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...?)
no subject
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
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...?)