Silence Will Fail (Doctor Who: An Examination Of The Silence Arc)

We're right.

Well, it's been a whole half a year since I talked about Doctor Who over here. We continue on through the long dark hiatus of 2019, bits and pieces of new news coming out and being rumored about Series 12... but not too much to show for it. I had to do something to pass the time, so why not a loving revisit? That led me to grabbing the Matt Smith years boxset on DVD for cheap, a simple little jaunt back to an era I hadn't thought about that much (and a precursor to an era I did think about that much, but this is not a Capaldi years post). It took a bit longer than it should have, and I took a big break near the middle, but I finished it. Even before I finished the first Matt Smith series, though, I knew I wanted to write this. 

See, I hadn't actually revisited the Smith years before now and given them a whole lot of thought in hindsight. New critical mind and all that, given I write about this shit now. The Smith years, in retrospect, are Steven Moffat at his most puzzlebox arc-ish peak. They're also him expanding upon (as well as nesting) earlier concepts that worked well for him in the past. Those being River Song and non-linear storytelling. Events being told out of order. Consequences shown and their inciting incidents teased. This either infuriated you or fascinated you. I happened to be in the latter camp at the time, and enjoyed the wild ride of trying to figure out the mysteries laid out before me. Who are the Silence? What are the Fields Of Trenzalore and the Fall Of The Eleventh? These things kept me guessing all through the runtime of the show. I always envisioned the Fields Of Trenzalore as a grassy plain, myself, where a question would be asked of the Doctor in a massive standoff. Well. I got it all except for the season. Everything was wrapped up sufficiently enough for me at the end of 2013, but on this rewatch a new revelation hit me. One which I knew I had to write about, one which kept getting more and more evident as I saw those consequences play out all over again. One fundamental truth which changes everything about the Smith years in hindsight.


The Silence may be the biggest cosmic fuckups to grace the 50+ year history of Doctor Who.

Moffat already told the story out of order, and I'm not about to try and follow his trail again. Instead we'll lay things out as I thought of them while watching, in the "proper" chronological order. Things may get messy, but let's hold on tight. So, then, here is the inciting incident for the antagonists of the Matt Smith years. On the planet Trenzalore, a crack in time and space threatens to let the Time Lords back into our universe, on confirmation by the Doctor. If he answers their question "Doctor who?", they'll come back through to our universe. Sounds great, but recall that they're locked away due to shenanigans involving the Last Great Time War. A return of the Time Lords would no doubt bring about the Second Great Time War, kill untold numbers of people, and burn up about half the universe in its wake. Bad news. The Papal Mainframe, a space church of the future, won't allow that to happen... and so the Doctor enters a standoff. If he answers the question and lets the Time Lords out, it will be a massive war. If he leaves the planet Trenzalore, the Papal Mainframe will burn the planet so the Time Lords can never return. The Doctor's stuck here, defending the planet from its attackers, and the Papal Mainframe changes its faith systems to reflect this new duty. The Doctor must stay quiet. Silence must fall. 

For hundreds of years, the Doctor, the Papal Mainframe, and loads of alien species remain in this standoff. Occasional invasions of Trenzalore occur. The Doctor thwarts them. So it goes for ages... but lurking just offscreen is an unsatisfied devout. Everything I've mentioned so far is plot and lore from Matt Smith's final episode, just to demonstrate how out of order Moffat likes to go with this shit. The entire mystery arc of 2/3rds of his season (and part of the third's finale) are the consequences of what happens here on Trenzalore, years before we get to see them on screen. The reveal that this unsatisfied devout was behind just about every scheme I'm going to lay out from here on is a minor detail, almost a set of throwaway lines. An "oh yes, by the way, it was her all along.". This annoyed a lot of people. Not me, especially, considering I was more invested in the consequences than the cause... but it makes things a lot more fun to think about. Let's think some more about that unsatisfied villainess, shall we?


