Epic, operatic, funny, tragic, silly, complex, moving, scary. I liked these eps.
One of the things I really liked was the list of questions we have been left with! Please let me know about the stuff I've forgotten.
How was TIA cliffhanger resolved?Amy's shot missed the little girl, we eventually find out, but what about Rory? If you'll recall, him and River were down in the tunnels in the Lodger TARDIS. The silence are sneaking up behind him, energy/lighting flashing and crackling (as they do when they are about to attack); River looks his way and shouts his name. What happened there? A few seconds of confused black and white footage, and then it's three months later. What really happened in that warehouse?
Who/what are the Silence?Okay. They’ve been here since the dawn of humanity, directing and using us. Why? Whatever they are, we were warned about them all last season. Everything implies that they have ambitions/powers that are far more significant than mere enslavement of a relatively primitive planet.
They seem to have TARDISs, yet they need us to make a space suit for them. Judging by the TARDIS in the Lodger, they must have some ability to manipulate or travel in time. For some reason they wanted Amy to tell the Doctor “what he must know and what he must never know”. Two separate things, or do they both relate to the pregnancy? In what way will Amy “bring the silence”? And so on.
Also please check the screengrabs I posted in the TIA thread.
*shiver!*
Why did they blow up the TARDIS?To cause the cracks in time, seemingly (if it was them who blew it up). Did that allow them into history, so to speak (silence was visible through the cracks)? Did the Doctor defeat their plans in the last season, or did they want the universe to be re-booted for whatever reason? Amy’s memory may be significant here.
Who is the little girl?Did the silence kidnap her or make her? Why was she in that space suit, seemingly designed to keep her alive indefinitely in a hostile environment? Why was the suit designed to make her look like an adult? Did the silence want Amy to shoot her, to create some sort of paradox? Why is she dying at the end of the ep, six months later? And WHY DOES SHE REGENERATE? Is she a Timelord or something else, like the result of experimentation?
Is Amy pregnant?The TARDIS seems unsure and that is ridiculous. Amy has a Schrodinger’s Cat pregnancy! So, the scanner could be playing up for some reason; the Silence may be manipulating perception; the pregnancy may be based on a temporal tipping-point that is constantly in flux. Things will be timey-wimey, maybe Time Head timey-wimey. Is the little girl Amy’s daughter? Just what happened during her kidnap?
How will the Doctor’s death be resolved?So it really was the Doctor and he really is dead. Except that we know the BBC would be quickly looking at get-out clauses in Moffat’s contract if he wanted to kill off the title character of their most popular show. Time travel paradox shenanigans are likely to be part of the explanations. It’s a bit like Columbo – you already know who did it and that Columbo will catch them; the question is how he will work out the murder.
Who is the eye-patch woman?Oh, dear. So a phantom hatch opens, a mysterious woman with an eye patch looks in on Amy as she wanders through the orphanage, and says, “No, I think she’s still dreaming.” Woman and hatch then completely vanish. This implies that at least part of what we’re seeing isn’t real. So just add that one to the time paradoxes and edited memories. My brow is furrowed.
How much does the Doctor know?Sometimes things are absent from a narrative just to keep it moving, but sometimes they are conspicuously absent. The Doctor received one of the invitations, number one in fact. So far, no one has remarked that he was late for his own funeral. Why wasn’t he there, and why has no one mentioned this? Also I may be seeing things where they aren’t, but he seems a bit too knowing to me.
Who is River Song?What is her relationship with the Doctor, and who did she kill? The kiss we just saw pretty much proves there is a romantic element to this, so that rules out ideas like her being Susan or a future incarnation of the Doc. She believes their lives are exactly reversed, but she makes mistakes. Why didn’t she at least suspect that it could be his first kiss with her? We know from Forest of the Dead that before the library a Doctor who knew her well took her to the Singing Towers and cried and gave her the sonic, so the opposite directions thing can’t be completely true.
