Fanfic / Last of the Time Lords

Last of the Time Lords, not to be confused with the Doctor Who episode of the same name, is an ongoing Doctor Who serial fan work by Nicor_Fyrweorm. The series approaches the plot of Doctor Who series 5 with 13 stories serving as individual works as their own 'episode' and has indicated plans to do the same for series 6.

This series of fan works explores what would happen if at "The End of Time" the Tenth Doctor had sacrificed himself to save his best friend and heal him as best as he could before truly dying, leaving the Master the, truly for real, final Time Lord in the universe. He makes his rounds to say the Doctor's goodbyes in lieu of the real deal and give the Doctor a funeral, only for the TARDIS to then crash in a little Scottish girl's yard in Leadworth, England....

Note: Due to the various names assumed by the Master throughout the series, he will simply be referred to either as "The Master" or "Koschei" for simplicity and avoid name confusion, especially with later events that occur in this series.

Tropes featured in this fan work:

• Accidental Misnaming: The Master refers to Amy as Chantho while dozing off, reliving memories of being Professor Yana in "Paradigm of the Daleks".
• Adaptational Angst Upgrade:
  • Various minor characters like Verity and Tom are given angst over the Dalek invasion of 2009 and people dying around them during that day.
  • The fate of the Star Whale and Starship UK is established to be a Fixed Point in time, adding even more drama to the dilemma of letting it continue to be tortured, destroying Starship UK in retaliation for the Whale's fate, or lobotomizing it so it can't feel pain, and simply not just walking away until Amy Takes a Third Option with releasing it.
• Adaptational Early Appearance: Madame Vastra and Jenny Flint are given an origin story to replace "The Hungry Earth" where it's explained how they met and started to warm up to each other in this particular work.
• Adaptational Context Change: Various quotes from the show said by the Doctor are either quoted by the Master (ie. when boasting about himself in "A Journey in the Dark" by using the Tenth Doctor's summation of himself in "Voyage of the Damned") or the TARDIS in the Master-Doctor's body who quotes the Eleventh Doctor's very first words after regenerating when dumped in the Time Lord's body in "The Doctor's Box".
• Adaptational Relationship Overhaul:
  • Unlike in canon, Mickey and Martha aren't married by their appearance in "The End of Time", instead being just very good friends. Word of God is that they couldn't see why said relationship would actually come to exist, so they made the decision to have Martha be married to Tom (her original fiancée before she married Mickey) instead.
  • Koschei is much closer to Rory than the Doctor was in canon.
• Alien Blood: Time Lord blood is orange in this fanfic.
• Ambiguous Syntax: It's frequently employed to help obfuscate to Amy and later Rory the identity of the Time Lord they're travelling with on the TARDIS.
• Arc Welding: The author merges "The Death of the Doctor" with "A Christmas Carol" by simply having the honeymoon planet in the former as the actual honeymoon planet that Amy and Rory spend time in on the latter.
• Arc Words:
  • "End of Time" is occasionally mentioned by the Monster of the Week throughout the first season as a misdirect for Koschei as he assumes it refers to Rassilon's scheme when it's actually meant to be lumped in the "Cracks in the skin of the universe/Pandorica will open/Silence will fall" set of phrases.
  • The "Tick Tock" rhyme is given greater prominence for the adaptation of series 6 as Rory keeps hearing them over and over again:
    • Rory hears it telepathically via TARDIS while he's resting in the final part of "The Day of the Revolution".
    • It's sung with new verses borrowed from the Demons Run poem, "Night will fall and drown the sun/Good men fight and demons run", in "20,000 Parsecs in Outer Space" to tie into the themes of series 6 and the fate of the 51st century Nautilus.
    • The verses referring to the Doctor's death are heard with increasing loudness as Rory is tortured by House in "The Doctor's Box".
• Ascended Extra: Martha's initial love interest, Tom Milligan, is given a POV and prominence for being married to a Companion of the Doctor (unlike canon, where he simply vanished and was dumped by Martha offscreen) in "Funeral for the Doctor".