Madame Kovarian of the Papal Mainframe is fucking pissed. The Doctor is down there on Trenzalore, grinding everything to a halt and risking the destruction of the universe by being in close enough proximity to answer the question. Silence must fall, and the Doctor needs to keep his fool mouth shut. The Papal Mainframe isn't doing a godforsaken thing about it. It is her right, her duty as a devotee of Silence to do what must be done. Madame Kovarian forms her own splinter group of religious crusaders in the name of Silence, the Kovarian Chapter. and sets off to the merry world of the past with a simple plan. A trolley problem sort of deal. Kovarian is certain that untold billions will suffer and die if the Time Lords get back out, but this pussyfooting around on Trenzalore is getting them nowhere fast. All they have to do, then, is kill the Doctor before he ever sets foot on Trenzalore! Kill one man (who Kovarian and her sect don't even fucking like anyway) to save the lives of countless people. On paper, it sounds... sound. It sounds like a great motivation for an antagonist who you could almost sympathize with, someone who you know is doing a bad thing but for reasons they believe are pure and just. That reading does not work once we actually meet Madame Kovarian and her sect in Matt Smith's second season, but we're getting ahead of ourselves. 

I called these people the biggest cosmic fuckups in the history of Doctor Who, and their Plan A is a good summation of why. Somehow or another, the Kovarian Chapter decides that the simplest way to kill the Doctor is to blow up his TARDIS. On paper? Fine. Good. You wouldn't want to leave a relic of Time Lord tech around anyway, and it's the one place you can know for sure he'll be. Somehow or another, they do it. They blow up the Doctor's TARDIS on June 26th, 2010. This is where the problems begin. For one, they don't actually blow it up with him on it. That would be a big blunder, were it not for what happens after. Exploding a space-time machine tends to not just blow it up in one time or place, and as such the explosion ripples all over the place, actually damaging the space-time continuum and creating cracks in time. Hey. Go back up and look at what it was the Time Lords were going to come back through. Yep. That's right. The Kovarian Chapter, in going back in time to prevent the Doctor from opening the crack on Trenzalore, create the goddamned crack on Trenzalore. What a poetic bit of predestination paradox prankery that is! Or, it would be if that were the end of the Kovarian Chapter's oopsies.

NICE GOING, MADAME K

Some other fun things happen with that TARDIS explosion. Like whole worlds getting erased by the spreading cracks. An entire alliance of space aliens banding together to stop the Doctor, believing that he's the one who blows up his own TARDIS and cracks the universe. Oh, and the tiny little thing of every star exploding simultaneously and the universe ending. Kovarian and pals didn't just create their own problem by being bold and trying to kill the Doctor. They caused the end of the universe. The problem they were trying so desperately to prevent. Luckily, as we see in the finale of Smith's first season, there's someone up to the task of reversing the damage and rebooting the universe to its proper state. Who's that? OH THAT'S RIGHT, IT'S THE DOCTOR. The running tally, then. Kovarian:

1) Fails to blow up the Doctor's TARDIS when the Doctor is actually on board.
2) Creates the crack in time which she's desperate to prevent from being opened.
3) Causes the end of the universe which she's convinced the Doctor and the Time Lords will bring about.
4) Has her end of the universe fuckup fixed by the very man she's trying to kill.


This is far more than just one arrogant oopsie. This is an utter and catastrophic failure to do the thing you were trying to do. This is like trying to kill someone with a gun and then shooting someone else with it while the person you were trying to kill performs life-saving surgery to bring them back from the brink of death. A smarter, humbler person would learn from their folly and go onward with a newfound wisdom. Unfortunately, either due to the universe being rebooted or sheer vanity and arrogance on Kovarian's part (and I'd buy either of those as plausible, really), nothing was learned from this attempt beyond "don't try to blow up the Doctor's TARDIS.". Instead, Kovarian and her Chapter plot a far more sinister plan, one that forms the backbone of Smith's second season... and one that throws any possible sympathetic motivation theory out the window with its cruelty.


