Theory:Doctor Who television discontinuity and plot holes/Day of the Moon

You are exploring the Discontinuity Index, a place where any details or rumours about unreleased stories are forbidden.
Please discuss only those whole stories which have already been released, and obey our spoiler policy.

This page is for discussing the ways in which Day of the Moon doesn't fit well with other DWU narratives. You can also talk about the plot holes that render its own, internal narrative confusing.

Remember, this is a forum, so civil discussion is encouraged. However, please do not sign your posts. Also, keep all posts about the same continuity error under the same bullet point. You can add a new point by typing:

* This is point one.
::This is a counter-argument to point one.
:::This is a counter-argument to the counter-argument above
* This is point two.
::Explanation of point two.
::Further discussion and query of point two.

... and so on. 

• At the end of the first episode Rory and River are clearly in trouble... yet no mention is made of how they got out of the pseudo-TARDIS?

They weren't in that much trouble. As we learned later, the Silence rarely act directly; instead of killing the two right there, they'd just make plans at their leisure for the human authorities to take care of the "terrorists" later, in a way that would raise no questions and require little effort.

There was flashing and an explosion! clearly something went down while Rory and River were in the lodger TARDIS. Although we know they survived anyway so the details arn't really needed by the viewer.

It may be that a later episode will come back and fill in the gaps, as "The Big Bang" did with episodes from earlier in that season, revealing more things happened than we're aware of. There was a lot of stuff left out, including the point raised below about how they came to keep records. There's plenty of room to fill in the blanks.

It may also be that their encounters with so many Silence caused their memory of that period to get a bit swiss-cheesed, and the viewers don't get to see it to represent how it's missing for the characters themselves.

The episode is from The Doctor, Amy, Rory and River's point of view. Rory and River don't remember how they escaped so we don't see it.

• Never-minding that two people probably couldn't lift a rock of dwarf star material, where did the US government get dwarf star material in the first place if they're just now getting to the moon?

Planet Earth has dealt with numerous of aliens and especially alien technology. Secret organisations such as Torchwood were up and running at the time. Earth is educated in many things alien. They only went to the moon because the Silence edged them too.

Since the prison was actually part of the Doctor's plan, he may have told them where to get it.

They are at Area 51. They probably have lots of alien technology there.

They do make a point of referring to it as an alloy, meaning it contains some other elements. Maybe they're hollow and filled with some particularly super-light substance? Could they have built it out of the pandorica?

Another possibility is that the Silence provided the material - as they were using technology from multiple alien races, they could've just as well given some of it to their unknowing operatives.

• Why was the Doctor captured and Amy, Rory and River hunted down? If they were working for the President, surely nobody would capture them and lock them up?

This was most likely part of the Doctor's plan in order to gain intelligence on the Silence.

And to keep the Silence off their trail. The Silence wanted to eliminate them, and Delaware was able to fool them into believing he was doing it for them. Only he, the Doctor, and Nixon knew any different.

Alternatively, the Silence were influencing the FBI to pursue the group.

However, the episode's explicit reasoning for this is given by the Doctor, as the whole point was to throw the Silent off their trail. Which is confusing seeing as the Silence were unable to infiltrate the Tardis. If they weren't able to, and the Tardis wasn't compromised why would they need to throw the Silence off in the first place?

We don't know that the TARDIS wasn't compromised. They may or not have something to do with it blowing up last season, after all. Additionally, if they didn't want to arouse suspiscion, letting the Silence think they were controlling the situation was probably a better move than having Delaware conveniently disappear into the TARDIS off and on for three months while they were all doing their investigation.

• The Doctor put the device in Apollo 11 before he received the video of the Silent and before he even knew what it was going to say. Why would he set it up?

Canton was probably trying to make The Silent order their deaths. It was the plan.

Any commands someone hears when looking at a Silent have effect; the Doctor already knew this (and demonstrated by having Canton adjust his tie). Any video of a Silent would have worked with a command sent along with it.

• How come The Doctor, Amy, Rory or River don't try to kill The Silence on sight? They must have seen the Lunar Landing.

The post-hypnotic command was never in the footage they saw in their own timeline.

And, we have precendent for the time travelers themselves not being effected by changes to the timeline, since they're at the center of the vortex, so to speak.

• Why didn't the Doctor sense that the Little Girl was a Time Lady?

The Doctor can't always sense a Time Lord or Lady if they are not synchronised with his time line, for example, The Master during Series 3.

The reason the Doctor couldn't sense the Master was because of the Archangel Network, not because there timelines weren't synced. Until we know the full nature of the little girl, we don't know for sure that the Doctor should have been able to sense her.

The space suit the Little Girl was in was composed of "at least 20 races of alien technology", so because of all that stuff (and the fact that space suits are supposed to be air tight), he probably couldn't smell her, since she was out of the suit before the Doctor got to it.

'Smell' is probably a very literal way of looking at Time Lord's sensing each other (despite the odd emphasis on it in End of Time) as the Doctor expects to detect Time Lords on the other side of the universe doing this.