• Been There, Shaped History: In the first season, the protagonists end up inspiring David Bowie, pushing the Brigadier to help form UNIT, making several references to Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit in front of J. R. R. Tolkien's father and possibly inspiring plot elements in those books, and telling Ignaz Semmelweis that he is correct about his medical theory.
• Big Eater: Koschei's Horror Hunger from "The End of Time" is reduced down to simply being peckish and taking every opportunity to have a meal, which is implied to have been a result of his Came Back Wrong status getting fixed from the Doctor's final surge of regeneration energy being infused in him.
• Borrowed Catchphrase:
  • Once the Master becomes the new Doctor, he starts using the Tenth Doctor's usual explanation of "It's X. Well... it's more like Y. Well... it's actually X+Y+ABCDEFG." He decides he doesn't actually like it and tells Amy to remind him to stop him from using it ever again.
  • Even after taking on the name of the Doctor, Koschei gets snippy with people using "And you will obey me" since he already has dibs on it as a catchphrase.
• Buffy Speak: Despite his distaste for it, the Master ends up having to use it in "A Journey in the Dark" since they'd all be crushed by collapsing rubble if he bothered to explain what's happening.
  Vastra: What's happening out there?
  Koschei: The crack is destabilizing the structure of the colony, erasing it having been there in the first place and thus destabilizing – Ugh, forget that! Timey-wimey spacey-wacey stuff.
• Call-Forward:
  • Koschei challenges Vastra to play the one-word game since there's no chance of lying with just one word in "A Journey in the Dark".
  • In keeping with how the Pandorica scenario is a trap for the Doctor devised from a companion's memories, the New Roman Empire has a Chariot Fair for 20th and 21st century cars, which includes Rory's dream car from "The God Complex".
• Cassandra Truth: Koschei glibly dismisses Lamia or her daughter's prophecies as irrelevant for describing past events. He realizes the error of his ways later on.
• Changed My Jumper: Played with as the main characters frequently change clothes to fit period dress in the past. Notable occasions for when they don't are the time they expected to arrive in future Rio de Janeiro but end up in 1880s London instead, Rory in 1847 period dress being dumped in 1969 London, and Koschei embracing the Doctor's quirk to simply not bother with changing clothes even for places like a historical costume party.
• Character Catchphrase: One indication of the Master's less heroic tendencies is his use of the classic "...you will obey me" phrase as part of his efforts to cow characters into going along with his current goals.
• Cliffhanger: "The Doctor's Box" ends with an alert from another TARDIS being picked up by the Doctor's TARDIS.
• The Conscience: Some remnant of the Tenth Doctor is left in the Master's mind who serves as a conscience for him by urging him to do nice things like let Amy have a trip in the TARDIS. This remnant disappears when Koschei takes the Doctor as his name as he no longer needs to be there to encourage him to do good, much to Koschei's despair who still wishes for the Doctor to come back deep down.
• Continuity Nod:
  • Rory mentions that all the alien invasions in the past few years seem to happen in London, especially during Christmas, which is why Atraxi and Prisoner Zero showing up in sleepy old Leadworth is so disturbing for him.
  • Since the events with the Atraxi are set in 2008, the Master sends the virus that sets everything to zero to Minister of Defense Harold Saxon who uses the Archangel network to make everyone upload it everywhere.
  • Characters from Torchwood circa 2008 also snark about the Atraxi threatening to incinerate Earth.
  • The clerics are awed by the idea of the Doctor because of the legend that he sealed the Devil away forever in a black hole a millennia ago.
  • The first hint that something's wrong with the cracks is that they radiate pure time energy and heat, not the cold and lifelessness of the actual end of the universe from the year 100 trillion where the stars have all gone out.
  • Lamia notes the Doctor's true name is burned in the Medusa Cascade, asserting his victims placed it there.
  • Because the Dalek invasion in "The Stolen Earth" got erased by the cracks, Amy and Rory only know of a Gas Leak Cover Up story to explain why Harriet Jones is dead by 2009.
  • Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart is met back when he was a Colonel, fresh from his encounter with the Great Intelligence. David also mentions that he was one of the evacuees during the Intelligence's interference with London.
