So, nuWho.

[avevale_intelligencer]

Um.

If there is sequential and linear physiological time, then there is time. If there is time, then the earth moves, the sun appears to rise and set, and it is not always 5:02 on the 22nd of whenever. If there is no sequential and linear physiological time, then the story we have just watched could never have started, let alone gone on.

If time itself requires that the Doctor die, then it (being an impersonal force of nature) is not going to be fooled by a robot. If time itself does not require that the Doctor die, then all that melodrama and there's-no-other-waying was unnecessary. And if an impersonal force of nature can be fooled by a robot, then nothing makes any sense at all. It's the Father's Day nonsense all over again.

So, two crashing, jarring, mind-mangling absurdities right at the heart of this culminatory episode and therefore at the heart of the entire season.

Apart from that, I've seen a good deal of waffle about post-modernism and such, but all I saw here was the usual panto-style "let's bring everyone back on stage for the big finale" that Davies started and Moffat has turned into a formula. The only thing that's missing is the marching-in-place singalong, Which is all very fine and large, but Doctor Who used to tell stories. And yes, sometimes they were nonsensical, but never, not ever, never did they show as much contempt for the audience's intelligence as this lot.

And sadly, the audience isn't noticing.

Comments

[were-gopher.livejournal.com]

Did you get the feeling he was trying to channel Edmund Cooper with his mess of time periods and historical figures together again for the first time in the opening pan across London?

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

I hadn't thought of that. In fact, I haven't thought of Edmund Cooper for years (must dig him out and re-read, especially The Overman Culture). I thought he was just trying to make a big flashy sparkly picture with lots of bits that people like, such as steam trains and balloons. And that certainly worked for me. If there had been a sensical explanation for why London was that way, I would have been far more intrigued and interested.

[aunty_marion]

What got me at the end, with the 'question' thing, is that the next series is obviously going to have to be The Doctor's Grand Quest For The His Real Identity. Or something.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Yawn. And since no possible answer could be anything other than an anticlimax, the quest will fizzle out in another spasm of distracting fireworks and cameo appearances and general whoop-te-do.

Three or four decent stories per season, told at a reasonable pace over four episodes or so, with emotional interaction at a more or less ordinary human level most of the time and heaven not routinely having revolving doors. And a Doctor I can believe in. Is any of that incompatible with decent production values and realistic budgets? I ask you, is it???

Never mind. Obviously it is.

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

No. He already *knows* his real identity. The problem is how much longer he can keep it a secret, when "none can lie, or refuse to answer".

And given that that's exactly the issue that was raised by the 25th anniversary season (in particular the otherwise abysmal anniversary story "Silver Nemesis"), I suspect it's going to be ultimately tackled in the 50th, with the Doctor having to find a way to keep the genie in the bottle for another 25 (viewer) years.

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

With regard to your first point, yeah, Stephen Moffat's ideas about what happens when time "starts disintegrating" owe a lot more to wacky fantasy than any actual scientifc appreciation of time. I can accept it as a shorthand for "a tiny closed loop/bubble of time has been created within which events can occur, but which exists within a single instant of 'real' time", but like any attempt to show what such a situation would look like from the inside, it falls apart as soon as you try to incorporate awareness of the outside world. "The clocks don't move" is as good/bad as any I guess.

As for the 2nd, though:
"If time itself requires that the Doctor die, then it (being an impersonal force of nature) is not going to be fooled by a robot. If time itself does not require that the Doctor die, then all that melodrama and there's-no-other-waying was unnecessary. And if an impersonal force of nature can be fooled by a robot, then nothing makes any sense at all. It's the Father's Day nonsense all over again."

This one keeps cropping up all of the doctorwho community, and it's driving me potty.

Time does *not* require the Doctor to die; Time requires "the event at Lake Silencio" to remain unchanged from what it has always been. Everyone (in the show and outside) has been assuming the event in question is the Doctor's death, largely because the Doctor (a) initially assumed that to be the case (partly 'cos everyone was telling him that was definitely what they'd seen), and (b) once he realised it didn't have to be the case, chose to let everyone else carry on believing it to be the case, so that the Silence (and others like them) would be fooled into thinking they had achieved their goal.

He's not trying to fool time; He doesn't need to. He's figured out what time needs, and it isn't his death. But he *does* need to fool the silence, and to achieve that, he has to fool (at least some of) his friends. He only lets (young/still-fairly-insane-thankyou-Madam-K/newlywed)!River in on the secret so that she'll stop blocking the plan, and then relies on her to keep the secret.

Hence older-saner-observer!River's reaction on seeing the Doctor alive just after having to re-watch the whole thing, *with her parents*, whom she can't tell the truth (which, it's hinted, she is only now beginning to remember anyway): [FACESLAP] "That was cold. Even for you, that was cold." (At this point, I don't think she realises that the Doctor in front of her is the much younger one.)

And as for "The audience isn't noticing"... Ha! Go read the comm. The audience is *hotly debating*.

I think far from showing contempt for the audience's intelligence, Moffat has overestimated it. (Or maybe he's quite happy with the fact that it's going to take a lot of the audience another year or ten to get everything straight in their heads...?)

