Whopping Theory: It's All About Amy

[rossbennett]

As Smedley (the Golden Retriever) and I walked around the lake today, I listened to the predictions episode and kept playing back the season in my mind. Some things struck me that I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere.

One thing I've never seen mentioned is an explanation of why the Doctor kept missing all his promised returns getting back to Amy.  Once it was revealed that The Crack is taking people out of time and rewriting history--and when we learned Amy had no memory of Daleks stealing the Earth, it seemed possible to me that the crack had taken big chunks of time out of Amy's life.

Try this conjecture: The TARDIS wasn't wrong when it arrived twelve years too late to come back to young Amelia. It traversed the right temporal displacement.  (Note to theorists: We might conclude from this the TARDIS measures displacement by temporal inertia rather than entropic measure.) Where the problem lay was that the crack had removed twelve years of the world and sealed the loose ends together.  After the events with Prisoner Zero, another short hop to the moon--another time away should have been brief but was two years in Amy's timeline.  Perhaps more cracky-wacky, timey-wimey.


This next bit is a bit involved.  Sorry to go on about it, but there are so many pieces that fit in.

Every single episode of this series has inched forward a geometry on the relationship between memory and reality.


Eleventh Hour: Amy's association and interaction with the Doctor as an adult is founded on a fourteen-year obsession with her childhood experience and deep reflection on the nature of The Doctor.  Her memories of her childhood were played over and over and became such a strong model of how reality should be that she bit four psychiatrists when they suggested her understanding was wrong.

The Beast Below: The entire society of Starship UK is built on a foundation of everyone choosing to remember or forget what they know. Amy's choice to forget--importantly for a very different reason than anyone else--is critical. It's her realization of the truth of the situation--her perception of what the reality is--saves everyone, even the Doctor's identity.

Victory of the Daleks: Amy's inability to remember the Daleks comes to light. (This is the genesis of my thinking the crack had swallowed several years of Amy's life.)  We also see Amy catching on that the key to saving Bracewell is for him to focus on his memories of his past love.

Weeping Angels stories:  We see Amy's ability to remember the clerics and the Bishop that were taken by the crack.  We're presented with The Ring, which is of course the physical symbol (and bears the psychic imprint?) of her love for Rory. (Many people thought that end scene with the seductive pitch between Amy and the Doctor was out of sorts with everything else.  So it had to be there for a reason.)

Venice:  As Madame Caldieri is about to walk the plank, her final words to the Doctor are, "Tell me, Doctor. Can you conscience carry the weight of another dead race? Remember us. Dream of us."

Amy's Choice:  Both worlds are memories that never existed. Though the psychic pollen may have chosen the Doctor for its embodiment, but both realities came from Amy's mind and the choice between realities was Amy's--and Amy's alone--to make.  It seemed right since it set the Amy-Rory relationship in solid ground, but I'm now conjecturing it's way more than that.  It establishes Amy as the arbiter of what reality is.

Silurian stories:  On the surface, a story about humans and silurians, but very clearly bookended by Amy's continuity.  It's Amy that sees the Rory/Amy pair in the distance, but only the Amy at the end of the episode. The voice-over narration says, "This is the story of our past and must never be forgotten."  [Emphasis added.]  Nobody forgets this is where Rory was wiped from Amy's reality, leaving only the ring behind.

It's also here the importance of The Ring is kicked into a higher gear. It's not just a defining and foundation item for Amy and Rory, but becomes the link of hope that promises to bring Rory back.

More rules are stated here.  Amy says she can't forget because she's a time traveler and she is supposed to be able to remember.  But the Doctor says that's not how it works when it's her own personal history.  He begs her, pleads with her to remember, but she can't hold Rory's memory.

Vincent:  "Oh, Amy; I hear the song of your sadness. You've lost someone, I think."
Amy: "I'm not sad."
Vincent: "Then why are you crying? [Beat.] It's all right. I understand."
Amy: "I'm not sure I do."

Maybe it's a bit of a stretch, but the whole ending of taking Vincent to 2010 to see his legacy is entirely about memories--specifically how Vincent will be remembered.  It's maybe worth noting here that Amy learns a hard lesson about world changing not being an easy fix.  She tries to change Vincent's world for the better, hoping there will be hundreds of new paintings, but she learns it isn't that simple.


