Doctor Who - Moffat/Eleventh Doctor Season Thread

[mkozlows]

Yes, it's fiction. But when they have ancient races of lizardmen sitting around underground since ancient times, you get why the Doctor never met them before: They're underground and weren't bothering anyone. But when the Silence are out in plain sight for all of human history, it's just silly, even in the context of a show that has ancient underground lizardmen.

Anyway, clearly what they should do is piss off both Bahimiron and me by having the Doctor go back in time to meet Rose when Christopher Eccleston first meets her, and save her from the Silence aliens who were secretly menacing her at the same time the plastic factory people were (since the '69 Silence have now determined that the only way to keep themselves from getting fucked is to mess up the Doctor's timeline by killing Rose). Then at the end, Rose and Matt Smith could have a tearful goodbye.

[Hugin]

Agree or disagree, I'm not trolling. Obviously people here love the over-the-top ultra-epic Very Special Episode thing, and the puzzlebox bucket o' foreshadowing approach -- but isn't anyone bothered by an alien race that has been controlling humanity from prehistory to 1969 that nobody's ever noticed before? Isn't anyone irritated by Rory's Doctor-jealousy after that was resolved last season?

It's an alien race with the specific special ability to erase themselves from memory. Not being noticed all this time is kind of their thing. Also, the impression one gets is that outside of their super duper stealth capabilities they're kind of weaksauce, just parasites. So they may not have been able to do all that much besides affect things subtly and stay hidden, while more overtly powerful aliens ran around with their little schemes.

Rory didn't bug me, he didn't do anything. It's not like he hauled off and punched the Doctor or whatever. Amy made a ridiculously ambiguous statement and he had some doubts for a while which he basically kept to himself.

[Gutsball]

Between the eyepatch lady and the female child regenerating my guess is the Silent might have something to due with the Rani. Ive been glancing over Doctor Who lore on Wikipedia and she is the only female Time Lord Ive seen mentioned and it looks like she was never killed. Her wiki entry says she used a race that was bat-like and hung from the ceiling, which the Silent did in the orphanage. I found a picture of the eyepatch lady and the patch looks more like a device. Maybe it allows her to always see a Silent so she never forgets them and then she uses them to direct the human race in the direction she wants. That might explain why the Silent have a Tardis but don't seem able to build technology without human help.

[Alan Dunkin]

You're missing Romona, who was definitely a Time Lord and female (and, potentially in addition, the two who were shielding their eyes with Rasalon in the last Tennant episode). There are plenty of female Time Lords (or were, whatever).

--- Alan

[Eilonwy]

Wasn't Romona trapped in...L-space or whatever?

[Bahimiron]

Oook?

[bloo]

Didn't Amy ask the Doctor about effects travelling with him through time could have on her child? My reaction was that like the Doctor the child had time particles, though instead of being born with them or imbued or however it is Timelords acquire them she absorbed them making her more timelord than human - though possibly with some as yet unknown drawbacks.

There was some shenanigans about Rose or Martha getting time-infected or something from travelling with the Doctor that prevented them from suffering some deal.

[roBurky]

isn't anyone bothered by an alien race that has been controlling humanity from prehistory to 1969 that nobody's ever noticed before?

I was more bothered that the Doctor /did/ notice them. That nobody can become aware of their existence for long enough to know what to do about them is why The Silence are so cool and scary. But at the start of the episode, the Doctor knew enough about them to have started developing ways to combat them, and they completely skipped over how that could have possibly happened.

[Hugin]

I was more bothered that the Doctor /did/ notice them. That nobody can become aware of their existence for long enough to know what to do about them is why The Silence are so cool and scary. But at the start of the episode, the Doctor knew enough about them to have started developing ways to combat them, and they completely skipped over how that could have possibly happened.

You are bothered that a Doctor Who episode featured the Doctor knowing something no one else can know and being resistant or immune to something that affects everyone else? Really?

[Dan Lawrence]

I was more bothered that the Doctor /did/ notice them. That nobody can become aware of their existence for long enough to know what to do about them is why The Silence are so cool and scary. But at the start of the episode, the Doctor knew enough about them to have started developing ways to combat them, and they completely skipped over how that could have possibly happened.

