OK, this time there are “Doctor Who” spoilers up to and including “Closing Time.” You know the drill.

Inspector Spacetime, you’ve done it again.

So with the very end ending of “Closing Time,” we’re back to time paradoxes. It’s hard enough to get the Doctor’s timeline straight, since we know he was already around on April 22, 2011 in “Impossible Astronaut,” and yet he’s going back there again as his future and Amy and Rory’s past.

Fine. If I lean over a little, tilt my head to the left and shake it around, I can just about wrap my brain around it. So that’s not the paradox I mean, and from what we saw in “Impossible Astronaut,” there may not be a paradox at all, as the younger Doctor appears to arrive after it all happens.

No, the paradox I mean is the one with River. If River is in the astronaut suit in the lake and again standing on the shore, we have the situation that apparently kept her from coming any sooner in “A Good Man Goes to War,” she couldn’t be in the same place as her baby self. As her mind is being constantly erased and rewritten by Madame Kovarian and the Silence (or their Munch Minions, at any rate) she may not recall being in the suit, but knowledge has never been a requirement for a time paradox (Although when Rose met her baby self in the David Tennant years, the fact that she was a baby, and thus couldn’t remember the meeting her older self seemed to factor in, I think).

If it was River at a later point in her life, we had a similar situation with Amy in “The Girl Who Waited,” both she and the older her were in the Two Streams Kindness Facility at the same time. We didn’t have any holes in the universe with the two of them together, so maybe the problem of the time paradox is one of the Doctor’s lies. But the facility also had, to borrow the term from my own Paradox,
time-management capabilities; Lake Silencio, not so much.

The TARDIS does.

(Did we see the TARDIS in “Impossible Astronaut?” And shouldn’t there be two TARDISes, the younger and the older Doctor’s?

But I digress).

Madame Kovarian said something to River, though, that was thought provoking: she called the Silence her “owners.” Why would River be owned?

Could the River in the suit be a Ganger? It would prevent a paradox on the shores of Lake Silencio, and the real River could still be convicted of the crime. Besides, we’ve been hankering for a Ganger for most of the season, even if it’s not the Doctor’s.

Of course, it is only a guess, and I have been ever so wrong before. But that is what I love about the show; in a world of TV where you can saw the lines along with the actors the first time through, it’s great to have the Doctor keeping me on my TV-watching toes.