I have to admit, when I saw the start of the episode, with time broken, I thought for sure it was going to be continued into the next season, it should have been a full season to kind of go through all of time happening at once.
You know what i'd love to see in who? a villain who dies in their first encounter with the doctor, but then appears later due to the doctor meeting earlier versions of them. this means that the doctor has to keep stopping the villain while also keeping them from dying to prevent a paradox, all without being able to tell them why for fear of another paradox.
In the audio Peri and the Piscon Paradox the Sixth Doctor ends up defeating an alien before he could do so as the Fifth Doctor, who is about to arrive in that time period. He has to dress up as the alien to keep the memories of his Fifth self intact, but gets quickly frustrated that his genial predecessor won’t get as violent as he needs to (“I’m dressed as a fish, and I’m fighting a wetter fish!”) The Eminence gets introduced with the Sixth Doctor knowing about it from an encounter he had with it as the Fourth Doctor (gotta love release schedules) but in his Eighth incarnation ends up caught up in the circumstances around its creation.
Here's another plothole - Why would Madame Kovarian, or anyone in the galaxy would be tricked that the Doctor died as his 11th incarnation, if they have records of him dying years later on Tranzalore? And why would they believe he dies there if there's 12th and 13th Doctors running around the galaxy announcing themselves to everyone.
Because how would everyone have records of the doctors death on trenzalore? Then everytime someone he knew was captured they would just take him there, even the Daleks didn’t know And The Doctor can’t go back into his own time stream so the only way anyone would know the doctors still alive is if he/she went back to their enemies years before, and it probably isn’t true to the story but since the crack is a tear in space and time, I like to think that it changed the future creating any possibilities which ended with the 12th Doctor reincarnation
@@Spyciality Except we see people from different races who know the prophecy of Trenzalore, and share it with others. So clearly this isn't something only the Doctor knows. The Silence especially wouldn't be tricked, cause Tasha Lem is still there, monitoring the Doctor. "Hey, Tasha Lem, it's Madame Kovarian, the plan worked, the Doctor is dead!" "No he's not." "What do you mean?" "He's still here, on Trenzalore, alive and well, so he couldn't have died in the past."
@Sic Semper Tyrannis But Twelth Doctor appears during the saving of Gallifrey, before Eleventh even went to Trenzalore, so he was always part of the original future. I would've asked what woulf rewrite the timeline, since there's no time traveller interfering with the events, so everyone should be making the decisions they did in Timeline 1 where Doc dies, but the fact Doctor knows of his fate on Tranzalore and is a time traveller probably means these events play out differently every time he learns of his fate.
@@HiperPivociarz okay sorry I completely forgot what we were talking about, but the Daleks knew that the doctor was actually on his 12th incarnation on Trenzalore so even if he did escape, the only people who would have known the doctor regenerated was the Daleks who all died,And Tasha Lem killed herself during the siege so she couldn’t have said anything , The Timelords changed the significance of Trenzalore so it will pretty much be forgotten after they closed the crack so literally nobody could have known the doctor lived, hell even the doctor didn’t know he would live and still thinks they should be dead What I would like to mention is that the doctor was trapped in a confession dial for 4.5 billion years, the universe grew without him there until he went back, so doesn’t that mean the flux would have killed him ? It tore space and time so I would assume so
@@Spyciality My point is he says he faked his death at Lake Silencio to trick everyone. But everyone knows he dies on Trenzalore, especially the Silence who is fighting with him there concurently, while the Kovarian chapter is targetting the Doctor's past. Kovarian would immediately know her plan failed, because Tasha Lem would tell her "Nope, he's still here". Why is there a record of his death at Lake Silencio if everyone was on Trenzalore and saw him fighting them. A lot of the races he's fighting have time travel capabilities, not to mention people would talk about it in years following the war, so you'd think people like Teselecta would know about it.