  • The Silence have pictures of the Doctor littered about in the little girl's room from Graystark Hall, depicting events from the various regenerations. Principal attention among the photos is Ten presented at his most detached and out of context in-universe with a young man tied to a cross, a terrified woman, and Pompeii burning.
• Crossover: The main characters take a hop into Torchwood for "The Lost Child" and "The Master Stitches" when the TARDIS is caught up in mysterious Rift activity in Cardiff.
• Diegetic Soundtrack Usage: Various pieces from "The Pandorica Opens" are heard when Rory uses a chronocartographer to see what happens next in his timeline.
• Discontinuity Nod: "Paradigm of the Daleks" has Bracewell scrap the space Spitfires because he's fearful that those have also been compromised by the Daleks.
• Doesn't Like Guns: Koschei seems to develop a trauma around guns mainly because of their involvement with the Doctor truly dying, then it gets stacked on further because Amy is shot and erased by the cracks, this helps serves the purpose of blurring his identity with the Doctor even further both to him and others as the story progresses.
• Double-Meaning Title: "The End of the Dream" refers to Amy and the Master-Doctor having a kind of good-bye with their imaginary friends, the Raggedy Doctor and Theta Sigma.
• Dreaming Of Things Gone By: All of the Doctor's former companions dream of a starless night where Earth is the only planet in the universe on June 26th, 2010. None of them quite know what to make of it or realize the dream comes from an alternate timeline where the stars never existed because of an exploding TARDIS.
• Everybody Lives:
  • Though River Song quotes her speech on this in the Weeping Angel two-parter, it's actually subverted as only the main characters make it out of the Byzantium^note Author's notes stated that four clerics and Father Octavian were meant to live but they all end up dying as in canon..
  • "The Snakes of Sicily" has a peaceful situation negotiated for everyone and plants the first seed that things can be worked out in such a manner for someone like the Master.
• Exact Words: Koschei frequently words things in a way that could imply him and the Doctor being one and the same, despite it being about his own experiences. The most common example is about ending the Time War in that sending Rassilon, the Time Lords, and Gallifrey back to prevent it from breaking out again and being the only one to live the tale is technically correct even if it's not the known end by the real Doctor's hand with Gallifrey and the Daleks being wiped out by the Moment.
• Expospeak Gag: When discussing Weeping Angel mechanics, Koschei goes on a long Technobabble version of the Timey-Wimey Ball speech before Amy interrupts and tell him Ten's version from the DVD recording is much easier to understand.
  Koschei: From a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, time is not a line but a big ball of interconnected events, the links of which are flexible and interchangeable up to a point, and malleable themselves so that any ripple caused on an event bubble by an established connection results in a modification of the connectors, which, in itself, would cause yet another ripple on the adjacent event bubbles, until—
  Amy: I get it now. Time as ‘a big ball of wibbly wobbly timey-wimey stuff’ is way easier to understand than that.
• For Want Of A Nail: The Doctor is Killed Off for Real when he saves the Master who doesn't go back to Gallifrey with the last of his regeneration energy instead of prioritizing himself, leading to the Timey-Wimey Ball of several events in the Eleventh Doctor era still happening to the Master despite the lack of Eleven to actually engage with events revolving around the Doctor, but Koschei takes on the name of the Doctor, thus mending the gap somewhat.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Several innocuous things River does in her first story are all things she picked up from the Pandorica two-parter like humming Smash Mouth's cover of "I'm a Believer".
  • The Master comments in "Monster of the Cosmos" that he knew a lovely leisure palace from the 48th century before it got mysteriously shut down because of extonic radiation. He later finds out that was the planet Midnight and it was shut down for very good reasons.
  • Charybdis comments on the pain of saying good-bye to someone they love in a graveyard with a Weeping Angel. It's assumed to refer to the adventure in the Aplan catacombs, but most likely refers to the events of "The Angels Take Manhattan".
  • The mention of televisions being everywhere in the UK by summer 1969 and the Americans preparing their venture into space in "Rory's Choice" sets up the idea of the coup de grace of the Silence's post-hypnotic orders being used against them in "Day of the Revolution".