So. Plan B. An assassin to kill the Doctor. A perfect assassin, raised from birth with their sole purpose being the murder of the Doctor. A crime scene that doubles as a fixed point in time, an absolute certainty that can, will, and must happen. Surely there can be no escape from such an impossible trap. Well, unless you happen to be riding inside a shapeshifting robot disguised as yourselves for the purposes of making everyone present think that you, the Doctor, are absolutely and totally stone dead at this lakeside... but who could have seen that one coming? It's here, of course, in Series 6 where we actually get to see Madame Kovarian, her Silence, and her Chapter. Kovarian's scheming, when laid out, officially crosses the line from atrocities done in the name of a greater good to atrocities done because, secretly, one enjoys committing atrocities against the object of one's seething hatred. The Doctor's current companion and best friend, Amy Pond, kidnapped by the Silence and kept at the ready until she's ready to have her baby. A newborn child, ripped from her mother's arms. A happy childhood that will never come to be, replaced with a ruthless upbringing of abuse and neglect and indoctrination in How To Kill The Doctor 101. A good family, torn apart in the name of Kovarian's endless, bitter war against the Doctor. Horrible things are done to the Ponds, all three of them. A more sympathetic and easy to understand antagonist would, perhaps, harbor some guilt over the things done in the name of their cause. Admit that yes, what they are doing is terrible, but it serves the purpose they are devoted to. 

Not Kovarian. No. Kovarian is arrogant, self-assured, spiteful, petty, and just plain nasty. She destroys a family because they dared to be the Doctor's friends, and she enjoys it. Kovarian is not just a devout of her faith doing what she thinks is best. Even the Papal Mainframe ally themselves with the Doctor near the end of his time on Trenzalore, putting aside their disagreement long enough to fight side by side. Kovarian is driven by sheer pettiness and spite, a burning hatred of the Doctor and everything he stands for. She will not only hurt his friends, but she will take pleasure in it. To quote from another spiteful petty person devoted to taking any measure in destroying their enemy... she's hurt the Doctor, and she wishes to go on hurting him. There's a scene in the closing moments of the penultimate Series 6 episode where Kovarian finds her would-be assassin, River Song, after the Doctor had given her a newfound sense of agency. She takes absolute delight in what she's doing as she loads River up for her trip in a spacesuit to blast the Doctor at Lake Silencio... and that leads our joyful little sadist into yet another blunder.

I dunno, Madame K., why couldn't you not break time in half?

River Song, in the moment of truth at Lake Silencio, manages to overcome her programming and not shoot the Doctor dead. That's great! Except this is a fixed point, so the Doctor not dying completely breaks time so everything happens at once. Yep. We're here again. Kovarian and pals have once again failed in such a spectacular manner that the universe is effectively in danger of being destroyed, and the motherfucker who has to put the pieces back together is literally the same asshole they have been trying and failing to murder because they think he's going to break the universe. Kovarian even gets a confrontation with him briefly in the Series 6 finale, her line amounting to "why couldn't you just die?". He would, if you were better at your holy crusade. But you're not, are you? Her final televised appearance shows her being murdered by Amy Pond in this broken time reality, Amy briefly giving in to the same pettiness which drives Kovarian and paying her back for all the emotional torture and taking away her daughter. Still, this gets undone when the Doctor inevitably fixes the broken time fuckup that Kovarian's scheme helped create. 

You would think, then, with that being Kovarian's last television appearance, we would be done. You'd be wrong. In chatting about this stuff as I watched Series 6, I was informed that Big Finish actually tackled some Kovarian arc follow-up stuff in their Diary Of River Song series. So I fired those audios up and gave them a listen... and wow. I regret to inform you that Madame Kovarian has fucking done it again. I'll keep things brief for this portion, but here's what goes down with her in Volume 3 of Diary Of River Song. It turns out that Kovarian had made more quasi-Time Lord assassins like River, and she actually plants one of them, Brooke, as the Doctor's companion. That would be the Fifth Doctor. I suppose Kovarian, getting frustrated with her failed attempts to kill the chinny bowtie one, took a peek at his timeline and thought "this man wears a goddamned vegetable, he'll die in seconds.". So, what then? She accidentally shoots her great-grandmother and ceases to exist? Well, no! Throughout a bunch of shenanigans in a restaurant outside of time or something... Brooke and Kovarian pull it off! Celery boy is shot dead! Silence has fallen!