He has some really good moments just some parts of this episode aren't those good moments he's also my first doctor so maybe I'm just a little biased who knows
@@yaboi9183 youre not the only one i rate matt smith second after Tennant for quality. Capaldi is good but he has less great episodes then matt smith imo
The fixed point isn't necessarily connected to The Doctor's LITERAL demise, but the events that "seem" to unfold at that specific time and space. It's sort of similar to the bootstrap paradox in Before The Flood, where The Doctor sees himself as a ghost, and thus makes it so that there is a ghost version of him due to a hologram by going back in time. In a world with time travel, you can watch a person jump off a cliff, but as long as you don't view them hitting the bottom, you can always go back in time to save them. Your past point of view will have stayed the same, keeping the timeline intact. But, it would happen that you going back to save them, and them not dying, was what unfolded in the first place. You just saw the exterior of things, not knowing the details. If someone falling off that cliff is a fixed point in time, their DEATH can be taken out of the picture merely by assumption. If the people who deem it a fixed point do not actually view in full detail the death of that person, then there is room to shift things enough to save their life.
see, the thing that really fucks me off about this story (and resolution) is the fact that the resolution is “oh the Doctor is inside the teselecta… despite the fact it’s explicitly started the Doctor DIES and he’s deffo not a copy and his death is deffo NOT a trick.” And to add to that… the solution/workaround of his death is not even thinkable/available to consider to the viewer as the solution until “Let’s Kill Hitler” so you couldn’t even figure it out until episode 8 or whatever it was it just makes the the quote from Canton Everett Delaware III mean NOTHING. He says “it’s deffo the Doctor” or whatever, but its NOT. Not at all.
The main thing that bothered me about this episode is that he did what he did to trick everyone into thinking he is dead. Only for him to soon after be told that he was going to die at trenzalore, meaning everybody knew he didn't die. I would've shrugged it off if literally every race didn't show up at trenzalore to kill him. If everyone knew he was going to die at trenzalore then why would he need to trick them into thinking he died in the first place. Idk I liked this episode when I first saw it, but after recently rewatching all of new who I realised how pointless this episode is, all it did was marry river and the doctor, but there were so many ways that this could've done something way more emotional. If Moffat waited till the towers of duruliam to marry them, it would've added much more emotional weight to river slowly accepting that she's never going to see him again. Only to visit the library, to see that her newlywed husband doesn't even know who she is, and she dies. Idk, this episode bothers me now😂
Wasn't it so that the Doctor didn't know at that time that he should die on Trenzalore and thought instead he should die on Lake Silencio. The reason he thought this, was due to the Church of the Papal Mainframe, later known as the Church of the Silence, which did try to create a new fixed point in time where the Doctor dies, because of the events on Trenzalore, which did force the Church of Silence to go into the silent mode. The fact that nobody can kill the Doctor, many enemies can speak of experiences, except of a Time Lord, entry River Song, did force the church of Silence to kid nap and train River Song to kill the Doctor on Lake Silencio to create a fix point in time, which they thought would kill the Doctor definitively without a way out. For this reason the Doctor tricked everyone into thinking he is dead. It is all a little bit timey wimey stuff. "I have no idea where he picks that stuff up…"
I never even noticed that the real eyepatch lady is still out there and never got dealt with, and that thing about how right at the end Amy and Rory are all of a sudden mourning the Doctor even though nothing really happened to him at this point in their timeline... great job Moffat Also am I right in guessing that Amy remembers the events of the weird alternate timeline just because of... wibbly wobbly cracky wacky in the wally stuff? Lol
@@tvguy61 I think the subtlety is that Amy was reacting like us as the audience were because we've just watched the Doctor submit to his death, but it's strange because from Amy's actual point of view, she last saw the Doctor when he dropped them off at the end of the God Complex, and he's still got another 200 years to live at that point. I might be wrong though, this is very confusing
"What was the point of the Pyramid Scheme." A question that haunts anyone taken in by one. 😅 I think most of the crit is valid, but also some is based on seeing the Silence as the big bad when to me it was Madam K and her group and the Silence are just her tools, which could have been set up better. In the end I gave it a pass because it was still ok enough that it didn't destroy or alter the Whoniverse in the end, it just fails to make any sense for the space of one episode. Now that we've experienced whole plotlines that make no sense from Chibs, I can look back on this with more fondness than malice. Oh remember when THIS was the extent of our worries? The Good Old Days! I was far angrier at Death in Heaven and what it did to the Brigadier and the Insane notion that water on a grave, even super special nanite filled rain, can somehow create Metal from nothing in caskets.
