Howling:Moffat screwed up Silents

Moffat's introduction of the Silents (alien race) created the following troubling conflicts or unlikely scenarios: The Doctor has effectively caused a massive civil war on Earth for a reason that makes very little sense as there are plenty of parasite species everywhere. Moreover, this doesn't even account for minority cases like the blinds (who wouldn't see a sight of them but never made clear if they are also affected by Silents) or people with physical disabilities (would a guy with no limbs suddenly jump out from his wheel chair and start biting Silents, acting like some mad dog to a person viewing from another angle?). The repercussions are too great yet Moffat seem to downplay it too much that it hardly makes sense. Did Moffat screw this up bad? --222.166.181.177 14:10, November 10, 2011 (UTC)
 * 1) Both Amy and Rory have never watched the moon landing? Aged Canton's presence when Amy and Rory first met him clearly indicates that Amy and Rory are on a timeline in which the footage has been tempered, yet Amy didn't went berserk and killed Silents.
 * 2) Why kill the Silents? There are many more parasitic species on Earth ranging from insects to bacteria, and you may even consider house cats parasitic, unless the Doctor has oddly suddenly became a racist, the Silents massacre is completely out of character.
 * 3) Silents can shoot lightning and humans can't, so unless we're in America, where most people are armed, whenever people see Silents and go berserk, the Silent(s) will either run or fry the humans into ashes. A lot more people should die around the world because of this and with (2) in mind, the Doctor has either became extremely stupid or, for some odd reason, decided to risk human to eraticate a specific parasite.
 * 4) Timecode. What happened to timecode in the videos? When all recording and copies of the landing has timecode error and the frames don't add up, isn't it obvious?
 * 5) When a person tries to kill a Silent, wouldn't the people around him who didn't see the Silent think the person went mad? Especially considering that the person will have amnesia afterward.
 * 6) Silents in countries with no television transmission at that time or the next few years afterward would have prevented the import of television or recordings. Plenty of countries except the States and the UK wouldn't have television transmissions or common playback devices at that time period. Many countries in Africa would have declared war on other parts of the world under the Silents' influence in an attempt to exterminate the hypnotized humans with Silent killing tendency.
 * 7) The poor who couldn't afford television would rebel against the rich and the government for the same reason in (6). Earth's humans would end up with a massive scale war divided by people hypnotized by the video and those who didn't until one party is all killed or the Silents effectively no longer on Earth.
 * 8) Bullets should have been flying everywhere in the states the moment the footage was shown, people would have been scared by this and a lot of innocent people would have been killed by accidents or the Silents.

Parts of the Silence rebellion are a bit unlikely, but all of your points can be explained. Blind people could still hear the Silence, but wouldn't kill them because they couldn't see them. People in wheel chairs would shoot the Silence if they had a gun or stab them or something if they are close enough, but they are only going to kill them in ways that they are capable of doing so. If a handicapped person is incapable of killing a Silence, they will not try.Icecreamdif talk to me 21:02, November 10, 2011 (UTC)
 * 1) The few times that Amy and Rory saw the Silence, they had very little opportunity to attack before they forgot about them again. In the scene in the bathroom, Amy may have felt some desire to kill the Silence, but she was able to exercise self control having encountered aliens before, and knew that taking a photo and gathering intel on the Silence would help lead to their destruction.
 * 2) This is just speculation, but maybe the Doctor and friends decided to kill the Silence because they've seen the moon landing footage before. The Doctor saw it a few times when he was stranded in the 60s with Martha (and he'd probably seen it before anyway), so he subconsciously wanted to kill the Silence causing him to manipulate the Silence into creating the message in the first place. Even so, the Silence are a bit more manipulative than your average parasite. Humans can't even remember seeing them, and they are controlling every aspect of humanity, effectively turning all humans into slaves. We all know that the Doctor isn't a huge fan of slavery, and likely felt that humans were better off without the Silence controlling them.
 * 3) First of all, I live in America and I don't know anyone who carries a gun around with them, but you still have a point. Before the moon landing, the Silence only killed people who were either a threat to them, or who were bugging them while they were using the bathroom. There were few enough mysterious deaths that nobody noticed. The Silence don't want humanity to realise that there are countless mysterious deaths, and there lightning attack is pretty slow and inneffective. The Doctor and River were able to destroy a whole rooom full of Silence and noone was hit by the lightning. The Doctor didn't even have a real weapon. They may have killed a few, but they would have been outnumbered and died before they could do much damage.
 * 4) This one's really a minor error. The timecode probably includes the bit with the Silence, and people just assume that nothing particularly interesting happenned in those couple of seconds.
 * 5) If you were able to tell that somebody was beating a Silent to death, you would have to see the Silence. Otherwise it would look like they just walked across the room for no reason. The only ones who would look crazy would be the ones with the guns and, as you said, most people don't carry guns around with them.
 * 6) Many people without televisions wouldn't have tried to kill the Silence. Still, many people would have seen it on other's televisions, or listened to it on the radio. Also, don't forget about all those Magpie TVs that are floating around. Presumably the people who would have been involved with importing the TVs were conditioned to kill the Silence anyway. The Silence probably didn't consider it worth it to drive the whole planet into war. There real purpose on Earth was just to hide Melody for a while, so they probably decided it would be more efficient to lie low for a while than to cause a huge war.
 * 7) Same as (6). It just wouldn't be worth it for the Silence.
 * 8) Guns are really only popular in the crazy redneck areas and the South in America. People all over the country do own guns, but at most there would have been a few isolated incidents with people being wrongly accused of murder. Still, even in places like Texas, bullets wouldn't be flying everywhere. People would be shooting the Silence. That means that people are only shooting when they see a Silence, and for the most part the bullets would hit the Silence and people would forget about it.

