Doctor Who/WMG/Series 6

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Speculation regarding Matt Smith's second season as The Doctor.

Series Six Cliffhangers

The Series 6 / Season 32 Midseason Cliffhanger will involve...

  • ...River.

Her identity one of the mysteries that's going to be covered next series.

    • CONFIRMED and CONFIRMED. She's part of the mystery of Amy's Schroedinger's Pregnancy.
  • ...the Silence.

The Cracks were slowly explained during series 5, why not dump reveal the mystery of the Silence at the midpoint, setting up the second half so the Doctor has to have separate adventures knowing what the Silence is, and that it probably has to be stopped immediately?

  • ...the Mondas Cybermen.

With a redesign, since it could be in the budget this year.

    • Confirmed, but not a major redesign. The chestplate is just slightly different.
  • ...the Daleks.

They're always involved when something big is happening, and when it's not them, it's...

    • Moffat has stated there will be no Daleks in series 6.
  • ...the Time Lords.

Okay, this is stretching it, due to The End of Time and everything, but maybe it's more specific Time Lords, like...

      • Jossed, though it turns out a plot revelation shows River/Melody is part-Time Lord, part-human, based on the mechanics of how the "real" Time Lords gained the ability to regenerate.
    • ...the Master.

Also not likely, but like I said, if it's not the Daleks, it's him. But maybe it's another Time Lord, like...

    • ...Jenny.

It's about time she showed up again. What a cliffhanger it would be, too.

    • Jossed.
  • ...a fez.

Will the Doctor get to the fez? You have to wait until fall! BEST. CLIFFHANGER. EVER.

  • ...Jenny wearing a fez.

Takes after her dad, no matter what he looks like and what silly things he thinks are cool.

    • Assuming you mean the Doctor's daughter and not Vastra's associate, Jossed.
  • ... Susan. (but it will be her regeneration. This will solve any problems that may be caused by Carole Ann Ford's health. She's 70 years old, at least. I'm sure that may be a liability.)
    • Jossed, though Bernard Cribbins was hardly a liability and he was well into his seventies at the time of "Voyage of the Damned".
  • ...a new species.

A new species called the Silents. This has been somewhat-partially proved in the trailer for this season, with that beastie that Amy turns her flashight on. I also found a script spoiler somewhere online with the line "Amy looks up at the ceiling. There are four Silents there." Finally, I found an interview somewhere with the producers saying that they were tired of the old monsters because of re-using them over and over, and wanted to introduce something new.

    • Due to the Silence's nature (who appeared earlier in the premiere "The Impossible Astronaut"/"Day of the Moon"), this isn't COMPLETELY disproven, however they do not appear, nor are mentioned. The ceiling spoiler is from "Day of the Moon", not the mid-season cliffhanger episode, "A Good Man Goes to War". One could argue that the "a new species" bit is disproven, as the Silence are very strongly suggested to have caused the Cracks in Time, and one of them said "Silence will fall".
    • It's since been revealed that The Silence is a religious movement, not a species.

The person behind the Silence is.......

RIVER SONG!!!! Now I can imagine what most of you are thinking about that theory. And yes, I am totally aware of how ridiculous that idea is, and also why it can't work, so there no need to review those details. The reason behind this theory is that we know that River has done something really awful in the future...er the past.......FNARG, And she said at the end of The Big Bang that everything would change. We also know that both the mystery voice and River's true identity are something of a puzzle. Who's to say they can't be the same puzzle? As for the logic behind trying to kill your past self, well if I'm right, I'll just leave it to the Grand Moff to explain, because even I admit that this one is far fetched, and I can't work out the mechanics behind it. Just consider that we've seen the rules broken before, and consider that the answers to both of these mysteries will likely be something completely out of left field.

The Silence are really...

The victims of the cracks in time. Now bare with me for a second. The cracks erased people from time and from memories. What happens when you look away from a Silent? They're erased from your memories. Because of the reboot that the Doctor performed on the universe, they aren't the full person who was eaten any more, more like an echo of them, and that is why they look the way they do. It also explains the fact that they are not a species—multiple species were eaten by the cracks in time, but because of the way the "echos" were created, they all ended up looking the same. It also explains why they've technically been around forever—the cracks completely erased you from time, so they could be in every time logically. It would also explain why Amy seemed to notice the Silent before anyone else and semi-remember them when no one else could—she grew up next to the crack, which made it easier for her to remember people once they were eaten while others couldn't. The same principle could apply here.


The Doctor, Regenerations and Valeyard

The 11th or 12th Doctor will, at the end of his life, be granted more regenerations.

By his former selves. The reason for the call backs to the previous Doctors is because they'll all help, if only off screen for some, create a device to give him more regenerations. Perhaps the Master will try to use it and 9, 10, 11 and maybe 12 (and previous ones, if they can get them) will work together to stop perhaps the Simm Master and a new one. As for how Rose won't be with 9, it could take place after he left but before he came back and picked her up. 10 could be between companions.

    • Jossed? In one episode of the Sarah Jane Adventures, the Doctor says he can change 507 times. Then again, he lies.
      • Probably jossed. Supposedly, if a Time Lord killed another Time Lord, they would get the dead Time Lord's regenerations. The Doctor killed a whole bunch of Time Lords and has their regenerations. Or, since the regeneration limit was artificial and enforced by Rassilion, with the Time Lords gone the limit on regenerations is nonexistent.
      • Also, supporting the 507 thing, we have to remember that the Time War led to huge changes in Time Lord society, to the point of literally reviving their King in the Mountain. It's quite possible that the increase in regenerations has to do with this. Either removing all limits to support the war effort, or artificially supercharging everyone's ability.

The Tenth Doctor thought he was going to regenerate into the Valeyard

The Tenth Doctor is clearly dreading his regeneration. When he can delay it no longer, he flips one last control on the TARDIS. When he regenerates into Eleven, the TARDIS is crashing into the earth. Coincidence? Accident? Or Ten's last attempt to save the world from himself? Of course, Ten was wrong in the end. Or was he..?

  • This is somewhat supported by the fact that, when Ten is agonizing over having to sacrifice himself to save Wilf, he starts shouting "I could do so much more!" One could argue that he's just upset, or he just means this particular incarnation, but it does seem odd that he's ignoring the fact that his next incarnation would (theoretically) be carrying on his work...
  • It looks as if Ten had reason to be scared of turning into the Valeyard. The Eleventh Doctor acts like the Valeyard/Dream Lord contained in a Stepford Smiler shell in "The Pandorica Opens". That last control that Ten flips before regenerating may have led to the TARDIS developing temporal energy-regulation controls such as the Friction Contrafibulator and Zigzag Plotter (unless of course either of those controls were already present before the TARDIS regenerated into its Series Five form).

Eleven is the Valeyard

See above, and consider also that the weird half-death regeneration-with-the-same-face might still have counted against the doctor's remaining regenerations, bumping him right up against that window of Valeyard-dom.

    • What about the Dreamlord?
      • The Doctor's evil side.

If the Doctor ever regenerates into a women, she will be a lesbian.

If you have been a male for nearly ten centuries, this is quite a probable side-effect, considering. And if the Doctor had been in a relationship with a companion before regeneration (like the newer series likes to do these days), it could get very interesting...

  • If Moffat ever writes episodes for a female Doctor, he'll probably make her bisexual as a continuity nod to Eleven and the other bisexual Doctors.
  • Look up Curse of the Fatal Death some time. Written by Moffat but non-canonical. Less bisexual and more intrest in the Master, dalek bumps and all.

The Doctor has become the Valeyard

And no one can stop him.

  • Series Five seems to imply that Eleven is the Valeyard/Dream Lord trapped in a box (the Pandorica). The Series Five finale also indicates that whether or not the force trapped in that box is the Valeyard/Dream Lord, it is a force that cannot be stopped; it can only be tricked into submission. If that force is the Valeyard/Dream Lord, then Eleven has been tricking it into submission repeatedly across the series; his Big Bang idea was the smartest trick he used, but until the TARDIS explodes, the issue is still unresolved.

A Time Lord's sexual orientation can change with each regeneration.

Their default orientation is asexual—possibly purposely engineered to keep the population down. For beings that can live hundreds of years, over-population could become a significant problem. However, every once in a while, after a regeneration they pop up as non-asexual. Ten is hetero, so is Eight, and we can presume One as well, since he had to get that granddaughter somehow. Eleven, I think, is gay—he does seem to go on a bit about how good looking Jeff is. This explains, for instance, how Five traveled with so many attractive companions of both genders without a hint of temptation. Also, why Nine didn't show any romantic interest in Rose, but when he became Ten, he fell in love with her.

