Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-7302713-20130509161406/@comment-188432-20130510004843

Digifiend wrote: In fact, didn't Two Days Later explain that he only fainted? No, Jenny explained that. But Jenny is, like all good nurses, lying. She's getting him out of recovery with a white lie before laying the full truth on him.

The difficulty here is that we have to look at three narratives to establish the sequence of events: A Good Man Goes to War, The Battle of Demons Run: Two Days Later and The Snowmen.

If you take Two Days at complete face value then the other two sources are wrong. Why? Well, let's look at what happens.

In AGMGTW, Rory is with Strax at the moment of death. If he walked away from Strax before the moment of death, Rory's core competency is stripped away. Strax has to die for Rory to leave the scene. Period. Or else Rory's character actually crumbles. I'd argue that you actually hear Strax' death rattle in the mix, and that Eleven is reacting to hearing it.

Also, look at where Jenny actually is during the Rory/Strax scene. She's rubbing Amy's back, quite far away from Strax. Vastra, meanwhile, is with Lorna. Neither of them is on scene, giving immediate medical care to Strax. Both of them remain close to Rory and Amy throughout the whole River revelation, all the way to the end of the episode. Strax is dead, dead, dead.

And this is what the Doctor explicitly confirms in The Snowmen:
 * DOCTOR: He gave his life for a friend of mine once.
 * CLARA: Then how come he's alive?
 * DOCTOR: Another friend brought him back. (shouts) I'm not sure his brains made the return trip!

You might think that the Doctor is lying here. But before you apply "Rule 1", ask yourself why. He has no motivation to lie to Clara, while Jenny has every motivation to lie to Strax himself.

Note, too, that the device which resurrects Strax is actually established in Snowmen. It's the same device that Strax uses to bring back Clara. In The Snowmen it's very clearly established that the equipment does indeed resurrect the dead. There's no doubt that Clara has died, then been revived by Strax's (well, really, Vastra's) device.


 * VASTRA: Her injuries are severe. That equipment will bring back anyone for a while, but long term ...

So, was Strax resurrected? Yep. Absolutely. Without doubt. By using the same prop used on Clara, Two Days actually confirms that he died and was brought back. Evidently, though, he just had less severe injuries, or at least more easily-repairable ones, than Clara.