It's always possible that the Doctor _did_ sense that she was a Time Lady, or that she was whatever else she might turn out to be, or at least that he sensed that there was something special going on that he couldn't quite figure out. He calls out the mystery at the end of the episode, after all.

If the little girl is in fact River then she is not fully timelord as it is said in A Good Man Goes To War that River is a Time Lord Human hybrid as her DNA is Human plus Time Lord so her Human DNA may work like a chameleon arch and disguised her Time Lord DNA form the Doctor.

• What happens to all the bodies of the dead Silence that are (presumably) killed by the humans in the open?

Buried? Burned? Whatever the human race normally does with alien bodies.

Exactly. Wouldn't the discovery of dead aliens littering the planet cause disruptions in the timeline?

It wouldn't if no one could remember seeing them.

So where does that leave the bodies? Do they just lie there and decompose?

The Doctor explicitly told the Silence that if they were smart, they'd run as fast as they could. It's not like they're Zygons who believe that backing down from a plan is equivalent to suicide, or Sontarans who would actively prefer to go down in battle than to retreat. Even if they pooh-poohed the Doctor's warning at first, they would have realized he was right pretty quickly, and gotten off the planet or gone into hiding as fast as they could.

That does make sense sort of since we only saw the humans turning against the Silence. We never actually see them actually killing them...

Well, _some_ of them are going to get killed. The only question is whether it's enough to choke the sewers, or just a handful of them.

• If the Silence have been guiding the human race's technological development, couldn't destroying the Silence cause a decline in humanity's technological growth?

It was stated by the doctor that the Silence don't create things by themselves, they act as a parasite and steal human technology. Humanity is still a naturally creative, and inventive race.

It can probably be assumed the Silence make specific nudges depending on what they need at the time, rather than spurring humans to motion in general.

This could actually be a reference to the actual timeline, because we really did have a technological advancement thing going on for a while up until around that general time. We are still improving, but more so then than now.

It seems the Silence's posthypnotic suggestion works by planting an idea of what to do rather than how to do it and leave the rest up to the Human race so everything is of human origin rather than Silence.

• If the earlier Doctor arrived in the Tardis from his timeline, wouldn't the older (dead) Doctor's Tardis be left in 1969?

No, it would be left in 2011.

Which still leaves two questions. Firstly: Where is that Doctor's TARDIS? Secondly: What happens to a Timelord's TARDIS when they die?

According to the novel Blood Heat, it begins to die, but it takes a long, long time. The 7th Doctor picked up the TARDIS of an alternate-timeline 3rd Doctor 20 years after his death, and it was still in good enough shape to use. Other novels have implied similar things.

"There is a cemetery of dead Tardises at the end of time" Read on the website, if I'm not mistaking. It is probably going to commit "time-suicide" or something like that.

200 year older Doctor dies, he arrived in the Tardis with Amy and Rory, 200 year younger Doctor arrives in 1969, wouldn't he be surprised that Amy and Rory were there already? Or would he assume River Song brought them? The younger Doctor leaves with Amy and Rory in his Tardis, but the future Doctor's Tardis would be left where Amy and Rory exited it. Would this create a paradox?

The younger Doctor meets them in the dinner in 2011 after the older Doctor dies in 2011. THEN they travel to 1969.

Does the TARDIS have some kind of "perception filter" which causes people to not really notice it (like Prisoner Zero) or forget it (like the Silence)? In "The Parting of the Ways", the Doctor sends Rose back to Earth in the TARDIS when he thinks he is going to die. He tells her to just "let the TARDIS die", and to leave it where it lands, confident that "No one can open it, no one will even notice it."

This is correct - In fact, I think the very first mention of perception filters in the new series (and they have been mentioned oh-so-very many times since) might have been in relation to the TARDIS.

Correct, the perception filter technology was originally referenced in regard to the TARDIS. Regardless of that, there's no particular paradox in play here. Older Doctor goes to 2011 and dies, leaving his TARDIS quietly sitting in the Utah dessert (or wherever it may be). Younger Doctor shows up nearby with his TARDIS, runs into his friends, and they all leav in his TARDIS off to adventure. Older Doctor's TARDIS is still there.

The Doctor seemed to know he was going to die. Why else would he send an invitation to himself and warn the others not to interfere? Also since this Doctor is from the future, he already knows about the TARDIS "graveyard" in the bubble universe. Seems just as likely he could have programmed the TARDIS to fly there immediatley after he exited it. Wouldn't matter if anyone found it there as there were plenty of other TARDISes anyway.

• Canton states that no signal could get through the walls of the Doctor's prison, but he sends the recording of the Silence to the Doctor and to Apollo 11 from inside the prison.

He left the door open.

he was likely using a superphone which gets signal anywhere as seen in World War Three

I was going to say - cell towers in '69?

Canton didn't send the video directly from Amy's phone, he pressed play and then clamped it onto some kind of transmitter which looked like the one the Doctor installed in the lunar module.

