Fridge / Doctor Who – Steven Moffat Era

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WARNING! THERE MAY BE UNMARKED SPOILERS!

Series 5 (Eleventh Doctor / Amy & Rory) Fridge

Fridge Brilliance — Series 5

• After regenerating into the Eleventh Doctor, the Doctor tries an apple and then tells Amy that he "hates apples. Apples are rubbish." Well, of course, an apple a day keeps the Doctor away.
  • And where do Amy and Rory end up being trapped after "The Angels Take Manhattan"? The Big Apple.
• Why did Amy grow up to become a kiss-o-gram? No parents to tell her she couldn't.
• After meeting the Doctor, Amy became obsessed with him, and of course she was — after all, the Doctor is so charismatic he often manages to make the more stubborn adults do what he wants and this was a little scared girl. She didn't have any relatives other than her aunt and said aunt didn't believe her about The Doctor and forced her to go to a string of shrinks because of her obsession. In the little boring village she grew up in everybody know about the Doctor.
• In "The Eleventh Hour", the coma patients suddenly call out for the Doctor, and then don't move for the rest of the episode. But the scene fades into the Doctor waking up, which explains it: the patients are mentally connected to Amy via Prisoner Zero, and Amy is overwhelmed with shock that the Doctor has reappeared in her life.
• Anyone else wonder what was up with the ducks (or lack thereof) in the first episode of series 5? How do you know it's a duck pond if there aren't any ducks? Amy has a lot of missing memories, but still remembers pieces. For example, she doesn't have parents, doesn't remember her parents, but does remember her mother carving faces onto apples. Later, Amy forgets Rory, Rory never existed, but is still triggered by the ring when she sees it, and cries without understanding why. It's just a pond without ducks, but a part of Amy remembers it WAS a duck pond, foreshadowing her later abilities to remember what's been forgotten, saving the Doctor. (And in the next season, being able to completely remember everything after time collapsed, something no one else aside from the Doctor and River was able to do.)
  • Amy is also, in a way, herself a "duck Pond without any ducks".
• In "The Beast Below", Amy is still registered as a living British subject on the UK's voter-registration list, despite this making her 1306 years old. This makes perfect sense, as history would have no documentation of her death, as she died before she was born while living in another country and under a different name.
• In "The Beast Below", Amy's marital status is listed as "information unavailable". A few episodes later Rory is erased from history, since it's years in the future and this has technically already happened but Amy still has all her memories of Rory, this could be interpreted as the computer struggling with the two contradictory timelines.
  • Plus, at this point in her timeline she hasn't married Rory yet (but from a chronological standpoint she already has), so there may be that as well.
• In "Victory of the Daleks", the Doctor is trying to get Bracewell to feel human emotions to counteract the Dalek bomb on him. The Doctor was trying to use pain and negative emotions which literally leaves Bracewell moaning "Doctor...it hurts..." while Amy had to be the one to think of fighting with The Power of Love. Considering everything the Doctor goes through and has been through all his life (always seeing people dying, leaving, oppressed, all the bad blood between him and his own race, being generally lonely most of the time, etc.), it actually makes a lot of sense that he would think of pain before happiness because, in the grand scheme of things, that's what he knows best. Look at "Amy's Choice": The Dream Lord is the manifestation of the Doctor's darker nature. The Doctor figures that out, saying: "There's only one person who hates me as much as you do." The Doctor really is just a walking ball of pain and self-loathing.
  • It also makes even more sense when you know why he hates himself, because of what the War Doctor did, or at least what he thought he did. On top of that, he's spent centuries having to sacrifice one person to save many, watching people die in his name, doing his best but still not being able to save people, and generally going through trauma after trauma after trauma with very few people he can really confide in. Honestly, it's a bit of a wonder the poor guy's even functional.
• "The Time of Angels": The Doctor leaves the parking brake on. Now, this is treated more as humor than anything, but think about it. The Doctor knows he can be rather... absentminded. Additionally, if there's a parking brake, that means that it can, depending on the situation, become unparked on its own. On a car, this is bad. On a TARDIS, this is a million times worse. If your TARDIS falls into time without you there, you're fifty-one flavors of fucked. Now, after the Time War, it's even more important, since he has to charge it on a time rift. Rifts which are characterised by making things fall through space and time randomly. If the Doctor turned off the parking brake, he'd sooner or later forget to turn it back on, and, knowing his luck, that would be the day when it happens. So, while he plays dumb about it, the real reason he leaves it on is because he knows that if he doesn't, he's going to screw up and lose the TARDIS.
• Plot-wise, if the Weeping Angels had been covering their faces in the cave in "Flesh and Stone" like we've always seen them do before, it would be a dead give away, but there's another in-universe reason: they can't see. Their eyes are rotted out. Or the Aplans took out the eyes after they realized what happens if you look into them. The Aplans were excellent stone-masons, after all, and since they had two heads each they were better equipped to attack the Angels than most other species — two sets of eyes could take turns blinking. Which in turn might explain why the Angels wanted to destroy them in the first place.
• "Flesh and Stone":
  • At the end of it, River tells the Doctor that they'll next meet "when the Pandorica opens". The Doctor tells her it's just a fairy tale and River laughs and replies "Aren't we all?" They're both right — the Pandorica is a fairy tale, about a trickster in a cage. Now who does the Doctor turn out to be, again?
  • "The Pandorica is just a fairy tale." "Aren't we all?" This is a later version of River, who already knows that she, the Doctor, everybody are (or soon will be) just fairy tale recreations from Amy's memory!
  • The Doctor looking over his shoulder at the angels as they're dragged into the crack—it's not (just) gloating, he's also keeping them stuck in stone form so they can't grab onto anything like he, River, and Amy are doing.
  • River's concern for Amy isn't just compassion, as it seems at first glance. Later, we learn that she's also Amy's daughter, so she's worried about her mom. Not only that, but if anything does happen to Amy, River herself will be erased from existence. Also, all of her showing off is also to impress her mother!
• Why does the Eleventh Doctor reference "The Vampires of Venice" so much? It's the first episode where Amy and Rory are together in the TARDIS. He really has respect for the Ponds as a couple.
  • Look at the order of the questions the Doctor asks Rosanna. First, he's trying to find out more about them: how their perception filters work, where they come from, their plans. Then, once he's gotten enough information to either help them settle peacefully on Earth or fight them, he asks the question that will determine which one it is: "Where's Isabella?"
• Technically, every line of dialogue delivered by the Dream Lord was courtesy of the Doctor. No matter how nice he is, that's always lurking in him. You hear him talk that way all the time to his enemies, but sometimes his friends get a hint of it themselves. The worst, of course, is reserved for himself.
• In "Amy's Choice", Rory's death causes Amy to decide the Leadworth reality can't be true, she triggers a Dream Apocalypse, and Rory ends up alive and well. This foreshadows how Rory dies for real in "Cold Blood" - and then, following his brief career as an Auton, comes back via Amy's memories after the universe is destroyed.
• Rory's dream home is in a small quiet town full of aging pensioners. This seems like an unusual choice until you remember he's a doctor. To a medical professional, seniors are job security.
• The Dream Lord's clothing choices serve as subtle foreshadowing of his identity and symbolism. We see him wearing a dark version of the Doctor's clothes, followed by a medical professional (obvious), lord of the manor (Time Lord), butcher (how much blood does the Doctor have on his hands?), racecar driver (man of speed and action), and open dressing gown (given that most of Moffat's era is about the Doctor's romances, not surprising). The latter also serves to creep out Amy.
• "Vincent and the Doctor":
  • Van Gogh, fighting an invisible monster only he can see, an invisible monster that has been haunting him for a long while, kills it with an artist's easel. Now think about the mental illness he's been dealing with in the same episode.
• There is a recent theory that claims Van Gogh didn't commit suicide — rather, a kid shot him by accident and he claimed he tried to kill himself (to, later, die from infections caused by it) to spare the kid. If this theory is right, showing him how important he would become and basically giving him a magnificent moment, indeed, would not have prevented his death, no matter how much he wanted to live before or after learning of his future legacy. Alternatively, Vincent van Gogh would've killed himself, but the Doctor changed history so this recent theory came to pass. Though it didn't save him and he'd still claim he'd killed himself, at least he'd die with the knowledge that he would be successful.
• What if in the "original" timeline, Van Gogh never killed himself at all, but after seeing how loved his works would be in the future and going back to a world where everyone thought he was an incompetent amateur made him depressed enough to take his own life. Nice job breaking it, Hero.
• When Amy says to Vincent "I'm not the marrying kind" it took a few views to register how this reveals just how big an impact Rory's loss has had on her — from "day before my wedding" to "not the marrying kind". Ka-pow.
• "The Pandorica Opens": The Pandorica is obviously a reference to Pandora's Box (see below.) And what was left in the box after the evils of the world left it? Hope. Moreover, hope is not just the last thing in Pandora's Box, it's the last evil, disguised as something good. The Doctor is described as an evil man who tries his best to be good.
• The coalition from "The Pandorica Opens" is a little confusing at first — even if the Daleks, for instance, thought that the Doctor was a threat to the universe, would paranoid xenophobes like them really join up with other species? "The Impossible Astronaut" and "Day of the Moon" explain it: 1. Assuming, as is heavily implied, that the Silence were the ones that tried to blow up the TARDIS, they definitely would have wanted the one man who knew the TARDIS well enough to stop them out of the way. 2. There was a line somewhere in "Day of the Moon" that implied that the Silence were not just on Earth, but spread across the entire universe. 3. The Silence can implant post-hypnotic suggestions...
  • Daleks might well be immune to the Silents' amnesia-effect, given how "Into the Dalek" reveals that their individual memories are stored (and edited for propaganda purposes) via computer. Whether or not this would also apply to Silent mind control is unclear, but Daleks have been known to work with "inferior" species for a short time if it's the only way to get what they want: they just betray and exterminate them once their mutual objective is secured.
• Why does Amy survive her trip into the Pandorica? Because it's the ultimate prison that doesn't let you escape by dying, which is important if you're trying to imprison a Time Lord who could regenerate and blow the entire apparatus apart.
  • This may or may not cause a plot hole as the Doctor is already at his last regeneration at this point but other species might not know so... but then again the Daleks already knew somehow in "The Time of the Doctor", though it's possible they found that out from Tasha Lemm, given how close she and the Doctor were.
• In "The Pandorica Opens", River finds a photo of Rory in Roman garb in Amy's room. She tells the Doctor that she's found a photo of the centurion, but why wouldn't she already know Rory from their previous adventures in her timeline? Because Rory never existed. Amy didn't recognize him, and neither did River, despite already knowing that Amy was her mother. Also a bit of foreshadowing, because that means that Rory is part of River's personal timeline, otherwise she wouldn't have forgotten him, being a time traveller.
  • Alternatively, River is pretending to the Doctor not to recognize Rory to protect the timeline.
• In the beginning sequence of "A Good Man Goes to War", River tells Rory that she's just come back from celebrating her birthday with the Doctor. This isn't just a throw-away moment to add depth to the relationship between River and the Doctor. On second viewing, the fact that this scene comes shortly after the birth of Melody/River suggests that the frivolous birthday party was another clever bit of foreshadowing.
• Another theory about the Pandorica. The legend goes that:
  Eleventh Doctor: There was a goblin, or a trickster, or a warrior. A nameless, terrible thing, soaked in the blood of a billion galaxies. The most feared being in all the cosmos. And nothing could stop it, or hold it or reason with it. One day it would just drop out of the sky and tear down your world.
  Amy Pond: How did it end up in there?
  Eleventh Doctor: You know fairy tales. A good wizard tricked it.
  River Song: I hate good wizards in fairy tales; they always turn out to be him.
  • The Doctor did effectively trick himself in. Okay, he meant to trick the Legion Of Super Evil into staying away, but what he did was confirm he was there and waiting for them. He trapped himself. The legend is 100% correct (it just misses out the bit where he tricks himself out of it).
• In "The Pandorica Opens", the villains made it so the Doctor couldn't die in said Pandorica: wouldn't it be better to just kill the Doctor?. But in "The Impossible Astronaut", where the Doctor was killed, however used it to warn his past self and companions about the Silence. It makes sense for them to condemn him to And I Must Scream: they don't want him to pull a Thanatos Gambit, which he's clearly capable of doing!
  • Also, if the Doctor is being imprisoned, he would be desperate to escape, but might believe until it's too late that there's some way out. If he's about to be killed, he'll be very desperate with nothing to lose. And a very desperate Doctor with nothing to lose... The Daleks, at least, who know the Doctor very, very well, are smart enough not to put him in that corner.
• From re-watching "The Pandorica Opens": No one had been able to read the words on Planet One (though it technically didn't exist until River went back to put it there) because it was in English/Greek, a language from an obscure little blue ball that might not have even existed yet. Fridge Logic also applies, due to River noting that the TARDIS takes time to translate the written word, yet Amy and the Doctor can read the cliff-side as soon as they open the TARDIS door.
  • Unless the words were actually written in English, an obscure language to most of the universe, but one the Doctor and Amy are both naturally fluent in (so the TARDIS only needs to translate the coordinates).
• One from Series Five here. It seemed a bit weird that the Daleks believe that the Doctor would cause the cracks in the fabric of reality by destroying the TARDIS. But in "Victory of the Daleks", he threatens to take them out with the self-destruct button. It makes a lot more sense now. Not to mention how he ended the Time War. They probably believe him capable of anything.
  • Heck, for all they know, the Doctor's still got the freakin' Moment hidden in a cupboard in the TARDIS somewhere.
• In the beginning of "The Big Bang", Amelia manages to stay behind at the museum to open the Pandorica after everyone is gone. It shows her carer calling out for her, and there's an announcement for her to go to the front desk. The museum still closes though, so that could make you think "the security for this place must be bad", but who is revealed as the security guard....RORY! if he hadn't been told so many times by Amy to shut up, he probably would have mentioned about making sure no one else found her as he worked out the reason she was there was to heal Amy and open the Pandorica.
• "The Big Bang": What could River have possibly done in the past (or future) that would cause a Dalek to beg for its life? Why, killing the Doctor, of course! Also doubles as foreshadowing.
• So, in "The Big Bang", River Song gets her Moment of Awesome when she makes a Dalek beg for mercy. Right — awesome for River. Except, the Doctor has committed genocide against the Daleks more than once, and yet this Dalek is still convinced that the Doctor or his associates will show mercy. When said Dalek realizes whom it is dealing with, it starts screaming for mercy. The Doctor chooses Companions because they have traits he doesn't see in himself (mercy, compassion, etc). The Dalek doesn't believe River will show mercy because the Doctor is merciful — it thinks she'll show mercy because the Doctor's Companions are merciful.
  • It's also foreshadowing for the next season, where the Daleks understanding the concept of mercy is very important.
  • Another River Song "The Big Bang" fridge moment: After the universe resets, everyone is gathered for Amy's wedding and River discretely swings by to leave her a blue TARDIS diary to help jog her memory of the Doctor. Why did River know to do this? Because she's traveling through time the other way, she remembers the Doctor because from her perspective, he's always been part of this universe because the events of this episode already played out.
• This one is for "The Big Bang" specifically, but connects to the rest of season 5: It's quite obvious how important Moffat thinks fairytales really are, and it's never been more obvious than in this episode. Watching the Confidential shows how really silly scenes in the museum were put together in such a way as to represent that the world was falling apart, and so a lot of history literally made no sense anymore. Displays existed including such fascinating things as the Nile Penguins, for example. One of the few things with any consistency in this slowly dying universe is the myth of the Centurion, Rory, and the Myth of the Pandorica... So many facts have literally vanished from existence that humans can't rely on the continuity of history anymore. So this universe is quite literally holding the remaining scraps itself together via the power of story telling.
• Amy pops out of the box saying "Okay kid, this is where it gets complicated." She sounds very lucid. And then she very woozy for the next few scenes. That's a direct message from the Doctor "like an ansaphone." (answering machine)
• In "The Big Bang", how does the Doctor knew that the Pandorica wouldn't let people die, because that would be escaping? Nothing like that is mentioned in "The Pandorica Opens". But it was Future!Doctor who told Rory to put Amy in the Pandorica, so he's already seen the outcome of putting her in there: she's still alive. Hence his knowing that Rory should put Amy in the box to save her — he already knows it works. It's a time-loop.
• So, in "The Big Bang" the stars, including our Sun, never existed and Earth is kept warm by exploding TARDIS instead. How exactly does it happen? Spacey-wacey Time-Lord technology or something like that, it's not really important to the plot. But then later, in "Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS", we learn that the TARDIS contains an entire star within it. That should have enough energy to keep Earth warm for millennia!
• Speaking of "The Big Bang" and stars, in the collapsing version of reality, the episode mentions Amelia's imaginary stars being a common occurrence, and that people through out history have had similar ideas. If we remember Vincent Van Gogh, and his stated unique view of the world, we can assume that this means that he is likely one of these people. This may have also have caused a perceived connection between his madness and the painting "Starry Night", perhaps to the point of causing the present distrust of Star Cults and Richard Dawkins.
• There's no sign of the Blinovitch Limitation Effect, despite young Amelia interacting with older Amy. This makes sense for two reasons: First of all, the whole universe is going to pot, so the usual temporal laws are out the window. The second reason is that Amy comes from an entirely different timestream.
• Ever since "The Big Bang", Rory is older than the Doctor. And he'd remain so at least until the final segment of "The Time of the Doctor", if not the opening shot of "Heaven Sent".
• When River first meets the Doctor, sh e's in a body he's never seen her in before, and knows nothing about him. When the Doctor first meets River, he's in a body she's never seen him in before, and knows nothing about her.
• The 2010 Christmas Special finishes with Abigail saving the day by singing to stabilize the crashing ship and allowing it to land safely. It's a beautiful, gorgeous, soaring song — but listen to the lyrics, and notice how often the word "silence" comes up...
• Kazram's dilemma about releasing Abigail from her freeze-pod is directly analogous to the Doctor's dilemma over having companions. Every time he invites a human to travel with him, he knows he'll become emotionally attached to a person whom, if he remains with long enough, he'll have to watch die. Yet every time he decides he can't bear to form such bonds any longer, the lack of companions leaves him overcome by bitterness, frustration and loneliness, to the point where he could do a lot of harm through his own indifference.
• This story doesn't show the Blinovitch Limitation Effect when young! and old! Kazran touch each other. Given that the Doctor deliberately brought young Kazran forward in time to meet his future self, he most likely set up some form of protection, either using the TARDIS or some piece of tech hidden on young Kazran, to stop that eventuality (last thing he needs at this point is to deal with that on top of everything else).
• At one point in the first "Meanwhile in the TARDIS", Amy asks whether the Doctor is "a tiny little slug in a human suit". Fast forward to the final episode of the next season...
• A meta case. Whether the writers intended or not, they've come up with the In-Universe cause of Chuck Cunningham Syndrome. Chuck and everyone like him, fell into a hole and was erased from history.
• Fridge Brilliance and Fridge Horror: It's never quite explained why the TARDIS ends up exploding across all of time and space when it should've just been blown up in whatever time and place it was currently present in. Furthermore, it initially doesn't make sense why River was needed inside the TARDIS before it is blown up... that is, until the finale. In "The Big Bang", it's explained that the TARDIS is trying to keep River alive by repeating the last ten seconds in a Stable Time Loop as a fail-safe. Assuming it's not just the TARDIS's inner dimension repeating the same loop but also the outer dimensions, this means it cannot occupy the same space twice at the exact same time. The TARDIS is exploding across the entire space-time continuum because the time loop fail-safe has been weaponized to ensure it will repeat the explosion everywhere and when.