  • Nine is bi. He showed some interest in Rose, argued that he was not asexual, was pretty overjoyed at the 51st Century's pansexuality, and therefor Jack's pansexuality and there were other hints between him and Jack.
  • I like this theory, but I think Eleven is bisexual at least. When Amy kissed him, his first instinct was to put one hand on her hip and the other in her hair.
    • The way Eleven checks out the rather hot young Venetian woman at the beginning of "Vampires of Venice" indicates that he has at least an appreciation for the other gender. I'm going with bi, personally.
    • I concur with Eleven being bisexual. Eleven's pained facial expressions in "Vincent and the Doctor" and "The Lodger" seem to indicate that he's also deeply entrenched in a Transparent Closet. Poor guy.
  • The Eighth Doctor Adventures and other EU stuff made the Eighth Doctor pretty definitely bisexual.
  • Clearly bisexuality is the default. Asexuality is a more cultural thing on Gallifrey.

The Dream-Lord is the Valeyard.

  • Not so much a wild-mass guess, as a logical assumption based on the information provided. Both are described as manifestations of the Doctor's dark side- the psychic coral merely acted as a conduit for the Valeyard to manifest himself prematurely from the stated point where the Doctor is meant to regenerate into him (between the 12th and 13th Doctor's- whom the 11th Doctor isn't that far off from). Notice how in The Ultimate Foe, the Valeyard manifests as a dark-haired and darkly-clothed man in contrast to the blonde, garishly dressed 6th Doctor, whereas in Amy's Choice he takes the form of a short, plump and plain man, in contrast to the 11th Doctor's tall, dark and handsome appearance, which he makes numerous mocking references to in the episode, amid his standard Hannibal Lectures.
    • I think it's more that the Dream-Lord is a manifestation of what becomes the Valeyard: not so much good-versus-evil, as a gradual degradation. Taking into account the events of "The Waters of Mars"—or even going back to "School Reunion"—it seems to me this has been a long time coming.

Regeneration doesn't have a hard limit, but a cultural/regulatory one.

There is a finite resource behind what allows/causes regeneration. A regen limit makes sense to avoid an eventual population nightmare if every time lord could liver forever, barring a double tap, no matter how low the birth rate is. Still, note that the Doctor now can regenerate ONLY 507 more times or whatever the number is. With no Time Lord Regeneration Regulatory Authority he either can freely use up his natural limit or that is all the regeneration phlebotinum the Doctor was able to salvage after the time war will allow for.

Eleven is becoming the Valeyard.

After the events of A Good Man Goes To War, Eleven has the Time Lord equivalent of a nervous breakdown and decides that in order to be 'good' again, he must fix history, starting with Earth. The first of the Autumn episodes happens to be entitled 'Let's Kill Hitler' (no, seriously). Assuming the first part of this WMG is right, the desperate Doctor attempts to 'fix' the worst event in human history: the Holocaust. Obviously, it doesn't work. Through his repeated attempts at 'fixing' history in various ways, he creates a universe in which all the crazy stuff rumoured to happen in A Good Man Goes To War (Roman Empire existing in the 21st Century, pterodactyls flying around and Winston Churchill riding a mammoth, for starters) actually happens. Realising that he has now just broken history possibly beyond repair, he falls deep into a state of despair and starts to call himself the Valeyard, believing that the alliance against him are actually right. 'Fixing' the Holocaust is the event the Doctor was referring to when he asked Rory about his time as the Lone Centurion, and holds great plot importance.

  • My god... the Doctor is responsible for the cracks. All in an attempt to change the universe enough, to fix the biggest mistake of all-The Time War.
    • OK, it's been mostly Jossed by Let's Kill Hitler. However, the new trailers and some new prequel-ly materials confirm that the crazy-alternate-universe stuff DOES happen. Whether the Doctor is the cause of it has not yet been revealed.

The Doctor's death will be used to get a fresh batch of regenerations.

How? Before he dies, the Doctor will plan a Xanatos Gambit to save his life. This will involve cloning a new Time Lord body, keeping it under tight wraps, and downloading all his knowledge and personality into it. Or just creating it as a vessel for his mind. This clone body will have never regenerated before, allowing the Doctor 13 more lives. The question is how to deal with the 24th Doctor, but that's not going to be until the 2060s.

The Ganger!Doctor is/will be the Valeyard.

A slightly unhinged version of the doctor, spawning from his eleventh form (making him a "twelfth" doctor), who, due to his presumably flawlessly copied time lord DNA can regenerate, and theoretically repair his own physical instability through the healing-y powers of that regeneration? Sounds reasonable to me.

  • Noob question; Who's the Valeyard?


The 13th and "Final" Doctor will be "The Perfect Doctor", a amalgamation of all of his previous incarnations. And Ginger.

The Doctor is basically a character who has a serial dissociative identity disorder- each regeneration brings a new personality (although with the raw essence of what makes the Doctor the Doctor always remaining). One of the main ways of treating multiple personalities, especially in Hollywood Psychology? Making all of the personalities merge into a single identity. So the 13th Doctor would be as if you had slammed the personalities and characters of all the other 12 Doctors together. Oh, and he'd be Ginger, because, well, it's a running gag.

  • His appearance and skills would reflect this too- Tom Baker's scarf, Sylvester McCoy's hat (although only after his companion told him to take off a fez), Davison's celery, Tennant's suits...

Alternatively, the 13th Doctor will be constantly switching between the 12 personalities.

i.e: He'll behave like 5 one second, then switch to 11, and start a sentence the way 4 would've, but finish the sentence the way 9 would.

  • It would be awesome, but we'd all have seizures.
  • 13 incarnations. 13 episodes per season.

The Doctor's final incarnation will be Flavor Flav!!!

Susan will return for the Thirteenth Doctor's last story.

She will inherit the TARDIS. Whether she regenerates at the end or goes on for a season or two before regenerating will depend on Carol Ann Ford's health.

The series finale will be the twelfth or thirteenth doctor comatose and stuck in a human hospital.

Not damaged enough to regenerate, but too damaged for the humans to wake up. He'll be signed in as a John Doe (John Smith?) because none of his companions will be there to ID him and (metafictionally) so they won't be able to identify him. The companions will be running around trying to find him, figure out if he has a regeneration left and, if not, figure out how to get around the 12 regeneration limit.

The next series will depend on how soon the show is Uncancelled. If it takes only a couple of years, or even a single season break, they will figure out how to revive him, and the Valeyard will be a result of messing about with his regenerations. If it's more than a couple of years, like when new Who fans are Running the Asylum and can have it revived, the series will pick up twenty years from the end of the current show's run with the companions' children and the same situation.

The Last Doctor will be a kid

Every regeneration of the doctor gets younger, so if were on the eleventh doctor, who is in his twenties, when we get to the last, it should be a teen or kid, and come on, how cool would it be to see a little kid with all the doctor's quirks?

10 or 10b will return in some form

We know how the River Song plot concludes on her end, and so eventually the eleventh Doctor is going to have to give her his screwdriver and do all that other stuff, leading to her heading to the library. There is just too much potential there not to show 10 again. Granted, David Tennant probably won't come back to guest star, so they'll have to use stock footage from the library episodes for those scenes.

Alternatively, Tennant will come back as a guest star to play 10b in an episode or two, now married to Rose and going permanently by the name "John Smith".[1] John and the Eleventh Doctor will come into conflict in some way. In fact, he could be the episode's Big Bad. John may be embittered about no longer being the Doctor and the Doctor could be jealous that John was able to step off the roller coaster of being a galactic fixer and live a peaceful life. Eventually they would settle their differences, and once again go their separate ways.

The last story

The last story will involve the 13th Doctor (the ginger female one) discovering the true nature of his universe : a work of fiction. Thus, having discovered the final truth of the laws of nature in his reality, he will force the writers to come up with a good end.

  • So, sort-of Blade Runner then?
    • Hangonamo, ginger female one? We've had two ginger female companions lately, and this troper's felt for a while that there needs to be a definitive conclusion to Donna's story...

The Ginger Doctor.

We all know the doctor wants to be Ginger, but who would play him? My guess, Rupert Grint

The Ginger Doctor will be the Valeyard

Any concurrent Doctors, as well as, preceeding, succeeding Doctors will not be ginger. The good Doctors will be hilariously irate about this.

The final Doctor Who episode will have all 13 Doctors

Seriously final, will-never-be-renewed, we mean it this time seriously really truly last episode. Because it could never be topped.

  • And instead of calling it "The Thirteen Doctors", it will just be "The Doctor".
    • Gonna be pretty hard to pull off since William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton and John Pertwee are all dead.
      • Computer-generated people are getting better all the time, though.
        • And it's not like they've never recast a Doctor before (Richard Hurndall playing the First Doctor in the 20th Anniversary special).

The Doctors final regeneration will be Conan O'Brien

The ultimate crazy ginger.

The Thirteenth Doctor will regenerate into...

  • A young man who looks an awful lot like the First Doctor. Time isn't a big ball or a banana...it's a wheel.
    • Or a girl.

The Doctor will have a major arc for his 'last' regeneration.

Something that occurred to me was that the Doctor is starting to run low on regenerations and I could see several things done by companions if he dies without the 'last' one.

