With all the crazy way-out and wacky Doctor Who theories floating around, here's another to add to the mix. You can call it my "Missy Theory," but it's a bit more than that as it attempts to explain various odd things that have been going on. It's completely ridiculous and if Moffat dares anything remotely like this I will personally march the length of Africa and remaining distance to have words with him. But here it is:
In the cliff-hanger finale of Series 7, Clara enters the Doctor's time stream in order to reverse the harms caused by the Great Intelligence having done the same thing. Not content to leave Clara to her fate, the Doctor insists on going in himself to rescue her, despite the potentially devastating consequences of such an action. The Doctor finds Clara and we're all wondering just how they are going to get out of this one, when Moffat throws one of the greatest curve-balls of his career and introduces a never-before-seen regeneration of the Doctor played by John Hurt. This is a mysterious regeneration that the Doctor himself has chosen to forget/suppress and is described as "the one who broke the promise". We are so taken aback by this sudden revelation, and the intrigue it presents for the highly anticipated 50th Anniversary episode, that we forget to worry about how Clara and the Doctor are going to escape the Doctor's time stream. Several months later, the Anniversary episode arrives and a month after that, the Christmas Special and the climax of the Eleventh Doctor's tenure. All this excitement and build-up and the emotions of Eleven's passing mean that we don't have time to fuss over the technicality of how Clara and the Doctor escaped his time stream.
But that has passed, and we're up to the 12th Doctor's fourth episode. The dust has settled and we're adapting well to this very different and yet somehow familiar new Doctor. But just how did he and Clara escape? Will we ever know? Probably not. But what if....what if they didn't escape? Or rather, what if there was no possibility of them getting out on their own?
Moments before entering his time-stream, the Eleventh Doctor has an emotional heart-to-heart with his sometime wife, River Song. She is present on the scene only through a mental link with Clara resulting from an earlier dream-induced time-travel conference. Through the course of the episode, we learn that the version of River who is present is River from after the events of Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead, where she dies in order to rescue hundreds of people trapped inside The Library's computer's hard drive. The Doctor, in return, uploads her consciousness to the library's computer where she is destined to live out her days (or eternity?) with her crew of archaeologist friends.
The last words that River says to the Doctor before he enters his time stream (after begging him not to go at all) are:
River: Oh there's one more thing.
The Doctor: Isn't there always?
River: I was mentally linked with Clara. If she's really dead then how can I still be here?
The Doctor: Okay, How?
River: Spoilers. Goodbye. Sweetie.
What did she mean by this? Surely more than simply that Clara is still alive. The Doctor already believed as much so that's hardly a spoiler.
Here's my theory. What if, knowing that the Doctor would never be able to exit his time stream and rescue Clara, River found a way to rescue both of them by uploading them from his time stream onto The Library's database? I haven't worked out the details of how this would be possible but it's hardly more impossible than any other means of escape the Doctor might find.
What if, on being uploaded to The Library, instead of finding themselves in the parts of the library we recognise from Silence/Forest, they are uploaded into a kind of adventure room/simulation programme on the computer's hard drive. I get my inspiration for this from various science fiction sources that I grew up with as a child. I imagine it as something like the holodeck from Star Trek, but inside a computer. Or something like the Imagination Station from Adventures in Odyssey (which is pretty much the same principle). The living-inside-a-computer bit, takes inspiration from various places (including Silence/Forest themselves) although is probably largely influenced by one of my favourite television programmes as a kid, the little-known 90s Canadian CGI series, Reboot. My "holoroom" would be comparable to a "game" from Reboot, but with significant differences. Obviously there are parallels here with The Matrix, but since I have yet to actually watch any of The Matrix films (I know, I'm a bad person), I'll leave you to make your own comparisons to that.
Based on this theory, I hypothesise that everything that has happened since Name of the Doctor has actually been simulated adventures experienced in this holodeck-type-place. I realise that this has some serious problems and some even-more serious consequences for what has happened in recent episodes (which I'd rather not even think about), but let's gloss over those for the time being. This theory does explain a few oddities that have taken place recently: like the presence of three Doctors at the same place at the same time; like how the Doctor was able to change his actions to end the Time War on Gallifrey when the Time War ought to be time-locked and inaccessible; like how the Doctor was miraculously able to get himself another twelve regenerations, just as he was about to run out.
But, more significantly, it explains a few of the mysteries raised thus far in Series 8: Who is Missy, and what is The Promised Land? I suggest that whenever someone "dies" in the holodeck-world, (because this is all happening inside a computer database and they are all saved as data), instead of actually dying, their data-string consciousness is transported out of the holoroom into another, central part of the library's hard drive - the place we see River and her companions at the end of Forest of the Dead. This is "The Promised Land" also known as "Heaven".
And who is Missy? Well she's not actually Missy, her name is Miss E, short for "Miss Evangelista". Who? The pretty but ditsy girl who was on River's archaeological team when she met the Doctor in The Library. She was incorrectly uploaded to the library database the first time and as a result was able to see the falsehood of what was going on when others couldn't. Her face got fixed in the clean upload after River's death, but I'm not quite sure what that did for her intellect. Now, how and why Miss E has become the gatekeeper of The Library world (well the part where people go when they die in the holoroom) beats me; and I'm not sure exactly why she thinks that the Doctor is her boyfriend (when the Doctor's wife lives in the vicinity) but I'll leave it for someone else to figure that part out. :P
As I said at the start, this is a fairly horrible theory, and Moffat had better not be attempting anything of the kind. But I've had a bit of fun playing with it and wanted to be able to share it. It's already had some handy side effects. Since I originally came up with the theory we've had an episode with Robin Hood. Not only did Robin Hood turn out to be real, but but he was uncannily just a little too perfect - matching certain versions of the legend down to exact details. We've also had some other impossible stuff like good Daleks, and a town called Christmas (I'm just joking about that last one).
So that's my theory. I realise it has plotholes the size of the crack in Amy's room, but whenever were plotholes a problem for Whovian fan-theories?