Fridge Horror — Series 5

• "The Lodger":
  • The episode, taking place in the present day, repeatedly gives the number 6,400,000,26 as the population of the human species. At the time of broadcasting, the actual figure was closer to, if not greater than, 6,700,000,000. The 299,999,974 person difference? That's alien-invasion fatalities and lack-of-birth resulting from said fatalities, so incredibly high due to how invasion-prone this Earth is. It's a rare day when nobody dies before the invasion is stopped, but damn.
  • And/or it's the number of people who have been eaten by the crack.
  • Keep in mind: In "The End of Time", the Master had turned every human being, sans Wilf, into himself. He said that there were over 6.7 billion versions of himself. Meaning a significant number of people have been completely eradicated from history.
  • Here's another one from "The Lodger". Eleven is behaving more like a Cloud Cuckoolander than usual, bordering on Idiot Ball territory. However, he has a psychic link/bond/whatever to the TARDIS. The TARDIS that was going haywire for the entire episode. Given that he spent the entire episode with the TARDIS screaming in his mind, no wonder he's a little distracted.
  • Speaking of "The Lodger", at the time it just seemed like a mid-season monster of the week episode, with only a tenuous connection to the season's mythology arc. The Doctor's adversary is just a computer on autopilot that self-destructs at the end, not something likely to appear again. That is until "The Impossible Astronaut", where we see a control room identical to the one at the top of the stairs. However, what you probably don't remember is that several times during "The Lodger", Amy stuck alone on the TARDIS seems to be aware of someone else there with her, only to seemingly forget it by the next scene. It turns out, the main ability of the Silence is inducing amnesia when not being directly observed. Since most viewers will probably forgot this part of "The Lodger", it means that the memory-blocking ability can effectively break the fourth wall.
• Both Brilliance & Horror: Perhaps not intentional, but in "The Eleventh Hour", we know Amy lived with her aunt as a child. However, we hear little, if anything, about this aunt in any episode after this one. Then we learn that the cracks in time erase people entirely from existence. Whether intentional or not, it's very easily more than just a case of What Happened to the Mouse?. Also crosses into Fridge Horror in that it's unknown if Amy would have even tried to restore her aunt the same way she did her mother and father.
• In "The Beast Below", everyone of voting age has the opportunity to choose between continuing to torture the Star Whale or releasing it, which would allow it to destroy Starship U.K. in revenge. They aren't warned that anyone choosing to release the Whale will be dumped into the creature's mouth to die. The legal voting age for citizens of Starship U.K. is sixteen. How many teenagers do you see among the surviving kids in the Tower, and how many 16-year-olds are likely to vote "Protest" out of youthful idealism or sheer rebelliousness?
  • Which explains the strict totalitarian government set-up: it was put in place to discourage rebellion and dispose of children who might be prone to rebellious behaviour before they reach voting age. Children end up associating rebellion or nonconforming behavior with severe punishment, and with the Smilers around, they can pretty much count on getting caught if they try.
• In "The Pandorica Opens"/"The Big Bang", a Rory automaton is created and given a personality based on memories from Amy's head. That automaton spends two millennia guarding the Pandorica and being a badass Roman centurion. Then the universe goes plooey, after which it's rebooted in a "second Big Bang", again based on memories from Amy's head and information subconsciously dumped into it from the glow-y time crack in her bedroom over the years. Rory comes back as a human, but he still has memories from auto!Rory's two-thousand-year vigil, which human!Rory never experienced. This makes sense; as far as Amy is concerned, auto!Rory was Rory, so his memories got dumped into human!Rory's head just like original!Rory's did. So now Rory has all these memories of stuff that happened to someone else. Where it becomes Fridge Horror is when you realize that the memories of his human life are just as artificial. None of that stuff actually happened to him: they happened to a different person in a different universe who just happens to be physically identical. And not just Rory: as of the Ponds' wedding, everyone in the universe has a head full of stuff that never actually happened, because they were all created complete with those memories five minutes ago. Ever see Dark City? That's your life, everyone in Moffat!Who: Descartes' worst nightmare made real.
  • The Auton version of Rory being imbued with the real Rory's heart and soul makes a certain degree of sense. He and the other Centurions were created using stuff pulled from Amy's mind when she lived next to the crack. And doesn't Rory's heart and soul belong to Amy?
  • Rory's heart and soul, as all but spelled out in the next season, are what attracted Amy to him in the first place. Of course that would be uppermost in her mind.
• Why is it Rory is always playing second fiddle to Eleven? He's the nurse and the Doctor is, well, the doctor. Any nurse will tell you that it's usually rather the other way around. Which is why, even though Rory may feel like he plays second fiddle to the Doctor, he's always first to Amy. The Doctor is the person who you ultimately go to to fix whatever is wrong with you: he's the man who makes people better. But nurses are there with you the whole time, they're a source of reassurance, solace, and also the people who deal with the less attractive, ugly side of medicine. Sounds like The Doctor and Rory to me.
• It was mentioned in "The Beast Below" that Scotland insisted on having their own ship, this was a throwaway joke but considering what we found out about how Starship UK was possible it's scary to think what they were using for the Scottish ship.
• The Doctor's PTSD from the Time War (and all his hatred of the Daleks from before that) is on clear view throughout "Victory of the Daleks". However, there's a subtler moment, when he looks absolutely exhausted and miserable while he's in the TARDIS talking to "Danny Boy." Why is that particular bit hitting him? It's one thing for him to throw himself between the Daleks and innocent people; that's practically second nature to him, and he's even somewhat used to it by now. However, here he's standing helplessly by while others fight the Daleks, and he can only watch and listen and pray they succeed. No doubt the same thing happened many times throughout the Time War. He thought he'd never have to do that again.

Series 6 (Eleventh Doctor / Amy & Rory) Fridge

Fridge Brilliance — Series 6

• In "The Impossible Astronaut", River insists that the Doctor's remains be incinerated, because a Time Lord's body is so incredible that there are whole empires that would destroy earth to get their hands on even a single cell. Jack had an entire hand sitting on his desk for a year. Considering the somewhat sporadic competence of the Torchwood team, let's count ourselves lucky that this news apparently never got out.
  • The Doctor's hand did prove to be a dangerous thing to have lying around, as the Master used it in conjunction with Lazarus technology to age the Doctor to the max extreme. In the following season, the hand accidentally grew a human-Time Lord hybrid thanks to regeneration energy. Thus proving the potential power of a Time Lord's body, even perhaps a single cell.
• "The Impossible Astronaut":
  • River says that a Time Lord's body is a miracle and they should burn the Doctor's body because there are whole empires out there who would go to war for a single cell. This is why the Doctor burned the Master's body at the end of "Last of the Time Lords".
  • River's scanner wotsit doesn't show any life signs when she uses it to scan the Doctor's corpse. Of course not; she's scanning a robot. It wouldn't have any life signs to show!
  • In "Let's Kill Hitler", the Doctor is killed by River Song as Mels and doesn't start regenerating afterwards, needing her regenerations to do so. So why did he start regenerating after the astronaut shot him? It was a hint that it wasn't the Doctor at all, not even a Ganger, as it was first foreshadowed, but the Teselecta, whose crew had no idea about the aborted regeneration of the Tenth Doctor and the existence of the War Doctor. Alternatively, the Doctor told them to fake the regeneration early.
  • The Confidential episode for this episode points out that this is the only time in the entire series, to date, when River and the Doctor have actually been in-sync. And then he dies. With that in mind, the choice of Adele's "Rolling in the Deep" elsewhere in the episode when discussing the titular astronaut seems particularly appropriate.
    The scars of your love remind me of us
    They keep me thinking that we almost had it all
    The scars of your love, they leave me breathless
    I can't help feeling
    We could have had it all
• This just struck me re-watching "Day of the Moon": When the Doctor walks into the Silence base/ship, he quickly mentions having seen something like it before, but abandoned, and he wonders why that is. He's referring to the ship from "The Lodger" from the previous series. The one that was/will be abandoned because of what he is about to/has done to the Silence. Timey-Wimey Ball indeed.
• According to NASA and Neil Armstrong, the original line written and spoken for the moon landing was "One small step for A man, one giant leap for mankind." However, the "a" was supposedly lost due to a glitch in the transmission...
• The Brigadier once said "Just for once, I'd like to meet an alien menace that wasn't immune to bullets." As of "Day of the Moon", we discover that he's been meeting them and killing them for much of his adult life, he just doesn't remember it.
  • As mentioned on Artistic License – Military, Rory saluted NASA personnel with a British-style salute, while wearing civilian clothing. This while impersonating an FBI agent. As anyone with any knowledge of U.S. military customs can tell you, his impersonation failed miserably.
• "Day of the Moon" shows the first Moon landing, Apollo 11, with the 11th Doctor!
• This episode also has the Doctor seemingly callous about the effective genocide of the Silents, while River shoots them down without a qualm. However, there are a couple of mitigating factors. In the case of the genocide, it's worth noting that the order is not "you should hunt us down and kill us all," it's "you should kill us all on sight." If the Silents hide themselves away from humanity (and there are plenty of places in the world without many humans, not to mention any underground bases they have), they won't be in danger. And in a century or so, humanity's going to start spreading out to the stars, meaning that the Silents can stow away and hide on other planets. In River's case, these are the beings who abused her as a child, turned her into a living weapon, and (almost) forced her to murder the man she loves. For her, this is well-deserved vengeance.
• In "The Doctor's Wife", Idris, who has been implanted with the consciousness of the Doctor's TARDIS, kisses the Doctor when she first sees him. While this is understandable considering their connection, to me there was a little bit of Fridge Brilliance behind it; when Rose looked into the heart of the TARDIS, the last thing the Doctor did to get it out of her was to kiss her. So the next time the TARDIS is in a living body, she kisses him back!
• One of the last things the TARDIS says to the Doctor is, "Hello." She knows that he hates endings.
• There has been some speculation regarding the Corsair mentioned in the episode. Gaiman considers the Corsair to be dead unless some writer on the show wanted to bring him back, in which case a few of his cells survive the collapse of House's pocket universe and possibly make it back through the rift. Consider that his/her body has been chopped into pieces, though, it seems logical to assume the Corsair might be missing vital components. Perhaps he should invest in a hook for an arm, a peg leg, and an eye patch?
• The exchange between the Doctor and the House ("Fear Me, I've killed all of them.") is even more badass when you think about it. The Doctor isn't just flaunting a higher body count, he's delivering a death sentence. The House eats TARDISes. If the Time Lords are all dead, the House will inevitably starve to death eventually. The Doctor killed the House long before the episode began.
• There are hints scattered about "The Rebel Flesh" that the Doctor went to the island deliberately to study the Flesh, and this is confirmed at the end of "The Almost People". But rewatching it, something else becomes clear; he didn't just go to a place where they used Gangers, he deliberately went somewhere where he knew there had been an incident. Pretty much as soon as he gets there he starts trying to convince the workers to let him take them away from the island, insisting that they will be in danger if they are there when the solar storm strikes. Not "might", will. Presumably, he wanted to take a look at the Flesh, and thought he could kill two birds with one stone by preventing some deaths while he was at it. Also, the Ganger!Doctor was created deliberately; the Doctor knew full well what would happen when he touched the Flesh. Probably, his plan was to drop off Amy and Rory (as he attempted to at the beginning), go to the island, remove the workers, calm down the Gangers and get them accepted into society somehow, and while he was there make a Ganger of himself, bring him back to the TARDIS, and then hide for a while until he confirmed his suspicions about Amy being a Ganger. Don't know what he was planning to do with the Ganger!Doctor after that; they were getting on well, so probably he wouldn't mind him staying. Goes to show how much he cares about Amy, that he would take such an extreme step if it could help her.
  • A bit WMG, but his original plan may have been to use his Ganger self as a duplicate for the Lake Silencio incident, until he realized that the Gangers weren't just copies of the original, they were people of their own.
    • Unlikely, he doesn't learn the truth of Lake Silencio until the Ganger incident.
• Rory is extremely sympathetic of the Gangers — second only to the Doctor. Then you realize: The Gangers believe themselves to be the same person as their human counterparts, on the virtue they have the same memories, same genetics, same feelings, etc. Rory's been in that position before, as the (plastic) Last Centurion. So, he has memories from when he was a Nestene — if the Gangers don't count as human, how could he consider himself one?
• The Doctor spends the entire episode sympathetic to the Gangers, only to turn around and dissolve Amy's Ganger at the end without a thought, why? The "Rebel Flesh" occurs in the 22nd Century, "A Good Man Goes to War" is set in the 52nd Century, around 3000 years later, on paper the Gangers are an excellent saftey precaution, allowing for a level of flexibility in the field a machine cannot mimic, without the risk, the only issue is that the Flesh retains an imprint of the mind that piloted it, with the possibility of becoming a complete clone of their pilot, and that when they are vacated, they are left to rot. Presumably, rather than totally discontinue it's use, after the events of the former episode, the Flesh was redeveloped to genuinely be what it was believed to be; mindless biomatter that can form a replica of a person remotely operating it. Furthermore when the connection is cut between Amy, and later Melody with their Gangers, the Ganger immediately dissolves back into pure flesh in seconds, not slowly and painfully rotting away. Furthermore,the Doctor mentions wanting to study the Flesh in it's early state as his reason for going to the factory, indicating that the Flesh technology does persist, and in the latter episode, the Doctor refers to the Gangers as "Flesh Avatars", perhaps drawing a line between the primitive Ganger version of the flesh, which retains an imprint, and the more developed Flesh Avatars, that are, as the name suggests, simply an avatar for their controller.
• In "A Good Man Goes to War", it's revealed that travelling in the TARDIS can result in human offspring with Time Lord qualities. So what happens when companions start having children? One episode of Torchwood even proved that Martha's whole immune system has mutated. Of course, she's been on New Earth during "Gridlock", after the cure for all human diseases was spread airborne in "New Earth".
  • Presumably for most couples this is less of an issue, it's explicitly stated that Melody is the way she is because she was conceived in flight, in the TARDIS (and, it's hinted, further experimented on by the Silence). A companion who becomes pregnant after leaving the TARDIS should produce a more-or-less baseline human child.
• In "A Good Man Goes to War", we learn River Song's identity: she is the daughter of Amy and Rory, having been conceived in the TARDIS and stolen by Madame Kovarian, to be a weapon against the Doctor. Yeah, let that sink in. This means not only that Amy and Rory will never get to raise their child, but the kid was manipulated and raised by Madam Kovarian and The Silence. Who will quite possible kill the future love of her life. In front of her parents. And herself. Not to mention, River's death may be necessary for her very conception. Ladies and gentlemen, River Song, Fridge Horror incarnate. And Steven Moffat likely planned this out from the beginning.
• In "A Good Man Goes to War", Baby Melody cries at the noise the TARDIS makes, which means River has been nagging the Doctor about it ever since she was a baby!
• "Let's Kill Hitler":
  • In "The Time of Angels", River told the Doctor that she'd learned to pilot the TARDIS from the best, and that he wasn't there that day. Well, in a sense, he wasn't, because in "Let's Kill Hitler", he was busy dying.
  • Mel spent a lot of time at Amy's House, brainwashed by the Silence. Which means she was in regular psychic contact with Prisoner Zero, who could then taunt the Doctor about the Silence's plans. Which brings up an interesting idea; perhaps it wasn't a coincidence that the first Crack appeared at Amy's house, leading to pretty much all the events of Season 5. What are the odds that it just happened to occur at a location where an agent of the Silence spent much of her time?
    • Bootstrap paradox. She spent all her time there because her mother, the Doctor's future companion, lived there. Which causes the other? I think it's more likely that the Crack appeared randomly, and events generated around it.
  • The reason Hitler is speaking English instead of German is that the TARDIS translates, but why didn't it translate "Führer" to "leader" when Hitler said it? Because Hitler had a twisted view of what it meant to be "the Führer", which is why the TARDIS failed to pick it up as being translatable. Another possible reason the TARDIS did not translate "Führer" could simply have been that everyone already knew the meaning of the word, making it unnecessary to translate.
• Mels WAS at the wedding. Not that she knew that at the time. Mels still skipped the wedding and River showed up years later to bring the Doctor back into existence.
• The focus on 32 minutes in "Let's Kill Hitler" is in reference to the fact that it's season 32 of Doctor Who all together. Also: The cards River/Amy/Rory receive tell them to arrive at 4:30 to the Lake in Utah and the records in LKH says he dies at 5:02. 32 minutes.
• Another one from "Let's Kill Hitler". When young Melody lived with and grew up with her parents she wasn't just doing so in order to spend time with them, but also in order to make sure that she'd encounter the Doctor at such a time that she'd be able to kill him without accidentally never being born. She was biding her time in order to make sure that she'd encounter the Doctor after the events at Demons Run. That's also why she didn't show up at the wedding, because if she had her conditioning would've kicked in and she'd have tried to kill him.
• Fridge brilliance for "Night Terrors", the facial proportions and hairstyle on the dolls bears a strong resemblance to George's mother. Which may represent a subconscious awareness that he isn't entirely human, i.e., isn't quite the same as his mother or any of the other people in his life. A feeling of alienation amplified by his fear of rejection turns his mother, the person a little boy ought to feel closest to, into an uncanny creature.
• For "The Girl Who Waited": Tropers may spot the Doctor's lie about bringing both Amys on board the TARDIS, despite the paradox this would entail. In "The Sound of Drums", the Master made paradoxes possible, but he had to horribly mutilate the TARDIS in order to turn it into a paradox machine that would permit this: something the Doctor could never bring himself to do.
• The quarantine that trapped Amy in "The Girl Who Waited" could have lasted a lot longer than 36 years. Rewatch "Gridlock": the last act of the New Earth senate before succumbing to the virus that killed them was to declare New Earth unsafe, thus enabling an automatic quarantine that would lock down the planet for 100 years. If Apalapucia were declared unsafe because of a virus, the same protocols would be put into effect. Odds are, the quarantine had been going on long before and after the Doctor and company came and went.
• In this episode, Rory chews out the Doctor for not doing his research. However, as other stories such as "The Fires of Pompeii" and "The Angels Take Manhattan" show, not doing his research is actually very clever. Once an event has been recorded and the Doctor's seen it, such as with Amy and Rory's grave, it's (pun intended) set in stone, and he has to make sure the timeline (appears to) stay fixed to that course. By not knowing too much about any particular time period or place, the Doctor leaves themself more room to help others and make small changes to the timeline.
• Some Fridge Brilliance crossed with Tear Jerker for "The Girl Who Waited": the Doctor's heartbroken expression when he realized that he had left Amy to wait again is first seen as immense guilt. But when you know the end of the episode, his grief is him realizing he was going to have to leave her behind.
• In "The God Complex", it's revealed that the Minotaur feeds not on fear, but on faith, torturing the hotel's inhabitants until they fall back on whatever they believe will save them. When the Minotaur came for Amy, it was because of her faith in the Doctor. Her faith that he would come back for her. That he would save her. That he would save the day, like he always does. She was almost taken because of the same thing that the viewers believe throughout the series. Steven Moffat, yet again you've doomed us all. Perversely, he does indeed save her, by convincing her he won't.
• "The God Complex":
  • Amy's room is Number 7. How old was she when she first met the Doctor?
    • Extra brilliance: This probably isn't random symbolism, especially since the Doctor's room is Number 11. Most likely, every door number has some kind of relevance.
  • Gibbis is from a species whose Hat is surrendering: they're one of the oldest races in the galaxy by virtue of being conquered and enslaved by just about everyone else. That's why his worst fear is Weeping Angels: they're an enemy that can't be surrendered to. Furthermore, Gibbis never started to praise even though he found his room before Amy did, why? Because the Minotaur itself broke his faith. "Joe was right. Whatever it is in here it actually wants to kill us. Not oppress us or enslave us, kill us!"
    • Except, however, that Gibbis is not shown to have the same mental reaction that other characters who discover their rooms do. Weeping Angels might be a good fear for him, but paying attention suggests that he never actually encountered his room at all.
• Why did the Minotaur show Rory the exit in "The God Complex"? Maybe it wasn't because Rory was fearless, but because his greatest fear was abandoning Amy?
  • Another thing from that episode, it claims that Rory is not a good enough source for the Minotaur because he didn't strongly believe in anything. However, underneath his timid nature, we see that Rory can be very strong-willed. Then it hit me. Rory has a lot of faith in himself, especially when it came to protecting Amy. He stayed behind with the Pandorica, despite not even knowing if he'd survive that long. He had quite a few bold lines in A Good Man goes to War, and he was willing to sacrifice himself to save Amy when they were in the Asylum of the Daleks. Self-faith must not be a valid food source for the Minotaur, which is why it breaks down one's self-confidence using their fears. Rory may have had a lot of faith in the Doctor as well, but he had more faith in HIMSELF, even in face of his fears.
• River was taken to kill the Doctor on the day she herself became a Doctor, thus invoking There Can Only Be One. This can be averted when you take into account that she ended up marrying the Doctor — the two Doctors became one. Aww.
• In "The Wedding of River Song", Amy asks the Doctor why he's aged when no one else seems to be doing so. He technobabbles some answer about being a focal point or pole of the disturbance or something. However, River would be the other focal point/pole and clearly hasn't aged. So what gives? Several possibilities:
  • The Doctor is really the shape-shifting robot. He's aged because he's programmed himself to age, because he thinks he SHOULD age. He's just covering up for it with the explanation. -hitchopottimus
  • Alternative explanation: River has access to a haircut, while the tower is sadly lacking in barbers.
  • Alternative-alternative explanation: the Doctor's letting himself go. He's at the pinnacle of self-loathing: here he is, in a point where his death is closing in upon him, and he knows that in the end when the plan comes through, he's going to make the people he cares about the most — his companions — feel sad, lonely, and hollow because they think he died. Being the self-loathing Doctor that he is, personal hygiene isn't really that high up on his list. After all, he's a dead man walking.
    • Alternative-alternative-alternative explanation: Beards are cool. The Doctor wanted to try out a beard; it's not a difficulty for the Teselecta, so why not?
• The Arc Words of Season 6 is "The Silence Will Fall When the Question is Asked". The Silence's plan was essentially defeated when the Doctor agreed to marry River, convincing her to go with the established chain of evens of his death. And what do you call asking someone to marry you? Popping the Question. "The Silence Will Fall When the Question is Asked"...
• This series illustrates a running theme in the Moffat era: that even the most monumental "fixed points" in time like Gallifrey's supposed destruction in the Time War can change, so long as the known effect is demonstrated for purposes of history. "Inevitable" events like the Doctor's "death" can be averted, so long as everything is in place to look as if nothing of importance is different. The show draws a crucial line between "history as it was known / recorded" and "history that happened with infinite shifts in the details, but for all intents and purposes, ended up where everyone knew it would."
• In "A Good Man Goes to War", the Doctor is seen to make an army by calling on people who owe him (and from "Amy's Choice", we know he's not a big fan of himself, and probably thinks not a lot of others are either, perhaps because he uses intimidation as a solution quite often). In "The Wedding of River Song", he hates himself even more and doesn't even ask for help from Amy, Rory and River, while they, along with an entire organization, prove to him that he could've asked for help, not because the people who owe him want to be rid of the possibility of the Doctor collecting his debt, but because they are grateful.
• The River visiting Amy and Rory at the end of "The Wedding of River Song" says she's come from the Byzantium, just after "The Time of Angels"/"Flesh and Stone". In these episodes, River sees a very young version of her mother get trapped with a Weeping Angel, nearly die after getting one trapped in her mind, and then almost get erased from existence by one of the cracks in the Universe, which would have erased River as well. It's no wonder she felt the need to check up on older Amy after all that.
• In "The Doctor's Wife", the Doctor talks about finding the lost Time Lords, only for Amy to ask "you want to be forgiven, don't you?" The Doctor simply replies, "Don't we all?" So when he goes to Utah to get shot by River, he tells her that she is "forgiven; always and completely forgiven." The Doctor's not only relieving River of any guilt, he's letting her move on with her life: be it killing your own race, or shooting your husband, he knows what it's like to carry the guilt of something that was out of your control.
• Fridge Brilliance for the way the Doctor handled the Silence: Why would the good Doctor be willing to sentence the Silence to death if they stayed on Earth? Well, think about what happened in finale of the previous season — a whole bunch of his enemies got together to sentence the Doctor to the Pandorica, and there was a giant clusterfuck that ended with Rory as an Auton caring for Amy who was basically dead and in the Pandorica for two thousand years all while River was trapped in a time loop inside the TARDIS that was exploding and exploding and exploding... Is it any wonder that he wouldn't want any "villain" around to potentially hurt him or his friends after everything they had already gone through?
• How did the Silence cause the TARDIS to explode in "The Pandorica Opens"? Because River was inside the TARDIS at the time of the explosion and since she was raised by them to be a Manchurian Agent, she was likely compelled to destroy the TARDIS against her will. Hence the reason she uttered the words:
  River: I'm sorry, my love.
  • By extension, this makes the brick wall appearing on the other side of the TARDIS's door a likely case of the TARDIS trying to make sure she didn't escape.
  • Also the fact that it's River piloting the Tardis is significant. In Series 5, the Doctor had previously seen June 26, 2010 as the date of the temporal event that destroys the universe. This temporal event ends up being the Tardis exploding. But the significance of this date isn't just about the Tardis exploding — it's about River's existence. River is the only other person who can pilot the Tardis, because she was conceived in the Tardis. And on what date was she conceived? June 26, 2010: Her parents' wedding night.
• In regards to "First Night"/"Last Night", when the older Doctor shows up, River explains to the current Doctor that he's "taking me to the Singing Towers of Darilluim" While that's a Tear Jerker in itself, it's what she says immediately afterwards that's significant: "He's been promising me for ages," which, when you think about it, makes perfect sense. Of course the Doctor keeps putting it off: he's giving himself a bit more time with River before he never sees her again.
• Why do the characters in "The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe" only ever refer to him as "Caretaker?" Because so far as the universe knows, the "Doctor" is dead.
• "The God Complex": Rita does seem very Doctor-like, doesn't she? Great potential to be a companion? Well, of course—she's a medical student. She's training to be a doctor.
• In "A Good Man Goes to War", the Doctor gathers a variety of allies to storm Demons Run, but notably does not include the Brigadier, one of his oldest allies and finest military minds the Doctor knows. Of course, there are plenty of Doylist reasons for this, but there's an excellent Watsonian reason as well. The Brigadier has never been impressed by the Doctor's dramatics. He's a soldier; he gets the job done in the most efficient way possible. He would've recommended getting in, grabbing Amy and Melody, and getting out, maybe kidnapping Kovarian along the way so she won't cause any further trouble. He never would have stood for the Doctor's melodramatic, over-the-top, multi-step plan. Furthermore, he probably would've given the Doctor much the same What the Hell, Hero? speech River does at the end of the episode. And the Doctor, deep down, knows that. Probably the same reason he didn't include Captain Jack, for that matter.
• In Doctor Who S32 E10 "The Girl Who Waited" the button choices for the Two Streams Facility once you know what it does. Red Waterfall; in a waterfall water travels at great speed, much like how time moves a lot faster within the Red Waterfall section. Green Anchor, an Anchor holds ships in place against the flow of water, much like how visitors to Green Anchor, certainly from the perspective of the Red Waterfall patients, are anchored in time, only aging a single day as the Patients live their full lives.
• "A Good Man Goes to War" reveals that Gallifreyan doesn't translate. Of course it doesn't; the TARDIS translation circuits may work for humans but it was designed for Time Lords, why would they bother including their own language when any time lord who qualified to fly a TARDIS would definitely be able to speak it.