And then shit breaks. Again. I'm sure you've noticed the pure blunder Kovarian's pulled here, but I'll spell it out. Her ostensible goal (you know, other than "kill the Doctor") has been to prevent the Time Lords from coming back and starting the Second Time War. Hey, you know who stopped the *first* Time War from destroying all of the universe? THE DOCTOR! Except now he won't do that because you've killed him dead during the time he was fond of cricket and decorative vegetables! The audio doesn't go into these consequences much, but the sheer nonsense of Kovarian being blinded by her own hatred to any common sense of cause and effect is ludicrous. She really is just the absolute worst at this... but a different consequence awaits her. You see, the Doctor... well, he saves a lot of days and a lot of planets from total destruction. Nipping 11 in the bud, like Kovarian wanted to do, would have undone quite a bit of that. You know what undoes way more? Nipping him in the bud six incarnations ago. All the dying worlds the Doctor now failed to save are burning out, and in revenge they send a hodgepodge race of robots called the Deterrent to fuck Kovarian's day up for dooming all of their planets in her half-baked spite war. 

Kovarian, for her part, is absolutely unrepentant. No, scratch that. She doesn't even admit that she was wrong in doing what she did. It takes some psychic link fuckery from River and the TARDIS, as well as some other time-travel nonsense involving replacing Five with an ordinary guy who happens to look just like him, but once again the Doctor's friends manage to fix the universe-ending mess Kovarian made in trying to hurt the Doctor's friends to save the universe from ending. That's three. Three times Kovarian massively fucked up time and space in her goal to save the Doctor from fucking up time and space. In a way, Kovarian is a dangerous villain.  Arrogant and spiteful, as well as totally incompetent. This does end her involvement directly in the story of the Matt Smith years... but we're not done yet. We have a fair few threads to tug on regarding that whole Trenzalore thing, and who the real target of Kovarian's ire could have been...


I mentioned nesting earlier, and what I find interesting when you look at Moffat's run (at least from the introduction of River Song to Hell Bent, the Series 9 finale) is how each mystery arc he creates intertwines with his last. River Song is tied into the Silence arc, as we've discussed, but come Series 7 we find it's all connected to his newest mystery arc. Yes, it's finally time to talk about Clara Oswald, the "Impossible Girl". Well, for a bit. Here and now, in the present, it feels almost wrong to be talking about Clara in terms of her mystery arc. It was all a subversion from Moffat, of course. After two seasons of surprising the audience with the strange goings-on of the cracks in time and the Doctor's death, we have a woman who died twice. The big secret behind her, the terrible reveal of what threat she holds to the Doctor is... nothing. She just jumped in his timeline and fractured herself to save him from a really surly Richard E. Grant. Nevertheless, both the majority of the audience (myself included, I'll own up to) and the Doctor spend the latter half of Series 7 going "NO BUT REALLY WHAT IS THE BIG SECRET BEHIND CLARA???". This is despite the fact that the show yells, at several occasions "SHE'S AN ORDINARY GIRL, YOU PUZZLEBOX-SEEKING CHUCKLEFUCK!!". 

Now, subversion and pushback against what the audience is expecting is kind of Moffat's thing, so I don't want to get into that so much. What I am interested in, for the moment, is why the Doctor is treating Clara like a giant mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in an eyebrow-raising metaphor. I want to preface by saying that, obviously, it's not cool that the Doctor jumps around Clara's timeline to investigate her childhood and do all this other wild research behind her back, sure that she's some trick or trap. What I am saying is that Kovarian and the Silence have the Doctor wound up so goddamned much with all these grandiose schemes to quintuple-kill-him-dead that he's too paranoid to see the obvious truth in front of him; that Clara's an ordinary girl, and all the doubles he's been seeing are consequence before cause. That paranoia does lead him to not see the actual mystery behind him finding the Clara of 2013, but we'll get to that. First things first, we need to go to Trenzalore.

Silence hath fallen.