1) Either the doctor or his companions make an equivalent devils deal with a being of power or the master to get the Doctor another regeneration or another set of them. Done by the doctors companions to bring him back or the doctor to save the world/a companion.

2) Somehow the doctor gets tied to the Masters extra regenerations. In essence now if one kills the other they both are put at risk, maybe even being sympathetically injured if nearby. This would add a few interesting new potential elements for future shows.

The 12th Doctor will have been a companion

Well, masquerading as one. It'd be interesting, wouldn't it?

    • Mickey. Out of the four guy companions of the revival series (since it's doubtful the Doctor will regenerate into a girl), he's the only one that makes sense. If it turned out to be Rory, it would put massive amounts of Squick on his and River's relationship. Jack's a bit too fond of guns. And Adam... no, just no. Which leave good old Mickey.
    • Leaving aside the massive paradoxes this idea would cause, there's also Wilf.

Rory, death(s) and lack of being dead

Rory will die in series 6

In the Doctor Who Confidential at the end of The Impossible Astronaut, Stephan Moffat says something along the lines of "sometimes, people you love die." He was referring to the Doctor and Rory.

  • Again?
    • as of the Siren episode it has only been three to four times. Not to mention since the show keeps reminding us of his time as the Centaurion he is effectively double the Doctor's age. You would think the poor chap wants to out do the Doctor everything, including regenerations.
  • He will die then not be dead once or twice more to make us think he never will, and then he will. For real and permanently.
    • This is a definite possibility. He's already died before in Cold Blood, and in both The Curse Of The Black Spot and The Doctor's Wife (though he was quickly revived in the former and the latter was an illusion). Everyone is expecting him to not die now, which means that in the second half of Series 6 he might be quickly and suddenly killed off for good, with no reset of the universe to save him again.
      • Alternatively, he might just become the Doctor Who equivalent of Kenny.
    • It appeared it was going to happen in The Wedding of River Song, with The Silence even commenting on it, before Amy's Big Damn Heroes moment.


Rory is immortal

For a moment, Amy had godlike power thanks to the crack in her bedroom. Not only did she bring The Doctor back into existence, but she also unconsciously made Rory immortal a la Captain Jack. Amy didn't successfully resuscitate him, he just came back to life shortly after she tried. Neither the TARDIS or The Doctor seem to notice this time though, possibly due to how it happened.

  • Sort of related to this, Rory is supposed to be dead. After all, he was dead or dying before he was erased from existence. However, Amy is some sort of reality warper(possibly due to the crack) and she brought him back. Now, the universe keeps trying to right itself, hence the reason Rory keeps dying. Amy keeps warping reality to cancel this. Eventually, this will start having really bad effects on the universe and Amy will have to accept the loss and let Rory die for good in order to prevent the end of the world as we know it.
    • This could also explain why the TARDIS sensors can't figure out if Amy is pregnant or not. She is pregnant with Rory's child, but Rory is supposed to be dead, so the baby both does and doesn't exist.
    • You have no idea how pregnancy works, do you?

River Song kills Rory.

As stated before, the Doctor isn't a human and Rory is the best "man" River knows. However with Rory's track record, he'll just get better.

  • I dunno about getting better, though I do have my suspicions about this. Recall the Doctor saying the following to Madame Kovarian:

The Doctor: Good men don't need rules. Today is not the day to find out why I have so many.

If you look at it one way, he's pretty much telling Madame Kovarian that he does indeed have rules, therefore not making him the good man that's been hinted at since and Stone. Rory, who, so far this season, has been nothing if not playing the role of 'the good man' straight ever since the beginning of the season, and the only time his temper's really been tested was only at the end of Almost People.

  • Considering the opening was a speech to dear River about how her father was amazing and would never let her down and all that, and well, he is her father, a role that is often looked up to by a majority of girls, that theory's just gotten a lot more likely, at least in this troper's opinion.
  • Look at River's expression when she first realises its Rory in the prison at the begining of 'A Good Man Goes to War'. Its absolutely pained. This may be because he doesn't remember her- or maybe because the last time she saw him, she killed him.
    • I though it was because this will be the last time she'll meet a version of her father, who knows who she is.

One of Rory's ancestors was a Chameleon Arched Time Lord

His Time Lord genes are mostly dormant, but he is still able to come back from the dead, just not regenerate. This might also explain the little girl. If it is Amy's daughter, Rory is the father, and all the time she spent in the TARDIS in utero activated her Time Lord DNA.

  • Jossed by the very episode that establishes Chamelon Arches. They don't make the Time Lord DNA "dormant", they put EVERYTHING Time Lord into the fob watch. Also, providing the Little Girl is Amy and Rory's daughter, also Jossed. She was conceived while the TARDIS was in flight, and got tampered by Eye Patch Lady and that's how she got Time Lord DNA.

Rory's grandmother was Susan Foreman.

In similar way to the Master, Susan escaped from the Time War by using a Chameleon Arch to make herself human. She then ended up starting a family and eventually died of old age. But before she passed away, one of her children ended up marrying someone with the last name Williams and they had a kid named Rory.

    • I thought she married David.
    • Time Lords don't have the same ageing rate as humans. He could conceivably have died before the Time War reached her.

Rory has a weaker version of whatever is causing Miracle Day.

The plot for Torchwood: Miracle Day, is that all humans on the Earth become immortal; they should be dead, but they keep living. Its been speculated in show that some aliens have been experimenting to cause this- maybe Rory just happened to be one of the earlier test subjects, and it allows him to keep coming back to life.

  • Given what we know by episode 10 of that series, probably Jossed.

Rory is The Master.

In Let's Kill Hitler, Rory mentions hearing a knocking sound in his head. Amy dismisses it as Hitler, but it could just be the sound of the drums. Rory is The Master, returned to life somehow. This is why he always comes back to life, because he's a Time Lord. Being brought back the way he was, he now permanently remains the same after regenerating.

  • Supporting the theory wholeheartedly. I say that he regenerated after breaking out of the Time Lock, and Chameleon Arched himself to be a human again. Regenerated to a little kid. The Doctor may or may not know about this fact already, but if he does, he just doesn't want to reveal him, and set the Master free - he does not want to basically kill Rory while freeing the Master. Also - the fact that he married the Master's daughter? Ouch.

Rory is The Doctor.

Something about the regeneration process split him into two people. The Eleven we know will become the Valeyard, and Rory is actually Twelve.

  • "You are turning me into you!" Rory, The Girl Who Waited. The Doctor, master of both the Batman Gambit and the Indy Ploy. On occasion the Indy Gambit and the Batman Ploy as well. The Doctor hates himself, really hates himself. Look at what he is facing, either an inevitable death or becoming the Valeyard. He can escape his greatest possible fall by suicide by River. Though, at what cost? He even said himself, or that Doctor said, in his final hours "humanity always needs saving". He'll need an heir if he does decide to not stop his death.
  • Alternatively, River lied about Rory being her father at Demon's Run, but earlier in her life (as Mels) thought he was before later finding out the truth. She truly is the child of the TARDIS and was actually conceived by the vortex itself. Rory has been a chameleon-arched Eleventh Doctor from the start, albeit with some kind of disguise or perception filter to look different that even he doesn't know has on at all times, including the illusion of having been a child. Note that Rory wasn't seen when young Amelia first appeared... he didn't exist yet. At some point, the Doctor figures out that Rory isn't what he seems and deliberately creates a paradox by crossing his own time-line and in effect, comes back for young-Amy after all and into her life as Rory. He had to do this, else Rory and River both would have never existed and bad things would have happened to the universe, but at the same time another version of himself still exists that shouldn't... the one doomed to die at the lake. It's a cruel parallel to The Girl Who Waited, with one Doctor having to face certain death. By the end, Rory would have found his fob-watch (thanks to questions from the Doctor about how he was missing something his entire life) and turned back into the Doctor, but the other Doctor is still dead and Rory is gone forever.
    • Or maybe it wasn't a paradox that he had to fulfill, maybe Eleven (a later eleven) planned and did this deliberately. One day he realizes he has grown too emotionally distant and realizes too late (after doing something unforgivable) that he's become a monster. So when he regenerates, he turns himself human, goes back in time, and deliberately becomes his own companion to see what it's REALLY like for them to travel in the TARDIS with him and regain a little perspective. When Matt Smith leaves, Rory will regain his memories and continue the show as Twelve (or move right into Thirteen with a new actor).
    • Or just to make this even more complicated, all of the above is true, except Rory is the regeneration of the ganger Doctor, sending himself back in time to gain perspective on humanity so he will be better equipped to stop the original Doctor, who has become the Valeyard.
    • This would also be a pretty big stab to the heart for fans of Old Amy. The TARDIS supposedly can't keep two Amys on board at once, yet there have been two Doctors onboard this whole time. Imagine how that realization might affect both Rory and Eleven.
  • It's also possible that Rory might not be the Doctor himself, but a sort of shadow or echo that imprinted on him since he was a child due to the Tenth Doctor's regeneration, as said above. Think of what happened to Jackson Lake, but to a lesser extent.