21:34 this moment is actually even more powerful when you remember he's in a time machine meaning he could have gotten this phone call at any point in his life, but it's the tardis that made sure he got this phone call when he needed it most.
really liked this episode but i think it needed 3 parts to be honest how i would have divided it part 1 being the setup thats handled with the flashbacks, the cliffhanger with amy shooting the doctor (the stun gun) as the end of part 1 we then get the cold open of part 2 explaining what happened with River refusing to kill the doctor then building the whole universe trying to help him to be a pointless thing then ending with either the original ending or river killing the doctor then using a thing similar to how they brought the master back in end of time
watching this was cathartic for me. after getting really into doctor who around 2010, starting with the reboot, i was finally able to watch series 6 live. after the opening 2-parter, i was so fucking pumped to see where the story was going, and while there were genuinely incredible highlights like "the doctor's wife" and "the girl who waited," i couldn't stand "a good man goes to war" or "let's kill hitler," and by the time i watched this embarrassment of a finale, i was so done. i hung on for awhile, but i didn't start actively watching doctor who again until capaldi's last series.
I think the world still has clocks and calanders because clocks and calanders are a thing throughout history. Like the fact that the time hasn't changed, I can imagine the people of the world just accepting it. Could argue why the roman is still driving a chariot when it's kinda obsolete in a world of engines, but he does because time's gone wonky and the world doesn't question it. "time's gone wrong and some of us noticed" Some might've noticed by acknowledging the existence of clocks and their implications.
I agree that this finale is terrible but the plot does make sense whether or not time is an entity or the doctor survives the fixed point. (For ~11:05) The butterfly effect only works when something is so undetermined that it just takes a flap from insect wings to tip the scales, but certain events are so important that they would undoubtedly change history and that's all that fixed points are. Travelling back in time is likely not going to unintentionally change this event because a huge portion of the timeline rests on it. It's like a load bearing support that's tougher to move because of all the stuff it's carrying and disastrous if you successfully do so. When time travel is involved, the reason you would have for changing a fixed point would definitely no longer exist once history is altered so significantly, and the universe rapidly trying to correct this (repeatedly altering the future, which then cancels out its own attempts) would cause some catastrophic time-breaking effect. What matters to history is that future civilizations will believe the doctor to have died on the beach, not that his death actually happened, so River disabling her weapon created a time-twisting anomaly and the doctor faking his death like he was always meant to fixed it.
In Doctor Who, the concept of "fixed point" is a bit loose, but I believe it's just poorly fleshed out. 1. "Time" or "the universe" is capable of dealing with paradox...up to a given point. 2. A "fixed point" is an event that MUST occur in all realities so that reality itself doesn't unravel. 3. It's the illustration of these "fixed points" that is murky. I don't see "time" as an entity to be fooled, but rather one that must be satisfied. If you are recorded as having died on a certain date and time at a certain place, all that matters is that history records your death at that date/time/location. As a time traveler, the Doctor can fake his death and everyone will presume they are seeing an earlier version of him running around. One can't alter one's own timeline...why the Doctor can have "do overs" of his past actions. We see in Father's Day what happens when he attempts this for Rose. An example of one kind of fixed point in time. Destruction of Pompeii. Poorly written. Yes, the Doctor is why Vesuvius explodes, but that's not what makes Pompeii a fixed point in time. If the Doctor doesn't explode the volcano to destroy the aliens, they will wipe out humanity before it ever leaves the Bronze Age. As we know in Doctor Who lore that humans leave earth and spread through many galaxies and even exist in some form or another to the end of the universe itself, we see that such a paradox is too great for the universe/time to adapt around it. Death at Lake Silenceo. The Silence want the Doctor dead to prevent his going to Trenzalore. Their first attempt triggered a total event collapse of the universe. They are willing to risk anything to achieve this goal. The Doctor gambled that he didn't need to actually die but only appeared to have died. He had to cheat death in a way that fooled the Silence so they wouldn't keep attempting to kill him. He later confronts the Papal Mainframe and says they were trying to change events to which they were already a part of...a classic legacy paradox. Death on Trenzalore. After Clara enters the Doctor's time stream to fix the harm caused by The Great Intelligence, the Doctor elects to go after her and bring her back. He specifically states that by entering his own timestream, it was collapsing in on itself. In other words, his history/future was no longer fixed. We then see that when he's at the end of his regenerations on Trenzalore, it is Clara who intercedes to the Timelords on his behalf...asking them to help...and they grant a new set of regenerations to the Doctor. Had the Doctor not saved Clara, he would have died as it was originally depicted.