Fridge Horror — Series 6

• "The Impossible Astronaut": River shooting at the astronaut is absolutely full of this. If she remembered who was in that suit, she's essentially trying to commit suicide to avenge the man she loves. If she doesn't remember, and if the bullets had managed to penetrate the suit and kill the inhabitant at that point in their timestream...
  • Of course, the other possibility is that she does recognize the suit and knows perfectly well that the bullets wouldn't work, and she was just wasting bullets to stay in-character.
• "Day of the Moon":
  • Those messages in the children's home on the wall? The one's saying "GET OUT"? Those were written by the guy working there. He kept seeing the Silence and desperately leaving himself messages to escape the house, but then instantly forgetting afterwards.
  • He probably actually managed to leave the place if only a few times. The Silence always get him back. Always.
  • Speaking of that guy, the Doctor mentions that repeated memory wipes would fry anyone's brain. How many people with mental illnesses or Alzheimer's are only that way because a Silent decided to continually pop in and out of their line of sight? Who's to say that Silents aren't the only cause of Alzheimer's? You still wouldn't be able to determine whether they caused it or not.
    • Hopefully, once the little girl escaped, the Silence would forget about him (what with being busy running and hiding from the rest of humanity) and he'd be able to leave.
  • Fridge Horror and What Happened to the Mouse? together: What became of the captive Silent at Area 51 after the order was given to kill them all on sight? Did the military doctor who'd been treating it suddenly decide through subliminal messaging to euthanize it? Did Canton order that it be sealed in for all time? Did it starve to death?
• Remember how disgusted the Doctor was over the House creating Uncle and Auntie from dead Time Lord body parts in "The Doctor's Wife"? From the TARDIS' point of view, that was exactly what the Doctor was doing when he build his makeshift TARDIS.
• Here's some from "The Girl Who Waited": this episode treats an alteration of the timeline like the death of the altered person. In effect, Older Amy ceases to be, and for her that's a death (although one should keep in mind that older!Amy also suffers a real death — the handbots kill her). Now, think of all the times the Doctor has changed timelines. Think of those times that he completely altered history. Yeah… Keeping this in mind, the Doctor has officially "killed" every being in the universe multiple times. Yow.
• "The God Complex": The minotaur is in prison, because by its very nature it brainwashes and kills people. If the entire species is like that... how many more hotels are there floating around in space?
• "The Wedding of River Song". All of time and space collapse because River decided to try and rewrite a fixed point in time and space. Now, remember what the Doctor was willing to do during "The Waters of Mars" and tried to rewrite another point. He was willing to risk the same thing happening if he couldn't control Time like he thought he could. Thank God for Adelaide's sacrifice.
• The Silence are able to induce amnesia, so you don't remember them if you aren't looking at them. Theoretically, they could exist in Real Life, or at least another alien race with the same abilities. And no one would know the difference. One could be standing right behind you.
• Fridge Horror in a surprising way. So, the Silence have been controlling humans for something like forever. Maybe they've been looking after them? Either way, was there any good reason to have them all killed, Doctor? They put just as much, if not more, work into Earth as you did. Also, humans now have total free will (well, despite the instinct to kill Silence on sight), what horrors could they do without the Silence to reign them in, prevent humanity from doing the wrong thing in the long run because they're much older and wiser.
  • Ironically, real life does look sort of like this happened. When the Silence were exterminated, human progress began to accelerate at a previously unimagined speed. Societal progress also began to accelerate at an impossible speed. However, without that controlling power, suddenly, there was a power gap. Just like how 10 made Harold Saxon able to get into power, 11 created megacorporations, the massive corruption of politics, the Siltheen issue, the Harold Saxon issue, and who knows how many other conflicts. Without masters, humanity became up for grabs.
• "The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe": The female Androzani miner refuses to shoot Madge because she's a woman. Does that mean she'd have no problem shooting her if she were an equally-defenseless man?

Series 7A (Eleventh Doctor / Amy & Rory) Fridge

Fridge Brilliance — Series 7A

• "Asylum of the Daleks":
  • Amy showed the fist with 'HATE' written on it first, before revealing the fist with 'LOVE' written on it, and later on she slaps Rory twice: once when she'd still believed to not have a wrist-band thingy (forgot the name) that prevents the subtraction of love and the adding of anger, and once when Rory says that she doesn't love him as he loves her in the same scene that reveals that she does and that she has a wrist-band thingy on her.
  • Surviving Daleks from various classic stories all the way back to "The Daleks' Master Plan" are kept in the most secure areas of the already maximum security prison for insane Daleks. Why? because their species' fear and obsession with the Doctor is so great that just encountering him is enough to send them utterly and horrifyingly insane. Remind you of anyone?
  • It was stated that the Daleks only grew as strong as they did because the Doctor fought them so many times. Remember, however, that the Doctor is (as shown in the previous season) the most feared and dangerous entity in the universe by this point, and the only race that has been fighting him from the very beginning was the Daleks. They could only ever develop to be so horrifyingly powerful because they were so dedicated throughout their history to fighting what to them was essentially an invincible monster.
  • Why are the oldest Dalek designs under maximum security? They've had to deal with the Doctor in their mind for what probably amounts to centuries, if not outright millennia, so it's no wonder they need restraints.
  • Rory asks the Doctor on a scale of one to ten of how dangerous the situation is. The Doctor responds with "eleven". He's the Eleventh Doctor, and he says this just as he enters the room Amy and Rory are in.
  • Another one for "Asylum of the Daleks" — Rory claims that "There weren't any good questions left" when he asks "What colour?" Fridge Brilliance kicks in when you realize that EVERY colour of Dalek were on the planet.
  • More like Fridge Tearjerker: When Dalek Oswin says, "We have grown stronger in fear of you," the Doctor's response is a disgusted, "I know." Look at the way he says it, the expression on his face: He blames himself for the Daleks becoming as deadly as they are. No wonder so much vitriol comes out whenever he faces the Daleks; not only does he hate them for everything they've done, he hates himself for forcing them to be strong!^note  Of course, it's not entirely justified, if at all, but there's his guilt complex for you.
  • Oswin's name makes sense, since that was Modern Day Clara's username in The Bells of Saint John, as throughout the episode she talks to everyone via technology rather than face to face.
• When the Doctor calls Rory "Mr. Pond" in "The Big Bang", it isn't a misunderstanding of human marital customs or a veiled joke about who would be wearing the metaphorical pants in Amy and Rory's marriage. Amy Pond was "the first face this face saw", the first person the Eleventh Doctor got to meet after his regeneration. On their first adventure together after the Prisoner Zero incident, it was Amy who realized that the space whale didn't have to be tortured or lobotomized, because it wanted to help protect the children of Starship Britain. This act of intelligence, courage, and compassion won Amy the Doctor's respect, and "Pond" to him has come to represent the best of humanity. In "The Big Bang", when Rory waited nearly two thousand years to protect Amy in the Pandorica, he became worthy of the title "Mr. Pond". In "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship", when Rory's father Brian volunteers to help pilot the Silurian ark with Rory (the Silurians set up the controls so that the two co-pilots have to be genetically related), the Doctor happily calls him "Mr. Pond". Also, when introducing his "gang" (Nefertitti and John Riddell) at the beginning of the episode, he insists that he is not replacing Amy and Rory, saying, "They're just people, they're not Ponds." To the Eleventh Doctor, when he calls Rory and Brian "Mr. Pond", it is simply the highest compliment he can bestow upon them.
• "The Angels Take Manhattan":
  • The concept of fixed points in time makes a return. Exposition reveals that what makes a fixed point in time is the act of observation, and that future events are subject to the uncertainty principle and thus malleable until they are either observed or already known in advance by time travellers. This also explains the whole point of spoilers; knowing the circumstances of your own future makes those events impossible to avoid without creating a paradox. We observed the tombstone with Rory's name on it long before The Doctor or Amy did. In essence, through that act of observation, we, the audience, consigned Amy and Rory to their fate.
  • If you're told about the future by someone that's been there, it becomes fixed, yes? Amy's last message to the Doctor asks him to visit her younger self and tell them about all the adventures she'll have, how she'll travel with the Doctor, fall in love with Rory, and generally have a good life. Basically, she's using the fixed time mechanic to her advantage and ensuring her younger self gets to experience all the happiness and excitement she did; once the Doctor tells the young Amelia Pond what's to come, it will be set in stone.
  • Also from that episode, there's a picture of the Statue of Liberty on the back wall of the Winter Quay elevator. The Statue of Liberty is an Angel. Anything the bears the image of an Angel becomes an Angel itself. And anyone riding the elevator is going to do so with their backs turned to one in that picture. The Angel of Liberty in the elevator is a contingency, in case the elevator broke down on the way up to the main trap.
  • An unfilmed (but animated!) scene reveals that Amy and Rory adopted in 1946... a year after WWII ended, when lots of orphans worldwide would be looking for homes.
• Fridge Brilliance about the many deaths of Rory Williams.
  • He was killed by the parasitic old folks in the Dream Lord's illusion. (1)
  • He was killed again when the TARDIS exploded in the Dream Lord's OTHER illusion. (2)
  • He was shot by Silurians and erased from time. (3)
  • Auton!Rory was killed when the universe ended. (4)
  • He faked his own death to escape from the FBI. (5)
  • He fell overboard Henry Avery's ship and drowned. (6)
  • An older version of Rory is killed by the House. (7)
  • An alternate Rory is killed by the Silence. (8)
  • Finally, in "The Angels Take Manhattan", Rory dies a total of three times, bringing the total up to... Eleven.
  • Which, if you really want to stretch it, could be allusions or references to the many deaths and eras of the Doctor:
    • He is disintegrated in a matter that makes it seem like his life force is being drained from him (First Doctor's life force was drained from him)
    • The Dream Lord is a direct cause of his second death (Second Doctor forced to regenerate by Time Lords).
    • While his third death isn't connected to the Third Doctor's, his era was that which introduced the Silurians
    • Gets killed during a universe-ending threat, which is what the Fourth Doctor died preventing
    • Fifth death has no real alien aspects to it, much like the much more human Fifth Doctor (I know, I'm reaching with this one)
    • Drowning by falling off a ship, a rather mundane death which has more than meets the eye going on (Sixth Doctor's "bump on the head" which was later revealed to be much more complicated)
    • We watch the Seventh Doctor die when he was much older, and often dealt with cosmic horrors much like House
    • Alternate!Rory is his eighth death, fitting as the Eighth Doctor's life was full of alternate timelines and universe-jumping
    • his ninth, tenth, and eleventh deaths are all at the hands of Weeping Angels, the most popular Modern Who alien: his Ninth, laying in a bed old and longing for spending time with Amy (Nine's last words reflected on what he wanted to do but couldn't, while Ten's life was very short, leaving him wanting to do so much more), his Tenth was a heroic sacrifice to save someone he cares about (both Nine and Ten do this), and his Eleventh death is his final one, as we believed Eleven was the final Doctor. Add in that Rory at this point is older than the Doctor, and we have a decent analogy to his lives and times through the companion of Rory Pond.
• Fridge Logic: So The Doctor cannot go back to help Amy and Rory because he cannot land the TARDIS in 1930's Manhattan, what's preventing him landing in 1930's Brooklyn?
  • The final chapter of the book was Amelia's Last Farewell. He can't change what's written, and Amy's goodbye in the graveyard was written as the last time they were ever together. It's not that he's locked out of Manhattan - he's locked out of the Ponds' life. Forever.
  • Given that the Ponds/Williams could have chosen to travel from Manhattan to some other city themselves, then had the Doctor come pick them up in 1930s Boston or Baltimore or wherever, it's implied that they consciously agreed to stay in the past once they'd reunited. The fact that Amy left a good-bye message at the end of the book, rather than a pickup time and location, confirms that they'd opted to stick with the hand Fate (and a gravestone) had dealt them.
  • We don't know that the Ponds never see the Doctor again and it can easily be written that they did if ever the Doctor had another adventure in the States when they were alive. Amy would know from that particular experience not to leave such spoilers in the book and if River told them what the end of the book said, (it's mentioned that they do see River again when she takes the book to Amy to be published) Amy would know she had to stick to the script.
• Fridge Logic: Two items for the Angels Take Manhattan:
  • Aren't the angels taking a bit of a risk with the Winter Quay farm even without the interference of the Doctor and company? If someone has made their death a fixed point in time by witnessing it, any deviation from their timeline that doesn't involve dying in a bed 30 years later would cause a paradox and kill them all. One would think that someone would go stir-crazy enough to start trying a hunger strike? or similar. They've already sentenced you to a life you have to live, what's the worst they can do?
    • They could blindfold the victim so they can't be seen and then force him or her to eat (the thought of a Weeping Angel spoon-feeding someone is both funny and utterly horrifying at the same time). And if all else fails, they'd do the same thing that was once done to Amy... implanting the image of an Angel inside his or her mind, except that when the mind-Angel has fully taken form it doesn't come out of the victim but instead takes near-complete control of them so they don't even try to run away or kill themselves. It stays inside until the victim dies many years later to produce the maximum amount of temporal energy possible, after which it comes out of his or her dead body to join the other Angels.
    • Think of it this way: the Angels are already, logically, bringing in the groceries and basic superintendent work/apartment maintenance as necessary to keep them alive. Spoon-feeding isn't that far a step up from that, compared to their usual modus operandi. On that note though, would they be bringing in groceries, or delivering prepared meals?
    • The episode seems like the angels have traded in their wandering existence for day jobs. Though they still haven't quite solved the problem of how to deal with unruly Tennants.
  • The Doctor said he couldn't visit Amy/Rory again, his exact words before regarding New York were that he couldn't take the TARDIS back to New York. I suppose there's some timey-wimey thing keeping him from parking on the other side of the continent or planet, then taking mundane transport in order to visit? Seems a bit selfish to me otherwise.
    • Presumably, although to be honest I'm not seeing how the alternative is 'selfish' in any way. And given how the Doctor himself is a fairly complicated space-time event all by himself, he's probably a bit wary of going back there in person and triggering something bad just by being there.
    • Moreover, Amy's choice to follow Rory made it pretty clear that she'd rather break ties with the Doctor than with her husband. The Doctor's always known that his companions leave him eventually, and that he couldn't stay with the Ponds forever; once he saw proof that they'd live out a satisfactory life together, he knew it was time to accept Amy's decision and move on.
• "The Snowmen":
  • At the end, upon discovering that the disembodied intelligence that was behind all the trouble would become the Great Intelligence — an enemy he faced twice in his second incarnation — the Doctor seems to find it vaguely familiar but can't quite place it. Of course, his second incarnation was a long time ago from his perspective, hence why he might not be able to instantly recall it; more than that, however, it's also an old enemy that features in two stories which have been wiped from the archives and no longer exist in their originally broadcast form. In a meta-sense, of course he can't remember the Great Intelligence clearly; the times he met it have essentially been erased from his memories.
  • It's revealed that the Snow only mirrors what it comes into contact with, it doesn't influence them at all. The ice-statue of the first governess is, frankly, demonic both in appearance and in personality. So if it's not the Snow doing that, just how nasty was that governess? Well that certainly explains why the kids hated her. With that in mind, it's amazing she ever got hired, unless she put on a sweet face in front of their father.
  • When Victorian-Clara first enters the TARDIS, the Doctor confidently expects her to comment on how "it's bigger on the inside" like everyone, and remarks that everyone says it without actually specifying what "it" is. This prompts Clara to leave the TARDIS and circle it for a few moments, again like several of the others who have come before her — however, when she re-enters, she confidently says that "it's smaller on the outside", something that visibly surprises the Doctor. Throughout the plot we've been given several suggestions that Clara is a particularly intelligent, observant and insightful woman, capable of making clever deductions from her surroundings and what people say. She's not just confirming for herself that her senses aren't deceiving her — whether she believes the Doctor's giving her another test or whether she just wants to impress him, she's working out what everyone else says and basing her response on that.
    • Alternatively, she's being even more clever than that. The TARDIS's true form is a huge, time-traveling spaceship that uses temporal and spacial manipulation to make its physical projection in space-time more compact. In other words, while humans would see it as a police box that's larger on the inside, Clara recognizes it for what it is, something big that just so happens to have a small external presence. Smaller on the outside indeed.
  • Remember when the Doctor tells Amy, Rory, and River "Don't play games with me. Don't ever, ever think you're capable of that"? We now have a companion that IS. No wonder the Daleks wanted to make Oswin into one of their own! And good thing she resisted, imagine if Dalek-Clara had been set loose upon the universe!
  • In Victorian-Clara's interview with Madame Vastra, after Vastra has explained how the Doctor has been hurt too much and has withdrawn into himself rather than risk being hurt again, Clara's one-word response to indicate her understanding is "man." It suggests that she instinctively understands that the Doctor, for all his huge and alien qualities, is ultimately just a man, as easily hurt and fallible as any human. In this she differs from Amy Pond, who — perhaps due to meeting him as a child — was initially starry-eyed about the Doctor and had to learn this the hard and painful way.
  • The interview also has Vastra remark that "there are two refreshments on your world the color of red wine; this is not red wine." On first glance, this seems like her being her usual self. However, it's also a brilliant and subtle test of character. Clara, who's obviously thrown by meeting someone not-human, would obviously be thrown by that comment—heck, most people would be! However, she keeps her cool, sits opposite Vastra, and plays along with the one-word test. Were she not companion material and just someone intrigued by the Doctor, she most likely would've run away upon meeting two non-humans in quick succession, one of whom implies herself to be carnivorous.
  • Moffat's reinvention of the Great Intelligence makes it a scary mirror for the Doctor. The Doctor comes in, picks up young people looking for adventure or be understood, uses them to aid him, and in many cases abandons them, sometimes to horrible fates. The Great Intelligence seeks out innocent children who feel alienated, gives them someone to talk to, brainwashes them, and then when defeated, leaves, leaving confused grown-ups with the minds of children.
  • In "The Snowmen", the Doctor bestows upon Clara a TARDIS key, and she begins to tear up, though she doesn't know why. In the series that followed it was highly contended amongst fans the reasons behind the TARDIS disliking Clara, and some have argued that Clara just was never given a key (and couldn't do things as simple as unlocking it), and granted we never see her get one, nor get confirmation that she had received one. But then why wouldn't the Doctor have given Clara a key? Because by that point, Clara was a mystery for him to solve, a mystery he did not understand, and not quite a companion. So when a version of Clara receives the TARDIS key, she begins to cry because the Doctor has bestowed upon her the highest honour he could give her, which is something she subconsciously remembers from Clara-Prime.
  • Vastra and Jenny probably got married in a Silurian ceremony, since same-sex marriage certainly wasn't legal under Victorian-era English law but the Silurians are unlikely to have had any such prejudices.
    • Alternatively/additionally, we see the Doctor officiating a wedding for Yaz's grandparents. No reason he couldn't have officiated for them as well (and it would explain Vastra's line "I know how you can blush")!

