Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-7302713-20130331225051/@comment-7302713-20130401010413

Or young Amy did notice some of these stories--they wouldn't have helped her with psychiatrists or sanity.

Also, Amy could be reading different books as an adult, actively looking for the doctor.

Amy is the girl who grew up sleeping next to a crack in the universe. She remembers things she shouldn't all the damn time, because time works differently for her. She can touch her younger self without time ripping to shreds.

And in terms of how she acts, well that's the issue isn't it? The Doctor lies. River lies. Did Amy lie? We know she understands the necessity of lying with timey-wimey issues, and we know she can lie. The question is: did she lie? Is it in her character to lie like that instead of breaking time, especially once she sees the consequences of time breaking?

My understanding of the casual nexus has the memories coming back immediately to everyone who can remember. This isn't Amy going back into her own timeline. This isn't the Doctor going back in time and changing things either. The only reason that there aren't a bajillion Doctors running around having adventures of every kind when time collapses is because he is the only thing that continues to age. Everything is compressed around him and he is the only thing that is moving. The Doctor is the only person that this all happens to linearly. He's 909 in Utah, slapped by River, almost 200 years happens and he's 1103, back in Utah at the same time and time is killed, time is healed and he dies. This also happens linearly for River I suppose. She's in Utah in the astronaut suit, time stops, she marries the doctor, time starts, she kills the doctor, she escapes into the lake, goes off and does lots of things and sometime much later she shows up in Utah for some of Napoleon's wine. But there's only one Amy at Lake Silencio. It's the same Amy before the Doctor is shot as it is the Amy after the Doctor is shot.

At any rate, I think the issue in regards to the wiki is that we have no freaking clue what's going on here. Maybe time works like that and maybe it wasn't. If it wasn't there's no error and continuity wasn't changed. If time works like that maybe continuity is different and maybe there's an error. Maybe it wasn't planned but if you asked the writers now they would say that it probably did affect continuity that way and it hadn't occurred to them. But would that be a continuity error? Or is it impossible for Dr. Who to have continuity errors.

The problem is that there are as many ways to view how time works on Dr. Who as there are fans. And that's all these are--they're are views, our interpretations. The bottom line is that we generally don't know when a character is lying unless we see that lie directly contradicted. And that tends to happen most often when one character tells another that they were lying earlier. Amy never said she was lying and we have no physical evidence to prove that she was. It's Schrodinger's cat. There's a cat in the box and we have no clue whether it's alive or dead. The only way to know would be to have the writer's tell us. And there can only be an error is the writer's say that they wrote it with one outcome in mind but if you follow the rules as they see them the opposite outcome would be correct.

So unless someone wants to run off and ask The Powers That Be we should probably just acknowledge that we know there's a cat in a box but that's the extent in our knowledge. Which would be adding a note to the Wedding of River Song page explaining when the conversation with River and Amy took place in their individual timelines and a note that we have no idea what's going on timeline wise until that point. Amy could have known the whole time or have only just remembered.