Howling:Six Months Later

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At the beginning of Day of the Moon, it is written "3 months later", and at the end of the episode, it is "6 months later" when the little girl regenerates. That makes it a total of 9 months since the doctor and his companions first arrived to 1969. Could it mean something that the girl regenerated after exactly 9 months of Amy arriving? (which is the total duration of pregnancy)? 94.187.83.217 11:27, May 1, 2011 (UTC)

You might be onto something. 92.29.183.234 11:42, May 1, 2011 (UTC)

Not really. The cause of the regeneration was the fact that she was taken out of the life support machine (astronaut suit), 6 months later, she dies. She managed to hang on for a long time, perhaps because of those mysterious time lord genes? Amy obviously gave birth to the girl at some point before 1969, unless the little girl has a TARDIS, which could mean any time! Ghastly9090 11:45, May 1, 2011 (UTC)

Just because the astronaut suit can provide full life support does not imply that the girl requires it to live. The 6-months-later death/regeneration could have an entirely separate cause. I do hope we find out more though. Remember the Doctor's clone/"daughter" Jenny who we never saw again? I always wondered what she was up to. Of course, this new girl is clearly far more central to the series arc and should show up again.

The little girl doesn't have to have a TARDIS; there are other ways to travel in time--hitching a ride in someone else's TARDIS (or on one a la Jack--sure, that would kill you, but a Time Tot might just regenerate), being carried or led by a Tharil, the Daleks' Time Corridors and related technologies, future humanity's Vortex Manipulators, Gallifreyan Time Rings, random or secretly-non-random Time Storms, cracks in the universe, helpful/evil/capricious quasi-supernatural beings (Fenric, Eternals, etc.), warp drive malfunctions, other random accidents... and that's just what I can remember off-hand out of what we've seen on screen. (Somehow, being around Cybermen seems to make a lot of the more random stuff more likely--see Earthshock, Silver Nemesis, Blood of the Cybermen, etc.--so maybe that's how the Cybermen will come into season 6, he said almost completely jokingly.) --99.33.26.0 08:00, May 5, 2011 (UTC)

I think that the silence are breeding a new race of timelords as well as TARDIS's. they began with Amy's daughter (the little girl).

Alright, I'm getting annoyed with everyone acting on the assumption that the girl is Amy's daughter. We have only minor dashes of evidence to support this. Can we please just continue reffering to her as "The Little Girl" until more evidence is presented?Sorryaboutthatchief 01:53, May 6, 2011 (UTC)

Or just call her The Rani. :) --99.33.26.0 02:45, May 6, 2011 (UTC)

:LOL I missed the part where that was an improvement XD Sorryaboutthatchief 05:38, May 6, 2011 (UTC)

If the little girl is a Time Lord or half Time Lord, there's an obvious possibility for her parentage that doesn't (directly) involve either the Doctor or Amy. The Master, in The Sound of Drums/The Last of the Time Lords, was married. In the earlier part of that story, the part that was not wiped out when the paradox was broken, Lucy didn't act like a neglected wife, rather the opposite. Of course, if the little girl were the Master's daughter, she'd need to have travelled back in time. Perhaps as a baby. Perhaps in the TARDIS. With Amy taking care of her. They could even have been photographed together. 18:35, May 26, 2011

Well, Lucy was one of the people who still remembered the Year (that's why she shot him), and in her timeline that early part was more than a year ago. But sure, it's possible that things didn't turn sour overnight, so she could have gotten pregnant part-way through the year. Or maybe the Master just didn't care that she was no longer interested. Or maybe she even had a child during that Year, who would still exist if she were on the Valiant at the end of the year.

Either way, Lucy says her father "has contacts", and he's later able to use those contacts to secretly gather a team of scientists to create opposite to the Master's life potion, so they seem pretty impressive. Obviously Lord Daddy Cole has a little knowledge of Time Lords, time travel, and at least UNIT-level secrets, so it's plausible that he'd know his granddaughter was a Time Tot, and know to contact the Doctor if she were in danger. (And if Lucy had to give birth in prison, if he could get her the potion while she was in prison, he could presumably get the baby out.)

And I kind of like the idea that the mysterious little girl is only there in 1969 for the Doctor to dicover because they will (later in their timeline) put her there. We've seen a few of those bootstrap loops involving a variety of things (the ending setup in The Lodger, the sonic bit in '"The Big Bang, etc.), but doing the same with a living person is more interesting.

But there's still one question: Of all the things Cole could ask the Doctor to do, how far down the list would be, "Take her back half a century and abandon her in an orphanage run by a creepy weirdo?" I'm not saying every girl who gets hidden from her dangerous father has to be raised by a Senator to be a Princess of a major planet of the Republic, but this seems a little callous. --12.249.226.210 23:18, May 26, 2011 (UTC)

You're confusing intention with outcome; they're not the same. The (apparent) fact that she was abandoned in an orphanage doesn't mean that's what those involved were aiming to do. They might have been, and probably were, trying to do something else but things went wrong. Remember, the Silence has plans for the girl. We don't know what those plans are but we know the Silence are trying to use her. Therefore, we don't just need to consider what Cole, the Doctor etc. intended to do, we also have to consider interference by the Silence. We also need to bear in mind that there may be other factors of which we know nothing, as yet. 89.242.68.115 06:15, May 28, 2011 (UTC)

