Howling:Messages for Amy Pond

IMDB SPOILERS (maybe)

The IMDb summary for "Closing Time" says "After traveling for 200 years and leaving messages for Amy Pond across time and space the Doctor realizes his time is up, its time to settle down and accept his future at Lake Silencio." Now, we know that there were messages for Amy and Rory in "The Impossible Astronaut" in the form of weird moments in history, and The Doctor showing up in a fez in an old comedy show on their TV. But could there be other messages, about how to save him, or about how he may have saved himself? This would, of course, be similar to Season 5, where The Doctor tells Amy she has to remember, which is what ends up saving him after he's been erased from time. So I'm wondering if previous episodes contain clues about how The Doctor will get out of this.

So far, all I've been able to find (and it's a stretch), is when young Amelia says "fish-fingers and custard" in "Let's Kill Hitler." The voice doesn't quite sound like the Voice Interface any more, and there seems to be a certain gravity to the moment. Like I said, it's a stretch--it could just be The Doctor imagining things from the effects of the poison; it could even be the TARDIS saving her Doctor (er... her Thief)--but it's an interesting moment. But... it's also not even something Amy sees, so how could it be a message for her?

Anyone else notice anything like this? Once again, I'm considering combing old episodes looking for clues... 216.239.45.4 20:26, September 28, 2011 (UTC)

I agree: it sounded to me as if it lacked the echoing quality of the voice interface and was something he drew from itself. Which has no impact on the matter, really, except for some fairly subtle issues, and indicates the affection he feels for Amy: it's not the woman, it's the trusting child he cares about. And never pay attention to IMDB, except for my reviews, which are brilliaant. Boblipton 21:42, September 28, 2011 (UTC)

The "fish-fingers and custard" in Let's Kill Hitler (which really didn't sound like the voice interface) might have been a message from the TARDIS or, more likely, from the Doctor's own subconscious -- but, if it was a message at all, it was a message for the Doctor about Amy, not for Amy about the Doctor. B******d if I know what it might mean, though. --89.242.68.25 05:23, September 29, 2011 (UTC)

Its a reference to The Eleventh Hour and The Impossible Astronaut. The Doctor was drawing strength from his first meeting with little Amelia Pond. Until The God Complex, the Doctor never really saw Amy as anything but a little girl. That's why he was so disturbed by her advances in Time of Angels, why he usually calls her Amelia Pond or just Pond instead of Amy, and why he refused to accept the name Williams for Amy, choosing instead to call her husband Rory Pond. Fish fingers and custard is an important part of his memory of his first meeting with little Amelia, and thinking back to it gave him the emotional strength to continue to try to protect the three Ponds despite the fact that he was dying.Icecreamdif 05:52, September 29, 2011 (UTC)

Well, yes, I'd got that bit. What I mean is that I don't know what, if anything, it might mean in the context of the Doctor getting himself out of being killed by Melody/River -- unless, of course, it's a hint that it'll be Amy who saves him, this time, as she did at the end of last season, though the method would presumably be different. --89.242.68.25 08:13, September 29, 2011 (UTC) It meant nothiing in the contexxt of the Doctor getting himself out of being killed. It was just meant to give the Doctor the strength to continue fighting despite the fact that he was going to die. It doesn't seem like it has anything to do with the overall story arc. At this point the Doctor still clearly believes that there is no way of getting out of being killed by River, so he can't have recieved a message telling him how to survive. The messages across time for Amy and Rory probably just mean the ones that we already saw in The Impossible Astronaut, including, obviously, the TARDIS-blue envelopeIcecreamdif 14:17, September 29, 2011 (UTC)

I don't think it meant anything much, either -- as I said originally, "if it was a message at all". I have to admit, when I first saw the scene in Let's Kill Hitler, I briefly thought "fish-fingers and custard" might turn out to be the antidote to the poison (no stranger than the cyanide antidote in The Unicorn and the Wasp). However, your logic's a bit adrift. The Doctor believing that there's no way out of being killed doesn't stop him receiving a message telling him how to do so, although it might stop him understanding the message.--(My IP address has probably changed) 89.242.69.18 14:38, September 29, 2011 (UTC)

