Because apparently I'm still bothered...
Jan. 20th, 2012 09:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenak...to quote a Catherine Tate character.
Now, I believe in constructive criticism instead of in just complaining. So I tried to find a way to fix what to me is the giant plot hole of season 6 that works with all of Moffat's other established plot points.
To recapitulate, one of my biggest, though not only, s6 problem is that the Moff ends the opening two parter by letting the Doctor blithely declare there isn't anything they can do more to figure out what became of the mysterious little girl and take off. This has an obvious Doylist reason - if they investigated further and actually found her, River's entire backstory would change. But there is no Watsonian reason given why the Doctor would just give up on a little girl in a horrible situation with no one else to help her. (It's especially glaring given that Moffat elsewhere, both in this season and the previous one, repeatedly emphasises the bond between Eleven and children and how the Doctor can't bear the idea of a crying child.)
Now, if the Doctor actually found out that little-girl-in-a-suit is River (though not that she's also Melody Pond), he could have a reason for his action. Because his and River's time line, and for that matter River's, Amy's and Rory's timeline, already intersected repeatedly, and if River had lived another life, she might never have been at the Library, or at the Byzantium to save Amy, to name but two examples. Ah, you ask, but what about "time can be rewritten" as the new rule of the Moffat era? Well, leaving aside that fixed points in time work better dramatically as an explanation as to why the Doctor & friends don't change all the history all the time, River herself told Ten "don't you dare to rewrite a single line" just before she died. So: the Doctor does find out girl-in-a-suit is River-to-be and realises if he goes after her and saves her, it will not only result in universe-breaking paradoxes galore but also go against adult River's direct wishes. Which leaves him with a one person variety of the Pompeii situation. It sucks, but it's a necessary decision.
Meanwhile, while we're fixing things, in the first half of the season Amy gets to have scenes like the one from the dVd extras in canon (i.e. her trying to deal with all the rewritten different timelines in her head after season 5), and Rory gets to deal with, oh, two millennia of centurian memories. I'm not asking for entire episodes devoted to this, just a few character scenes here and there, and the one from the dvd prove Moffat knows exactly how to write them. We also get conversations about whether or not Amy and Rory would prefer only one of the timelines, and how they would deal with yet more revisions in their lives. We even, gasp, maybe have a scene or two with Amy's parents and her feeling weird because she know has this beloved family members which in one version of her life she remembers were not there, and how does she adjust? (Maybe not the most subtle of foreshadowing, but hey.)
Most importantly: we do get Amy and Rory wondering now and then why the hell the Doctor was so insistent on leaving the little girl behind, and whether or not that has something to do with him inviting them to witness his death. As you would.
After the big Melody-is-River-is-Mels revelation from before and after the mid season hiatus, Amy and Rory have to accept they can't find their daughter as a child anymore without yet another massive timeline change or wiping out the River-that-is from existence, but it's hard for them, and we get not just scenes with the Doctor but importantly with adult River interacting with them as the result. When they realise the Doctor knew about River being the girl, they have a hard time dealing with this as well and start to wonder whether or not they really want to continue in the TARDIS.
And then we get to The Girl Who Waited. Someone, preferably Rory, asks the glaringly obvious: if the Doctor and he can go back to spare young Amy thirty years in horrible isolation, but thereby wiping out old Amy, why couldn't this be done for Melody/River? Yes, there is the explanation that the thirty years of isolated Amy did not affect anyone else's timelines the way River's existence did, but emotionally, that's not good enough. I would prefer the episode to end with older Amy, not younger Amy making it out alive, but either way, by the end of it Amy and Rory have come to the decision to leave on their own. Also, they ask to be dropped off in the 51st century so they can live with their daughter for a while as she recovers from life as a trained assassin and studies archaelogy. Mutual trauma healing in the Pond family for the win!
When Madame K. and the Silence kidnap and reactivate River again at the start of The Wedding of River Song, Amy and Rory notice immediately and call the Doctor to team up again and and save their daughter. Of course, time goes bonkers anyway, and we get the multiple crashing intersecting timelines, but the emotional pay off in the climactic scenes feels earned, not least because a) it turns out younger River's own agenda is not just to not kill the Doctor, timelines be damned, but to change her own life; Amy, coming-from-a-girl-who-waited place, can relate but also has come to accept that what happened, happened, and it makes part of the whole which is older River who taught her that, and b) Amy's showdown with Kokovarian happens after we've spent a second half of s6 where Amy and Rory were actually struggling with the whole parents-of-a-kidnapped-child-who-is-also-their-friend thing.
