Nonetheless, he takes Dorium in his box to the TARDIS. Having heard the question off-screen, he looks a bit shaky. "You know what the question is now," Dorium says. "You see why you have to die." The Doctor looks at his date of death on the TARDIS monitor and grows ever more uneasy.

Back in the Senate, Winston and the Doctor are having a stroll. "But what was the question? Why did it mean your death?" Winston asks. The Doctor speaks of dangerous secrets that must never be told and Winston reluctantly agrees that death may be the only way to make sure the secret would be kept. "The silence will fall" is the Doctor's silence. He looks very sad and very old and even more tired. Then he realizes he doesn't know why they went on a stroll. He also realizes that Winston is carrying a gun. The Doctor glances down at his arm, on which a black hash mark has suddenly appeared.

So he goes on with his story, picking up with his road trip with Dorium. "Why Lake Silence? Why... Utah?" he asks, saying the last with a bit of distaste. "It's a still point in time," Dorium says. "Makes it easier to create a fixed point and your death is a fixed point, Doctor." Also, the name of the lake was sort of thematically apropos. But the Doctor is hot to procrastinate a bit longer. With a time machine, he can go anywhere. He mentions helping Rose Tyler with her homework and going to all Jack Harkness's stag parties, but he seems a bit square for the latter. To prove that time can't lay a hand on him, he decides to phone up his old friend Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, only to find out he died some months earlier. A nurse, trying to cheer him up, says the Brigadier always poured an extra brandy in the hopes the Doctor would come around, but it's not cheery at all. The Doctor is quietly devastated. He also seems to realize there's no avoiding death. He takes the blue envelopes from his coat pocket and brings them to robotic Gideon. Gideon's like, "Fool, do I look like your personal courier?" Only it comes out more like, "Surely you could deliver the messages yourself." But the Doctor can't cross his own timestream or something, although it seems like he's done some of that before. Robotic Gideon promises to deliver the messages. As the Doctor turns to go, Gideon stops him. "Whatever you think of the Tesselecta, we are champions of law and order, just as you've always been," he says. "Is there nothing else we can do?" The Doctor gives the robot a sad look and heads out the door.