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Then (and forgive me) if the event at Lake Silencio is what it has always been, what causes the time disruption? The Doctor says it's him still being alive, but since he is now still alive and time is no longer disrupted, that isn't the true explanation.

[teddywolf.livejournal.com]

I suspect the trouble was that the event at Lake Silencio required that the Doctor get hit by those beams and then be burnt; it was a fixed point in time with fixed events. However, only the observers there at the time make the event a fixed point - meaning, that if you have another way to make events unfold that way, you can still *do* it, just without the logical conclusion because you use a much trickier conclusion instead.

The time disruption was caused by the impossible astronaut not following the script and not hitting the Doctor with those beams - thus not making him fall in the dust.

I think there is another reason why they decided to address this fixed point issue. During the Donna Noble run there was the fixed point of Pompeii; during the lone Doctor/end of Tennant run there was the Mars expedition getting wiped out which was supposed to be a fixed point but which he altered. In short, they are at least saying that even the Doctor is not quite sure what makes a point fixed, but even he has to abide by a true fixed point - just not always in the logical conclusion way.

I should mention that there's a piece of anime called Steins;Gate which addresses mutability and immutability of time. The series end bears some relation to the Doctor's solution - making something conform to a witnessed account but be absolutely nothing like what was seen.

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

"what causes the time disruption"

River. In her attempt to save the Doctor - because she believes he's about to die - she manages to override the suit and thus "prevent" (temporarily, if that can be a meaningful word in this context) the events that should follow.

" The Doctor says it's him still being alive, "

Of course he does! He can't let on the real reason, as that would reveal that he's not about to die at all.

As we've been told several times this season (and significantly, at least once by post-Silencio!River), "Rule 1: The Doctor lies".

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

So, basically, there was always an easy way out, and the entire storyline has been a scam.

Well, all fiction is a scam, of course, that's probably why I like it so much. And anyone who believed the Doctor was really going to die was...possibly engaging a little too much with the fiction. But am I really the only one who found the resolution just a little bit too easy, just a little bit of an anticlimax after all that over-emotional grind? And am I the only one who thinks that at least some of the previous incarnations would have viewed "Rule one: the Doctor lies" with a certain amount of horror?

Maybe I am. And maybe the fact that I've got trapped into thinking about this again is a sign that it's doing what it's supposed to.

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

A scam perpetrated upon whom? On the viewers? Not if you've watched the whole series. All the clues are there, just mixed in with some very clever red herrings (such as planting the Ganger two-parter early in the season, with a duplicate Doctor in it, to get everyone wondering if it was the "Flesh" Doctor we saw on the beach...)

It's certainly a scam perpetrated on the Silence/Kovarian, though, and quite right too! =:o}

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

So we were actually supposed to sit through all that weeping and melodrama and angstiness (that took up huge chunks of every episode that could have been filled with, you know, story) saying "oh, come on, he can use the robot"? Oh, that's all right then. I thought I was doing it wrong. :)

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

"And am I the only one who thinks that at least some of the previous incarnations would have viewed "Rule one: the Doctor lies" with a certain amount of horror?"

Not just his previous incarnations, but this one too! (Even though all of them have told a few woppers in their time... "The fluid link's broken! We'll have to go and get some mercury from that fascinating city you wouldn't let me explore"... "'Boney', I said: 'Always remember, an army marches on it's stomach'"... ) But it's the eleventh Doctor himself who coins that rule (amongst others), as a gloomy comment on his own behaviour. It's one of the many things he doesn't like about himself, that send him running away for 200 hundred years. Not just running from the Silence, but running from his friends and himself. Until eventually he gets an answer to the question he asked the TARDIS last time he was dying: "There must be someone left in the universe I haven't screwed up...?". There is: Craig. One person he's pretty sure he actually did help. He decides to pop back and reassure himself of that, before he goes to face what he still thinks, at this point, is his inevitable doom...

That's the beginning of the end of his self-destructive spiral. But the real turnaround happens when he goes to talk to the Teselecta guy, and - with a clear head at last, having finished making all his preparations - finally puts two and two together: He can satisfy all the requirements of the Lake Silencio event, and get away safely and unseen, if he goes there *in the Teselecta*.

To me, the only weak point in the plotting there is the idea that the Doctor could actually manage to survive a massive blue funk lasting 200 years without either caving in and taking on board another "stray" or dropping himself down teh nearest singularity. But I suppose if he stays aboard the TARDIS she'll nurse him through most of it.

Or maybe, as some have suggested, it isn't really 200 hundred years he's been running: It's just that during this period he decides to start giving his real age again... but still doesn't admit to having lied about it ever since his 9th incarnation. Giving up one lie, only to conceal it behind another...

[(Anonymous)]

And River goes on to tell her mother: "And so do I."

Which makes me think that he actually did tell her his True Name (wouldn't have been a valid Gallifreyan marriage without, would it?)and she now knows what the whole fuss is.

And I think you're wrong, Zander: I think we will find out what the Big Deal is and what the Silence is and why the Doctor's Name will cause it. And it will cause it. And we will have to have another 'With One Mighty Leap' to get them all out of the mess again.