Point taken. But the problem is that the Doctor, Amy, etc., have already been to 1969, so they know what will happen if they try to take the little girl back to the 1960s. (Maybe Cole doesn't know, but then it seems callous of them to keep it from him, unless there's a good reason.)
Of course there are possible answers to this. Maybe they don't work out that the 9-year-old girl in 1969 has anything to do with the 3-year-old they're taking back to 1963 (or whatever), although that seems pretty thick for the people involved. It's also possible that they have a plan to avert her fate, but it fails. Or maybe they can all predict what's going to happen, and they agonize and argue about it, but ultimately decide that they have no choice because she's a fixed point in time and causality has to be preserved. And here are probably many other things that could happen--especially because, as you say, there are probably other factors of which we know nothing, as yet. But, just because there may be possible answers doesn't mean there's not a question. --99.33.24.89 09:18, May 28, 2011 (UTC)

There is a question: If (big if) the girl is the Master's daughter by Lucy Saxon (nee Cole), why was she taken back in time? However, the question actually asked above was: 'Of all the things Cole could ask the Doctor to do, how far down the list would be, "Take her back half a century and abandon her in an orphanage run by a creepy weirdo?"' which presupposes that he knew what the outcome would be. It would certainly be callous if he did know the outcome but there's every reason to suppose he did not. There's also (as yet) no reason to think Cole asked anyone anything. 89.242.77.101 12:48, May 28, 2011 (UTC)

Another question: According to River, the life-support software in the suit indicated it was intended to support a human but why put the girl in the suit while she was still on Earth? So far as I can see, there's only one reason and it's the same reason the Apollo astronauts were put into their suits while still on Earth: She was about to leave for some other environment where life support would be needed. That suggests to me that it wasn't for the purposes of the Silence that she was wandering around in the suit. They meant to send her somewhere else and she decided she didn't want to play that game. In other words, she was already running away (or trying to) before she did her Tarzan act to get out of the suit. 89.242.77.101 13:04, May 28, 2011 (UTC)

"Well, Lucy was one of the people who still remembered the Year": She did and during that year, something went very badly wrong with her marriage. OK, the fact that it was the Master she was married to meant there was lots wrong with it from the start but she apparently didn't know that at first. During that year, the Master started to abuse her and we've never been given any information why, as in what triggered it. With some men, the arrival of a child has a very bad effect. The mother may not be as willing to have sex during or shortly after the pregnancy as she was before. The man finds he has a rival for her attention in the new baby, etc. That can and too often does result in the man abusing the woman and/or the child. The Master seems just the type to react in such a totally self-centred way. Even if RTD didn't have that in mind when he wrote The Sound of Drums/The Last of the Time Lords, SM might very well have picked up on it as a "hook" on which to hang his new stories. 89.242.64.169 14:22, May 28, 2011 (UTC)

And that's even more reason that it's unlikely that Lucy was pregnant at the end of the episode--which is why I brought up the possibility that the baby could have been born during that year, not after it, which lets the rest of your theory work. --99.33.24.89 19:00, May 28, 2011 (UTC)

I hadn't intended to imply that Lucy had the baby after the Year That Never Was. I'm sorry if I was unclear. The reference to "the part that was not wiped out when the paradox was broken" was to identify which part of the story I meant and only for that purpose. For Lucy herself, none of it was wiped out. I can't see how Lucy could have had a child before the Year That Never Was without that having to be mentioned somehow. Afterwards doesn't work too well, either, although not totally impossible -- I've no reason to think the Master would hesitate to rape his wife, if he felt like it. A birth sometime during that year seems most likely.

The baby (again, if there was one) would most likely have been aboard Valliant but unseen by us. That's easily explained. Lucy would want to keep the child (a provocation) out of the Master's sight and he'd not object to that, if we're assuming he objected to the child's very existence.

There's plenty to use as a hook and enough room for manoeuvre in the timing to let SM adjust details to suit his story. Unfortunately, none of that proves that SM has, in fact, hung anything on the potential hook. We still have to wait and see. 78.146.191.220 01:53, May 29, 2011 (UTC)

OK, so we're pretty much 100% in agreement; that's exactly what I was trying to say. --99.33.24.89 19:34, May 29, 2011 (UTC)

Looks like we are, even if we'd to go all around the houses to convince ourselves of it.

Whoever the girl turns out to be, I want to see a lot more of her. That alleyway scene was brilliantly done by Sydney Wade. I know she's created an impact in other shows and I can understand why. Her manner while talking to the scavenger was spot on; she sounded like someone who knew what she was doing . With the regeneration itself, I'm sure she got lots of help from the director and so on but, in the end, it's down to her to convince the audience that she's really in that situation, seeing things (regeneration energy) that won't be added until postproduction -- and she did convince. 78.146.185.15 22:25, May 29, 2011 (UTC)

I don't think I've seen her in anything else yet, and we didn't get that much of her in those two episodes--but I agree, what little I did see was impressive for a child actor. Of course we'd want to see more of her in any case, given all the mystery about her character, but yeah, that definitely adds to the anticipation. --99.33.24.89 01:45, May 30, 2011 (UTC)

Sydney Wade is in Marchlands, playing a character called Amy (of all names). That character's mother Helen is played by Alex Kingston (DW's River Song). Sydney Wade has got some very good reviews for Marchlands, even though many reviewers think the show itself had a poor ending. I can't say much about Marchlands, because I've not watched it right through, but I did watch some (out of curiosity to see SW in something else) and what I saw makes me think SW deserves her good reviews. Of course, she sounds and behaves quite differently -- no US accent, for a start -- but that just reinforces the point: she's a damn good actress. 2.96.23.10 07:23, May 30, 2011 (UTC)

OK, the girl turns out to be River Song, a.k.a. Melody Pond, and we've not so far seen more of Sydney Wade, just a clip of her in the spacesuit from episode 1 or 2. Still, we've obviously not finished with the young Melody/River, so there's hope yet that SW will make a longer appearance. 89.240.245.9 22:16, June 4, 2011 (UTC)