The Mystery of the Anachronistic Phone Charger

[sweet_anise]

I know it hasn't been long since The Power of Three aired, but I'm still surprised fandom hasn't jumped all over this, yet...

Comments

[magic_7_words]

Even if "A Town Called Mercy" takes place during "The Power of Three," it proves that episode order needn't necessarily correspond with in-story chronology, and we needn't be told when we're not seeing things in order.

I saw an excellent theory online just now, that the Ponds "die" of old age after an angel zaps them back to 1970's New York and they opt to live out their lives there, chiefly because they've just been reunited with a newly-regenerated Melody.

I almost wish I hadn't seen it, because now if it doesn't happen I'll know what we're missing.

[sweet_anise]

Ooh, I like that one. And we know River's in the next episode, so she could be the one to tell the Doctor what happens, and that it'd be a paradox for him to go back and retrieve them.

[magic_7_words]

Yes! She can take him to see the elderly Ponds. At which point Amy, on her deathbed, promptly expires because she's been waiting for the Doctor to come back to say goodbye.

It will probably come off as too heavy-handed to be especially touching, but honestly, this possibility makes me more confident of the theory as a whole. There's no way the writers, if it ever occurred to them for a second, would pass up this chance for Amy to go out as the girl-who-waited.

[giallarhorn]

Except that theory actually doesn't make sense in the fuller context, since Melody said that she had only regenerated once prior to regenerating into her present guise, and since the first time she technically did appear was about age 5 with Amy and Rory, that'd mean that she'd be aging super slowly somehow or that plot point is going to be ignored.

There's also the fact that if River was subsequently raised by Rory/Amy, why would she still be so far intent on carrying out her mission?

If anything, the only real time that Amy/Rory would be able to be with River in the time frame they've given us is sometime prior to her escape from the orphanage, since there's still that picture of Amy and River as a baby that has yet to be explained.

Of course, that's all assuming that they actually want to respect the issue of plot holes which they don't seem to mind

[giallarhorn]

I had assumed that ATCM took place within the timeframe of TPoT, mostly since TPoT was an episode that was supposed to encompass the time frame of a year (I think it was a year?), so...I suppose the best way to signify the passage of time, since they couldn't feasibly do it over the time period of a year, they'd just throw a tie in back to another episode to show that some of the events of TPoT took place prior to ATCM (though if it did where were the cubes) and after Asylum of the Daleks? It'd be much more of just indication of passing time.

Not to say that there isn't a full possibility that the next episode has events that do occur sometime between the things that happen in this episode, since it was shown that a variety of things were happening.