Back in May, after two episodes of Doctor Who series 6, I made some predictions about the rest of the series. Now that the series is over, it’s time to go back over those predictions to see how I did.
There were nine of them.
- The eye-patch lady is going to be important.
Excellent start. The eye-patch lady was Madame Kovarian who turned out to be the major baddie of the series. - Craig Owens will be back.
Another score. Of course I went on to make some suggestions about the Silence which turned out to be completely untrue. But Craig came back. Therefore I get a point. - Amy is having some kind of “Schroedinger pregnancy”
I was kind of on the right lines here. But I’m not going to give myself the point. - Amy’s daughter is the little girl from the spacesuit.
Yep. Another point for me. - The little girl either is a Time Lord or has somehow acquired some Time Lord attributes.
And another. And I even went on to correctly predict why she acquired those attributes. - The Silence are interested in the little girl because of her Time Lord abilities.
No, not really. The Silence were interested in Melody mainly because they wanted her to kill the Doctor. And I don’t think any of that hinged on her Time Lord abilities. - It was River in the spacesuit at the beginning of The Impossible Astronaut.
Yes yes yes. In the middle of the series I thought I’d got this wrong. I thought that it would be young Melody in the spacesuit. That would still give me the point on a technicality, but I was glad to see that it really was the older River. - The little girl will grow up to be River Song.
Really quite proud of myself for getting that one. - Idris is one of River’s earlier regenerations. And that’s when River and the Doctor marry.
Completely and utterly wrong on all counts. Of course, I would never have made the second part of that prediction if I had known the title of episode 13 at the time.
So six out of nine. Not at all bad. Maybe I should apply for a job as a writer on the show.
What did you think of the seires finale? I enjoyed it very much as I was watching it, but having slept on it I’m not sure how much I liked the resolution with the Teselecta. I think it leads to, at least, three plot holes.
- I’m unconvinced that the Teselecta could fake the regeneration energy that we saw surrounding the Doctor as he died.
- If the Doctor who met River in the Pyramid was the Teselecta, then why does time start to move again when they touch? It’s not the Doctor and River touching.
- As the Doctor didn’t realyl die at Lake Silencio, why did time start moving correctly? Surely time can’t be fooled by a simple trick like that.
Of course, it really doesn’t pay to look at most science fiction as closely as that. Probably best to just site back and let the story wash over you.
I’m now looking forward to the next seires, with the Doctor working underground.
1) Given that it’s apparently capable of faking the appearance of lots of other stuff, such that people standing next to it can’t tell the difference between it and an actual person, and that it can extend itself sufficiently to create things like a whole motorbike (as in ‘Let’s Kill Hitler’), I think I can presume faking regeneration energy is straightforward for it. Remember, Mels’s regeneration happened when it was in the room, so the Tessalecta and its crew knew what that looked like.2&3) You’re presuming that the Doctor originally died at Lake Silencio, and the Tessalecta was just a subsequent fake. But suppose it was *always* the Tessalecta that got shot there?Then the Fixed Point in Time is still the same, its effects on those who witness it are what’s important, and River and the Tesselecta are, indeed, what need to be involved for things to work out. What screws things up is not that River doesn’t kill the Doctor, but that the Doctor doesn’t *appear* to have been killed to everyone involved, particularly to those who go off to 1969, and to the Silents who were witness to the events at Lake Silencio. The events in the mangled timeline show that River needs to be let in on the secret, so that she will go through with events as they’re supposed to happen, instead of fighting them. Events that include Canton conveniently turning up to ‘dispose’ of the body before anyone gets the smart idea of doing a post-mortem on it and blowing the gaffe.