Which will annoy you, Zander, but in a different way.

Michael Cule

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

I get the feeling you think there's nothing nuWho could do that wouldn't annoy me. This is not the case. I've set out my wish list further up, and it could all be done. But it won't.

[pola-bear.livejournal.com]

Thank you for pointing out the thing about what time wanted. I never had a problem with that, although if you take what Moffat has said, then maybe it's more of an issue, but just as the Doctor lies, so does Moffat.

And for pointing out the 'that was cold' bit, too!

I can understand most of the issues in this post, they just didn't bother me that much. I was a bit disappointed with how it all came together, but not hugely.

To be honest, I'm not sure it could have been possible to ever satisfactorily end that storyline. Either the doctor is alive and the whole thing is a scam or the doctor is dead and the whole thing is over (ok, that might have satisfied some people). It was pretty flawed from the offset.

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

"but just as the Doctor lies, so does Moffat."

[GRIN]

Someone's stated it as:

Rule 1: The Doctor lies;
Rule 2: So does Moffat;
Rule 3: So does River;
Rule 4: So do the teasers!

Remember that brief shot they included in the season trailer of naked River? Never appeared in the series, did it? =:o} (The scene got cut from the ep. in question.)

I just saw this season all along as a "Howdunnit" puzzle: obviously the Doctor couldn't really, permanently die (because, duh, no more series!), so the questions were (1)how and (2) why did it come to appear to everyone that he had? We learned the "why" halfway through the season (Ep7:"A Good Man Goes To War"), and just had to wait till the end for the "how".

And I *like* the why. It paves the way for getting back to exactly the kind of smaller-scale, less "legendy" Doctor Who that Zander wants, but in way that doesn't just throw the baby out with the bathwater. Basically, the Doctor is going back under cover, leaving his legend behind. He'll probably need to be careful to spend his time now in small, out of the way places, where word of his wherabouts can't get back to the Silence (or where he can cover by pretending to be his pre-Lake Silencio self). He should be able to get away with that for at least a year's worth of stories... until this question business catches up with him.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

And you have to admit it was jolly clever the way the Teselecta not only fooled the sophisticated sensors which the Silence would doubtless have installed in the suit to guard against just such elementary trickery, but even managed to simulate regeneration energy release when it got shot. For a robot designed to rearrange its outer shell to mimic human forms that's a nifty feature.

I'm now considering a story entitled Zander Nyrond Must Die, in which sixty per cent of the tale is taken up with him explaining how absolutely unalterable and inevitable his death is and taking tearful leave of his many friends, ten per cent with a tear-jerking and utterly moving death scene, twenty-nine per cent with said friends weeping over his lifeless body, tragically recalling the good times and vowing revenge, and half of one per cent with him leaping up and saying "ha ha, fooled you, of course Nyronds can't die, did you really think I meant it?" And then his friends kill him and throw a party to celebrate.

[keristor.livejournal.com]

"If there is sequential and linear physiological time, then there is time. If there is time, then the earth moves, the sun appears to rise and set, and it is not always 5:02 on the 22nd of whenever."

Hmm. In that case at least one Asimov and at least one Clarke story are wrong. However, the two things are not connected (if you allow time speed variation at all), because there is nothing which says that physiological time is fixed to the movement of the sun round the earth. Indeed, it is very obviously not so fixed, things like adrenaline and hibernation can increase and decrease the physiological time, and "time flies when you are having fun" indicates that psychological time is fixed to neither.

The 'stopping' of time resulting in the collapse of all versions of that day throughout history (or worse only certain copies of it collapsing, the ones with people of whom the audience have heard) into a single 'day', is however nonsense. As is the ability of people in that state to integrate the technologies (running a steam train into a pyramid with hi-tech at the same time). But then I treat all of DW as 'fantasy' rather than 'science' so it doesn't really bother me.

The substitution of the robot for the doctor is explained by Paul B. I'd just point out that such a substitution, where the observable events are the same but the actual details are different where they can't be seen, is not at all unknown in 'hard' SF (Colin Kapp's "The Patterns of Chaos" uses it, for instance, in a case where the fact of the explosion at that point in the future was definite but it didn't have to be the spaceship which was at that point). Neither the audience nor the characters seeing the initial version of the event had all of the information (indeed, it's possible that even the author didn't know at that time).

(Hmm, the final singalong -- Bollywood Who?)

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Adrenaline and hibernation don't affect the rate of time, they affect the way the body reacts to it, and psychological time has nothing to do with it. What we're talking about here is a failure of basic logic, papered over with slick effects designed to appeal to the superficial geek in all of us.

Observable events...well, see my last comment to Paul. B7 did it, with Orac showing a ship very like the Liberator blowing up and nobody ever bothering to ask him if it actually was the Liberator or another ship like it despite having lots of time to think about it. I didn't like that much then, but I came up with a theory to account for it. But to imagine that a vast interstellar conspiracy like the Silence would not think of the possibility of a substitution is to make a nonsense of the whole thing.