Fridge Horror — Series 7A

• "Asylum of the Daleks": When Rory is gathering the "eggs" in the mistaken belief that the insane Dalek is asking him for them, the object he picks up is a sphere that's come loose from the Dalek's lower chassis. Back in "Dalek" we learned what those spheres are for: they're a self-destruct mechanism, which Daleks can trigger when given an order to do so. If the Dalek had been suicidal as well as homicidal in its madness, it could've blown Rory's arm off by triggering the "egg", rather than having to try to aim an obviously-degraded weapon at him.
  • Although "eggs" is an Arc Word throughout "Asylum of the Daleks" by itself, this Tumblr post points out more significance behind Oswin's souffles; in particular, roughly speaking how do you make one? Crack open some eggs, stir them, cook the resulting mixture for a few minutes, and then eat. Or, in other words: Eggs. Stir. Min. Ate. Oswin's failure to make a souffle thus becomes symbolic of her refusal to accept the Dalek conditioning; the process is finished when you eat one, and you can't eat one if it's been burnt...
  • A bit of Fridge Horror mixed with Fridge Brilliance: When we first meet Oswin, she's settling down for the night and turning up the music to drown out the sounds of attacking Daleks. However since she's a Dalek herself, there's not really anything attacking her. It's actually the Dalek conditioning trying to get through her mental shields at the time when she's most open to attack: when her mind is relaxing.
  • The reason the Daleks summoned the Doctor in the first place was to get rid of Oswin. The Doctor, unaware of the situation, assumed that they were afraid of having all the crazy Daleks escape, but that's just his initial conclusion — all the Daleks do is show him the signal, and since believing he's saving a human would render him way more cooperative than saying "Our experiments on sentient beings went wrong", there was no reason for them to tell them otherwise.
  • Some have complained that the Asylum Daleks weren't much scarier than the regular ones... but with the Daleks' "normal state" being that of an Omnicidal Maniac, would we humans even be able to discern the difference between regular Daleks and some who are a little bit more crazy than they normally are?
  • Oswin said that "she had plenty of time to mess with [the Asylum]", as a response to the Doctor's remark that the place was supposed to be fully automated. Which implies that the Asylum would be a lot more terrifying in its normal state, and is a further testament to Dalek!Oswin's ability to hack Dalek technology everything as she pleased — which explains why none of the Daleks in the Parliament would go near her. A genius hacker would obviously be a cyborg creature's natural enemy, as the Daleks are totally dependent on their machinery.
  • The Daleks have unsuccessfully trying to assimilate the "human factor" since the classic series. With Oswin, their experiments went horribly right. As the Daleks are themselves products of mad science and turned on their creator too many times to count, the idea of one of their own experiments resulting in something beyond their control is just too poetic.
  • Not to mention that we're dealing with Daleks here. A Dalek that doesn't want to exterminate all the non-Daleks would probably be quite unsettlingly insane by their standards.
• Fridge Horror: In "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship", Rory mentions that he's thirty-one. In "Let's Kill Hitler" Rory and Amy were shown to be the same age, and when Amy first went on the TARDIS, in 2010, she was twenty-one. So it is now 2020 in Amy and Rory's time. What's so bad about that? Well, in "The Hungry Earth", set in 2020, they saw their future selves revisiting the area. Despite the cracks in time and the universe being rebooted, the viewer might take this as a reassurance that Amy and Rory aren't going to die. But it's 2020 for them now, they've probably already gone back there to wave at their past selves, meaning their fate is now wide open. That's just evil, Moffat.
  • It's worse than that. Think about it... they lived through Miracle Day. Unlike the rest of humanity, though, they were likely expecting the Doctor to swoop down and save everyone. Instead... nothing. Here's hoping there was some off-screen badassery where Amy, sick of waiting, started contacting all the other former companions running around to kick some ass and save people. Imagine Amy and Ace on a bombing run. That sound you just heard? Whovians orgasming in glee.
    • There's something that's been missed in the above notes: in "The Power of Three", Amy tells the Doctor that she and Rory think it's been ten years since they started traveling with the Doctor, but it's clarified that its only been ten years for them, not the Doctor or the Earth. Amy and Rory have essentially aged ten years in the three years since their wedding. Maybe even before. Amy even pointed out in "A Town Called Mercy" that their friends would notice the Ponds were aging faster than them.
  • Additionally, Amy and Rory's gravestones depict Amy as living to be five years older than Rory. The implications are that either Rory died and Amy had to suffer the heartbreak of this last death sticking for years, or that the Weeping Angel sent her "further and further back" than it did Rory as the episode mentioned them doing — to five years before Rory would appear and leaving her alone for years before he arrived, possibly out of spite when it overheard Amy telling the Doctor that it sending her back was the only way she could reunite with Rory. Either way, she's forced to be the Girl Who Waited one last time.
• Fridge Horror: In "The Angels Take Manhattan", Rory and Amy have been sent into the past and died before the present day. People are going to notice that they are missing, especially since, in the previous episode, we've seen that they have friends who care about them. Not to mention Rory's dad, Brian.
• Fridge Horror: Remember how the Doctor told Brian that Amy and Rory would never die? Not only are they dead, but Brian will be living for the rest of his life, waiting for them to come home, unless the Doctor tells him, but how to announce that someone is dead after you promised that they wouldn't?
  • He'd promised that they wouldn't die so long as they traveled with him. Amy technically chose to leave the Doctor when she blinked on purpose, so one could argue that she forfeited being a companion at that point.
  • At least they lived a long life before they died. Probably the only thing about the Weeping Angels that isn't Nightmare Fuel incarnate.
  • Ah, but there was a scene that was unfortunately not filmed due to actor unavailability, but animated and released as a clip with Arthur Darvill providing a voice-over as Rory, where Amy and Rory's adopted son, Anthony, shows up a week after Amy and Rory left and gives Brian a letter from Rory, explaining what happened and who Anthony is.
  • Strictly speaking, the Doctor's statement turned out to be 100% true in the Exact Words sense: Amy and Rory didn't ever die after he told Brian they wouldn't, because they'd already done so, decades earlier in New York.

Series 7B (Eleventh Doctor / Clara) Fridge

Fridge Brilliance — Series 7B

• At the end of The Bells of Saint John, Clara claims the leaf in her book is actually "page 1". While initially a dumb line, the next episode clarifies: that leaf lead to her parents meeting for the first time.
  • After watching "The Name of the Doctor" it makes perfect sense that the leaf overloaded the Old God. She claimed it represented all the infinite possibilities and, without realizing it, she was dead on. Without that leaf not just our Clara would not have existed to be split into all the millions of Claras spread across the Doctor's timeline. She truly did possess near infinite possibilities.
    • So in other words, if not for that leaf causing her parents to fall in love, conceiving her, The Great Intelligence would have undone every single heroic deed the Doctor ever did. Meaning the universe would have been obliterated before it even started. That's one heck of a lot of calories for a single leaf.
• In "The Rings of Akhaten" the Doctor gave the Old God all his memories. So did the Old God now know the Doctor's name?
• In "Journey to the Center of the TARDIS", we learn that the charred zombie-things are future echoes of everyone on the TARDIS after the engines exploded. Since the zombie with his hand fused to his face is implied to be the Doctor, it means that when the Applied Phlebotinum explodes, it prevents the Doctor from regenerating from that nightmarish form.
• Clara's travel book skips ages 16 and 23. In "The Rings of Akhaten", Clara's mother dies when Clara was 16. Being such a horrible year for Clara, it makes sense that she would block out that year. Same could be said for age 23: it's the year Angie and Artie's mum died and forced Clara to halt her travel plans.
• Fridge Brilliance and Fridge Horror, depending on how you look at it: In "The Name of the Doctor", the Doctor says that there is one place in all of time and space that a time traveller must never ever visit: their grave. This implies that the visiting of your grave by yourself guarantees that your death will always happen wherever your grave is, and you can't change it. Your death is "set in stone", if you will. Does that sound familiar? When Amy and Rory visited their own graves, they died. They guaranteed it.
• The Whispermen look like the Trickster. Maybe they were connected to the Trickster, who helped the Great Intelligence enter the Doctor's Timestream. What GI did seems like the Trickster's modus operandi and the Trickster said he would like to remove the Doctor from existence.
• Why were Oswin and Victorian Clara much more flirty, quirky and fearless than the regular Clara? Because, as one of the many thousands of alternate doppelgängers of modern day Clara, they're supposed to be exaggerated or idealised caricatures of the real Clara's best personal qualities. This serves to aid them in their life-long quest of eventually helping save the Doctor from peril. Aside from having the unexplained gut feeling that they need to assist him, these alternate Claras are kind of Self-Insert Fic versions of the real Clara, created by her consciousness while she's falling through the Doctor's timestream. Clara's wish to do her utmost to help save the Doctor from the Great Intelligence's meddling is so great that the alternate Claras are all inexplicably badass, each one in her own way. The real, original Clara, while still a brave and smart young gal, starts out noticeably more timid and humble, usually keeping the badass side of her persona under the surface. Oswin and Victorian Clara are, in contrast, not as vulnerable; it's all part of the plan.
• That the Doctor has a guardian angel in the form of Clara, existing in countless incarnations throughout his timestream with the sole purpose of saving the Doctor, helps to explain how he always manages to come out of seemingly impossible situations on top. Sure the Doctor is clever, powerful and always assured of his own victory, but it clearly helps to have Clara there to put her thumb on the scales of chance. Remember all those times the Doctor was suspiciously conveniently lucky? Clara did it.
• Also a bit of Freeze-Frame Bonus, but in "Nightmare in Silver", the badge the Doctor plucks off of the platoon leader and later gives to Clara (which she keeps at the end) seems to be made of gold. The platoon is part of an Empire that has great experience fighting Cybermen, of course they'd outfit their troops with gold until presumably the enemy upgraded past the need for it. Its also likely symbolic. Could count as Meta Fridge, since its just like Adric's badge.
• The first Clara echo is said to be the one who told the Doctor to steal the TARDIS we all know and love. Why did the Great Intelligence not go back before that and try to kill the Doctor as a child? Other stories have implied that he didn't run away until he was in his 200s or so. That's a heck of a big window. However, for most if not all of that time he was on Gallifrey, pretty much at its height, surrounded by Time Lords. Much, much easier to try and kill the Doctor subtly once he's gone jetting off around the universe already getting into danger with only a human or two for company and protection.
  • The Intelligence may well be worried that if the Time Lords catch even one fragment of it, they'll wipe it from time entirely as they did with the War Lord.
  • There's also the possibility, as raised above, that Clara's echoes help the Doctor with other, non-related GI problems, such as getting him to steal that particular TARDIS, perhaps guiding other companions to him at the right point, assisting against other monsters, etc.

Fridge Horror — Series 7B

• In "The Rings of Akhaten", the Doctor states that there are seven planets in the system where the titular rings are located, and that most of the aliens seen in that episode were from that system. Since the villain of this episode is the living sun of this system, does that mean that the Doctor and Clara just guarantee the death of every inhabitant in the Akhaten system via slow, painful freezing of their planets?
  • He said that the people of those seven worlds believed the planet was the source of life. He never explicitly stated that the planets were in the same solar system as the Rings.
  • As Akhaten is not a star but a planet, this argument is actually completely invalid.
• Fridge Horror: In "The Crimson Horror", Mrs. Gillyflower was willing to experiment on and blind her own daughter and torture and kill possibly hundreds of people.
• Another example of Fridge Horror is that the day Clara's mother died was the same day Rose Tyler joined the Ninth Doctor on his adventures, and was thus the setting of the first episode. Guess what happened during that episode? There was a full-scale Auton attack, including one at the mall that Jackie Tyler was at. Although Jackie Tyler didn't die, the conspiracy theorist featured in that episode died ... and it could be strongly implied that Clara's mother was at the same mall during the Auton attack.
  • Want to make it worse? Clara's mother could have been chasing after who she thought was her daughter, wondering why she was here and trying to save her from the Autons, with the possibility that she may have failed.

2013 Specials (8th/War/10th/11th Doctors) Fridge

"The Last Day":

Fridge Horror

• The mind of soldiers outfitted with a head-cam will be uploaded onto their family drive when they die. Die, not regenerate. The later episode "Listen" mentions that Gallifreyans have two career choices - either join the military, or go to the academy and become Time Lords. In other words: The ruling class, including high-ranking officers like the General, is given the ability to cheat death. The cannon fodder which has to protect them from the Daleks is not. Geez, no wonder the Doctor is so disgusted by all things related to the military.
  • It's almost certain that the Daleks figured out a way to one-hit kill Time Lords; be a lot harder to fight a war if your enemy just picks themselves up five minutes later. Still, it is implied that the lower classes don't get regeneration, so your point stands.

"The Night of the Doctor":

Fridge Brilliance

• "The Night of the Doctor" is actually a perfect finale for Eight. It's set on Karn, previously the setting for "The Brain of Morbius" (Fourth Doctor), which is essentially a pastiche of Frankenstein. What was Eight's first TV story? Doctor Who: The Movie, also a pastiche of Frankenstein. So, "The Night of the Doctor" is actually a cyclical end to the Eighth Doctor.

