Doctor Who Episodes

Maybe I'm spoiled with Moffats great episodes, where the intrigue is clever and solid, but Steve Thompsons The Curse of the Black Spot made me question why I was watching Doctor Who at all (so naturally I come to 4chan to whine, because I know that you all care very much). It was clear that it was a filler episode even before Wikipedia confirmed it (as it was previous scheduled as the ninth episode, but later easily moved) but very sloppily(?) done.

There was nothing wrong with the basic premise, but the line is crossed when the Doctor "invents" that parallell universes can be linked through reflective surfaces. I'm not a nerd boy expecting everything to be canon, but this was handwaving a solution: "X can be a portal to alien spaceships sometimes."

The Doctor previously mentioned that the myth about sirens was persistent for a valid reason, so this implies that derelict spaceships ROUTINELY seeks out ships at sea with reflective surfaces to project their holographic medical AIs through. The alternative is that... ...the ships somehow crashed into eachother for some reason? ...and the boy infected them with typhoid fever? This is never explained, and yet this is most likely an obvious filler that will never be referred back to or explained further.

...but all these insane things doesn't compare to the finale, where they find Rory strapped to a medical table, because he's been kept alive so that he doesn't drown. His condition is easy to cure: His lungs are filled with water. I can understand that the ship doesn't know how to cure him, but the Doctor is known for his TREMENDOUS skills with alien computers, so this is where he should point his sonic screwdriver to the ships medical bank and explain to it that fluid doesn't belong in human lungs. Alternatively they could manually resusitate his heart and lungs while he's being kept alive.

Instead we have yet another cliché lifesaving scene where Rory magically gets better once Amy has stopped breaking his ribs, all because the series wants to explain to the viewers that she loves him and that he matters. It's so cliché and horribly contrived that what this scene does, is making Rory into an annoying burden.

I think I figured out the finale on this season, with the help of another forum:

River Song has created a paradox. As if her conception aboard the Tardis wasn't enough, she sought out her own mother and brought her and her father together, and from that moment the fabric of time and space has been slowly tearing apart. Cracks have been showing, between the possibility of Amy choosing Rory and making River Song, and Amy leaving Rory and River Song not existing, cracks in Amys very bedroom wall, but also elsewhere. This gives birth to the cult of the Silence, who somehow exists in this twillight, and maybe because of it.

When the Doctor finds out about his own death, this furthers the paradox, into a possibility where he doesn't know about it and gets shot, and where he does know about it and avoids it. This results in there actually being two Doctors aboard the Tardis: One that won't know about his death and will die, and one that does know and won't. The one who doesn't know and gets shot, wears a BLUE bow tie throughout the season, while the one who finds out about his own death and avoids it wears a RED bow tie. Once inside the Tardis after this episode, the "red Doctor" will simply toss the cowboy hat over to the "blue Doctor", and the Silence will be none the wiser.

Having witnessed the assassination, the Silence is aware that his past friends witnessed it as well. Some within this cult, who wants to SAVE the Doctor, figures that if the younger Doctor is warned, he might still prevent it, and tries to insist that Amy "tell the Doctor" that he's going to die in The Impossible Astronaut. (That was actually a good guy, or else why try to bring a message?)

River Song does shoot the Doctor with the prophecy "Silence will fall when the question is asked." still unsolved to the Silence, because the surviving Doctor is still alive. Letting the Silence assume that the Doctor is dead, as verified by this belief in all his friends, he can work covertly in bringing them down, up until the Silence finds out and asks "Who's Who? (Was the Who the one we killed, is Who just one version of two, and then was the one that we killed the version who knew of his death, or is Who still alive?)". "The living question" is thus asked, whereupon the Silence falls. Maybe it falls because the Doctor did something, maybe it falls because the paradoxes are somehow resolved, or maybe it falls because the paradoxes somehow turn in on the Silence itself somehow. (Impossible things has happened in finales before, and if we add "the power of the miracle of love" into the mix, then "anything can happen".)

>>404
Actually, no, that's false: I went back and looked at some episodes, and the Doctor switches from a blue bowtie to a red one somewhere before The Curse of the Black Spot, and then back to a blue bowtie in the beginning of this half of the season (before Let's Kill Hitler). (Then, of course, he probably starts switching between them in these latest episodes, as demonstrated by the apple and the rubiks cube.)

Another interesting thing is that this still doesn't rule out that there are now two Doctors. On the contrary, the Doctor mentions that his duplicate could very well survive his own demise at the end of The Almost People (after using a sonic screwdriver to melt himself and all flesh around him), and also that bringing flesh creations aboard the Tardis will stabilize it into real lifeforms. Note that the Doctor speaks about the clone surviving not only the melting, but the following explosion somehow, which can only be done through Tardis transportation.

It's no hazzle for the Doctor to travel back and create anything from the flesh back at the factory, but as there wouldn't be much time between the former Doctor leaving and the explosion, he'd probably just scoop up his former clone, and then bring the new Doctor aboard the Tardis to make him real (and thus be able to regenerate, and not melt when shot and burned).

It's also weird that in Partners in Crime, we learn that the (tenth) Doctor doesn't keep spares around of his sonic screwdriver, but the Doctor seem to have the sonic screwdriver he tossed to the clone, at the beginning of the very next episode, so I think that after he cut the signal and turned Amy to flesh, he more or less IMMEDIATELY went back and scooped up his clone, hiding it in his Tardis.