DOCTOR WHO SERIES 7! 1st September...

[snapespeare]

I have been waiting for this for a very long time! :-)

Why did Amy get taken by the angels, when it looked like The Doctor and River were still looking at it?

I thought that too. Rory was taken when Amy was watching too wasn't he? Not sure about that but I thought she saw him go. Perhaps they all blinked simultaneously.

I wondered if perhaps Rory and Amy find the regenerated toddler River and help her. I can't remember what detail was given about that part of River's story.

it's a far cry from Tom Baker's day where companions just got left behind and The Doctor had so little control of where or when the tardis went, he could not go back to pick them up!!

So much more complicated now!

Aitch, I agree that (assuming River is right in what she says right) the Doctor doesn't like his companions aging because he likes to pretend to himself that they'll be together forever (he's effectively promised as much to both Amy and Rory) and any evidence of their aging reminds him of their mortality and shocks him out of that comfortable delusion. He wasn't happy when in 'Dinosaurs on a Spaceship' he said "Come on Pond, you'll be there till the end of me" and Amy replied "Or vice versa", for example. And his reaction to the death of the Brigadier towards the end of last season was more than just grief at the death of a friend - he'd assumed on one level that the Brig would be there forever for him to pick up and go adventuring with at any time and the reminder that that wasn't so galvanised him into changing his course of action.

I think this is probably more an issue for him now that there are no more Time Lords so that there is no one with whom he can maintain a "normal" life-long relationship.

soup that would be nice. River might have mentioned it but she does keep things very secret.

As there an significance in the headline to the newspaper Amy was reading at the picnic?

Detroit lions win Super Bowl? As far as I can google, the Detroit lions have never even qualified for the Super Bowl, never mind won it! Or is it just a red herring?

I do sometimes wonder if us lot could write dor who ourselves maintaining the arcs and filling all the plot holes as we go!

I though mr big took hi. Because he knew the angles were following him and mr big wanted to collect them!?

Right, my questions:

• Could the Doctor pick up Rory's dad and then take him somewhere a train-ride away from 1930s Manhattan so he could see them both and get to say goodbye? Or would Amy with her 'publishing contacts' manage to send him some kind of message?

• Would they both be listed as missing persons and then eventually be presumed dead in 2012? (just being practical)

• Isn't professor a chair/job title at an institution rather than an actual qualification? (Which, by the way, always bugged me about Harry Potter - that all the teachers were professors.)

• I have worked in publishing and that novel would have had to have been self-published or otherwise they'd have had to bribe/blackmail the publisher to print it. Any decent editor would be saying 'But this bit about "I have to break it because Amy read it in a book" makes no goddamn sense. And what the hell is that postscript about??!'

• Which reminds me - he didn't break her wrist, she did. So how does that affect the 'It has to happen' stuff?

• What was to stop one if the inmates in Winter Quay getting themselves zapped either to a different timeline or to death? I mean, if you're stuck in a tiny apartment and can't get out (where does their food come from?!), surely once you work out that you're going to die there, you might as well get zapped again, no? And what was to stop one of them jumping off the roof?

I don't think Mr Big did target Rory, and neither did the angels, any more than they targeted anybody else. Mr Big was interested in River, Rory just got involved because he was with River when they took her, and when they got to Mr Big's house, they put him in the cellar to get rid of him - to 'feed' the babies that he kept there - it was the baby angels who sent him to Winter Quay.

Once anyone was in Winter Quay, the angels there kept them there, and if they tried to escape sent them back again, and presumably if they did, they pursued them.

When Rory was taken, the angel was behind him and Amy didn't know it was there, so she wouldn't have looked at it. When she was taken, she turned round to say goodbye to the Doctor, and he was looking at her, not the angel. River wanted Amy to go, so she wouldn't have looked at the angel either.

minniebar
1- Maybe, but probably would be too long and not really pertinent to the plot.
2-probably!
3- River is a professor at the Lunar university or something!
4- You could drive a truck through that plot hole, but it's just a plot device, to enable Amy to tell the Doctor that they were OK. I thought it was lovely, and made me all emotional- I didn't really care about where or how until I started reading this thread!
5- He wanted her to change the future because he wanted Amy not to die, I suppose her wrist was broken because of him- he made her do it.
6I thought they did continuously get zapped. I thought that was the point of the block, so they could just constantly just zap the inmates in time and live off the time energy?