I'm guessing we are meant to assume that having been lead to The Silence's secret warehouse full of Silence related technology by solving the riddle of the little girl The Doctor is clued into their existence but not their exact nature. This leads to the teams three month long fact finding trip between the episodes and, eventually, when the doctor has enough info and a nice hidey hole, the faked up kidnapping/team reassembly. Once hidden from view the doctor is able to safely craft those clever silence listening devices and embark on the moon landing plan without fear of The Silence figuring it out in advance. That's an insanely dense amount of inference though from a few minutes of actual TV show.

Once you realise that The Silence's main weapon is subliminal suggestion rather than super slow charging lightning hands a lot of the earlier scenes take on a new meaning. Particularly the time in the first episode when The Silence tells Amy to tell the Doctor 'what he must know and what he must never know'. Perhaps that is the real reason Amy later tells the Doctor she is pregnant.

Wild theorising; perhaps The Silence have decided they need their own pet Timelord as humanity has the Doctor. In some future episode perhaps The Silence will encounter the Doctor for the first time directly in the past and perhaps also find the crashed Tardis like ship from The Lodger and embark on their Time Lord creation plan. I wonder if The Silence see the Doctor as some kind of competition, both of them aliens seemingly needing humanity and shepherding them throughout history.

[Shieldwolf]

My Who memory is failing me. Was the ship the Silence were in a Tardis?

Is the doctor immune to the Silence?

[mkozlows]

It's an alien race with the specific special ability to erase themselves from memory. Not being noticed all this time is kind of their thing.

Sure. I'm cool with REGULAR people never noticing them. And if this episode had taken place on an alien planet we'd never seen before, and it turned out that the human colonists there had been controlled by these Silence dudes, it would have been a great conceit. But doing it on Earth means that the Doctor has been here many, many times and has had many, many opportunities to see them, and presumably all his past adventures are full of moments where he or Rose or Donna or whoever is all "OMG ALIEN... wait, what was I saying?" but somehow we never saw that.

That's what I mean by saying that Moffat is too epic for his own good. The Silence are great, the Silence secretly controlling a planet of humans is great, but making it Earth and for all of human history just means it's a too-obvious retcon that makes no sense.

Rory didn't bug me, he didn't do anything. It's not like he hauled off and punched the Doctor or whatever. Amy made a ridiculously ambiguous statement and he had some doubts for a while which he basically kept to himself.

Well, right, it's not that Rory is being silly, it's that Moffat is setting up those ridiculously ambiguous situations still, when that should have been very done with and over.

[roBurky]

You are bothered that a Doctor Who episode featured the Doctor knowing something no one else can know and being resistant or immune to something that affects everyone else? Really?

I didn't get the impression that the Doctor was at all immune to the forgetting. It seemed that they had figured out the presence of The Silence despite that, somehow. Considering the difficulty of doing that is the source of all of The Silence's power and scariness, I thought the lack of a scene showing that critical moment was a bit disappointing.

I certainly didn't have mkozlows' problem, is mainly what I was saying.

[Eilonwy]

I think the clues were there for the viewers to put it together, though it certainly was a lot to just "fill in" in a three month gap. Like I'm pretty sure the hologram came from the picture Amy snapped of the guy in the bathroom. So most likely they made their first plan (carry a pen on your neck and mark yourself when you see one) while staring at it, and the marks then were a sort of trigger, just like the whole flashing light in the palm, which was the next level of plan when they realized that they weren't just trying to figure things out--the Silence knew they were there, knew they knew somewhere back in their heads, and was hunting them both as themselves and using the government.

At least, that's what I filled in. The thing I most found jarring about the three month leap was that the Doctor never bothered to ask Amy "Why did you tell me you were pregnant?" during those three months? Really? He waited until everything was over to be like "REMEMBER THREE MONTHS AGO WHEN YOU TOLD ME THIS THING?"

But that's a minor quibble.

[Dan Lawrence]

it's a too-obvious retcon that makes no sense

I can forgive this kind of thing in Dr. Who as one if it's main conceits is that The Doctor is constantly retconning human history through time travel. As a few others have mentioned, The Doctor is constantly gabbing about not changing things but usually as he is massively altering events in the past. As such the current 'whoverse' cannon 'all of human history' is now wildly different to the all of human history at the start of the show. At one point Planet Earth had an identical twin called Mondas that rocked up to earth to drain it of it's life essence, the Daleks invaded numerous times and so on. Time is regularly reset, or memories are erased to keep the show in a 'near real world earth' setting. That's just how the show works and always has worked.

[Rasputin]

Like I'm pretty sure the hologram came from the picture Amy snapped of the guy in the bathroom.