Yeah, but why try to send such an insignificant sounding message to him 200 years before he's going to die. What are the odds that while at Lake Silencio, River will point a gun at him and suddenly the Doctor will think "Wait a second, fish fingers and custard," run to the nearest store, by fish fingers and custard, and use them to cure River's brainwashing. Sure, the Doctor might not have used the voice interface since then, but since there is a perfectly good purpose for the line in the episode, there is no reason to believe that it means anything more than that. It's not like in Flesh and Stone, where the dialogue between the older Doctor and Amy was almost completely irrelevant to the circumstance that they were in.Icecreamdif 19:26, September 29, 2011 (UTC)

Like I said, I don't think it really was a message. I was only pointing out that what the Doctor believes doesn't stop it being one. I also didn't say I thought "fish-fingers and custard" would cure Melody's brainwashing -- just that (for a moment, while first seeing the episode) I thought it might be an antidode to the poison she'd used, which it obviously wasn't.

Anyway, how do we know it was 200 years in his timeline before his death at Lake Silencio? I gather that IMDB says the 200 years passed between The God Complex and Closing Time but nothing on screen has said that, so far, and IMDB isn't exactly a reliable source. From what's been said and shown on screen, it's still quite possible that a large chunk of the 200 years could have passed between A Good Man Goes to War and Let's Kill Hitler, while the Doctor was searching for Melody. In Amy and Rory's timelines, that interval was a couple of months (a summer) but it could easily have been far, far longer in the Doctor's timeline, especially because he was searching for Melody. The "Leadworth crop circle" saying "Doctor" would serve as a marker in time just as much as in space, so the Doctor could have spent a couple of centuries on the search and still have returned to meet Amy and Rory at that time and place. Considering IMDB's past record for accuracy, the fact that it places the 200-year interval where it does is almost enough on its own to convince me that isn't where it belongs!

One thing that bothers me about the ending of The God Complex and Amy and Rory's brief appearance in Closing Time is that those scenes seem to suggest that the two of them are fairly relaxed about the Doctor's impending death, which is out of character, especially for Amy. OK, they may think (because they've no reason to think otherwise) that it's still 200 years away but that didn't stop Amy fretting about it rather a lot throughout most of this season, so why does she seem to have stopped now? The Doctor's generosity at the end of The God Complex might have been enough to put it out of Amy's mind long enough for the Doctor to get away from them -- it appeared intended to do exactly that -- but Amy, at least, would pretty soon start thinking about it again and, being Amy, would want to do something about it or (at minimum) to be reassured that the Doctor was doing something useful about it. As we've seen repeatedly and as was emphasised in The Girl Who Waited, Amy simply isn't the type to accept the inevitable with philosophical resignation. As the Doctor said to Rory, "If anyone can defeat predestiny, it's your wife!" because she's "bloody-minded, contradictory and completely unpredictable" -- and the slogan on the perfume ad looked as if it could be a message from Amy to the Doctor. "For the girl who's tired of waiting," with Amy's face and a reference to the TARDIS password on it, displayed all over the place looks to me like a way of saying: "Doctor, get in touch with me -- now!" --89.240.240.113 00:56, September 30, 2011 (UTC)

Well, something is going on, because the time sequences are out of whack. The Doctor seems to think that because tomorrow is the day he dies, he can't go off to a billion years before or after first, as if the TARDIS has lost its ability to travel in time. Is that the Doctor? Or a ganger? And how did Amy go from being a kiss-o-gram to a famous model with her own line of perfume in three years, or maybe three months, since she seems to be signalling the Doctor. I have the feeling that a lot of timelines are going to collapse at the season's end and that perhaps River-in-the-eyepatch will foul up the Silence's plans. Either that or it will tunr out that Madame Kovarian is her Valeyard. Anyway, we'll know in 48 hours.... 42 for Brits. Boblipton talk to me 01:06, September 30, 2011 (UTC)