Fridge Horror

• A subtle one. In "The Night of the Doctor", the Eighth Doctor regenerates into a much younger John Hurt. Think about how long it takes for Time Lords to physically age as much as Hurt's incarnation would have to have done to get to him as we know him in "The Name of the Doctor". The First, by comparison, is generally accepted to have died of old age at around 400-450. This, logically means that the War Doctor fought the Time War for nearly FIVE HUNDRED YEARS before finally ending it, and it was already destroying the universe by the time he was born...
  • Even worse: In "The Day of the Doctor," he states that 11 is, at roughly 2,000 "four hundred years older" than the War Doctor is. He spent roughly 800 years fighting the War. And then, given that the ninth Doctor claimed to be 900 years old, he spent about a century alone with his guilt and PTSD.
• Why was Cass' ship crashing? If you know "The Brain of Morbius", you'll find that the Sisterhood of Karn has a reputation for causing nearby spaceships to crash into their planet. They were responsible for the crash, and that crash killed the Eighth Doctor. The Sisterhood killed the Doctor.
  • Even worse: The Sisterhood are implied to have at least some precognitive ability. They may well have deliberately crashed that ship and murdered Cass in order to guilt trip/beg the Doctor to save the universe.
• "The Night of the Doctor" made the Big Finish Doctor Who adventures canon, meaning that the Doctor has experienced all of the traumatic events from those stories. It also means that the Doctor is at least more than 2000 years old, just from the Eighth Doctor spending nearly a thousand years helping one planet in Orbis.
• The conversation between Cass and Eight:
  The Doctor: Well, look on the bright side; I'm not a Dalek!
  Cass: Who can tell the difference anymore?
  • What makes this conversation absolutely chilling is how right Cass is. We've seen Davros and Rassilon at the height of their power during the Time War. And both Davros and Rassilon have amounted to committing total destruction in order to ensure their victory, regardless of the innocent lives caught in their war. Planet Earth, twice victim to the mechanisms of the Daleks and the Time Lords. Davros saught to use Planet Earth as a machination for the Daleks' Reality Bomb, ensuring the total annihilation of all non-Dalek lifeforms in existence. Rassilon saught to replace Planet Earth with Gallifrey itself, and then saught to ensure the total annihilation of all non-Time Lord lifeforms in existence with. Both Davros and Rassilon saught the advice of crazed individuals who saw into the Time Vortex, to better predict the futures of their armies and victories. But the scariest bit? Davros held better standards than Rassilon. We've never seen Davros exterminate his own Daleks for holding different opinions, granted he did engineer all Daleks to be Omnicidal Maniacs. Yet, Davros has never called for the extermination of any Dalek for failure or disappointment. Any failures the Daleks suffered were due to the Doctor. Contrast, with Rassilon, who pretty much erased a Time Lord from existence for simply suggesting a different opinion. Davros gave every fiber of his cell and being to ensure that all Daleks were loyal to him and dedicated in pursuit of their victory against the Time Lords (and every other non-Dalek for that matter). Rassilon was very much concerned with not dying at any costs, removing anyone who got in his way of self-presetvation or injured his Time Lord Ego.

"The Day of the Doctor":

Fridge Brilliance

• In regards to how "The Day of the Doctor" ended: Anyone start to feel that Moffat has been foreshadowing the true fate of Gallifrey since "Silence in the Library"? Not to mention a curt reminder of the same idea with the missed moment of awesome with the door dilemma. If the Doctor DID have all that time to think about it, why wouldn't he find the means to save Gallifrey?
  • Heck, Moffat was foreshadowing the method by which Gallifrey would be saved way back in "Blink"! Now you see it, now you don't, instant Circular Firing Squad....
• In "The Day of the Doctor", the three Doctors use the phrase "Gallifrey stands" to represent their plan to stasis lock Gallifrey in a pocket universe. Why is this significant? Because in "The End of Time", the High Council believe that there are two possibilities — either Gallifrey falls, or Gallifrey rises. The Tenth Doctor and the Master managed to push Rassilon and the High Council back into the Time War, ensuring that Gallifrey did not "rise" in the way that Rassilon had intended. Although at the time, it seemed as though Gallifrey was doomed to fall, we learn in "The Day of the Doctor" that this is not the case either, because the three Doctors managed to work out an alternative to destroying Gallifrey. Thanks to the efforts of the Doctor, Gallifrey neither rises nor falls. It just... stands. Frozen in an instant of time.
• The insane amount of Daleks that escaped from the Time War makes a lot more sense when you know that they were just blasted by their own crossfire instead of wiped out by the Moment.
• At the start of "The Day of the Doctor", Clara is able to get the TARDIS to open its doors just by beeping the horn on her motorcycle, and she's able to close the doors with a snap of her fingers. Quite a change from the TARDIS's initial hostility towards Clara. What changed? "The Name of the Doctor". Until that point, the Doctor didn't know what to make of Clara, unsure if she was friend or foe. The TARDIS recognized this and, protective of the Doctor, went with "foe" unless prompted otherwise by the Doctor. However, after "The Name of the Doctor" answered the questions about what Clara was, the TARDIS knew she was without a doubt a friend and has since become much more cooperative. Of course, that begs the question of what the TARDIS did see. All throughout the Doctor's timeline a malevolent force was out trying to destroy him. The Great Intelligence doesn't have a physical body, so at the center of nearly all of these what would anyone or anything see but that period's Clara Oswald? The TARDIS may have sensed the Intelligence, seen Clara there, and, as noted above, been unsure of who was friend or foe. It didn't resist the Doctor bringing Clara aboard, but it didn't like it either, until Clara proved herself.
• It looks like the Twelfth (13th?) Doctor turning up to assist Gallifrey has put the Time Lords into a situation where they have no choice but to help The Doctor if (as seems likely) he’s run out of regenerations. They can count and they know how many turned up in order to save them all.
  • Tied into this: Having the Twelfth Doctor show up settles some possible requirements: 1) 13 Doctors might have been needed, but with the Meta-Crisis Doctor in another universe, the 12th could be a substitute (he also didn't have his own TARDIS) and/or 2) 2000+ years might be needed to do the full calculations, and the 12th Doctor could have those final numbers.
• The Doctor and the Master are so much one another's foils, even the Doctor's darkest and the Master's least dark sides are contrasting counterparts. Both the War Doctor and Professor Yana were the product of a regeneration that was artificially manipulated, War by a potion and Yana by a fob watch. The War Doctor is the only Doctor to be dedicated to killing (Daleks), while Yana is the only Master to dedicate his life to helping others. The War Doctor is the only Doctor who doesn't have companions, while Yana is the only Master to have one he wasn't just exploiting (Chantho). Both of these black/white sheep are thought of with deep revulsion by their successors, and both of them, at the end of their lives, showed their true colours and reclaimed their rightful names: War, by saving his planet instead of destroying it in a feat worthy of a Doctor, and Yana, by setting out to dominate those he'd once saved and become their Master.
  • Yana's not the only villain whose experiences are a flip side to the War Doctor's, either: Dalek Caan's Motive Rant in "Journey's End", in which he calls out his own kind for their crimes and reveals he's engineered their defeat by their most dreaded enemy, is virtually the same as War's narrated condemnation of both warring races at the beginning of "Day". Both Caan and War were creative geniuses and free-thinkers compared to their hidebound fellows, each realized that his own species had become too great a threat to be permitted to run rampant any longer, and each was prepared to sacrifice every principle he'd once believed in — Caan, his xenophobic commitment to annihilate life, and War, his Doctor-like commitment to defend and cherish it — all to ensure that the wider universe could survive and the slaughter would go on NO MORE.
• Fridge Heartwarming: The Doctor tells the soldier he needs to borrow his gun, and then uses the TARDIS as a battering ram instead of having attached some kind of cannon or missile launcher to her. Even despite having renounced the identity of The Doctor, he still refuses to use a gun. Also a moment of Fridge Awesome—he fought on the front lines of a war against the Daleks, still armed with nothing more than whatever's handy, overconfidence, and a screwdriver.
  • As is later said: "The first thing you notice about the Doctor of War is that he's unarmed. For many, it's also the last."
• Another Fridge Heartwarming: When the War Doctor is facing the button, with the intention to press it and letting down everyone on Gallifrey, Ten and Eleven show up to press the button with him so that he didn't have to do it alone. Ten and Eleven know the feeling not just because they believed they pressed the button before and wiped out their kind, but that they showed up to help because Ten himself had to make a similar choice in "The Fires of Pompeii." The Doctor had to set off Vesuvius in order to save the world. However, when he did, Donna pulled the lever with the Doctor, knowing that he didn't have to take responsibility alone. The feeling of difficulty that Ten had at that moment, and the comfort that Donna provided by helping, would be remembered by both Ten and Eleven, and they traveled to that moment to help the War Doctor because they knew how difficult it was going to be to push the button and to provide comfort to their older self in the same way (before they realized the way to save Gallifrey).

"The Time of the Doctor":

Fridge Brilliance

• Ever since Moffat amended his past statement regarding the numbering of the Doctor's regeneration, we now know that the Metacrisis Doctor took up one, making the Eleventh Doctor the thirteenth incarnation. This means he hit his limit. Suddenly Trenzalore being his final resting place becomes much more ominous... and unavoidable. Perhaps River's gift might work in the end, or maybe the restriction placed by the Time Council would be a challenge to surpass. All that's certain is, the Impossible Girl is going to get a very impossible Doctor.
• With the revelation in "The Time of the Doctor" that the Silence are genetically altered priests who were actually controlled by the Papal Mainframe, then in "The Wedding of River Song", why did they take control of the eyepatches the human agents were using to remember them, and subsequently turn on Madame Kovarian? One of two reasons could exist:
  • Fridge Horror: These Silence were genetically altered to be more violent than their counterparts. However, because of that, they ended up becoming more vicious than their creators, causing them to turn. It would also explain them randomly killing humans For the Evulz.
  • Fridge Brilliance: Alternatively, these Silence could have been no more evil than the ones in "The Time of the Doctor", and eventually realized what they were doing was wrong, hence why they turned on Kovarian in the crashed timeline.
• In the Christmas episode "The Time of the Doctor", Clara has an admittedly very mild example of a Wicked Stepmother.
• From the Grand Finale of Matt Smith as the Doctor. According to history, Trenzalore is where he dies. It's how the story ends, as he says. However, in "The Time of the Doctor", the Time Lords of Gallifrey give the Doctor new regenerations, meaning that Trenzalore shouldn't be his final resting place since the Doctor, though the faces change, is still the Doctor. However, this is actually a very clever workaround akin to what happened in "The Day of the Doctor" as well. 13 Doctors chose to freeze the entire planet in an alternate universe, frozen in a moment in order to prevent them from having to burn the planet. However, because it happened so fast, and due to temporal paradoxes, the universe (and 3 regenerations of Doctors) thought they had still burned it using the Moment. Though the truth is different, history remembers that Gallifrey fell. Now the exact same thing happened in this special, in that the way his regeneration worked means that the people of Christmas might have thought that the Doctor died rather than regenerated, given that they never saw him again after he destroyed the attacking Daleks. History might think that this was indeed the Doctor's final resting place only, just like the 50th anniversary special before it, history was WRONG. It's a funny mirror both on how the Doctor changes others and how he changes himself.
• Why does the Twelfth Doctor have a Scottish accent? The last person on the Eleventh Doctor's dying mind was the Scottish Amy Pond. That can also explain why Nine has a Northern accent (War was with Clara).
• Why do people need to be naked when going to space church? Humans kill the Silent confessor-priests on sight, so can't be allowed in with anything that might conceivably conceal or constitute a weapon.
• Here's a question. If the Doctor had reached the end of his regenerative cycle, then why did his body enter the process before being preemptively terminated by River in the astronaut suit? Because it was the Teselecta and the Doctor was purposely making it look like he had more regenerations when he really had none. Another question. Why did the Doctor waste regeneration energy on River's hand in "The Angels Take Manhattan"? Because he knew he was at the end of the cycle and knew that the best use of the lingering energy from River's regenerative gift in "Let's Kill Hitler" could serve no better purpose than being returned to the one who gave it. And finally, why did the Doctor tell Mr. Clever in "Nightmare in Silver" that he could regenerate to purge the cyber-infestation when he couldn't. Because he was following Rule Number One. He lied to put the Cyber-Planner into a position inclined to a compromise, enabling the Doctor the time necessary to formulate a plan.
  • Alternatively — maybe the 11th Doctor didn't know he definitely couldn't regenerate again for some time. The 10th Doctor's aborted regeneration in "The Stolen Earth"/"Journey's End" did not complete and so did not count as a full regeneration, which would explain why River was so angry at the Doctor in "The Angels Take Manhattan" for wasting what regeneration energy he had remaining on her. Certainly he seems to think he can regenerate again in "Let's Kill Hitler", and he doesn't seem confused when River mentions having pictures of his future faces in her diary during "The Time of Angels". It isn't until after the Doctor is stranded on Trenzalore that he realises he cannot regenerate again when his injured leg won't heal properly. Why did the Doctor later count this as a full regeneration? Because it simplifies matters and he regrets his 10th incarnation being so selfish.
  • In addition, in "Let's Kill Hitler", the TARDIS voice interface says, "Regeneration disabled." It wasn't because of the poison, it was because despite the Doctor's (willful?) ignorance: the TARDIS knew he couldn't regenerate again. If he tried, he might have ended up like the Master did in "The Deadly Assassin". Indeed, all the various things that would kill Eleven without regeneration all make sense in the context of Eleven being the last one of that cycle. Also, the Doctor would most likely rather hear that his regenerations are disabled rather than be reminded that he's going to die relatively soon anyway.
• Just before Eleven regenerates, he takes off his bow tie and drops it on the floor. This alone emphasizes that Eleven is truly gone, but there's a subtler moment earlier on that also establishes this. Eleven has a long history of Painful Metaphors (Cup-a-Soups, anyone?), but during his regeneration scene, after he sets the TARDIS in motion, he says "Everything you are, gone in a moment... like breath on a mirror." His final metaphor is perfectly straightforward. This, combined with the big bow-tie-drop, really helps hammer in that Eleven is gone.
• The overarching plot of the Matt Smith era as a whole. All of it. Although while it was airing, many were quick to claim there was no plan or that it didn't make sense, in hindsight, much of the consternation came from Moffat telling the whole story backwards. And also forwards, and sometimes sideways, and then in a big giant loop. It quite literally uses time travel to defy all conventional notions of storytelling and cause & effect; the way it has wheels within wheels of Stable Time Loop and Ontological Paradox told in long-form over almost four years might be unparalleled in sci-fi, and the narrative juggling act it necessitated would have crushed a man with a lesser grasp of plotting.
• When Eleven admits he'd shaved his head because he was bored, Clara asks if that's what happened to his eyebrows too, and Eleven defensively replies that they're just delicate. That's not something he'll have to be touchy about for much longer. In fact, if the theory about a regeneration's appearance being chosen subconsciously is true, this may even have been deliberate!

Fridge Horror

• We've had the Name, the Night, the Day, and now the Time. That's four instances of using the title "The [X] of the Doctor", in a row. "The Time of the Doctor" is when the Doctor regenerates. Four Is Death.
  • Although his previous selves regenerate in "Night" and "Day" also, so it's more a case of Four Is Chronological-Out-Of-Verse Death.
• Fridge Brilliance and Fridge Horror together: Remember "The Pandorica Opens", when Eleven gave his infamous "No plan, no backup, no weapons worth a damn" speech. At the time, both the Doctor threatening his enemies assembled and said enemies were bluffing and trying to outwit one another. In "The Time of the Doctor", the same situation happens, without the bluffing: the Doctor has no plan, no backup, no weapons worth a damn, nothing to lose anymore… and he finally makes good on the veiled threats from Matt Smith's first season finale: suddenly his Stonehenge speech sounds a lot less like empty grandstanding and bluff.