• If Amy was with the Silence and didn't remember the last few days she was locked up with them how did she remember calling Rory 'stupid face' and leaving him that message

We don't know how much Amy remembers, but if she didn't see the Silence while she was leaving the message, she may still remember it.

• How did The Doctor and his companions leap from never remembering The Silence in episode 1 to actively keeping record of and going after The Silence in episode 2?

There was a three-month gap in-story between the episodes. My guess is that when the Silence attacked at the end of TIA, the group escaped, realized that had been attacked but couldn't remember anything about the attackers, and then went about trying to discover the attackers.

Remember that Amy took a photo of one in the White House, and that you are aware of the Silence when you are looking at one, in addition to recalling all your previous sightings and encounters. If Amy saw the photo on her phone, as long as someone was looking at it they would be aware of the Silence and that they had seen them in the warehouse. As soon as they looked away they would forget, but while looking at the photo they could have formulated the plan to "tally" the sightings.

Also remember that at one point near the end, the Doctor specifically tells them to keep one Silence in sight at all times. Presumably they've done this before--maybe even using the hologram--to make it possible for them to make their plans.

That still doesn't explain how they were able to start remembering. At one point when the group is inside the Tardis, and viewing the hologram of a Silent, the Doctor explains that the longer you look away, the more you forget. If this is true, then no amount of video recording or looking at Silent could cause you to remember them. As for formulating the plan while looking at a Silent, they would have forgotten about formulating that plan as well. Essentially everyone would be stuck in a "Wait, what are we tallying again?" loop.

That part's easy - not everyone needs to be looking at the Silent while they're planning. If person 1 is looking at a Silent and describing what they are seeing, and what they remember from previous encounters, while person 2 is *not* looking at a Silent, then it's true that person 1 will forget all about that once the image of the Silent is gone. However, person 2 would remember.

• In the episode 'Blink' the Doctor and Martha are stuck in 1969 and state they have watched the moon landing four times. Does this mean the doctor must have already seen the silence ordering everyone to kill them? Also does this mean there were two versions of the doctor in 1969?

The Doctor has traveled to many of the same years / dates as previous incarnations of himself, he just tries to make sure he doesn't run into those incarnations. That said, this is just an instance of the Doctor rewriting history. His previous selves haven't experienced this particular timeline, and the Doctor is known to rewrite history every now and again and since his living timeline isn't linear, being a time traveler, his previous selves would be unaffected by the change.

Also, in "Blink" when they said that the watched the moon landing, I think they meant that they watched it live from the moon not on TV. That's what made it special for them. Otherwise they could've watched in on TV in any other year not 1969. So if Martha and the Doctor were physically on the moon during the moon landing, then they didn't see the Silence since it was only on TV.

Martha (and any of the other new-who companions) would have seen recordings of the famous moon landing a few times in their lifetime. The previous point of the Doctor's timeline not being linear still stands.

For that matter, most of the old-Who companions would have seen it, too. Only the first 6 seasons of the show were before 1969, so everyone from Liz Shaw on (and that's even if the UNIT stories weren't set in the future--she started in 1970) would undoubtedly have seen the moon landing (except for a few special cases like Leela). (And, even from the first 6 seasons, Vicki, Steven, and Zoe were from the future.) But so what? Maybe Liz Shaw and UNIT had seen the Doctor's message in 1969, and were still killing Silents off-camera every once in a while. Or maybe the Doctor hadn't changed the timeline yet, so they were all under Silence control. Or maybe theory 4) below is right and the Silence hadn't changed the timeline yet so they weren't even on Earth in the timeline where we were watching Liz run around. None of those lead to any contradictions. The same options exist for Martha (except that in the first option there probably weren't too many left to kill).

• River Song says that the child said that the Spaceman was going to eat her. The only way she could have heard this was through the phone of the President or recordings of these calls. However, it was the space suit which made the calls to the highest authority, so the girl would have to be already inside the suit when the calls were made.

I'm confused by what you're trying to point out as a plot hole here. One assumes once the President accepts the Doctors help, he is made privvy to the full extent of the phone calls and thus the Doctor tells his team what's on the tapes (River included.) Also, yes, the child is the space suit when the calls are made. So, what are you trying to say is the plot hole?

The only way that the message that the Spaceman is going to eat her could be sent, would be to be inside the suit itself. Therefore, the Spaceman has already ate her. So why would she say that the Spaceman is going to eat her?

The suit can connect to the president's phone line, no matter where he is. Starting a call from a phone in the same room would be fairly easy in comparison. Also keep in mind that the suit was there to protect the little girl. It mightn't be able to give her oxygen or stop her from needing food while she's outside of it, but surely it can make a phone call for her.

The Doctor says the little girl suffers night terrors, and that this causes the President to get calls in the middle of the night. The girl is dreaming, traumatised by the memory of the spaceman coming to eat her.

River, Amy and Rory were watching what was happening on the scanner so they would know about what was been said.

