The Doctor's death at Lake Silencio

The Eleventh Doctor's death at Lake Silencio was an event engineered by the Silence.

History

Origins

After all incarnations of the Doctor had relocated them to a pocket universe to escape destruction at the hands of the Daleks in the Last Great Time War, the Time Lords of Gallifrey found a crack in time leading to the Doctor's universe at the planet Trenzalore. Through it, they sent the message "Doctor who?", intending for the Doctor to answer so that they could return to the universe. However, this led to the Siege of Trenzalore as "half the universe" fought over the planet to prevent the Time Lords' return. The Doctor, recognising the risk of the Time War starting anew, stood guard on the planet, refusing to answer the message. Mother Superiorius Tasha Lem changed the faith of the Papal Mainframe into the Church of Silence so as to ensure that the Doctor did not say his name and restart the Time War.

The Kovarian Chapter, represented by Madame Kovarian, broke away from the Papal Mainframe, travelled back along the Doctor's timeline to change history so that he never reached Trenzalore. (TV: The Time of the Doctor ^[+]Loading...["The Time of the Doctor (TV story)"]) One of their attempts had caused the Doctor's TARDIS to explode on Earth on 26 June, 2010, resulting in a total event collapse which threatened to erase all of reality from history. (TV: The Pandorica Opens ^[+]Loading...["The Pandorica Opens (TV story)"]) As the eye of the storm, the Earth outlasted the rest of the universe, and was ultimately where the Doctor initiated Big Bang Two, restoring the universe. (TV: The Big Bang ^[+]Loading...["The Big Bang (TV story)"]) Ironically, this event caused the creation of the crack in the universe which had precipitated the entire conflict, which the older Doctor at Trenzalore noted was part of the “destiny trap”. (TV: The Time of the Doctor ^[+]Loading...["The Time of the Doctor (TV story)"])

Lake Silencio

Following an encounter with a minotaur, the Doctor left Amy and Rory at a new house on Earth (TV: The God Complex ^[+]Loading...["The God Complex (TV story)"]) the Doctor embarked on a farewell tour. Eventually, in the days leading up to his death in 2011, the Doctor reunited with Craig Owens in Colchester, where they faced the Cybermen. (TV: Closing Time ^[+]Loading...["Closing Time (TV story)"]) Before meeting his death, the Doctor investigated why the Silence wanted him dead, acquiring information on from the Dalek data core of a dying Supreme Dalek to that end. (TV: The Wedding of River Song ^[+]Loading...["The Wedding of River Song (TV story)"])

After some time at Luna University, River Song received her doctorate. On that day, she was met by Madame Kovarian and two Silents, who forced her into an intelligent spacesuit. (TV: Closing Time) The suited River was submerged in Lake Silencio, Utah, where she emerged on 22 April 2011. River met the Doctor, who had arrived to meet his death as recorded in history. However, River was able to drain the suit's weapon systems, preventing it from firing on the Doctor and thus breaking a fixed point in time, causing a new reality to be created as time began to collapse. (TV: The Wedding of River Song ^[+]Loading...["The Wedding of River Song (TV story)"], The Impossible Astronaut ^[+]Loading...["The Impossible Astronaut (TV story)"])

In the new world, which was a combination of Earth's history, the Doctor was aware of the change in the timeline and came into contact with Amy, Rory and River, all of whom were part of a group of people who perceived the change, based at Area 52. Also present were Madame Kovarian and a group of Silents, who had been captured by Amy's forces, who wore eye drives derived from Kovarian's in order to observe the Silents. However, the Silents were able to take control of these eye drives, using them to attack their captors as they broke out of captivity to ensure the Doctor's death. Whether intentionally or not, Kovarian also began to feel pain from her eye drive. Amy, holding Kovarian responsible for robbing her of her baby, left her to be killed by the eye drive.

The Doctor, realising that the change in history would ultimately destroy reality, convinced River Song to make physical contact with him in the form of a kiss, in a wedding ceremony witnessed by Amy and Rory. Looking into the Doctor's eye, River saw that he was actually the Teselecta, with the real Doctor inside. Because she and the Doctor were the opposite poles of the disruption in time, their touching caused time to be returned to its original state, where River "killed" the Doctor. Kovarian was alive again in the restored timeline (TV: The Wedding of River Song ^[+]Loading...["The Wedding of River Song (TV story)"]) and was finally abandoned by the Silents. (AUDIO: The Furies ^[+]Loading...["The Furies (audio story)"])

Aftermath and legacy

Having apparently killed the Doctor, River Song was imprisoned in the Stormcage Containment Facility. However, she would frequently escape from the facility to meet up with him. (TV: The Wedding of River Song ^[+]Loading...["The Wedding of River Song (TV story)"])

River was taken out of Stormcage to the Bekdel Institute, learning that the Director was a "solidogram". When Missy, the female incarnation of the Master who identified herself as the last of the Time Lords, came to the Institute, River helped her to escape. To throw off the Director, they created a set of solidograms, one to be placed into the detention cells, and another to crawl through the sewers in order to be caught by the Director and the cubes, a trick to allow both River and Missy to meddle with the Institute's computers. It was at this point that the two women figured out that the prisoners were all solidogroms, generated by the Institute's main computer. River and Missy also figured out that they were brought to the Institute to learn if the Doctor was still alive after his assassination. They finally escaped after Missy tricked the computer into thinking that the inside was the outside and vice versa. After agreeing to save Missy from an opening airlock using her Vortex manipulator, they were transported to a planet, where Missy set off back to her TARDIS and then revealed she had meddled with River’s manipulator so it instantly teleported her back to Stormcage. (AUDIO: The Bekdel Test ^[+]Loading...["The Bekdel Test (audio story)"])

River was put in Father Octavian's custody in the 51st century for a mission to try to earn her pardon. She infiltrated the Galaxy class Byzantium to find its Home Box, into which she carved "Hello Sweetie" in Old High Gallifreyan, along with her temporal coordinates. This attracted the Doctor's attention twelve thousand years later, leading Amy (who at this point in time had not met River before) and the Doctor to her and the Byzantium's's crash site on Alfava Metraxis, where they encountered an army of Weeping Angels who had awakened in the planet's Maze of the Dead. River acknowledged whilst speaking with Octavian that she was dealing with the the Doctor at an earlier point in his time stream, before he learned exactly who she was. (TV: The Time of Angels ^[+]Loading...["The Time of Angels (TV story)"])

Octavian himself was killed by the Weeping Angels, but not before telling the Doctor that River had been put in Stormcage for killing "a good man. A hero to many.", and that the Doctor did not want to know who the man was. After the Angels were defeated, River told the Doctor that she had killed a "very good man. The best man I've ever known." but the matter of who he was was a "long story" which had to be lived, not told. (TV: Flesh and Stone ^[+]Loading...["Flesh and Stone (TV story)"]) Shortly following the incident, River met up with her parents after they had witnessed the Doctor marrying River in the alternate timeine, revealing to them that the Doctor had escaped his apparent death. (TV: The Wedding of River Song ^[+]Loading...["The Wedding of River Song (TV story)"])

Wanting to be left alone, (HOMEVID: The Inforarium ^[+]Loading...["The Inforarium (home video)"]) the Eleventh Doctor erased himself from every database in the universe, making sure that no one had ever heard of him. After it was discovered that there was no evidence of the man she had murdered having ever existed, River Song was pardoned and released from the Stormcage Containment Facility. (TV: The Angels Take Manhattan ^[+]Loading...["The Angels Take Manhattan (TV story)"])