I think that the act of "River pulling the trigger at Lake Silencio" was the fixed point, not "The Doctor dying". The episode is still a bit messy, but it at least explains why time still breaks from her *not* shooting. It would just be that everyone kinda assumed it was supposed to be the Doctor dying.
Why do Amy and Rory know River is their daughter in this world. This is the Amy and Rory from episode 1. They don't know this yet. Sure, all of time is happening at once but that shouldn't really explain it.
The clocks and calendars thing could have even been a plot point. Something 11 tried to use to convince Churchill. “You know this isn’t right, Winston. You’ve always known.” “And why is that, exactly” “Because of the question.” “What question?” “The question. If it has always been and will always be the twenty-second of April at 5:04 PM… why would you have a clock in the first place”
i can't explain why but even through the mess that this episode is i still LOVE season 6 and this episode and will defend the river song storyline until my dying breath
I'm at 11minutes into the video And I think that the fixed point in time wasn't the death of the doctor, but rather River shooting her gun, which is what she altered.
11:07 I think you could also see it as not the universe thought he died, but everyone who catalogued the event (like the Teselecta) got it wrong 13:00 oh my god this is the thing that REALLY bugged me this episode, surely if Amy remembers it, it would be the Amy from that moment in time... right? 23:22 does it need to be explained? I mean, they can literally transform into almost perfect replicas of most things on their data base, the idea that they can figure out a way to fake regeneration isn't THAT egregious, what if they just... had some regeneration particles?
i mean the whole episode is an answer to the question "what happens when you rewrite a fixed point in time?". So i don't see a problem with the episode.
I'm not defending the episode, because lol, but not killing the robot when the robot was supposed to die is still deviating from a fixed point in time. Although, I still think when we see him die in Episode 1 it's the real Doctor. I can't believe A Good Man Goes to War, Let's Kill Hitler and this are all in the same season together. There's a reason rewatching it isn't as fun as others. At least Amy looks really nice in that suit.
I got my girlfriend watching Doctor Who. We just finished season 6. She was so excited to finish the season and had so many theroies about what would happen. Then we got to the finale and she was just *pissed* like wtf did you just put me through?? I had to warn her that Season 7 revloves around the mystery of the doctor's name and that we don't ever actually get the answer to that because I think she'd quit watching if I didn't prepare her for that level of annoyance.
As to answer why do calendars and clocks exist: they just do. It's a frozen universe. Nobody made them. They're just "echoes" of the real timeline. Because like pterodactyls once existed, clocks did too
you can explain amy and rory as thinking the doctors dead as we know that he took long breaks after god complex when he would go and see them. We can assume that one of the breaks may have been a long time and during this time Amy assumed the doctor would have died, as from her perspective there is nothing that would have stopped that from happening
Lovely to hear a Thick Of It reference to round off an excellent critical breakdown of why this episode was such a disappointment. Fuckity bye to the Wedding Of River Song
Yeah, I hated the Silence storyline. It was just a vague driving force that was around for much longer than it deserved to. This should have been the crux of who they are, and why exactly they want the Doctor killed. But they just... kinda forgot thats what the season was about? It wasn't until the end of Eleven's run that we actually found out what the fuck was up with the Papal Mainframe but it was literally too little too late.
