Saturday, May 28, 2011

31 Days of Who #27

(I’m giving the comics a rest for another day before getting into the last few, because I’ve got a mental theory about Doctor Who’s current season that I want to get out of my head. And because I haven’t written anything about Doctor Who in weeks.)

I’m all about the new Doctor, whoever he is. It’s that excitement of the new and shiny, combined with a wonderful uncertainty, because I often have no idea what is going to happen next. But that doesn’t stop me from thinking about it. A lot.

In the old days, stories were sometimes stretched over a matter of weeks. Between them, the Dalek Master Plan and The War Games were spread over half a year when watched weekly, which is a long time to think about what is going to happen next.

It’s something that has been lost a bit in the hour-long adventures of 21st century Doctor Who, but there is still some long term mysteries that are now spread out over an entire season – What’s up with Amy’s pregnancy? What really happened out at that lake in the middle of nowhere? What’s up with River Song? Who is that little girl?

So here’s my grandiose and absurd theory. It’s probably already been brought up somewhere else, but I haven’t seen it. (It’s probably on one of those big who message boards, but I can’t read them. People there are unnecessarily mean and nasty about stuff I genuinely love, so I can’t do that.)

I reckon this whole storyline with Amy and the Doctor is going to end with Mr and Mrs Pond giving birth to a whole new race of Time Lords, who are going to be different this time.

It’s a theory made up of wild speculation and careful examination of several facts. The fact that Amy’s pregnancy is in a state of quantum flux is only to be expected when you’re dealing with the birth of beings that will exist in every time simultaneously, or the fact that something regenerated in that New York alley, or even the joke about the time head baby, because Steven Moffat loves making bizarre and nonsensical jokes that turn out to be REALLY IMPORTANT.

And it fits an overall theme that has been running ever since the Moffat/Smith thing got rolling. On one very obvious level, the first season was all about growing up and finding somebody to grow up with. It was a season that was all about that wedding in the final episode.

So it’s only natural that the season after that would be all about the next step in life, and creating babies and building families. The first two episodes were dripping in this stuff, a TARDIS was born in a new body in Neil Gaiman’s excellent episode (probably my single favourite complete episode since The Girl In The Fireplace) and there is already one whole new lifeform born in the current two-parter.

(I don’t know how the pirates fit into it, but they’re pirates. Not fitting in is what they do.)

It would also fit Moffat’s template of a Happy Ending Every Time. He likes to go out on a high, and bringing the Time Lords back would certainly fit that deal.

It’s a dodgy theory that has lots of holes – not sure what the death by the lake is about, or what River in up to – and it will probably be blown out of the water by the very next episode, but it’s something worth thinking about.

There is always something worth thinking about in Doctor Who.

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