Series 8 (Twelfth Doctor / Clara) Fridge

Fridge Brilliance — Series 8

• In "Deep Breath", Clara answers a call that Eleven had made just before his regeneration (the scene implies that she hung up on him in Trenzalore before walking into the TARDIS for his final moments); the call is basically Eleven trying to comfort Clara on the change and pleading with her to see past the face and stay with him. More than anything else this appears to be Moffat himself personally asking the audience to accept that, as per the nature of the series, a new Doctor is in — that even though his face and mannerisms may differ — who he is remains the same; perhaps trying to prevent the sheer amount of backlash that hit Matt Smith when he took over from David Tennant not but a few short years ago.
  • The fact that Eleven would take pains to do such a thing, where other Doctors didn't think of it, is also Fridge Brilliance: he knows what it's like to emerge from a regeneration without a companion's emotional support, as Ten had been traveling alone for a while before "The End of Time", and Eleven had only a confused little girl on hand to help him through the aftermath. Then he was forced to send his own companion away for centuries to protect her, and couldn't bear the thought that Twelve would lose her permanently, right when his future self needed her the most.
• When Twelve first hears his voice and realizes "Oh, I'm Scottish. I can really complain now!". There's a bit more humour in it when you remember not only the Ponds (Amy had a real mouth on her), but Two's Companion Jamie who had a tendency to do a lot of eye-rolling and snarking at all the crazy stuff the Doctor had landed them in. And remember the last time he spoke with a Scottish accent? Seven knew how to start and end a lot of trouble by being better at arguing (or complaining) than his opponent.
• Add to this the continuing list of Sherlock Holmes references:
  • We already knew that Vastra is the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes, so her saying "the game is afoot" isn't a huge surprise.
  • More obscurely, Vastra also mentioned that she's working on the Conk Singleton forgery case, a case that Watson mentions in the Conan Doyle stories as a case that Holmes worked on.
  • Also a bit of Meta-fridge brilliance here, but some fans of Sherlock ship Sherlock and John Watson together, which is basically them claiming that Sherlock and John are gay. In Doctor Who, Vastra is in a relationship with Jenny Flint, a female human, who is The Watson to Vastra in some manner.
• Both times the Doctor has encountered organ-stealing clockwork robots, the would-be infiltrators' nature is betrayed by their essential bodily functions. In "The Girl in the Fireplace", it's the droids revealed by the ticking of their gears. In "Deep Breath", it's living people giving themselves away by their breathing.
• The first sign that something is amiss at Mancini's is the fact that the Doctor was allowed inside while he had the appearance of a vagabond; everyone else was dressed nicely, and normally well-off middle- and upper-class would prefer fine-dining over taverns and pubs that the lower class frequent (and can afford). In the event that someone was out of place, there would be very loud gossiping, which brings hint number 2, right before Clara and the Doctor realize their mistake: not one person had said a word since their arrival, the silence emphasized when Clara and the Doctor finally realize that something is wrong.
  • Also, Clara comments about the smell of the Doctor's clothing almost immediately, but nobody else notices. Droids probably don't have a sense of smell.
• According to the Twelfth Doctor's entry on the Characters page, his regeneration into a generally older-looking man is reminiscent to pulling off a mask and showing how old and universe-weary he really is. Considering this, Hurt's incarnation plays into this mode of thought, especially considering that the Tenth and Eleventh would rather forget he existed — essentially concealing himself further.
  • Note that the face/mask which the Doctor removes when he sheds his disguise as a Droid looks younger than Peter Capaldi, too.
  • That's because they used a mask of Matt Smith's face!
• Back in "The Doctor's Wife", Rory asked Eleven if he had a bedroom, but never gets an answer. When Clara, Jenny and Vastra try to convince Twelve to lie down and get some rest, he's baffled by the whole concept of having a room for the purpose of not being awake in.
• The Doctor doesn't see any purpose for an entire room for not being awake in, because (according to the Expanded Universe) Time Lords only sleep for about an hour or so. Meaning that whereas humans need 8 or so hours and need a room specifically to house them, Time Lords can likely just find a chair to nod off in for an hour.
• The Droids' willingness to turn humans into spare parts seems like a tremendous coincidence, considering it's the second time the same improbable glitch had happened independently in the series. But if these same Droids had been scrounging organic parts since the time of the dinosaurs, then they could have utilized Silurians' body parts in the same way. (Note that when the Half Faced Man says they'd repaired their ship with "you", he's speaking to a group that includes Vastra.) Silurians kept pre-human hominids as livestock they raised for meat, so Droids rebuilt with Silurian tissues could have picked up that same attitude toward hominids (i.e. that we're Human Resources to be butchered as necessary) from the reptiles, overriding their original programming to obey their human makers.
  • Also, the reason the glitch happened is that they were programmed to repair their ship with "any materials necessary." Clearly, whoever programmed them hadn't heard of Asimov's Laws of Robotics.
• The Doctor mentions that the SS Marie Antoinette isn't ringing a bell with him. While this may be partially due to lingering regeneration amnesia, the fact is that he never found out the name of the SS Madame de Pompadour! It was only revealed to the audience after the TARDIS left.
• Clara's belief that something has gone wrong with the Doctor's regeneration makes perfect sense given her experiences with other versions of the Doctor. She met War and Ten, and traveled with Eleven, and then watched Eleven age from being physically around his twenties to being physically an old man. She would naturally believe that a regeneration starts young and then ages over time.
• In "Into the Dalek", it looks like the Dalek has merely changed its position from "destroy all living things" to "destroy all Daleks", not learning from its new ability to conceptualize and appreciate the beauty of life. However, note the Doctor's own words when he melded his mind with the Dalek's: he said he was now "a part of [the Dalek]" — not to explain that they are melding minds, but that the Dalek adopt the Doctor's own core beliefs into its moral compass. The Doctor believed it would adopt his ability to appreciate beauty in life, along with his desire to protect it. He thought the Dalek only saw his hatred and took from that instead. But it's not hard to see the parallels between this "good" Dalek and the Doctor: both turned against their own kind; both attempted to (initially for the Doctor) kill their whole kind. The Doctor turned against the Time Lords because they went against his beliefs — his doctrine concerning the universe, and that they became the very monsters that they opposed — the same, if not worse, than a Dalek. Now the Dalek believes in this concept too: it doesn't seek out the Daleks to kill them because it has to, it seeks them out because it believes the Doctor once turned against his people for disagreeing with him. The "good" Dalek has adopted the Doctor's doctrine now, too, and if the Doctor turned against his own people to protect it, so too must the Dalek. And recall, a part of that doctrine is how the Time Lords had become just like the Daleks. Suddenly it's less "destroy all Daleks" because it can only destroy; the "good" Dalek has to destroy all Daleks because they must be destroyed.
• Clara helping out the Doctor in this story and helping him believe that a Dalek becoming good is possible: She's never met the Daleks (aside from very briefly seeing them in action during Day of the Doctor and Time of the Doctor), and so she can view them from a more objective point of view than any other companion, let alone the Doctor with his millennia of hatred towards them.
• In the end, it was a very good idea to edit out Rusty's death in the final cut of "Into the Dalek". Rusty is very unique and that uniqueness should be allowed to appear again in the series. The potential plot possibilities for the particular Dalek the writers can now come up with are almost limitless. Not only that, but like the Klingons of Star Trek, Rusty could lead to at least a portion of the Daleks to reforming. Now I'm not saying all Daleks should reform, (I don't think either the writers or the viewers will ever go for that) but even a splinter faction of reformed Daleks would be interesting.
  • Even a splinter faction of traitor Daleks would be interesting, if Rusty can't pass on his enlightenment but resorts to merely re-programming some of his fellows to exterminate other Daleks, redirecting their hatred. In which case, the wider issue of what Daleks would do if they're given free will can be revisited in the future: is it better to force them to turn on their own, or to keep trying to convert them into moral beings for real, knowing the effort's likely to fail?
• There is an overarching theme in Series 8 about Heaven and whether or not the Doctor is a "Good Man". Now, the Doctor told the Half-Face Man that he, himself, had no expectations about reaching "The Promised Land". In the next episode, Clara concludes by telling the Doctor that she's not sure if he's a "Good Man", but that he tries to be, and that's the point. No wonder the Doctor doesn't expect to see Heaven. How does that old expression go? "The Road to Hell is paved with good intentions".
• Many people have a presumption (whether in-Universe, or among fans) that Danny runs the Coal Hill Cadets because he's teaching children how to be soldiers. This is inaccurate, and actually reveals a lot about his character from his first appearance alone, especially if you take his being a maths teacher into account. Military lifestyle teaches order and discipline. With children, learning that early on builds character (and with a teacher like Danny, who is strict yet patient around children and is generally awkward around people, won't go wrong), and there's nothing wrong with that. However, when questions and assumptions arise about his time as a soldier, Danny closes off, and almost shuts down when asked if he'd ever killed a civilian before. It begs the question: why would Danny choose to be a teacher, surrounded by students who are more than curious about their maths teacher being a former soldier and would naturally ask questions, even at the risk of forcing Danny to remember his past with so much pain and anguish? The answer: Danny needs order. Many soldiers pick a lifestyle far removed from their time as a soldier, to help cope and keep that part of their life as separate as possible. The military lifestyle, of order and discipline, helps Danny, and what settles this Fridge Brilliance is that he's also a maths teacher. It was not specified if he does it because he's particularly good or that he likes it; maths just happens to be the subject that gives the most straightforward answer, no matter how many times one does the same equation over and over again. It's certainly less chaotic than teaching classes that delve into philosophy and questions one's morality, or one that looks into human history that is defined by its bloodstained past of many, many wars in centuries prior.
  • The revelation in "Listen" that Danny spent time in a children's home is even more suggestive: orphans' childhood can be extremely chaotic, as they're moved from one foster home or facility to another, never really having parents or siblings or possessions of their own. If he lost his parents at a very young age, the army might well have been the closest thing to a stable "family" he'd ever known, making it only natural that he would try to establish a father-figure's rapport with his students by acting the part of a training officer.
• The way Rusty became susceptible to feelings and drives other than hatred once his memory-culling mechanism was disabled suggests that Dalek Sec's Heel–Face Turn wasn't just a result of his merging with a human. Rather, the act of separating from his Dalek shell released him from its memory-blocking functions, meaning that experiences that changed his perspective about what's right or wrong could be retained instead of erased. In effect, he wasn't a Dalek/human hybrid at all, but a Kaled mutant/human hybrid, lacking the artificial constraints that make Daleks so much worse than their Kaled ancestors. And although the Kaled mutants could be vicious creatures out of their robotic shells, Rusty's case proves they don't have to be.
• So we know from River from earlier on that the reason the TARDIS always sounds like that is because the Doctor always leaves the handbrake on. Question: why does he do that? It can't be good for the TARDIS's systems. However, "Listen" provides the answer. Clara vworped the TARDIS into the Doctor's room while he was still young, then provided a comforting speech regarding his fear of the dark before vworping out again. Chances are, throughout his entire life, he's actually subconsiously associated the horrible groaning vworping noise with comfort, and that's why he leaves the TARDIS handbrake on. It's purely for the noise, a noise that reminds him of that comforting speech and his own creed. Oh, Clara, what have you done?
  • Word of God has it that River just flat-out lied about the parking brake thing. However, it may well be that the noise does remind him of this scene.
• Gallifrey in all times is locked up in the current universal timeline, nothing can enter and leave it. So how does Clara jumped to Doctor's home planet in "Listen" then? Answer is simple: The TARDIS travelled not in the current universal timeline, but in the Doctor's personal timeline.
  • Which reinforces the strongly-implied notion that the Woman In White from "The End of Time" is the Doctor's mother. For her to have broken out of the Time Lock in order to convince Wilf to aid the Doctor, she must have had an extremely powerful connection to the Doctor's personal timeline.
  • She could also be his daughter, sister, wife, Susan, or Romana, any of whom would also have a strong connection to the Doctor's timeline.
• Why do most incarnations of the Doctor not like guns? At least partially, it's because he was gifted "Dan the Soldier Man" in his first incarnation's childhood, who was a soldier without a gun.
  • This brings another level to what the Gallifreyan soldier said about the War Doctor in "Hell Bent": The first thing you notice is that he isn't armed, and for many, it was the last thing they noticed.
• Better yet, why did the First Doctor become so interested in the planet Earth, of all the countless worlds that he and Susan could have settled down on? Because at some point in his wanderings he got a look at an actual British soldier who was dressed like Dan the Soldier Man, and recognized the similarity to his favorite childhood toy!
• "Time Heist": Clara wonders why the Teller's victim is still alive if his brain's been reduced to soup. However, if it attacks by feeding on others' thoughts, it makes sense that only the prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain where conscious thought takes place — would be destroyed; the unconscious portions that maintain visceral body functions should remain untouched. It's not an accident that only the front part of the man's head caved in, it's Fridge Brilliance.
• "Time Heist": Psi's parting remark about how, having wiped his own memories to protect his loved ones, he sees no one when his life flashes before his eyes is pretty tragic upon initial viewing, and we see Clara overhear him and realize, to her horror, that he's making a Heroic Sacrifice for her because she — whom he's only known for a few hours — is the closest thing he has to a friend. But it's also Tear Jerker-caliber foreshadowing for "Hell Bent", when it's the Doctor who will lose his self-destructive feelings for Clara along with his memories.
• In "The Caretaker", the Doctor gets a job at Coal Hill High. He would have applied for the job with one of the governors — Ian Chesterton, one of his first human companions. Part of the original TARDIS crew. The Doctor met Ian Chesterton off-screen. Off screen moment of heartwarming, anyone?
• Scolding Danny in "The Caretaker" for assuming he's Clara's father, the Doctor has a bit of a "Strax moment" when he tries to argue that he and Clara look like they're the same age. This seems like either his usual weirdness or lingering residue from his post-regeneration confusion, except that there's another possible explanation: because Time Lords can appear to be different ages when they regenerate, they probably don't even bother to judge how old people are by their looks, but by how much life experience they can sense in that person. While Clara is a young woman chronologically, she's also got the mark of her timestream-duplicates' many, many lifetimes upon her, and even if she doesn't consciously remember her other selves' lives, these cumulative traces throw off the Doctor's intuitive notion of how old she is when he's in mid-snit and not thinking clearly (plus, as a companion, she's far more experienced and lived more than most other people anyway). Hence, his guessing jaded-as-anything teen Courtney's age at 35 in "Kill the Moon": she's not even half that old chronologically, but she is that cynical and has gotten in enough trouble to make him "read" her as older.
• The Doctor and Danny:
  • The Doctor is not being a jerkass to Danny just to be a jerkass, or even because of his long-standing hatred of soldiers (if that were the case, Three, Four and Ten would have been almost insufferable on a number of occasions, Three almost contstantly). The Doctor is almost certainly suffering from long-standing PTSD. Even though the guilt of having destroyed Gallifrey is gone as he found out he didn't, we are still talking about a man who has participated in about two millennia of war (circa 800 years of the Time War, and 900 years of the Siege of Trenzalore). In Real Life, multiple deployments of troops to hot combat zones such as Iraq and Afghanistan, or longer tours of duty such as those seen in World War II or Vietnam can cause considerable mental scars. Given what the Doctor had to endure, or even what he had to do, he by all rights should have been reduced to a barely-functioning wreck. He's likely actually showing Danny a ton of restraint, when Danny is, without intending it or even knowing it, a walking, talking PTSD trigger. And given that Danny himself has been explicitly established to have PTSD issues from his own deployments to Afghanistan, it may become a case where later on they have to help each other get over their issues to survive. Moreover, he's the first Doctor to have arisen after he'd accepted that the War Doctor was himself, not just some malignant rogue alter-ego like the Valeyard. Emotional wounds that his prior three regenerations could avoid dealing with through sheer "That Wasn't Really Me" denial aren't so easily-repressed, anymore.
  • There's also the uncomfortable matter that has been brought up numerous times in the Reboot era — that the Doctor may not like to get his hands dirty, but he does shape his companions into weapons. Some of the things Danny told him? He's heard it from sources ranging from Rory Williams to Davros! Being reminded that he's doing it again and being called out on it is hardly pleasant.
  • Additionally, Danny's scornfully calling the Doctor an officer implies that the Doctor is the kind of armchair general who'll sit back and let his subordinates march into the meat grinder while he keeps his hands clean. For an All-Loving Hero who fought on the front lines of the Time War, and has mourned countless friends and allies lost in battle, that would really piss him off.
• The Doctor may have fought in the Time War and on Trenzalore, but he still may not think of himself as a soldier. As he tells Journey Blue, "soldiers take orders", meaning soldiers follow orders without questioning them or deciding for themselves whether they are good orders or the right course of action to be taking. The Doctor may have fought, but he was never one to follow orders unquestioningly. It's relinquishing all responsibility and doing as they are told that earns the Doctor's scorn, not having fought or killed. Therefore there's no contradiction or hypocrisy in the Doctor's scorn of soldiers.
• "Kill the Moon": Why did the Doctor force Clara to make a decision whether to destroy a harmless creature or let the creature live, despite suspecting it was going to be harmless? The Doctor was trying to stay out of a scenario like this, as he felt like if he interfered, he would mess it up ... similar to "The Beast Below".
• The way the moon-creature grows without any obvious food source to bolster its increasing mass isn't really that weird, considering how the Whoniverse is home to creatures that live off such immaterial things as life force, hard radiation, temporal potential, sentient beings' memories, or good old-fashioned fear. Moreover, it's actually a clue that the creature won't seek to harm the Earth once it hatches: it doesn't need to eat matter to grow before it hatches, so there's much less cause to think it'd start gnawing on the Earth for sustenance once it's emerged.
• In "Mummy on the Orient Express", there's a scene where Twelve is talking to himself, partly in his own style and partly in Four's. Meta-wise, this is Capaldi paying tribute to his own fond memories of the Tom Baker era, but in-Verse it's possibly no accident: the last time the Doctor'd had a chance to chat with another of his selves (whether or not he remembers doing so), it was the Curator.
• In "Dark Water", Missy tells the Doctor that her hearts are maintained by the doctor (keeping her alive/going). Considering who Missy really is (The Master) this could well be true, even without Foe Yay. Her /his justification for attacking Earth has always been summed up as "to annoy the Doctor". She keeps planning this, in the knowledge that the Doctor will find it out eventually and it would annoy/scare him like crazy.
• "In the Forest of the Night" takes on a whole new perspective when you learn in "Dark Water" what Danny did as a soldier. His dedication to the children under his protection is his attempt to make up for his killing a child during battle in the Middle East.
• A possibly unintentional/meta bit of Fridge Brilliance at the start of "Dark Water": when Clara tells the Doctor to take her to see a volcano, he's unusually dismissive of the idea (even for Twelve), saying volcanoes are just "leaky mountains" and "rubbish". While the most common explanation is that he's sensing what Clara is planning to do, another possible explanation is that, since it's already been implied that regenerations are based physically on a pre-existing person, Twelve is remembering what happened the last time his current eyes saw a volcano.
  • This theory is somewhat strengthened by the implication in "The Girl Who Died" that Twelve managed to choose his current appearance deliberately, albeit subconsciously.
  • It could also be a call-back to the short piece where the Doctor told Amy that when you make all of time and space your backyard, sooner or later all you have is a backyard—eg he's seen so many volcanoes it's boring for him.
• Bit of Fridge Brilliance in "Death in Heaven" when the St. Paul's roof opens and the Cybermen begin to fly out. Osgood counts 87, OCD, while Missy corrects her to 91, Queen of Evil. Only thing is Osgood was right! There are four short because three of them were sent after Clara and the fourth was Danny Pink!
  • Even more brilliant: Danny couldn't have been the other missing Cyberman, because his corpse was still in the funeral parlor and only arose with the second wave of Cyber-undead. Rather, the fourth Cyberman would be someone else who'd died a few years earlier, and whose lifelong exemplary service to Britain would have merited entombment in the cathedral: the Brigadier!
• "Dark Water"/"Death in Heaven" makes for a bit of retroactive Fridge Brilliance in "Deep Breath", as it finally explains why the newspaper listing led Clara and the Doctor to the clockwork robots' "restaurant". Missy arranged it in order to kill two birds with one stone: to ensure that Clara would remain a companion through which she could manipulate the Doctor, and to eliminate the competition for London's cyborg-convertible Human Resources, trusting that the Doctor would shut the clockwork droids' operation down.
• Twelve's dig at Missy for how he'd been named President of Earth without even trying, in contrast to all the times the Master'd tried and failed to take over the world, hits home a lot harder when you realize that it's the second time this has happened: in "The Deadly Assassin", the Master's scheming inadvertently got the Doctor named President of Gallifrey without him ever wanting the job!
• During the last time they met in "The End of Time", the Doctor spent the time desperately trying to provoke a Heel–Face Turn in the Master, wanting to help him and become friends again. What does the Master do after coming back? Try to provoke a Face–Heel Turn in the Doctor, in an perverse attempt to help his heroism with an army of the dead. Turns out you got through to the Master, Doctor, but Be Careful What You Wish For!
• In "Last Christmas", all four scientists have different British accents. While this can be easily overlooked at first, it's revealed afterwards that not only are they only dreaming about being scientists, they are all in reality from different locations and time periods brought together in their shared dream.
  • Another early clue that the Arctic base is a dream: The Doctor enters Clara's dream of Danny to bring her out, by having the scientists put a dream crab onto him as he's holding sleeping Clara's hand. But the only crab they'd had captive was the one in the jar, which was attached to Clara at the time. So where did the second crab for the Doctor come from? Presumably, if asked, they'd all say It's a Long Story...
• The Doctor is instantly incredulous that the Nick Frost!Santa is real. He has a good reason to: the Eleventh Doctor saying in "A Christmas Carol" that he partied with the "real" Santa ("Or as I've always known him: Jeff") and Albert Einstein at Frank Sinatra's hunting lodge in 1952. He even has a photograph of them together that he shows off. If anyone could spot an impostor, it'd be the Doctor!
• Dream-Danny's sudden behavior change, in which he abruptly starts trying to persuade Clara to wake up rather than remain with him, could actually be a case of Nice Job Fixing It, Villain on the Dream Crab's part. It wants Clara to remain trapped, so it redoubles its efforts to make dream-Danny as convincing and realistic as possible. But, just as Missy didn't reckon with how the real Danny Pink's loyalty to Clara wouldn't be changed even with the Cyber-inhibitor at work, the Dream Crab failed to realize that a realistic Danny would insist that Clara live on without him: his and Clara's phone conversation in "Death in Heaven" proved that. So the Crab sabotaged its own work, in trying to make it more effective.
• Each episode of Series 8 can be seen to represent a different Doctor (to be fair, some more than others):
  • "Deep Breath" — 11: High-concept ideas, the Paternoster Gang, and a timey-wimey ending that includes a cameo by 11 himself.
  • "Into the Dalek" — 6: A pragmatic, somewhat violent Doctor is tougher on his associates than usual.
  • "Robot of Sherwood" — 3: Shares multiple story beats with "The Time Warrior"; the Doctor references "Carnival of Monsters" and uses Venusian Aikido at one point.
  • "Listen" — 12: All about 12! It calls back to 12's first [cameo] appearance, and features Series 8's soldier motif heavily.
  • "Time Heist" — 8: A heroic, adventurous, caring Doctor makes things up as he goes along.
  • "The Caretaker" — 5: Reminiscent of "Mawdryn Undead", what with a former soldier being a maths teacher and being stuck at a school.
  • "Kill the Moon" — 7: Features the destruction of a celestial body; the Doctor's manipulations drive a wedge between him and Clara, with her chewing him out and choosing to abandon him at the end similar to Ace's temporary rejection of him at the end of the Virgin New Adventures Novel/Big Finish Audio Love and War.
  • "Mummy on the Orient Express" — 4: Gothic horror atmosphere, a unconventional mummy as the threat ("Pyramids of Mars"), an offer of jelly babies, and the Twelfth Doctor mimics Tom Baker's voice at one point.
  • "Flatline" — 10: Present-day Earth setting, dark, monsters that can turn people into images and vice-versa ("Fear Her"), the Doctor builds a gadget and is trapped for a significant chunk of the story, at most advising/assisting a female character in picking up the crisis in his stead ("Fear Her", "Blink", even "Last of the Time Lords").
  • "In the Forest of the Night" — 1: Educational aspects to the plot, the Doctor is very much in "grumpy grandpa with a soft side" mode, two Coal Hill teachers, (relatively) low-budget and could've been filmed on a soundstage.
  • "Dark Water" — 9: Present-day Earth setting, dead people returning from the grave evilly altered ("The Unquiet Dead"), a companion trying to undo the death of a loved one in a road accident despite the risks ("Father's Day"), and teleporting people to become fodder for a cyborg invasion ("Bad Wolf"/"The Parting of the Ways").
  • "Death in Heaven" — 2: A Cyberman invasion complete with a march down the steps of St. Paul's Cathedral, UNIT is prominently featured, the Brigadier (introduced during 2's tenure) makes one last appearance, and the Doctor calls himself an idiot.
    • Or perhaps "Listen" was War's: it has the old barn, "never cruel nor cowardly", the Doctor confronting what he dreads and being forced to become a soldier, and witnessing the future of a lonely Last of His Kind time traveler. Which would leave "Last Christmas" for Twelve.

