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promethia_tenkSpoilers for Doctor Who 6x01 and 6x02. Although having seen though 6x04 would probably be safer. Please no future spoilers in the comments.
So, I've been doing some Moffat-specific story analysis here (symbols, running themes, comparison to other Moff stories) and I am seriously starting to think that the little girl in the astronaut suit could be the Doctor and River's. Why is fandom not even WONDERING if this could be the case? We've got one Time Lord left in the whole universe and suddenly there's a little girl who can regenerate. Are we so used to Doctor Who story logic being insane that the most straightforward explanation available doesn't even occur to us? Are we so lulled by our sense as television viewers that 'they're not allowed to do that' that we won't even think it? Cause four years ago who would have believed a writer would actually disrespect the status quo so much as to give the Doctor a wife? And look where we are now.
Look, I've got reasons!:
1) Basically, if this were just any show that Moffat was writing without a fifty year franchise history to take into consideration, I would be surprised if that little girl wasn't the Doctor and River's. All writers have their things and this is very much Moffat's. [Quote of Moff's supplied by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
owlsie : Russell reckons it's all about parenthood with me. It's his view that every writer has one story that they go on re-telling, and that being a father is mine.]
2) Season five has taught me to trust the symbolism. Symbolism said Amy and Rory would get married. Symbolism said the Doctor would fix the universe and Amy by sacrificing himself to the cracks and that he would then be brought back to life through the combined auspices of Amy and River. The symbolism says the story of Eleven and Amy is the story about how both of them will grow up. And the symbolism around the Doctor/River relationship is crammed full of parental tropes. Now, I would be perfectly happy to accept all that in an abstract kind of sense in which the Doctor and River serve as a metaphorical mum and dad to the universe (see icon) and with Amy as a stand-in daughter figure, but that was before there was a six year old running around with an ability to regenerate.
3) SPOILERS FOR JEKYLL. So a few years ago Moffat wrote this six-episode television show called Jekyll, which is a modern re-imagining of the story of Jekyll and Hyde. At its heart, it is a six-hour long elaboration of what went down between River and the Dalek: mess with my family and I will FUCK YOUR SHIT UP. Moffat is already borrowing heavily from Jekyll for the Doctor/River storyline, including playing with ideas of dual identity, putting people in stasis boxes, a woman married to a man who takes different forms, cyclical god/goddess symbolism, the connections between violence and love . . . even apples. And the only major component that's missing is children. But that's a huge, central component. So much so that I was looking at bits of River's actions last year like the scene with the Dalek and going 'this makes better Moff-sense if there are kids at stake.' In Jekyll, the main character's children are stolen by an evil corporation that's been directing his life in the hopes of using them to gain control of the super-human powers of Hyde . . . so why do you think the Silence are interested in little Time Girl? What did River say about why you can't leave Time Lord bodies lying around?
4) A storyline in which future!Doctor and future!River's daughter has been stolen by the Silence in order to steal her Time Lord-y powers, possibly controlled/altered by them in some way, and current!Doctor and current!River have to discover who she is and acknowledge her in order to save her (and the universe), thus claiming their own identities in the process hits . . . approximately every Moffat narrative checkbox ever. Especially ones about stolen/estranged/altered children and about discovering and acknowledging hidden family connections being the key to resolving whole multi-threaded storylines. Also, I have no idea by what story logic this would work, but re: future!Doctor and what he's plotting--having to set up an elaborate time-paradox manipulation in order to force one's younger self into rescuing his future daughter seems like sufficiently weighty reason to choose to submit to mysterious astronaut-related death.
5) Re: discovering hidden family connections. Owlsie had this to say: Moffat would absolutely, totally, 100% try to make us think that it's all about Amy's kid when PSYCH THE WHOLE TIME IT WAS REALLY ABOUT THE DOCTOR'S KID AND AMY'S PREGNANCY IS A DIFFERENT PLOT THREAD ENTIRELY The blatantly manipulative head writer of this show has had the blatantly manipulative alien menace put a photo of Amy with a baby in a kid's room and fandom is taking that as more reliable proof of parentage than AN ABILITY TO REGENERATE? The show even went out of its way with the whole voice recorder 'oh no, does Amy actually love the Doctor not Rory why did she tell the Doctor about her pregnancy before Rory?' thing to discount the possibility that Amy's child is the Doctor's. But nobody's bothering to ask how the girl who regenerated might be the Doctor's in some other way?
6) NARRATIVE IRONY. Watch the scene with the Doctor and River examining the astronaut suit and talking about the little girl but make the assumption that they are unknowingly talking about their own child. It starts to feel very like the scenes in The Pandorica Opens where they're trying to figure out what's in the box and the Doctor keeps not realizing that he's talking about himself. "I have the strangest feeling she's going to find us." Ditto the end of the episode: "So, this little girl, then. It's all about her. Why is she important?"
