My neighbor is a Time Lord

… or so she would have me believe.

Her ship looks suspiciously unlike an early-1960s British blue police box. Maybe the Eleventh Doctor (or who knows, Dr. River Song, who seems to know how to operate a TARDIS better than the Doctor himself) finally was able to fix the control that was broken in the First Doctor‘s time, which makes it possible for a TARDIS to adopt the most appropriate disguise so as to be inconspicuous in its surroundings. Surely an old Alaska beatermobile of indeterminate color is more inconspicuous at my apartment complex than a 1960s-era British blue police box.

But wait! — look closer! Look at the plate! It doesn’t say TARDIS — it says TARD1S! That’s the numeral 1, not the letter I!

And look: here’s the back plate. Same problem here! “Time And Relative Dimension In Space” has become “Time And Relative Dimension —” what? — “One Space”? That doesn’t even make sense!

I think my neighbor’s messing with me. An imposter. Not a Time Lord at all.

And here it is, Rapture Eve, with a Rapture Van driving all over Anchorage warning about a “Judgment Day,” like some bizarre new form of Dalek aiming its harsh, Bible-Purple cry of exterminate, exterminate! against any who are not Dalek. From all over the world we’re hearing reports of people claiming that they will be somehow caught up into the sky, mystically teleported — apparently beginning tonight at 10:00 PM Alaska Time* — to some indefinable place called Heaven: the name, one must suppose, of an alien spaceship belonging to the powerful and xenophobic race to whom these people owe their allegiance.

And then, over a period of five months, the spaceship will rain its destruction down upon us.

And the Doctor, who could save us, is nowhere to be found.

Unless…

Do I have the wrong mythology? Yes. Yes. It’s obvious.  Like Sunnydale, California, and Cleveland, Ohio, Anchorage obviously sits on a Hellmouth, in our case centered somewhere in the vicinity of Baxter Road and Northern Lights Boulevard.

Surely Buffy will avert this apocalypse, as she has averted so many others.

But please, Buffy, please. Do not avert the Rapture. Let them go. Let all the xenophobes go.

* Note about Rapture timing: Per The Atlantic, The Rapture will begin 6 PM on March 21 in the first time zone at which that time occurs, then will proceed around the globe time zone by time zone. “So, according to these calculations, the Rapture will actually begin like a rolling brown out across the globe at 11 p.m. PST on Friday, May 20th” — i.e., 10 PM AST. But we’re in daylight savings time now, so I’m still a tad confused. In any case, those Alaskans whose loyalty to the xenophobic aliens is expected to be rewarded with Rapture will be among the last on the planet, at 6:00 PM tomorrow, to be rolling brown-outed to the alien mothership.

h/t John Aronno, Alaska Commons; Julia O’Malley, Anchorage Daily News