Rory's immortality has already been explained.

Rory Williams is Stormageddon, Dark Lord of All

  • Craig and Sophie get caught in some more wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey adventures, and the Doctor loses another baby in time. (Seriously, don't let the Doctor near your baby). It lands in Leadworth and grows up to be Rory.

Rory can only die when he believes Amy no longer needs him.

  • Amy's exposure to the Time Crack over many years has made her a low-level reality warper, as revealed in the Big Bang, where she willed the Doctor back into existence. Because of her love of Rory, even when he'd been removed from her memories and timeline, when the Doctor's enemies used her memories to create a trap, she pulled his soul out of oblivion and into an Auton body. The combination of the Time Crack's power, Amy's exposure to it, Rory's devotion to her and his spending two millenia dedicating his existence to her protection have made him into the ultimate guardian of Amy, so much so that he is unable to truly die so long as she lives and needs him. That is why the Silence told him that no matter what he goes through she would never come back for him when he confronted them in the aborted timeline - it wasn't mockery or a threat, they knew that he'd never let them past him to threaten Amy while he lived, and they can't kill him unless he believes his duty to Amy was over. They wanted him to doubt Amy, and by extension his guardianship of her, so they could get past him and get to the Doctor.

Rory is related to Ash.

  • That level of badassitude? Gotta be genetic.

Silents

The eyepatches let people remember the Silence

  • Not necessarily the eyepatch itself. If one wanted to remember the Silence, they would remove one of their eyes, hook it up to their brains wirelessly (or something), and keep it looking permanently at a Silent. You would be missing an eye, hence, eyepatch.
    • Confirmed.
      • Specifically, the eyepatches stimulate your memory functions so you remember them.

The Silents are the Echthroi

When they do their electrical attack, the victims are Xed (unNamed). This not only destroys them, it removes them from existence, like the Time Cracks. Which are ultimatly their doing also. At one point in A Wind in the Door the Echthroi are said to be causing rips in the universe. We never got any follow up on that destroyed secretary because she was removed from existance.

Amy is naturally, or was caused to become, a Namer. That is how she brought everything back. The Doctor, who has some qualities of a namer himself, tried to directly, but only subconciously kicked Amy's abilities into action when Rory died and was Cracked. "Tell me about Rory. Fantastic Rory, funny Rory, gorgeous Rory. Remember Rory." Which is how Rory's essence survived long enough to be actually Named.

Rory: Listen to me, you have to run. You have to get as far away from here as you can. I'm a thing. I'll kill you. Just go! Please, no, I don't want to go. Im Rory! I'm— Amy: Williams. Rory Williams from Leadworth. My boyfriend. How can I forget you?

In fact, at this point, Rory has been Named several times over. Rory Williams, Rory Pond, The Lone Centurion, Stupidface, Pretty...that's why he's so hard to kill.

The Silence Won't Fall...

  • The Silents will fall. We already know that there are going to be creatures in the upcoming series called 'Silents', afterall.
    • Jossed. Though technically a better translation is that silence "must" fall.

The Silents will be revealed to be Time Lords who were twisted refugees of the Time War, or The Silents were at least somehow involved in the conflict

I keep thinking of a (then) throwaway line from The End of Time, where Ten talks of the Skaro Degradations, The Nightmare Child, and the Could've-Been King and his Army of Never-Weres, and wonder if the Silents might fit in to that somewhere. The nature of none of those events or entities have been revealed heretofore, and we know that Steven Moffat loves binging on Continuity Porn, so the means, motive and opportunity for him to pull this twist is certainly out there. Since we don't know where the Time War fits into to time, linearlly, could they possibly be combatants from the war who somehow were able to evade the time lock and the destruction of both Skaro and Gallifrey? If that's the case, it might bring some sort of answer to, if not who killed The Doctor, at least WHY. Particularly if the Silents are twisted Time Lords. And remember, they did, apparently, build their own TARDIS-like-thingie...

  • Oh, and the mid-season cliffhanger is called A Good Man Goes to War. Mayhap a Time War?
    • It's not the Last Great Time War, and the battle is fought in one timezone (though it does involve beings spanning from the 19th to 41st centuries)
    • Alternatively, the Silents are a twisted new breed of Time Lords descended from River Song, making them a race of Time Lord-human hybrids. They eventually develop their own version of the TARDIS that is seen in the Lodger, but just as they aren't "pure" Time Lords (you can't just cook up a Time Lord like that, as a certain someone said) , the technology they develop is also impure - the Doctor claims that he's "too much" for the Lodger-TARDIS, which indicates that their TARDIS isn't as powerful as a Time Lord's one. This could also explain why they were supposedly driving the human race to develop space-faring technology - their attempt at a TARDIS could travel in time, but not space, so while they could go back and exist since the wheel and the fire, they remained bound to a single world. On the other hand, they found a way to master the perception filter technology even more than the Time Lords ever managed, which is where their Forget-attribute comes from.

Schizophrenia is caused by the Silence in the Whoniverse

We don't really know what causes schizophrenia. All we know about it is that the symptoms include hallucinations, delusions, and, occasionally, catatonic stupor and that antipsychotics and certain other treatments seem to be somewhat effective in treating it. The most common hallucinations are audio - the hearing of noises (like voices) that aren't there. Who's to say the voices aren't the Silence, and the delusions aren't the Silence putting suggestions in the affected person's mind? In "Day of the Moon", it is revealed that the Silence can put someone to sleep merely by telling them to, even without leaving their sight. The catatonic stupors (loss of physical mobility for a set period of time) may also be caused by the Silence. As for why certain treatments seem to be effective, the Silence are smart. They could easily lay off a bit. Why would they do this? Seems like a fun prank for the adolescents to carry out.

The Silence and the Silents are two different things.

The Silents are an alien race that serve something called the Silence or are working towards an event called the Silence. Thus when they say Silence will fall, they are not referring to themselves, rather to their goals.

  • The Silence is a religious organisation. Probably confirmed.

The Silence really were in the Library.

And they, inadvertently or not, were responsible for filling it with so many Vashta Nerada.

  • Jossed in the story. The Vashta Nerada were not "filled". They were taken there when their spores were inside every book.

The Silents and the Ood are closely related

  • The Silents' faces look like silly putty somebody dragged their fingers through. It could be the precursor or descendants of the Ood tentacles.
  • The Ood were developing time travel technology when we last saw them, and somhow advancing way faster than they should. It was never explained. Perhaps they got as far as the Black TARDIS?
  • There is a scary Ood in the trailer for "The Doctor's Wife". Eyes glowing green this time, almost creepier than red.
    • The episode gives no connection to the Silence. The green-eyed Ood is possessed by a being from another universe.
  • The Silents' sits even look like they're made from the same sort of material as the Ood's outfits.
  • Fact is, no matter how much they were abused, the Ood are a scary looking people. And they have reason to be angry with humanity.
    • The Silents'/Silence's anger seems more focused on the Doctor.

The Silence help out humanity, such as protecting them from aliens when The Doctor is not around.

So, Silence Falling is referred to as a bad thing. The Silence have been controlling Earth since as long as there have been protohumans. We are still around, aren't we? They may protect us when there are problems when The Doctor isn't around. We just don't know how many times that they have saved us since we forget them. They may antagonize The Doctor because they are protective of us, we're their protectorates, not his!

  • Also, that might explain Amy's baby/not baby: If the Silents have been protecting Earth, then Earth will have been destroyed if they fall. In the original timeline, they are still ruling Earth, allowing Amy and Rory to live a normal life. In the new timeline that the Doctor made, aliens have destroyed and ravaged Earth, not allowing Amy and Rory to have children.
    • Her baby/not baby has nothing to do with alternative timelines. That's because Amy's occupying a Ganger body.

The Silence aren't evil and the Doctor is essentially committing genocide.

  • Think about it: we have only seen a Silent attack without provocation once, and as mentioned above, that may have been out of frustration. Furthermore, one person's action does not define a species. And controlling human history behind the scenes is not necessarily evil: if a new species appeared on your planet that forgot you existed when they looked away, wouldn't you want to help them out a bit? We don't know for certain that the Silence are responsible for the cracks in time. It's all Steve's fault, of course.

The Silence were not responsible for destroying the TARDIS and the universe. Rather, something much, much worse was and it is now free.

"Silence will fall" in fact refers to their downfall in Day of the Moon at the hands of the Doctor. Something terrible was being restrained and rendered powerless by them, which might have been one of the reasons they acted as they did... though they were silent, mostly-evil conquerers they were also in a sense protecting humanity and the rest of the universe (but most importantly, themselves). With their power and influence greatly diminished, whatever it was they were guarding has broken free. Destroying the universe and the TARDIS were just pieces of a great plan to get the Doctor to neutralize The Silence, which he ultimately did.

  • And that person they tried to stop...may just be the Doctor.
    • Jossed. "Silence will fall" has nothing to do with their downfall.

Between 1969 and 2011, The Silence did something to reverse or counter the hidden extermination order in the moon landing.

It is unlikely that Amy, Rory or River never saw the moon landing video during their lifetimes, but none of them were compelled to kill any Silent they see on sight. With those two episodes being a Stable Time Loop set up by the future Doctor (supposedly), they should have been affected but they weren't.

  • They wouldn't need to. Whenever you look away from a Silent, you forget. It'll be as if there wasn't any change to the moon landing video, and you will never know.Quite simply, The Silence may have used the same trick the Doctor did back in 1969... embed a hidden message into something that many, many people were sure to watch, telling them to submit and listen to whatever The Silence order them to and that this order supersedes all others now and forever (making the moon landing video useless).
  • The Royal Wedding perhaps? 0.5 Billion? NO!! 2.5 Billion. The Doctor would have to wait a while to beat that!

The Silence are behind the whole of Madame Kovarian's operation, and also the attempt to blow up the TARDIS (without knowing the consequences).

The motivation for the anti-Doctor group led by Madame Kovarian still hasn't been adequately explained ('boo-hoo the docter is scary' doesn't quite satisfy me), and the idea of 'Silence will fall' was set up as being way too big to blow its whole load in the first two episodes (and we know that the characters from the Lodger will return...) so after the Doctor destroyed the Silent Empire, they created the Anti-Doctor organization slowly (only took 'em three millenia) as a means of revenge against him. This is actually plan B after plan A - blow up the TARDIS - somehow failed (I guess the voice in the TARDIS just before it explodes is a silence? Maybe).

The Silents are good, but think that the Doctor is evil.

Assuming that the Silents are ultimately benevolent, despite how scary they are, they could be against the Doctor because they see him as a threat. It's been established in "The Pandorica Opens" that much of the universe is scared of him, so who's to say the Silents aren't? They first occupied Earth because it's where the Doctor and so many aliens love to visit. At first, they weren't exactly sure if the Doctor was the monster they'd come to believe. But after theorizing that he may be why Earth is a Weirdness Magnet, and more importantly ordering their execution, they felt it was absolute proof they were in the right. Their alliance with Madame Kovarian is to fight off the Doctor.

How The Doctor will stop the Silents for good

  • He will go into the Time Vortex and broadcast the message from the Silents through every television for eternity, every holoscreen, every phone. Once a day sending out a continuous subliminal message: You should shoot us all on sight. Ever watched an episode of a tv programme again and think "I didn't see that bit last time!" That's because that part was on when the message happened to be replayed. Tinkering in the background. Maybe a little image in the corner. Either way, you will forget and you will do it.

The Silents predicted their downfall

  • They kidnapped Amy Pond because they think she led to their defeat. Let's face it, if Amy was never there, The Doctor would be dead. Also, Amy spawned River Song, who has killed a *LOT* of Silents. So when they said "Silents will fall" they were talking about their own defeat. They had seen it (maybe they're precognitive?) and wanted to stop her.

The Silents made the crack to save Rory's life.

Yes, it seems that Rory is now nigh un-killable. But in "Cold Blood" he should have died, and would have, if the crack hadn't eaten him. The time crack might have wiped Rory out of existence for a little while, but in the long term, it did him a lot of good. It was the crack streaming through Little Amelia's head which allowed Amy's memories of Rory to be kept. It was the crack which allowed the creation of Nestene Romans, one of which became Rory.

So why would they do this? Possibly because they seem to have interest in the time tyke seen in "The Impossible Astronaut"/"Day of The Moon", who was hinted to be Amy and Rory's daughter, and hinted very strongly to be River Song. They might have known that for the her to come into existence, they would have to keep Rory alive, so the child could be concieved. Thus the crack was made to save Rory's life.

The Silence are Slendermen

Or their leader is. They look remarkably similar (Tall, Slender, Male, in a suit) and fans have wanted this for a while and Steven Moffat complied.

  • And after having seen the first episode of Season Six, this guess looks ever more plausible. The business suits, the tallness, the general creepiness, the fact that they mess with memories... It's almost like Moffat has been watching Marble Hornets and said "Yeah, that'd make a great villain!"
  • The one few memories that exist of them are so faint and vague we incorporate them into stories. Creating the illusion that there is only one of them, when there are many identical and also the reason we most often depict the Slender Man as The Blank, because their face is too alien and horrifying for us to take in.

The Silence are both the result and the cause of a massive paradox involving River Song

It wasn't the TARDIS exploding that caused "Silence to Fall" - at least, not directly. It was the fact that River Song was on board the TARDIS when it exploded on Amy and Rory's wedding day. This theory is based on the fact that River Song is heavily implied, if not actually confirmed, to have been conceived that night, River claiming to be a complex space-time event similar to the Doctor, and the Silence claiming that Amy will bring the Silence, which might be a reference to her daughter. The destruction of the TARDIS not only tears reality a new one, it causes a complex space-time event to cancel out her entire existence at the moment of her own creation, causing a hell of a paradox. River says that something is overriding her and driving the TARDIS to destroy itself, and hears a voice state that "Silence will fall". This is actually the Silence using their ability to leave post-hypnotic commands, meaning that River is actually the one forcing the TARDIS to explode, subconsiously countering her own desperate attempts to stop it. Why? The Silence exist in a reality outside of the multiverse and the void, so very different that they can't exist in any reality we would consider normal. They used this paradox as a way to destroy what they couldn't have, or maybe it was a Xanatos Gambit depending on the Doctor cancelling out the destruction of reality, allowing them to slip into it and weave themselves into the reality created by the TARDIS' Big Bang in a way that allows them to exist within our reality - if this is the case, they may also have inspired the creation of the Pandorica for the Doctor to use to save the day. Of course, this means that the Silence would have to have been around before any of this started, but when it comes to Paradox and time travel, Effect doesn't necessarily follow Cause.

The Doctor has encountered the Silence before.

However, he has (naturally) forgotten all about them. One of the Silence mentioned being on Earth since fire and the wheel. The making of fire was a major goal of the cavemen in the very first episode of the series. The Doctor wasn't all that heroic in this episode, so intentional thwarting is somewhat out of the question. Accidental stowaways on the TARDIS perhaps? Stranded in pre-history, their plans for recovery delayed by the Doctor, whether he knew it at the time or not.

  • Well, have you watched "Edge of Destruction" recently?

The Silence are both the remnants of alterations to human history, echoes of future alterations, The Enemy from Faction Paradox, and a link between RL Earth and Who Earth

In the Whoniverse looking away from a Silent means you forget the existence of the Silence. This of course means that a wild mass guessing on the nature of the Silence is impossible in the Whoniverse. Are you looking at a Silent or a picture of one while reading this? Probably not. Do you remember them? Yes otherwise this example would not exist.

Now what else can't be seen unless your looking at it? Changes to Time and of course Plot. Imagine your a girl that hangs out with those two guys then some time traveler changes history and guy one becomes a girl and you now always lived in a harem comedy. where did the first boy go? No where it was silenced by the change to history. Can you see a change to history or remember it if your not a outside observer like say The Doctor. No it simply "has always been that way".

The Silence can affect Time Lords because they exist in a higher order of time. Time lords follow cause and effect time except when traveling. Silence exist in "wouldn't that be neat time" also called 'plot time'. The Silent that killed that woman knew everything about her not because it stalked her but because it was a coporeal manifestation of the past'(pre-time alteration) future she will no longer have and the 'future' (post-time alteration) death. The Silence killed her because plot demanded it.

Now then in the Faxtion paradox series the "Great Houses" a.k.a. Time Lords faught a nameless Enemy that was described more as a force of history then an oranization or group of beings. Why didn't the Time lords name this enemy? They only knew it existed due to its side-effects. They forgot what the enemy was when not seeing them but knew the enemy existed. Once everything went to hell with Fation Paradox, the Ancestor Cell, the Celestis, the Remote, and Lady Lolita (who evolved from The Master's old Tardis and takes after her Time Lord) the Silence sliped away so their masters (not to be confused with The Master(unless he's a fan of Doctor Who)see below)could watch.

Now who are the masters of the Silence. The humans from this Earth in particualar those incharge of making teh episodes and other parts of Doctor Who. The Silence never appeared in the library not because we forgot them but because it would ruin the plot twist. Now then the Second War in Heaven ended with Galiifrey's destruction yet it's a different war then the Last Great Time War why? Because until the plot twist Dalek were easier to film then a memetic force thus the Silence altered the time War and replaced it with a different time war that was more coporeal. We can't see how a bio-data virus that alters its victims genes and history works nor have we seen The Nightmare Child (probably not the biological or adopted child of Steven Moffat, too obvious to be a child version of Moffat that escaped into the Whoniverse) but it's easier to imagine something eating a flagship while also properly "big enough" to be incomprehensible.

This of course means that when one decides to explore the setting of Doctor Who a Silence is made to "set the stage" and after that it simply disappears until needed again. They appear in the new series because the Doctor needed something ominous to face that his try to reason with it tactics would not work. Thus the normally formless Silence took form by the orders of the King of Nightmares.

