

I'm not sure what his intentions might be; I think he's left it vague enough that he can decide next year what still happened in history. But it still happened in the Doctor's and our (the viewers') memories, though.

What I find interesting is the River Song bit at the end. "But beware - it all changes now." I reckon we're going to see an adversarial relationship between them. I bet when they first meet, they're enemies, and will be for some time. But he'll remember her future then, and she won't (instead of the other way round) because we're moving earlier in her life and later in his.

 

[Morrus]

Oh, and I think "Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue" was a perfect description of the TARDIS! Brilliant!