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| - Donna, our favourite stroppy Londoner, has been having some funny turns recently. As we all know, she's happily married with two kids, but lately she's been having "lost time" and Dr. Moon says everything is fine, and... What? But what about the library of the future, and the people-eating shadows, and River Song and everything? And then, we see a familiar person in Donna's world: Miss Evangelista, one of the Red Shirts killed in the last episode. And she tells Donna that none of this is real.
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| abstract
| - Donna, our favourite stroppy Londoner, has been having some funny turns recently. As we all know, she's happily married with two kids, but lately she's been having "lost time" and Dr. Moon says everything is fine, and... What? But what about the library of the future, and the people-eating shadows, and River Song and everything? And then, we see a familiar person in Donna's world: Miss Evangelista, one of the Red Shirts killed in the last episode. And she tells Donna that none of this is real. Miss Evangelista takes off her veil and reveals that her face has become glitched. The little girl, watching all this on her TV, screams. So do you, because, Steven Moffat. Donna and everyone else aren't really in present-day London. They're in a Lotus Eater Machine, and the computer is getting a little overloaded. Doing what? Saving all the people, of course... that's where they all went. They got saved... to disk. When the Vashta Nerada arrived, the library's computer tried to teleport 4022 people out all at once, and the system overloaded. Even the neural echoes of people, briefly captured by their suits' comm systems, get included. Which is how Miss Evangelista now lives on. The Vashta Nerada usually live in forests. They hatch in trees. Trees... that were made into a planet full of books. The little girl really was a little girl: related to the founder of the library, she was merged with the library's computer as a gift to her when doctors couldn't save her life. Her therapist, Dr. Moon, is quite literally the planet's moon, which stabilizes the computer from above. While the Doctor, back in the real world, works all this out, a couple more people get eaten by the shadows. The Doctor teaches the Vashta Nerada how to use the suits' comm systems to communicate, but it doesn't exactly help. He does, however, convince the creatures to give him one day, and after that, they can have the planet all to themselves. River knows the Doctor's name. His real name. Just as the Doctor realises that he's encountered someone who will eventually mean a great deal to him, he also realises that he'll need to pull a Heroic Sacrifice to rescue Donna and the rest of the saved people. River punches him square in the face, handcuffs him to a wall and sacrifices herself instead. Because she knows that if the Doctor would sacrifice himself this way, he wouldn't be able to regenerate, as the machine's continuous shock would kill him permanently in the middle of regeneration. And now she knows that this is not only his first time meeting her, it's also her last time meeting him... and that from his perspective, their entire relationship will have been based on the moment the Doctor saw her die. All the not-dead people are transported back to the library. Donna desperately searches for her Matrix-world husband, whom she truly loves. But just when he sees her, he's teleported away to his own home, and she decides he must have been imaginary. The Doctor leaves River's diary and her version of the screwdriver behind in the library -- -- she knew his name. He gave her his screwdriver. Why did he give her his screwdriver? Because the screwdriver has a neural relay with her mind's echo stored inside it. The Doctor races back to the little girl / computer and plugs in what's left of River. Her echo, and those of her loved ones who died today, can live on forever in the Matrix system. In a very bittersweet way, Everybody Lives.
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