Closing time absolutely should never have been the penultimate episode, if only to spare us a second pointless James Cordon playing himself filler episode.
Are we really, honestly criticizing the Pyramid's being Area 51? I mean, this show has space London on a space whale, evil robots with plunger pump hands and a time machine that is bigger in the inside. How can anyone even bear to watch Doctor Who with that approach?
For start, even if I don't agree with some of your review, I genuinely enjoy your analysis, but I couldn't enjoy this.I on't want to sound like hater or something, but I can hardly find something I agree with you in this. I was even suspecting some translation error or something and that we saw different episode, because I was all time stopping video and answering your questions etc. I can only say, you entirely misunderstood whole episode and didn't realize what is happening(+- some parts I agree, but main point are completely off) I will probably not talk about everything, but I will try to explain, how I see main points. 1. They aren't in parallel timeline and it doesn't effect entire universe. In fact, this anomaly is simply local Earth issue, that is spearing, but didn't get to sun yet, so pretty small scale. They don't live in alternative world, they live in time, when everything trying to happen at same time, so clock etc. exist, because it existed before. Things doesn't make sense, because they are crazy combination of things that happen. (Pterodactyl lived there once, there use to be warnings about feeding and people use to go there at some point of time, so it happen at same time and creating crazy scene) 2. I agree, that there was misunderstanding, but it wasn't just companions who misunderstood, Doctor (and you) misunderstood what is River doing. She isn't trying to save him, she is trying to give him good farewell. It is difference between man being shot in wildness and just dying and dying with friends around you and people who cares about you praying outside. Doctor is at this point hunted by many groups and it's look like everyone wants to kill him. She is showing him, that he is loved and his death will be loss for universe. Whole point of story is simply Wedding of River Songs. She accept Doctor decision to die, but chose to do something logically meaningless, just to make his passing little nicer for him. O think, that that is moment, when she became different from other companions and Doctor start to love her (more that flirt and companion) and he decided to marry her. 3. I like, how you compare it to water of Mars and Time Lord Victorious(TLV) but I disagree on who is there TLV. It isn't Doctor or River, but Silence! Doctor is playing role of time, who will fix itself up, no matter what they do. There was say, that that meeting was firm(?) (not sure if it's right term, translation etc.) point of time, that is important, because Doctor must be there to start they moon landing adventure and affect whole history. Silence did work really hard to change it to fixed point of time to prevent him in researching Trenzalore (from when they traveled and end war, before it starts. They did try to blow up TARDIS, just to create crack that start whole war, this is same) They are trying to alter history to prevent great historical point that existed in their time. And just like with TLV, they overlooked something and Doctor really arrive where he should be and it looks like what they expected, but it's just Doctor in new suit (that he has time to upgrade whatever way he wants, he is time travel, he had as much time as he wants). Doctor will always arrive to Trenzalore and face question and they just changed details. There is more, like how they should use something that was already introduced rather that magically made it appear from air or how his going to hiding did fill its goal and stop hunt of silence until Trenzalore etc., but that isn't main points that I wanted to express there.
Moffat should never have been a showrunner. He can write great stories, but he couldn't plan out seasons let alone make them logical, filled with engaging characters, or end in a satisfying way. He even managed to ruin his best creation, the Weeping Angels.
I think the angles were impossible to do again, they only Worked once and never really did again (in any type of media) they worked as they weren’t up against the Doctor, there were real stakes and the dr couldn’t laugh smile and beat them (like Time of Angels)
Maybe the fixed point isn't the death of the doctor in general but the murder or the doctor by River Song. She needs to go to the Stormcage for future stuff to work, so by surviving in secret, the doctor hasn't negated the crime bit which is the fixed point
@@magica3526 to be fair, she’s in prison for 5 minutes of the day then breaks out to go on adventures, so jail isn’t really a punishment for her, since she just breaks out every day anyway
This! It seems pretty obvious to me. The insistence of the season on records and collective memory makes a whole lot of sense once we understand that the point was people wanting the Doctor dead. It's not about biology, it's about a murder case.