Fridge Horror — Series 8

• Mancini's Restaurant is a ruse set up so the droids can capture customers and harvest their body parts. It's advertised in the paper as a family restaurant, and it has a children's menu.
• Missy's casual quip about liking Twelve's accent — "Think I'll keep it" — rates as a meta-level reference to both actors being Scottish, so it's a minor bit of Fridge Brilliance. But it becomes a lot more disturbing — indeed, Fridge Horror — in-Verse, once you know that she's the Master. Not keeping the accent implies she'd been seriously considering murdering the Doctor just to see if she'd like his next regeneration better, and doing so for as trivial a reason as whether or not she likes Twelve's manner of speaking.
• The contempt shown to Danny Pink due to his former career as a soldier by both his class and by Clara (and his own resigned acceptance of it) may seem exceptionally dickish, until one remembers that in the Whoniverse, the events of Torchwood: Children of Earth (in which the military publicly attempted to violently round up millions of children for a very obviously horrible fate) and their impotence in the face of a good dozen or so very public alien incursions over the past decade likely sapped their public image enormously. Considering that some of the children the army attempted to take to the 456 would have been around 9/10 at the time (Children of Earth was set in 2009), and the current Whoniverse year is 2014 at the earliest, as well as the fact that Shoreditch (where Coal Hill School is located) is an inner-city/working class area of London, so may have been selected for the government's Kill the Poor solution. It is entirely possible that some of the teenagers in Coal Hill School may have been rounded up for the 456. This would explain their dislike for soldiers.
  • Actually, that may not be the case, since in "The Pandorica Opens" the Doctor stated that some of history had been rewritten. And while it hasn't been confirmed as yet by Word of God, no one from "present" Earth has ever mentioned the event since. Likely meaning the event itself was removed from history.
• In "Deep Breath", Twelve wears a face taken from a person and used by one of the clockwork droids. For symbolism, it was actually a mask of Matt Smith's face (technically, taken from a mannequin of him). Also, in this episode it is suggested that during regeneration, the new body is modeled after an existing person. This, of course, means that the person used as the template for the Eleventh Doctor was killed by the clockwork droids.
• So, Missy is creating her own breed of Cybermen, presumably loyal to her, by sucking their souls into the Time Lord device, then downloading them again to their newly upgraded Cyberman bodies. So far, so horrible. But what about the people who don't have bodies to go back to? The truant officer's body was charred to skeletal remains missing more than a few chunks. One individual was utterly vaporized by Dalek antibodies, with nothing left but protein dust in the Dalek's food chamber. Do these individuals get sent back to new bodies? Are they left forever in the Nethersphere? Or is their soul purged and released when it's discovered that they have no body to be downloaded into?
  • Or maybe she's holding them in reserve to download into animal-derived Cybershades, or into Cyber-converted alien races that don't have discrete individual minds, like the Ood. Bad enough to have your own body subjected to Unwilling Roboticization, but to be stuck in one that was never even human to begin with...
• Just the very concept of the Nethersphere is horrifying when you think about it for long enough. Basically, it's an artificial "heaven/afterlife" for every human that ever died, maybe even including humanoid species as well. By itself, that doesn't seem so bad but then you find out that the main purpose of the Nethersphere is to trick or force dead people to delete their emotions to turn them into Cybermen! And as if that wasn't already bad enough, you suddenly realize some things:
  • EVERY human that ever died ended up in the Nethersphere. And they ALL got turned into Cybermen after most of them probably deleted their emotions!
  • And to make matters worse, this includes several people that the Doctor knew, including but not limited to Harriet Jones, Pete Tyler, the Brigadier, Danny Pink as well as several of his other assorted allies.
  • And that's only including the television show. If we go into the Expanded Universe, then more people ended up in the Nethersphere, such as Lucie Miller, Alex Foreman, Tamsin, Evelyn Smythe, Ianto Jones, Tosh, Jack Harkness (whenever he dies), and maybe even several people from the books and comics!
    • Although this does lead to some fridge hilarity: Jack has died hundreds of thousands of times during this due to being buried alive by his ex. If every death gets a Jack copy, Missy probably eventually had to just program it to immediately delete Jack Harknesses because he’d overrun the place. Plus, it would be impossible to keep the place remotely stable if you had a million Jacks running around, because they’d turn it into the universe’s biggest orgy. He’s already died so many times that the threat of feeling his corpse is pretty insignificant, and all of those endless copies just suffocated to death millions of times from their perspective.
  • Amy and Rory too. And Sarah Jane.
    • During the filming of the finale, pictures surfaced of the gravestones for Clara Oswin Oswald, Ellie Oswald, and Amy and Rory. Cut scenes?
• "Time Heist": Psi's recounting of why he'd deleted his own memories of his friends and family hits a lot harder if you didn't miss the bank manager's passing reference to how the family of the man whose brain was "souped" will be arrested and imprisoned, purely as a warning to other would-be bank robbers. If the legal system of their far-future era is corrupt enough to have innocent people prosecuted for the crimes of their relatives, then it surely wasn't panic that made Psi shield his own, whatever the cost to himself.
• In a bit of Fridge Horror that's actually sympathetic to the Master, Missy's scheme with the Nethersphere involves convincing the downloaded dead that they're faced with a potentially-agonizing future, as they're doomed to feel the anguish of their former bodies decomposing, being autopsied, and getting embalmed and/or cremated. While this is a nightmare in itself, it's even more alarming to realize that she must have drawn upon direct personal experience in coming up with the idea: the Master, after all, spent an unknown number of years as a shambling, decay-riddled wreck after Roger Delgado's Real Life demise, before the character took to swiping others' bodies for himself. Indeed, one has to wonder if the Pratt/Beevers Master had been plagued by the constant dread that he'd be trapped as a ruined husk forever, or if the reason he clung to life so tenaciously for so long was because he honestly feared the afterlife might be exactly as Seb describes it.
• The Heartwarming Moment at the end of "Death in Heaven"? It was sad and sweet to say a proper farewell to the Brigadier and a Dying Moment of Awesome for Danny Pink, but think about this — how many friends and allies were in that Cyberman army? We're talking at least three quarters of Torchwood to start with. Jenny Flint (considering the lifespan of humans), Rose's dad, the Ponds...
  • Taken even further, "Dark Water"/"Death in Heaven" could easily be considered a Wham Episode for the entire Whoniverse. Why? Because there's no telling how widely Missy searched the Doctor's personal history, or that of the Earth, for minds to download into the Nethersphere. It's conceivable that every person who's ever died in this Verse — past or future, classic or revival or Big Finish or anything else — wound up in the Data Slice with Danny! Aside from the few Everybody Lives episodes, none of them can ever feel quite the same again, if you keep this in mind each time a named character or Mook or unlucky bystander goes down.
  • Though there's some relief in knowing that not every person could have been downloaded into the Nethersphere because River and friends were uploaded into the Library's computer at the end of "Forest of the Dead", preventing Missy from ever being able to download them.
  • Even beyond that: How many bodies were converted into Cybermen? It's likely that the whole of Britain, if not the Earth, has no corpses left. Every cemetery empty.
• Also from "Last Christmas", the happy ending for Doctor and Clara isn't for everyone. The world everyone woke up to from Santa's sleigh is the Old Clara world. Clara and the Doctor woke up from that one, but everyone else who was on the base is still asleep and being eaten.
  • Not necessarily; some characters' dreams may have been more deeply nested than others.
• Missy's entire plan in Series 9 was revealed to be her birthday gift to the Doctor — an army of Cybermen for him to control and become corrupted by. While she obviously wanted the Doctor alive to fulfill her plan, she noticeably leaves him to fall out a plane to what would've been his death; she observes him falling and complains about his lack of "finesse", but shows no interest in saving him herself or sending one of the Cybermen swarming the skies under her control to save him. She then seems annoyed when he figures out a way to save himself, and even destroys her AI assistance in irritation for his being impressed. In the next series however, she goes out of her way to try to save the Doctor. Why? In the next series, she fears he expects to be Killed Off for Real and it suddenly turns serious for her. In this episode? She's willing to let him die, because she knows he'd regenerate. Hence why it's a birthday gift... and a newly regenerated Doctor, still weak from the rebirth and mind a bit scrambled, might be in a more vulnerable state of mind she could more easily take advantage of to try to sway Thirteen to her side. Especially if she made herself the first face Thirteen's new face ever saw, meaning Thirteen would be even more irrationally attached to Missy than the Doctor usually is to the Master.
  • “Thirteen” is actually 15. Who was it that revealed that somewhere between the 12th and final regeneration the Doctor would become the Valeyard? The Master. She was trying to create the Valeyard.
    • 14. "Ten" using up an extra regeneration doesn't make him a different incarnation before and after.

Series 9 (Twelfth Doctor / Clara) Fridge

Fridge Brilliance — Series 9

• "The Magician's Apprentice" calls back to "Genesis of the Daleks" in more ways than one; not just with the archive footage or the presence of Davros, but with the battle scene at the episode's beginning. In "Genesis", The Doctor notes that a lot of the technology is VERY old-fashioned (muskets and mines), meaning the war must have been going on a very long time. Harry Sullivan quips, "They'll be down to bows and arrows next." What weapons are being used in the battle scene at the beginning? Bows and arrows! With biplanes, to boot! No wonder the Doctor didn't recognize it as Skaro at first: he'd never materialized in THIS part of the conflict before.
  • Except the scene in question happens when Davros is still a child, so it's actually decades earlier than the events of "Genesis". If anything, Harry is underestimating how much Kaled and Thal technology have already degenerated.
• In "The Witch's Familiar", it's revealed that the Dalek travel machine "translates" whatever its operator says into Daleky sounding phrases and the more emotional the operator gets, the more emphatically the travel machine screams "EXTERMINATE!!" Combined with the fact that the interface seen in the "Asylum of the Daleks" flashbacks to Oswin's imprisonment in a travel machine and the interface Missy wires Clara into in "The Witch's Familiar" look similar then the latter episode gives retroactive Fridge Horror to the former in that Oswin may still have been human inside the casing and not entirely Dalek as Eleven supposed.
  • Deconstruction and/or Fridge Horror from Clara's time inside the Dalek casing — Clara says "I love you", calls out her name, is desperate to communicate with the Doctor peacefully, but the translator turns it into aggression and hate; so for all the Doctor knows the Daleks could be peace-loving hippies trapped inside their solo tanks trying to make friends with him and their heightened emotions at failing to do so end up firing the guns. It's said Davros' final modification of them was to remove the ability to feel pity, compassion, or remorse, but perhaps he just removed their ability to express or act on those things by ensuring the translator software edited them out. Alternately, Missy screwed with the translation hoping that she could get Clara killed.
  • This revelation about how Daleks' words are "translated" into messages of hatred adds a new spin to Rusty's and the Metaltron's parting lines to the Doctor. If Daleks' self-identification automatically translates to "I am a Dalek", then who's to say that one or both of them weren't trying to compliment the Doctor for being a formidable opponent and/or a loyal Time Lord, and "You would be/are a good Dalek" isn't just how that was translated...?
• Davros quips about how he's courteously provided the Doctor with the only other chair on Skaro. For there to actually be a normal chair on Skaro seems bizarre, unless you recall that the Daleks have used robotic duplicates of people to infiltrate enemy groups as long ago as "The Chase". Presumably the Dalek engineers occasionally upgrade the technology for such duplicates, and would need to test their new designs' ability to walk, stand, sit and lie down like living humanoids, so the chair probably came from the testing facility for such mechanisms.
• In "The Witch's Familiar", Missy tries to convince the Doctor to kill a "trapped-in-a-Dalek-casing" Clara. This seems and is pretty despicable, but it makes sense when you think about it as Missy is jealous of their close friendship. This seems strange as she was boasting to Clara in "The Magician's Apprentice" about how she's the Doctor's friend, how she's always cared about him and how complex and complicated their friendship is and denying their relationship to be one of romantic love. But then, when Missy realizes he's doing something stupid, (i.e., using his regeneration energy on Davros, and in turn the Daleks) she immediately rushes to his aid and kills Colony Sarff, thus freeing him. But when he wakes up, he sees that she's alive, and instead of acknowledging that, he asks about Clara. Missy is quite obviously offended at this and she has good reason to be, as the Doctor barely acknowledges her, not even thanking her for potentially saving his life! And so, her trying to trick the Doctor into killing Clara — while extreme — is in her eyes a just punishment of the Doctor for ignoring her. And when the Doctor tells her to "run" in anger, her feelings are obviously hurt, as she taunts him while leaving.
  • But on the Doctor's side of things, him not acknowledging her makes sense because he most likely isn't surprised to see her still alive, due to how many times the Master has cheated death before. He probably doesn't mean to be insensitive, he just knows that the humans — i.e., Clara — have to come first because they are more vulnerable then Missy is. And even though he just left her there on Skaro, he probably knows that she's going to survive for those exact reasons. So, some sort of meaningful conversation discussing this might happen between them when they next meet.
• Several times in New Who, we hear characters talking about how "evil" the Doctor is, and how he always uses people. In "The Witch's Familiar", we see what traveling with the Doctor would be like if he were really evil, in the form of Missy's abusive interactions with Clara.
• In "Before the Flood", The Reveal that the "ghost Doctor" is a hologram he'd set up to play the part of one seems to be contradicted by how it was able to open the Faraday Cage door. But a handful of episodes, most recently "Mummy on the Orient Express", include holograms that are evidently capable of handling solid objects, presumably being backed up by some force fields. So, we know that's doable with Whoniverse tech.
• It's been pointed out that Clara has never put her hair up on screen before "The Zygon Invasion"/"The Zygon Inversion": specifically, she was never seen engaging in the act of tying her hair. This is the first, clear sign that she's a Zygon copy, as the act of pulling her hair back is a symbolic gesture implying she has nothing to hide.
• The opening monologue of "Heaven Sent" plays, on first viewing, like it's the Doctor addressing the audience, Breaking the Fourth Wall to deliver a scene-and-theme-setting bit of verse, similar to his account of the bootstrap paradox earlier this series, in "Before the Flood". It sets up the notion of the Doctor's journey through the castle, and the slowly approaching menace, as a metaphor for life and inexorable death. By the end, though, this has been turned on its head, as we realise that the "you" referred to is not the indefinite listener, but specifically the Doctor — the Doctor is thinking or speaking these words in-story, is grimly and sadly imagining the warning he would give to the next iteration of himself, just before the moment of their "birth" — which he will not live to see — and precisely and accurately describing the life before them, and its inevitable, inexorable end. It is no longer a bleak metaphor for life — it is a bleak, hopeless, but entirely accurate and literal description of the entire life of the man who is just about to be born.
  • It is actually a warning that explains how the Veil works, written for the Doctor on a wall right outside the teleportation chamber. He finds and reads it in the original script, but the scene was cut from the final episode, though the text is still visible as a Freeze-Frame Bonus.
  • It gets better. On rewatch, you notice that during the narration, the camera is following not the Veil, but the footsteps of the Doctor as he crawls back to complete the loop. The opening monologue is also describing the Doctor himself! To emphasize that, when he appears out of the teleport, he delivers a warning that ends with "I'm coming to find you, and I will never, ever stop."
• In "Listen", the Doctor tells Rupert that fear can let you react so quickly that you can slllooooww dddooowwwnn tttiiimmmee. In "Heaven Sent", we see how the Doctor himself takes advantage of this ability.
  • The same story has the TARDIS essentially steer herself to pre-Time War Gallifrey. How is this possible, when Gallifrey is time-locked? Well, one possibility is that just the War period itself is sealed away. However, this also raises the possibility that the TARDIS, being the super-amazing advanced piece of technology she is, can pierce the time lock; the Doctor just chooses not to because it would be too painful.
• In "Heaven Sent", the rooms reset, and the wall is hundreds of times harder than diamond. So, even assuming that a Time Lord is strong enough to chip away at a wall hundreds of times harder than diamond, why does the wall not reset like every other room? Since the whole thing was just his confession dial, the reason it didn't reset is because it was all in his head!
  • Because the wall is not part of the castle — it's one side of the stasis cube (last seen on the console in "The Day of the Doctor") which contains Gallifrey's pocket universe. The castle is perhaps merely attached to it.
  • Word of God says that the wall is the outer layer of the Confession Dial, which the Doctor literally broke through.
• The Doctor's final confession in "Heaven Sent", that he's the Hybrid, but the Hybrid isn't a biological hybrid, gives a ton of new meaning to one of his comments in "Into the Dalek". Everyone's been interpreting the prophecy as being about a half-Time Lord/half-Dalek. But if the actual wording says, e.g., that the Hybrid would be "born of Gallifrey and of Skaro", then the Doctor as the Doctor qualifies perfectly: he said it himself, that it was meeting the Daleks that made the title a promise rather than just a name. It also works on a meta level, because "The Daleks" is the story that made Doctor Who a hit.
  • It's also mentioned that the prophesy technically only specifies two warrior races, and speculates that "human" is one of those races. Though the Doctor is from Gallifrey, he is definitely a lot more human than the average Time Lord (Although of course that varies from regeneration to regeneration), most readily makes references to human culture, and explicitly thinks of Earth as his home. So he is half-human, half-Time Lord in the sense that he is genetically Time Lord, but on some level identifies as human.
• At the end of "Heaven Sent", the Doctor mentioned that the Time Lords had the prophecy wrong. The Hybrid is not Half Dalek, the Daleks would never allow that. No one knows that more than the Doctor, who once, in Manhattan, saw what Daleks are prepared to do to those who mix Dalek DNA with another race's, even if it is one of their leaders who did the tampering.
• As of "Hell Bent", we know why Type-40 TARDISes were retired from service. Apparently the chameleon circuits tend to stick quite easily on the first form they choose.
• Clara's ending. Not only does she essentially "become" the Doctor in a sense, with her own TARDIS and companion, but her predicament in the end closely mirrors that of the Eleventh Doctor's at the end of Series 6, in that her death is an inevitability, a fixed point in time she will eventually have to face, but in the meantime she has a time machine and she can go on running for as long as she wants.
  • And there's the fact that she ran away from Gallifrey in a stolen Type-40 TARDIS, to travel the universe with a fellow quasi-immortal...
• Ever notice that once Danny was gone, that's when Clara's attraction to women became more noticeable? Notice how she phrases things after Danny is gone; she swears she's not going to love another man. But Danny wasn't the kind of guy who would want her to live without companionship. He would have wanted her to be happy. So she is going to honor her word to Danny and his wish for her to be happy.
• In the opening sequence of "The Return of Doctor Mysterio", when the Doctor meets Grant, what is he doing up on the roof? Trying to fix the temporal damage that prevents him from traveling to New York in the period where Amy and Rory wound up. Of course he is: this episode's running subtext is that Twelve is dealing with the loss of River Song. He may not remember Clara anymore, but he does remember the Ponds, and he's trying to get back to them so he can tell them all about how their daughter lived and died.

