Sea Devils And Die: GeroniMoffat's Doctor Who In The 2010s

What, they don't remember they've had a baby? Or that the kid was stolen? Or that their mate turned out to be their other grwn up mate? Or their grown up mate turned out to be their daughter? Family events must be for shits and giggles round your place.

If this happens after The God Complex then the A&R we see here know all of this series and ergo the above. So it has to happen before, in which case why did Amy never mention being a superstar model during the entire series?

The newspaper the Doctor holds up in the episode (the one that refernences someone form Britain's Got Talent) clearly states the date of it is 19th April 2011. That fairly firmly dates the episode.

idgi. how does signing the autograph prove that they don't remember the events of the series? they've gone on with their lives since being dropped off by the Doctor a year or three ago, Amy's had a job as a model (or curator of a perfume line, given the name of the perfume), Rory's had to adapt to being second fiddle in a new way, etc

xp where is the date shown in The Lodger?

Didn't Amy look straight at the Doctor but fail to recognise him? (I'm unwilling to trust my own judgement here since I was so INCREDIBLY bored that I may have been dozing at that point)

I don't think she did, no.

no, he starts to step out of their line of sight as they approach, but then the little moppet runs up for an autograph and Amy only looks at the kid

Just watched it a bit drunk, and didn't entirely understand it - not sure if this is the alcohol's fault or the writer's. But I enjoyed it well enough, it was funny and Cybermen are personally my favourite of the big Who villains. Cybermat with teeth was kind of daft though.

Quibble: wasn't the Doctor's death in Utah supposed to have happened/will happen 200 years in to his personal future? Has he had a couple of hundred years of adventures since ditching Amy and Rory?

I agree with aldo except that it's not just a question of Amy and Rory knowing about what's going to happen in advance, if that's them after the events of the series so far and about to go through the events of The Impossible Astronaut then they're stuck in some kind of time loop.

http://www.ranger-retrocenter.com/misc/thedate1.png

OK? So the date of this episode is set.

From The Doctor's point of view, he could easily have had 200 years of adventures between The Impossible Astronaut and now. Big Blue Box etc.

From Amy & Rory's POV, this is the day they need to get on a plane for Utah and the events of The Impossible Astronaut. So, if this is after The God Complex for them then the events of the series have all happened (as in fact they must have even if The Doctor picked them up after the end of The God Complex again and whizzed them about to various other places and dropped them back in Colchester in April). So, when The Impossible Astronaut takes place, Amy already knows River is her daughter and all the other stuff because she's already found out in the future.

Has he had a couple of hundred years of adventures since ditching Amy and Rory?

yep. this is covered in dialogue.

if that's them after the events of the series so far and about to go through the events of The Impossible Astronaut then they're stuck in some kind of time loop.

it's not both though. it's either well after the events of the series, or poooossibly before and they never mentioned Amy's perfumery career happening in the gap between the Christmas Carol and the Impossible Astronaut. and the chances of it being the latter are miniscule, given the name of the perfume.

yep. this is covered in dialogue.

although, er, it might be in ǝposıdǝ ʇxǝu ǝɥʇ.

Hmmmmmm at aldo's xpost - newspaper prop could be an art dept fuckup like Rory's nametag in Eleventh Hour tho?

Do we definitely know what date amy and rory met up with the doctor in Utah? I'm just not really seeing a problem here, tomorrow for the doctor doesn't have to mean tomorrow for amy/rory/anyone else. In fact it seems to me that tomorrow for the doctor means "months ago, before any of this series happened" for amy/rory.

Also we don't know for sure what date he dropped them off at the end of the god complex. That could also have been a few years ago for all we know, giving amy time to become a model by april 2011.

And I really don't see why the amy/rory we see in the shopping centre should need to go to utah at all? That's the amy/rory who have already done all that stuff.

Yes, Utah takes place on 22 April 2011. It keeps getting shown on the TARDIS screens as the death date of The Doctor.

The Amy & Rory from the shopping centre on 21 April need to be in Utah on 22 April because that's where we already know they are - unless you're suggesting there's more than one Amy & Rory.

Well yeah, I think there are two Amy/Rorys. The pair in Colchester, who are having their happy ever after, some time after they got dropped off at the end of the god complex. And the pair who are about to go (or have already gone) to meet the doc in Utah, the same pair we saw at the start of the series.

It's the same Amy and Rory at a different point in their lives, isn't it? They can be at two different places on the plant at the same moment in (actual) time, at different points on their timeline, can't they? Don't I remember them waving to themselves across a valley in that one with the Silurians? (I hesitate to post this because Aldo knows so many million times more about the Who universe than I do. But whatevs.)

