You wanted obsessive fan-deconstruction cube?
How do you know it's a duck pond if there aren't any ducks in it?
That's an exchange from the first episode that never quite sat right with me when I was watching it. It wasn't really a joke, and it was really oddly placed, brought up and then dropped straight away. The exchange, from memory (and I DID watch this a LOT before the second ep came on), is something like...
"And WHAT is that?"
"It's a duck pond"
"Then why aren't there any ducks in it?"
"There's never been any ducks"
"Then how do you know it's a duck pond?"
"Is it important?"
"I don't know. Why would I know?"
Then he kind of collapses due to post-regenerative stuff and it's totally dropped. It also comes at the point where The Doctor is in free-associative brain overdrive, looking for anything that might be important. Just after this, he has the moment where he realises he's just seen something and missed it and then does that Martixy 360 scan thing.
There was something about that that just seemed odd and out of place. Kind of left it there, but now it's been deliberately referenced again. Is it that there's never been any ducks? Like there's never been any Daleks? Like there's never been any clerics watching Amy in the woods?
Skipping back through the iPlayer thenow, just as the clerics run off to get excised from time...
"Cracks. Cracks in time. Time running out. No couldn't be. But how is a duck pond a duck pond if there aren't any ducks? AND she didn't recognise The Daleks. Okay, time can shift. Time can change. Time can be rewritten. Ah. Oh!"
Spatula: Then, after their little adventure, he gets filled with excitement about the new Tardis interior decoration and buggers off again, leaving Amy standing in the garden. Again. When he eventually returns to pick her up, another two years have passed.
That's something that I picked up on too. It's something that's edited in a way where it's easy for the audience to infer the sequence of events, but there's the possibility that The Doctor has been up to all sorts in that wee bit.
He knows from Prisoner Zero that there's something up with the cracks in space and as soon as he's sorted stuff with The Atraxi, he's off again. There's a shot of wee Amy hearing The Tardis, and then we're back to where we think we're meant to be.
When Amy finally gets back into The Tardis, she asks The Doctor why he picked her out of everyone. He tells her there's no reason and that it's just that he's lonely and needs a bit of fun. She asks if that's all and he says aye, it is. Right in front of a stinkingly obvious picture of the crack in her wall on the Tardis display monitor.
He knows something here that he's not letting on, and it's very possible his time away has not just been spent on a quick trip around the moon.
So when they're in the forest and things are about to start getting erased from history there's this little exchange...
"Remember what I told you when I was seven."
"What did you tell me?"
"That's not the point"
What is the point then? The fact that Amy doesn't remember it happening, I reckon. Like she doesn't remember the Daleks. I picked up on that, but totally missed:
Why was he wearing his jacket? He'd lost it to the angels and at no stage throughout the rest of the episode was he wearing it. Except there...
...There's something jarring about the Doctor's dialogue for it to be completely in context.
That. And I think you might be bang on the money. I think The Doctor here might not the same one who just left her. He just might be the same one who went off for the jaunt around the moon in a new Tardis, or perhaps more likely, possibly one from later. It happens just after he says that he always comes back, and that's a line that's been heard before. Specifically in this kind of context. He's also got an urgency about him. Like there's something else very important going on that hinges on Amy getting a handle on her time-weirdness. I think there might be a link here to the season finale.
Y'know, Cracks in Time are closed by swallowing things that are *breath* chronologically-anomalous enough. Like The Doctor or River Song, both of whom are going to be there at the Pandorica. But someone here is stranger than both of them.
Also....
There's something else going on in the first episode (and others) that may be classed as spoiler because it is VERY subtle (You'd need an insanely keen eye or a good grasp on history), but it is all there and is likely to become important soon, since we're heading back to Leadworth. Can't pretend to have found this one myself...
[+] [-] Notreallyspoilerbutsensitive Something wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey is definitely going on. I totally missed this and it was someone in my studio who had found it on a sci-fi blog he reads, but Leadworth is riddled with anachronisms. Rory, who is in his early twenties, registered as a nurse in 1990. The cars are nineties registration plates. The phones and laptops are modern. Also, in the Dalek episode there are documents realting to British Steel, which wasn't around for another twenty years.
And there's never been any ducks. |