There wouldn't be anything to stop the inmates getting themselves zapped into another timeline, but it wouldn't do any good because they would just end up in the same place, at a different time, but they would still be the same physical age and would still die there. If they killed themselves, it would possibly deprive the angels of a bit of potential time energy, but it wouldn't kill them. The reason Rory's death killed them was that he killed himself before he'd been touched, so he was never sent back, and never died in that building. So he died there but didn't, which created a paradox. As the time energy was the angels food, a paradox 'poisoned the well' as River said, and killed the angels.

I don't see that the publishing of the book is a plot-hole - why shouldn't it be self published?

caseyshraeger, regarding the aging thing, it's no use if you have to look to Moff's own doctor to back up the case, though. imo. of course moffat is building his own back story, it's just one that i don't agree would be the case that the doctor would be repulsed by his companions aging.

I though his being repulsed by ageing was down to the knowledge that all humans will die eventually and that he dosn't like endings. hence ageing is a visible sign that an ending is drawing nearer

Is it just me who hated it? I mean, I found the first half hour quite entertaining, but I really loathe all this timey-wimey stuff because as soon as you start thinking about it, none of it makes any sense. It's all so ridiculous that for me it has no emotional impact at all - when Rory and Amy disappeared for good, I really couldn't give a f*.

I know, it's just me.

yes, but that's all moff. where was it before? (moff is a great big sexist pig btw, and probably well-repulsed by women aging).

When the Doctor is reading at the start one of the bits was about a cleavage!

Why do you think Moff is a great big sexist pig?

(do you know something we don't?)

There's the bit in School Reunion, where Rose asks the Doctor about Sarah Jane he says that 'humans decay, they wither and die - imagine watching that to someone you...' - he breaks off, leaving 'love' unsaid, as Ten always did. But he does say that he wouldn't leave Rose, which indicates that different 'incarnations' of the Doctor have different attitudes and different ways of dealing with situations (after all, the First Doctor came close to murdering a wounded caveman because he was slowing them down and was only stopped by Ian) Maybe if the Fourth Doctor had been like Ten he wouldn't have left Sarah? Maybe Eleven is more like the Fourth Doctor in his attitude to ageing?

yes and no. he's so blusteringly proud of having shagged his way round the BBC following his divorce, it's a bit gruesome. he's just one of those 'i LOVE women' guys... so long as they're pretty.

i think it's that which is informing me, perhaps. ten would not have left rose, he would have borne the pain of watching his companion become infirm... i don't suppose i'm taking into account the changes in attitude within each doctor. (whcih i think is a bit crap, btw. like i say, we don't abandon the family labrador just because they can't go out on such long walks).

But Eleven wouldn't have left Amy either - there's no indication of that. He doesn't (according to River) like seeing her age, but that's a different thing. And actually the evidence from what Eleven says and does is all in another direction - it's more that he is continually shocked and confused by humans aging - he knows they do it but it still takes him by surprise, and then he feels sad about mortality for a while until he forgets again. Perhaps River, who's in love with him, is chiefly interested in sparing him pain? (and I'm pretty sure she doesn't say 'repulsed'). Going back to the dog analogy, you feel sad when the dog who to you is still the ball of fluff who used to widdle in your slippers and chew your table leg starts to get an arthritic hip and is a bit wobbly getting out of bed in the morning, but you're not repulsed by it.

And if we want pre-Moff, is Sara Kingdom a big accelerated metaphor for the Doctor's relationship with all his future companions? Discuss. In fact, having to watch what happened to Sara could give him a bit of a complex. And from the point of view of an ageless being, how much difference is there between ageing at a much-faster-rate-than-the-Doctor and at a much-much-faster-rate-than-the-Doctor? Some, obviously; not wanting to overstate it.