*No Spoilers* Eyepatch Lady and Dead Doctor speculation!

[Rob McCow]

So, Amy Pond keeps seeing an 'eyepatch lady' peering at her through a hatch. What on earth is going on with that?

And the Doctor appears to have died five minutes into episode one. Admittedly, it's a hundred years in his future, but it's hard to believe that this is the official death of Doctor Who. So how the hell can they get out of that one? Any ideas?

[Paul Clement]

I think the eyepatch lady works in an asylum, and Amy is a patient in there. Everything we are seeing in the episodes is a delusion.

[Jon Masters]

Don't care

[Rob McCow]

Wow, that's early in the season to have lost interest, Jon!

[Darren]

Maybe the Doctor was wrong at the end of The Big Bang. The universe was brought back including the Doctor, but he never met Amy. Having implanted the idea of him in her mind though, as far Amy's concerned, the Doctor and everything around her is real, but she's actually been sectioned by her parents. She is receiving treatment and the "death" of the Doctor has been slipped into her mind by the asylum to ween her off him.

The real Eleventh Doctor is merrily going about on his adventures which is where we will pick up in Series 7.

[Dino]

I'd like to thank the good people of this forum for now making me imagine all through the series instead of seeing a Lady with an eyepatch, Amy keeps seeing a bare arse appear from behind the hatch, as we hear the laughter of an American teen going "Huh-huh! She's looking at your butt!"

Oh no wait, that's just my mind.
I'll be back when I've seen a few more appearances. I haven't got much to go on. Ok, Amy is a test subject. Not a mental patient or a prisoner.
No idea how that will play out and I reserve the right to pretend this post never happend as the truth gets revealed... in episode 13 probably.

[Andrew Curnow]

I hope it's not leading to an "actually it's all been Amy's dream" kind of pay off, that would be just awful.

[Paul Clement]

Perhaps it's not a dream, perhaps she is re-living experiences she has actually had. That would still fit an asylum/hospital theory.

[SiHart]

That might fit.

I'm still convinced that something has gone wrong with the universe reboot at the end of the last season, and this is why Amy's pregnancy isn't showing properly on the TARDIS scanner- somethings haven't rebooted quite as well as they should have.

I wonder if the eyepatch lady is connected to this in some way, maybe they're another race that are aware of this and exploiting it through Amy?

Oh this makes sense in my head, explaining is somewhat more difficult.

[Andrew Curnow]

My theory on the pregnancy is that she is and she isn't, just as she is and she isn't the Amy we first met. There's an orphaned Amy who met the Doctor when he crashed into the garden of her house when she was alone one night... but there's also an Amy who has parents and was married at the end of last season. Both Amys have travelled with the Doctor on the TARDIS, so she's sort of an anomaly.

IMHO!

P.S. My worry is that we'll get to the end of the season, and they still won't have explained how the Doctor doesn't really die looking like Smitty in 200 years time... and then Moffat will pop up on Confidential to say, "You will find out - as part of the fiftieth anniversary in 2013..."

[J.R. Southall]

Okay, without any spoilers that haven't already been talked about in the DWM previews...

(Although if you haven't read DWM, then probably best not read on.)

The Doctor, 200 years older. In Episodes 5 & 6, we pretty much know that there will be clones created of the Doctor, Amy and Rory, and that the gist of the story is this: are the clones as real as the originals? I have a feeling the answer will be yes, they are living, breathing, feeling people, with all the memories and emotions of the people they were cloned from. And I have a feeling that the Doctor clone will survive and somehow end up in 1810, whereby he has to live two hundred years without the TARDIS in order to meet Amy, Rory and River on that beach in 2011 - possibly not realising he isn't the real Doctor - and thus it's the clone Doctor we see in The Impossible Astronaut pre-titles sequence (hence the blue balloon, the tunnel and the fancy car he turns up at the beach in). I don't have any evidence for this, just a hunch.

Eye-Patch lady, Amy. I like the idea of Eye-Patch lady being a doctor of some kind, and the stories as we are experiencing them being memories (perhaps in a comatose Amy Pond being looked after by Frances Barber's character), with occasional glitches as this 'doctor' feeds through into the memory. The pregnancy could thus be explained as follows: Amy in the memories is pregnant, Amy remembering isn't (or vice versa). The only problem with this theory (and I'm sure it isn't one that Steven Moffat would be too worried about) is that we shouldn't then be privvy to things that happen when Amy isn't around...

[Awesome Wells]

Perhaps a little bit of a gap between the spoiler warning and the spoiler might have been nice....

Or perhaps a spoiler tag... or perhaps no spoilers in a thread marked "No spoilers"...

[Jon Masters]

Wow, that's early in the season to have lost interest, Jon!

No, I've just decided not to give a stuff about any of the series arc because
a) It'll be crowbarred into every story lest we forget
b) There won't be enough information to solve it anyway ( see "The Crack" and "The Pandorica" )
c) The various fan theories will all probably be more satisfying than the actual solution
d) Given how long we've been waiting to find out about River Song, we may not know any or all of the answers this series.