• Fun T-Shirt: Though initially dismissive of this kind of t-shirt, Koschei starts wearing them at first to maintain time loops and expresses a preference for the more snarky ones, and then making it his full time Iconic Outfit distinction when he embraces the name of the Doctor. There tend to be two variations, a snarky or fun message for his companions and/or regular people or a deliberate warning towards his enemies.
  • Variation 1:
    • The t-shirt that kickstarts this trend was bought by Amy and Rory is part of the Running Gag that pokes fun at his height, portraying a chick annoyed at how tall everyone else is.
    • A white t-shirt that says "Breaking News: I Don't Care" worn in "A Journey in the Dark".
    • A gray t-shirt that says "Of course I talk to myself, sometimes I need expert advice" worn in "Funeral for the Doctor".
    • A white t-shirt that depicts Gandalf saying "I want YOU for an adventure" as a parody of the Uncle Sam poster worn in "The Deadly Astronaut".
    • A black t-shirt that says "The Angels Have The Phone Box" in "The Doctor's Box".
  • Variation 2:
    • A t-shirt the same shade of blue as the TARDIS that says "KEEP CALM and RUN FOR YOUR LIFE" worn in the last three stories of the first season.
    • A black t-shirt that says "YOU BETTER RUN" worn in "The Day of the Revolution" as a warning to the Silence.
  • His most normal t-shirt is a black AC/DC "Highway to Hell" shirt, which is an indication of how he's going to his own death and putting a pause on the fun at Lake Silencio.
• Future Imperfect: Discussed as Koschei and Rory go to visit the New Roman Empire, since 'cars' are now considered to be vehicles fit for long journeys with gravity repulsors, vehicles with a combustion engine and four wheels are now considered to be the 'chariots' of the Empire.
• Humanoid Abomination: This fanfic leans into the idea of Time Lords as far more alien than what is depicted on the show, with the implication that their humanoid appearances are just to contain their fourth dimensional forms in a way that most creatures will be able to comprehend.
• I Have Many Names: Koschei cycles through thinking of himself as the Master, Koschei, Harold/Harry Saxon, Ulysses, and the Professor throughout the series and has even more names from various characters around him who aren't sure what to call him (Doctor, Raggedy Man, Starman, Time Lord, etc.). He leans more towards 'Koschei' as the death of the Doctor has left him feeling adrift and alone in the universe and unsure of whether he should pick up the mantle of the Master again without a Doctor. This is a notable reason why nobody believes Koschei's assertion he is not the Doctor. Not only has the Doctor used multiple aliases, titles, and names, there are countless epithets coined by other people applicable and the name Doctor was denied for a time, so there's no reason not to think the Time Lord with a TARDIS disguised as a police box is simply going through a phase where he isn't using the name Doctor when he's not using the name Master either. Almost all of them are discarded when he tries to use the psychic mental imprint of the Tenth Doctor to possess him but ultimately just pans out as an elaborate psychological means of truly embracing the title of Doctor to save the universe since the original can never come back, not even with the psychic imprint. From then on, he alternates between the Doctor most of the time and slipping back into Koschei when feeling uncertain about himself.
• Have We Met Yet?:
  • Besides the living embodiment of this trope, River Song, who has her personal timeline even more jumbled from interacting with two different individuals who she identifies as the Doctor; the Master meets Jack Harkness in this order: the initial encounters in canon, during the hookup with Alonso from "The End of Time" where it's insinuated to Jack that the Doctor is dead, in 2008 after the events of series 3, a phone call from Jack post-hookup with Alonso where he knows when Silence will Fall, a DVD recording of a pre-2008 Jack instructing people to meet on April 22, 2011 for the events of Lake Silencio, and presumably a future meeting in order to arrange the DVD recordings in the first place.
  • The Brigadier meets Koschei who he assumes to be the Doctor's new face after the 1960s, but it's actually retroactively his first encounter with the Master and the latest encounter with the Brigadier for the Master!
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: The individual chapters of several stories in the fanfic series have some kind of theming for chapter titles.
  • "The Lives and Times of the Raggedy Doctor and Amelia Pond" names its chapters using a "The [Person] who [Verb]ed" template modelled after Amy's epithet of "The Girl who Waited".
