Doctor Who (32 page)

But there was a third companion of sorts. In Tennant's final season, Steven Moffat had written a two-part story introducing Professor River Song. In the first episode, “Silence in the Library,” the Tenth Doctor and Donna are in a sealed library when a team of archaeologists appears. Originally, the Doctor was going to recognize one of the archaeologists as an old friend, but Moffat decided that plot device was too easy and dull. Instead, he had one of the archaeologists recognize the Doctor and reveal herself as a paradox. From her perspective, the two are extremely close: She knows his real name; he has given her a sonic screwdriver; and, another character implies that she is possibly his wife (or will be). But as far as the Doctor is concerned, they've never met.

Moffat took partial inspiration for the character of River from Audrey Niffenegger's science fiction romance
The Time Traveler's Wife,
which depicted the relationship between a woman and a man repeatedly sent backward and forward through time, leading to a decidedly non-linear relationship. After creating River, Moffat decided to bring her back as a recurring character once he took over production duties on the program. He had hoped to secure Kate Winslet for the role, having worked with her before. When that didn't happen, the part went to Alex Kingston, a former member of the Royal Shakespeare Company best known to American viewers for her turn as Elizabeth Corday in the medical drama
ER.

River's debut also depicts her death, which adds a weight and tragedy to all her later adventures. We and the Doctor know that River is never truly in danger of dying during later adventures because we've already seen how her story will end. This paradoxical relationship also means that every time the Doctor and River meet they must first figure out what the other knows
so as not to give away spoilers concerning their personal futures. Moffat later said that he had told Kingston that River has encountered all of the Doctor's previous incarnations at different points (a plot point that Moffat would later repeat for a different character and which is used in the BBC Worldwide Digital Entertainment video game
The Eternity Clock,
in which each previous Doctor has his memory of the encounter erased).

Moffat explained River's true origins to Kingston but kept them secret from the rest of the cast. Viewers responded positively to River Song, and many polls showed that she was one of the most popular characters of the modern-day program. Still, others criticized that she began to appear too often, seeming more and more a supporting player to the Doctor rather than someone strong and independent enough to have her own adventures.

Gary Russell commented, “I think the problem with River is that, while it's fun and funny to have her sometimes frustrate the Doctor, you also don't want her to outshine him too much. River Song is more like the Doctor than the Doctor is at times, and I think you need to be careful that, while you poke fun at your title character, you don't want to undermine him and completely ridicule him, too. It starts to make him weak.”

Certain fans also saw Professor River Song as a strange echo of Professor Bernice Summerfield and wondered why a novel-born companion couldn't have been brought into the TV program. Having played Benny for years, Lisa Bowerman had her own thoughts on the matter. “When River Song first turned up, I was quite pissed off actually. I thought,
Wait, she's an archaeologist, she has a diary, she's tough, she knows the Doctor. What's this?
But obviously Steven had turned her into a very different character and took her down such a different path, a completely different direction. She means something else entirely to the Doctor than Benny did, and she's really in the Doctor's world, while Benny goes down her own path and her own life for years afterward.”

Time Can Be Rewritten

The fifth season of
Doctor Who
presented a long fairy tale adventure that begins with a girl praying to Santa and ends with that same girl getting
married to her true love. Unlike other fairy tales, though, marriage was the beginning of new adventures rather than the end of the story.

In the fifth season, Moffat wanted to truly explore what it meant to be a Lord of Time. While the Ninth Doctor had warned that it was dangerous to create one too many paradoxes, the Eleventh Doctor encountered them frequently, hunting down “cracks” in the universe that seemed to be connected to his new companion. Ironically, he used paradoxes in his own timeline to eventually heal these cracks and rifts across space and time.