I'd rather just enjoy the stories as they are for now.

[Darren]

A-C happened throughout RTD's reign.

[Jon Masters]

A-C happened throughout RTD's reign.

True, but never beyond a 5 second mention of them, as opposed to the last 2 episodes which, IMO, merely served at setups for the rest of the series rather than being a story unto itself.

[Darren]

I think the whole series is one story. 1&2 purposefully set up a lot of questions to be answered by November (hopefully).

[FlyingBeastie]

I think the eyepatch lady works in an asylum, and Amy is a patient in there. Everything we are seeing in the episodes is a delusion.

Oh god-

kay, so at first I thought the same thing and it was true- that everything we've seen up to this point isn't real.

But... what if Moffat is just redoing the DS9/Buffy episodes that have the protagonists in an imagined asylum? And some force (eyepatch woman) is just trying to keep her there believing the asylum reality is true?

Also, my brother read me the synopsis for the "Almost People" two-parter, and I immediately thought of Moon -____-

So, I kinda agree with that spoilered paragraph J.R posted.

I still think The Silence somehow got their hands on The Doctor's DNA and implanted Amy with a baby while she was unconscious and that child is River.

Again, I'm thinking that the whole idea of "imprinted memories and thoughts" is going to be a recurring theme for this season, especially for the main arc and cliffhanger.

[J.R. Southall]

Perhaps a little bit of a gap between the spoiler warning and the spoiler might have been nice....

Or perhaps a spoiler tag... or perhaps no spoilers in a thread marked "No spoilers"...

I thought if it had been in publicity and DWM, then it was fair game. Only the very first sentence was "spoiler", the rest was mere speculation.

[Perry Vale]

I still think the eyepatch lady will be explained by the events in Curse of the Black Spot. I think she's in a "universe within a universe", looking through at what's happening. Wibbly-wobbly-spacey-wacey.

I can't believe for a second that Moffat would go down the asylum/dream route.

[Llordllama]

Gawd, if anything is explained by reference to The Curse of the Black Spot I'm going to be seriously depressed come November!

[Awesome Wells]

Just remembered this thread's existence. This is wot I sed somewhere else on PS about this matter:

I think everyone's looking at the eyepatch lady (can we call her Frannie B or something?) in the wrong way... through their patch-covered ocular receptor, perhaps?

The preggers/death-of-Doctor-Who references, although annoying and a little bit superfluous to some, are essential tenements of every part of this first half of the series. Everything that happens, even in apparently unrelated stories, needs to be watched with those two facts in mind. These aren't callbacks to things that have happened; they're not even looking ahead, either. They're important signposts to things happening RIGHT NOW.

Frannie B is precisely the same - and yet different. Her presence is important in exactly the same way as the other things; yet she isn't being shoehorned in and her appearances are not designed to "remind" viewers of what's gone before. How can they be, when there's no apparent indication of who she is or what her relationship is to Amy or anything else? It's a layer of mystery that, through repeated appearance, is actually unpeeling slowly like the skin of an onion. (To reveal the soft stuff that makes you cry underneath, maybe...?) Wether you love, hate or feel we don't need the pregnancy/death stuff, Franny B HAS to keep on appearing. It's not superfluous, it really isn't.

But hey, what do I know? I keep thinking the actor who plays Rory is named Arthur Scargill.

[Rob McCow]

I don't see how this is any different from the 'Bad Wolf' thing from 2005. Or the stars going out, or Rose turning up, or the bees disappearing, or 'You Are Not Alone', or the Tenth Doctor banging on and on and on about how he's going to die. Or even the supposed repeated appearances of the moon in 2006.

I don't understand why people are upset about it! It's not shoehorned in, it's there on screen for 5-10 seconds an episode and then forgotten about. Yes it's repetitive, but I don't think there's any reason to be annoyed by it.

[duncan]

It's certainly no different to the crack last year.

[Dirk Gently]

I'm with Steve on this, it doesn't bother me in the slightest & is definitely not a problem for me when E.P.W pops up. It's an extremely brief interlude in the story & it'll be quite interesting to see where it's all going.

[Andrew Curnow]

As one of those who is finding EPL's appearances irritating, I feel I ought to try and justify myself - the main reason for me actually isn't that she's taking up valuable screen time in episodes 3 & 5. The reason (for me, I can only speak personally) was that her first appearance was IMHO just one thing too much, overegging the mystery pudding if you like - we came out of the first two-parter not knowing how the Doctor lives, who the girl is, how she can regenerate, how Amy is connected to her, what happened in those three months, why the Silence wanted the girl, etc, etc. So many (too many!) mysteries left hanging, that one more on top of it was just too much. One assumes (one hopes!) that they're all connected together in some way, but it just feels to me like too many things slung into the mix - the Doctor's death AND Amy's pregnancy AND the Eyepatch Lady.

As I've said before, I expect (well, hope) that when the series is finished and the mysteries are solved (I hope) I'll probably enjoy rewatching these earlier episodes again. But at the moment, the constantly harking back to the ongoing 'arc elements' just stops me really kicking back and just enjoying the story at hand.