This was explicitly stated in the show, so you're 100% correct!

mkozlow, you really need to chill on your expectation of hardcore continuity for Doctor Who, or else stop watching before you stroke out.

[Derek Meister]

The ship from the lodger had a very primitive time engine, so the Silents having a similar (if not same) ship complicates the idea that they were "always" there.

Thanks to the wibbly wobbly nature of time in the new series, and with them being somehow involved in the Tardis Big Bang, their timeline on Earth likely didn't exist until the 11th Doc's "time". It's possible that he really hadn't encountered them prior to that point from his perspective.

[Armando Penblade]

Perhaps one of his latter-day adventures in the past actually opened up their avenue of invasion, say, by eliminating some other threat that kept them away or, as someone either here or on reddit suggested, actually forced them off their own world (perhaps the cracks were their vengeance on the Doctor/the universe?). Basically, he caused their always-being-thereness.

[Derek Meister]

Via Etsy - They're so cute when they exterminate you.

[Justin Fletcher]

Thanks to the wibbly wobbly nature of time in the new series, and with them being somehow involved in the Tardis Big Bang, their timeline on Earth likely didn't exist until the 11th Doc's "time". It's possible that he really hadn't encountered them prior to that point from his perspective.

This is what I'm expecting the resolution at the end of the season to be. Whatever our heroes do over the next ten or so episodes will result in time being rewritten due to them preventing the Doctor's murder.

As for the Doctor running into the Silents, I have a feeling they would have given him a wide berth during any previous encounters on Earth. Maybe because his Time Lord juice might detect something wonky, but more likely because, left to his own devices, the Doctor saved the planet numerous times. Their planet.

So why would they confront him now given that he's probably been extremely useful in the past? That leads to the really pertinent question: not who killed the Doctor, but why?

Dude, chill out! Everyone knows that Doctor Who doesn't make sense.

I don't agree with mkozlows, either—other than this really needs to be the last time for the romantic triangle thing—but I've always hated it when people trot out this argument. As I've said in previous threads, the sci-fi/fantasy setting doesn't excuse sloppy storytelling; there still has to be internal consistency. That obviously wasn't the mandate back in the day when Doctor Who was considered a disposable kids show, but I think we should have higher standards now.

The fact of the matter is that it doesn't make sense that parasitic aliens that have to inspire the Space Race just to get a space suit can suddenly supply super dense matter to build a prison. Sure it makes for an exciting reversal (a la The Invasion of Time), but it isn't very logical.

Neither is the plan to split up for three months in the first place; they couldn't just check out the world as a group from the relative safety of the TARDIS?

Neither is a plan to save the world that hinges on getting one of the Silent to say an extremely specific phrase. And if the post-hypnotic suggestion worked on everyone who watched the moon landing, why didn't it work on Canton when he recorded it? Shouldn't he have gunned down the next alien he saw?

I really enjoyed the episode despite all of this, and I'm looking forward to seeing how all the threads play out. But the shortcuts Moffatt has been taking are as annoying as the deus ex machinas of the RTD era.

[_Poe_]

Spoilers follow for the Pirates! episode.



Absolutely fantastic fake-out at the end there. It totally had me believing it. After Rory coughed, the rise of the music perfectly mirrored my own relief at his survival. Nice bit of melodrama.

[Derek Meister]

The problem with a Rory death scene is that it's far from the 1st time it's happened.

On the other hand, Rory's "I'm a nurse" reminder made me smile, if only because he's used that training in previous episodes far more than Martha did her med school experience.

[Brian Rubin]

The Rory thing was fine by me, and mostly I loved the ep except for one tiny thing. Exept for Rory, if someone went toward the siren, all swooned by her and shit, the others would make these lame attempts to stop them and then quickly give up. It was like, "Oh, wait, don't do that...well alright then..."

[Eilonwy]

You want to get a rise out of me, kill Amy next time guys. Rory always almost really dying is overplayed at this point.

[Desslock]

Awful episode. I don't understand why this show seems incapable of telling a coherent story. I like the macro-season threads woven into the episodes, but I have little confidence that they'll ultimately make sense either.

The show also just feels compelled to take everything "up to 11" -- like someone said earlier, if the Silence had been on Earth for a while, successfully infiltrated it for say, "a few years" -- that would have been an interesting, creepy story. But instead, they're written to have been here "forever," which just takes any drama out of the premise because it's an absurd premise, along with being a dumb retcon, and it even renders the extremely modest episode goals of the villains silly.