Fridge Horror - Series 9

• Osgood's effect on Zygons: In "The Day of the Doctor", a Zygon takes Osgood's form and connects to her mind. After a mindwipe in the black archive, and realizing that the Osgoods better keep quiet about who is the human, when they come out, they behave as Osgood previously would. The Zygon's personality seems to be effectively gone (not that we see a lot of it). Then, one Osgood dies, "Zygon Invasion/Inversion" happens, and concludes in the rebellion's leader Bonnie becoming the new Osgood, and acting exactly like Osgood. Just what does that woman do to Zygon minds?
• In "Heaven Sent", imagine if Clara was still alive and also entered the castle with the Doctor. Eventually she'd also have to follow the Doctor's loop for 2 billion years!^note Although like the Doctor, she would only remember the last loop. After some suffering while trying to solve the castle, the Doctor seemingly smashing the tough wall in one punch!
• Unless the Time Lords had a tally going, no one will ever know how many times the Doctor had to die to break out of the Confession Dial. His new iterations have no memory of the previous ones, it's unclear how long it takes for him to complete a cycle, the stars don't give more than a very rough estimate of the length of his imprisonment, and even counting the skulls wouldn't tell the answer because most of them would disintegrate or be washed away by the waves within a few thousand years.
• Rivers' speech in "The Husbands of River Song" is tear-jerking enough. But then you remember that she was raised by Kovarian and the Silence, then for a lot of her life, the Doctor and her parents didn't even know who she was! River has spent the majority of her life feeling that no one loves her.

Series 10 (Twelfth Doctor / Bill & Nardole) Fridge

Fridge Brilliance — Series 10

• Seeking "the deadliest fire in the universe", i.e. Dalek weapons-fire, the Doctor lures the oil-slick creature into the middle of a battle between the Daleks and the Movellans. Of course he does: he knows that underneath their humanoid facades, the Movellans are just another race of malevolent robots, so — unlike practically any other Dalek opponents he might've chosen — he won't feel morally obligated to save any of them, and thus get sidetracked from his current task.
• The Doctor and Nardole have been sticking around St. Luke's University in Bristol for at least 50 years protecting the Vault, hidden underground, and its mysterious contents. So why Bristol of all places? Simple. Although the Doctor likes hanging out in the United Kingdom in general, he tends to spend most of his visits there — particularly in the 20^th and 21^st centuries — in London. Most of his companions from that time are also either from London, or he's met them there. The only previous occasion that we know of, in the entire 20^th and 21^st centuries, where he's been to Bristol was the events of "Flatline", where he was stuck inside the TARDIS for most of the episode, which took place in and around some rail lines and a nearby council estate. And, given how respected Oxford and Cambridge are, the Doctor's probably spent time hanging out at both storied universities, and knows people at both. So Bristol and its university are the perfect place to base himself for a long period of time in the UK without having the danger of running into his past selves or former companions. Especially as he's trying to go unnoticed into the bargain.
• Try listening to the Doctor's lecture without looking at the screen. "Nobody's moving anywhere... just frozen moments... every moment of your life laid out around you... boredom and laughter and cutting your toenails... we stand together, forever... Time And Relative Dimension In Space. It means life." This isn't the Doctor teaching a course, it's the Doctor slowly going stir-crazy because dull Vault-guarding duties have confined him to one planet.
• Why does the Doctor discourage Bill from joining her transformed sweetheart Heather in "The Pilot" to explore all of space and time, and his pointing out that the latter is no longer human, after his The World Is Just Awesome speech early on? Well, the Doctor is an alien space-and-time traveller, and he's seen what happens to the wide-eyed human companions he takes on to show him all the wonders — in the revival series it changes them for both better and worse, and they often come to bittersweet ends at best. This Doctor has had to deal with losing both Clara Oswald and River Song to the grave, and in the wake of that it's telling that he decides he'll hold himself to the vow of the Vault and, by and large, give up adventuring altogether. Thus he can't help but think of the worst-case scenario for Bill and Heather and thus discourages Bill from choosing to stay with her. Part of his Character Development in Series 10 is his emerging from his self-imposed "exile" thanks to Bill, and choosing to embrace exploration again — and later trying to redeem Missy — despite the risks to him and those he cares most deeply about.
• The Doctor getting furious at racism directed toward Bill takes on new meaning with the official confirmation in the previous season that Time Lords can regenerate not only as a different sex but a different racial appearance. To someone who could do that, discrimination based on appearance would be stupid and personally insulting. Combine that with the Doctor's own morality, and his Parental Substitute nature towards Bill, and the result is expected.
• Crossing over with Fridge Horror, at the end of "Oxygen", the Doctor reveals that he's still blind after loaning Bill his helmet on a spacewalk. The medical technology on the TARDIS, despite clearing his eyes, didn't cure his blindness. Why? Two Words: Brain damage. When a person suffocates, the first thing to go is vision. The second thing that happens is that brain damage starts to set in, because your brain needs a lot of oxygen — 20% of the oxygen you breathe. Now, Time Lords are more durable than humans, but since they still need to breathe oxygen, the same logic applies. The Doctor was without oxygen for too long, and so he got some brain damage, as well. And Time Lord brains are far more complex than human brains — in fact, Time Lords might just have the most complex brain structure of any sapient species in the entire Universe. Which means that the only people who might be able to fix the Doctor's blindness now are the Time Lords — who, one recalls, he's currently on bad terms with.
  • He also can't fix it using regeneration energy because the only times the Doctor has been seen using regeneration energy to heal himself was in the early stages of a regeneration. He can't use regeneration energy to heal himself if he's not actually regenerating. And, given out-of-universe Unfortunate Implications if he deliberately regenerates, or injures himself more to force himself to regenerate, just to deal with his current problem, he's not going to consider his current situation bad enough to regenerate. Not to mention that brain damage is, obviously, no small thing. He could probably summon some regeneration energy to heal a broken bone or something, but given how enormously complex his brain is (as noted above), this isn't something he can just siphon off a little for.
• At first, it seems weird that the Doctor is able to successfully pilot the TARDIS (twice!) at the end of "Oxygen" while being blind. Then you remember that she can pilot herself, and it gets obvious: she helped him so he could keep his secret!
• Possibly an unintentional one with the Doctor's wardrobe: He only seems to wear hoodies with his blue and black coats, with the red coat reserved for a more formal appearance with a button-up shirt and vest. So why does he suddenly start wearing a hoodie with the red coat in "Extremis"? He's blind. He probably doesn't even realize he's wearing the red coat.
• Missy's appearance in the custody of humanoid executioners, on a planet renowned for proficiency at that profession, makes a twisted sort of sense: when last seen, she'd been left behind on Skaro and surrounded by Daleks. Said Daleks had seen her and Clara survive an apparent disintegration by their weapons mere hours ago, so they would hardly expect blasting her again to be any more reliable; they'd also have it on record that their previous attempt to formally execute the Master hadn't worked. So it makes sense that, however reluctant they might be to yield up a kill to non-Daleks, they'd turn Missy over to an organization that specializes in 100% surefire executions.
• In "The Pyramid at the End of the World", the Doctor says that the Monks, having been studying Earth for a very long time, have chosen this time and this place to arrive for a reason. What reasons? For the place, misdirection. The threat of World War III starting in Central Asia isn't what will end the world, it's the accidental creation and release of a killer bacteria in a biofuel lab in Yorkshire. While that also covers one factor of the time of the pyramid's arrival, there's also one other reason: The Doctor is still blind. In fact, the Doctor's blindness is ultimately what gives the Monks their victory — it means he can't open a combination lock to escape the lab with the deadly bacteria before it's blown up as sterilization. He's forced to 'fess up to Bill, and she in her desperation asks the Monks to cure him. Ultimately, the exact crisis may not have mattered to the Monks, what mattered was that the Doctor was blind.
  • Moveover, this is the first time that the Doctor has been so vulnerable because of his blindness since the Silence were unseated from their own position as manipulators of humanity in 1969. The Monks couldn't have taken over Earth any sooner than that date, because they wouldn't be able to remember the Silents long enough to incorporate their actions into their own simulations. It's only after the previous secret controllers of humans had been evicted that their virtual Earth's predictions became accurate, because humans weren't being selectively mind-controlled by creatures the Monks couldn't effectively monitor.
• The alternate memory that Bill uses to override the Monks' memory-revising signal in "The Lie of the Land" isn't a material one, but the constructed "memory" of the mother she'd never known, as she'd imagined based on the photos Twelve gave her for Christmas. Of course it was: the one experience the Monks' predictive simulations couldn't model is what's happening solely within a person's imagination, beyond the reach of their ubiquitous monitoring. Hence, despite all the invaders' precautions and foresight, they Didn't See That Coming.
• One may be still angry at why Bill somehow doesn't feel at least a shred of anger towards the Doctor's Secret Test of Character, which forced her into a decision that could threaten humanity (either shoot or don't shoot the Doctor) in "The Lie of the Land". But think back to "Kill the Moon". His previous companion, Clara, had a decision that could also doom humanity, and after the experience, angrily stormed away after she learnt the truth of the Doctor's actions in regards to this. It shows that the Doctor has learnt from this experience, and created a situation that was better handled.
• A minor one: In "Empress of Mars", the Doctor is shown to have never heard about Terminator, The Thing or The Vikings (continuing a Running Gag from "Last Christmas" where he was shown not to know about Alien), but he does know about Frozen. Given that all of the previous films are uncomfortably close to his everyday life (with The Vikings reminding him of Ashildr to boot), it's probable he prefers to watch Disney films when he wants to get his mind off things.
• We know that when Missy is introduced in Season 8, she makes a comment about liking the Twelfth Doctor's accent enough to adopt it herself. Given the events of "The Doctor Falls", where her predecessor, Simms!Master, is alongside her and Twelve before she double-crosses him and forces him to regenerate into her, it makes sense on two levels why she has the accent: Simm!Master already knows his successor will have the accent, and Twelve's impassioned speech of being kind likely stuck in his mind enough to inspire the change of heart(s) Missy begins later in her life.
• In "Spare Parts", Doctorman Allan realises she can use information from the regenerative centres in the Doctor's brain to stop people going mad with pain from Cyber-conversion and prevent the human body rejecting the implants. The Colony Ship Mondasians in "World Enough and Time" never ran into the same problem, because they also had a Time Lord available, one who was manipulating the entire project!
• Having the Testimony show the First Doctor his future seems like a stupid idea at the time, but remember—they're time travellers! Presumably they know enough about how the timelines work to realize that, once the First Doctor leaves his future self, he'll forget everything he saw until the second time 'round.
• When Lethbridge-Stewart asks the Doctors to look in on his family, the First Doctor says, "We should be delighted," and the Twelfth says, "You can trust him on that." It's not only foreshadowing of the fact that his friendship with the Brig is yet to come from the First Doctor's perspective, but, since the Twelfth has experienced the loss of his friend, doesn't plan to look in on the Brig anymore.
• Bill initially mistaking the TARDIS for a knock through makes a lot of sense when one considers the nature of the current design; there is a rectangular 'entrance hall' leading from the doors to the main console room. Maybe not quite the right size to match the police box interior, but far more reasonable than the prior designs, which immediately open up into the larger space.
• The First Doctor is criticized for being extremely out of character, being a chariceture of who the character was and England as a whole was during the 1960s. But consider that the First Doctor was undergoing regeneration for the first time. Delaying a regeneration has never really turned out to be a good thing for Time Lords, especially for the Doctor. There's a good chance that the First Doctor was mentally relapsing as he was fighting off the natural regeneration process. The Twelfth Doctor did a bit of this as well during "The Doctor Falls" where he goes through flash imitations of his past incarnations before completely stopping the regeneration process. The reason why the Twelfth Doctor doesn't extremely relapse as bad as the First Doctor is due to the fact that Twelve has had a full regeneration cycle to get used to the process. One is about to start and he's extremely terrified. Add in the fact that his future self has completely different sensibilities and fashion choices, and again with the First Doctor being written as a representation of England during the early 1960s and the Twelfth Doctor being a byproduct of the late 2010s, it's not hard to imagine why the First Doctor acted the way he did. He really didn't want to go.
• At the end of "The Doctor Falls", the Doctor refuses to regenerate because he's feeling the weight of being so many different people. Remember that the existence of the War Doctor bumps the modern Doctors' incarnation counts up a number. ^note As an unnumbered Doctor, the true ninth incarnation who underwent the ninth regeneration, his "count" shall we say is War/9/9, Nine is 9/10/10, Ten is 10/11/11 until Journey's End where he becomes 10/11/12, Eleven is 11/12/13 and Twelve is thus 12/13/14. Twelve is the Doctor's thirteenth incarnation; of course he'd rather die than change, he's at the point in a Time Lord's life cycle where they die! Double Fridge Brilliance occurs when you realize that the weight that Twelve feels is probably why Time Lords are limited to twelve regenerations in the first place.

Fridge Horror — Series 10

• So far, we have not been revealed what the contents of the Vault are. But we are given a hint as to what is inside it: it knocks four times at the end of "Thin Ice". Those who remember the Davies Era would also remember that the "four knocks" prophecy was resolved in "The End of Time", with the main antagonist of it being the Master, who hears four drumbeats in his head.
• The Doctor is shown to have a picture of his wife River Song... as well as his granddaughter Susan Foreman. Susan's fate has thus far never been fully revealed in the wake of the Time War, but we know that River is dead from the Doctor's point of time, and the fact that the Doctor treats both pictures as equally sentimental and even argues with them the same way makes it more explicit that the Doctor either doesn't know what happened to her since he last saw her on Earth and has has likely lost hope that he ever will, or that she is truly dead.
• At the end of "Smile", the Doctor has negotiated a peace between the humans and the Vardi. However, while the Vardi are no longer killing anyone who becomes unhappy, they have now lost all sense of loyalty towards the humans, or even any knowledge that humans created them and brought them to the planet. The Vardi now see the planet as theirs, and the humans as strange foreigners who have suddenly shown up at their doorstep. The humans, being refugees from a dead Earth, have nowhere left to go, have no tools to make a home for themselves on the planet (since the Vardi were supposed to be their tools), and have virtually no ability to challenge the Vardi's overwhelming physical power. This leaves the humans entirely at the Vardi's mercy, and (thanks to the Doctor's suggestion) the Vardi's first thought of what to do with the humans is to exploit them economically. It's not hard to see the survivors of the human race becoming, if not slaves, then an oppressed underclass serving machines that have only a limited understanding of how their new subjects think. And all the humans can do about it is "smile".
• It's a very good thing that Bill and the Doctor wound up releasing the sea serpent in "Thin Ice" from its shackles on the bottom of the Thames in 1814. If they hadn't, Victorian London could've stood witness to an honest-to-goodness Kaiju battle between a sea monster and a tyrannosaur, a couple of generations later, when the big girl from "Deep Breath" accidentally stepped on the mega-eel!
• In "Extremis", Penny, who is heavily implied to still be in the closet and thus a bit nervy about being on a lesbian date, freaks the hell out when she sees a bunch of Catholic clergy standing around her date's bedroom. She probably thought she was going to be exorcized...
  • If she did, she didn't know much about the Catholic church. While they disapprove of homosexuality on principle, they don't believe gay people are possessed or anything. And exorcisms are extremely rare, because while the Church technically believes in demonic possession, they have a strict formal process about it and generally assume normal mental illness, just like everybody else. Sometimes a joke is just a joke.
• The Doctor reveals that all video game characters have conciousness and feel pain when they die. Good luck with that next playthrough you had planned!
• This isn't the first time the Monks have ran the simulation. Many versions of Bill, the Doctor and Nardole have suffered and died who knows how many times.
• The one guard in "The Lie of the Land" who forgot to switch his bullets for blanks is Played for Laughs. However, what if Bill had grabbed Dave's gun? Given that she fired at his chest four times, it could have destroyed both his hearts, which we know is one of the ways to negate regeneration. The Doctor might have actually been killed, by his own companion no less, because that guard made a stupid mistake.
• In "Oxygen", space medicine and physics get treated relatively realistically for once, thus, there is, of course, no sound in a vacuum (in this case, at least not if you're not wearing a helmet). Think about what that means for the Doctor; for most of the spacewalk he is, first, effectively both deaf and mute, then at some point, goes blind as well, which, combined, would make communication almost impossible. This while he's desperately trying to save someone's life and overwhelming numbers of homicidal zombies are stalking everyone. He really went through a harrowing ordeal, and it's no wonder he sounds so scared when later volunteering to give Bill his whole suit...
• In "The Pyramid at the End of the World", the Doctor keeps holding the simulator "thread" showing the Earth one year in the future, although everyone else has already let go in horror. He says it's because it's just not his first dead planet, which shuts even Brabbit up, but remember, he's blind. It might just be that it feels pretty good to get to view a couple of actual images after who knows exactly how long in total darkness, even if the images are horrible.
• In "World Enough and Time", the Doctor could've saved time. Knock out Jorj as soon as he puts the gun down, and get explain time dilation to Nardole and Missy while they're in the elevator to the bottom floor. Not only could he have saved Bill from full conversion, he might well have found a way to prevent the Cybermen from being created!
  • Except the Proto-Cybermen already existed before the Doctor's party arrived, because they're what Jorj was afraid of. And given who he really is, it's very likely that Razor deliberately brought Bill to the conversion chamber at that exact time, because he'd seen on the monitors that the Doctor was boarding the lift and the Master wanted her to be freshly-upgraded and disoriented when it arrived (plus, it gives both the Doctor and Bill a Hope Spot he can steal, and the Master loves to see others suffer). Even if the other three had headed down immediately after Bill was taken, Razor/Saxon would've had years to arrange her transformation while they were still riding down in the elevator.
  • If anything, the 10-year time lag actually helped Bill, because at least it gave the surgeon-engineers time to develop that pain-suppressor headpiece before she went under the knife. Imagine the additional agonies she'd have endured if Jorj had grasped the idea of Time Dilation on the first try....
  • And in a related issue, while the Doctor could have boarded the lifts with Bill and the Proto-Cybermen in the first place instead of trusting them and assuming she'd be safe on the other end and he could catch up, what might Saxon!Master and the Proto-Cybermen done to both him and his companion when they arrived, with the Doctor honestly unaware of what was going on at that end?
    • Probably the fact that, y'know, Jorj had more or less told them that the "things from below" would tear them apart if they tried to enter the lift with them? Those Proto-Cybermen might be bent over in non-stop anguish, but they're still damned strong. And none of the Doctor's party had cause to suspect the Time Dilation problem existed until they talked to Jorj some more and examined the ship's life-sign scans, so they saw no reason not to at least ask what the heck was going on before charging in blindly to the rescue.
• When Missy and Saxon are speculating about ways to kill the Doctor, they mockingly ask him how he'd died before. Aside from having "felt the blade", which could be seen as Foreshadowing how Saxon dies in the same episode, they're all ways that we've seen the Doctor die previously: not just Four expiring from a fall in "Logopolis", but Twelve himself burning to death billions of times in "Heaven Sent", and Ten drowning permanently in the alternate reality of "Turn Left". Sucks to be a Time Lord sometimes...
  • The related comment about how they can't kill Twelve by tossing him off the roof, because they'd be "up and down the stairs all night" before his new cycle of regenerations runs out, becomes Fridge Funny after the revelations in "The Timeless Children". They'd have been up and down the stairs until the stairs wore out and collapsed, and still wouldn't be done.

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