It's almost thrown away as a second thought, but we learn an important axiom of memory and reality in The Lodger.  On entering the time engine, the Doctor says, "The time engine isn't in the flat; the time engine is the flat.  It's someone's attempt to build a TARDIS."
"No. There's always been an upstairs," says Craig.
"Has there? Think about it. [...] A perception filter is more than a disguise. It tricks your memory." [Emphasis added.]

In The Pandorica Opens there are other axioms.  The Ring, we're told, is "a memory a friend of mine somehow lost."  And what appears to be a Great Truth of the universes, "Nothing is ever forgotten--not completely--and if something can be remembered, it can come back."

The whole episode is revealed to have been constructed from Amy's memories--the Romans, the Pandorica, the setting, the time--all elements taken from Amy's house.

Thinking that scene over of River in Amy's room--Boom!--another piece clicks into place. It's another piece of evidence that the crack had sucked away large parts of Amy's life. All the things on Amy's dresser are the toys and memories of a young girl.  No young adult novels.  No Harry Potter. No romance novels.  No teen magazines. 

Stick figures, clay, milk bottle dolls, crayon drawings, picture books, and a child's edition of The Legend of Pandora's Box.  Fairy lights draped on the bed. Had we all presumed Amy had been looking them over on the night before her wedding? But these things weren't in a scrap book. They were out on her child-size desk. They wouldn't fit in that small suitcase of Amelia's.  Children's things were all there were.  Nothing contemporary for a grown young woman other than the wedding dress.  Nothing there to show those missing twelve years the Doctor supposedly overshot on his journey back to Young Amelia Pond.

---

So every single episode has had a seed planted about the importance of memories, the behavior of memories, and the relationship between reality and memories.

Not in every episode, but enough to be important, is The Ring as the embodiment of Amy's reality and Amy's memories. I don't think anyone will suggest that's a stretch.

Now...two things which have been sitting in my head waiting to be explained.

• In Flesh and Stone, the Doctor comes to the realization that there's more going on than just the possibility for time to be rewritten.  He realizes time can be unwritten.  As he realizes this, he draws a circle in the air and reverses it.  Why the circle?  I've come to believe that's a foreshadowing of Amy's Ring.  And...
• Why didn't Autonicus Roranicus put the Ring on Amy's finger once her memory of Rory had reasserted itself?  It would be such a natural consummation of everything getting back into place, it's conspicuous in its absence.  Aha! I'm thinking.  Because that act will symbolize more than her memory coming back. That is the act that will reinstate the universe once and for all.

At the end of The Pandorica Opens, Amy "breaks the rules" we've been given about memories and the axioms of the reality-eating crack as we know them.  That remembering will turn out to be a greater significant event than we've been led to believe.

Amy's memory of Rory returning elevates Amy to playing outside the rules of the universe.  When it's said and done, she will be recalling much more than Rory. The rebuilding of the universe may be completely a product of this new perspective of hers and her memory.

So here are my predictions. (No spoilers, because they're only guesses!)

• Tom will be correct in that The Doctor will be zipping back in time to set the stage to very slightly alter things so Amy isn't dead at the critical moment of resolution.
• Amy's house will be revealed to have so many empty rooms because her (possibly very large) family had all been swallowed by the crack.
• The Doctor may put everything into place, but in the end he has to present the final setup to Amy, because she's the one who has the power to put things right.
• The act that stabilizes/resets/reinstantiates the universe--quite possibly in the culmination of a big bang--is The Ring going back onto Amy's finger. Amy will have to make a positive assertion for that to happen.

So this very long post--thank you for wading all the way!--amounts to this hypothesis:

It's Amy's volition that bring it all back.  It's all Amy's memories. 

It's all Amy's Choice.


Enjoy the finale, everyone!  Watch out for the Woozles and Heffalumps!

[dylangibbs]

Wow! It has to be something to do with the Ring! It has too!
I didn't exactly realise the memories part, but now I think about it, it all makes perfect sense. Are you sure you aren't Moffat in disguise, because that post is something that Moffat would do.
 And it all makes sense too! I think you may be onto something here

[wallybee1]

erm. I understood like the majority of that as in I guessed it kind of revolved around Amy...

and it sounds pretty solid and seems to work out from the technical words you are using (temporal inertia rather than entropic measure comes to mind).

so yeah. pretty good

[dylangibbs]

Ooh... You should never let me think about things for too long.
The Tardis did NOT actually return after 5 minutes, so the crack didn't erase any of Amys life.
Rory says that they used to dress up as the doctor, as a game. And amy drew comics and made models. She couldn't have done all of that in 5 minutes, could she?

