Grab your tinfoil hats...

[tmoh]

...'cause we're goin' into space!

I've got a crazy theory connecting Doctor Who (new) Series 5 and Firefly, and it's right here:



Starship UK was one of the Arks.

• The premise of "The Beast Below" is essentially identical to the backstory of Firefly: a fleet of ships carries the last humans away from Earth when the planet's no longer habitable. We still see signs of national identity in the 'Verse-The Sino-American Alliance, of course, plus place names like New Melbourne and New Paris-which suggests that the Who model of a separate Ark for each country or region might've happened there.
• This provides a neat explanation for why so many regional accents still exist in Firefly's future. Starship UK, the British Ark we see in The Beast Below, seems to be divided up into sections that approximate the country's counties; it's possible that smaller regional divisons also exist, with people generally continuing to live in the district of the Ark that corresponds to their ancestors' hometown. If this local insularity got specific enough, it's possible that there was an East London division whose inhabitants became the ancestors of Badger and the other Dyton colonists.
  • If the East London accent really is unique to Dyton, then all of the people who still had that accent when Starship UK reached the new system would have to have immigrated there at around the same time once the colony became habitable; they would more than likely have been among the first to do so. Given that some sources refer to Dyton as a penal colony, this emigration might not have been willing-but then the Alliance isn’t exactly known for its ethical treatment of its citizens.
• Of course, this theory implies that the 'Verse and the Whoniverse are one and the same, which gives us some problems re: aliens. But this isn't as difficult to overcome as it first appears: humanity's Weirdness Censor and judicious use of the Reset Button has caused Earth to experience First Contact multiple times in just the new series of Doctor Who, so it's plausible that by the time people started leaving Earth they'd forgotten that the aliens were anything but mythical.
  • It's a little more difficult to justify an apparently alien-free 'Verse for the British refugees and their descendants, considering what happened on Starship UK. Perhaps they forgot, too…or perhaps the people do remember, and just don’t realize what they’re remembering is true. It’s a story, after all, about a magic man in a magic box and a giant space whale and a queen who lives for centuries-and what is that but a fairy tale? It could well be that kids on Londinium and Dyton grow up with that story the way we do with Grimm and Andersen, and nobody thinks to ascribe any more truth to it than you would to “Snow White.”
• All that still leaves the matter of time, which is the hardest contradiction to account for. We’re told that Firefly takes place in the 26th century; “The Beast Below” is set in the 33rd. But if this theory is correct, “Beast Below” needs to have taken place first. How can that be?
  • It’s possible that in one or both time periods they’re using an Alternative Calendar. The time that the Arks left the Earth is centuries before the events of either story, so there could have been a global changeover from the Gregorian calendar to some other system-maybe to avoid the religious baggage of the current system? If so, then that’s the calendar Liz 10 and her people would’ve been using in the “33rd century,” which in our terms is something closer to the 23rd. (If we accept this, it also helps to assume that Elizabeths III-IX were all, or at least nearly all, the same woman, who changes her regnal name after each time she elects to “Forget” because she doesn’t know she was the last queen, too). Some time later, the calendar gets changed again, probably back to some variant on the Gregorian system-because the different Arks reckoned their dates differently and needed to be reconciled, or because the first colonial leaders wanted to recalibrate the calendar to fit Londinium and Sihnon, or (most likely) both. This put the date back in the previous millennium, where it needs to be in order for Firefly and Who to coexist.