Sunday, April 18, 2010

AS THE WORM TURNS

Last night, the American TV audience (in general) finally got to see what all the hoopla has been about in Great Britain regarding the new Doctor in 'Doctor Who'. (Actually, it's the same Doctor, just his 11th incarnation.)

And that means Toobworld Central is now free to discuss certain aspects of that first episode, "The Eleventh Hour".

And I'd like to get right into it with a Toobworld theory about the villain of the piece, Prisoner Zero.

(There's no need to discuss the latest incarnation of the Doctor, now played by Matt Smith. You can find plenty of that sort of thing all over the web In the TV Universe, he's still the same man, just with new physical features and personality quirks. I'll just say that Matt Smith is fantastic in the role and move on.)

"Prisoner Zero" is not a name; it's a designation. On the other side of the crack in the skin of the universe which was found against the bedroom wall of Amelia Pond, there was a prison. And Prisoner Zero escaped through that crack to Earth. Why did it come to Earth, or rather, why did it choose to remain on Earth, when it had all of the universe to choose from?

I think it's because it had been to Earth before, sometime before its capture.

Its designation was "Prisoner Zero", and like the "Patient Zero" of the AIDS epidemic, that designation must signify that it was there at the prison right from the very beginning. But then the prison's first prisoner should have been "Prisoner One". So Prisoner Zero must have been imprisoned at that place since before the prison was even constructed. Whatever held Prisoner Zero imprisoned, the Atraxi saw it as the perfect place to augment the strength and security of the prison they sought to build. (The Atraxi are the intergalactic jailers who look like giant eyeballs floating in crystalline spaceships. More on them later.)

So why was Prisoner Zero locked up? I think it was because of some crime it committed on Earth Prime-Time near the very beginning of the planet's life.

And who might have imprisoned him?

I think it was the mice.
Toobworld Central has already established its theory that Earth Prime-Time is not the Earth as seen in the Bible stories; it wasn't created in six days by God. That televersion of the Earth would be the twin planet of Mondas which was in orbit around the Sun first. Earth Prime-Time was an inverted copy manufactured by the Magratheans for their clients: pan-dimensional beings who took the form of mice in the main TV dimension. They wanted a super-computer that could run the program which would ultimately provide the question for the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything - which was "42" (as depicted in 'Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy'.)

And the pandimensional mice who commissioned the project were not going to let this alien snake ruin everything with its presence in the program. So they had it removed from the planet and imprisoned elsewhere in space. That way, the computer known as "Earth" could run properly.

As such, Prisoner Zero was the first computer worm.

The story of Satan in the Garden of Eden actually played out on Mondas, as did many of the biblical legends. When the stories were brought over to Earth Prime-Time by some Mondasian space traveler, it was adapted to be about the Great Snake who tempted Eve Norta (whom we met in 'The Twilight Zone' episode "Probe 7, Over And Out".)

Prisoner Zero knew it would be killed by the Atraxi should the jailers ever recapture it again, so it chose to remain on Earth where it already had a feel for the place. Since the Atraxi did recapture it with the help of the Doctor, it's likely that they ordered an immediate execution. (After all, they were willing to boil the planet just to make sure Prisoner Zero was killed.) So it's unlikely Earth Prime-Time will ever see it again.

And as for its actual name, we still don't have a clue, but it wasn't the Devil. As mentioned before, His Maleficence was doing his thing in the Garden of Eden over on the planet Mondas. (And this depiction of the Garden comes from the opening credits to 'Desperate Housewives', of course!)

BCnU!

(This is just a theory, and O'Bviously the furthest thing from the mind of Steven Moffat when he wrote the episode. In its way, it's also a poor tribute to the late Elizabeth Montgomery, who played Eve Norta, and whose birthday was earlier this week.)

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