You're forgetting the obvious-River was the little girl. Unlike rory and amy, she doesn't need to have been told it or overheard it, she was the one who experienced it. She probably did re learn it again or had an alibi, because if she just plucked information out of the air that it would be impossible for her to know would make the doctor as well as others suspicious.

• Why didn't the soldiers question Nixon walking out of a large impregnable box that had been closed for days? Surely they would have suspected some sort of trick?

Nixon is the President of the United States. They are not going to question him.

Keep in mind that these aren't just soldiers, these are soldiers who have been rewarded with one of the best assignments in the army (especially when the alternative was the jungles of Vietnam), and who are cleared for the highest levels of secrecy, so they're not likely to be the type that talks back to superiors. Also, in 1969, many soldiers were still enthusiastically pro-Nixon, and their first reaction would be, "Wow, I got to meet the President in person!" rather than, "How did Tricky Dicky get in there?" And finally, I'm pretty sure soldiers stationed at Area 51 saw all kinds of bizarre things regularly, and were reminded on a daily basis, "It's not your job to think about it, it's your job to follow orders."

• Amy was (presumably) captured by the Silents and the space suit after having marked tally counts on her arms and face. When she awakens in the pseudo-TARDIS control room, she has no marks. It's clear that the implanted recorder was taken from her hand; why do the Silents also wash her face and arms? Or do we catch up with a later version of her having missed a longer series of events?

The Silence could have washed the tally marks off so that Amy would not remember how many she saw at the orphanage.

The Amy that the Doctor saves is Ganger Amy (The Almost People) and this Amy doesn't have the tallies on her.

No it isn't, she had a vision of the eye patch lady before they took her.

It is said later in the series that Amy was taken 'before America', therefore she is, for pretty much the whole first haf of the series in her ganger form. Also, she is in the Silence TARDIS for a few days, who is to say the marks don't just rub off?

• Dwarf star material is not the densest or heaviest material in the universe. Even if black holes can't be used in construction, and quark matter (and preon matter, string matter, etc.) doesn't exist in the Whoniverse (we don't know whether it exists in ours), there's still neutronium, which we've actually seen used on the show. Given that human scientists had conjectured about neutronium years before 1969, and discovered actual neutron stars in 1967, and science fiction had been using it for years, the Doctor can't be lying to trick the humans or to avoid questions.
  

Perhaps dwarf star alloy *is* the densest material in the universe, or at least the densest that they were able to land their hands on at that time. If the latter, the Doctor can be probably be given the luxury of a slight exaggeration, given the circumstances. Since it is an alloy, however, that implies that it was somehow manufactured starting from other materials. This artificial alloy may well be denser than neutronium.

The "at least" part is a good answer. Maybe 1969 Whoniverse Earth scientists think they've proven that neutronium is impossible, and rather than convince them otherwise, the Doctor goes with the "slight exaggeration".

But as for it actually _being_ the densest material in the universe--no. There's a limit to how densely you can compress atomic nuclei, and neutronium is what happens when you go beyond that limit. White dwarf cores have a density of about one billion, while neutron stars about a billion billion (those are short billions, in kg/m^3).

And being an alloy doesn't help. First, dwarf cores are already "alloys"; a typical white dwarf is made of carbon and oxygen (with trace amounts of other elements). Second, alloying a material with a lighter material doesn't make it denser (but it can make it stronger, which is the whole point).

• The Doctor says something like "a lot more happened in 1969 than anyone remembers" at the start of the whole thing. Does that mean that _he_ remembered it the whole time? If so, how? If not, what else could it mean?

From this Doctor's point of view, it all happened 200 years ago. He may not be able to remember the Silence themselves, but he remembers all the tally marks and voice recordings, and he remembers how he stopped the Silence.

• If the Silents were running the show "since the wheel and the fire", why didn't they do anything about all those invasions and other crises in the intervening millennia? I can think of a few answers, but none of them are fully satisfying.

1) The Silents assumed that Earth would be a reasonably safe place to conquer. They got very unlucky when Earth turned out to be the favorite place in the neighborhood to shake a conquering stick at, and just as lucky that the Doctor (and Sarah Jane, Torchwood, and a few others) always just managed to thwart the invaders and save silencity as well as humanity. That works, but it's kind of dramatically sterile to triumph over such a race.

2) The Silents will have time travel in the future (which is how there was one at the picnic in 2001), and therefore they knew that the Doctor would avert these invasions. There may have been plenty of other invasions that they had to take care of themselves (or nudge humanity into taking care of), which we never saw because we're watching Doctor Who rather than The Silent Chronicles, or maybe there weren't. Possible, but how did they know that without also knowing that the Doctor would overthrow them in 1969?

3) The Silence _have_ been doing something about it--they've been manipulating Sarah Jane, Torchwood, even the Doctor, and even in one instance the Master into saving the world all those times. That kind of takes away the whole point of the entire series; all those times we've watched the Doctor beat the aliens, he's just been the pawn of the Silence, saving humanity to continue being unwitting slaves?

