Many years ago, long before he became a writer — and now, executive producer — of Doctor Who, Steven Moffat wrote a Doctor Who story for an anthology of fan fiction. The story, called “Continuity Errors,” involved the Doctor using his time-travel technology to mess with a librarian’s personal history, manipulating it to serve his own ends. She figures it out by noticing how some events in her life don’t quite jibe with others. Continuity errors.
Now that he’s the man in charge, his first full season seems to be playing with a similar idea. The Doctor probably isn’t responsible, given that he’s as in the dark about it as anyone. But there are a number of “continuity errors” between reality as the Doctor has experienced it and reality as his new human companions remember it.
It came to a head in the third episode of the season, “Victory of the Daleks.” Amy Pond, who would have been somewhere in her teens when massive armies of Daleks invaded Earth in the Season Four two-parter “The Stolen Earth” and “Journey’s End,” remembers nothing about it. (It’s not mentioned in the episode, but it was only a few years earlier that Daleks and Cybermen both had invaded the Earth in “Army of Ghosts” and “Doomsday,” the Season Two climax. Presumably she doesn’t remember that either, as she has no idea what Daleks are.)
This revelation gets the Doctor’s mind working. He recalls the duck pond from his first adventure with Amy — a duck pond that never has any ducks. In that first episode, “The Eleventh Hour,” he asks her why it’s called a duck pond. More troubling, he mentions the events of “The Next Doctor,” one of the four specials that ushered David Tennant out and Matt Smith in — a giant cyber-king trampling Victorian London like a steampunk King Kong — and marvels that nobody seemed to have remembered it, as certainly it would have been written about at the time and preserved in history books.
So far (I’m on the American schedule for episodes which is about three weeks behind the UK), other discontinuities in memory have not been explicitly discussed since, but the strange crack in space and time that first appeared in the premiere continues to show up in most episodes. We learned in “The Time of Angels” that if you fall into the crack, you disappear from existence and indeed, never existed at all, so no one will remember you. The Doctor traced the origin of the crack to some sort of temporal upheaval on June 26, 2010 — Amy’s planned wedding day. (And also the date that the final episode of the season will be shown in the UK.)
Another apparent mistake that’s being widely discussed occurs in that two-parter. The Doctor loses his tweed jacket, and at one point leaves the room, leaving Amy with her eyes closed against the weeping angels. (It makes sense if you know the show.) Then, while the camera stays on her, he is beside her again, urging her to remember something he told her when she was seven. He has his jacket on. Is this a continuity error, or a subtle clue that things aren’t what they seem?
One more point: When the Doctor first meets Amy, she’s a little girl, the seven-year-old Amelia. He leaves for what he expects to be a five-minute jump into the future just to stabilize the TARDIS, but is gone for 12 years. Then, after vanquishing the enemy of that story, disappears for another two years. Amy’s wedding day is in June 2010, which means that their first meeting, 14 years prior, was in 1996 — well before the adventures of the Ninth and Tenth Doctors, and the crack was already at work.
Moffat has given himself a way to do pretty much anything with the recent continuity of the show.
Another theory that some fans are discussing is the possibility that everything that’s happening this season is the Doctor’s regeneration-induced dream. We know the Time Lords need some recovery time after they regenerate (regeneration in modern Doctor Who is apparently a lot more traumatic than it was in the classic series.) After Christopher Eccleston regenerated into David Tennant, he spent most of his first episode unconscious. Tennant’s Doctor was beginning to crack up a bit toward the end of his run … in “The Waters of Mars” he angrily saved people he knew were supposed to die, only to have them die on him anyway. But for a moment he was unnervingly megalomaniacal, the “Time Lord Triumphant.” And in the next — and final, for Tennant — outing, “The End of Time” parts one and two, he broke down in tears while confessing to Wilf how “I tried to do some things that went wrong.” And he seemed to have actually contemplated, later on, letting Wilf die in the radiation chamber rather than saving him, with a speech about Wilf’s relative puniness and insignificance compared to the Time Lord — uncharacteristically self-pitying and selfish.
So he was not in the best state of mind when he regenerated into Matt Smith, and the regeneration energy when he did was so powerful it crashed the TARDIS into Amelia’s garden 14 years in the past. Perhaps, some fans speculate, the Doctor is lying unconscious, fever-dreaming all this, and the crack that appears is the real world trying to break through.
I have no idea, and that’s exciting. Russell T. Davies did a marvelous job revitalizing Doctor Who into a serious science-fantasy show for today, and told or supervised some really beautiful and compelling stories duing his tenure. But with the season, for the first time, I am truly baffled by the clues Moffat’s giving us, and have no idea where this is all going to end up when the season draws to a close.
G.R.
Michael