What do you think?
Now, I believe in constructive criticism instead of in just complaining. So I tried to find a way to fix what to me is the giant plot hole of season 6 that works with all of Moffat's other established plot points.
To recapitulate, one of my biggest, though not only, s6 problem is that the Moff ends the opening two parter by letting the Doctor blithely declare there isn't anything they can do more to figure out what became of the mysterious little girl and take off. This has an obvious Doylist reason - if they investigated further and actually found her, River's entire backstory would change. But there is no Watsonian reason given why the Doctor would just give up on a little girl in a horrible situation with no one else to help her. (It's especially glaring given that Moffat elsewhere, both in this season and the previous one, repeatedly emphasises the bond between Eleven and children and how the Doctor can't bear the idea of a crying child.)
Now, if the Doctor actually found out that little-girl-in-a-suit is River (though not that she's also Melody Pond), he could have a reason for his action. Because his and River's time line, and for that matter River's, Amy's and Rory's timeline, already intersected repeatedly, and if River had lived another life, she might never have been at the Library, or at the Byzantium to save Amy, to name but two examples. Ah, you ask, but what about "time can be rewritten" as the new rule of the Moffat era? Well, leaving aside that fixed points in time work better dramatically as an explanation as to why the Doctor & friends don't change all the history all the time, River herself told Ten "don't you dare to rewrite a single line" just before she died. So: the Doctor does find out girl-in-a-suit is River-to-be and realises if he goes after her and saves her, it will not only result in universe-breaking paradoxes galore but also go against adult River's direct wishes. Which leaves him with a one person variety of the Pompeii situation. It sucks, but it's a necessary decision.
Meanwhile, while we're fixing things, in the first half of the season Amy gets to have scenes like the one from the dVd extras in canon (i.e. her trying to deal with all the rewritten different timelines in her head after season 5), and Rory gets to deal with, oh, two millennia of centurian memories. I'm not asking for entire episodes devoted to this, just a few character scenes here and there, and the one from the dvd prove Moffat knows exactly how to write them. We also get conversations about whether or not Amy and Rory would prefer only one of the timelines, and how they would deal with yet more revisions in their lives. We even, gasp, maybe have a scene or two with Amy's parents and her feeling weird because she know has this beloved family members which in one version of her life she remembers were not there, and how does she adjust? (Maybe not the most subtle of foreshadowing, but hey.)
Most importantly: we do get Amy and Rory wondering now and then why the hell the Doctor was so insistent on leaving the little girl behind, and whether or not that has something to do with him inviting them to witness his death. As you would.
After the big Melody-is-River-is-Mels revelation from before and after the mid season hiatus, Amy and Rory have to accept they can't find their daughter as a child anymore without yet another massive timeline change or wiping out the River-that-is from existence, but it's hard for them, and we get not just scenes with the Doctor but importantly with adult River interacting with them as the result. When they realise the Doctor knew about River being the girl, they have a hard time dealing with this as well and start to wonder whether or not they really want to continue in the TARDIS.
And then we get to The Girl Who Waited. Someone, preferably Rory, asks the glaringly obvious: if the Doctor and he can go back to spare young Amy thirty years in horrible isolation, but thereby wiping out old Amy, why couldn't this be done for Melody/River? Yes, there is the explanation that the thirty years of isolated Amy did not affect anyone else's timelines the way River's existence did, but emotionally, that's not good enough. I would prefer the episode to end with older Amy, not younger Amy making it out alive, but either way, by the end of it Amy and Rory have come to the decision to leave on their own. Also, they ask to be dropped off in the 51st century so they can live with their daughter for a while as she recovers from life as a trained assassin and studies archaelogy. Mutual trauma healing in the Pond family for the win!
When Madame K. and the Silence kidnap and reactivate River again at the start of The Wedding of River Song, Amy and Rory notice immediately and call the Doctor to team up again and and save their daughter. Of course, time goes bonkers anyway, and we get the multiple crashing intersecting timelines, but the emotional pay off in the climactic scenes feels earned, not least because a) it turns out younger River's own agenda is not just to not kill the Doctor, timelines be damned, but to change her own life; Amy, coming-from-a-girl-who-waited place, can relate but also has come to accept that what happened, happened, and it makes part of the whole which is older River who taught her that, and b) Amy's showdown with Kokovarian happens after we've spent a second half of s6 where Amy and Rory were actually struggling with the whole parents-of-a-kidnapped-child-who-is-also-their-friend thing.
What do you think?
