Steven Moffat is messing with my mind!

Doctor Who is back…

and it’s well and truly made a break from the RTD era. Only two episodes in, series 32 (though they persist in calling it series 6!) is definitely darker in tone, there are plot threads carrying on from past series’, and more “WTF!? moments” than ever before.

The modern Who has always dropped clues to what would come to pass in the finale of that year, and it had become a bit tiresome, and overdone. Even last years ‘cracks in time’ started to feel like this. But now, we have threads continuing from last series, and even earlier, and more being woven in to the story. Doctor Who feels more like an ongoing epic saga, than ever before.

The most significant event at the start of this series, in The Impossible Astronaut, was witnessing the 11th Doctor’s death. A final death, with no apparent hope of regeneration. If that wasn’t huge enough, at the end of last week’s follow-up, Day of the Moon, right at the end of the episode, we see the mystery child in the spacesuit, starting to regenerate!!!!!

So, who is this child?

It’s established that she is human, but no ordinary human. She knows that she can regenerate when she’s dying, though the process seem new to her when it starts, so it is likely the first time it’s happening to her.

Regeneration was not something Gallifreyans are born with, in Doctor Who of old. It is an ability given specifically to Time Lords. The Doctor initially had 12 regenerations, as we learned during the Tom Baker years. During his time as The Doctor, we also learned that The Master‘s regenerations had expired requiring him to ‘steal’ other peoples bodies. Although later on, in The Five Doctors, he was offered the chance of more regenerations as a reward from the Time Lords. So it seems to be a technological process, not one that a Time Lord is born with.

In modern Who however, in The Doctor’s Daughter, we see that the regeneration ability can be hereditary now, in some way. Also, The Master, now has fresh regenerations, as he changed from Derek Jacobi to John Simm with ease in Utopia.

Is the girl The Doctor’s offspring? We know the Doctor had children in the past, his first incarnation travelling in the Tardis with his granddaughter, Susan. Could it be any of his family (including Jenny from The Doctor’s Daughter)? So many possibilities there, but I don’t think Steven Moffat would go down that road. Jenny certainly could return at some point, Moffat even asking for that episodes end to be altered so she survives, but I don’t think she’ll return as a child, or as anyone else for that matter.

As The Doctor is doomed to die, is the girl him? Is this a rebirth of sorts? Hard to say.
There are strong hints that it is Amy’s as yet unborn daughter, but if so, how could she regenerate? Is Amy a Time Lord? Is there a Fob watch in her house somewhere? Is the girl Amy herself, regenerating into a young Amelia Pond?

I’m leaning more towards a connection with Amy somehow, as there’s something amiss with her pregnancy, and the Silence were interested in her, and the girl. Did they need them to pilot their proto-Tardis? That would indicate that they must be Time Lords, but I think the girls regeneration is the result of something else.

The Silence are referred too as parasites, super-parasites even. They use other peoples technology, they have no need to make anything themselves. So, I personally think that the Silence took regeneration technology from the Time Lords, and it was not compatible with their own biology, so they used a human. But I don’t think it could have worked on an ordinary human, it had to be someone different. Maybe there’s more to the “time head” thing, as we’ve never had an unborn child in the Tardis. Also, the Silence held Amy for several days. What were they doing with her? And why did a Silent want Amy to tell The Doctor she was pregnant?

So I think the girl is probably Amy’s daughter (though I still have a feeling it could be Amy herself), a human child altered by having travelled through time while unborn, given the ability to regenerate by the stolen Time Lord tech.

Plausible? I could be way off. Hopefully we’ll find out before the years end.