In the 2010 Christmas special, “A Christmas Carol,” the Doctor employs a strategy that may have been unthinkable to some of his previous incarnations. Realizing a villain he's encountered still has some good in him, the Doctor goes back in time to visit the man throughout his childhood (again, echoing Amy Pond and Madame de Pompadour), slowly changing his past and his temperament. “Time can be rewritten” practically became the show's motto, an interesting contrast to the original creators' thoughts on the matter. For the Eleventh Doctor, time travel was no longer just a plot device allowing entry to a new story; it was a churning force that needed to be reined in, manipulated, and commanded.

The fifth season was a hit with many and the Eleventh Doctor had cemented his place in the hearts of many fans. As the sixth season approached, BBC America made a bigger push in marketing
Doctor Who.
A new wave of fans emerged in the US, aided by the show actually filming episodes in America and visiting various cities and conventions there, which the previous production team hadn't really focused on.

Silence Will Fall

The premiere episode of the sixth season features the companions watching the Doctor's death, now knowing his future but unable to share it. While RTD had treated episodes fairly separately while peppering hints of what was coming in the finale each year, Moffat turned most of the season into a plot-driven story arc.

With the Doctor's death hanging in the balance, the sixth season contained more complexity, full of time paradoxes and layered manipulations. We also see the Doctor confronted by how dangerous and deadly he had
become over the years, evolving from a strange old man exploring the universe with his granddaughter to a destroyer of worlds. Many races now feared him, the man who had led empires to their destruction, who'd held the Key to Time, and had committed genocide more than once (even if he'd had good reasons). Had he lost his path?

During RTD's run humans became more aware of aliens and the Doctor began frequently encountering fans and people who saw him as a fearsome protector of Earth. Moffat, however, wanted to go back a few steps. The cracks in time seen during the fifth season wound up rewriting parts of history, making this fictional version of Earth closer to our reality, in which the public often dismisses the possibility of alien life. Still, planets beyond Earth, particularly in the future, know full well about the Doctor. The Time Lord considers the fame he's acquired in the modern day series and wonders whether it might be time to revert to the unknown and largely unnoticed wanderer he'd been during his first several incarnations.

The seventh season also recalls McCoy's era, revealing an organization determined to prevent a secret from being shared, a secret that would answer “the first question” to haunt the universe: Doctor who? As Moffat's episode “The Girl in the Fireplace” pointed out, the Doctor's name was “more than just a secret.”

The season was about life and birth. While the Doctor seemed to be heading toward his final hour, Amy discovered she was pregnant (though, it being the Whoniverse, it turned out to be more complicated than that). Amy's child Melody Pond was conceived in the TARDIS and affected by “artron” energy, temporal radiation that exists in Time Lords and the space time vortex. This made the child valuable, and neither Amy, Rory, nor the Doctor could stop others from stealing her. But then, they learned that, all things considered, it would be OK. Melody Pond would one day grow up to be the hero River Song.

Fans were very much divided on this revelation, as a fair number had predicted this scenario (or something similar) based on the fact that River Song and Amy Pond both had aquatic themed names. Steven Moffat even admitted that his own child had accurately guessed River's true identity at the top of the sixth season. But for her fans, it didn't matter if the truth was obvious; they still loved her all the same.

In a stand-out episode of the season, “The Doctor's Wife,” written by Neil Gaiman, the Doctor finally gets the chance to speak with his ship directly when she takes on human form. It's a touching meeting, giving voice to a few fan theories and confirming the living ship as the Doctor's truest and most faithful companion. Her first word to him is “goodbye” and her last “hello.” The episode won the 2011 Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation and the 2012 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form.

The sixth season is also significant for introducing a trio of new characters to the Whoniverse. Having played two reptilian Silurians who fought the Doctor before, actor Neve McIntosh was reintroduced as a different Silurian character named Madame Vastra. Like the rest of her people, Vastra had gone into hibernation before the ice age, though she woke up in Victorian England. After befriending the Doctor, she established a secret life for herself in London, gaining a reputation as a detective and evidently inspiring some of the Sherlock Holmes stories. At her side was her housekeeper and then wife Jenny Flint, played by Catrin Stewart.