7) More from Owlsie: And if the little girl is a Timebaby, the Doctor would know, which may be why he seems to be running from her? [it really, really bugs me that he's not trying to find her and I'm SURE there's an EXCELLENT reason for that because Moffat wouldn't spend a whole series/ an x-mas special establishing the Doctor's devotion to children and then have him do something that out of character for NO REASON....right?] Which does have that same kind of 'ack, personal future, do not want!' kind of motivation that had him running away from River in Time of Angels.
8) How did Moff get us all (and, not coincidentally, the Doctor) to accept the idea that the Doctor could actually have a wife? He presented her as a fait accompli, let everybody freak out for awhile, and then it all settled down and three years later we have the impossible: a majority of the audience are going to tell you 'of course she's his wife!' Why not pull the same trick with a kid?
9)elisi trying come to terms with this possibility: I guess I'm just trying to wrap my head around the concept of the Doctor having sex in canon (oh God, it would be THE END OF EVERYTHING!!!! *g*) I'll just point out here that it already was. We got that out of the way last season, lol. The universe ENDED because the Doctor had sex in the future. And while, after last season's finale, I was puzzling over the sudden shift away from the water symbolism that dominated the beginning of the season over to the sun symbolism and its mother/father connotations, all of that makes so much more sense as a set-up for a storyline about actual parenthood.
10) Just from a perspective of not wanting to watch a lot of Doctor Who episodes about raising a toddler: I figure that's mitigated by the fact that this show doesn't have to be closely tied into sequential time. We know there are big jumps in the Doctor's timeline sometimes that we don't get to see (like the Time War, or the time Ten spent running from the Ood's summons). Heck, we started this season with a Doctor 200 years older than the last one we saw. I'll fully accept that they can jump over a lot of the young years and get the kid to a point where they are leading their own life that intersects with the Doctor's from time to time. And Moff's also given us the idea with Amy and Rory that companions might pop back to their own lives for a while and then come back to the TARDIS again--he's breaking us away from the idea that this show is about the Doctor and one companion who stay together no matter what and we follow (pretty much) all of their story until the companion leaves and then we repeat. We've got the concepts in place for a much more flexible sort of storytelling and system of relationships.
Anyway, I'm not saying I'm 100% sold on this, but I feel like, in the ways that it's possible to predict Moffat's writing, it all fits rather well and I'm a little confused as to why fandom seems to not even have thought of this idea and/or dismissed it out of hand without too much consideration past 'no, they wouldn't dare to do that!'
So, I've been doing some Moffat-specific story analysis here (symbols, running themes, comparison to other Moff stories) and I am seriously starting to think that the little girl in the astronaut suit could be the Doctor and River's. Why is fandom not even WONDERING if this could be the case? We've got one Time Lord left in the whole universe and suddenly there's a little girl who can regenerate. Are we so used to Doctor Who story logic being insane that the most straightforward explanation available doesn't even occur to us? Are we so lulled by our sense as television viewers that 'they're not allowed to do that' that we won't even think it? Cause four years ago who would have believed a writer would actually disrespect the status quo so much as to give the Doctor a wife? And look where we are now.
Look, I've got reasons!:
1) Basically, if this were just any show that Moffat was writing without a fifty year franchise history to take into consideration, I would be surprised if that little girl wasn't the Doctor and River's. All writers have their things and this is very much Moffat's. [Quote of Moff's supplied by
owlsie : Russell reckons it's all about parenthood with me. It's his view that every writer has one story that they go on re-telling, and that being a father is mine.]2) Season five has taught me to trust the symbolism. Symbolism said Amy and Rory would get married. Symbolism said the Doctor would fix the universe and Amy by sacrificing himself to the cracks and that he would then be brought back to life through the combined auspices of Amy and River. The symbolism says the story of Eleven and Amy is the story about how both of them will grow up. And the symbolism around the Doctor/River relationship is crammed full of parental tropes. Now, I would be perfectly happy to accept all that in an abstract kind of sense in which the Doctor and River serve as a metaphorical mum and dad to the universe (see icon) and with Amy as a stand-in daughter figure, but that was before there was a six year old running around with an ability to regenerate.
3) SPOILERS FOR JEKYLL. So a few years ago Moffat wrote this six-episode television show called Jekyll, which is a modern re-imagining of the story of Jekyll and Hyde. At its heart, it is a six-hour long elaboration of what went down between River and the Dalek: mess with my family and I will FUCK YOUR SHIT UP. Moffat is already borrowing heavily from Jekyll for the Doctor/River storyline, including playing with ideas of dual identity, putting people in stasis boxes, a woman married to a man who takes different forms, cyclical god/goddess symbolism, the connections between violence and love . . . even apples. And the only major component that's missing is children. But that's a huge, central component. So much so that I was looking at bits of River's actions last year like the scene with the Dalek and going 'this makes better Moff-sense if there are kids at stake.' In Jekyll, the main character's children are stolen by an evil corporation that's been directing his life in the hopes of using them to gain control of the super-human powers of Hyde . . . so why do you think the Silence are interested in little Time Girl? What did River say about why you can't leave Time Lord bodies lying around?