My favorite part of this episode was 11 arguing with Dorian that he can run as long as he wishes since no one can tell him what to do, as long as he get to the fixed point eventually. He then calls up his old friend the Brigadier to show that since he has a time machine he can have more adventures, only to discover he had died and that the doctor had never visited thereby locking that into stone as fixed history. Truly a tragic way to show that knowing the end locks in the journey
I've always seen this episode as one of those "I see what you're doing, but this isn't how you do it." Kind of thing. Definitely needed two parts (at least)
Alright, this episode is mostly a mess, but I will defend the Tesselecta cop-out as making sense (even if it's crap from a writing perspective). The fixed point stipulates that the Doctor needs to be *observed* to die at Lake Silencio. It was always the case that the Doctor was aboard the Tesselecta when that happened. That's the event that was fixed; the Tesselecta getting blown away by River. That's why River draining her weapons destroys time, because that wasn't part of the fixed series of events.
I think you're misunderstanding the fixed point thing here. It's essentially the same as the ending to Steins Gate, and is one of the standard get-out-of-jail-free cards for time travel stories. You can't alter an event that you've already seen, because of the grandfather paradox - if that event never happened, then you never had a reason to go back and alter it, so who prevented it from happening? It's one of the few rules in Who time travel that tends to be consistently applied - no going back into your own time stream. The loophole is that it's not the event itself that's fixed, it's only your *perception* of the event - so long as any changes you make still result in past-you seeing the same thing, they still have the same reason to go back in time to avoid it happening, and so the paradox is avoided.
Kind of like the doctor stated in The Doctor Dances. "History says a bomb exploded on this site. Who am I to argue with history?" To which Rose replies "Usually the first." We know that what "history" says and what really happened aren't necessarily the same thing. So that's a good way to look at it.
I like to think I'm pretty good at understanding convoluted Doctor Who stories. I pride myself on it 11 years later I still struggle to make heads or tails of this one.
River doesn't kill him, the universe breaks, he convinces her to kill him to fix everything. Turns out the whole time he was in one of those giant robots. The destruction of the robot and the universe beliving he was dead was the fixed point.
The future Doctor dies at the beach. Amy and Rory continue with their timeline thinking he died, and tries to save him. The past doctor figures out everything over the season. To keep time from breaking, he has to survive while making Any and Rory think he died, so they can do their same timeline that results in the doctor surviving. If the Doctor doesn't die at the beach, then Amy and Rory don't help him survive, which means he does die at the beach.
10:57 - Time wasn't tricked, the Doctor faking his death was what the fixed point was this whole time. Everyone just thought the fixed point was the Doctor's death, because they thought he died.
What a great two part opener this season had, great mystery and suspense around the doctor's death and learning about River. This finale just unwinds all of those threads in the quickest, least meaningful and most insubstantial way it possibly could. I really liked the buildup through season 6, what a shame this happened.
Series 6 is built on the assumption that everyone loves river song, but in actual fact her story become boring and tedious half way through the series with the fact she was revealed to be Amy and Rory's child ( extremely predictable in the first two parter of the series) didn't help at all. Plus let's kill Hitler was terrible and felt like an end to her arc anyway. Also throughout the story the doctor comes to terms and accept his demise, only to suddenly change his mind and takes all the drama and investment out of the whole arc. Series 6 moffat went to far with his ideas and he would do it again in series 9 with the hybrid, another confusing finale...
Yeah like the idea of River Song is fine, meeting someone out of order is something that could theoretically happen to a time traveler, but it's just a gimmick, in order for the character arc to work you need everything else to be good too.
'Closing Time' definitely should have been sacrificed to give this finale two episodes. I felt at the time that the arc stuff was half-hearted and needed to be seeded consistently throughout the whole run in order to work. The fact that 'Night Terrors' and 'Black Spot' were switched didn't help matters either, as the former doesn't mention the events of the mid season finale at all. Such a shame as it did start so well - Moffatt needed someone like RTD to reign him in as his ideas are great but undisciplined. Series 6 was where my enthusiasm for Doctor Who started to wane a little.