Feel reassured and less paranoid? Don't. Here's how it gets worse. That link they create between the two universes. Nothings stoping anything from finding a way to follow it back into this universe. The Nightmare Child, Skaro degenerations, and the Could Have Been King have to escape to somewhere? Right? Good Day.

So basically its all Steve's fault.

The Silence "convert" people.

  • If the Silence, as revealed in Let's Kill Hitler, is actually not a species, but rather a religious movement, then why are they all identical? The Headless Monks are capable of making a rather, er, fundamental change to your body. Perhaps the Silence run a similar but more elaborate operation, and can reprogram your biology at a basic level to gradually make you one of them...brr.

Jack Harkness was working with the Silence.

  • Or rather, the person who would become Captain Jack Harkness was working for the Silence. We know that River Song, who the Silence were training as a weapon against the Doctor, spends a lot of her time in the 51st century. It's quite probable that the Silence are based in the 51st century. The 51st century is also Jack's native time period. If the Silence is fighting against the Doctor, they might well have asked the Time Agency for help. Given that the Doctor keeps on messing with time, the Time Agency may have seen the Doctor as problematic and supported the Silence's attempts to get rid of him. So they may have sent some of their agents to work for the Silence. In "The Doctor Dances", Jack claims that the Time Agency erased two years' worth of his memory. We know that you cannot remember the Silence (the species version, if not the entire religious movement) after you've stopped looking at them. If Jack spent two years working with them, he probably wouldn't remember most of what had happened. But he wouldn't have been looking at the Silence every single second for two years, so surely he should be able to remember something? Not really—if the Silence have that much power over someone's memory in the first place, it would hardly be surprising if they figured out how to make someone forget everything they did during a time period when they were even vaguely associated with the Silence.

The Silence aren't, as a whole, actually evil.

Aside from traitors or others coerced in some way, they are more than content to share the Earth and help humanity (and themselves). Perhaps the Doctor was used to try and exterminate them once the Silence organization didn't need them anymore, which nearly succeeded. He will then free and help the enslaved ones, who will then go back into obscurity and live as they always did.

The Daleks from Bad Wolf/Parting of the Ways are part of the Silence

They mention having waited in silence for years. They have guided human evolution via Satellite 5 and the game station. They mention blasphemy and the Doctor asks them 'Since when did Daleks have a concept of Blasphemy? -The Silence is a religious order. And then in series 6, where does the Doctor get his information about the silence? From a Dalek scientist's memories. Now why would Daleks work with the Silence? Because there's something out there they both fear and hate so intensely. The destroyer of worlds, the oncoming storm.

There's a Silent hiding within the TARDIS

At two points in the Lodger, there are scenes where Amy, stuck in the TARDIS as it tries and fails to complete a materialisation, is talking to the Doctor when something odd happens. As the Doctor talks, once in Craig's spare room and once on the football field, Amy looks off screen, gasps and looks shocked and then cries "Hey!" before the scene carries on as usual. During the second time, as she reacts like this, the Doctor says "Hang on" as she cries "Hey!" - she repeats his "Hang on" in an uncertain tone of voice and shakes her head as if trying to wake from a tired state. Later on, as the Doctor and Craig race upstairs to help Sophie and Amy experiences turbulence in the TARDIS, over the earpiece she can be heard to cry "Doctor!", and then inexplicably say "Hang on..." in the same uncertain tone that she did earlier. Her actions here aren't explained. Perhaps the Silent was the pilot of the primitive TARDIS above Craig's flat, and the disturbance that caught the TARDIS was it managing to transport itself into the Doctor's TARDIS. On two occasions, Amy saw it darting away from her out of the room, causing the reaction, but the trademark effect of the Silence kicks in and she immediately forgets it happened. As we also know that seeing the Silence can leave a post-hypnotic suggestion in a person's mind, maybe seeing this Silent accidentally left the Doctor's command of "Hang on" in Amy's mind, which then came back to her mind when she was again in danger of being lost in the Vortex as the Doctor was warning her about. It's not long after this - the next episode, in fact - that the TARDIS inexplicably shoots off to 26/06/2010 with River Song and explodes despite her efforts - was the Silent in the TARDIS sabotaging it? And if it was, was it killed in the explosion, or could it have survived? Could it still be in the TARDIS even now, watching the Doctor? And if it is, what happens when it warns the rest of the Silence that the Doctor survived Lake Silencio?

The Black Guardian is the one behind the Silents.

At the end of the Black Guardian trilogy, the White Guardian said that the Doctor would meet up with the Black Guardian one final time. That has yet to happen. Also, what does the Black Guardian love most? Chaos. Causing Silence to fall by having the question asked? Sounds like chaos if you ask me. It's exactly his type of thing- manipulating other people/creatures to cause the chaos for him, and hating on the Doctor a lot/wanting to kill him.

The Silents are the Doctor and the TARDIS

Even for the Doctor, that was a very unusual regeneration between Ten and Eleven, wasn't it? Regeneration is never exactly quiet, but to create such a blast wave that it destroys the TARDIS console room, causes it to crash, and requires it to completely shut down to rebuild itself? And, on another subject, if the Time Cracks appear throughout time and space, and if the Silence has manipulated humanity since the Stone Age as they claim, why is it no sign of any of them was ever seen until the Doctor regenerated into his Eleventh incarnation?

What if that huge explosion of regenerative energy purged something from the Doctor? And took with it something from the TARDIS telepathically linked to him? Something that manifested into a group of creatures now called the Silents? The memory-proof nature of them? From the TARDIS' perception filter. The energy attacks they use? Energy from sources they draw on in the same way that the TARDIS draws on. Their makeshift TARDIS machine? The result of the Doctor's knowledge of the TARDIS without sufficient or suitable materials to grow a proper one. River Song being as close to a Time Lord as you can get? She may have got a spark of the Time Lord gift from being concieved on the TARDIS, but the Doctor insisted that it took far more than that to cook up a working Time Lord...his knowledge of which the Silence could draw on to create their weapon, just as they could to take control of the TARDIS and blow it up.

So, why are they so hell-bent on eliminating the Doctor, then? Well, maybe they have the shadows of something buried in the Doctor's mind, so deeply not even he can clearly remember it. Something that scared the Doctor a long time ago, so much so that he sealed away his name in such despair, something that he has run away from all his life. The answer to a question that deep down, he knows must never, ever be answered. And if these newborn Silents took a memory from the future, one that the TARDIS could know due to her non-linear perception of time, that told them that one day the Doctor was destined to reveal this terrible secret, what lengths might they go to to stop him?

Eleven is going to change the events of Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead.

The only water in the forest is the river. "Forest" of the Dead contained "River" Song and piranhas. Air piranhas. Plus, it makes for an epic episode. Donna Noble, Amy and Rory Pond, 11 and 10 all with River. Could you imagine 11 pulling a "spoilers" on 10?

  • If this happens, it'll be in the series finale- firstly because arc words always show up in the last episode(s), and secondly because how else can they top restarting the universe, The Master Race, Daleks trying to destroy all universes, The Year That Never Was, Cybermen vs Daleks vs Torchwood and Daleks on Satellite 5? Also, Rule of Cool demands it.
  • Plus, the main villains of Series 6 are the Silence. Silence in the Library?! Knowing Moffat, he could very well have planned this entire thing out beforehand.
  • Coupled with the IMDB rumor that David Tennant is returning for the season finale, this theory is looking surprisingly likely.
    • Of course, a similar rumor also insists the Peter Davison is in the finale, which would throw a pretty big wrench in this theory.
      • And they're not on IMDb any more.
        • Wouldn't that be interfering with his personal timeline? Isn't that against the rules?
  • There were two children in the computer (Donna's kids) that were still there listening to River's bedtime story with the library's heiress - Amy and Rory?

The Dead(th) Doctor

Real!Doctor wasn't actually sure the Teselecta!Doctor plan could work. It wasn't an example of The Doctor coming up with a perfect answer to his problem, but an example of The Doctor performing one final, desperate gambit.

The key is that The Doctor doesn't actually know why his death is a fixed point in time. All he knows is that the Silence went out of their way to force it to become one. Now, the reason a fixed point in time is immutable is because so many other events are so casually tied to the fixed!event that attempting to changed the fixed!event causes so many other things to change that the universe gives up in frustration. The fixed!event is the load-bearing block of a universal jenga puzzle. So why is The Doctor's death fixed in stone (and how would that affect his gambit?)

1) The future of the universe must unfold in a way that requires The Doctor to have absolutely no more influence on it whatsoever. If this were true, then the plan using Teselecta!Doctor simply wouldn't work. Teselecta!Doctor touching Married!River would not set time straight again, and Real!Doctor would've eventually had to shrug his shoulders, climb out of the Teselecta, and set things straight himself.

