jencat | Whobilation....

Aw, the Doctor's back :o)

Well, the first ep wasn't completely perfect - that kind of drama so early on immediately puts your audience's back up, as obviously it isn't real, or permanent - but it was pretty damn entertaining. The thing is, mega-dramatic deaths have to happen at the end of an ep, and the end of a series, or we know they're not real. Turns out this one is real, but not... now, as such.

So not... relevent? It's brain-meltingly complex, but it wasn't heartrending at that point in the ep. Mostly everyone watching knows you haven't really done anything game-changing just yet, so we're just waiting for you to move on and get on with the bloody story.

The heartrending part... ohhh, River. Every time. We got the Time Traveller's Wife riffing expanded on - River was very young when they first met; he knew everything about her already,so very TTW. Will we ever see that?! Do we even need to? Except at the end of Matt Smith's incarnation, possibly.... And they're moving in completely opposite directions, how does that work? They must have had some cross-over, seeing as neither of them are necessarily moving linearly.

And the worst day coming for her is apparently the first time we ever saw her in Silence in the Library? Really? It feels too simple for that; to answer that question so quickly. We still don't know what she was, officially, to the Doctor, and it has to be something official because of the whole deathscene clues - knowing his name; and knowing who he would only ever tell that to...? Being married doesn't always seem like the likely answer, seeing as how they can't seem to stick in the same timestream for very long. Plus, we know the real secret is that she's in prison for killing somebody important, and we still have no clue about that.. Except I guess we know it can't be the doctor?

Except, except.... the doctor dies in this incarnation. That's set as canon now (ignoring the very obvious fact that we, er, just re-set the entire universe a couple of eps ago, if we're talking about game-changers). He dies 200 years older than he is now, and with his Matt Smith face on, so... has the Moff just sounded the death knell for DW as we know it? No more regeneration?! Woah, apparently hiring a twentysomething for this gig has made them very... confident about the future?

So we've just established that River only ever knew him as Eleven until their first/last meeting - so shouldn't she have been... more surprised; less likely to recognise him when she finally saw him as Ten? That initial conversation at first seemed to suggest that she was pretty damn comfortable seeing him with different faces, but that just can't be the case, surely?

Gah, the trouble with the frickin' Universal Reset is that it makes you doubt the rules, yet again.