  • "Monster of the Cosmos" uses the four verses of the Beast Below's rhyme for its four chapter titles.
  • "Paradigm of the Daleks" has "[Noun] of the...".
  • "Silence of the Catacombs" and "Forest of the Angels" both use River Song quotes.
• In Spite of a Nail: The TARDIS still crashes in Amelia's backyard in 1996, despite the lack of a powerful regeneration from the Doctor to damage the console room. It's implied that the TARDIS crashed there on purpose to set everything in motion.
• Ironic Echo: The Master finds himself the one to beg the Tenth Doctor not to die and regenerate already because they're the only ones left as a parallel to the Series 3 finale.
• It Amused Me: Unlike the Eleventh Doctor in canon where it's ambiguous over whether he actually knew why Amy and Rory didn't want bunk beds, the Master-Doctor decides to put bunk beds in their room because he thought it'd be funny to screw with them.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: Koschei confesses to Sarah Jane about the original Doctor's death and that he took up the title for various reasons. He then wipes her memory because he still can't fully deal with the emotional trauma or judgment of those who knew the Doctor.
• Last of His Kind: Koschei encounters various creatures that believe or are known to be the last of their kind and there's also much drama playing out regarding how he is now the last Time Lord.
  • Amy makes the same assumption in canon with the Star Whale as a parallel to the Doctor, unaware of the implications for assuming the Master to be in the same spot, who for his part is contemplative of what it means for himself to be alone in the universe, how he could have taken up travel with the Doctor before the latter's death, and being thrust in a role like the Doctor to save the Star Whale.
  • This series explores a scenario where the Master instead of the Doctor is the last of the Time Lords comes up against the last of the Daleks. He's very dismayed to see that he fails in preventing the New Dalek Paradigm from being created.
  • Lamia, Scylla, and Charybdis are the last Laestrygonians after Laestrygon fell into the cracks. However, after some negotiation with Koschei, pleading from Scylla and a near mentally-dead Charybdis, Lamia accepts her fate and leaves with her partially converted men to establish their city where they shall live in seclusion for the rest of their days until Legend Fades to Myth and they are remembered as beings from Greek legend.
  • Vastra believes herself to be the last of her kind, but Koschei reprimands her for thinking so and acting in accord as there are other Silurian colonies out there or the opportunity to use time travel if she wishes to see her brethren again via the TARDIS.
  • The Idakari alien pirates of the Nautilus in the 51st century are the only remaining members of their kind as the Silence destroyed their planet in order to obtain a weapon to blow up the TARDIS. Koschei then destabilizes a temporal Negative Space Wedgie inside the ship, which obliterates the Nautilus with seemingly no survivors. He hopes there were survivors, but admits that there probably weren't as he starts to feel actual guilt for finishing a genocide and morbidly wishes the Doctor's ghost would show up to reprimand him so he doesn't feel crushing loneliness over this.
• Legacy Character: Amy dismisses that the Doctor is one as her research has led to a surface level understanding that regeneration implicitly exists and doesn't think that there's any other individual who could be him. The Dramatic Irony is that she's actually with a different Time Lord who eventually does embrace this title to help take care of the universe when the original is dead.
• Like an Old Married Couple: Because of the Master's looser morals, he warms up to River much quicker than the Doctor and already starts mock flirting with her by the time they get out of the Aplan catacombs. He rationalizes it by asserting that if the Doctor had Jack Harkness, then he'll have River here in the present and in the future. By the time he gets to the Pandorica, Rory keeps taking note of how many times Koschei and River come off as casually flirting or being intimate.
• Logical Weakness: The Fever is simply puerperal fever with sentience so Rory just dumps chlorinated lime solution (the historical solution Dr. Semmelweis recommended to counteract the disease by washing hands in it) on it, which works to bring them down.
• Loss of Identity: Since the Saxon incarnation of the Master is so pointedly in opposition to the Doctor in personality and ideals, he's at a loss as to who he even is in the universe without his enemy/friend to fight and pointedly stops using the epithet of the Master for most of the series. The drums being ripped out of his head make him somewhat more stable, but just contribute further to the identity crisis that permeates the first season.
