SPOILER WARNING:
No, this pic isn’t the spoiler. The spoiler is some speculation of mine about the upcoming Doctor Who episode “A Good Man Goes To War,” based on two bits of spoilage, one official and one not. So I’ve relegated it once again to the comments section. Proceed at your own risk.
So, the official bit of spoilage is that River in the preview is dressed in 19th-century garb (and I gotta say, it’s really not the right look for her). The unofficial bit of spoilage is that “part of the story is set in Jack the Ripper era London” — which doesn’t necessarily mean that Jack the Ripper himself is involved, but if he’s not, why describe it that way?
Hence my speculation that River & Ripper will interact. And if they do, there’s only one way that can go, right?
So I predict we’ll see a scene (a brief one — it won’t be a major story point) in which Jack the Ripper is stalking a woman in London, she turns around, we see it’s River, and the Ripper’s career thereupon, um, swiftly terminates.
The real question is, what does Adolphe Thiers have to do with all this?
When I read the subject heading, I really thought you were going to put forward a hypothesis about who River Song is…
The most tantalizing I’ve heard: Amy’s child.
The least plausible: Amy herself.
To lower the bar: River Song is….Jack the Ripper himself! dun-dun-DUN!!
Well, I’m in the grip of an inconsistent triad:
1. There’s evidence (both leaked dialogue, and the new leaked info that the kid is named Melody) that River is Amy’s child.
2. There’s also evidence (most notably the orphanage pics) that the kid we saw regenerating at the end of “Day of the Moon” is Amy’s child.
3. But there’s good reason to doubt that River is the kid we saw regenerating. (For one thing, Moffat has said that River is “100% human.”)
To add to the confusion, there’s Jenny (from “The Doctor’s Daughter”) potentially in the mix.
4. It’s rumored that when Davies was going to kill Jenny off, Moffat requested that he let her live.
5. There’s a character named Jenny coming up, played by a different actress but when one can regenerate that’s no obstacle. And she looks the part.
So if the new Jenny might be the old one, she conceivably might somehow be the little girl too, though I’m not quite sure how to make sense of that. And I suspect this new Jenny will just turn out to be a red herring with no connection to the other one (just as the Gangers’ Sontaran helmets etc. turned out to be).
I also wouldn’t count out the possibility that whatever gets apparently resolved in “A Good Man Goes To War” might get un-resolved by subsequent episodes. And I worry about babies getting switched at some point (Escape from the Planet of the Apes keeps coming to mind …).
I think I read somewhere that Jenny is slated to appear (maybe this has already happened) in some webisodes or some such. Perhaps that’s why they kept her alive. Certainly, it would be crazy not to have her appear again in the future…
In any case, I’m usually the sort of person who occasionally reads spoiler-y material but doesn’t remember it well or reflect about it very much. Thanks for the summary of the available evidence.
I am a little fascinated about the dramatic possibilities of River’s turning out to be Amy’s child. Would we see a younger version of her, then, played by a younger actress, mooning all twitterpated over The Doctor – perhaps while Amy observes? How would Amy react to a romance between her daughter and The Doctor? It all sounds a bit soapy to me. Like Marge Simpson says “Then what happens is that P….with sexy consequences!”
One reason I’m skeptical is that Jennydoc’s return would merit its own episode; it doesn’t seem to be something to be sandwiched into an episode filled with so much other stuff already.
Well, Amy and Rory are almost certainly departing at the end of this series. So the Doc will need a new companion. River (I mean the actress) is unwilling to commit to be more than an occasional guest star. So might next season’s companion be young River?
Actually I’m inclined to doubt it. But it’s possible.
Jennydoc as a companion would be cool too — for similar reasons, actually.
Yeah, I was a bit incredulous about the idea. I hadn’t thought that Amy and Rory would be leaving at the end of this series, but yeah, it makes a lot of sense.
Having Jenny be a companion would be a new and interesting direction to go in, since it would likely lead to a new and different character dynamic. But aren’t the companions supposed to be the audience-surrogates in the show? That is: isn’t this one reason why the companions are consistently contemporary English folks – to motivate The Doctor’s many explanations of alien phenomena, and to allow folks to imagine their own reactions to his wild adventures? Jenny wouldn’t serve this purpose very well, so I’m guessing that if she does end up a companion, she’ll be one alongside an Earthling companion or two – let’s face it, at least one very attractive female Earthling…
But it also makes sense to have a young River as at least a sometimes companion of The Doctor (as the older River has been): perhaps in the 2nd half of the present series, if not in the next series. After all, we need to see her fall in love with him. My image of their early meetings is of a much younger, more naive and innocent River – not the ass-kicking River we’ve seen so far – who is completely enthralled but perplexed by him. Then again, they certainly have already done that whole bit to death: Rose, Martha, Amy (lucky bastard)…
That’s been the case in the revived series (the neither-contemporary-nor-English Jack Harkness aside), but it wasn’t always (though it was usually) the case in the original series. The Doctor’s companions in the original series occasionally included people from the future (à la Harkness; Zoë Heriot is an example) or robots (e.g. Kamelion) or robot dogs (e.g. K-9) or barbarian warriors from other planets (e.g. Leela) or even Americans (e.g. Peri Brown). Most notably, from 1978 to 1981, his companion was Romana, a fellow Time Lord. And she seems to have been popular with audiences, despite not being ideal as a “viewpoint character.” Maybe the new series has been overly cautious?
So, currently on the official Doctor Who website is an animation featuring just four characters: the Doctor, Amy, Rory, and Jenny (which suggests the latter is more important than we might otherwise have thought, which in turn breathes new life into the Jennydoc hypothesis). And along with the animation we hear River’s voice reciting the following poem:
OK, the software won’t let me embed it. But it’s here.
In other news: are these the Headless Monks in the series 5 finale?
And what’s the connection between the Silence and the Monks?
I dunno, but “silence will fall” and “you will bring the silence” wouldn’t be a bad way of describing the death of “the man who talks, the man who reasons, the man who lies.”