IN A WORLD WHERE IT’S ALWAYS 5.02PM ON 22 APRIL 2011, where steam trains run through skyscrapers and pterodactyls prey on picnickers in Hyde Park, Emperor Winston Churchill orders the release of a soothsayer from the Tower of London and asks him what has happened to time.
The soothsayer – who is of course the Doctor – tells Churchill how he travelled through time and space looking for information about the Silence, the religious order who call themselves “sentinels of history”. The Silence mean to prevent the Doctor from reaching the planet Trenzalore, where, according to prophecy, he must never be allowed to answer the oldest question in the universe or else “silence will fall”. They have engineered his death at Utah’s Lake Silencio on 22 April 2011, a fate he has been avoiding.