• Mama Bear: The primary theme of "The Snakes of Sicily" is that both human and alien mothers will do whatever they will at all costs to protect their children, but must be willing to let go of that protectiveness when their children themselves implore for peace and to let them go for their new lives.
• Meat Puppet: Puerperal fever was granted sentience by a combination of a temporally displaced sliver of the Nestene Consciousness and the power of the crack, which slowly take over anyone infected by the disease until possession is complete. Unfortunately since their very nature damages the human body, they will slowly die anyway when the body succumbs to the fever and are desperate to figure out a way to extend the life of the bodies they now control.
• Mistaken Identity:
  • Amy believes Koschei is named the Doctor because he refers to the TARDIS as a "doctor box" without elaborating on what that means and she is unaware of the implications of such a title until growing up. This mistake in names and lack of clarity on the matter culminates in Amy's memories bringing Koschei back as her Doctor after the universe is repaired because that's the story she believes in and has no reason to disregard it.
  • Entities who are aware of the TARDIS and what it represents are also dismissive of any attempt to correct the matter, either assuming the Time Lord with the blue box is being a Consummate Liar with empty words again or simply ignoring anything to the contrary.
• Mythology Gag:
  • River telling Amy that the Doctor (Koschei) is in a time where he's still trying to figure out himself in the wake of a great catastrophe and will not use the name Doctor until then combined with Amy's assumption that it has to do with the Time War and Gallifrey appearing over the sky during Christmas 2009 to conclude it's about guilt over killing his people because of the War has remarkably similar undertones to the War Doctor's circumstances and his rejection of his name in canon.
  • Several of the story titles refer to previous debut episodes like "Silence in the Catacombs" replacing "The Time of Angels" as a mashup of "Silence in the Library" with the location of the original story.
  • River quotes a modified version of her Everybody Lives speech from "Forest of the Dead" before she parts ways from Koschei for the first time.
  • Rory and Amy are given Saturnyian clothing (which conveniently resembles dress from Greco-Roman antiquity) to wear. Saturnyne was the planet the Monster of the Week hailed from in the story being replaced by "The Snakes of Sicily".
  • Thirteen's console room is used as a chronocartography room in the TARDIS in this fanfic.
  • The Master references the "Last of the Time Lords" Deleted Scene where he taunted the Doctor with how deposing Harriet Jones from power led to him becoming Prime Minister in his thoughts, annoyed with how it only resulted in a judgemental look from the Doctor.
  • The Master-Doctor is wearing a "Angels Have The Phone Box" t-shirt in "The Doctor's Box", appropriate given that the TARDIS is hijacked in the story it's based on by an Eldritch Abomination who feeds on time energy.
• Non-Linear Character: When the TARDIS is given a POV in the first part of this series, it's shown that she perceives the Doctor's death as simultaneously happening, already happened, and something that will happen. She has a lot of Time-Travel Tense Trouble trying to sort that out in-between her emotional pain.
• Noodle Incident:
  • Ten met with River Song one more time in the theme park of Asgard in this fanfic's version of River and the Doctor's timeline.
  • After Amy is erased by the cracks, Rory spends an indeterminate amount of time travelling with Koschei alone, which during this time they went to Lyle Beach on Space Florida. The only details are a revolt over development of automatic sand and hypnotism had to be crossed out as an option to quell the chaos.
• The Nose Knows: Koschei primarily uses his nose to identify anomalies or feel the environment.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Rory realizes something is seriously wrong if Semmelweis is not latching onto the same data that he historically used for his medical discoveries. He turns out to be correct as the Fever is deliberately interfering with the clinic for their own nefarious purposes.
• Out of Continues:
  • Neither the Doctor (had one extra regeneration than in canon) or the Master (unstable resurrection that went wrong) have the ability to regenerate into a new body at the start of the series, so the former gives up all of his regeneration energy to the latter.
  • Even in the rebooted universe, Amy bringing Koschei as the Doctor back didn't grant him new regenerations, leaving him with just the one body.
• Physical Religion: The Idakari worship the Ninth Doctor as their creator because he stabilized the Time War weapon that brought their race into existence and allowed them to thrive after disarming it.
