the Doctor shouldn't die when he's supposed to die.

TV I should probably be saving this for next Thursday but well, hum. Updating the ever popular contemporary Who chronology with Night Terrors (reviewed here and below), I realised I needed to work out if it went before or after Torchwood's Miracle Day. Finally bothering to look in the TARDIS Index File at the dates when these fictional events in a fictional universe occur I stumbled on this:

Torchwood's Miracle Day is set in and around 22nd March 2011 and knocks on for a good few months.

The astronaut parts of The Impossible Astronaut are set in Utah, USA, 22nd April 2011.

WTF?  FFS!  etc etc etc

Davies and Moffat apparently have chatted about how the two shows effect one another in which case how could something like this occur? From a suspension of disbelief point of view, it would mean the Doctor wilfully ignored the world going to the wall and neither Amy or Rory bothered to tell him.  Or River.  Or Canton Delaware.

But, as a few people noted on Twitter when I posted this information there, it would also logically mean the Doctor shouldn't die when he's supposed to die.  Ish.  Arguably he does become a category one, and they did burn the body. 

But we don't know how Miracle Day's going to end.  For all we know all the category ones could miraculously be re-constituted from the ashes, in which case so could the Doctor.

I suppose it's one thing for the many decades of spin-off media to be contradicted by the television series, it's the mechanism under which Doctor Who has always worked.  It's something else for the two television shows to contradict each other quite this much, especially after all the hoopla in Torchwood's first couple of series enmeshing itself with the parent series.

Assuming it is a contradiction and Miracle Day isn't indeed going to be used to resolve all of this. Either way, we can probably now add, "ruining Doctor Who" to the list of its crimes.

Updated! As has been pointed out, the headline to this post is potentially misleading since the Doctor isn't human and its been established that Miracle Day only effects humans. Unless, I suppose he wasn't joking in the TV movie. But the point still stands. This means the Doctor et al are on Earth during Miracle Day when everything is going to pot and do nothing about it ...

Updated! Showing the kind of determination only a fan would have, I've sat through the thing again and found the on-screen proof. It's Rex's text message towards the end:



The only potential contradictory bit of info is that the text was sent at 6:13pm, but the on-screen caption just before says they landed at 5pm:



Though that can be explained away through the complexity of international time zones. Obviously.
/
Update! 06/09/2011 Another possibility. Perhaps this part of the episode was being shot this March and no one bothered to change the date and time when they sent the text message to the prop assuming no one would be paying attention this or bother to freeze frame.

They obviously don't know us very well.

Assuming that is the screen from the prop and not a CGI replacement. If it is a CGI replacement, that makes it deliberate. In which case we're back where we started. More along, move along ...

Update!  11/09/2011  This post has been featured at SFX Magazine's blog.  Here's a new blog post about that.