4) The Silence have been there since the wheel and the fire. But, until The Big Bang, they _hadn't_ been there since the wheel and the fire. Forgive the lack of time-travel-appropriate tenses here. Rory as we first met him had never been an Auton, but Rory a year later has been an Auton, because time was rewritten. And time was rewritten in a big way--it was completely rebooted from the memories of the TARDIS crew and a bit of air from London in 2011. In fact, that may have been their entire plan last season. They set up the TARDIS explosion, knowing that the Doctor would come up with some clever way to avert it by making use of Amy's memories. They also insinuated themselves into Amy's subconscious memories. So, when history was recreated, they were written into it, going back thousands of years. Of course Amy, the Doctor, and the viewers all remember the old timeline, where the Silence weren't in control, and the Doctor was saving Earth for humanity. But The Big Bang created a new timeline, where the exact same actions by the Doctor were actually saving the Earth for the Silence. And, because the Silence had been present in the old-timeline 2011, they knew that their planet was safe at least until 2011. If I had to put money on it, this is the one I'd bet on. But I have a hard time imagining that the Moff would expect everyone to figure all this out, so unless they're planning on explaining it at great length in a later episode, there must be something simpler.

You are all missing it, all those things you are talking about, haven't happened yet, there have only been a few invasions before now, and if they did succeed, all the the silence would have is another of slaves, why should they interfear?

First, Moffat never said that the cracks and/or the universe's reboot erased every single threat to the Earth in its entire history. They did erase the ones that changed humanity, making us all accept alien invasions as a "ho-hum, again?" matter of course, but that's all he's said. This could mean that the universe was recreated backward from 2011 London, with humans who don't believe in aliens as part of the consistency conditions. Or maybe there were just a random smattering of things that were erased, and that happens to include the handful of invasions in the 2000s (and 1851--and maybe 1975, because he did once mention Nessie in the Thames as the only similar case in the classic series) plus a handful of others (but we'll probably never know exactly which others).

Either way, that still leaves a lot of major threats to the planet. And not every threat would have just meant more Silence slaves. Maybe the Silence could control, say, the Empty Child-infected humans in 1941, or even the Nestene in 1971+UNIT, what about the Pirate Planet that nearly made it to Earth and compressed it into a tiny ball in 1978, or the Slitheen plan to blow the Earth into radioactive slag, or countless others of times that aliens were going to destroy rather than conquer humanity? Just because those threats were aborted by the Doctor early on (or, in a few cases, aborted pretty late but effectively covered up by UNIT) doesn't mean the Silence didn't have anything to worry about--unless, of course, they knew what was going to happen and/or were using the Doctor.

Some of the incidents may have been things they would not have been able to prevent, including Pirate Planet (would they have even known that the Earth was about to have anothre planet materialise around it and destroy it?). Also, they were presumably out of the picture for anything after 1969.

If an alien race with better technology than Humans invaded that would just mean they have control over a race with better technology plus remaining humans. The things the Silence could do with Dalek tech would be unthinkable and the race would not remember them anyway so why would they stop it in the first place.

This doesn't answer any of the above points. If there were a bunch of incidents that they would not have been able to prevent, that means they just got unreasonably lucky that the Doctor managed to save the world for them? And again, there were plenty of attempts to actually destroy the Earth rather than conquer it; there's no way those events could have benefited the Silents.

It's possible that Earth recieves markedly fewer threats than other planets; invasion and destruction and whatnot may be far more common on most other planets.

The Silents were always there. It's just that no one could remember them, not even the Doctor. There is nothng complicated going on like alternate timelines, just that if the Doctor did notice them before, he was too busy to pay much attention, then he forgot about them.

That's already one of the options above, and it doesn't answer any of the problems raised above.

• Why stop the Silents at all? Have they really done anything wrong? As far as I can tell, having them around isn't really hurting anything.

Well, they DID try to blow up the universe...

Also, the Doctor kind of has this thing for letting people be masters of their own fate, and most modern humans feel similarly. Would slavery be OK if nobody ever whipped their slaves? Or maybe only if nobody told the slaves that they were property?

They kidnapped Amy, drove Renfrew insane, murdered Joy, imprisoned the little girl. The Silents are clearly malevolent.

Presumably, there are a LOT of Silents. Yes, they murdered Joy but that's really about the only thing they've done that could be characterized as malevolent, and surely the crimes of a single individual cannot be used to indict an entire species? There's nothing explicit or implicit in any of the Who episodes from series 6 or 5 to indicate the Silence blew up the Tardis (and judging from what we saw of them in 6x01 and 6x02, it's highly unlikely they would have the technological capacity to do so). Yes, they kidnapped Amy--but look at what she was doing--she had essentially invaded their home. She wasn't killed or tortured, simply detained. And Renfrew? Yes, they drove him mad. But it should ALSO be pointed out that they chose an isolated, abandoned building to "nest" in, which would result in the least amount of contact with humans, and therefore, the least amount of damage inflicted upon human minds from prolonged exposure.

