| 1 | Click [[Headscratchers/DoctorWho here]] to go back to the main page. |
| 2 | |
| 3 | New entries on the bottom. |
| 4 | |
| 5 | '''WARNING! THERE MAY BE UNMARKED SPOILERS!''' |
| 6 | |
| 7 | [[foldercontrol]] |
| 8 | |
| 9 | [[folder:The Doctors age]] |
| 10 | * Ok so I know they retconned The Doctors age at the start of Nu Who however in this episode The War Doctor seems pretty certain its around 800 years and we see him regenerate into a young John Hurt at the end of Night at The Doctor, also we see in Time of The Doctor that it takes him around 300 years to start looking like an old man. So if thats the case does that mean that the 8th and all previous Doctors were less than 500 years old. |
| 11 | ** Not necessarily; in the classic series, the Seventh Doctor identified himself as about 950. A popular theory is that the Doctor is so old that he's simply forgotten exactly how old he is, and keeps reciting an age that sounds good or sounds roughly about right. Alternatively, the War Doctor might have started counting his age from scratch since he didn't consider himself to be the Doctor, and his successors simply based their ages on what his count was. |
| 12 | ** Which I guess when you think about it is somewhat scary/tragic as that may mean the doctors after that still consider themselves The War Doctor instead of The Doctors we knew from the Classic Series |
| 13 | ** The Time War and its time-lock may have scrambled and distorted time's progression so badly, the War Doctor didn't have any ''choice'' but to start counting off years again. |
| 14 | [[/folder]] |
| 15 | |
| 16 | [[folder:The End of Time]] |
| 17 | * If [[spoiler:Gallifrey wasn't destroyed]], then how and why [[spoiler:did the events of Recap/DoctorWhoS30E17E18TheEndOfTime come to happen]]? [[spoiler:The first part of Rassilon's plan was to get out of the time lock which, as shown by this episode, never existed]]. |
| 18 | ** Note that the high council was offscreen the entire time, only showing military command, and that Rassilon noted that his actions in The End of Time were the last day of the war. From Gallifrey's perspective, the two episodes were probably concurrent, and [[spoiler: his seers were mistaking being sealed in single moment for a time lock]]. |
| 19 | ** That makes sense. Maybe the Doctors intentionally [[spoiler:didn't inform Rassilon himself of their plan]]. Doing so would have changed established events in their own timeline. |
| 20 | ** I thought that the time lock was there from the start of the war, and [[spoiler: the Moment let the Doctors through to save Gallifrey. Otherwise, both sides could simply time travel back several centuries and build up their forces.]] |
| 21 | ** [[spoiler: The above is implied in the episode itself, when the Tenth and Eleventh arrive at a time before the War Doctor activates the weapon, and still ponder how they managed to get into a time-locked period.]] |
| 22 | ** It works out as follows: |
| 23 | --->Rassilon is preparing for The Final Sanction. The War Doctor knows about this.\ |
| 24 | The War Doctor steals The Moment, and is prepared to use it. (This is shown in this episode, and discussed in [[Recap/DoctorWhoS30E17E18TheEndOfTime "The End of Time"]].)\ |
| 25 | Rassilon enacts his plan to escape the time lock, and the events of "The End of Time" take place.\ |
| 26 | The War Doctor, [[spoiler: with the support of his other selves, decides to enact a plan B of putting Gallifrey in stasis, which will temporarily look to the Universe as if Gallifrey is destroyed]].\ |
| 27 | The Time War itself is still timelocked, but [[spoiler: Gallifrey has been saved from this by being removed from time and placed in stasis]]. (It is then lost, which will presumably lead to The Doctor searching for it.) This leads to a bit of Fridge Horror. (See below.) |
| 28 | ** Yes, shortly before the Doctors all save Galifrey, the General mentions that the High Council's plan has already failed - this is what happened in "The End of Time". |
| 29 | * More broadly: in "The End of Time", The Doctor had the opportunity to bring Gallifrey forward in time from the instant of its destruction, undoing his "crime." But he decided that Gallifrey, as far as it had fallen by the end of the Time War, wasn't worth saving. Ten doesn't know that yet but Eleven most certainly does. That creates two holes in his characterization that I can't reconcile -- first, [[spoiler: saving Gallifrey is not a new opportunity for him. Hell, he could probably use some timey-wimey to reach out and snag the signal Rassillon used to connect with the Master anytime he wanted]]. Second, he can't just blame the War Doctor for killing the planet, because ''he did it again''. Ten stared down Rassillon and consigned his whole race to oblivion. |
| 30 | ** Evidently you missed the point where it would have brought the entire Time War through that time and knocked the Earth out of its orbit. No, that was not an opportunity to [[spoiler:save Gallifrey]]. |
| 31 | ** In his defence, the Tenth Doctor doesn't destroy Gallifrey -- he just re-seals the lock on the destruction that has already happened and traps Rassilon and the other Time Lords back at the point of their destruction. And since his whole motivation for destroying it in the first place was that Rassilon and the other Time Lords were at that point just as big and dangerous a threat to the universe as the Daleks (they were willing to destroy the entire universe in order to allow themselves to ascend to Godhood, after all), one can hardly in all fairness pick fault with him for doing something similar to prevent this. And he hasn't even done this by the point that he meets the War Doctor in this episode. |
| 32 | ** It's claimed the High Council have plans of their own but it is then said they have already failed. Or the events could have happened while the War Doctor was in the desert. |
| 33 | ** This is a show about ''time'' travel. From the Time War's perspective, Gallifrey could've been shunted back the moment after it left and none were the wiser. |
| 34 | ** What about Gallifrey's appearance? In the end of time, there is snow on the mountains, the glass dome is broken in several spots, and the area around the citadel is covered by crashed Dalek saucers. In the day of the doctor, almost all of the glass is gone, there is no snow on the mountains, and the citadel is surrounded by buildings instead. How do you explain that? |
| 35 | ** Wasn't that Arcadia shown in "Day" rather than the capital city? |
| 36 | *** Exactly. A planet half again as big as Earth with billions of inhabitants does have more than one city. |
| 37 | [[/folder]] |
| 38 | |
| 39 | [[folder:Escaping the Doctor's timeline]] |
| 40 | * [[CliffhangerCopout When did Eleven and Clara escape the Doctor's timeline]]? [[Recap/DoctorWhoS33E13TheNameOfTheDoctor The Name of the Doctor]] ended with them stuck, and the Doctor had no idea how to get them out. |
| 41 | ** This was more the Hurt!Doc's story than Matt-Smith!Doc's tale. Judging by the trailer at the end of the show we'll be rejoining his tale on Christmas. So I'm guessing this is all slightly out of continuity. Think of it being a weird sort of flashback. |
| 42 | ** ''Were'' they stuck with no way to get out? Unless I'm forgetting something, after the confrontation with Hurt!Doctor the Eleventh Doctor simply picks up the unconscious Clara and walks off. I don't remember anything else about them being stuck, and that could be taken to imply that the Doctor knows the way out. Presumably Clara by herself would have been stuck but the Doctor was able to navigate his timeline safely to extract them both. |
| 43 | ** It was not said that they were stuck or that the Doctor had no idea of how to get out. He came in and found Clara on his own, and it is his ''own'' timeline, so he should know the way. The danger of stepping into his timeline was that it could create a paradox that might cause the timeline to collapse in on itself, and while that certainly would be a problem for the Doctor, we can infer that he managed to get out before that could happen. |
| 44 | ** Possibly the reason entering his own timeline would endanger Eleven would be that he might meet one of his ''later'' selves there, potentially causing an internal paradox that couldn't be resolved. Luckily, he only met a past self, albeit the one he least wanted to meet. |
| 45 | [[/folder]] |
| 46 | |
| 47 | [[folder:12th Doctor]] |
| 48 | * If the 11th Doctor remembers [[spoiler: saving Gallifrey along with his past incarnations]] and succeeding, then why was [[spoiler: the 12th Doctor there? Just to lend a hand for old times' sake?]] |
| 49 | ** Because [[spoiler: he remembered seeing himself there, and knew an additional TARDIS and additional Sonic Screwdriver calculation time might have been necessary for the plan to work]]. |
| 50 | ** Or because [[spoiler:the calculations ''started'' with the First Doctor, took hundreds of years, and the TARDIS was only ''finished'' calculating by the time of the Twelfth. Then HE came back (via the Moment) and shared the solution with the other 12.]] |
| 51 | ** I guess that explains why there weren't any other future incarnations there. |
| 52 | ** The presence of the 12th Doctor does introduce a factor that will have to be explained at some point. Normally, in these multi-Doctor encounters, only the most recent Doctor present remembers the events. We are expecting 8.5, 9, 10 to walk away from this not remembering the events. But if 12 showed up, why does 11 remember? |
| 53 | ** But 11 doesn't remember. At the end, both him, 10 and 8.5 are all questioning whether or not their plan worked and if Gallifrey really survived. Only when the Curator, heavily implied to be a future incarnation of the Doctor, explains to him to go find his home does 11 realize his planned worked. Even that, however, is not the most clear version of the events; it is only when 12th Doctor realize that his involvement was necessary to change the outcome of the Time War does the events shown in the movie remain true. |
| 54 | ** He does remember the plan: even immediately after it happened, no one was really sure if it worked. That's not a matter of forgetting, that's just because it was a risky plan. 8.5, 9, 10 walked away with this with no memory of the multiple-doctor intervention. |
| 55 | ** The Timelords are well aware that the 12th Doctor is essential to saving Gallifrey. This might be a plot point if it becomes clear that The Doctor has run out of regenerations, with the Time Lords obliged to assist for their own survival. |
| 56 | ** This is how it seems to be. Another element of "if you know it's going to happen you have to go through with it" from the last Amy/Rory episode. The Time Lords saw 13 incarnations of the Doctor save the planet. They themselves at the time probably did not know 10 abused one regeneration. So when Clara asks them for the chance they know they had to give it to the Doctor on the grounds they have already seen an older than 11 version. |
| 57 | ** As of the end of "Day" 11 knows that he saved Gallifrey, but at the beginning of the next episode he's not sure. The knowledge he gained from the Curator has faded. |
| 58 | ** He also forgot that Twelve had been present, because he honestly expects to die permanently in "The Time of the Doctor". It's unclear if he forgot about meeting the Curator or not, because the Curator never out-and-out ''said'' he was the Doctor -- there could be enough ambiguity there to bypass the "must forget to avert paradox" rule -- but for everything else, Eleven is free to remember ... not least, because ''Clara'' could remind him about anything she'd witnessed, anyway. |
| 59 | ** Alternative possibility about why 12 was there: He wasn't there to save Gallifrey because his past selves had already done that. 12 was still trying to find Gallifrey, and had gone to view the moment his past selves saved it in the hope that it might give him a clue as to where it went. |
| 60 | ** The 11th Doctor doesn't even necessarily know that the 12th doctor was present for these events. He certainly (probably) knew that the previous doctors were, but we only know that the Time Lord council is aware of 12's presence. |
| 61 | ** The Moffat novelization has ''every incarnation of the Doctor ever'' showing up to help. |
| 62 | *** Which reaches a whole new level of awesome with the revelations of series 12.... |
| 63 | ** If the 11th Doctor remembers [[spoiler: saving Gallifrey along with his past incarnations]] and succeeding, then why was [[spoiler: the 12th Doctor there? Just to lend a hand for old times' sake?]]? |
| 64 | *** “Answer? I’m the Doctor, just accept it.” |
| 65 | |
| 66 | [[/folder]] |
| 67 | |
| 68 | [[folder:The Curator]] |
| 69 | * The use of [[spoiler: Tom Baker]] as The Curator ensures that the series can never actually ''end'', or, at least, that The Doctor can never really die. [[spoiler: Tom Baker is coming on in the years; unless they run through a number of doctors in a short time, he'll be dead and/or retired by the time the story reaches a point where he could conceivably reach that regeneration. Thus, he can never be shown to reach that regeneration, and, thus, can never die, as it must always lie in his future.]] |
| 70 | ** FridgeBrilliance Solution: The Curator could [[spoiler: be whoever everyone thinks of as the oldest and/or most famous Doctor alive, meaning a future appearance could be an Old!Davison or, even farther in the future, an Old!Tennant or Old!Smith).]] |
| 71 | *** Or to expand upon that- we now know that the 12th (14th) Doctor is an older man, much like the 1st Doctor. Perhaps, on his second cycle, he may go through faces that are similar to and correspond with the faces in his first cycle. For example: 13th (15th) Doctor might be short, like the 2nd Doctor, 16th (18th) Doctor might be young and blonde, like the 5th, and 18th (20th) Doctor might be Scottish, like the 7th Doctor. Revisiting old faces? |
| 72 | ** That was actually suggested in-episode, as he said he was revisiting the old faces. |
