Natalie Sharp of tumblr Booooom! Strawberries points out something interesting:
That first image is from “A Town Called Mercy.” The second image is from “The Power of Three”… which comes after “A Town Called Mercy,” at least how we saw things.
Which means that the Doctor refers to Rory leaving his phone charger in Henry VIII’s en suite before we see them in Henry VIII’s bedroom.
The Doctor is talking about something that won’t happen till later. But it cannot be that the Doctor is meeting up with Amy and Rory out of chronological order, because Rory obviously knows what the Doctor is referring to. So that event has happened to him already, too.
So it’s just that we’re seeing their adventures out of order. But that means “A Town Called Mercy” has to happen within the Year of the Slow Invasion. Within that seven weeks that Amy and Rory went missing from their anniversary party.
What the hell?
This cannot be a production accident, because why bother having a phone charger in the Henry VIII scene otherwise? It doesn’t figure in the action.
Unless Steven Moffat is just fucking with us now. I could believe that.
(If you stumble across a cool Doctor Who thing, feel free to email me with a link.)
Simplest explanation: the scene in ‘The Power of Three’ could show them getting the charger back. Pretty important that you don’t leave that sort of tech lying around hundreds of years before it’s invented.
Ah, that’s a good possibility!
Dinosaurs and Mercy were the first episodes made for this season, so it’s not a production-order thing.
Maybe, maybe not. If the scripts were written with a particular broadcast (sorry, transmission?) order in mind, but that order was changed after production was completed.
You may well be right, of course; my understanding is that scripts are generally still being revised not only up to the start of shooting but often during it.
That’s true. I’m saying that the decision to air “The Power of Three” after “A town Called Mercy” may have been made after both episodes had wrapped shooting.
Nope! They went back for the phone charger.
You sound awfully certain about that…
you’re worried about chronological order in a time travel series?
Yes, because the order that things happen in to the characters matters.
Or, over the course of 10 years, he’s gotten used to the Doctor occasionally getting the order of things wrong?
But then mightn’t Rory have said something like, “Oh, I’ll look forward to that” or “Ooo, we haven’t done that yet”?
Eh, maybe, maybe not. Familiarity breeds contempt, and all that.
OTOH, what’s the point of building up a mystery around two characters who’ve already been written off the show?
Didn’t Dr. McCoy leave a communicator on that gangster planet?
No, he hasn’t done that yet. Happens in somewhat less than 300 years.