It's clear that the Silence are SUPPOSED to be evil, malevolent "big bads." The problem, however, lies in their depiction. We never really see them do anything evil, nor do we learn anything about their plans other than they involved, you know, instigating one of the greatest moments in humankind's history. The only crime the species has committed is the fact they're born with the whole "forget when you look away" perception filter thing. They can't help that.

The Silents themselves clearly think they're bad guys. Go back and watch the conversation between Canton and the injured Silent again. Does that sound like someone who thinks he's innocent and that there's no reason humanity should be offended by what's being done to them?

It's not slavery, it's symbiosis. Again, it's a matter of depiction. In the episode(s), the Silents are not portrayed as evil or slave-owning or anything like that. The relationship is mutually beneficial. The Silents use humans to make stuff, the humans (apparently) get all of their ideas/inspiration for cool high-tech stuff from the silence. If you compare what the Silents have done in the episode versus how they're portrayed, we've got "one random murder" versus "the space age."

I won't say the Silents aren't evil. Clearly, they ARE meant to be evil. The problem is, they're not depicted as evil. We have the characters say that they make humans slaves, we have characters SAY that they can give "commands" and crap, but we never actually see ANY of that happen. Nor are we privy to ANY dialog of substance between the Silence and anyone else. In short, they're too insubstantial to be considered evil. The idea is there, but the background material--the justification--is absent. Like a hole. In the plot.

Not depicted as evil, huh? So I guess Joy deserved to be vaporized?

No, it's not symbiosis, it's parasitism. Here's the one major dialog we _are_ privy to: "You tend to my wounds. You are foolish." "Why? What would you do in my place?" "We have ruled your lives since your lives began. You should kill us all on sight. But you will never remember we were even here. Your will is ours." Do you have to do a campy Master laugh for an Evil Overlord speech to count? The Silence clearly consider the humans their slaves, and even gloat over how complete their domination is. Why shouldn't we (and the Doctor and his companions) trust them on that?

As for being mutually beneficial--the humans don't get their ideas for cool high-tech stuff from the Silents. The Silents don't invent anything. Humans would be doing all kinds of high-tech things either way, but instead of doing high-tech things that serve their own human purposes, they're doing high-tech things that serve the Silent's purpose. Again, that's parasitism. It may not be that harmful ("a good parasite never destroys its host"), but it's at least somewhat negative, and there's no positive to balance it out.

That dialog we are privy to (the only thing in the entire episode, by the way, that indicates the species as a whole is evil) occurs AFTER the Doctor sets the plan in motion to kill all of them, and the Doctor himself could not have been aware of it, so from his point of view....

Think about it--he suspected it for all the reasons we saw on screen, and presumably many that we didn't. His plan was perfect--if they really were villains, it would work, while if they really were just understood, it couldn't (because no friendly symbiont would give the Evil Overlord speech).

As for the whole symbiosis thing... keep in mind we don't really know ANYTHING about the Silents beyond what we see them do, and what they say. Everything about post-hypnotic suggestion? About being parasites? That's all the Doctor's supposition. Based on zero evidence, by the way. There's more to indicate that he's WRONG about the post-hypnotic suggestion at least: the only time we see a Silent give an order to anyone, it's to tell Amy to tell the Doctor what he "must not know." Clearly, from Amy's perspective, this can only be his death. 4 episodes in, she hasn't mentioned it, so we can assume the whole post-hypnotic suggestion thing is completely wrong.Are the Silents bad enough for genocide? The Doctor only kills when he's facing absolute evil, like the Daleks. He kills Daleks, we've seen him kill Daleks. But are the Silence really Dalek-bad? He should definitely defeat them, there's little question of that... but should he have massacred them? And don't say he had no other way of beating them, because while that's true, it's irrelevent. It's always been my opinion that if the Doctor were faced with a decision between killing an enemy who didn't quite deserve it and letting them get away, he would let them get away. I mean, we've known this man for forty-eight years, and knowing him as we do, let me ask you this: if he had a gun, and saw someone who had just robbed a convenience store running away, would he shoot them? NO. This is THE DOCTOR we're talking about. The only reason he's never had to make that choice is because it's never been in the script.

There is never any indication that the Silence gave humans anything in return for what they received. They simply manipulated humanity into giving them what they needed. Think about it. They are an advanced alien race who has discovered space travel for themselves at the very least. If they wanted to help humanity, they wouldn't have left them to develop Apollo 11 on their own. They are simply slavedrivers and parasites, not symbiotes. In addition, the Silence kidnapped Amy and River Song, tried to use River to kill the Doctor, and possibly blew up the Tardis in the previous season. They definitely are malevolent.

The Doctor is kind of like Batman. He doesn't kill unless he absolutely has to (see Dinosasurs on a Spaceship). In this case, he gave them the chance to run away before making them give the order to be killed on sight. Now that humanity is killing them on sight, they will leave Earth if they have good sense, which is exactly what the Doctor had in mind in the first place.

