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?

[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.

[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...?)

[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?)