Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-1827503-20141102022000/@comment-1827503-20141104174622

CzechOut wrote:

We've been here before. The end of the cliffhanger of the final story of the series is pretty much never what it appeared to be. Did David Tennant regenerate at the end of The Stolen Earth? Not really. (Well, not until we learned otherwise five years later.) Was The Army of Ghosts genuinely "the story of how [Rose Tyler] died'? Only metaphorically. Could we state with any authority what the true nature of the Toclafane were at the end of The Sound of Drums?  Absolutely not.  Did we know what the Pandorica was at the end of The Pandorica Opens?  Of course not; otherwise the teaser to The Big Bang didn't work.


 * Army of Ghosts: "This is the story of how [Rose] died" is the opening narration, not the cliffhanger, though you are right in saying it was an implication in the first part that was proven false in the second.
 * Utopia: You didn't address this one in your post, being that it wasn't the penultimate episode of the series, but "Yana is the Master" was more-or-less definitively proven by the end of the episode. The clear difference between Utopia and Dark Water is that Dark Water was a one-line throwaway that could conceivably be a lie.
 * The Sound of Drums: We could not definitively determine what the Toclafane were, but we could define them as "vaguely robotic spheroid life-forms working for the Master"
 * The Stolen Earth: The clear implication of the cliffhanger (and lack of a Next Time trailer) is that Tennant's Doctor would regenerate into a Doctor played by someone else. This did not turn out to be the case, though it's a lie of omission rather than misinformation.
 * The End of Time, Part 1: The Donna cliffhanger was outright misdirection, in the style of a classic series cliffhanger. However, the return of the Time Lords was clearly not intended to be taken as misdirection.
 * The Pandorica Opens: The cliffhanger had two "parts": one, Amy died, and two, the Doctor was imprisoned inside the Pandorica, causing the universe to have never existed. The first was proven false, while the second was true. This is the biggest reason we can't call Gomez's character the Master yet, as BBC publicity claimed Amy was permanently dead, in the same way they claim Missy is the Master. (As for the nature of the Pandorica, it was a prison of some sort meant to contain the Doctor. The Big Bang did not contradict this, though it did reveal extra information we did not know.)
 * Closing Time: The reveal that the astronaut was adult River rather than child Melody is completely true, but the Doctor didn't actually die. (@CzechOut: How did we handle the Doctor's "death" prior to the airing of TWoRS?)