Papal Mainframe

Papal Mainframe
Used by:	The Church
First mentioned in:	A Good Man Goes to War
Appearance:	The Time of the Doctor

The Papal Mainframe was the headquarters of the Church: the militarised, syncretic religious order headed by the Mother Superious Tasha Lem, which later reformed into the Silence during the Siege of Trenzalore.

Due to its being the Mother Superious's headquarters, the Church was sometimes referred to as "the Church of the Papal Mainframe", even after it became the Church of the Silence, (TV: The Time of the Doctor ^[+]Loading...["The Time of the Doctor (TV story)"]) and Colonel Manton once spoke by metonymy of "the Papal Mainfraime herself" to refer to the Mother Superious. (TV: A Good Man Goes to War ^[+]Loading...["A Good Man Goes to War (TV story)"])

When a message was broadcast from the planet Trenzalore, the Papal Mainframe arrived before any other space fleet and erected a force field to prevent orbital bombardment of the human colony below, unaware that a group of Weeping Angels had made planetfall. When the Eleventh Doctor arrived, he and Clara Oswald were dispatched to the town of Christmas below to investigate, leading to the Siege of Trenzalore when the Doctor discovered that the message was a call from the Time Lords, seeking to return to the universe.

Three centuries later, the New Dalek Paradigm had grown tired of the holding action and attacked the Mainframe directly, converting its populace into Dalek puppets. Doing so on Tasha Lem allowed the Dalek pathweb to restore its memory of the Doctor. Still unable to lower the force field, the Daleks engineered a trap for the Doctor, bringing him aboard the Mainframe to exterminate him and ensure the Time Lords would remain lost. Before the Daleks could exterminate them, the Doctor praised Clara's fearlessness when faced with them, denouncing Tasha as spineless and unreliable. The anger allowed Tasha to overcome the Dalek programming, regaining her free will and exterminating the Dalek drones. Before the programming could take over once again, Tasha teleported the Doctor and Clara back to the Doctor's TARDIS. (TV: The Time of the Doctor ^[+]Loading...["The Time of the Doctor (TV story)"])

Behind the scenes

• In A Good Man Goes to War, Manton refers to "the Papal Mainframe herself", suggesting it is a title or office. The Time of the Doctor reveals that the term properly refers to the Church's spacefaring headquarters, while the title of the religious leader is actually Mother Superious. Manton's phrasing would therefore be analogous a person referring to an order from the real-world Pope of the Catholic Church as coming from "Rome himself" or "the Vatican himself"; the correct phrasing would be "the Mother Superious of the Papal Mainframe herself." However, Manton's remark remains problematic in another respect: Time of the Doctor revealed that the branch of the Silence led by Kovarian, which was the one featured in A Good Man Goes to War, had seceded from the authority of Tasha Lem and the Mainframe. It is thus unclear why its permission would be relevant to Manton's actions.