Here it is, then. The Fields of Trenzalore after a great and terrible battle. Millions dead, and a giant tomb of a TARDIS sitting there with one big open wound in time at its heart. Here, in the finale of Series 7, we see the ultimate folly of Kovarian and the Silence. They never had to do a goddamned thing. The Doctor never opened the crack and let the Time Lords out. Silence fell, without any need of getting clever with causality. Kovarian and friends destroyed the universe three times, ripped a family apart, and made a good man paranoid for absolutely nothing. There is the small matter of Richard E. Grant jumping into the Doctor's timestream, undoing every victory, and ending half of reality for all of five minutes... but for once, it's not on Kovarian this time. At least the Great Intelligence is aware they're doing it and doesn't give a shit, rather than Kovarian's ending of the universe in trying to save it by needling the Doctor at the same time. Then Clara splinters and saves the day. 

Here's where things get a little confusing, for me at least. In Name Of The Doctor, we see the Bad End of Trenzalore where the crack doesn't open and the Doctor dies. Two episodes later, in Matt Smith's swansong, the crack opens enough to give him more regenerations. He turns into Peter Capaldi and the show goes on, averting its imminent death. Now, here's the question: At what point did the immutable history of the Doctor's death become rewritten? The real world answer, of course, is that Doctor Who as a show wasn't going to end here. I'm more interested in poking around in-universe. The divergent point appears to be Clara pleading to the Time Lords on the other side of the crack to save him. Okay, so how did this come about? How do we simultaneously have the bad end timeline of Name Of The Doctor with Clara involved in her splintering, and her pleading to the Time Lords being the divergent point that gives us the continuation of the show? It's a bit of a timey-wimey mess, but I've got my own interesting answer for it; future continuity.


I said this wasn't a Capaldi years post, but things change. Now we have to get into them, because Steven Moffat is very much into nesting his story arcs as well as creating symmetry. So, let's talk about Missy and her symmetry with the Silence arc. It all ties into River, you see. River, who was introduced before the Silence arc and ended up being integral to it. In the same way we have Missy, introduced a year after the resolution of the arc, being integral to it. There's also a reverse shift occuring between the two as they slide on the scale of order to chaos. River, as we've learned, was molded to be an agent of chaos who could kill the Doctor, but eventually turned to his side. Missy, on the other hand, started off as the Doctor's ally and friend before driven to madness and generally being quite nasty. Still, in her Capaldi era incarnation, she shows glimmers of a complex relationship with her former friend, rather than just wanting to kill him like her former male incarnations. 

Where is this going? I'm sure you can guess, but here it is. If it's Clara Oswald being on Trenzalore that averts the Doctor's inevitable death, then who put the Doctor and Clara Oswald together? Answer: Missy. As of Series 8, quite why she did this remains unclear... but that's where my theory comes in. Suppose Missy learned about the inevitability of Trenzalore, her oldest friend in the universe's fixed death and the church gunning for him. Putting the Doctor and Clara together ensures that time is rewritten, and her friend's life is saved. As to why Missy would do this, we only need look to the next series and the Hybrid arc. The Doctor and Clara's co-dependence on each other is such that the Doctor would tear apart time and space to save her life, and thus we get the Time Lord's prophecized Hybrid. This is Missy's second motive, of course, in putting them together; to bring the Doctor down to her level, to darken him and have him embrace the chaotic. To have her friend back.


It's fascinating, once you look back on these six series penned by Moffat, just how much everything fits together. The ultimate person Kovarian needed to stop was Missy, in the end. There's no way she would have done that, of course; her seething hatred for the Doctor blinded her to things like common sense and rational thinking. It's almost a shame we got no denouement with Kovarian in the Capaldi years. What happened to her? I can easily imagine an aged and bitter Kovarian ambushing, say, Jodie Whittaker's Doctor on some alien planet and threatening her companions' lives, still so desperate to kill the Doctor... and our Doctor finally confronting her spiteful nemesis, taking her down with words and some actions, before moving on. Look, it would be leagues better than that Ranskoor Av Kolos malarkey, that's all I'm saying. Regardless, this was quite the ride. It was a different one as these stories aired, but the added knowledge of the future makes this take all the more interesting. Part of me wishes Kovarian was written as a more rational-minded "the needs of the many" type, but the hateful sadist eyepatch lady is so memorable in her own right, even before you have the benefit of the future to realize she's a complete joke. Maybe she'll go after Missy someday. That would end well, huh? Much like this post.