Rounding out the trio was Strax, a Sontaran who owed the Doctor a debt and fought at his side. Played by Dan Starkey, Strax quickly became a great source of rough-edged comedy. He was an over-the-top character who cherished proving himself in battle yet couldn't tell the difference between boys and girls. Strax was killed during his first appearance, but Moffat decided later to resurrect him off-screen, reintroducing him as a constant ally to Vastra and Jenny. By the time Strax was resurrected, Amy, Rory, and the Doctor had all seemingly died and come back in one story or another, so it seemed to just be one of the tropes of the new
Doctor Who
era.

While the fifth season showed the Doctor using some paradoxes to save the day, the sixth season finale showed how much chaos erupted if you let them run amok. Skipping between alternate timelines, the Doctor marries River Song (though why this is part of his victory plan exactly is not made clear) and then uses more straightforward time travel and basic trickery to avoid his own death. But he doesn't mind people thinking he's dead and, again, wonders if perhaps it's best that he travels alone.

Everything Changes

Rather than do a full season in 2012 and 2013, it was decided to split the season in half. The first several episodes aired in the summer of 2012, followed by a Christmas special. The first half was set up to be stand-alone episodes, to contrast against the heavy story arc of the previous year. Responses were mixed. There was also a sense of approaching loss behind the stories, as it was known that Amy Pond and Rory were leaving. The season actually begins with them already separated, later realizing that they still love each other and had somehow stopped really listening to each other.

Family is a major theme in these episodes. Rory and Amy are concerned about the possibility of trying to start a family again. We meet Rory's father Brian Williams in the episode “Dinosaurs on a Space Ship,” played by Mark Williams. And in the episode “The Power of Three,” the Doctor meets UNIT's new top scientist Kate Stewart—daughter of Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart (though this was lost on some viewers, as Alistair was only briefly mentioned in two episodes of the modern program and his relationship with the Doctor was never explained).

The first half of the season ends with “The Angels Take Manhattan,” where once again paradoxes are a thing to avoid rather than use. Despite the Doctor's best efforts, he is separated from Amy and Rory, seemingly unable to reunite with them. Again, viewers were divided. Some appreciated the story and considered it an excellent farewell, while others said there were too many contradictions to established continuity of the past few years, making the ending convenient rather than heartfelt.

In any event, Amy Pond and Rory Williams were gone now, having enjoyed every minute of their impossible lives with the Doctor. But the hero does not take the forced separation well. When we see him again in the 2012 Christmas special “The Snowmen,” he has decided to retire, leading a hermit life with the TARDIS parked on a cloud over Victorian London. Based on revelations in the 2013 episode “The Name of the Doctor,” it seems that in between “The Angels Take Manhattan” and “The Snowmen,” the Eleventh Doctor and River Song had their last date before she was fated to meet his Tenth incarnation and face her death. So the Doctor's
retirement was not just spurred by the loss of two friends, but by the loss of his wife.

The Impossible Girl

Before the seventh season began, it was announced that the Doctor would be meeting a new companion in the 2012 Christmas special, a girl named Clara, played by Jenna-Louise Coleman. So it was quite a surprise to see the actor playing a different character named Oswin in the season opener. Oswin was a brilliant girl who sacrificed herself to save the Doctor, smiling as she asked him to remember her.

In the 2012 Christmas special “The Snowmen,” the Doctor meets another version of Oswin, this one named Clara. The two join forces against a new villain played by Richard E. Grant, making it the third time the actor had participated in some kind of
Doctor Who
broadcast. Clara dies at the end, saving the Doctor's life. The hero wonders how it was possible for this person to be the same girl as Oswin and yet not.

Clara quickly gained fans for her clever wit, playful nature, assertive­ness, and intelligence. But some criticized that she was too obviously attracted to the Doctor. Rose had been one thing, but the hero was married now and it was even worse that he seemed to share the attraction. Moffat freely admitted that the Doctor was indeed smitten with the different versions of Clara, not explaining at the time that the hero apparently now considered himself a widower, as revealed in “The Name of the Doctor.”