They know the Doctor is going to die in TWO HUNDRED YEARS of his own personal timeline. Amy and Rory are going to die in about 60. I can see why they wouldn't be 100% panicked about it.

xp And the policeman in "Blink", he overlapped with himself for sure: "it's the same rain".

Do we definitely know what date amy and rory met up with the doctor in Utah? I'm just not really seeing a problem here, tomorrow for the doctor doesn't have to mean tomorrow for amy/rory/anyone else. In fact it seems to me that tomorrow for the doctor means "months ago, before any of this series happened" for amy/rory.

This is obviously the case. I mean, really obviously.

So yeah, there are two Amy and Rorys wandering around, as there will have been at several other points in their travels. When we see them in the department store it's further ahead in their personal timeline then we've ever seen them before. They don't need to go to Utah for the Impossible Astronaut because they've already done that.

Doesn't mean they definitely won't go to Utah and get stuck in, of course. Wouldn't be surprised if that was part of the Doctor's plan in dropping them off early.

kill me

I think people (including me) are getting a bit confused about Amy + Rory's timeline because

a) at one point the Doctor was totally against risking anyone crossing their own timeline, which admittedly seems to have gone out of the window now, and

b) if the Doctor thinks he has dropped off his companions to have nice normal Earth lives then he is being a bit dotty (ok, not out of character) if he's left two copies of them running around at the same time, I mean what is Amy's mum to think when Amy rings talking about her new house and car in London and an hour later she rings again saying "sorry I haven't called for a week, would you like to come for tea at my flat in the duckpond village", etc

Also we know this is a later Amy and Rory because we've never heard anything about Amy being famous before.

Amy and Rory in Utah ...

If the Amy and Rory in the department store were an Amy and Rory who postdate the Doctor's death, you'd think they'd be a little bit fucking sadder, knowing the Dcotor was going to die the next day. Unless they're so far in advance they know he doesn't die.

But if that's the case, the Amy and Rory in the department store are just living average everyday lives (apart from being superstar models). And so were the Amy and Rory who at the start of the series went to Utah for the doctor's death.

While there can be two Amy and Rorys at the same place in the timeline, surely one of them must be a time travelling pair who are just dropping in. Can both pairs really live ordinary domestic lives at the same time? At a practical level, it's going to show up on tax and national insurance systems. Someone will notice.

I was going to go for tomorrow must mean tomorrow for the Doctor only, but it's pretty clear that:

a) Corden is in April 2011.
b) so are the Ponds who are heading to Utah to meet the Doctor (who dies on 22 April 2011).
c) So are the Ponds who are living life as supermodel-ed couple, and can't possibly be the same Ponds in b).

I can just about deal with the idea of them living in different places at the same time if both pairs were just living their own quiet lives, but wouldn't the Amy in b) be bothered by her mug suddenly cropping up on billboards everywhere?

Another explanation is that the doctor actually meets an earlier Amy/Rory in Utah 2010, before Tardis-ing them to Utah 2011, though why he'd bother getting them to go all the way there in the first place is a mystery...

(another holdover question I had from "The Impossible Astronaut" was where Older Doctor's Tardis was - we only see him in a stetson on a car, and we don't know what happened to it after he died. The first Tardis we see belongs to the Doctor who's 200 years younger.)

Are we supposed to believe that the doctor has been going around without a companion for 200 years? What if he is going early to Utah (in his timeline) and this screws things up somehow.

Roll on next week.

We need to crowd-source a complete list of questions to be answered next, s we can tick them off as we watch and double our fun.

xpost But I don't think he does Tardis them to Utah 2011, since that episode began with them alone frantically driving to try to make it to the appointed spot. Can't imagine he'd drop them in Provo and then say "You've got six hours to drive to Lake Silencio." Cos Provo's no fun.

(ps Fang Rock was the very first ep I rewatched in my "Time Reconsidered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Who Eps" project over at FT. I hugely prefer Matt as Doctor, but TBaker is actually not as awful as usual in Fang, and I enjoyed it quite a lot.)

Honestly, they could've just avoided this crap if they hadn't included the scene with the Ponds in the department store. I mean, what did that accomplish really? Proving that Amy is capable of getting a job? That modeling is a good substitute for time-traveling and saving the universe? Bleh.

I took the point of it to be:
(a) the Doctor is taken aback by their being there;
(b) one party gets (unobserved) to glimpse another party in unexpected byways of the timeline
(c) the Doctor has to restrain himself from getting their attention

If any of these needed achieving for urgent plot-reasons, it did so.

I'm reading his very very late-doors sense of shame-filled self-knowledge as being a nearing-death self-reflective thingie.