2) The future of the universe unfolds in a way that's dependent on the news of The Doctor's "real" death. Hence, it's not The Doctor's actions that create the fixed point, but actions of other people that create the fixed point. So it doesn't matter if The Doctor lives or dies, just that other people act as if that he did. That's why the Teselecta!Doctor plan worked.

3) The universe hates people that try to mess with it. The Doctor's death didn't start out as a fixed point in time, but the Silence had made it so. The universe remembered the original version of events, decided to flip off the Silence for telling it what to do, and sided with the Time Lord Victorious just this once.


The astronaut is Old!Amy

Somehow Old!Amy doesn't die in The Girl Who Waited but gets rescued (by the Silence?) and is really angry with the Doctor for lying to her about sustaining the paradox (of both Amys surviving), in order to get her to help Rory save Young!Amy.

  • Jossed.

The astronaut is not River Song

In The Impossible Astronaunt, River seems just as surprised as everyone else is that the Doctor is dead, and when he returns, she doesn't see it coming at all, even though she supposedly was the one who killed him. Also consider the fact that she seemed pretty clueless as to who the little girl was, and we can deduce that River has completely forgotten being the little girl, or is not the little girl. We never saw the little girl regenerate into Mels, we only saw the beginning of her regeneration. I think Moffat's messing with us.

  • Why didn't Mels kill the Doctor in the cornfield? "We'd only just met." Mels had never met the Doctor before this, but the Doctor seemed to know who the astronaut was. If it was River, surely she would remember seeing and killing the Doctor when she was younger.
  • Jossed.

The astronaut/child is Jenny

When Mels/Melody meets the Doctor in the beginning of "Let's Kill Hitler!", she seems like she has never met him before. The young girl in "The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon" did at least get a glimpse of the Doctor, and spoke on the phone with him. Even if it was River, and, at the time, she was too young to know it was the Doctor, you would think she would have "studied" the Doctor enough to at least retroactively realize who it was.

I don't think it was ever explicitly mentioned that the astronaut/child was River, but it was made pretty clear she was Timelord. If I remember correctly, at the end of "The Doctor's Daughter" Jenny is shown to start regenerating. Honestly, I'm surprised Jenny hasn't at least been mentioned here.

  • Jossed.

The Vashta Narada killed the Doctor

A space suit and River Song, and living in the Library they'd be able to figure out time travel and how to kill the Doctor.

  • Jossed.

The Doctor who died in The Impossible Astronaut is the Ganger version.

He really is the doctor, and yes he is dead. However, he's the Ganger Doctor and not the original Doctor. This might be the simplest answer as opposed to one involving multiple time lines or time travel or something.

    • Alternatively, the Doctor who died in the Impossible Astronaut was the 'original' Doctor, but since there's no fundamental difference between the Ganger and the Original, Doctor Two can take his place, allowing the show to continue.
      • There is a fundamental difference-Ganger Doctor will have a 200-year difference with the Doctor who dies.
    • Jossed. It's actually the Doctor operating a Teselecta of himself.

The Doctor who died in The Impossible Astronaut is not the Ganger version.

Because that would be too easy. It was the real Doctor. The original Doctor. The Ganger will replace him. Has anyone else noticed The Doctor's recent habit of being cloned, by the way? First Jenny, then 10.5, now Odo - I mean - the Ganger?

  • Ganger!Doctor is simply a Red Herring. By the previews for The Almost People, he seems to be at the very least psychotically unhinged and most likely will die in the same episode. The 'theory' that the future Doctor is his clone will probably be brought up between Amy and Rory to make the audience think it may be possible, but then he'll end up being killed. Also, Ganger!Doctor wouldn't probably be able to regenerate, whereas Future!Doctor seemed to be starting to before being killed.
    • Why would the Ganger!Doctor be unable to regenerate? The Gangers are exact duplicates of the original people, down to the very last detail. If the Gangers are identical to their originals, then there should be no physiological differences between them (excepting the cellular/DNA/whatever destabilisation). The Ganger!Doctor should therefore be able to regenerate to some degree. Due to the destabilisation the Gangers suffer, perhaps the process cannot be completed, but there does not seem to be a reason he couldn't at least /begin/ to regenerate (Ten pulled that trick off in Journey's End, remember?).
    • Also, wouldn't anybody be 'psychotically unhinged' if they realised that they weren't really who they thought they were, but just a copy? Since the preview scenes have been taken out of context, we don't know which Doctor is which or what happened to make either one act the way they did. We all know that the Doctor has a nasty habit of winding people up, and that almost certainly includes himself (all Nu-Who Doctors so far have suffered a huge amount of self-hatred). Er, anyway, point I was trying to make is that anything can happen and the Moff is obviously never going to stop screwing with us. (Long-winded comment got so long I had to cut it in two...)
    • Given some credence. The Ganger Doctor was deactivated, but otherwise was sticking pretty well together.
    • Confirmed. He's not a Ganger.


The Doctor who died in The Impossible Astronaut is a different Ganger version.

Amy and Rory tell him about being killed, and he uses the ganger machine to complete the stable time loop without being killed.

  • Jossed.

The Doctor will come back through a Ganger.

Prior to his death, the Doctor created a Ganger version of himself. Containing all his heart, mind and soul, it'll effectively be a Replacement Goldfish. Since Gangers are supposed to be indentical, the Ganger Doctor will be capable of regenerating. Indeed, since that clone never regenerated, he'll get 12 more lives.

  • Jossed. It was a ruse.

The Doctor that was killed is really the Teselecta robot.

It's not like the Doctor to leave a perfectly working transforming robot in the middle of Nazi Germany. We've seen that it can take the form of anyone it has data on, so why not the Doctor? At that moment it only seemed to respond to Amy commands, but I'm sure with a little Time Lord know how, he could adjust it so that it would take his appearance. I'm sure the Doctor would adjust it so that it's movements and interactions won't be as stiff. The Tesselecta is a perfect stand in to take a blow for the Doctor.

  • By extension, he could theoretically control it remotely with a ganger-harness or some such device.
  • Confirmed! Although he didn't pick it up in Germany. And he was inside, not controlling from afar.

It will be River's plan and not the Doctor's that saves him from his death in The Impossible Astronaut

To echo her saving him in LKH. everyone is expecting the Doctor to have some plan to save himself from death. Last season finale he had managed a last minute plan to set up Amy bringing him back from being erased, so we expect he should manage to change his own death.

  • After "The God Complex" he's starting to look like a Death Seeker. He seems to have resigned himself to dying for real and might even welcome it. It's probable that someone else is going to have to come up with and pull off a clever plan to save his butt this time around.
  • Jossed, sort of. It's complicated.

It was the real Doctor, but he isn't really dead.

A couple quotes:

"You cut off my hand...And now I know what sort of man I am. I'm lucky. 'Cause quite by chance, I'm still in the first fifteen hours of my regeneration cycle. Which means I've got just enough residual cellular energy to do this." (regrows hand) –Tenth Doctor, "The Christmas Invasion"

"Never shoot a girl while she's regenerating." (blasts Nazis with regeneration energy) -Melody Pond, "Let's Kill Hitler"

And, above all, Rule One: "The Doctor lies"

He's not going to die, obviously. Matt Smith has signed on for the next season. The question is, how is he going to get out of it? We learned way back in Christmas, 2005 that a regenerating Time Lord can heal injuries, and Melody/River kindly reminded us in "Let's Kill Hitler". The Astronaut waited until the Doctor started to regenerate before shooting again. It was implied that this was because that's when he was vulnerable, but what if it was the opposite? What if the Astronaut, whoever that is, didn't want him to die? He was shot again, but it had no effect. River said he was dead, but it was probably an earlier version of her in the suit, so she knew what was going on and lied to keep the continuity stable. The Doctor stayed quiet while they burned him alive because he's guilty and masochistic like that. Once they were all gone, he popped up gasping and swam to shore. He then lied, lied, lied to the entire Universe, made them all think the Doctor we know to be 11 had been the final regeneration. That's why he told Amy, Rory and River he was 1100 when we've seen him in trailers donning a cowboy had and telling the Tardis it was their last trip. The Doctor lied, River lied, and Stephen Moffat lied. Are you reallly surprised?

  • To the argument that the Tessalecta people said his death there was a fixed point in Space and Time: It's canon that Time Lords somehow see how fixed certain points in Time are. Presumably, these Justice Department blokes have a computer program, because they are certainly no Time Lords. No computer could rival the Doctor's own brain. I wouldn't be surprised if he planted that fact himself, so people would stop trying to kill him at other times.
  • Confirmed, at least in part. He faked his death, and used a Teselecta to do so.

The Doctor Killed The Doctor.

  • Either through a bizarre timeloop or something Ganger related, the Doctor was the astronaut as well, and the "death" was something quite different then what everyone else thinks it was.
  • Jossed.

