Working around these ideas:

1) The Silence have been around since the beginning of human civilisation (or a very long time)
2) Rory was around for two thousands years, presumably meeting and forgetting lots of Silents along the way.
3) The Silence could have rudimentary time travel tech- re the attempt to build a TARDIS plus you can get Vortex manipulators if you want.
4) Rory doesn't remember his history 'all the time'
5) Something to do with the parallel timelines theory (ok, I have no idea where I might go with this particular point, but someone else might!)

So.... erm, some sort of Rory being manipulated in the long term by the Silence to protect them from their discovery by the Doctor/ some other purpose?

Plus Rory the Dark fits in with my River theory that

fair play to you for trying to suss it out but is it just me who is finding the whole thing a bit of a mess and painfully dull... Each one of the main cast dies too often and then they come back again...

It's losing any sense of structure... new episodes bring new questions rather than answering anything we saw previously :sleep:

do think that the lack of structure is because you have only seen 3 episodes? as i thought this at first.

I now figure that i cant make that judgemnt was the gaps and unanswered questions make me watch next week (yes i count the sleeps til saturday arrives ) and that by the end the structure will be complete.

as too the dying too often, totally agree, they need to stop the fake deaths.

Did either of you think River really died in Silence in the Library, out of interest? I always thought she was 'saved' just like the other library people, and can be rebooted by the Doctor at any time. I was quite suprised when I checked out forums and online reviews and found out she 'died'.

DW story arcs seem to be far more important than Doctor Who now. It was all so simple back in the 70s

Yes she died. All the other saved people that came back hadn't suffered severe trauma. The other saved people we saw at the end, had all been killed or had died (CAL)

I wish they would stop messing around with my Doctor Who. It is becoming a travesty and unwatchable.

I can remember when the stories gripped you. Now I would rather do something else.

She died in the real world, good and proper. Burned up and crispy. Her screwdriver, which had one of those 'ghosting' relays, just kept a copy of her consciousness for long enough that the Doctor could plug it into the CAL system.

The only thing I am still slightly bewildered by is how Rory has the memories of Auton Roman Rory. Roman Rory was created from Amy's memories, but somehow remembered dying as a human even though Amy couldn't remember him.

Surely when The Doctor rebooted the universe and real Rory came back into existence, Auton Rory never existed. I guess Auton Rory just became real Rory.

Yeah, there's a certain amount of handwaving involved (if the Alliance got a copy of Rory's consciousness from Amy's house, why did the Auton Rory have all his memories of his travel since then?), but generally, time travellers remember all the things that happened, even if they've been subsequently undone.

For example, Amy still remembers the events of the broken universe, at least she does now that the Doctor and the TARDIS are back in the fixed one.

Basically, you can assume that the characters are as aware of what happened in the story as the viewer is, unless they make a point of showing that they aren't.

That makes sense. I think that with The Silents it is taken to the next step. The Doctor mentioned that having your memories erased so much can cause madness. Maybe this is something that might play out later on.

But since there weren't any bodies mooching around the library (gobbled up by the Vashda Nerada presumably), all the people who were restored had new bodies created for them. I wouldn't put it past them for a future Doctor to pop up, restore River and experience time in a straight line together for once.

No, they were downloaded and 'saved' by CAL to prevent them being gobbled up, just like she did with Donna. Mass to energy conversion - the thing is, you have to have a blueprint of the original body to reconstitute. If you only have a print of the mind, it's not so easy.

Of course, this is fantasy - there's a million and one ways they could do it anyway, if they wanted to. It would somewhat take away from the poignancy of the moment though, of River accepting her fate.

I wouldn't exclude the possibility that there's another - as yet unknown - party involved.

If the Silence were present when plastic Rory was created, that would mean they were also "seen" by Daleks, Cybermen and all the other races and species that were also there. Making the Silence so powerful that not even the most powerful species in the universe could detect them - including some that reply on inanimate enhancements - is maybe a step too far (and raises questions about why they picked on our relatively primative planet in the first place when so much tech was already there for the taking - including a Tardis).

We still don't know why they "needed" a 1960's spacesuit? Apparently, they didn't need the rocket or a trip to the moon* and it's fair to assume that they got to Earth using tech so why even involve humans in building it? It's almost as if they made the suit and then had to wait around till humans had one like it - like your wife hanging on to 300 old frocks - in case they ever some back into fashion

There's still a big question mark over the killing of "Joy". She wouldn't be forgotten and someone disappearing after passing through security at the Whitehouse would be noticed very quickly (plus there was "residue" - she wasn't completely phyiscally erased). It's possible that the Silence could brainwash the security guards into not noticing that didn't leave - or even erase here from everyone's memory - but that still leaves at least one of them going round that bathroom with a mop and bucket It also seems out of character for the Silence to kill someone - totally unnecessary and risks bring attention to themselves (a guard was stood just outside the door) - unless it was to make some point to Amy - to instill fear that would remain after the actual memory had faded. It stands out for me that they didn't take any violent action against the Doctor and his team despite obviously seeing that they presented far greater threats than some short-sighted old woman who just wanted to take a leak.

My take on the Silence is that they have been waiting for a specific event that couldn't be forced - such as the birth of some Golden Child. That implies either propecy or time travel (or both with the ability to time travel being "lost" or removed away along the way). There's a popular plot-line in sci-fi (and Von Daniken style books) that the Earth was "seeded" by an alien race - either as a social experiment, to continue a species/expand territory or to create a specific event at a fixed point in our evolution. Dr Who (the TV series) has always tapped into this sort of populat story line and just tweaked it a litte - and I think that's what series 5 and 6 have been about.

Given that Moffat seems to be undoing a lot of the changes made by RTD, I'm going for the Silence being proto-Time Lords or at least a species planted by the Time Lords as a kind of reset switch or safety net.

*Allowing for possible logical flaws in the story but - everything onboard Apollo was weighed to check payload wasn't exceeded - you might not "see" them, but the Silence have mass and that means they have weight. Logically, it was impossible for a Silence to get aboard Apollo 11 - (a mobile, empty suit doesn't work as they didn't wear helmets during take-off and flight)

Just chewing things over

I also think this - I have a species in mind, but it's not Gallifreyan...

It's not 'your' Doctor Who, you don't own it, and lots of us are loving it at the moment. I personally think it is the best it has been for a long while and to call it a travesty is a joke. I love Moffat's writing (I liked RTD as well so this isn't a RTD v Moff comment), I really like the more complicated story lines, it's good to have to think and use the brain, it's good not everything is explained and leaves you trying to work things out. Matt Smith is so, so good as the Doctor, my favourite of New Who by a long way and up there with the best of the original series - I think he will have overtaken them fairly soon, in my eyes at least Loving this series as much as the last and far, far more than the previous ones

There's a really obvious answer to that, which I am too polite to post.

Seriously, I'm sorry you don't like it. Maybe you should give it a rest until the next Doctor/Showrunner and see if you like it then? It's not compulsory to watch, you know.

I think you will find you are in a minority on this forum.

Don't tease

What species are you thinking of?
i could think of one and if we take that thing what moffat said seriously, i could be right.
but i doubt that