to fall down or press the wrong button

TV Day Two:



So this must be the hinted at premise for the next five episodes. Rather than Amy and Rory travelling with the Doctor, he jumps in and nabs them whenever something's about to happen. Now to be fair the Ponds, and contractual obligations aside, surely with "all of time and space, everything that ever happened or ever will" available to him, he could do better than a couple of humans who're more likely to fall down or press the wrong button than actually do something useful? River Song, perhaps? What's left of Torchwood? The Brigadier at some earlier point? Sherlock Holmes?

What we're seeing here is the Doctor going domestic.  Settled down.  Having made some friends, they're the ones he wants to go on adventures with, even if as it seems, they don't want to live in the TARDIS.  This is rather the same attitude the Third Doctor had in his later years when "all of time and space, everything that ever happened or ever will" had been returned to him by the Time Lords and despite having spent months belly-aching about being trapped on Earth, he retained his position as UNIT's scientific advisor.  He needs some kind of chronological compass and contemporary Earth still suits him.

Of course given the TARDIS apparently drops him were he needs to be, you have to wonder what catastrophe he's failing to attend to once he's sodded off to the next one.  Perhaps that finally explains the Miracle Day mess.  He's a one global catastrophe at a time kind of Time Lord, or as was the case then he was so preoccupied with his impending doom and Amy and Rory didn't think it was worth bringing up or simply didn't have time what with regenerating River and Hitler and all of that stuff.  Or it was a fixed point in time and since it sorted itself out eventually it probably wasn't worth mentioning.