They definitely should've just cancelled night terrors. But the arc of s6 was the best one in all of new who! After S5, and before 6 was finished being written, there was a bit of a writer's revolt at the BBC. The other writers demanded more control and wanted to be less constrained by having to put arc plot into episodes they wanted to write. They wanted more monster of the week style to do whatever they want. This is why S6 and 7 ended up airing in 2 parts. You can definitely tell S7 is now like individual stories, but somehow Moffat still managed to put some continuing story in there. The narrator mentions that the doctor ended up getting people to forget about him, which was great. And how the show should be We shouldn't just be expecting the people of earth to shrug off an alien invasion one week, just for 2 weeks later, to be surprised when they find out aliens exist again for the 100th time. But then we had that all power of 3 episode, where Chibnall threw all that back on our faces. That was a warning of things to come when he became showrunner. Somewhat ironically, Chibnall, who complained about wanting more autonomy from the showrunner, ended up wanting full control over all the writers, and more control over the arcs himself, refusing to work with a lot of the writers that had done great stories, and employing new ones who would do his bidding.
@@tvguy61 Night Terrors was filmed in Block 1, and AGMGTW and Black Spot were filmed in Block 4. I imagine the decision to switch episodes was taken during filming Blocks 2&3, hence why they were able to film an additional cameo for Avery & son (which probably wasn't part of the initial draft script).
I remember as a kid liking this episode and series because of the crazy time shenanigans, I thought it was cool. But later on in life I can see some of the issues it has, and didn't enjoy it as much upon rewatching it many years later. It was interesting going back through doctor who episodes and seeing how my views have changed viewing it as a kid, and then an adult. Some episodes I like more, some less, and some about the same. I still love waters of mars for instance, loved it as a kid too for similar reasons to this episode, the idea of messing with time. But unlike this episode, the waters of mars has that very important C word, which is why I still love it as an adult. It's not just showing off, it's got some thought to it.
i fear that i unwillingly have been a moffat apologist for about 12 years now and also a lover of the serialized nature of series 6, but this episode is truly unwatchable for me. i love river and to me this episode completely taints both her actual character exploration and her reputation as a character for the audience. it's almost a cringey experience - and this is coming from someone who loves the moffat era. like this episode itself makes me want to write to hbo max and ask them to add a "skip episode" button to their UX. thanks for your consistently great reviews x
I remember the confusion on the release of this thing. I found the series intro incredibly disorienting because of having to set up for this, and for this to not-pay it off so spectacularly still has me shaken. I just flash in my head to the alternate-world bullshit in pyramids and I shake my head knowing it's coming down the rewatch pipe.
Imagine if the series 6 finale ended with the Doctor actually, properly dying and staying dead. Then the Christmas special revolves around a story seeing something happening that brings the Doctor back and the special focuses on what it is and what it means.
Just River being forced to shoot The Doctor, but then discovering he’s in the robot would have been fine for the finally. That was quite clever. All the sideway world stuff that Amy somehow remembers after makes it hard to take the rest of the series seriously.
I hate the idea (Or at least what Moffat does with it) that “The time and date have always been the same” and “All time is happening at once”. There’s nothing nitpick-y about questioning the clocks, calendars or anything else, because it’s just such a stupid set up to an episode. So humans have a way of objectively measuring time outside of their own perspectives. Sure, that’s fine. But they obviously still perceive time moving, or else they would all be frozen statues. So why aren’t they measuring subjective time? But more importantly how does this time line even work? Why are there cars strapped to balloons? At what point in history did we travel by balloon-car? And even if we DID eventually decide to travel is probably the most inconvenient way possible, why would we still do that when there are Pteradactyles. These are free thinking people. Why in this broken time line are people getting into their balloon cars, hundreds of feet in the air when even a stray BIRD could end up killing them? How is the War of Roses entering a second year if they aren’t subjectively measuring time, and time is frozen? How is the War of Roses EVEN HAPPENING? The Roman Empire is in charge, so why is there a war going on for the throne? Things like this is why I’ve always hated Moffat as the show runner and stopped watching the show in his era. He’s not a good enough story teller to tell the types of weird ass stories that he wants to tell. I can accept weird and crazy shenanigans. You need to to like Dr. Who as a whole. But it feels like Moffat never thinks any idea past a rough draft “This would be funny/cool” before diving head first into turning it into a story.
