Winders report this behavior to a silly woman in a huge red cape, who is herself surrounded by glasses of water and wears a silly Phantom mask, and she goes, "Did he do the thing?" Right, so now instead of anybody pointing out that it's a stupid thing to do -- and stolen right from Jurassic Park to boot -- we've got another character propping it up, like, yes the thing with the glasses makes sense, but to have her condition of being notified about the Doctor be that he does the exact same thing with the glass of water? Does that make any sense at all in the context of the episode? "Sometime in the next three hundred years, a dude might show up and do this annoying thing I do with the glasses of water"? No, it doesn't. It's just another neat image -- the cape, the mask, the water glasses like candles -- that got plopped into an episode that would have been a lot more interesting and hella more meaningful without half of them.

The evidence for the police state theory is a little girl, crying. Pay attention, this is very important and insightful: "Children cry because they want attention, because they're hurt or afraid. When they cry silently, it's because they just can't stop." If you wondering where the Doctor gets off telling us about kids, or what any of this has to do with anything except the Very Meaningful Ending, you're not alone: Amy asks him straight up if he's a parent. He doesn't answer. But he does make a very good point, which he could have made twenty literal minutes ago: "Hundreds of parents walking past, and not one of them's asking her what's wrong, which means they already know, and it's something they don't talk about."

If this were a real story, we would say that the people passing by the little girl are thematically representative of the people of the Starship UK as a whole. Except in this metaphor, the little girl is also representative of humanity itself -- the thing the STARWHALE!, who also represents the Doctor, cannot help saving -- which means the little girl is not just the STARWHALE!, in the first metaphor, but also humanity in the second, and in the big sweeping metaphor that we get at the end of the episode, Amelia Pond, because the Doctor is the STARWHALE! and Amelia Pond was one of the human crying children that we, and not-a-stripper Amy, have left behind. This is bad writing, because it establishes no objective correlative for any of this and just makes everything a metaphor for everything else in the attempt to seem valid.