| 73 | ** But we now know that he'll be revisiting [[spoiler: Tom Baker]] at some point. What'll they do about the point in the Doctor's timeline when he revisits that particular face, as he now knows he will, and the owner of that face is no longer around to play the part? |
| 74 | ** Same way they showed previous Doctors in this episode and "The Name of the Doctor" - clever editing of archive footage, body doubles, and CGI. |
| 75 | ** They don't have to '''show''' us that he revisited Old!Tom's Doctor. They can just put it off as a passing remark. |
| 76 | ** Or maybe they arranged for Tom to shoot several short scenes in which he takes up his position as Curator, complete with some words of wisdom about having earned a rest and the chance to remember those he's traveled with. They could store that footage as long as they need to, then splice whichever version fits best into an epilogue for the series' GrandFinale, however far in the real-world future that might happen. |
| 77 | ** FridgeBrilliance -- this is the whole point. There's potentially an eternity to go between the Eleventh Doctor and the Curator. The character can theoretically last forever and ever now. |
| 78 | * Also, is the Curator actually [[spoiler: the Doctor]] and if so, how can that be if [[spoiler: Four was obviously far less aged than Tom Baker as the curator at the time he regenerated in "Logopolis"?]] Or perhaps he could be [[spoiler: the Watcher?]] |
| 79 | ** If the Curator is [[spoiler:the Doctor]], he's most likely a [[spoiler:future regeneration. The Curator mentions "revisiting old faces," so presumably some time in the Doctor's distant future retirement, he starts feeling nostalgic, and regenerates into Tom Baker again.]] |
| 80 | *** "The Girl Who Died" suggests that [[spoiler: the Doctor's faces are selected by his own subconscious. Presumably he starts "revisiting old faces" because his feelings of nostalgia are skewing the process, not because he deliberately decided to look that way.]] |
| 81 | ** It could be he is 4 in all honesty. Time Crash establishes that when multiple incarnations of a Time Lord meet it can have an aging effect on the earlier ones, as seen in the Two Doctors as well. The simple fact is we'll never know for certain. |
| 82 | ** Timey-Wimey. Some events are fixed, and some aren't. The Curator seems to be a potential future incarnation of the Doctor, but future events may or may not lead him to that path... and I personally hope not, because GOD was that a stupid plot point. Way to kill both the Time War and Trenzalore, the two biggest source of drama and drive in one episode. |
| 83 | ** The Doctor/Curator could still die at Trenzalore. Maybe he comes out of retirement for some reason. |
| 84 | ** Or it could have turned out to have changed his death back to Lake Silencio as the Teselecta had recorded. |
| 85 | ** The Time War has been driving the series now since 2005 -- that's eight years at time of the episode airing. Let's face it, drama-wise it's probably a safe time to start moving on from that and finding something else for the series to explore. Realistically, there's only so long you can keep beating the "the Doctor's the Last of the Time Lords and is really really sad / depressed / angry because of the Time War" drum before it starts to look a bit stale and repetitive -- ArcFatigue and AngstDissonance are things to consider as well. As for Trenzalore, come on, let's be honest -- that's practically had "the Doctor's gonna figure out some way of getting out of ''this'' one" stencilled on to it in letters eighty miles high in fluorescent yellow ink since it was introduced. The Curator is just confirmation of something we all deep down know anyway -- the Doctor's not gonna be dying at Trenzalore any time soon. |
| 86 | ** If they do want to revisit an old Doctor after the original passed away, including [[spoiler:Tom Baker's Curator]] They'd likely do what they all ready did; cast an actor who looks enough like him that people will accept him as playing that character, it's how "Twice Upon a Time" includes the 1st Doctor with William Hartnell long dead. |
| 87 | [[/folder]] |
| 88 | |
| 89 | [[folder:Learning the Zygon's Plans]] |
| 90 | * If Queen Elizabeth was [[spoiler:impersonating the Zygon commander,]] then where exactly did she have time to [[spoiler:learn all their plans? Did one of them go AsYouKnow on her, thinking she was who she was impersonating?]] |
| 91 | ** As the (apparent) commander of the invasion fleet, she could simply order one of them to give her an update. |
| 92 | ** It's still a hell of a lot of detailed information for her to rattle off so calmly - she sounded like she knew exactly what she was talking about. |
| 93 | ** She's the Queen of England; confidence, calm, authority and poise are part of the job description. |
| 94 | ** The Zygons appear to be somewhat telepathic (with Kate Stewart's Zygon knowing her classified information and Osgood's Zygon knowing about her sister being "the pretty one") In fact the Tardis Index File states that they keep the person they're impersonating alive as a "Psychic and genetic template". Though we can't know for certain, it's possible when Elizabeth killed her Zygon duplicate some of its memories wound up in her head through this psychic link. |
| 95 | ** This also explains how Osgood knew where her Zygon duplicate was, and how Kate knew that the Zygon duplicate of herself had all of her memories. The memory transfer is 2-way, so what ever one of them knows, the other will know as well. Later in the episode, the real Osgood makes a few remarks about the possibility of being a Zygon and "what happens if I lose a shoe or something?". The two way memory transfer psychic link would also explain that as well. |
| 96 | ** "The Zygon Inversion" reveals something of what a pod-encased Zygon-victim experiences, and they ''can'' perceive what their Zygon copy is doing. It's likely that Elizabeth was initially sealed up in a pod, but was set free by one of the castle's human occupants once the majority of the Zygons had entered the paintings and there weren't enough of them left to guard the pods. Which would rather imply that the one Ten was romancing at the start ''was'' a Zygon after all, just one that was better at holding its shape than the horse... |
| 97 | [[/folder]] |
| 98 | |
| 99 | [[folder:Lack of Reapers]] |
| 100 | * Yet again, why doesn't various Doctors touching each other bring [[ClockRoaches the Reapers]] in? |
| 101 | ** One of the Doctors at the end notes that they shouldn't be with the War Doctor at the end, meaning that something is making it possible for them to cross the timeline. Presumably the Moment is fixing things somehow. |
| 102 | ** Did no one pay attention to what allowed the Reapers to appear in Father's Day? 3 versions of a human, two of the same incarnation of a Time Lord, two of the same TARDIS, a paradox and a man alive who should be dead. Rose touching baby Rose merely exacerbated an already badly damaged situation. Just touching your past self doesn't cause Reapers to appear, as evidenced by the Doctor, the Brig and Kazran doing it on past occasions. And 10 noted they shouldn't be there because it was a part of the Time War, and should have been Time Locked. |
| 103 | ** ^ All very true; making physical contact with another version of yourself doesn't attract the Reapers; massive paradoxes do. Although with that being said, Time Lords have always been shown to be immune to the Blinovitch Limitation Effect, so it wouldn't have affected the Doctors anyway. |
| 104 | ** Ten also mentions that the three of them locked in the same cell for a long period of time would have bad repercussions, so there's no saying it wouldn't happen, just that the threat isn't too immediate. |
| 105 | ** Also a point people seem to miss a lot with the Reapers; they are not an inevitable result of time paradoxes, they are a ''possible'' result of time paradoxes and not even a likely one, judging by the fact they only showed up once in decades of episodes. In ''Fathers Day'' despite the dozy of a paradox the Doctor isn't expecting the Reapers to show up until he finds the empty TARDIS. He knows what they are but their appearance was a surprise to him. |
| 106 | [[/folder]] |
| 107 | |
| 108 | [[folder:Married to the Queen]] |
| 109 | * Doesn't being married to a [[strike:British]] [[InsistentTerminology English]] King/Queen make you a prince(ss)(technically royal consort)? |
| 110 | ** Back then, as I understand it and possibly I don't, marrying the Queen made you the King. That was why Lord Dudley was in such a panic to get Lady Jane Grey (the "nine day queen" poor girl) on the throne, so he could then claim it via his marriage to her. I think the modern Prince Consort thing was because of William and Mary following the Glorious Revolution. I could be completely wrong though. |
| 111 | ** William III had a strong claim to the throne in his own right, so he and Mary II reigned as joint monarchs. Prince Consort is from Albert when Parliament decided that they needed to show that just marrying Queen Victoria didn't mean that Albert was now entitled to utilise her theoretical powers. |
| 112 | ** ^Queen Anne's husband, in the very next reign after William III, wasn't made king, either, and was only known as Prince George become was a Danish prince in his own right. I think the title Prince Consort was created for Albert so that he could have an official title short of king, rather than just being the Queen's husband. |
| 113 | ** This -- or something like it at least -- was one of the reasons why the real Elizabeth I was so reluctant to marry; marrying would transfer most, if not all, of her power to her husband. |
| 114 | ** Ten, after finding Liz was real, mutters "I'm going to be king!" So yes, I suppose technically he's a King of England. |
| 115 | ** Which means that Victoria couldn't banish him! He'd been king for over three hundred years at that point. You can't banish the king (I assume while acknowledging that I know nothing of English succession laws). |
| 116 | ** Except Elizabeth was dead at the time so he was technically no longer King. And he hadn't married Elizabeth yet in his personal timestream. |
| 117 | ** To be fair you can't say that for certain as for some strange reason English Royal Succession Laws do not seem to cover what to do in the case time travel. |
| 118 | ** Also, you can indeed banish the king, provided you also depose him. There are several instances of this throughout the history of England and other countries. |
| 119 | ** There is no precedent that being married to the Queen Regnant makes someone the King. Mary I was married to Philip II of Spain, but he wasn't King of England. Ten was probably being flippant when he said that he was going to be king. |
| 120 | ** Queen Elizabeth II's husband is Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. Take that as you will. |
| 121 | ** The Doctor's just making a quip about the awkward circumstances he's inadvertently gotten himself stuck in, he's not giving a lecture on the exact nature of the British laws of succession or the rules and customs of British royal titles. Plus, he's pretty big-headed. Hence why he says 'king' instead of 'royal consort' or whatever. |
| 122 | ** Presumably if he ''had'' married her and stayed there, he'd eventually have outlived Elizabeth. Unless humans and Gallifreyans can have children with one another (and this series, unlike many scifi shows, doesn't let its alien races crossbreed willy-nilly) he could well have ''inherited'' the throne upon her death. |
| 123 | *** The succession laws in regard to the crown of England do not run backwards, you can't inherit the crown from your spouse. |
| 124 | ** To the original person who said about Guilford Dudley. He had nothing to do with the crowning; Jane refused to make him King and said she make him a Duke (Duke of Clarence, I believe!). So the Doctor would only be King if Elizabeth decreed it or gave him the Crown Matrimonial, which allows them to rule together. Mary I had Philip II of Spain crowned as King and all their documents were signed together, but he never ''truly'' ruled England - that was solely Mary's job. He was the King Consort. Presumably, The Doctor would have been made the same. King Consort of England, Ireland and France, Defender of the Faith, Head of the Church of England and Ireland. |
| 125 | ** Similarly, one of Mary, Queen of Scots' problems with her second husband, Darnley, was that he wanted to be (actual) King of Scotland. As he had just as good a claim on the English succession as Mary did, he believed this would boost his chances. |
| 126 | ** Important point; whatever the criteria to be king you aren't actually officially in the position until your coronation which the Doctor never had. So no, he was never actually king. |
| 127 | [[/folder]] |
| 128 | |
| 129 | |
| 130 | [[folder:Events of the Climax]] |
| 131 | * Okay, I'm kind of confused by what the previous Doctors were doing when they showed up. Were they aware of what was happening? Did they come in knowing about the Time War and what they were doing to save Gallifrey? And what exactly ''were'' they doing to save Gallifrey? Someone, please help me! |
| 132 | ** Okay, quick capsule explanation / theorising as best as I understand it; the Moment was allowing the Tenth and Eleventh Doctors to access the previously timelocked period of the Time War to comfort the War Doctor and be with him while he does what he has to. Once there, they realise that since there are now three of them, they can use their minds working together to figure out an alternative, better solution to destroying Gallifrey. They come up with a solution, but similar to their solution to escaping the jail cell using the sonic screwdriver where the earliest Doctor present begins solving the problem and the latest Doctor enacts the solution, they realise that it's going to take even longer than just the time difference that exists between the three of them. The Moment allows them to somehow contact the First Doctor and explain the situation, and he begins thinking of the calculations to enact the solution, which he continues to do when he's the Second, Third, Fourth Doctors etc. By the time it gets to the Eleventh Doctor, they've realised what the calculations for the solution are going to be, and they require all of the Doctors to be present in order to enact it. As the Moment is already allowing two time-displaced Doctors to access the Time War, it somehow enables all of them to do so. All of them presumably have some awareness of what the situation is / is going to be at the point when they're saving Gallifrey, but once they return to their own times the Moment or the space-time continuum or whatever basically wipes their memory of events so as to preserve the timeline (although presumably all of them have a subconscious memory of them in order to enable them to continue working on the solution to the problem, even if they're not consciously aware of what the problem will be yet). |
| 133 | ** As for what the solution ''is'', it's basically the same thing as the Gallifreyian 3D paintings we saw throughout the episode, except writ large; the Doctors have basically rigged those things that capture a single moment in time to be able to capture the entire planet, and have come up with calculations for how far away they need to be from Gallifrey to safely capture the entire planet within a single moment of time. This then puts the entire planet into temporal stasis, which to all intents and purposes takes it out of the space-time continuum. Essentially, it ceases to exist as part of the universe proper, and occupies it's own little 'bubble' of space and time where it exists frozen until it can be found and safely restored. |
| 134 | ** They not only had to calculate the mass of the planet, but also the mass of every person on Gallifrey, its vegetation and architecture, the oxygen around it, and exclude the daleks and their war machines. |
| 135 | ** The Doctor might have set the TARDIS to do the calculations. I don't think he was subconsciously doing them for centuries. |
| 136 | ** True, and even likely, although if we want to get picky he ''does'' tell the Time Lord general "I've been thinking about this for a long time," just before the other Doctors show up. |
| 137 | ** ^ Actually, he says "You might say, I've been ''doing'' this all my lives," which could still apply to having the TARDIS run the calculations for him. |
| 138 | ** Well played, my friend. Well played... |
| 139 | ** Depending which version of Time Travel is in effect here, it's possible the Doctors had always already been calculating for this and Gallifrey was actually locked in time rather than blown up the first time, and he only thought he had destroyed it, so he went back and confirmed what he'd already done, while *thinking* that he had un-done something he never actually did. |
| 140 | *** Oh no, I've gone cross-eyed... |
| 141 | ** Wouldn't it be interesting if it turned out the portion of the TARDIS's system that was doing the calculations all this time was the portion that normally handled the calculations for the Chameleon Circuit? It would certainly explain why it's never worked right... |
| 142 | * When the Doctors were freezing Gallifrey, why didn't the Daleks shoot down the TARDIS? They flew right through what was implied to be the largest Dalek fleet ever assembled! Surely the Daleks would have been capable of doing it, since they had already destroyed EVERY battle Tardis, and gotten through the 400 sky trenches surrounding Arcadia! The only reason the Daleks in the parting of the ways couldn't do it was because of the waveform extrapolator, which the pre-ninth doctor's [=TARDISes=] didn't have, and those Daleks weren't even up to time war level tech! |
| 143 | ** How do we know the classic-era [=TARDISes=] didn't have the waveform extrapolator? The Doctor (all 13 of him) is engaged in a very tricky task, and it's implied that it ''demanded'' all of his incarnations there to pull it off. We only ''see'' War, Ten, and Eleven throwing the console switches, but why bring in the others if they weren't involved in setting up the stasis as well? When One was handed the calculations to begin work, "... and it would be really nice if we all lived through setting up the field despite flying through an enemy armada at the time" sounds like a reasonable addition to make. |
| 144 | ** The earlier [=TARDISes=] may not have had a waveform extrapolator, but they likely had some kind of forcefield technology. Possibly FridgeBrilliance; the Ninth Doctor didn't have a forcefield because the TARDIS was damaged during the Time War, and the waveform extrapolator allowed him to ''replace'' it. |
| 145 | * Not only that, there don't appear to be NEARLY enough Dalek ships. There only appeared to be a few hundred at must, yet it was stated in "Dalek" that there were TEN MILLION ships when they all were destroyed. To put that number in perspective, that's FIFTY THOUSAND times larger than the Dalek fleet in bad wolf/the parting of the ways. Ten million ships should have looked like a cloud enveloping the planet. |
| 146 | ** This one, I think, has to be chalked up to exaggeration and memory distortion (in-universe) and technological / budgetary limitations (outside-universe). From a Watsonian perspective, the Doctor might not have an accurate memory of how many ships there were (understandably, given how swiss-cheesed his memory must be from all the temporal shenanigans going on at the time and how many versions of himself appear to have been present) and is simply using a big number to establish that it was quite a lot. From a Doylist position, even for modern special effects units it might be a bit of a tall order to ask the CGI animators to generate exactly ten million Dalek ships without completely blowing the budget or the computers used to animate them to bits or completely obscuring exactly what was supposed to be going on. |
| 147 | ** Considering the plan was to have the Daleks kill each other in the crossfire, I think the ten million and the cloud idea is probably more inclined with what happened and they just couldn't show it. Dozens of ships easily could have survived the crossfire from what we see there but if it's basically a wall firing in wards it gives a lot more credence to the idea of (most of) all the Daleks being destroyed in the battle. |
| 148 | ** Another possible Watsonian / FridgeBrilliance solution; the Doctor says there were ten million ships at the final attack -- however, keep in mind that he himself is there ''thirteen times''. The real amount is likely much less, but he is confusing the multiple times he encountered the same ships and conflating them all together as the War Doctor's memory of events rather than the thirteen different perspectives on the same event it actually was. |
| 149 | ** Or maybe there ''are'' ten million ships attacking the planet, but the majority aren't anywhere near big enough to be seen in a shot that includes the whole of Gallifrey in the background. Planets are ''big'', and only the most gigantic ships of the Dalek fleet would be visible as more than pinpricks in relation to the world they're attacking. Realistically, we wouldn't be able to see dinky little police boxes zipping around it either, if the camera didn't specifically zoom in on them so the audience can make out that they're the TARDIS. |
| 150 | ** This Troper always took the use of The Moment being the destruction of both worlds and their species regardless of where they were in the universe. Destroying a single planet shouldn't have killed them all, nor the ship to ship crossfire managing to destroy every Dalek. Nine said "10 million ships, the entire Dalek race, wiped out in one second." This sounds like The Moment had to have reached out and did a Thanos-snap to get them all. |
| 151 | [[/folder]] |
| 152 | |
| 153 | [[folder:The rest of the Time War]] |
| 154 | * What happened to the rest of the Time War? I had kind of assumed that when we finally found out exactly what happened re Gallifrey, the Daleks, the Doctor, the Moment, etc, we would ALSO find out what happened re the Could-Have-Been King and his army of Meanwhiles and Neverwheres, the Nightmare Children, the Quantum Time Lock... etc. Apparently not. |
| 155 | ** The time lock was not the end of the war. It was simply a way to isolate the war from the rest of the timeline. Those events are a part of the war itself, not its end. |
| 156 | ** Plus, to look at it from a Doylist point of view for a moment, some things work better as {{Noodle Incident}}s and / or don't need to be shown or explained. |
| 157 | ** There was a mention at some point (towards End of Time or Utopia or there abouts) of how both sides kept abusing time travel to revive their troops, resulting in the same soldiers dying countless times (a stealth shout out in Last Day), so I'd assume they time-locked it once things started getting out of hand. |
| 158 | ** Maybe the Nightmare Child ''et al.'' were the other superweapons from the Omega Arsenal. The Time Lords had already expended them, and they failed to end the war. |
| 159 | ** It's worth noting that the unfortunate Time Lady that Rassilon vaporizes in ''The End of Time'' mentions that Gallifrey is "the furthest edge of the Time War." Presumably, the Time Lords would try to keep all the really nasty stuff as far from themselves as possible. |
| 160 | ** This bothers me too. You can't really say all the other threats were dealt with at that point since the Doctor mentions they'll come back too during the End of Time which is set on the last day of the war (though coming to think of it the Doctor might not have known when Rassilion was). I feel like they wanted to simplify the story by removing all the other factions of the Time War since the 50th anniversary was a big event that a lot of people that aren't major fans of the show would watch. Hence why we spent most of it dabbing around Victorian England rather than the Time War. That and actually depicting the sort of things that were meant to be there would really hard. |
| 161 | ** There's a specific time-stamp on the opening Fall of Arcadia scene, that states it's the ''last day'' of the Time War. Presumably all the battles and catastrophes and nightmarish creatures which the Doctor had name-dropped in previous stories were brought to bear much earlier in the war than that. |
| 162 | [[/folder]] |
| 163 | |
| 164 | [[folder:Numbering]] |
| 165 | * Due to Hurt's existence, we now have a problem in terms of identification and lifespan. Hurt is now known as the Ninth incarnation of The Doctor, replacing Eccleston and making all revived series Doctors up a number. Does the numbering system change as well with him? I bring this up because it is not just a fandom identifier, but also a reference to The Doctor's lifespan. It is a set-in-stone canon understanding that a Time Lord can only regenerate 12 times. |
| 166 | ** My guess is that they'll continue calling him the War Doctor so they can keep their past numbering. Remember that the episode ends with TrickedOutTime, so War through 10 still don't know he deserves to be called the Doctor, and 11 just learned. As for the number of regenerations - I expect that they'll make an episode about the Doctor extending his number of regenerations somehow. It may be set in stone, but in a show about time travel, you can always go back and rechisel the stone. |
| 167 | ** Didn't the Master acquire a new set of Regenerations for the Time War? Plus, didn't Melody/River Song give up her Regenerations to the Doctor? |
| 168 | ** ^ River Song did not give her regenerations to the Doctor. She used her all of regenerative energy in one big burst in order to bring him back to life and heal him of the poison. They note at the end of the episode that the energy was "used up," and when the Doctor does the same thing in order to heal River's wrist in "The Angels Take Manhattan", she calls it a "waste of regeneration energy." |
| 169 | ** Well, there's still the "granted new regenerations by the Time Lords". If anyone has earned them, it would be The Doctor for saving Gallifrey (assuming he wanted them of course). |
| 170 | ** Yes, but I think 11 is technically the last incarnation of the Doctor if he's like any other time lord and can only regenerate 12 times. Here's the order: 1st - 2nd - 3rd - 4th - 5th - 6th - 7th - 8th - War - 9th - 10th - 11th. But keep in mind 10th regenerated twice in Journey's End, so it's actually 9th - 10th - 10th(Meta-crisis). Melody/River Song might have gave up her regenerations to 11 but remember he gave some of it back in the events of The Angels take Manhattan. |
| 171 | ** You've made a small error. A Time Lord has 12 ''regenerations'', but 13 ''incarnations''. The first incarnation begins with ordinary birth, and the other 12 incarnations begin with regeneration. So the Doctor has 13 lives. Matt Smith is the 12th incarnation, but he's the 11th "Doctor", because the War Doctor doesn't count in our numbering scheme. Peter Capaldi will be the 13th incarnation, and the 12th doctor. (As for the meta-crisis Doctor, maybe that doesn't count for some reason. It wasn't a normal regeneration, after all.) As for what happens ''after'' Peter Capaldi...I'm guessing there will be a storyline where the Doctor gets a new set of regenerations somehow. |
| 172 | ** Steven Moffat has commented on this matter in [[http://metro.co.uk/2013/11/24/doctor-who-steven-moffat-clears-up-the-whole-doctor-regeneration-problem-sort-of-4199592/ An interview]], saying that it is basically up to the viewer to determine the numbering. The War Doctor carried the title of "Doctor" for about a day which he subsequently forgot all about, so he can be called the "War Doctor" or the "Ninth Doctor" depending on one's own interpretation. In-narrative, there have been twelve incarnations of the Doctor (although he seems to have used up an extra regeneration on the meta-crisis, which would mean that Capaldi breaks the twelve regenerations limit), but only eleven of those incarnations have formally used the title of "Doctor." |
| 173 | ** Is the "only 12 regenerations" thing set in stone? Because I've seen other discussions about this that say things like that was just a rule the Time Lords set up and they can actually regenerate more times than that if they wanted. Plus they somehow gave the Master more regenerations, if the Doctor really is out of "regeneration energy" or whatever there does seem to be a way to get more. As for the numbering thing, Hurt = the 8.5th Doctor seems to be a popular option. |
| 174 | ** The new series basically quietly forgot about the 12 regeneration limit. It was never brought up again. In fact, in [[Recap/TheSarahJaneAdventuresS4E5E6DeathOfTheDoctor SJA "Death of the Doctor"]], Eleven claims he can regenerate 507 times, though given the context, it's quite possibly a joke. |
| 175 | ** In cinemas prior to the airing, he made reference to 57 Doctors. As wiser people than I have noted, in both cases the numbers add up to twelve. |
| 176 | ** The intro is probably not canon, considering the Doctors are talking directly to the audience and referencing the fictional nature of the show. |
| 177 | ** It's been implied (if not outright stated), that the limit is at least partially artificial (or regeneration itself is, given to time lords by Rassilon). If the limit was imposed or built into regeneration when it first started, there's no reason it couldn't be changed. |
| 178 | ** Solved in "Time of the Doctor". [[spoiler: 11 is actually 13, counting the War Doctor and meta-crisis Doctor, but during the siege on Trenzalore the Time Lords grant him a new regeneration cycle.]] Presumably since the numbering doesn't get called attention to in-universe too much (it's mostly just a way for fans to distinguish between them), the numbering will stay the same with the names of the extra Doctors being referred to by the names above. |
| 179 | * FWIW, at time of writing several years on, broad consensus seems to have just kept the War Doctor as the War Doctor and the (for want of a better term) 'proper' Doctors have kept the original order of numbering, meaning that Eccleston is the Ninth Doctor, Tennant (both before and after the meta-crisis) is the Tenth Doctor, and so on. |
| 180 | [[/folder]] |
| 181 | |
| 182 | [[folder:"Gallifrey Falls"]] |
| 183 | * "Gallifrey Falls / No More" is ''not'' the pocket universe where the Doctors hide Gallifrey, it's just a Time Lord painting, right? (If it was the real Gallifrey in the painting, Eleven should've figured that out.) Meaning that it's just a depiction of one frozen moment of time. How, then, are the Doctors able to move inside it, as they were on the real Gallifrey? And how are they able to punch a (seemingly) real Dalek out of the painting? Wouldn't this mean they could also bring all the Gallifreyans out of the painting, thus saving them? |
| 184 | ** "Gallifrey Falls / No More" is ''just'' the capital building ''after'' it had fallen. There probably aren't any Gallifreyans in there to save at that point. They're probably limited to the depicted area as well, so if they could pull out the Gallifreyans, it would just be that building's worth. It's literally too little and too late. |
| 185 | ** What's more, how did they even get into that particular painting when they did? Did they go to Gallifrey to freeze themselves in that moment? The transition from them formulating the plan to them executing it was unclear (it was cool though). |
| 186 | ** They added themselves to the painting the same way the Zygons did with other paintings (with the glass thingy). |
| 187 | ** Yes, but that still doesn't explain how they were able to move inside the painting (which is supposed to be only one moment of frozen time), or where the Dalek came from. |
| 188 | ** In all likelihood, the painting only appears frozen from the outside but some limited amount of movement is possible (if only within a fairly limited range; like, only within the area of space captured by the painting, for example). In any case, they're Time Lords entering a piece of time-locking technology created and used by other Time Lords. If the Zygons clearly managed to figure out a way to move around inside of the paintings, three Time Lords should be able to do it no problem. |
| 189 | ** This. The painting's ''duration'' is longer on the inside, same as the Tardis's height, width, and breadth are larger on the inside. That's what makes Gallifreyan art more than just fancy holographics; proper art appreciation on Gallifrey probably involved ''walking around'' inside the image. |
| 190 | ** I'm rather confused that it wasn't, as that looked to be where the episode was heading. It could still turn out to be Gallifrey I guess... |
| 191 | ** When the three Doctors explain their plan to the Time Lord bosses, they say that what their doing is similar to the stasis cubes (the machines used to create the [=3D=] paintings), but much bigger. So the implication is that a mere painting couldn't hold entire Gallifrey. They also mention that Gallifrey will be hidden in another universe; it seems unlikely it's in the painting. |
| 192 | ** I took it that using the technique for suspended animation was something the Zygons cooked up as an additional feature. The Doctor(s) then not only use this to get back to the 21st century, but turn it up to eleven (or rather, thirteen) to stow Gallifrey away. |
| 193 | * How did Elizabeth get her hands on the painting in the first place? |
| 194 | ** She didn't. The curator (implied to be a future version of the Doctor) did. |
| 195 | ** So if the curator found it, why is it described as "Elizabeth's credentials"? Why did Elizabeth need credentials? How is a painting a credential anyway? |
| 196 | ** A painting made using Gallifreyan space magic is proof - her credentials - that she had something to do with the Doctor, a Gallifreyan space magician. |
| 197 | ** But if Elizabeth didn't get her hands on the painting ever, what is its connection to her? |
| 198 | ** Where is it ever said she didn't? The curator remarks that there's "an interesting story" behind the recovery of the painting, but doesn't elaborate any further -- it's hardly out the realm of the possible that Queen Elizabeth was somehow involved. |
| 199 | ** The painting is painted using Time Lord technology, but if the Time Lords were all killed/sent into a pocket dimension at the last moment of the Time War, who could have painted it? While it's not specifically stated, based on dialog it's pretty obvious that the Doctor didn't; but he's the only Time Lord left who could use that style. |
| 200 | ** The Curator says there's a very interesting story behind the acquisition of the painting. Perhaps the Doctor ''did'' paint it, but he hasn't ''yet''? |
| 201 | ** Or it was painted by one of the Curator's ''previous'' regenerations. Perhaps painting ''Gallifrey Falls No More'' is the last thing some far-future Doctor will do before he retires and ''becomes'' the Curator. |
| 202 | ** And gifts it to Elizabeth and has her write the letter to himself to close the loop. |
| 203 | * So is the "painting" really a painting? i.e. Did some artist use materials to create a stylized image based on his/her observations, albeit with literal depth, or should we consider it more like a photograph, albeit with more depth? |
| 204 | ** Apparently yes; everyone calls them paintings, we have no reason to doubt them, and when you look at them they do have a kind of stylized 'painted' look to them. Precisely how they are painted is [[NoodleImplements left up to the imagination of the viewer]], but they apparently are paintings (not least since, well, if they were photographs everyone would presumably just refer to them as such). |
| 205 | [[/folder]] |
| 206 | |
| 207 | [[folder:The War Doctor is not very Warlike]] |
| 208 | * Is it just me, or should the War Doctor have been more...warlike? I mean, he contrasted with 10 and 11, but mainly in the sense of being more gruff and serious. He didn't seem any more ruthless than his counterparts, and he didn't use any more violence. Sure he killed some Daleks at the beginning, but 11 has killed Daleks too (in the "Asylum" episodes). The War Doctor is willing to sacrifice innocent people to save the world, but 10 made a similar choice in "Fires of Pompeii". The War Doctor is supposed to be a great warrior, isn't he? But he's easily imprisoned by some medieval guards; he apparently carries no weapons whatsoever. (I guess he discarded that gun he had at the beginning.) In "The Night of the Doctor", we see that 8 ''specifically'' regenerated into a warrior. But the War Doctor doesn't seem particularly warlike. He just seems gruff. What's up with that? |
| 209 | ** He's been at war for a ''loooong'' time. We're not shown how old he looked when he first regenerated, but he was probably far younger, and it takes a very long time for Time Lords to show any signs of age. He is a very old veteran of a very old war. He's done with all his fighting; he just wants to finish it. |
| 210 | ** The glimpse of his face at the end of "The Night of the Doctor" is of a much younger John Hurt, less wrinkly with no beard so yes it would seem he's been at it a while. Although he says he's only 800 years old which is a slight issue cos he's certainly aged a lot physically. War does that I guess. |
| 211 | ** The Doctor lies, especially about his age. He could have meant just that regeneration was 800. |
| 212 | ** Unlikely, considering other Doctors' off-screen lifetimes. Off the top of my head, Eleven spent 300 years away and didn't visually age, so another 500 would make him look as old as the War Doctor? Also, I know Eight spent 800 years on Orbis in the ''Orbis'' audio drama and he didn't really change either. You can call in the debatable canonicity of the audio dramas all you want, but it still makes it less likely that they're just going to say "War Doctor lived 800 years" when Eight did it and was still pretty. |
| 213 | ** Perhaps regeneration specifically as a warrior causes faster aging? could be either being a warrior (whatever that actually means other than being gruff) takes a tougher toll on that particular regeneration or should said regeneration not die in battle the accelerated aging allows them to die of old age(which he seemed to do at the end of the episode) and regenerate sooner? |
| 214 | ** That's partly the ''point''. The War Doctor built himself up as this man who would go farther than anyone else, and he ultimately convinced his future incarnations of that. However, in the end, he couldn't change who he was... he was ''still'' the Doctor, still the good man that honored the promise he kept when he took the name. And that's ultimately the tragedy of the character: he'll forever be remembered this way, and carry this guilt for so long. He made the ultimate sacrifice, and that was his own good name. |
| 215 | ** I understand that the War Doctor is still essentially the Doctor. But really, shouldn't the man at least carry a weapon of some sort? How exactly has he been effective against the Daleks, when he can't even handle some medieval guards? |
| 216 | ** His greatest weapon is still his mind? He does carry his screwdriver on a bandolier, but doesn't "wave it around like a water pistol". |
| 217 | ** The above point also still stands in that he is clearly a very old man at that point. Even great warriors get old and can't throw down like they used to at some point. If you were to try picking a fight with Genghis Khan at age 65, he might be able to hold his own but you'd probably have an easier time of it than if you tried picking a fight with him at age 17 or 24 or 33. Furthermore, it's technically himself (well, the Eleventh Doctor, but you know what I mean) who eagerly accepts, even ''encourages'' the guards to throw them into the Tower. At that point, the Eleventh Doctor clearly looks like he has a plan to get them out of that particular mess, and since the main reason the War Doctor is there is to observe his future selves, he goes along with it in order to continue observing them. He doesn't 'handle' the guards because he has no ''reason'' to handle the guards. |
| 218 | ** Plus, it's ''only'' Daleks that he's been fighting for all this time; anyone who looks like a Time Lord, he's been ''protecting'' as best he can. The guards are human, so look like Time Lords. Now that he's got his first opportunity in ages ''not'' to fight, but to let Ten and Eleven do it for him, he's not going to be in a hurry to knock around people who look just like the troops he's been leading and the civilians he's been defending. |
| 219 | ** The original script was intended to feature the 9th doctor in the role that the War Doctor eventually took. As Eccleston declined to revisit the role, it was rewritten to feature a brand new incarnation that no one ever heard of before. The characterization makes much sense when you realize that it would have featured the PTSD ridden 9th doctor instead of John Hurt. |
| 220 | *** Which would have made Clara's realization that he ''hadn't done it yet'' all the more of a surprise, possibly to the audience too in that version! |
| 221 | [[/folder]] |
| 222 | |
| 223 | [[folder:Zygons and the Memory Gambit]] |
| 224 | * When Kate Stewart explains how the memory erasing machines work, it seems they only wipe the memory of your visit to the Black Archive, i.e. the events of one day. But when the machines are used on the humans and Zygons, that shouldn't be enough to make anyone forget who they are, since they're still gonna remember the day before the visit, when they were either a human or a Zygon. In order for the memory thing to work, the machine should wipe their entire memories right down to early childhood. But if that's the case, everyone in that room should be awfully confused, and certainly not capable of having any negotiations. |
| 225 | ** The Zygons might have worked out who they were but don't want to go back to the nuclear warhead stage. |
| 226 | ** Doesn't the Doctor manipulate the machine using his screwdriver? He might as well have changed its setting in a way that the Zygons forgot their non-copied memories, and the humans... well, they don't seem to have forgotten anything, really. |
| 227 | ** It seemed to go both ways, shuffling the memories around. The Zygons already had both human and Zygon memories, so the humans were given Zygon memories, with a few edits so that no one knows for sure which is which. |
| 228 | ** Also note that, if their memories were truly completely wiped, they would have forgotten *everything*, including how to speak. The "memory wipe" technology is likely more of a selective block of conscious memories. They can't actively recall any specific events that occurred to them, but their minds are still capable of recalling, for example, the capabilities of each race (otherwise they could never have negotiated a treaty). |
| 229 | * So, the Doctors wipe the humans and Zygons' minds to get them to negotiate. What was stopping the groups from attempting to drop their disguises to figure out who was who? Both groups knew one group was composed of Zygons, after all. Although it could be that, without knowing they were definitely Zygons, the Zygons wouldn't know how to drop their disguises. |
| 230 | ** Because if either side worked out who the Zygons were, they could be sent back to a less than desirable square one. If the Zygons choose to attack, they would have to trigger the self destruct and blow london. If they choose to negotiate, it would be from a position of weakness. Either way, it's bad for both sides. The humans don't want to destroy London, and nor do they want to give too much to the Zygons. The Zygons don't want to be blown up, and know that they would get a much better treaty while they're still uncertain. So once they've been blanked, nobody has anything to gain by finding out until after the negotiations are complete. This is vaguely hinted at when human Osgood gives the inhaler to zygon Osgood, and they both wordlessly agree to stay quiet about it. |
| 231 | [[/folder]] |
| 232 | |
| 233 | [[folder:Plot Holes and Loose Ends]] |
| 234 | * So... Why was the subplot with the Zygons suddenly dropped? What happened after [[spoiler: the two Osgoods realized who was real and who wasn't]]? What happened to Kate at the end? Did they work everything out? Really, this thing could have at least given them a passing line. Also, why did Elizabeth I ever agree to marry Ten after he blatantly insulted her to her face several times? Why didn't the War Doctor tell Ten and Eleven what was going on (especially after the "Did you say 'Bad Wolf girl'?" line rom Ten)? |
| 235 | ** I think the negotiation, particularly the bit with the Osgoods was to imply that they were willing to work things out. |
| 236 | ** Several of these points, although not directly explained, can be easily resolved through inference. The fact that, at the end, the three Doctors and Clara are calmly taking tea in the secret rooms of the National Gallery and discussing Gallifreyian art instead of frantically running around a London that's been reduced to a blasted post-nuclear war-zone clearly suggests that negotiations between humans and Zygons were ultimately successful. We can also assume that the Tenth and Eleventh Doctors didn't leave to join the War Doctor until they made sure that everything was resolved (it's not like for them there's a rush, after all, since its in their past). The fact that Inhaler!Osgood shushes her doppleganger when she hands over the inhaler, with Non-Inhaler!Osgood silently taking it, suggests that both kept quiet about which was a human and which was a Zygon. Kate, in light of the previous, was presumably a-okay. As for why Queen Elizabeth still wants to marry the Tenth Doctor despite his rudeness, well, he's still a handsome and charismatic Lord of Time with a magical police box which, if nothing else, would probably make an advantageous pairing for an ambitious royal; she wouldn't be the first to be attracted to him despite his less admirable qualities. As for why the War Doctor doesn't spill the beans after mentioning 'Bad Wolf girl', who's to say he didn't? It's just that he kind of got caught up in events previously so didn't really have a chance, and then they undertook their whole plan to save Gallifrey, which took up more time, and really, up until that point he has no particular reason to suspect that 'Bad Wolf' or Rose Tyler has any special significance to either of these Doctors -- for all he knows she's a companion who enters his life even after them. |
| 237 | ** The real Elizabeth I wasn't exactly free of vanity and, in the episode, appears to have a pretty massive crush on the Doctor; she might have just convinced herself that the Doctor was merely lying / bluffing / joking about all that bad teeth, narrow eyes, smelly etc. stuff. She wouldn't be the first. |
| 238 | ** The Zygon plotline is, for the most part, resolved in "The Zygon Invasion/Inversion". In quite a satisfactory way, IMHO. |
| 239 | * Clara is wearing a wedding ring. |
| 240 | ** It's on her middle finger, not her ring finger. |
| 241 | ** We saw her being given that ring as a thank-you present at the end of another episode. |
| 242 | ** That ring was a gift from her dead mother. She needed to give it away to save the Doctor in a different episode, and they gave it back to her to thank her for saving the day. |
| 243 | * The War Doctor should remember Ten, since he saw him back as Five, in [[{{Recap/DoctorWho2007CiNSTimeCrash}} Time Crash]], and we know Ten did remember that encounter. |
| 244 | ** I think the Doctor forgot about these events until he needed to remember to sustain the time loop. |
| 245 | ** When multiple incarnations of a Time Lord meet, only the last one remembers the encounter at all (from "The Five Doctors" and "Time Crash" itself). On the other hand, ''during'' such an encounter those incarnations should all be aware of each other even if they haven't met (the Third Doctor knew all about the Fourth in "Five Doctors"). All three Doctors in this story should have recognized each other ''instantly'' with no chance of error. |
| 246 | ** Not necessarily. In "Time Crash", the Fifth Doctor doesn't immediately recognise the Tenth Doctor. And technically, in "The Five Doctors" the Third Doctor only 'knows' all about his future self because Sarah directly tells him that he changed and mimes out his next body's most distinctive characteristics ("Teeth and curls?!"); he even seems a little aghast when he says it, as if he's thinking "Oh God, I'm going to have big teeth and bad hair in a future body." There's nothing to suggest that the Third Doctor knows anything about or would immediately recognise the Fourth Doctor beyond what Sarah mentioned about him. It appears to be the case (or at least is something of a retcon in the new series) that when multiple personalities of the Doctor meet, the earlier Doctors don't immediately recognise the later Doctors but the later Doctors recognise the earlier Doctors. |
| 247 | ** As for Bad Wolf / not explaining what's going on, the War Doctor's there to observe his future selves to see how they've ended up and what they're like. He wants to get as accurate and natural impression of them as possible so he can figure out how they've turned out, so mentioning "Oh BT-dub, guys, this weapon of mass destruction I'm conflicted about activating has taken on the form of some blonde I haven't met yet and is sending me through time to observe you, so just act natural, yeah?" isn't likely to help, and is more likely to cause more arguments and explanations than it's worth. He probably explained it afterwards (or, more likely, given the Tenth Doctor's reaction to the out-of-nowhere mention of "Bad Wolf Girl", his future selves probably put two and two together in some way). |
| 248 | [[/folder]] |
| 249 | |
| 250 | [[folder:Elizabeth I]] |
| 251 | * ...How do we know that the Elizabeth I at the end ISN'T the Zygon pretending to be a victorious Elizabeth I? |
| 252 | ** The fact that she never did anything noticeably Zygon-y after that? |
| 253 | ** Well, she never ''did'' marry, did she? She was either waiting for the Doctor... or an Alien. |
| 254 | ** Also, would the Zygon have known if the real Elizabeth carried a hidden knife under her massive dress? |
| 255 | ** Knowing your opponent has a knife doesn't automatically prevent you from being stabbed by it. For all we know, there was a struggle first. |
| 256 | ** I suppose if we're technical we don't, and if you really want to head-canon that it ''was'' the Zygon then there's nothing really stopping you (it would partly explain why she never married and had kids). Although really, if she ''was'' the Zygon then there's no real reason to suddenly claim she was the real Elizabeth after all, since the 1562 part of the Zygon's plan is basically done by that point and if the actual Elizabeth's dead then someone's got to be the historical Queen Elizabeth and there's nothing the Doctor can do about it until 2013 anyway. |
| 257 | ** Wasn't it established in Terror of the Zygons that they could only hold their forms while the "originals" were alive and well? If the Zygon had killed Elizabeth, it would have had to mimic someone else. |
| 258 | [[/folder]] |
| 259 | |
| 260 | [[folder:Horrors still on Gallifrey]] |
| 261 | * The Doctor will now presumably search for [[spoiler: Gallifrey and rescue it from stasis]]. In doing so, he will also be releasing [[spoiler: The Master]] back into the Universe. Worse than this, however, [[spoiler: Gallifrey]] still presumably contains a very pissed off [[spoiler: Rassilon who was ready to use The Final Sanction. Even if he no longer seems to think that necessary (although that is far from a given) he'd likely be pretty pissed at The Doctor personally for thwarting him in [[Recap/DoctorWhoS30E17E18TheEndOfTime "The End of Time"]]]]. |
| 262 | ** [[spoiler: To say nothing of the ''thousands'' of Dalek ground troops that were fighting on the surface of Gallifrey. The Doctors' clever plan only annihilated the ones that were in the orbiting fleet.]] |
| 263 | ** [[spoiler:The Sky Trenches had only just fallen. The bulk of the Dalek forces were still bombarding the planet, while the bulk of the ''Time Lord'' forces were on Gallifrey. There was a LOT of Daleks on the ground, but they won't be getting reinforcements while the Time Lords whittle them down.]] |
| 264 | ** To make matters worse, [[spoiler: the Dalek Empire has recovered by now thanks to "Victory of the Daleks". Unless things change, recovering Gallifrey will cause hostilities between the Daleks and the Time Lords to resume, re-starting the War]]. |
| 265 | ** This becomes the central plot point of [[Recap/DoctorWho2013CSTheTimeOfTheDoctor "The Time of the Doctor"]] and by extension the entire Matt Smith era: [[spoiler:Everyone is certain that the return of Gallifrey to the main universe will result in the Time War beginning anew. The Silence and the Daleks do everything they can to prevent this.]] |
| 266 | ** There's also the issue of all the [[spoiler: [[EldritchAbomination Nightmare Child and its ilk]]. If the Moment didn't destroy everything, does that mean they potentially survived the war as well?]] |
| 267 | ** Then again, [[spoiler:they're {{Eldritch Abomination}}s. Maybe, being put into stasis isn't good for them]]. |
| 268 | ** [[spoiler: Maybe that's why Twelve looked so pissed in the brief moment (heh) we saw him: he knows what's coming.]] |
| 269 | ** Who says the Nightmare Child, the Would Have Been King, or the Army of Neverwheres were ''on'' Gallifrey during the Last Day? Bringing Gallifrey out of the timelock in "The End of Time" simply meant, to the Tenth Doctor, that the timelock itself would dissolve, allowing ALL the time-warring factions to come out of it wherever and whenever they pleased. |
| 270 | ** Or maybe the reason the Daleks have been able to interdict and assault Gallifrey itself is that they've already ''defeated'' all of those Omega-vault superweapons. The Time Lords were on the brink of ''losing'' the war when Arcadia fell. |
| 271 | ** [[spoiler:The Lower Council very explicitly states that the High Council (Rassilon's) was in emergency session cooking up its own plans, but the acting leader states that those plans have ''already failed''. And if they ''have'', and Rassilon isn't there to throw his weight around, he's probably dead or lost to them. He might not even be a threat anymore.]] |
| 272 | ** Rassilon has unlimited regenerations, so he's probably been foiled. |
| 273 | ** Wait, so Rassilon's "Final Sanction" plan failed before Gallifrey disappeared? |
| 274 | ** Makes sense, Rassilon tried his dodge, but the Doctor and the Master shoved them all back in the box. There is probably a change in leadership going on in the high council, when tyrants [[YouHaveFailedMe fail for the last time]] in their OTT plans they very quickly find [[YouHaveOutlivedYourUsefulness they have outlived their usefulness]] and a change in offices happens. Means one less thing for the Doctor to deal with when he recovers Gallifrey in the future. |
| 275 | ** Or the failure of all of Rassilon's current plans has led to the [[spoiler:invasion of Gallifrey]]. Given that Rassilon seems to be a psychopath with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, the [[spoiler:fall of Arcadia]] could very well be the tipping point that leads to his use of [[spoiler:The Final Sanction]]. |
| 276 | ** The General's line about "the High Council having plans of their own" probably means that the events of "The End of Time" happened simultaneously as this episode. So when just as the Master shoved Rassilon back into the box, the Doctors then froze Galifrey at the same time. |
| 277 | *** Specifically, he said that the High Council's plans had failed because Gallifrey was still in the line of fire. Presumably he'd known of Rassilon's attempt to shift Gallifrey to Earth's solar system, although not necessarily of the "destroy the universe and ascend to a higher plane" part of his scheme. |
| 278 | ** It could also possibly be that Rassilon's plan was a doomed-to-failure, never-going-to-work, "order-Steiner-to-defend-Berlin-with-nonexistent-troops" desperate scheme that was only even considered by the rest of the High Council out of fear of what an unstable Rassilon might do to them. |
| 279 | ** [[spoiler: The Master]] wasn't on Gallifrey at the time, so the [[spoiler: stasis]] didn't affect him. |
| 280 | ** [[spoiler: The version of the Master that ran from the war and gave himself amnesia wasn't there, but the future incarnation of the Master that shoved the corrupt Time Lords back to Gallifrey during "The End of Time" would be, since he went back with them.]] |
| 281 | ** Well hopefully the Doctor figures all this out and is able to stop them if needed when he [[spoiler: frees Gallifrey]]. |
| 282 | ** [[spoiler: Gallifrey is frozen in time.]] The Doctor has the whole of his life to prepare for the backlash that will come from [[spoiler:freeing Gallifrey.]] |
| 283 | ** I think that we're looking at some Fridge Awesome for the whole of Gallifrey, rather than ApocalypseHow; who else but the Time Lords - because [[TimeMaster Time. Freaking. Lords.]] - would (or could be able to move around while [[spoiler: TimeStandsStill]], thus providing ample opportunity to check the planetside Daleks into the Smackdown Hotel and refortify their planet. True, they wouldn't have any functional weapons, but the Daleks would be entirely defenseless before a race of angry and super-intelligent aliens. |
| 284 | ** Validated by the fact that Time Lords are apparently aware in whatever space-time pocket they currently occupy, and were watching the real universe through a crack on Trenzalore. They were also able to answer Clara's plea to save the Doctor, then dying of old age and having no more regenerations, by granting him a new cycle in a rather spectacular Dalek-obliterating fashion. These kinds of actions would be impossible if they were frozen in time. |
| 285 | [[/folder]] |
| 286 | |
| 287 | [[folder:The War Doctor and the rest of the regenerations]] |
| 288 | * Now that the War Doctor has been officially recognized as a Doctor by Eleven, Creator/PeterCapaldi will officially be playing the thirteenth man to bear the name Doctor. Unless he has extra regenerations, this means two things: |
| 289 | ** The Valeyard is coming. |
| 290 | ** Twelve is actually going to be the final Doctor. |
| 291 | ** Or, you know, there will be shenanigans that will allow him to regenerate more often. There's precedents for that. |
| 292 | ** The Master has had his regenerations reset at least twice (thanks to the events of [[DoctorWhoS18E6TheKeeperOfTraken "The Keeper of Traken"]] and [[Recap/DoctorWhoTVMTheTVMovie the Doctor Who movie]] respectively. Granted, he's evil and his actions heavily relied on a BodySurf and GrandTheftMe, but a Time Lord having his regenerations brought back to zero isn't unheard of. This also doesn't take into account whatever happened to the Master when he got brought back to life in [[Recap/DoctorWhoS29E11Utopia Utopia]]. |
| 293 | ** The Master did ''not'' regenerate in either The Keeper of Traken or The TV Movie. In both cases, he extended his life unnaturally by inhabiting the bodies of others. He was offered a new set of regenerations in [[Recap/DoctorWho20thASTheFiveDoctors "The Five Doctors"]], but as he failed in his task it was unlikely that he was given them. He tried to steal The Doctor's remaining ones in "The Five Doctors" (the body he had stolen was already breaking down, and he wouldn't have lived in it long) but that didn't work. The Time Lords did finally give him a new set of regenerations in The Time War, and ''that'' is why he was able to regenerate in Utopia. |
| 294 | ** Also, it's pretty ''heavily'' implied that The Curator, played by Tom Baker, towards the end of the special is a distant future incarnation of the Doctor, so there's that. |
| 295 | ** Also the bonus regenerations he got from River, in [[Recap/DoctorWhoS32E8LetsKillHitler Let's Kill Hitler]] must be remembered as well. |
| 296 | ** ^ Those were not bonus regenerations. At the end of the episode, it is said that all of the regeneration energy was used up in one go in order to bring the Doctor back to life, and the Doctor's own transfer of regeneration energy for the purpose of healing River's wrist was called a "waste" of regeneration energy. |
| 297 | ** The Master was also promised a new batch of regenerations in "The Five Doctors". |
| 298 | ** That potion brewed up by the Sisterhood of Karn probably fixed the regeneration problem. According to them the Doctor was DeaderThanDead when they pulled him out of Cass's suicide run. |
| 299 | ** You also have to think why the War Doctor regenerated so soon. The elixir was basically borrowed time, meaning he didn't have much time to do what he needed to do. Plus, he could've willingly regenerated after his task was over. For the Doctor, his time as a War Doctor was probably so short, compared to the years of his other regenerations, meaning they probably couldn't remember much about him. |
| 300 | ** I should think that the War Doctor actually lived quite a long time, given how young he looked in [[Recap/DoctorWho50thPrequelTheNightOfTheDoctor "Night of the Doctor"]] just after Eight regenerated. (Makes for some Fridge Horror about ''how long the Time War lasted''!) Rather, it seems that much like with the First Doctor, he just had gotten so old that it was his time. His last words even mirrored the First Doctor's comments about his body wearing thin... That would make for some irony that the War Doctor was one of the few Doctors to regenerate due to natural causes. |
| 301 | ** Perhaps less ironic than it sounds. The War Doctor was the only Doctor that was regenerated specifically for war circumstances so perhaps he was better suited for surviving conflict than the Doctor usually is. |
| 302 | ** The War Doctor is the Doctor who chose to fight in The Time War. As The Moment said: living is his punishment for that decision. (Granted, she said that would be his punishment if he used her to end the War). |
| 303 | ** Apparently, after Moffat watched the special in theaters, he stood up after and told the audience that the final shot of the episode showed ''all thirteen Doctors.'' How? David Tennant played (factoring in John Hurt as the Ninth) the Eleventh ''and Twelfth'' Doctors -- when he was shot in Journey's End, he actually did regenerate; all the energy from it was just stored inside of his old hand. Which makes Matt Smith the ''Thirteenth Doctor.'' Now the Christmas special makes a lot more sense -- it will be where the Doctor dies after his thirteenth life (for good) in a battle on Trenzalore (with Daleks, Cybermen, Weeping Angels, and the Silence, if the teaser is to be believed). Now the question is, how can he still become Peter Capaldi (and later Tom Baker again) if his thirteen lives are used up? Less than a month until we find out... |
| 304 | ** As long as the show keeps making money, there will be an excuse for why the Doctor has more than thirteen lives. |
| 305 | |
| 306 | [[/folder]] |
| 307 | |
| 308 | [[folder:Not the same screwdriver]] |
| 309 | * The key to unlocking the tower door (that didn't actually need unlocking) was that the War Doctor's screwdriver is the same as 11's, just with a different casing. But it's not. 10's was destroyed when he regenerated, and 11 had the TARDIS create a whole new one for him when he returned to it at the end of ''The Eleventh Hour''. So it's not the same one. Even if he had the calculations backed up in the TARDIS somehow and transferred the function to the new screwdriver, it would've had to have been set to do that beforehand. Meaning he'd have to have been aware he would need it to do that, but he didn't actually realize it was doing it until it was done. |
| 310 | ** TARDIS is sentient. Unlike the Doctor, she remembered this, since she does not see time in a linear way, and she backed up the calculation as soon as she started working on a new screwdriver. |
| 311 | ** Aye, they say it is the same _software_ in a new casing. They don't say any of the hardware is the same. |
| 312 | ** The War Doctor says he implanted the calculations into a permanent subroutine of the software architecture, meaning every version the screwdriver's software would have the calculation embedded somewhere in the base code. So the TARDIS isn't really necessary in backing up the calculation. |
| 313 | ** Think of it this way: every copy of your favorite program (say, web browser or text editor) uses the same code, but different data. Presumably the screwdriver makes periodic backups of the data it processes (in the TARDIS or wherever), which includes periodic backups of the state of this particular computation. Destroying one screwdriver simply meant the data was restored from the latest backup and the computation continued from this point. Similar to how a cautious modern computer user would restore data from backup if their hard drive failed. (At least, this is how I, a programmer, rationalize it. I don't think Moffat gave it that much thought.) |
| 314 | ** Except Doctors 1, 6 and 7 did not have screwdrivers at all in the television series. When 5's screwdriver was destroyed he said it was like losing an old friend it was never used again in the original run but does turn up again in the TV movie. |
| 315 | ** Doctors 1, 6 and 7 didn't ''need'' the sonic screwdriver; the subroutine was only added to the sonic screwdriver by the War Doctor, who existed well after these Doctors. Only the War Doctor and his immediately following incarnations -- the Tenth and Eleventh Doctors, in other words (well, and the Ninth Doctor as well, but he's not there, so) -- needed to have a sonic screwdriver for this purpose. (Although to be pedantic, since the Seventh Doctor used the sonic screwdriver in the TV movie technically he ''did'' have the screwdriver in the TV series; we can safely assume he eventually got around to rebuilding it.) |
| 316 | ** Also, just because we don't see them using Sonic Screwdrivers, there's nothing to suggest that One, Six and Seven don't ''possess'' them. |
| 317 | [[/folder]] |
| 318 | |
| 319 | [[folder:Nuclear Standoff]] |
| 320 | * So, Zygon!Kate and her cohorts are hanging out in the Black Archive. Then Real!Kate walks in, unarmed, and activates the nuclear countdown so she can kill all the Zygons. Why the heck is Real!Kate unarmed? Why didn't she march in there with an entire platoon full of soldiers, and order them to shoot the imposters? Or heck, just walk in there with a pistol and shoot 'em yourself. For that matter, once Zygon!Kate realizes that Real!Kate is defenseless, why doesn't she ''attack'' Real!Kate? Why not just jump her, and stick her to the wall with Zygon goo? Then Real!Kate wouldn't be able to issue any more voice commands, and Zygon!Kate would be free to stop the detonation on her own. Then the Zygons could go conquer the world! It looks like ''both'' sides could have been a lot smarter here. Instead they deadlocked on a verbal sparring match, and they couldn't be bothered to think of anything else. |
| 321 | ** Maybe she wasn't sure if she could trust anyone else other than those she ''knew'' weren't Zygons (ie. those whose bodies had already been nicked). |
| 322 | ** Most likely this; Osgood and Other!Guy are, at that point, the only two people besides herself that she knows for certain aren't possibly Zygons. As for why Zygon!Kate doesn't attack Real!Kate, Zygons in their natural forms are clearly rather ungainly and not the most effective combatants; they seem to overpower people mainly by taking advantage of their shape-shifting abilities to get the jump on their victims when they're not expecting it and are too startled to offer much effective resistance. Real!Kate, by this point, is clearly expecting Zygon!Kate to try something and is not going to let her guard down so easily. Furthermore, Kate is the head of U.N.I.T, an organisation that has clearly been taking advantage of alien tech; just because she looks unarmed doesn't mean she ''is'' unarmed. |
| 323 | ** Regarding that last sentence: If Real!Kate is armed, why doesn't she just shoot the Zygons? |
| 324 | ** Because there are more kinds of weapons than just guns, and while she might be armed she might not be specifically armed with a gun on her person. Hard to shoot someone with a stealth alien defensive shield or a knife, after all. |
| 325 | [[/folder]] |
| 326 | |
| 327 | [[folder:Keeping the Treaty]] |
| 328 | * The Doctors mess with everyone's memories so they'll be willing to craft a fair treaty. But they'll regain their memories ''eventually'', right? After that happens, why would anyone continue to abide by the treaty? The Zygons were already willing to conquer the earth; will they really abandon their plans just because they signed a treaty? And if they're willing to disobey treaties, why bother crafting one in the first place? Has the Doctor actually fixed anything? |
| 329 | ** They'd abide by it because it was a completely fair treaty? The Zygons were said to have lost their home planet due to the War, so presumably weren't up for the full-on punching match that would result if they backed out now that they'd been rumbled. So if they can work out a peaceful resolution that works for everyone, why wouldn't they stick by it? |
| 330 | ** Worth pointing out that "The Zygon Invasion/The Zygon Inversion" a couple of seasons later suggests that the treaty wasn't 100% perfect and at least some of the Zygons felt a bit hard-done by it, and ''also'' worth pointing out that the Doctor himself points out that while it might not have been a perfect solution, it was the best he could accomplish at the time with what he had. If a solution will solve most a problem and it's the only thing you have, then it's senseless to abandon it on the grounds that it doesn't solve ''all' of the problem. The perfect being the enemy of the good, and all that. |
| 331 | * Why does Ten answer saying he only made a choice to sacrifice the few to save the millions (referencing the Time War) once? What about Pompeii? |
| 332 | ** Technically, he said he'd made the choice to sacrifice millions to save ''billions'' before. There weren't millions of people in Pompeii, or billions on Earth, at the time. |
| 333 | [[/folder]] |
| 334 | |
| 335 | [[folder: TARDIS Color]] |
| 336 | * We saw at least 3 [=TARDISes=] standing near each other and they had different colors -- Eleven's TARDIS was lighter shade of blue, while Ten's and War Doctor's were darker. Was it color-coded for our convenience or was the model of Ten's TARDIS actually darker ? |
| 337 | ** The exact shade of blue has varied from prop to prop. |
| 338 | ** Yeah, you can see the various TARDIS exteriors in [[http://www.thedoctorwhosite.co.uk/tardis/exterior/ this article]] |
| 339 | ** It's entirely possible that the Doctor repainted it at some point. |
| 340 | ** More like the TARDIS repainted itself. She regenerated at the end of [[Recap/DoctorWhoS31E1TheEleventhHour "The Eleventh Hour"]]. |
| 341 | ** Even simpler, her chameleon circuit may not be ''entirely'' broken, and she might be changing the details of her form around periodically. Heck, given her personality, she very well might have an entirely functional chameleon circuit, and just refuses to change her appearance more than a certain amount to make sure her Thief doesn't forget where he parked her again. |
| 342 | [[/folder]] |
| 343 | |
| 344 | [[folder: UNIT Helicopter]] |
| 345 | * So the helicopter picked up the TARDIS roughly 10 seconds after Clara drove into it. How did it miss seeing this? They surely would have noticed a scooter driving down the road towards the TARDIS since they would have to wait for it to pass before picking up the TARDIS. And even if they did see it drive in, they surely would have rung Kate Stewart to say this before even attempting to move it. |
| 346 | ** Most likely, they were ''supposed'' to pick up Clara. They know that she's the doctor's companion, after all. She could be useful. And it's mentioned later on that Clara has earned a top security clearance, for some reason. So it's no wonder that they picked up Clara. What's weird is that ''Clara'' didn't notice the helicopter. |
| 347 | ** Helicopters fly over London all the time. She didn't have any reason to assume its presence had anything to do with the Tardis. |
| 348 | [[/folder]] |
| 349 | |
| 350 | [[folder: The Moment's choice of form]] |
| 351 | * Without getting into the Rose Tyler fan debate, why did the Moment choose Rose? The idea of the Moment is that it is a weapon of mass destruction that had developed a conscience. Therefore, it is a weapon that makes sure you know what you are doing before you do it. So wouldn't it make more sense for the Moment to choose someone that the user will definitely recognise. If the Moment chose someone like a family member, old friend, former teacher, maybe even an old enemy etc, having someone like that ask "Are you sure you are ready to kill billions of innocent people" instead of a complete stranger (from their perspective) makes you question it more. Choosing someone from their personal future doesn't really help in that matter. |
| 352 | ** There's an easy-to-miss-line where the Moment tells The War Doctor it chose someone significant from his past, and then amends that to future, reasoning it 'always gets those mixed up.' I think it's supposed to be a callback to The Doctor's Wife, when the Tardis says something similar. Out-of-universe, the casting was most likely chosen because they knew it would appeal to fans. |
| 353 | ** In universe, it is because the Moment took on Bad Wolf, who had itself taken on Rose. Thats why the first answer was "Rose Tyler" but after further thought, "Bad Wolf" |
| 354 | ** I think the Moment just made a mistake. It meant to imitate someone from the Doctor's past, but ended up imitating one from his future instead. |
| 355 | ** The Moment is actually a ''lot'' sneakier than she lets on, given how she slips clues about how to TakeAThirdOption into what's ostensibly a demonstration of what the Doctor's post-Time War selves are like. It's probably not beyond her power or cunning to have taken on Rose's form ''because'' hers will be the first face Nine ever sees: if he retains even a vestige of memory about his encounter with the Moment, and how she'd helped him, he'll be unconsciously drawn to Rose and can more-easily accept the emotional lifeline she'll provide for him, when he needs it most. And while the Moment was perfectly willing to name his survival as a punishment if he ''did'' burn Gallifrey, [[spoiler: she wouldn't see it as just for him to carry that same guilt all alone, if he ''didn't'' do it.]] So she throws the old veteran a bone: another clue, that his next self should find Rose. |
| 356 | *** ^^ Wasn't Rose the first and last face the TENTH doctor saw? The Ninth Doctor would have regenerated from the War Doctor into Nine and then flown around time and space before meeting Rose. He was seen in the photos of important historical events in the first episode of the revamped series, so he naturally should have seen other faces first. Unless you mean the Tenth Doctor in the first place. |
| 357 | *** This is Ood erasure |
| 358 | *** It's possible that those other adventures happen in the ten or so seconds at the end of "Rose" when the Ninth Doctor disappears in the TARDIS without Rose before returning to pick her up again. In any case, while she might not have been the literal first face that the Ninth Doctor sees, it's hard to argue that she doesn't make a very strong instant impression on him and quickly becomes one of the most important people in that incarnation's life, so the point as made by the poster above still stands. |
| 359 | *** There is a book that that takes place during that gap. There is still a gap between the Doctor leaving Rose during the episode and the start of the book though, so other stories could also occur during that gap. |
| 360 | * Why wouldn't the Moment actually take the form of someone important from the Doctor's past such as Ian or Susan? Why of all of his numerous companions and friends would it choose the one that he would meet in the future? From a story standpoint, it would have made even more sense if the Moment took the form of Ian/Susan/Romana/Adric/Ace etc. so the War Doctor would really realize what was going to happen sooner. |
| 361 | ** Maybe it's because Rose was the first person who cheered him up after the Time War. |
| 362 | ** Even leaving aside the Moment's confusion over past and future, there is a kind of logic to it. At that point, the War Doctor has no real hope for the future left; he's abandoned his name and identity, the Time War is destroying the entire universe and the only way to end it is (apparently) to completely wipe out the Time Lords. Rose Tyler represents the first point after the Time War where the Doctor really started feeling positive about his life and the future again. The Moment is, whether consciously or unconsciously, trying to remind the War Doctor that things will get better, he has options and that he doesn't have to give in to despair and hopelessness. |
| 363 | ** RE: Ian/Susan/Romana/Adric etc.: A good real-world explanation is that the classic series actors have aged too much to make that sort of thing credible. [[note]]Billie Piper is only about 7 years older than she was filming ''Doomsday'', and so still looked the part. William Russell is most likely pushing 80, Carole Ann Ford is right around 70, and so would be unrecognizable as the 35-ish and 16-ish characters, respectively, they played in 1963 and audiences would have been expecting (If they wanted to go that route, they ''could'' have used the actors from ''An Adventure in Space and Time'', but the ''Doctor Who'' staff seems to have more or less an aversion to recasting). Ditto for Lalla Ward (Mary Tamm, sadly, had passed on by the time of filming IIRC) who was 35 or so years removed from her last on-screen appearance as Romana. And Adric died an adolescent, something Matthew Waterhouse is no longer. The only reason Tom Baker got away with it is that it was explicitly stated that he was not ''the'' Fourth Doctor, but a later, older Doctor who was riffing on favorite faces.[[/note]] |
| 364 | ** It may have been a two-way connection. The Bad Wolf could see the whole of time and space, much as the Moment could. Perhaps in her brief time as the Bad Wolf, some minor, distant part of Rose's awareness reached out, and the Moment reached back. |
| 365 | ** [[CrackPairing Bad Wolf/Moment OTP!]] But yes, both seem to have greater-than-normal-for-this-show control of space and time, so it seems natural that they'd link up, especially if Bad Wolf was [[StableTimeLoop trying to ensure the series of events that lead to her creation.]] If nothing else, maybe she was just easier for The Moment to identify with, hence taking her form. |
| 366 | [[/folder]] |
| 367 | |
| 368 | [[folder: Cup-A-Soup]] |
| 369 | * I know that it's just a throwaway joke, but... how did the War Doctor not know what Cup-A-Soup was? 800 years travelling the universe, with a particular fondness for contempory Earth, and he never sees a Cup-A-Soup? |
| 370 | ** Some possible reasons, off the top of my head. |
| 371 | --->1: He's been fighting the war a long time, and it's likely he hasn't been to Earth for ages. He's forgotten some minor parts of Earth's cultures. Or the memory was lost during a regeneration.\ |
| 372 | 2: Eleven is a big fan of processed food, which none of the previous doctors have been. Maybe before becoming Eleven, he didn't bother with finding out about it. |
| 373 | ** It's a fairly culture-specific thing. ''I'' had no idea what it was and had to look it up on Wikipedia. Never heard of it in Russia. |
| 374 | ** It may be called something different in the UK (Pot Noodle, I think?). It's a British show so it would use a British term. i.e. Cup-a-soup. a Pot Noodle is something totally different. |
| 375 | [[/folder]] |
| 376 | |
| 377 | [[folder: Dead children]] |
| 378 | * Wait, if Gallifrey Falls No More, then how did 10 go back and count all the dead children there? |
| 379 | ** How would he have gone back there in the first place? Gallifrey was time-locked and it was supposedly hit by a "Galaxy Eater", so the only thing that would be left would be atoms. He probably just ran the calculations or checked a census, in a more thorough manner, of course. |
| 380 | [[/folder]] |
| 381 | |
| 382 | [[folder: Clara is a school teacher?]] |
| 383 | * If she's qualified to teach high school why was she working as a nanny? |
| 384 | ** Maybe she was working as a nanny while she finished gaining her teaching qualifications, or during a period of unemployment. Or, since she was in part working as a nanny to help out a family friend after the death of his wife, she took some time out to help him through his issues but went back to teaching when he was better equipped to cope by himself. |
| 385 | ** It's perfectly normal for a single adult to have an second job (Or a third) on the side. Though keep in mind, this is a trait Clara naturally has, remember in "The Snowmen" Victorian Clara was a Barmaid as well as a Nanny. |
| 386 | ** I got the impression that she's just a friend of the family helping out, possibly while between jobs. Memory's a bit fuzzy, so I can't recall if anything was indicated otherwise. |
| 387 | ** Possibly she went on sabbatical, taking some education courses for professional development and watching her friend's kids between classes. |
| 388 | ** Maybe she's a different clara and the doctor really did fail to save her. |
| 389 | ** It's explained in "The Bells Of Saint John" that Clara was preparing for a trip around the world when she'd stopped to stay with the Maitlands. (Possibly she'd wanted to experience London before she tackled farther-flung places.) Mrs. Maitland died while she was visiting, so naturally she stayed to help the children get through a loss which she, herself, had been devastated by in her own childhood. Taking on that burden used up all the time off from teaching that she'd arranged for her trip, which is why she was so glum about never having gone traveling when Eleven met her. |
| 390 | [[/folder]] |
| 391 | |
| 392 | [[folder: The Doctor's memory of the Time War's end]] |
| 393 | * I get that it's an event he tried to suppress from his memory and never think too hard about, but still, did it really ''never'' strike the Doctor how odd it is that, as we must assume, he has no clear recollection of actually activating the Moment or witnessing Gallifrey's destruction? |
| 394 | ** He probably chalked it up to a side-effect of an unpredictable superweapon. Plus he regenerated immediately afterwards and regeneration does a number on the old memories at the best of times. Combine those two, along with that desire to actively ''not'' dwell like you mentioned and it is far more understandable. |
| 395 | ** Even leaving aside all the things that were removed from it, memory can be a funny thing. Once the War Doctor regenerates, the Ninth Doctor probably has a whole jumble of confused and contradictory memories about what he just experienced -- not just from what the War Doctor's perspective but from the perspective of his other eight previous selves, his future three selves, and what he himself experienced in his own personal future as well. He probably remembers stealing the Moment and activating it, but then has a lot of confused and fragmentary stuff rattling around in his brain involving him flying around Dalek ships in the TARDIS as they blast Gallifrey, followed by a massive explosion that results in Gallifrey and the Daleks gone. So he put together a rough idea of what happened from those fragments, came up with some logical ways to fill the gaps based on what he knew for certain he'd done and came to a logical conclusion about what must have happened. And since people can be good at retroactively editing their memories to suit their preconceptions (it's partly why two people might have very different memories of the same event that they both experienced), he convinced himself that that logical conclusion was exactly what he experienced even though it wasn't. |