4) A storyline in which future!Doctor and future!River's daughter has been stolen by the Silence in order to steal her Time Lord-y powers, possibly controlled/altered by them in some way, and current!Doctor and current!River have to discover who she is and acknowledge her in order to save her (and the universe), thus claiming their own identities in the process hits . . . approximately every Moffat narrative checkbox ever. Especially ones about stolen/estranged/altered children and about discovering and acknowledging hidden family connections being the key to resolving whole multi-threaded storylines. Also, I have no idea by what story logic this would work, but re: future!Doctor and what he's plotting--having to set up an elaborate time-paradox manipulation in order to force one's younger self into rescuing his future daughter seems like sufficiently weighty reason to choose to submit to mysterious astronaut-related death.
5) Re: discovering hidden family connections. Owlsie had this to say: Moffat would absolutely, totally, 100% try to make us think that it's all about Amy's kid when PSYCH THE WHOLE TIME IT WAS REALLY ABOUT THE DOCTOR'S KID AND AMY'S PREGNANCY IS A DIFFERENT PLOT THREAD ENTIRELY The blatantly manipulative head writer of this show has had the blatantly manipulative alien menace put a photo of Amy with a baby in a kid's room and fandom is taking that as more reliable proof of parentage than AN ABILITY TO REGENERATE? The show even went out of its way with the whole voice recorder 'oh no, does Amy actually love the Doctor not Rory why did she tell the Doctor about her pregnancy before Rory?' thing to discount the possibility that Amy's child is the Doctor's. But nobody's bothering to ask how the girl who regenerated might be the Doctor's in some other way?
6) NARRATIVE IRONY. Watch the scene with the Doctor and River examining the astronaut suit and talking about the little girl but make the assumption that they are unknowingly talking about their own child. It starts to feel very like the scenes in The Pandorica Opens where they're trying to figure out what's in the box and the Doctor keeps not realizing that he's talking about himself. "I have the strangest feeling she's going to find us." Ditto the end of the episode: "So, this little girl, then. It's all about her. Why is she important?"
7) More from Owlsie: And if the little girl is a Timebaby, the Doctor would know, which may be why he seems to be running from her? [it really, really bugs me that he's not trying to find her and I'm SURE there's an EXCELLENT reason for that because Moffat wouldn't spend a whole series/ an x-mas special establishing the Doctor's devotion to children and then have him do something that out of character for NO REASON....right?] Which does have that same kind of 'ack, personal future, do not want!' kind of motivation that had him running away from River in Time of Angels.
8) How did Moff get us all (and, not coincidentally, the Doctor) to accept the idea that the Doctor could actually have a wife? He presented her as a fait accompli, let everybody freak out for awhile, and then it all settled down and three years later we have the impossible: a majority of the audience are going to tell you 'of course she's his wife!' Why not pull the same trick with a kid?
9)
elisi trying come to terms with this possibility: I guess I'm just trying to wrap my head around the concept of the Doctor having sex in canon (oh God, it would be THE END OF EVERYTHING!!!! *g*) I'll just point out here that it already was. We got that out of the way last season, lol. The universe ENDED because the Doctor had sex in the future. And while, after last season's finale, I was puzzling over the sudden shift away from the water symbolism that dominated the beginning of the season over to the sun symbolism and its mother/father connotations, all of that makes so much more sense as a set-up for a storyline about actual parenthood.10) Just from a perspective of not wanting to watch a lot of Doctor Who episodes about raising a toddler: I figure that's mitigated by the fact that this show doesn't have to be closely tied into sequential time. We know there are big jumps in the Doctor's timeline sometimes that we don't get to see (like the Time War, or the time Ten spent running from the Ood's summons). Heck, we started this season with a Doctor 200 years older than the last one we saw. I'll fully accept that they can jump over a lot of the young years and get the kid to a point where they are leading their own life that intersects with the Doctor's from time to time. And Moff's also given us the idea with Amy and Rory that companions might pop back to their own lives for a while and then come back to the TARDIS again--he's breaking us away from the idea that this show is about the Doctor and one companion who stay together no matter what and we follow (pretty much) all of their story until the companion leaves and then we repeat. We've got the concepts in place for a much more flexible sort of storytelling and system of relationships.
Anyway, I'm not saying I'm 100% sold on this, but I feel like, in the ways that it's possible to predict Moffat's writing, it all fits rather well and I'm a little confused as to why fandom seems to not even have thought of this idea and/or dismissed it out of hand without too much consideration past 'no, they wouldn't dare to do that!'
