Cold Blood

[torkell]

"I do not recognise your authority at this time"
"Well then. You must shoot me."

They just had to go and ruin it, didn't they? The Doctor has organised the first official meeting between the lizards and the humans, the participants are slowly working out how they can fit it all together, and then the lizard commander busts in ready to start shooting. At the same time the party upstairs Tazer their hostage to death. Idiots, the lot of 'em.

I did like the reference back to the fixed points in time - we first saw that with Waters of Mars, where the death of the main character was a fixed point of the universe. The Doctor makes a big thing of how this isn't one of those fixed points, and so making it work is entirely up to them.

There's something seriously screwy going on with the canon in this series - given that they don't think humanity is ready for the lizard race, that implies that most if not all of the alien visitations from the past few series haven't happened. The hospital badge with the wrong date is looking more and more like a production goof (especially as the date when all this mess started is shown in-universe to be the 26th - the date of the final episode), so it's not just that the date has been moved round. Here's a random theory: if the Tardis really does explode (which looks likely, based on the shrapnel), then the explosion undoes everything that the Doctor has achieved with the Tardis. He gets eaten from existence by the cracks, and so do all his actions.

Speaking of the cracks, they're definitely getting more menacing, and interacting more with the universe. They seem rather picky too - it ate Rory out of existence, but ignored the Doctor when he stuck his hand in. Interesting piece of shrapnel - the strong implication is that the Tardis exploded. I guessed something similar in a comment elsewhere, though my theory was more a "travelling through time leaves holes behind" than "Tardis fall down go boom". Interestingly they've already referenced/foreshadowed blowing up the Tardis in Amy's Choice

One last thought - what happened to the ring? Rory very carefully put it in a special holder thing in the Tardis, and it's still there. So what's in it? Is it going to trigger a sort-of Bad Wolf moment in Amy?

Comments

[elemnar.livejournal.com]

I don't think they're sticking to their 'fixed points in time' thing at all - Water on Mars was in a future with a human-only(-ish) Earth, which meant that the outcome of Cold Blood couldn't be coexistence because it would interfere with that point. The same goes for any episode set in the past now too - the Earth will never blow up/be invaded/whatever because Water on Mars says so.

And also about the ring - the Doctor has it (there was a moment when it fell off the control-panel-thingy in the centre of the tardis and the Doctor saw it).

I hope that everything gets undone by the crack - it'd be an interesting timeline and also give the writers a clean slate to play with for the next series.

[torkell]

That's an interesting way to look at it. On the one hand it makes sense, as the universe must arrange itself such that those fixed points occur. On the other hand, the fixed points preclude a lot of the more major possibilities from occurring (like the potential human/lizard alliance).

Note that the Doctor has the box that has been shown to previously contain the ring. It's possible that the contents of the box has now changed into something else (or is currently unspecified - they do enough messing with the timeline that a Schrödinger's cat scenario is plausible).

I'm not sure about having the crack undo everything, as it removes all continunity. Interestingly they've been very strong on that in this series, both in the deliberate references to past Doctors (the montage at the end of the first episode showed every Doctor to date) and in pointing out in-universe when continunity's been broken (the complete absence of the steampunk Dalek, for example). The previous two incarnations made little if any reference to their past lives.

[ptristan.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure about Rory's badge being a production goof, it seems likely and GMS has confirmed it as such, but in the Confidential for the episode they made a big deal about the attention to background detail that goes on. I guess it's possible that the production team is so busy making sure that the postcards you vaguely see in the background are all correct that they completely miss the obvious things like the badge and the Doctor's amazing disappearing, reappearing jacket. I'm kinda hoping it's a 'thing' like Bad Wolf and the crack though.

And whilst I'm on the subject of cracks, I don't think that it ignored the Doctor as such, it's just that what with him being the massively complicated space-time event that he is, it would take much longer to erase him from the time-stream. That kinda also explains why Amy wasn't absorbed, even though she was right there - she's travelled in time more and has had a bigger effect on the Doctor than Rory.

Oh God, this turned into an essay, I'm sorry!

[torkell]

Hey, long time no see! How've you been?

I still think the badge is a production goof (remember the hymn numbers in Father's Day?), though having looked into a bit more I'm amazed it got through post-production (I didn't before realise the badge appeared in a close-up, for example). It could always be an in-joke by the production crew, or even a *deliberate* production goof in an attempt to draw suspicion away from the real hints.

Hmm, that's plausible. Another thought is that the crack found it easier to eat Rory because he was dead, and so couldn't dodge or resist the existence-erasing light.

Don't worry about the length of the comments - it's fun to see all the different theories (and anyway my initial post was much longer, so give yourself a pat on the back for managing to read all through it :)

[ptristan.livejournal.com]

I've not been too bad, same old, same old I guess. You?

I've managed to almost completely repress everything that happened in Father's Day and my Google-Fu is apparently weak today, so I actually don't remember, enlighten me?

This is the thing, from what I've seen of the confidentials, the episodes seem to be painstakingly picked over and re-re-rewatched. But on the other hand mistakes have to happen occasionally. I'm actually starting to think that all these production errors are deliberate, but only in the sense that they've left them in just to screw with the nerdier people in the audience.
What would be the real hints, in your opinion? Just the occasional crack appearance?

