I spent my whole Christmas break poring over photographs they'd saved, that I never knew about. From another life. I thought they were gone forever, and I went through them again and again and pulled out my favorites and brought them home. I'm still staring at them. And I realized at some point that this is the difference between vanity and narcissism: That my obsession with these pictures of my father, and my mother, these pictures of myself as a young kid, had nothing to do with vanity and everything to do with finding all the pieces of myself. The Doctor puts his hand on Scrooge's shoulder, so calmly and firmly, and swears that he's okay. It was just a movie. There were good parts too. It's over now.

The Doctor, in addition to setting up this little series of visitations, has also engineered it so that every one of Scrooge's servants has won the lottery, all at the same time, and have up and quit. He has also engineered the existence of the lottery, at that. On the video, the boy weeps and his father tells him to keep the windows shut tight. The Doctor and Scrooge watch it together, he can't take his eyes off the screen. He cried all night, desperate to see the fish. He learned life's most invaluable lesson: "Nobody comes."

And the Doctor dances away, and appears at the window behind the boy. The babysitter won the lottery, it seems, as well. He jumps on the bed and says hello to the camera, to the future: "Now, your past is going to change. That means your memories will too. Scary, but you'll get the hang of it." And as it begins to happen, it happens.

The Doctor swept round the room, talking about what was under the bed and in the cupboards: "Do you know, there's a thing called a face spider. It's just like a tiny baby's head with spider legs, and it's specifically evolved to scuttle up the backs of bedroom cupboards..." I think that's when I would have begun to trust him. He showed the boy the psychic paper: "I think you'll find I'm universally recognized as a mature and responsible adult?" But no, he'd broken it: Finally, a lie too big.

The Doctor and the boy discussed the fish, the fogs, taming the sky and like that. He promised to let the boy see the fish, and hung out his screwdriver while they hid in the cupboard, as a shiny bait. (No face spiders that time of night: "They'll all be sleeping in your mattress.") When the Doctor asked why the boy wanted to see the fish, he said it was because they were scary. A good answer, and the Doctor agreed, but it wasn't the real answer. During the last big fog the fish had broken through, a whole shoal of them. Nobody got hurt, but it was scary and everyone was there and they all saw, except for the boy. He didn't get to be a part of the story.