‘Doctor Who’: Series 7 – out of order?

Posted Filed under

After five final adventures with his beloved long-time pals Amy and Rory, the Doctor has been permanently separated from them by the last of the Weeping Angels in New York and forced to travel on alone. Thanks to the last chapter in Melody Malone’s book, he’s established that the Girl Who Waited and the Lonely Centurion found each other again in the past and lived happily ever after, but there must still be a lingering sadness in his hearts that his path will never cross Team Pond’s again.

Or will it? Amy and Rory’s last escapade with their raggedy man was ‘The Angels Take Manhattan’ and that’s a fixed point; an ending. But what if it’s only an ending for them? What if some of their adventures with the Doctor have yet to happen from his point of view?

In Doctor Who, time usually moves in the same direction for the Doctor and his companions that it does for us watching at home (the older Doctor’s appearance at the start of Series 6’s first episode aside). But this time round, things are different. We’ve encountered the Daleks, the dinosaurs, the town of Mercy, the invasion of the black cubes and the Angels in Manhattan in that order – but what if the Doctor and Team Pond didn’t? Amy and Rory aren’t travelling constantly in the TARDIS anymore; how do they know the order in which the Doctor picks them up for adventures is the same for him as it is for them? And with the current ‘movie-of-the-week’ format meaning none of the episodes reference the ones immediately preceding it, how do we know that the order we’re watching them are the order in which they occurred?

Before our heads explode with the tortuousness of it all, let’s try to keep it simple. We think the Doctor’s first adventure with the Ponds since last Christmas is ‘The Angels Take Manhattan’. He picks them up, they go to America, and it goes pear-shaped. By the end of the story, a fixed point in time has been created and in the future – Amy and Rory’s future – they can never meet up with the Doctor again. But there’s nothing stopping a Time Lord – particularly a lonely god missing his best pals – zipping off to an earlier point in the Ponds’ timeline and picking them up for more adventures.

Providing he keeps them safe and doesn’t mention that he knows what happens to them in their future, neither they nor the watching audience at home would be any the wiser; and if the Doctor already knows he’s said goodbye to his friends forever, it makes his words to Amy on the banks of the Thames in ‘The Power of Three’ all the more poignant.

‘I’m not running away from things,’ he says to her. ‘I’m running to them before they flare and fade forever. And it’s alright. Our lives won’t run the same. They can’t. One day – soon, maybe – you’ll stop. I’ve known for a while. I’m running to you and Rory before you fade from me.’ He’s not being fatalistic about the future of their friendship; he’s speaking from experience about something that has – from his perspective – already happened.

There are other signs that things are not quite as they seem. The repeated flickering/broken lightbulb motif has yet to be explained. (Some sort of energy surge created by the Doctor repeatedly crossing the Ponds’ timeline, maybe?) The Doctor chastises Rory for leaving his phone charger in Henry VIII’s en-suite in ‘A Town Called Mercy’, yet they don’t meet the multiply-married monarch until ‘The Power of Three’. Does this mean that for them, episode four occurred before episode three? Then there’s Amy’s differing attitudes to the Doctor sacrificing Solomon and attempting to do the same to Kahler-Jex. She kicks up a fuss about the latter but doesn’t bat an eyelid at the former; is this because (for her) ‘A Town Called Mercy’ occurs before ‘Dinosaurs on a Spaceship’ and she’s seen how saving Jex from the Gunslinger didn’t really achieve anything?

These are all maybes and what-ifs, of course. The lightbulbs might mean something different entirely, and everything else could be just down to changes in the production/transmission order of episodes, or even continuity cock-ups. We might have manufactured all this out of thin air. Yet what about Oswin, the new companion, apparently dying as a Dalek in Episode 1, and her mysterious grin to camera, ‘Remember …’?

What if Steven Moffat’s comment that the ‘movie-of-the-week approach does not stop with the Ponds’ doesn’t just mean the second half of the season is unlinked, but that the deliberately-disordered episodes are to continue as well? What if the secret twist of Series 7 is that the first episode for us was really the last episode for the Doctor?

Or maybe we’re just being out of order.

What do you think? Let us know below…

> Order Series 7 Part 1 on DVD on Amazon.

Watch the Series 7 trailer…

> Follow David Lewis on Twitter.