Overanalysis Of and WMG About River Song

My dears, I am far overdue for another Doctor Who-themed post. I'm sorry if you do not watch or do not like Doctor Who—in the case of the former, it's a great show and you should give it a chance; in case of the latter, I cluck my tongue at you in disappointment (unless I've forced you to watch it, in which case I'm now spending a moment feeling sorry for you.) Later I'll post a very lazy post about some short stories I wrote a couple days ago while waiting to tour a brewery. Aw yeah.

The spoilers for series four, five, and the first half of six start here. I haven't seen any of the second half of series six yet, so these theories might already have been jossed. Please to not tell me. I'd like to stay in my fluffy cloud of frantic not-knowing for the next year until Netflix gets series six part two on streaming. Dayum.

Anyway, I've spent some time obsessively analyzing some of River Song's Doctor Who episodes, including the Silence in the Library/ Forest of the Dead and The Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone two-parters, and most of series six part one. Wikipedia and other such sources contributed to my theories. By now, I've come to some conclusions.

• *ahemahem* SILENCE in the Library, FOREST of the Dead, and FLESH and Stone. Silence: series 6 baddies that look like the Slender Man. Forest: The only water in the forest is the river, a clue to River's true identity. Flesh: flesh avatars, otherwise known as a clever way to explain the fact that Amy has been pregnant for the entire sixth series without, like, doing another Amy's Choice thing. Clever, Moffat, clever. 

• Let's consider the background detail/nerd hook of the spacesuits from the Library episodes being in the dropship in The Time of Angels. This may imply that River goes to the Library soon after the Angel episodes, except that she's a doctor in that episode, not a professor. How long does it take to get a professorship? 

• Melody's life-support unit is a spacesuit. In the Library episodes, River wears a spacesuit. Foreshadowing/backshadowing/symbolism?

• Although an astronaut does shoot the Doctor, and Melody was living in a spacesuit at the time, I doubt that the killer astronaut is River. It seems a little obvious, and there are some details that just don't work out. 

• Related to the above, WHY did River shoot at the astronaut after it shot the Doctor? If she really was the astronaut, she would have been around eight or nine at the time. Little Melody probably would have remembered shooting the Doctor twice. Perhaps when she regenerated, she lost her memories for some reason. Maybe she knew/remembered that Eyepatch-Lady-I-can't-spell-her-name turned Melody into a weapon, but that still doesn't explain why she shot at herself. 

• In The Impossible Astronaut, what's with the picture of Amy and her daughter? Amy looks really happy, so I doubt it was taken around the time of A Good Man Goes To War. Logically, it must come from the future, most likely after the gang rescues Melody. ('Cause they're totally gonna.)
• Off-topic, but Moffat confirmed that River's sonic squareness gun from the Library episodes is Captain Jack Harkness' from his first episodes. Even if he left it in the TARDIS, it was probably lost when the TARDIS regenerated. Maybe Idris!TARDIS will return somehow, and for some reason she'll give River the gun. Maybe Jack and River meet, and she gets the gun from him. I'd like to see that episode. 

We know that Moffat was planning all this right from the beginning, the brilliant troll. Therefore, everything could mean something. Not every detail, but any detail. (<-- Obligatory Library reference)

In conclusion…this. Which also doubles as today's Awesome Thing. Does that still exist?

"What does it mean? What does it mean?"

Towel Day

Towel Day was yesterday, and in all the kitty excitement, I just plum forgot to write a post about it! I feel like such a bad Hitchhiker. I mean, I carried a towel around with me all day and everything, but still.

What's that, you say? Explain what Towel Day is? Well, if you insist.

Now there's a frood who really knows where her towel is.

It's a tribute to Douglas Adams! Who wrote The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy! Everybody carries around towels all day! See quote from the book:

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have "lost". What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Hence a phrase that has passed into hitchhiking slang, as in "Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There's a frood who really knows where his towel is." (Sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with; hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.)

See? (Yeah, I kinda copy+pasted that from Wikipedia. That's why the font's all messed up.)

Well…yeah. Maybe next year I'll dig out a beach towel, instead of just grabbing one from the bathroom.

Nothing More Terrifying (A Psychological Assessment)

No, not that. Or this. (Oh my God…)

I mean the fear of the unknown. Sometimes I get up late at night to go to the WC, the light switch of which is only a foot or so away from my bedroom door, and find that some idiot (love ya, Mom) has turned off the hallway light.

Sometimes I end up standing in the door for five minutes before deciding it's not worth it. Other times, I'll turn around and grab my phone, a book, and a Sharpie. Yeah, I need all of that in order to sprint the two feet to the loo. Like you've never been scared of the dark.

I'm fairly sure there's a reason behind this. We don't know what could be waiting for us in the void of the stairwell, or on the other side of the darkened window, or just behind the craft room door, so our minds fill it in for us. Have you ever noticed how movie previews seem a lot more exciting than the actual film? It's like that.

What could be waiting for us in the dark? (Warning: Only click that link if you've got a few dozen hours of your life to waste.)

Extraspecial Pt. 2: Awesome, totally not scary thing of the day: Ice Cream Changes!

Why Halloween Is My Favorite Holiday

A few minutes ago I went downstairs with the sole intention of finding that Band on the Run album (Jet! Jet! Doo doo doo doo doo doo!) to import to my iTunes. I came upstairs without it, instead clutching a plethora of Beatles, Monty Python, Halloween sounds, and Beethoven. Which kind of tells you all you need to know about my musical tastes. Yes, I now actually have an album of Halloween sounds on my iTunes.

I never did find Band on the Run…

Okay, have I mentioned that I'm going to Ireland next month? No? Are you sure? Well, I am. A great opportunity for me, because I have a ton of themed outfits that I've planned but never worn (would my new striped cardigan or the 90's sweater go better with my hipster outfit?), and now I have a reason to try them out. See also post title.

Also, this Ireland brought up an issue that I had totally forgotten about. When I was little, I lent my book of Irish folklore and fairies to my friend's mom and then forgot I had ever heard of the thing. And that is my random memory for today. Carpe diem.

Anglophile Much?

Royal wedding! This is history in the making, y'all. Which is strange, because I almost never say y'all. But really. Tomorrow night I will watch it in full, but today I watched royal wedding highlights for almost an hour. I didn't care if they were showing the same clips over and over and over again. I wish I could have been there! Again, history in the making. I know that this has got to be worth at the very least a paragraph in the history textbooks. I know that, years from now, I'll be telling people where I was during the wedding (asleep at Claire's house, heheheh), and what I did that day (just about nothing).

I can only hope my own wedding will be 1/10th as magical. Pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease.