History Headscratchers / DoctorWho2009Specials

*** [[Recap/DoctorWhoNSS2E5RiseOfTheCybermen He/she's right.]]

*** Indeed. The Doctor all but confirmed that in ''Flesh and Stone''.

*** It's possible that [[spoiler: since the TARDIS explosion is now no longer a factor,]] people will remember the Cyber-King now; having not seen anything beyond 'The Big Bang', it's impossible to say for certain. Alternatively, [[spoiler: in recreating the universe]] certain events might have been kept, and others lost; the Cyber-King incident might be one of those incidents which fell between the cracks, so to speak.

*** 10's entire speech about regeneration meaning that one Doctor dies and a new one walks away gets a lot of flak from the fans for [[CharacterDerailment going against all of the established continuity about the different faces being the same person.]] My attempt at a Sonic MindScrewdriver, considering the fact that he wanted to permanently drown in [[Recap/DoctorWho2006CSTheRunawayBride Runaway Bride]] but not regenerate in [[Recap/DoctorWhoNSS4E12TheStolenEarth Stolen Earth]] or [[Recap/DoctorWhoNSS4E17E18TheEndOfTime End of Time]], is as follows: he feels that he's getting too genocidally violent ([[Recap/DoctorWhoS12E4GenesisOfTheDaleks 4 didn't wipe out the Daleks]], 8 wiped out the Time Lords), he doesn't want to feel that his "better" lives ([[Recap/DoctorWho2007CiNSTimeCrash like 5]]) are guilty of what he's done more recently, [[ThatManIsDead tries to lie to himself that they're different, better people from the Oncoming Storm]], and is worried that 11-13 will be even worse. Plus, regeneration probably heals psychological damage alongside the physical, as somebody further down the list points out.

*** The problem with the reasoning of the troper above is that while 10 did lead Adelaide to kill herself he also saved 2 people which without his intervention would of died a gruesome death.So if you ask what's worse between 3 people dying or 1 dying and 2 living,it really becomes basic utilitarianism.The other problem is that the text above assumes the Doctor ''became'' arrogant when he always was,9 called humans apes , 11 was daring entire armies to take him on while also berating humans and 10 previously called himself the highest authority that existed 3 episodes into his tenure.As for power,this only gives him the ''potential'' of becoming evil(which already had) ,but the Doctor is already acknowledged in universe as regularly altering history and as one of the most powerful beings in the Universe.The Master argument above is dangerously close to Godwin's law.At best you can say the Doctor was acting based on bad motives not that what he ''did'' was wrong.

** I believe there's a few [[DoctorWhoExpandedUniverse Expanded Universe]] stories where Rassilon turns out to be a wrong'un, and in the same story the Second Doctor ominously notes that there are conflicting legends about Rassilon, some suggesting that rather than a rosy-cheeked white bearded father of Time Lord society he was actually a sadistic lunatic. In any case, though there is a bit of a history of seemingly benevolent Time Lords going off the deep-end into madness-inspired supervillainy (most prominently, Borusa -- again, in "The Five Doctors").

(Yes, the person who moved me does realise that "2008-10 specials" is technically the more "correct" term)

** [[spoiler:500 feet? Closer to 90, 100 tops. Still noticably large yes, still a HumongousMecha, but 500feet is silly. I can think of several mecha including {{Real Robot}}s that size wise far outclass it... and if you include {{Super Robot}}s its easy-peezy.]]
** How did the Doctor recognise the Cyberking as a ship, when no such thing has ever been built by the Cybus Cybermen? Let's not forget, these ''aren't'' the Cybermen he's been encountering intermittently throughout his life; the only contact he's had with them was in "Rise of the Cybermen" and "Army of Ghosts".

** Because then the episode wouldn't have had [[spoiler:a flying bus]] in it. One is forced to the conclusion that [[spoiler:the flying bus]] is a Fixed Point In Time(tm), so the Doctor had to ignore any possible solutions (eg, [[spoiler:tow the bus out with a steel cable]] or [[spoiler:send in an armoured personnel carrier]] that might have been simpler but didn't lead to [[spoiler:flying buses]].

** The Doctor ''could'' also have just asked UNIT to push his TARDIS through the portal. Since it's completely indestructable, it'd get through the portal just fine. Then everyone can escape quite easily.
*** Hate to point this out, but the TARDIS isn't indestructable. It just has shields which protect it (which, for all we know, only work when the TARDIS is travelling). Plus, I think he knew that, if the TARDIS was pushed through the portal, who/what put it into the portal would also go as well, therefore killing/destroying it as well (how else did they manage to travel through the portal in a bus, if not protected by a magic bubble). I think he just didn't want to have more blood on his hands. Anyway, (I haven't seen the episode in the while, so I might be wrong here) I don't think the TARDIS was close enough to where he was for them to find it, explain why they needed to transport the police box (assuming the perception filter doesn't make it impossible to find it) and get it to his location before he had found a way back. I think that he knew how long it could take them to find the TARDIS and, as such, decided to only ask for it if there was no other way back.
*** The TARDIS can use shields without moving; we saw that in Bad Wolf and The Parting of the Ways. As for how they'd get the TARDIS through without killing anybody, they could just as well use a robot or, as a matter of fact, ''a bus''. (Or more likely a metal truck, because you'd have to fit the TARIS inside.) UNIT does manage to retrieve the TARDIS by the time the Doctor gets back. I suppose that if they had retrieved it very recently then it didn't make a difference either way. But if they had been holding onto it for a few minutes then yes, they should have thought of pushing it through.

*** It also made me think of the fairies in ''Series/{{Torchwood}}''. Considering that they can apparently choose to become invisible to security cameras, it at least sets a precident that there are ways to trick sensors. In this case projecting the image of what the user wants.
*** Because the paper itself is psychic. It doesn't just take an image from the user's, or indeed the victim's, mind. The paper can use its psychic ability to analyse the machinery and display information, barcodes, possibly even generate a magnetic strip, as required.

** Its talked about alot here about the Doctor releasing the Reapers by saving Adelaide, what about the Daleks? Maybe the reason why the Dalek didn't kill Adelaide was because it would bring Reapers into the picture. Invincible bat-monsters eating everything that moves would likely be harmful to the plan, especially if they somehow got to the Crucible. Also, the Dalek likely knew that the reality bomb would wipe out all of existence, presumebly including the Reapers, so she was going to die anyway. It seemed like too much of a risk just to kill one little girl who probably won't be a threat.

** I thought the whole episode was to show the Doctor that even if he is the only Time Lord, time will always snap back into place (that is, the event will happen) at those fixed points, whether he wants it to or not. Also, the Reapers were paradox eaters- ie Rose touching her younger self is a paradox, whereas the paradox for Adalaide was fixed almost immediately. Also, is it just me, or are they working up to a breakdown of Houseian proportions (hearing voices, seeing Ood Sigma)? WHO WILL BE HIS WILSON??

* OK, so the Doctor spends the WHOLE time essentially going on about how this is a fixed point in time and how it must happen [[spoiler: before he decides to give everyone that is still alive a lift home to Earth...]] but why did he get so worked up about this ONE point. Presumably, he has been travelling for some time since the Time War and there have been other events where his hands were similarly tied... the Doctor has a big soft spot for saving people but really, he's known these people for five minutes and then all of a sudden has a mental breakdown, realises he's the God Damn Batman of Time and it's time to flip off the universe? SURELY there have been other points when he'd have more compelling reasons to mess around with the rules. Beyond going on about fixed points in time, there isn't much lead up to this - and not to mention, that he even cites precedent for this - the Fires of Pompeii - where he did something almost identical.

** I think it was a fixed point in time because the Doctor already knew what was going to happen; he had read about the space station beforehand. He basically jst stumbles onto his other adventures and since he ''doesn't'' know beforehand what's going to happen to the people he meets, he's free to try and save them.

* Gadget was practically covered in the infected water on his way out of the station. Keep in mind that the Flood virus seems to transmit fairly easily from one source or form of water to the next, not to mention the great efforts that the Doctor and company had taken all episode to not come in contact with anyone or anything that had touched the stuff. So, naturally, when Gadget enters the TARDIS (touching the doors and control panel in the proces) or later rolls out of the TARDIS and onto the '''snow-covered ground''' outside Adelaide's home, this isn't brought up as an issue. And then the Doctor LEAVES GADGET. Sure, he's a bit out of it, what with [[spoiler: Adelaide having just killed herself]], but aren't there repercussions to leaving a robot that's still potentially covered in a dangerous virus ''in an environment that the virus thrives in??''

* In the same vain as the previous querry, why does Adelaide's suicide "fix" the timeline? We learn that her grand-daughter went into space having been inspired by her grandmother's heroic death on Mars; committing suicide on Earth under mysterious circumstances is ''not'' going to have the same effect.
** Here's my best understanding of how ''Doctor Who'' TemporalMutability works. TheButterflyEffect is not nearly as much the case as scientists belive in the real world. Time (to the extent that it's correct to personify it) cares deeply that fixed events happen, and it ''doesn't'' care as much about the logic of their happening, even when one fixed event leads to another. So if "Adelaide's death inspires granddaughter Susie" is a fixed event, then by God it's going to happen, even if the logic of it seems strange. (Continued in next bullet)
** I'll admit I don't find this system very narratively or logically satisfying; my intuitions about history are a bit more Butterfly Effect-driven. But I grant this "CloseEnoughTimeline" thing to the show, especially since the fundamental premise of hopping about from one famous event to another doesn't work quite so well without it. (In the very first story, the characters interacted with cavepeople; by my understanding of history, this would be very likely to mean that a specific distant-future event, like the ''Titanic'', wouldn't happen in exactly the way we know it, unless YouAlreadyChangedThePast is in effect, which, in ''Doctor Who'', it very often is.) (Continued in next bullet)

** Actually, we have no confirmation that Adelaide's suicide "fixed" the timeline any moreso than her survival would have done. We know that her original death on Mars led to the standard future. We know that her new suicide on Earth leads to a very similar future. What we don't know is what would have happened if she just took the Doctor's advice and lived her life. We didn't have, for instance, a repeat of Father's Day, wherein the reapers start eating people until the timeline is (relatively) back in place.

* In "Waters of Mars" how does Adelaide commiting suicide still inspire her grand daughter to become an astronaut?

*** I doubt that. Adelaide's death, whicher way it happened, was really high-profile. Once she started school, she was going to find out even if they could keep it from her before.

Sixthly; '''''it doesn't end well.''''' ''That's'' the point. Not that the Doctor's gone evil, but that his arrogance and hubris has had terrible consequences. And the key redeeming thing about it is that the Doctor ''realises'' this. He realises he's gone too far, that whether Adelaide could have lived and inspired the future or whether '''TIME ITSELF''' interfered to kill Adelaide, he's let himself get out of control and that a good person has suffered and died -- and worse, taken her own life -- because of him. That for all his good intentions, for all that he dismissed Yuri and Mia, the irony is that they get to live and the big prize he was after, the reason he was all so glowy and triumphant and smug? Is dead anyway. His arrogance has resulted in exactly the same thing he set out to prevent happening (and remember, he ''wasn't interested in the slightest'' about saving Mia and Yuri when it came down to it, they were just the 'little people' he happened to catch as well), only it's worse now because it's directly his fault that it happened. And really, it all comes back to point 1 -- for all the arguments we can have about whether the future would or could have been the same if Adelaide had lived or died, ultimately, the Doctor's arrogance led to a woman deciding to kill herself. Even if nothing else, ''that's'' why it's bad.

* At the end of "The End of Time Part 2" if 10 knows he's regenerating and has said good bye to everyone he's going to say good bye to, why does he take off in the TARDIS? Why doesn't he just sit in a room off to the side and regen instead of risk burning it up and crashing?

** Also, why doesn't he just go to, say, New Earth or somewhen else with good enough medtech to heal him?

** On a similar note, wtf was up the design of that radiation chamber anyway? Who builds something like that that can't be evacuated quickly?

** This has since been addressed in a way in episode "The Angels Take Manhatten" the Doctor was told that the person who would bring on his death would knock four times. Once you read something about the future that future must happen, therefore when Wilfred knocked four times it meant that he would be the one to cause the Doctor's death. There is no way around that once the Doctor hears those four knocks from Wilfred.

** I thought, from all the laughing and giggling, that he wasa bit crazy at the moment, and wouldn't really be thinking straight.
** Regeneration's a traditionally destabilizing process; presumably he was a bit more concerned with making sure he had all the required parts and didn't die crashing (and if we're talking JerkAss behaviour, I'm sure if we flipped the situation around Eleven could probably have some choice words to say about Ten's self-indulgence and over-dramatic angst resulting in the fact that Eleven was now starting his new life in a death-dive) than angsting about his last self's death. In all seriousness, I'm not sure that going too far down this rabbit hole will be wise, since pretty much ''every'' Doctor who's just regenerated has at at least one moment where he's all but gone "God I'm glad I'm now me, and not that last version of me; he was the ''worst''..." Particularly since Ten was equally chipper after he technically 'murdered' Nine -- what a sod.

* Why does the Doctor keep being surprised to find that he's got legs, arms, a face, etc. when he regenrates, when we've ''never'' seen a Time Lord who looks like anything but a two-legged, two-armed, ten-fingered human? Well, except when Romana screwed it up on purpose.

*** Also, recall that Ten died of radiation posioning. What's one of the main problems for children born to people exposed to dangerous radiation? Mutation and malformation. Since Eleven had, technically, just been born, maybe it makes sense that he'd be a bit worried about having all his limbs.

** They DID know he was The Master. When Lucy tells them that his real name isn't Harold Saxon the woman in charge yells they know that his true name is The Master. Presumably he also told them about his true nature...with a few embelishments to make sure they would stay loyal
** It's pretty clear that they were worshipping him because they knew he wasn't ''just'' a dead Prime Minister, even if they didn't actually know he was a Time Lord. And let's face it, it plays right into the Master's ego to set up a cult devoted to worshipping him that he can manipulate if necessary.

** I don't think that the gate ressurected the dead, i think it just changed them to make their bodies into the Master, so essentialy, its like digging into a grave and putting a mask over them. Defamation is the best word i can think of

*** Gas giant? Saturn!? Unless you're pulling this from somewhere other than what we SEE in The End of Time, that's patently ridiculous. Saturn's easily ten or fifteen times larger than Gallifrey, if not moreso! (Also, Gallifrey barely looks more than three or four times larger than the Earth, but that's neither here nor there)
*** Two things. One: judging for what we see in the episode, Gallifrey is nowhere near the size of Saturn. Saturn has about 9 times Earth's radius. Gallifrey seems only about three Earth's radius, that will make it, knowing volume increases with the cube of the radius and assuming identical density, 3^3 = 27 times as massive as Earth. Two: Surface gravity not only depends on mass but also on radius, because a greater radius means you are standing a greater distance from the center of mass, and if you remember high school physics, gravity equals the product of the masses divided by the distance squared. So, three times more radius means nine times less gravity. This makes Saturn surface gravity, contrary to popular belief, a bit LOWER than earth's because it has a big radius and a very low density (even Jupiter's is only two and a half that of Earth, not the tens or hundreds of times most people believes). Concluding, gravity in the surface of the Gallifrey we see in the episode would be 27/9 = 3 Gs tops, and that assuming Earth's density. If we allow for half the density of Earth, it would be reduced to 1.5 Gs . This would make it only a little less dense than Mars, so it's not an impossible density for a rocky planet, not sure how much iron would you find on its crust though, less than on Earth for sure, but maybe enough for Timelords neccesities. And a gravity 50% percent higher would be uncomfortable but not bonecrushing for someone accustomed to earthlike gravity.

*** Perhaps, but they weren't at the bomb's ground zero, they were several kilometres away.

** I personally think it took at least a day, since he had to do a lot of research first. Figure out where everyone is, determine a nice way of helping them out, plan out the actual helping process, and finally execute the helping. He probably released flying time monkeys at least once, incidentally: there's not really any way of knowing about Luke and the car without previously observing the event. Noticing the Sontaran may have required similar time travelling, or just plenty of running.

**** Think of it this way; it's like when you really need the loo. You can hold it in, you can fight for as long as possible, but it's ''going'' to happen. And the more you hold it in, the more forcefull it is. Metaphorically, the Doctor was just holding it in until he'd got some paper.

*** Deaths after falling from a great height are in reality very, very tricky things. It's not always just about how high you fall, but also about how you ''land'' (stunt doubles are taught to fall on their sides where possible - because there are no important bits on your sides). Some people sruvvie falling from much greater heights, while others are killed toppling down a set of stairs. I've even heard of a woman who survived a parachute jump from 10 000 feet when her parachute failed to open, because she managed to hit a single telephone wire on the way down, slowing her down enough to avoid death, and only suffer a couple of broken bones (she also used the relaxing technique mentioned earlier) - incredibly lucky, but possible. And Ten hit a pane of glass. This makes a lot more sense than the radiation bit, I reckon...

** ''My'' question actually comes from a different part of the same scene- Rassilon, to prove he's a real douche, decides that the Master has Outlived His Usefulness and prepares to kill him. Only the Master ''hasn't'' outlived his usefulness- the drums in his head are keeping the link open, and as seen several minutes later, breaking the link instantaneously dooms the Time Lords. So if 10 hadn't turned up at all then Rassilon would've Idiot Balled himself out of existance ''and'' taken the Master with him, ''and'' 10 wouldn't have died rescuing Wilf.

* Was any one else pissed at the revelation that the Time Lords had tried to commit genocide? the Time Lords were, as Giles the Krillitane pointed out, a race of dusty old senators. They were essentially Star Trek's Prime Directive taken to the extreme; willing to borderline execute the Second Doctor for simply trying to explore the universe. Now we see that they were no better than the Daleks - how is it possible for us to now feel sympathy for the Doctor during his emotional speeches about Gallifrey and all it's wonders now that we know they were willing to destroy everything we hold dear? between this and the fact the Time Lords ''started'' the damn war (by sending the Fourth to end their creation) the Time War actually comes off as less ''heroic battle to save the universe from the Daleks'' and more ''the Daleks were acting in self defence.''

*** Because a diamond is small, and a Time Lord is big. Presumably the 'gap' or whatever that enabled the Time Lords to send the diamond through wasn't large enough to send the Time Lords through.

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* At the end of "The End of Time Part 2" if 10 knows he's regenerating and has said good bye to everyone he's going to say good bye to, why does he take of in the TARDIS? Why doesn't he just sit in a room of to the side and regen instead of risk burning it up and crashing?

*** Two things. One: judging for what we see in the episode, Gallifrey is nowhere near the size of Saturn. Saturn has about 9 times Earth's radius. Gallifrey seems only about three Earth's radius, that will make it, knowing volume increases with the cube of the radius and asuming identical density, 3^3 = 27 times as masive as Earth. Two: Surface gravity not only depends on mass but also on radius, because a greater radius means you are standing a greater distance from the center of mass, and if you remember high school physics, gravity equals the product of the masses divided by the distance squared. So, three times more radius means nine times less gravity. This makes Saturn surface gravity, contrary to popular belief, a bit LOWER than earth's because it has a big radius and a very low density (even Jupiter's is only two and a half that of Earth, not the tens or hundreds of times most people believes). Concluding, gravity in the surface of the Gallifrey we see in the episode would be 27/9 = 3 Gs tops, and that assuming Earth's density. If we allow for half the density of Earth, it would be reduced to 1.5 Gs . This would make it only a little less dense than Mars, so it's not an impossible density for a rocky planet, not sure how much iron would you find on its crust though, less than on Earth for sure, but maybe enough for Timelords necesities. And a gravity 50% percent higher would be unconfortable but not bonecrushing for someone acostumed to earthlike gravity.