Absolutely, he deserves your username far more than you do because the way he puts style over substance is just bad. There's nothing wrong with style, but it only works if you like the style.
I did understand it like that the time broke and everything on earth from the past until this moment was compressed in a single moment of time, while combining some parts to new ones like different kinds of transportation to flying cars or the tower and the pyramid as a train station. And while all this is combined in a single moment, the moment of the explosion, people have the combined knowledge of Romans, Churchill, calendars, clocks etc. and the concepts behind it, but while it is a single moment in time, the clocks and calendars are only showing this single moment. And they can only measure the single moment they are in. And that Amy doesn't recognise Rory is due to the time in the past when Amy did forget that Rory did exist. A part from the past reflecting in this moment. It's not like it all got reinvented over a period of time, it's just there. It's just like the painting from Galifrey, frozen in time, captured in a single moment in time, but this time also reflecting parts from the past. Resulting in this beautiful mess like a rewind from the past seasons. That is how I did interpret this episode. But I also like such episodes where you have something to think of or to interpret in or something surprising strange/new/other, instead of the normal stuff where you know in which direction it goes, why it is so and where you get some (obvious) hints what is going on so you can feel good because you got to the right conclusion before the episode did. I did find the Wedding of River Song episode and the Pandorica opens episode great and entertaining.
I honestly like much of what Moffat has done, but I find that many times that rather than just give us a good adventure, he likes to terrorize and torture the companions he has created for several episodes. Rory spends 2000 years by himself, Amy watches her baby disintegrate to goop before her very eyes, Rory kills the woman he loves, The Doctor dies... sometimes - most times - I just want a fun story. Oh, and when he does do one of those ongoing stories, like you said, they usually just peter away and die before the get to the end..
Not only that but then he doesn't follow through with the horror he's subjected the characters to. We get Amy's baby melting to goop in her arms in one episode, then four episodes later it's revealed that her greatest fear is.... The time she had to wait all night for the doctor. Not like, any of the insane trauma she's been through since then. Just waiting. She's ✨the girl who waited✨ after all.
and funny he writes no psychological consequences for any of them. if companions of other eras of DW had gone through the things which Amy and Rory went through, like any normal human being, they would spend years trying to recover and certainly won't even think a second about traveling with the Doctor again.
So basically this episode is that scene in the last part of The Web of Fear where the Second Doctor feigns defeat to the Great Intelligence but actually has a plan to destroy but can’t tell his companions as it would compromise his plan, but this also leads to Jamie fucking it up. This small scene was used as an actual season plot, resolved in a 20 minute Inferno rip-off , and somehow tricking multiple Moffat stans online into thinking it’s good. I shit on the Chibnall/Whittaker era a lot but if it didn’t exist than I would still have the Moffat/Smith era to shit on. These two eras of Modern Who are pretty bad and consist of everything I don’t like about Doctor Who. Doctor Who being about complicated plots is fine, but to condense these plots so horribly and to dumb them down to “The Doctor is Important because… uhhh… [Insert Random Bullshit]” almost never works. One of the only few stories to do this well is Lungbarrow but that had years of previous books to build off of and the fact that.. well, it was a book, so it can do all that weird shit and do it well. The Doctor needs to be like Spider-Man, not Superman. The friendly neighborhood Time Lord who drops in a random location and tries to help. Not an actual fucking God who’s being treated by every species in the universe as such. The Doctor should be a weird urban legend, not a fairy tale Superhero messiah.
Actually I think the clocks and the calendars do make sense. If all of time is happening at once then some thing as big as the creation of a clock or the construction of a Calendar would still be there. That could even be the spark that got the doctor to notice