This makes absolutely no sense, the subliminal message was to kill Silents on sight, not try to kill Silents if you can and don't bother if you can't or devise a plan to commit genocide on the Silents. Saying Amy can fight it with sheer will power is like saying the subliminal message never really fully worked in the first place. The Silents will go extinct if they didn't do something, so if this still isn't worth it for them to take action, I don't know what will. You obviously have no idea how many people outside of US and UK would not own a television set even by mid 70s. The timecode doesn't add up isn't a simple matter of people thinking a few seconds aren't interesting, the footage is used over and over again, television editors, etc will be jogging frame by frame, the timecode will jump in every single copy of the recording. To say that people would either not notice other people killing silents or would be involved is the same as saying that everyone would have seen the silent in the picnic and not Amy alone. --222.166.181.160 22:48, November 10, 2011 (UTC)

Well, if Amy had gotten up and attacked the Silence instead of just acting a bit weird, everyone would have noticed the Silence at the picnic. It's possible that River and the Doctor both knew exactly what she was talking about, but decided not to comment since they knew what had to happen. The subliminal message isn't mind control- it doesn't force you to do anything. If you see a Silence, then you're going to think "wow, I should really kill this thing on sight." If you're unable to do so, then you'll decide not to. If you see it shoot lightning out of its hand, and you have a friend who you know is good at stopping alien invasions, you can decide "Nah. As much as I want to kill this thing on sight, I'll just take a picture and show it to the Doctor later." The Doctor could have interpreted the phrase to mean that he should literally kill them all, which he attempted to accomplish by planting the suggestion in the first place. Even if only a handful of people in the entire world owned televisions and radios it wouldn't matter. In the short term, yes the Silence would be fine. However, a couple of decades later, when everyone owns a tv, and then even later when the internet is big, almost everyone will see it and will kill the Silence. Since their plans don't actually involve ruling the Earth, and they've already got that space suit they wanted, it's really more practical for them to just lay low and avoid humans instead of coming up with complicated plans to prevent the spread of television. Maybe there were some instances where people noticed other people killing Silence, where they somehow didn't see the Silence, and thought that they were crazy. There were already people who had gone due to the Silence, so a few more wouldn't make a huge difference. In the vast majority of cases though, if you are able to see that someone is attacking something you will be able to see what they are attacking. As for the timecode-maybe in the Whoniverse it's just considered one of those mysterious things. Nobody knows why it doesn't make sense since they forget whenever they find out, but it's not a big deal and they've just given up trying to figure it out.Icecreamdif talk to me 00:52, November 11, 2011 (UTC)

The message was, "You should kill us all on sight." "Should" not "will" or "must", so Icecreamdif is quite right that it won't (or wont't usually) produce a major conflict if killing is impossible or impractical at the time.

The first point about the timecode is that most people wouldn't be paying any attention to it, anyway. The second point is that the "memory-proof" nature of the Silents wouldn't work at all well unless it caused people to overlook inconsistencies. There are different types of forgetting. If you go into a shop (say) to buy something but can't remember what it was you intended to buy, you know there's something you've forgotten. On the other hand, if you agree to make a phone call but forget to do so, you may well not even be aware of having forgotten anything -- at least until someone (like the person you should have called) or something (like a note saying, "Phone Fred") reminds you. With the Silents, people forget so completely they're unaware of having forgotten. The exception, as in the case of the Doctor and his friends, is where they've reasoned out (in the absence of any Silents) that there must be something they've forgotten and then adopt measures to draw their attention to it when it happens again. The effect of the Silents operates similarly to hypnotism, which means a victim's subconscious is actively steering his/her mind away from possible reminders; it isn't a purely passive process. --89.241.69.214 23:40, November 11, 2011 (UTC)

The use of "should" is not just a suggestion. It is a clear order phrased in the subjunctive. "Should you see us, kill us." Boblipton talk to me 00:58, November 12, 2011 (UTC)
 * Even if it was meant to be taken that way the fact that is that since there is discussion about it not everyone would have interpreted it that way. Also out of the people who did interpret it as a suggestion doesn't mean they would carry it out, many people act against what they think they should do, so even if they thought they should kill the Silents doesn't guarantee they would. The Light6 talk to me 01:50, November 12, 2011 (UTC)


 * Yah, in Blighty where the subjunctive has been weakened. Sorry if that sounds slighting, but it's a fact of the way the two major dialects have evolved. Boblipton talk to me 02:05, November 12, 2011 (UTC)


 * Since we're being grammatical, the subjunctive "may be used for subjective, doubtful, hypothetical, or grammatically subordinate statements or questions" (from Dictionary.com). That leaves plenty of "wriggle room" for people. Anyway, Boblipton's rephrasing doesn't have the same meaning as the original. "Should you see us, kill us," means "Kill us if [or whenever] you see us." The original, "You should kill us all on sight," in its context meant, "It is in your best interests to kill us all on sight," and isn't a command at all. Taken out of its context (as it was, once the Doctor had inserted it into the Apollo 11 footage), it does sound like an instruction but it's still not a strong command. Nobody in the army (for example) would say, "You should open fire." They'd say, "Open fire!" One's advice, the other's an order. It's not only in British English that the subjunctive is weak, although the difference may be greater in British English. --89.241.69.17 05:29, November 12, 2011 (UTC)