Howling:New US poster

There is a new poster promoting the second half of Series 6, which unfortunately I don't have a link to, featuring the Doctor, Amy, Rory and River, with a silent in the background. Also on the poster is a what looks like a shot of lightening coming down the poster

Some people have suggested that this bolt is the crack from series 5 turned on it's side, and that there is something significant about it seperating the tardis crew off from river.

Personally, I think this looks more like the lightening the Silence shoot at people from their hands. The bolt does bear resemblance to the cracks, though, so maybe their connected?? Do the Silence's lightening bolts create the cracks somehow, or is this just reading too much into a simple promotional poster??

Any thoughts??UnicornandtheWasp 10:41, August 10, 2011 (UTC)

Are you talking about this one from last week: ? If so, the lightning seems to be traveling horizontally, and all but the edges are obscured behind the TARDIS crew, so I don't see the "crack on its side" at all.

Meanwhile, we may find out that the Silence engineered the TARDIS explosion, possibly even doing it to destroy the universe, but the idea that they did it by creating the cracks just seems backward. The cracks were a (probably unintentional) side-effect of the TARDIS exploding inside a time loop; they didn't create the explosion, and they weren't created by anyone.

Also, when hyping season 6, Moffat repeatedly talked about how some of the mysteries of season 5 were resolved, like "What are the cracks and where do they come from?", while others were left open, like "What is the Silence?" So, I don't expect any new revelations about the cracks. It's not as if Moffat doesn't have enough plotlines between the obviously-unfinished series 5 arcs and the new stuff in the first half of this series…

PS, Alex Kingston should shoot whoever did the Photoshopping on that image; they were obviously trying to make her cheeks look more defined, but the result is to make her face look saggy and weird.

PPS, There is a sense in which the cracks caused the explosion. The whole thing is an ontological paradox, a logical circle. The cracks are what motivated the Coalition to imprison the Doctor. Imprisoning the Doctor prevented him from getting to the TARDIS to stop the explosion (or fail and blow up), leaving River there alone. River being there alone and unable to do anything is why the TARDIS time-looped itself. And that's what created the cracks, and goto 10. --173.228.85.118 06:34, August 11, 2011 (UTC)

He probably wouldn't have been able to get to the TARDIS anyway, since it was in 2010 and he was in 101. Even if he had been able to get there, he probably wouldn't have been able to stop the explosion anyway, though if the alliance hadn't created the Pandorica in the first place, Van Gogh wouldn't have painted The Pandorica Opens and River wouldn't have been flying the TARDIS.Icecreamdif 18:04, August 11, 2011 (UTC)


 * Well, he certainly thought he could so something about it. At the very end of TPO, when they're sealing him in the Pandorica, he yells out, "Please, listen to me! The TARDIS is exploding right now and I'm the only one who can stop it! Listen to me!" Maybe he's lying, or just wrong, but we don't have any evidence of that. And, as you say, it hardly matters, because he wouldn't have been separated from the TARDIS in the first place without the alliance. So, even if he was lying, the alliance are still responsible, and there's still a circular chain of causality, just a slightly larger circle. --173.228.85.118 19:39, August 11, 2011 (UTC)

Well, Rule One: The Doctor lies. Gallifrey102 22:26, August 11, 2011 (UTC)

There probably wasn't anything the Doctor could have done, but he certainly would have tried if the alliance wasn't locking him in the box. I'm not sure that he could have prevented it even if he had been piloting the TARDIS instead of River. There were probably Silence in the console room that messed with the controls to blow it up. iver, of course, forgot about them.Icecreamdif 00:46, August 12, 2011 (UTC)


 * Yes, the Doctor sometimes lies—but that doesn't mean that everything he says is a lie. It's pretty obvious that he really was desperate to get back to the TARDIS in time, he wasn't just saying that for the sake of saying something.


 * Meanwhile, if the Doctor had gotten back to the TARDIS, maybe he'd have stopped the explosion, or maybe he'd have failed while doing something about it and therefore the TARDIS wouldn't have time-looped itself. So, either the universe is saved, or the universe is gone; either way, no cracks. So the point stands: the alliance are inadvertently responsible for the cracks. --173.228.85.118 04:31, August 12, 2011 (UTC)

Was the TARDIS timelooping responsible for the cracks? I thought that the only effect of the timeloop was to save River, and the cracks were just a byproduct of the universe exploding. Either way, the Doctor didn't know exactly what the situation on the TARDIS was, and he would try to prevent it from exploding to save the universe even if the situation was hopeless and there was nothing that he could do. Until we know exactly how and why the Silence caused the TARDIS to explode though, we can only speculate as to whether or not the Doctor would have been able to stop them.Icecreamdif 04:42, August 12, 2011 (UTC)

The TARDIS time-looping was responsible for it operating as a substitute Sun for the Earth, which is why the universe still existed at all. Also, if the TARDIS wasn't time-looped and had already exploded, the Doctor couldn't have gotten back into it to fly into the cracks and reboot the universe. So, it's at least the reason we now have a universe that had (in the meta-past) time cracks instead of having no universe of any kind. (I guess you _could_ talk about whether a universe that didn't exist would or would not have had cracks in it had it existed, but what's the point?) --173.228.85.118 05:07, August 12, 2011 (UTC)

So the TARDIS timelooping is why there is still a universe now, but that is not why there were cracks. The effects of the TARDIS explosion cracked the universe back through time. If the TARDIS hadn't time looped, there would still have been cracks, but everyone on Earth would have frozen to death after the rest of the universe was destroyed, and the Doctor wouldn't have been able to reboot the universe.Icecreamdif 06:08, August 12, 2011 (UTC)


 * Sure, maybe. We don't know exactly why the explosion caused the cracks. Maybe if the TARDIS had gone off all at once instead of stretching it out by being time-looped, there would have been cracks in the infinitesimal (meta-)time before the whole universe blew up. So what?


 * More importantly, what does this have to do with the original question? Either way, there's no reason to believe that the Silence caused the cracks by shooting them out of their fingertips, and that's how they blew up the universe. --173.228.85.35 07:57, August 12, 2011 (UTC)

Yeah, this has kind of gotten off topic. Whether or not the timeloop was involved, the cracks were caused by the TARDIS explosion, not by the Silence's lightning.Icecreamdif 17:13, August 12, 2011 (UTC)