Thinking aloud with pictures...

[elisi]

Because we are watching one long, continuous story, and it's timey-wimey and told backwards, but also hugely dependent on what came before (i.e. Ten).

Let me show you what I mean (obvious point is obvious, but hey ho, that's not stopped me before):



The Impossible Astronaut (/this whole season) is literally the counterpoint to Waters of Mars. That is... on Mars the Doctor declared that The Laws of Time were his, and that he could do whatever he wanted and broke a Fixed Point.

In TIA he submits to The Laws of Time and - willingly - makes sure that the Fixed Point stays fixed, even though it means his own death.

Now the other thing is the Doctor's death. When Ten died you had to have a heart of stone not to feel for him (oh that music)...



OK, so he was man!pain incarnate, but he'd screwed up pretty much everything and died alone, realising what a fool he'd been.

Now Eleven... Well, it was a bit of a surprise, to say the least. And we didn't know what to make of it. But looking back at that scene on the beach, his final words are beginning to be painfully poignant:

Comments

[promethia_tenk]

Actually, the interesting thing with how River was created is that it makes the constraints on having new Time Lords ethical rather than mechanical. If the Doctor really wanted to revive the whole race, what's to stop him from setting up a little TARDIS honeymoon business? Invite couple after couple to come traveling with him, seed the whole galaxy with new Time Lords? But River's whole life is basically showing that those powers are a liability and a responsibility. It would be utterly foolhardy to spread them around willy-nilly with a bunch of people who will have no idea how to use them or of the danger they might be in because of their special status. No doubt many of them would run wild like Melody and/or fall prey to groups like the Silence.

And the gangers were rather similar in this respect: creating new life was easy, probably too easy. The constraints had to be ethical. And that was the problem the Time Lords ran into--what they could do exceeded their sense of what they should. And in the universe of seemingly infinite power Moff is giving his characters (of rewriting time and recreating people and wishing things into existence), what keeps any of them in line? It's not so much about what they can do as it's about their responsibilities to each other and to the greater order.