In addition to that, Rory being dead would also mean that he has no more potential for the crack to erase, whereas with Amy she has a good 60 odd years still to live, if that makes any sense?

Theories are good! The only other people I know that watch the show are still whining over Tennant leaving and there's not a great deal of discussion to be had on that front.

[torkell]

Yeah, mostly same ol' same ol' here, apart from a bit of excitement in March when I moved to a different flat. I can't remember if I included you on the new address/new phone number emails - let me know if I missed you out and I'll forward them to you. Other than that I'm still in the same job, and still in the same town.

Anyway, in Father's Day, when they enter the church there's a board visible with some hymn numbers on it. All very well, except one of those numbers was too big to be a valid hymn number (and the set of numbers had also appeared in other episodes). The fandom pounced on that and went crazy with speculation trying to work out just what it referred to (e.g. using the numbers as reference to a specifc moment in a old episode). In the end, it turned out that it was a geniune production goof that the production team turned into an in-joke to misdirect fans.

I think the real arc hints for this series are the cracks, the silence at the end of the universe, and the fact that no-one remembers anything from series 1-4. My current guess for how it all links together is that the cracks and the silence are caused by the Tardis exploding at the end of time, and the silence is some sort of anti-time that removes entities from the timeline. The cracks themselves aren't bad as such, just weird, as not all the cracks open on to the silence (the first one merely opened onto a prison cell). The reason no-one remembers things like the steampunk cyberman is because a crack opened near it, and the silence ate it (and in doing so closed the crack).

On Rory, that makes sense. The angels talked specifically about a complex space/time event, so it's reasonable that Rory being dead is a smaller space/time event than Amy, and both are massively less complex space/time events than the Doctor.

Heh, I made the mistake of wandering over to the GameFAQs forum for the new Who game and it's full of people ranting about both Tenth and Eleventh.

Oh, a random thought: what's going to happen to the spaceship in The Beast Below, and to Churchill and co in Victory of the Daleks? Both of those had a crack (and quite a large one in The Beast Below) appear just after the Doctor left.

[ptristan.livejournal.com]

>>The hymn numbers in Father's Day
Odd, I don't remember any of that! And it's exactly the sort of inconsistency that I normally love to obsess over and make theories about. At the very least it proves that the production team isn't above messing around with the audience, which is good to know.

>>The real hints for the series
I would add "The Doctor in the Tardis doesn't know" to the list, as I'm sure it's been mentioned a few times this series. As has that "How is it a duck pond if there aren't any ducks?" business, but I can't see how that could be relevant to anything. I do so want the theory that a Future!Doctor has been travelling around in the background of this series to be true, though that's looking less and less likely as we approach the finale. Speaking of the silence at the end of the universe, what do you make of the silence at the end of the Vampires of Venice?

>>On the cracks
These are pretty much my exact thoughts, though I think of the silence as less "anti-time" and more "outside" of space/time, so stuff gets sucked into it the same way air gets sucked out of a spaceship when an airlock is opened. The retconning of series 1-4 means that the cracks must be spread throughout space/time, as opposed to following around Amy or the Tardis or whatever, which is what the series seems to be implying so far. Ugh, confused.

>>The cracks in TBB and VOTD
I thought those cracks were pretty small or at least thinner than those in FaS/CB? For a while I assumed they were instances of the "benign" cracks that simply link space/time, and so would be more or less harmless. But then in Cold Blood the Doctor said that the cracks were getting bigger, so I guess they could be early instances of silence!cracks. In either case, the silency cracks seem to only be eating people (though the mental image I'm now getting of millions of earthworms flying towards the underground crack from Cold Blood is pretty amusing) so Starship UK is safe, and we know that a crack hasn't eaten the major players of WW2 London because surely Amy would be affected?
Having said that.. perhaps the trigger for the finale is that those cracks start getting all serious business, Amy starts Back to the Future-ing all over the place and the Doctor finds out that Starship UK disappeared under mysterious circumstances.

And now I will stop as I'm starting to ramble, my apologies.

By this point I'm sure I've spent more time analysing this bloody series than the writers have. I need to get me one of those "life" things I've heard so much about.

(Oh boy, GameFAQs. I love the site, but I avoid the forums like the plague!)

[crschmidt.livejournal.com]

Fixed points in time were mentioned first in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fires_of_Pompeii , I believe. "In The Visitation he started the Great Fire of London, and in The Fires of Pompeii he caused the volcano above Pompeii to erupt, which killed everyone in the city (but saved the rest of the world)" -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_(Doctor_Who)

(I didn't see The Visitation, afaik, but he definitely mentioned that he knew what was going to happen, and couldn't stop it, in Fires of Pompeii.)

I'm really hoping that Rory isn't actually gone, and he comes back somehow. I don't have any idea how likely this is, but I'm hoping.

[torkell]

I think The Fires of Pompeii was less a fixed point, and more an "it's Pompeii or the world" decision. However, see my reply to elemnar above - Pompeii could be considered a fixed point in that it's a prerequisite for the fixed event of The Waters of Mars to occur.

I think Rory is the only traveller to actually get killed off in New Who - the only other traveller I remember leaving was Adam, back in The Long Game, and even then he wasn't killed, just abandoned. As it is, the ring is what makes Rory's departure curious - there's something left behind that's highly likely to still be connected to him, whereas when the guards were nommed in Flesh and Stone there weren't any reminders left.