• Prophecy Twist: When Lamia brings up the "exploding TARDIS brings about the end of the universe and must be fixed by sending in the Pandorica" scenario as one of her prophecies, it's worded in such a way that it's assumed to be referring to the events of "The End of Time" so it doesn't sink in that it's referring to an actual future event until they actually get to the total event collapse of the universe dying.
• Race Lift: It's established that the Doctor has a pre-Hartnell incarnation who is a black woman to explain away why the Tenth Doctor was Out of Continues unlike canon and make the base premise of the fanfic work.
• Real Event, Fictional Cause: The whirlpools in the Strait of Messina were formed by a permanently comatose alien slumbering in the ocean floor.
• Retgone: Even with the cracks of the universe resolved, a planet is still mentioned to ominously vanish out of existence with no clue as to why, presumed to be the work of the Silence who have been casually manipulating other species besides humans and removing all traces of their interference via their memory powers and destroying a planet for their war with the Doctor.
• Ripple Effect Indicator: The Dalek invasion of 2009 Earth is used as one. Before the cracks, it's still fresh in everyone's minds, once the cracks start happening around June 2010, all memory is erased, but after the cracks are resolved, memory of the event is back in everyone's mind with no awareness it was ever different.
• Role Swap AU:
  • Besides Koschei/The Master unintentionally stumbling into the role of the Doctor during the plot of Series 5 and 6, Amy is the one who gets erased by the cracks in time and becomes an Auton centurion who kills her fiancee instead of Rory.
  • Subsequently, Rory is the one kidnapped by the Silence instead of Amy in "Day of the Revolution".
• Running Gag:
  • Rory has to pay for everyone's meals and notes when he doesn't have to pay for them.
  • Noting how the Master is shorter than various characters.
• Secret Secret-Keeper: Both River Song and Jack Harkness figure out what's going on with the Doctor and the Master by themselves, but neither of them are currently in a linear timeline with Koschei so new difficulty in their status rises from when they know about it if talking to him.
• Ship Tease: The TARDIS' affection for Rory is established earlier than in canon as she always guides him to rooms to do something while Koschei is busy, her engines hum whenever he's around, and she tries to comfort him telepathically after being rescued from the Silence (it was with the morbid "Tick Tock" rhyme, but it's the thought that counts).
• Shout-Out:
  • "A Journey to the Dark" features Amy and Rory frequently joking about Lord of the Rings and comparing Koschei to Gandalf, which is compounded by the latter unwittingly quoting Gandalf.
  • "20,000 Parsecs in Outer Space" is a reference to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, with a further reference thrown in as the alien captain Nimoy replaces Nemo (as in Leonard Nimoy).
• Space Romans: Rory and Koschei visit the New Roman Empire, which was an offhand mention from Nine in "The End of the World". It's explained that the planetary society of the Solar System consciously chose to embrace both Roman aesthetics and empire after some unexplained incident to toughen themselves.
• Spoof Aesop: The Master's takeaway from The Teletubbies was that it's a great show to teach collaboration and friendship to humans... so they'll be compliant minions he can take advantage of in the future.
• Stable Time Loop: Multiple small loops are employed to ensure events happen as they did, with the timestream unravelling after sealing the cracks in time resulting in several different loops seeded throughout the story.
• Story-Breaker Power: Even after getting fixed, this incarnation of the Master still has the power to shoot lightning. In order to prevent him from simply using them all the time, it's noted that the lightning still drains his life energy and after rebooting the universe gives him an even stabler body, he can't just use lightning all the time if he wants to abide by the ideals of the Doctor.
• Title Drop: In "Forest of the Angels".
  Koschei: A forest of Angels. A forest of Angels with a spatiotemporal rift to the end of the universe going right through it, widening, casting a Time Field that destroys reality as it expands. Soon, the little Forest of the Angels will have never existed. What do the Angels need me for when they should be running for their lives?
• Wham Line: River reveals that due to being from a personal timeline's future, she already knows a great deal of what's going on when she first parts ways with Koschei.
  River: I know the Doctor is dead. I know you killed him.