The Doctor's death only became a fixed point in time after the Big Bang 2

When River Song tries to work out what point in his timeline the Doctor is in relation to her in Silence of the Library, one of the occasions she asks him if he remembers is the crash of the Byzantium. This happens in the Time of Angels, during which the Doctor is in his Eleventh incarnation - the same incarnation that River witnessed him die in. But when she asks his Tenth incarnation if he's gone through that adventure yet, she has to believe that the Doctor could be in an incarnation following his Eleventh, otherwise the question makes no sense - if he died in the same incarnation he witnessed the crash she's talking about, she'd know a different incarnation can't have witnessed it, and therefore the question is pointless (and potentially dangerous, given the views of herself and the Doctor on "spoilers"). Perhaps when the universe was destroyed and rebooted, someone or something took advantage of the re-creation to try and make some alterations to what normally couldn't be altered, such as changing the time and events that cause the Doctor to die. He can't have always been destined to die in his Eleventh incarnation, as we know from the events in the Sixth Doctor's trial that the Valeyard split off from him between his Twelth and Final incarnations. So perhaps the universal reboot allowed a new fixed point in time to be created. And maybe this is the Doctor's chance to survive. Protected by the Pandorica, he still counts as being from the original version of the universe, not the new version, so maybe he's not as bound by fixed points in time as is made out to be.

The Doctor used the Two Streams facility on himself to deliberately create a paradox, after seeing what happened to Amy.

The Doctor wasn't shown often during the episode, so it is possible that he had wandered off into his own personal stream for a while. He then found another stream from some time into the future and rescued his older self, who then took his place as the Doctor. Due to being a Time Lord and near the Vortex both versions of him could, for a while, be able to exist together. The present Doctor hid in the TARDIS away from Amy and Rory, and soon left for Lake Silencio after careful discussion and planning with his other self, while the future Doctor took over the Doctor's role. From The God Complex on, the Doctor we've seen is a paradoxical future-self that shouldn't be able to exist.

The present Doctor is the one to be shot by the astronaut, who is actually the future-Doctor about two hundred years older. Once he dies, the universe can't quite make up its mind whether his other self should be dead or alive. After everyone else was gone and the Doctor's body reduced to a mere skeleton, he recovers it and does much the same thing that River Song did to him in Berlin... he uses up his remaining regenerations, and indeed his entire life force, to revive the Doctor. He is completely absorbed into the 'real' Doctor, leaving no body behind, making them one once more with all the memories and experiences of both and ending the paradox.

  • Time goes wibbly, but it has nothing to do with Two Streams.

The Eleventh Doctor will be the last

If his future self's death The Impossible Astronaut was for real and won't be retconned, then there will never be a twelfth doctor. There is unlimited time for the series to continue, as the Doctor lives another two hundred years, but he will not regenerate again.

  • It turns out that he didn't die for real. Rule One in action.

Canton Everett Delaware III was lying.

Either the Doctor isn't dead, or he was a copy or a robot or something. But, for reasons yet unknown, the Doctor needed everybody to think he had died. But since this would be the last time Canton would see Amy, River, and Rory, there would be no way for them to discover this until the Doctor Revealed that he wasn't dead. Why do this? Who knows! The best theory this troper can imagine is that, for some reason, they needed to see the Doctor die so that Amy would try and kill the astronaut in an attempt to save him, for some reason I can't determine because we're only two episodes in as of this writing.

  • He was in fact a robot. Or something.

The Astronaut is some incarnation of Susan Foreman.

A bit out there, but the impossible astronaut can be thought of as unearthly, a call-back to An Unearthly Child.

  • Jossed. It's River. And NASA astronauts are from Earth, so what does that even mean?

It was River who...

killed The Doctor (or whoever it may actually have been) in "The Impossible Astronaut. Seems likely. She's Amy and Rory's daughter and after firing at the astronaut, she says, "Of course...". Seems like she knows why it didn't drop dead at the very least.

  • Confirmed. Sort of.

Other

In Series 6, River will meet the Doctor for the first time.

  • In the Christmas Special or the first episode of Series 6, the Doctor will encounter River at the earliest point in her timestream. For River, this will be the first time she's ever met the Doctor (Wibbly wobbly, timey wimey, etc...). Expect the Doctor to be that one that starts saying "spoilers!" and such.
    • Jossed, but the mid-season finale shows River at just one month old. However, this is too young for him to communicate with her.
      • The Doctor does speak Baby.
  • For a time (maybe a block of episodes, maybe the entire series), River will be a companion of the Doctor's, travelling on the TARDIS, all that jazz. They wind up in a real romantic relationship; just knowing that they'll probably get together in the future is enough to get the Doctor thinking that maybe she's someone he'd want to get together with. Predestination paradox and all that.
    • Nope, just two-parters as usual.
  • At the end of the series, she'll kill "the greatest man [she's] ever known" and be locked up in the Stormcage. Worse, she'll really piss off the Doctor.
    • Or, she'll kill Eleven, causing him to regenerate into Twelve. Hence her apoligising in "The Big Bang" and saying that everything will change soon.
    • And at some point in the future, there'll be an episode called "The Time Lord's Wife". Just wait, you'll see.
      • Close, it's "The Doctor's Wife".
      • ...which has nothing to do with The Time Traveller's Wife OR River Song (apart from some arc words), so disregard.
      • None of the Doctor's incarnations are supposed to stay dead. Ideally, the actors who play the Doctor move on to other roles when the Doctor regenerates (but actors are people too, so they do what they like). Every human the Doctor has ever worked with is a hive mind of fans. The most recent Doctor(s) did not show his (or their) fans sufficient respect, so BBC America broadcast images of the Eleventh Doctor at gunpoint, so that angry fans would send Eleven to figurative Hell. He fought his way out over the course of a few weeks. The Force is currently in balance (approximately).

Series Six will deconstruct Davies' habit of not knowing when to quit with his pet characters by having River turn out to be Not A Nice Person, Period, or perhaps just an especially persistent admirer of the Doctor's.

The Doctor will eventually have to reboot the Randomiser just so she'll go away and people will stop talking about her, already.

    • She's already untrustworthy, a Child Soldier and very likely killed the Doctor. Take what you will from that.
      • Plus she would have risked the whole of time and space just for him. The Doctor wasn't amused.
      • She's both insane and sociopathic, but still derided by some as a Creator's Pet and Canon Sue. Take from that what you will.

Series 6 will feature Nine/Ten's TARDIS

If you pause at exactly the right moment at 0:37 in one of the trailers, you'll see this: http://img855.imageshack.us/i/tenstardis.jpg/ Yeah. Eleven's TARDIS doesn't have those curvy support beam-thingies. Nine/Ten's does. (Also a lot of people were saying that the people looked like Ten and Rose, but it's pretty obviously Rory and Amy.) My guesses are that the Silence somehow puts them into the actual old TARDIS or whoever was making the TARDIS from "The Lodger" made it in the same design as Ten's. Either way sounds suspicious, but there is no way that's Eleven's TARDIS.

  • Partially confirmed in "The Doctor's Wife". It's still Eleven's TARDIS, but there's an archived control room which is Nine and Ten's.

Eleven WILL wear a Fez in season 6!

C'mon, Matt Smith will bug Moffat so much that he will go Sure Why Not.

    • Alternatively, The Doctor will get a new Nice Hat every episode, ranging from bowlers to sombreros to pretty floral bonnets but by the end of the episode he'll lose it or it will be destroyed. Then in the season finale, the Master lures him into a trap with a Fez.
    • He wore another fez in A Christmas Carol and he's got a Stetson on in the Season Six preview. Semi-confirmed?

Series 6 will have another Redeemable Dalek

There was the lone Dalek During the 9th's tenure, and 10 had Dalek Sec and Dalek Caan. It takes extreme circumstances, but the Daleks have shown that they can change, that they can break out of their usual thought processes. I think one of the Dalek Rangers will turn on his brothers. He will probably then immediately get killed.

  • Or not. Two words for you: Dalek companion. IMO, the best bet would be Dalek Strategist, as a strategist would probably be more capable of abstract thought, and could figure out the best bet for Dalek survival would be stop making the Doctor mad. Also, IIRC, Strategists are blue, and would go wonderfully with the TARDIS. It could even show it's allegiance with a bow tie!
    • That idea is has more madness in it than all of Sparta. But, it may actually be the most logical conclusion if said Heel Face Turned Dalek dodge the Redemption Equals Death Bullet.
    • Maybe the Doctor picks up this redeemable Dalek and as they travel together they bond a little, and it becomes much better/nicer because of his influence. Then, the day comes when they split up, the Dalek ends up alone on some random planet, and it manages to create a race of nice Daleks, or at least Daleks who don't try to screw with everything they see.
      • The preview for The Wedding of River Song includes a very quick shot of what looks like the Doctor standing by a damaged Dalek at an odd angle that could be a non-hostile moment, maybe these two most ancient of enemies having to team up against the falling of the Silence, an alliance so unpredictable that it's the one thing that even the Silence and its carefully-laid plans can't account for? (Of course, it's far more likely that this is just the Doctor dealing with one more Dalek trying to exterminate him. But you never know...)
  1. ↑ And, perhaps, a ginger dye job courtesy of Jackie Tyler
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