Roz OTM. Just because they didn't trust us to realise that the Doctor is not yet done with Amy and Rory. As if we'd forget their existence if they were absent for one episode. Risible.

The Doctor didn't look taken aback to see them. He looked wistful.

Initially he was surprised is all I meant: he wasn't anticipating they would be there. If they were only in the ep for the reasons yr saying, yr right, that's p lame. I assumed there must be more to it, but in a very "show me then" kind of a way. So perhaps "hoped" more than "assumed". I quite liked the idea that Amy becomes A BIG DEAL in the non-doctor world: but they only needed the poster for this.

I don't mind that idea either IF it had taken place in any year after 2011. but no, they HAD to also emphasise that this was taking place the day before he died.

As it is, it's just sloppy writing and embarrassing given how many genuinely complex timey-wimey stuff that Moffat has pulled off successfully before.

Amy doesn't know what Petrichor means in The Doctor's Wife, does she? if not then Closing Time HAS to be later in her personal timestream than God Complex.

I'm really hoping the newspaper was a production error now. ɥbɹɐ ʇı ʇnoqɐ ʞןɐʇ ʇ,uɐɔ ı ʇnq buıɥʇǝɯos oʇuo sı pɐǝɹɥʇdn ǝuoǝɯos ɹo

Newspaper also throws up the conundrum that The Lodger takes place in Summer 2010 (as the flier for the Van Gogh exhibition states) which doesn't leave enough time for Craig and Sophie to have a 12 week (? my guess) old baby.

Other time problems not resolved include Amy's two ages in The Beast Below and the am/pm changes in Time Of Angels. There are more, I'm sure.

If there are two Amys/Rorys it would probably explain why he bought them that new house and made them live in Colchester. Naah, I think the whole thing would make sense anyway it if wasn't for that newspaper and the whole episode was set in 5 years time or something.

maybe it's an issue printed on psychic paper by the silence

I don't get why Moffatt doesn't just have a big timeline where he marks all these things out?

Still, I can see why the Doctor might carelessly leave Amy & Rory in the right place a few months too early, he's kind of sloppy when it comes to things like that.

A&R not being that arsed about their baby is the big annoying hole in this series though, definitely. Especially given its a baby they already know as a grown-up and has been snatched away and trained to kill the Doctor. It doesn't make sense that they'd then just carry on jaunting around as space tourists. Weird thing is, there'd be so many legitimate reasons to be going to these planets, like as part of the search or something, that it's weird these just weren't written in.

The self-contained, non-Moffatt episodes all have the air of being hastily shoehorned into the overall plot. It was fine in the first half of the season but feels more awkward as things progress.

That said, I don't buy that it's any more inconsistent than usual. It's always inconsistent, it depends all on the highs and lows. If anything I think they're both less high and low than normal - nothing that's made me go "fuck that was awful" but equally nothing amazing either, although the first couple of eps were terrific.

I'm sure Moffat would have a big timeline - surely the only way to do it - whether he remembers everything to put on it is a different matter, but main characters wd be there you'd imagine.

I was very bored by that episode, although I'm not sure there was really much wrong with it. (too many bloody living rooms in this half of the series - not enough disused quarries) but yes, they did mention it was Colchester.

I never understood what people saw in "The Lodger", but, have to say, I did enjoy this episode a lot. It was one of the few 'funny'/lightweight/Gareth Roberts eps that has worked. Really couldn't care less about the ming-mong-y stuff.

Just watched - Craig definitely mentions they're in Colchester. Timey-wimey hurting my head, lot of issues mentioned discussed by us - getting to Utah by tomorrow, how do Amy and Rory not remember they are River's parents when they get to Utah tomorrow for the events of The Impossible Astronaut, etc.

Still remain vaguely confident they will be explained, but seems a lot to fit into one ep.

hand-wave.gif

There you go, sorted.

Anyone expecting too much more than that probably needs to speak to someone who lived through the LOST finale.

Meh episode with some laughs and once more HUMAN EMOTIONAL LOVE saving the day. Didn't any of the thousands of people cybered up in all those other episodes have babies they loved so much they could reverse the conversion?

THEY DIDN'T LOVE ENOUGH

We need to crowd-source a complete list of questions to be answered next, s we can tick them off as we watch and double our fun.

down w/ this

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/sep/28/doctor-who-confidential-axed

Amazed this was still a thing tbh

I've only ever watched a few of those, and reckon it must be a real pain in the arse to work on a show where not only do you have to do takes, but you have to spend so much time in between takes explaining what you're doing, instead of just standing around smoking and freezing your ass off.

i often enjoy these more than the show

Even if there is a shit handwave there's no way it will be as bad as the Lost finale.

list! now!

Jacob?