[rossbennett]

Ooh... You should never let me think about things for too long.
The Tardis did NOT actually return after 5 minutes, so the crack didn't erase any of Amys life.
Rory says that they used to dress up as the doctor, as a game. And amy drew comics and made models. She couldn't have done all of that in 5 minutes, could she?

Quite right! Those twelve years definitely did not slip into the crack in only five minutes.

Except...it's been suggested that shadow in the kitchen while little Amelia was waiting out in the yard might be the timey-wimey Doctor going back to refit continuity.  What would the Doctor do there?  What would be the point?  It wasn't to catch Prisoner Zero. 

[Okay, we don't know since it wouldn't have might be if the Doctor hasn't done something that will not have happened yet....but that wouldn't just cheat the timeline, it would cheat the audience.]

Rory, who may have been dressing up with Amy when he existed, doesn't, so he didn't.  Except we see at the end of a different gummi worm where they're both playing dress-up, his consciousness as a centurian, her's as a policewoman.

Remember time is not a line of cause and effect.  Do this experiment*:

Lay a sheet of plastic wrap on a flat surface. Make a mark on the sheet with a pen. Hold a key ring over the sheet about about five minutes away from the mark. The key ring represents a time-and-space-swallowing crack. Now...reach through the crack and pinch the plastic sheet and pull out twelve years. Notice how what comes through is a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff. Notice also that what came out of the universe below isn't all from the future of that mark you put down.

Now, attempt the experiment again, but instead of the plastic sheet, use gummi worms, which are a much better representation of actual time. Make the pen mark as before.  Invite an assistant to put their thumb on the worm containing the mark. This represents The Doctor, who has created a time barrier to protect Amy from falling into the crack.

The solution involves calculus, so it won't be presented here. But the ink spot, you will find, exists on 26 Jun 2010. Of course that's if you do the experiment today.  If you wait, your result will be different.

First imagine your perception of reality if you're sitting on that inky, gummi spot.  How will your life be different from your perspective?  You'll still be progressing along the gummi worm at the same rate of entropic momentum. You'll still have those twelve years, though with all your family and friends being sucked through a gummi worm eating crack, there probably won't be much left to do except read the odd book you have lying around and doing a bit of coloring.

Now...if your TARDIS is sitting on one side of the crack event in front of a young Amelia pond, then you pull it away and set it back down on the other side of the crack, how much worm skin have you traversed from Amy's perspective?

* This experiment works because it represents time as a two-dimensional sheet of plastic or rubbery confection.  In truth, time is of higher order than either of these things.

[Henry Gordon Jago]

Remember time is not a line of cause and effect.  Do this experiment*:

Lay a sheet of plastic wrap on a flat surface. Make a mark on the sheet with a pen. Hold a key ring over the sheet about about five minutes away from the mark. The key ring represents a time-and-space-swallowing crack. Now...reach through the crack and pinch the plastic sheet and pull out twelve years. Notice how what comes through is a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff. Notice also that what came out of the universe below isn't all from the future of that mark you put down.

Now, attempt the experiment again, but instead of the plastic sheet, use gummi worms, which are a much better representation of actual time. Make the pen mark as before.  Invite an assistant to put their thumb on the worm containing the mark. This represents The Doctor, who has created a time barrier to protect Amy from falling into the crack.

The solution involves calculus, so it won't be presented here. But the ink spot, you will find, exists on 26 Jun 2010. Of course that's if you do the experiment today.  If you wait, your result will be different.

First imagine your perception of reality if you're sitting on that inky, gummi spot.  How will your life be different from your perspective?  You'll still be progressing along the gummi worm at the same rate of entropic momentum. You'll still have those twelve years, though with all your family and friends being sucked through a gummi worm eating crack, there probably won't be much left to do except read the odd book you have lying around and doing a bit of coloring.

Now...if your TARDIS is sitting on one side of the crack event in front of a young Amelia pond, then you pull it away and set it back down on the other side of the crack, how much worm skin have you traversed from Amy's perspective?

* This experiment works because it represents time as a two-dimensional sheet of plastic or rubbery confection.  In truth, time is of higher order than either of these things.

"And that's how the universe was created?"

"No, but it's a marvellous way to relax."

[rossbennett]

"And that's how the universe was created?"

"No, but it's a marvellous way to relax."

heheheheh!

[George Harrison]

"And that's how the universe was created?"

"No, but it's a marvellous way to relax."

heheheheh!

What did he say?
He just phoned to wash his head at us.