Same with Rory waiting around as an Auton for Amy - if he'd waited for a few years it might have seemed like a dramatic, heart-wrenching sacrifice -- but having him wait 2000 years is just goofy, and would render his earlier 20 years of life meaningless, not something he'd just hop back into effortlessly with a couple of lines of dialogue about how it was a blur.

There's just a lot of laziness, which I didn't expect from Moffat given his stories under Davies. Threats are treated frivolously until the narrative decides otherwise - it's as if it's constantly breaking the 4th wall and the characters know when they can safely act in a manner that wlll get them immediately killed if they did it 10 minutes later - it's just flippant in a way that destroys the narrative, while at its best the characters were unorthodox/strange/daring/pacificist but weren't so cavalier about threats/danger until a plot point mandated otherwise (insert fake Rory death time).

Previously, it was largely a show about an ostensibly silly character who actually knew more than anyone else about what was likely going on, but was otherwise played largely straight (the characters and the stories). Now it's devolved into an incoherent, almost entirely silly show that tries to intermittently insert dramatic moments and more realistic characterizations, before hopping into the next deus ex moment to resolve grandiose, flowery schemes.

Have high hopes for Gaiman's story next week, but the show is rapidly losing me. I feel like I'm only sticking with it out of nostalgia now.

[Shieldwolf]

Is the Amy Pond opening an American thing or are they really doing that for the show? I absolutely hate it. Why are we putting so much importance on her.

[PowderedToast]

Is the Amy Pond opening an American thing or are they really doing that for the show? I absolutely hate it. Why are we putting so much importance on her.

By the fact I have no idea what you're talking about it must be an American thing!

[PowderedToast]

Awful episode. I don't understand why this show seems incapable of telling a coherent story. I like the macro-season threads woven into the episodes, but I have little confidence that they'll ultimately make sense either.

The show also just feels compelled to take everything "up to 11" -- like someone said earlier, if the Silence had been on Earth for a while, successfully infiltrated it for say, "a few years" -- that would have been an interesting, creepy story. But instead, they're written to have been here "forever," which just takes any drama out of the premise because it's an absurd premise, along with being a dumb retcon, and it even renders the extremely modest episode goals of the villains silly.

Same with Rory waiting around as an Auton for Amy - if he'd waited for a few years it might have seemed like a dramatic, heart-wrenching sacrifice -- but having him wait 2000 years is just goofy, and would render his earlier 20 years of life meaningless, not something he'd just hop back into effortlessly with a couple of lines of dialogue about how it was a blur.

There's just a lot of laziness, which I didn't expect from Moffat given his stories under Davies. Threats are treated frivolously until the narrative decides otherwise - it's as if it's constantly breaking the 4th wall and the characters know when they can safely act in a manner that wlll get them immediately killed if they did it 10 minutes later - it's just flippant in a way that destroys the narrative, while at its best the characters were unorthodox/strange/daring/pacificist but weren't so cavalier about threats/danger until a plot point mandated otherwise (insert fake Rory death time).

Previously, it was largely a show about an ostensibly silly character who actually knew more than anyone else about what was likely going on, but was otherwise played largely straight (the characters and the stories). Now it's devolved into an incoherent, almost entirely silly show that tries to intermittently insert dramatic moments and more realistic characterizations, before hopping into the next deus ex moment to resolve grandiose, flowery schemes.

Have high hopes for Gaiman's story next week, but the show is rapidly losing me. I feel like I'm only sticking with it out of nostalgia now.

I share your sentiment somewhat, I'm definitely disappointed in this season so far. I can expect the odd shit episode from a guest writer but when Moffat's own contributions are feeling this rushed and inconsistent, it's a bit worrying - makes you wonder whether the weight of being a showrunner is affecting him. The Silence two-parter needed at least one more episode, even just to rectify the insane pacing and structural issues. I mean Moffat is in the position of reasonable control and yet his writing gives the impression that it's the complete opposite. Maybe it's too early to judge, The Silence will no doubt be returning in some form, but he's gonna have to really deliver to allow those first two eps to improve in retrospect.

[Delta]

MINOR SPOILERS:

One of my Twitter buddies pointed out something that removes all scant credibility of this last episode:

"If we get one tiny cut, we die. SMASH ALL THE GLASS!"

[liquorice]

Wait wait wait.

Isn't rory some kind of plastic automaton?
Who can't really die?