The Silents tried to blow up the ENTIRE UNIVERSE. YES, they are Dalek-bad.

We know that, according to The Silents, "We have ruled your lives since your lives began." That seems pretty good confirmation that they've enslaved humanity in some way. Of course it's possible that the Doctor was right about the what but wrong about the how and just got lucky... but it's simpler to assume the Doctor was right about both.

• After the alien informs the Doctor that its species are the Silents, the Doctor continues to refer to it as the Silent throughout the rest of the episode. How does he remember being told that the aliens are called the Silents?

I don't recall the Doctor trying to stop them from leaving Earth. In fact IIRC he even told them to leave before they all get massacred. "How fast can you run? Because today's the day the human race throw you of their planet" So as you say, he did "let them get away" unless they were stupid enough to try to stay. But that's their choice to stay and die, not his. As he's said previously, you only get one chance. "No second chances, that's the kind of man I am"

All information learnt is recorded on that device in their hands remember?

• If the Silents have always been around and you remember previous sightings every time you see one, shouldn't everyone upon remembering them be totally aware of there presence? I mean, Canton acts like he's never seen them, but chances are he would have ran into many in his time.

Steven Moffat has suggested that people are to some degree aware of the Silent's existence on a subconscious level. Anyway, the Silents have probably spent most of their time on Earth living underground, only appearing in the open when they needed to influence someone or observe something.

Good point! That also explains why the gutters aren't clogged with Silent corpses 5 minutes after the moon landing.

• When you look away from a Silent, what exactly happens? The episode(s) seemed to imply that you forgot everything about the Silents... but if you open a door to a room, look inside and see Silence, and leave the room, do you remember ever looking inside? Likewise, how can anyone forget about Silents if it's all keyed into visuals? All you have to do is have one character looking at a Silent (like a photo on a cell phone) and the other characters NOT looking at it. Sure, the person not looking won't remember anything, but won't everyone listening still remember the conversation? Wouldn't that kind of... wiggle-room allow for crude sketches, more open dialot, etc., etc. Basically, the whole manner in which the Silence were depicted seems pretty wonky, silly, and not entirely well-thought out to me.

I think those kind of incidents are what gave rise to the classic bug-eyed-alien cliché and the men in black myths.

I'm willing to bet these are exactly the sorts of tricks the Doctor, Amy, and Rory used to devise their plans during the three month gap.

I think you would remember what you would see if the Silence was not standing there.

The whole point of the silence is you forget. Do you ever have times when you go downstairs and forget why you went downstars? Or gone out of the house and forgotten if you locked the door even though you did it a few seconds earlier? Ever been totally alone and terrified at nothing? Ever had the feeling that someone is watching you even though there is noone nearby? These are supposed to be times when you might have had a silence encounter. And that makes them even more scary.

• The Doctor states that the Silents have ordered their own destruction, but couldn't they just use post-hypnotic suggestion to stop the humans from killing them?

Perhaps, although the next time the person watched the moon-landing footage again, they would want to kill them.

Also the post hypnotic suggestion appears only to work once some one has looked away from a Silent. Once somebody saw a Silence and tried to kill it, as long as they didn't look away, the Silence's suggest of "don't kill me" wouldn't take hold.

In order to stop all Humans killing them they would need to find something that most people would watch and want to rewatch years later with before the internet would be a problem.

• How did Canton kill Amy and Rory? Surely the other agents would have known if they were dead or just faking death when they but Amy and Rory into body bags.

Depends how careful they were. Presumably the agents weren't going to be checking for a pulse, since they just saw the person shot at point-blank range. Amy and Rory would have each just needed to be completely still for a moment until they were in the bag, which Canton undoubtedly had done quickly and may have even done himself.

I assumed they've got high-tech alien stunguns at Area 51 that can put people into a kind of temporary stasis that could fool a doctor, much less an average FBI agent, into thinking it was death, and that he and the Doctor disguised one of them as a pistol. So, Amy gets shot, goes into statis, and wakes up an hour later in a body bag in a truck, where Canton let her in on the whole thing..

It was explained in the Brilliant book 2012: The Doctor gave Amy and Rory Cryostasis pills which made it seem like they were dead,

• This is an error in the wibbly wobbly timey wimey nature of time. Rory is watching a TV show that he has seen many times, yet he does as if he knows nothing about the Doctor waving into the camera and dancing. Since the Doctor did this in the past when the show made, Rory should have memories of seeing the Doctor in the show, and would anticipate his appearance instead of looking into the book.

Not necessarily. We don't know "when" (relative to Rory & Amy's timeline) the Doctor inserted himself into that film. He may not have been in there the previous times that Rory had watched it. Not being Time Lords, our understanding of how that works is somewhat limited. Or, if indeed he had seen the Doctor in it before, they presumably had already talked about and processed that information, and didn't really need to re-visit it. Having seen it many times, he would then not have necessarily been compelled to watch the scene intently.