Well, the Valeyard showed up during the Doctor's final incarnation, and we've seen River's final incarnation so I doubt it, though I guess something could have happenned during the regeneration at the end of Day of the Moon. Amy has also had plenty of time to become a model, in the two years she was waiting at the end of The Eleventh Hour, in between The Big Bang and The Impossible Astronaut, in betweeen A Good Man Goes to War and Let's Kill Hitler, and in whatever time passed for them in between The God Complex and Closing Time. Amy also probably wasn't too famous-the girl likely just wanted her autograph because there was a giant poster of her right behind them. She probably just used the "Girl who waited" and "petrichor" things, because remembered those phrases from her time with the Doctor, and thought they sounded good. As we saw in Let's Kill Hitler, Amy has much more direct ways of sending a message to the Doctor. While something is clearly going to be wrong with time in the finale, I don't think anything is wrong with it yet. The TARDIS must still have the ability to travel through time, since he has to go back to April to meet up with Amy and Rory, go to the 51st or 52nd century to deliver River's invitation, and go somewhere where he's already been to deliver his own invitation. The Doctor doesn't mean that he will literally die tomorrow, he means that he will die the next day in his own personal timeline. Even if he'd spent his last day in the future or past, he would still have to go to 2011 to die tomorrow. As for the 200 years thing, I didn't know that IMDB had claimed this. I was just making the assumption because a lot of time is more likely to have passed in between The God Complex and Closing Time than in between A Good Man Goes to War and Let's Kill Hitler. Especially since we know that the Doctor has met River at least a few times during the 200 year gap, and that would probably be a bit weird while he was looking for the younger Melody. Still, for all we know, there were a hundred years during the mid-season break, and a hundred years before Closing Time. Amy and Rory are obviously worried about the Doctor's deeath, but what are they supposed to do about it. Amy doesn't know that the Doctor knows that he's going to die, so what was she supposed to say in The God Complex. She's probably learned enough from her daughter to avoid spoilers. Since they didn't know the Doctor was nearby in Closing Time, and some time had probably passed for them, it wouldn't make sense for them to bring up the Doctor's upcoming death while they were in a store. I'm sure that Amy is worried about the Doctor, but there is nothing that she can do about it.Icecreamdif talk to me 06:21, September 30, 2011 (UTC)

"he has to go back to April": Craig's newspaper in Closing Time was dated 19th April 2011. The point about River's invitation still stands, though.

If the date on Craig's newspaper is genuinely the date of the action (not a prop error like the 1990 date on Rory's badge in The Eleventh Hour), the Amy we saw in Closing Time ought to have been Ganger-Amy a few days before The Impossible Astronaut, so she'd not yet know anything about the Doctor's impending death. However, that would make it at least slightly odd that, in The Doctor's Wife, she'd never heard of the word "petrichor" (part of the TARDIS password), since that was the name of the perfume she was advertising. According to the page in this wiki for Closing Time, that episode takes place on 18th to 21st April 2011, which fits with the newspaper but seems to mean the Doctor is absolutely relying on Royal Mail to deliver the invitations to Amy and Rory the next day and assuming Amy and Rory will be able to get from Leadworth to Utah (booking a flight, getting through security, etc.) in a matter of a few hours. That would make it odd in the extreme that neither Amy nor Rory in The Impossible Astronaut remarked on the shortness of the notice.

Basically, the timing seems very unlikely, so (as Boblipton says) the time sequences are out of whack -- already. They may not be as badly and obviously out of whack as the trailer implied they would be in the next episode but they're at least beginning to head in that direction. The Doctor could use the TARDIS to go back a few days to post the invitations to Amy and Rory, which would ease some of the problems, but still can't explain why, if she'd already begun advertising a perfume of that name, "petrichor" rang no bells with Amy in The Doctor's Wife. The script of The Doctor's Wife specifically drew attention to the word "petrichor" and Amy's lack of familiarity with it -- it was the reason Amy realised she needed to think of the meanings of the words in the password, not merely to say the words themselves. --89.241.65.202 16:05, September 30, 2011 (UTC)