This is the whole point of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey. Time isn't linear. There's not just a single 1939 (the year Flying Deuces was made)--there's 1939 before the Doctor changed it, and 1939 after the Doctor changed it. In 2010, the original 1939 was in Rory's past; in 2011, the new 1939 was. If this couldn't happen, there would be no way for time travelers to do anything at all.

not alternate timeline, he changed history so that he was always there. why are the people on here so obsessed about parralel time streams? when the doctor changes time, he changes that time stream. only on extreem ocasions does his tampering produce a parallel time stream. so therefore, the movie always had the doctor in it, uinless that version that they were watching was the only one changed, like if he joind the dance for one take and on amy and rory's dvd he changed the original scene with the take that had him on it, so therefore the original movie wasn't changed, just their dvd version altered by the doctor. because that is the copy that rory has always had, he doesn't notice any difference. all the other copies are fine.

Nobody said anything about an alternate timeline, just 'wibbly-wobbly'. The reason people here are 'obsessed' about them is because Moffat has flat-out told us that's how the Whoniverse works, and even had the Doctor tell us in-universe in the 2011 DVD mini-episodes.

• Was it out of character for Rory to allow his wife to travel alone through the US for three whole months?

I suppose The Doctor would have convinced Rory before this happened.

Also Rory knows Amy can take care of herself.

Perhaps Rory and Amy were travelling together and had to seperate for some reason.

• River song jumped off the building backwards. Confirmed dead. Caught by Tardis. Paradox?

Canton was obviously lying about that part.

It's also possible she was caught by the TARDIS and the TARDIS dematerilised fast enough that it looked like River had just picked up speed in her fall.

Nothing confirmed. Canton said that it was because he saw her fall off a building that he assumed her dead as he thought there was no way to survive a fall from that height.

• As Canton was on there side the whole time, and the deaths were staged to throw the silence of there track, why did River jump off the building? Sure she knew the doctor would catch her but why go to all that trouble, why not play along like the others did?

Such reckless actions are commonplace for River.

• Why don't the Doctor, Amy, and Rory start killing the Silents on sight as soon as they see the "you should kill us all on sight" footage? Canton sent it to the Doctor on that communicator, so it should have affected the Doctor just like it affected all of the humans who saw it during the moon landing broadcast? Likewise for Amy and Rory - they're right in front of a television as the Doctor edits in the footage, so they see the command, but instead of killing the Silents, Rory focuses on getting Amy free from her restraints and after that, they run toward the TARDIS with no regard for the Silents around them, even though they just saw the same command as everyone else.

They did... Remember the Doctor's introduction of 'my friend River' who is 'good with a gun, which I shouldn't like but I do.'? They just had the self control and sight contact with the Silents to not start immediately. Also, it's subconscious information, meaning that Rory would have known by the time he stepped back out of the TARDIS, but not before then. Rory didn't have a gun, and something that should be killed on sight is dangerous, so he looked scared, and River shot it, despite that she had forgotten it by that point.

• How does information about the Silents erase itself? Information isn't sentient, so it can't know what it is and that it needs to be erased. And what are the limits of this? The Doctor seems to imply that simply telling someone about them won't stick because it'll erase itself, but those are just words, and the person receiving the information wouldn't even be looking at a Silent, so there wouldn't be anything to propagate the effect.

• Was it ever explained what exactly it was that the Doctor "must know, and must never know"? Is it Amy's pregnancy and the Doctor's death, respectively? Why would the Silence care if the Doctor knew about those things?

I would guess everyone has it backwards.. he must never know about the pregnancy and must know about his death. But it's all conjecture.

• I'm not sure its clear- how "far along" is Amy and when was she taken? As the conversation at the end of the episode (the one Rory listens into with the red dot thing) implies that Amy was pregnant whilst aboard the TARDIS. This makes sense, as the Doctor implies that Melody was conceived on the Ponds' wedding night, on the TARDIS. However, in TIA, she cannot have been further than the 1st trimester; the Doctor comments on the fact that she'd "gained a couple of pounds". Any further, and surely Rory would have noticed as they were sleeping together. So assuming they spent max 1 month in the TARDIS post-conception, then 2 months later, TIA events begin. The relevance of this would be that there has to be a certain amount of time between when Amy is taken and the end of The Rebel Flesh, maybe 6 months if we assume she was 3 months along when taken. So I think the relevant points here are: 1) What's the approximate timeline between TBB and TIA? 2) At what point in Day of the Moon is Amy taken? 3) Is there any concept of how long there is between the point of Amy being taken and her awakening in Demon's Run?

As far as I can see we aren't given exact details for the timeline between TBB and TIA but us not being given exact figures is hardly a plot hole. Amy wasn't taken to Demon's run in Day of the Moon, she was taken before series 6 but at sometime where she was pregnant enough that the Doctor would notice the ganger Amy being larger. And finally there aren't exact lengths of time stated for between Amy being taken as far as I can see but again this is hardly a plot hole

• Why did the silence kidnap Amy and keep her in the Silence's Tardis when they already had her at Demon's run