| 396 | ** There's also the fact that the Doctor clearly doesn't know how the Moment works, just that it's apocalyptic. Combine this with his intent to use the Moment right up until he hears another TARDIS activate, and the fact that his next memory would be regenerating in the TARDIS, and it forms a logical if mistaken pattern: he's about ready to use the Moment, has second thoughts, and then another TARDIS shows up with a Time Lord trying to stop him. He uses the Moment, all the Time Lords and Daleks are gone, and he's mortally wounded. |
| 397 | [[/folder]] |
| 398 | |
| 399 | [[folder: Why not the 9th Doctor?]] |
| 400 | * So, I understand the production reasons behind the Ninth Doctor's absence, that Eccleston decided not to make an appearance. But just strictly speaking in-universe, why ''didn't'' the Moment open a time window to the 9th Doctor's timeline too? The whole point of showing the War Doctor his future incarnations was to try to persuade him from activating the Moment without considering the consequences. Surely, seeing his guilt, sadness, and bitterness in the period immediately following the last day of the Time War would be pretty important. |
| 401 | ** Since it's implied the Moment actively brought the Doctors together in order for them to devise their alternative plan to save Gallifrey, she might have thought that the Ninth Doctor was ''too'' guilty, sad and bitter for this purpose; he's too close to the immediate after-effects of the Time War and might find it harder to devise an alternative solution or be convinced that the alternative solution was even possible. For all that both the Tenth Doctor and Eleventh Doctor clearly have guilt issues around the Time War, both also have a distance from it that the Ninth Doctor doesn't quite have and so find it easier to devise and accept an alternative solution. |
| 402 | ** The answer to that is probably in "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS27E13ThePartingOfTheWays The Parting of the Ways]]" at the end of the Ninth's life. The Doctor's plan in that was "push big button and destroy Earth, self, and Daleks, for the greater good". He just was not capable of going beyond that, still too caught up in the after effects of his decision, and too ready to repeat it (if it hadn't been for the Emperor Dalek's taunting, he would have done it too). What could he have brought to the party except "do it and be done with it". By the time he was open to miracles and hope again, he's already regenerating. |
| 403 | ** Besides, the Moment wants the War Doctor to ''learn'' from his future selves. The only thing he'd be likely to learn from Nine is how it feels for one of your future selves, still raw and embittered about something he thinks you've done, to punch you in the nose. |
| 404 | ** The War Doctor also doesn't need to ''learn'' what it's like to feel guilty, sad and bitter about destroying Gallifrey; he's ''already'' guilty, sad and bitter about what's going on, to the point where he's renounced his name because he doesn't feel he can call himself the Doctor anymore. It's not like he's going into things expecting that destroying his home world and everyone on it is going to feel great; he already feels pretty crappy about the choices he's made and the choice he feels he's being forced into making, so seeing that his immediate future self also feels pretty crappy about it isn't really going to tell him anything he can't already surmise. |
| 405 | ** He would've tried the door. |
| 406 | [[/folder]] |
| 407 | |
| 408 | [[folder: The Doctor's timeline in the previous episode]] |
| 409 | * At the end of the previous episode, Clara steps into the Doctor's timeline, and sees flashing visions of all the Doctor's incarnations, the last one she sees is the War Doctor, who speaks what is probably that incarnation's most well known line: "What I did, I did without choice, in the name of peace and sanity." The War Doctor saying that would be fine if Clara stepped into the Doctor's memories, but it is made clear that this is his TIMELINE, which does not make sense as [[spoiler: he didn't do it]]. The only possible explanation is that he is referring to the decision he made (as the Eighth Doctor) to become the War Doctor in the first place. |
| 410 | ** Perhaps the timeline is manifesting as the Doctor's mind, like in Timewyrm: Revelation. |
| 411 | ** Or maybe War just presumes that Eleven wouldn't ''believe'' him if he told him what really happened, and knows his future self will learn the truth first-hand eventually, so plays along with Eleven's expectations for the time being. |
| 412 | ** Perhaps since everybody thinks the Doctor committed double-genocide (or near enough tried to, given the Daleks' [[JokerImmunity survival]], nobody sees that chapter of his history as a ''victory''. So the GI skipped over that period, and so did Clara. |
| 413 | ** War ''doesn't'' remember cup-o-souping Gallifrey at that point. Once he leaves Ten and Eleven in the gallery, his memory fades (and immediately gets scrambled by regeneration to boot). |
| 414 | ** There is no time between the events of "Day of the Doctor" and War's regeneration for him to appear as that particular manifestation of the Doctor's timeline. So he must be referring to one of the other events during the 300 years or so he spent as the War Doctor. |
| 415 | ** Re-watch the end of "The Name of the Doctor" again: At no point does Eleven actually accuse War of ''destroying Gallifrey'', but rather of being "the one who broke the promise". War doesn't ''know'' Eleven is talking about Gallifrey's destruction; when he says "what I did", he's referring to how he'd set aside One's long-ago promise to be a Doctor, in the first place. |
| 416 | ** It should be noted that the scene in question takes place within an otherworldly realm created from the Doctor's own personal timestream (i.e. literally ''everything'' that's ''ever'' happened to the Doctor), so the Doctor's past and future are perhaps not as concrete or logical as they might be outside of it. It is possible -- even likely -- that the "War Doctor" who the Doctor interacts with is not the actual War Doctor, but in fact a representation of what is essentially the "complete" War Doctor (i.e. the sum total of everything that happened to that incarnation of the Doctor). Consequently, he might be aware of things that happened to him beyond that point, not just the War Doctor at the point in which he encounters the Eleventh Doctor in "The Day of the Doctor". Similarly, had the Eleventh Doctor hypothetically met the Tenth Doctor in that realm, he would meet the "complete" Tenth Doctor, and that version of the Tenth Doctor might have known what would happen to him in "The End of Time" despite that having not happened to the actual Tenth Doctor when he met the Eleventh Doctor either. |
| 417 | ** As for why neither of them demonstrate knowledge of what ''actually'' happened to Gallifrey, that might be because what's going in the Doctor's timestream is at that point shaped around the Eleventh Doctor, and the Eleventh Doctor doesn't have that information yet. Notably, we only see past Doctors, not future ones, despite the fact that future Doctors would logically show up as well; we don't see them because the Eleventh Doctor doesn't know they exist. That War Doctor might think he destroyed Gallifrey because the Eleventh Doctor ''also'' thinks he destroyed Gallifrey, and it's the Eleventh Doctor's perspective that's shaping the world around them. Had the Twelfth Doctor been there instead, the War Doctor might have had a different perspective on events. History depends on the perspective of the one remembering it, after all. |
| 418 | *** The "timeline" the Doctor and Clara jumped into was itself located in an alternate timeline (Trenzalore), where the Doctor died. Thanks to [[spoiler: the actions of Clara and the Time Lords,]] that timeline, with the giant TARDIS and River's secret passage grave and the Doctor's timeline, no longer exist. The "timeline" they jumped into would have ended with the 11th Doctor's death on Trenzalore, ergo, no future incarnations. |
| 419 | ** It's implied that the War Doctor was much more, well, war-like than other incarnations. Blowing up Gallifrey may have been the worst act of his life, but who said he was proud of some of the other things he did during the Time War? |
| 420 | |
| 421 | [[/folder]] |
| 422 | |
| 423 | [[folder: The Doctor, 10 and 11]] |
| 424 | * Something I found odd, the fact that the Tenth and Eleventh Doctors seem to get along during the "Day of the Doctor" seems, to me at least, a bit out of place. Not only considering in most other multi-Doctor stories, the Doctors always bicker with each other. Considering all the times Ten inflicted AFateWorseThanDeath on his enemies (something Eleven doesn't approve of), his "Time Lord Victorious" phase (Eleven doesn't like people with [[AGodAmI God Complexes]]), and his ego issues leaving Eleven without anymore regenerations. You'd think that Eleven would be highly critical of Ten, and perhaps even outright antagonistic of his younger self. But that just never happened? |
| 425 | ** I guess the simple answer is just that the Tenth and Eleventh Doctors' personalities just happened to mesh well together as opposed to that of the Second and Third Doctors or other incarnations. Both of them being post-incarnations of the War Doctor and the Time War is also a unique common ground they share (though, as we see in the dungeon scene, it ''does'' briefly derive some tension between the two). In terms of the "Time Lord Victorious" stuff, perhaps Eleven just gives him a free pass on that since he remembers how he truly felt in that crisis, and he knows that Ten would eventually realize his mistake on his own and regret it. |
| 426 | *** In the expanded universe, at least, not '''all''' Doctors don't get along. Eight and Four get along swimmingly in [[Recap/BigFinishDoctorWhoSpecialsTheLightAtTheEnd The Light at the End]], and Five and Ten have a pleasant time researching (This is not a euphemism, they're literally researching) in [[Recap/BigFinishDoctorWhoOutOfTimeE2TheGatesOfHell The Gates of Hell]] because [[Recap/DoctorWho2007CiNSTimeCrash]] had already happened for Ten so he wasn't prattling on like an idiot with fifty cans of energy drink inside of his bloodstream. |
| 427 | ** Also, it's the first chance either of them have had to have a conversation with ''another Time Lord'' in ages, so they're not going to sweat the small stuff. Heck, Ten was desperate enough for the company of another of his species that he was frantic to convince the Master to stay alive, even after the latter'd finally succeeded in enslaving and trashing the Earth; putting up with Chinny's nonsense is cake by comparison. |
| 428 | ** It wasn't 10's ego that wasted a regeneration, it was the fact that he was shot by a Dalek; it was just that he managed to keep the same form. He would have expended the same regeneration energy whether he had kept the same body or not. |
| 429 | *** Well, if that ''had'' happened, Eleven would still only be the second-to-last regeneration, and it would've been Peter Capaldi's version (or possibly a different one, since Twelve is the product of a rejuvenated cycle?) who must deal with having no regenerations remaining. |
| 430 | [[/folder]] |
| 431 | |
| 432 | [[folder: Leaving the Black Archives]] |
| 433 | * After the Zygon conflict is cleared up in the Black Archives, the Tenth and Eleventh Doctors both head to their [=TARDISes=] to meet up with the War Doctor. But how were they able to leave the Black Archives without having their memories erased? And furthermore, how did the Tenth Doctor find his TARDIS again, since (as far as I understand) they took it into the fall of Arcadia itself in order to emerge from the painting? |
| 434 | ** Given that the Doctor's sonic screwdriver is clearly shown to be able to control the memory-eraser thingy, that suggests they'd be easily able to leave without their memories being affected. In any case, they're the Doctor -- even if memory wiping technology programmed for humans would work on him to begin with, the fact that he's clearly aware of the Black Archives and has been for what's implied to be a while without UNIT suspecting, that does suggest that the memory erasing technology probably doesn't work that well on him. |
| 435 | ** As for the Tenth Doctor's TARDIS, that's easy; the Tenth Doctor simply re-entered the painting (possibly thanks to the Eleventh Doctor also piloting his TARDIS into the painting in order for him to do so) and walked back to where he'd parked the TARDIS while inside the painting. |
| 436 | ** That wasn't Ten's TARDIS, it was the ''painting's'' depiction of War's TARDIS from when it took part in the original battle. Ten left his TARDIS back in Elizabeth's time, joined the other two in the painting, then presumably hitched a ride with Eleven to pick up his own from the past. |
| 437 | ** While not explicitly shown on screen, obviously the Archive memory wiper doesn't wipe the memory of everyone who goes there - just those who it is assigned to wipe. For instance, Kate Stewart can come and go as she pleases and always remembers that she was there; meanwhile the guard, who has a lower clearance level, gets wiped every day. |
| 438 | *** So how does that poor guy get through life if he's doing a GroundhogDay? |
| 439 | *** Presumably only his memories of the hours he spends at his job are wiped, not every single memory he has. |
| 440 | ** Also, the Doctors specifically stated that nobody would remember if they were human or Zygon. They never said anything about anyone losing memories of whether they were ''Time Lords'' or not. |
| 441 | [[/folder]] |
| 442 | |
| 443 | [[folder: Vortex Manipulator]] |
| 444 | * What happens to the Vortex Manipulator after Clara uses it to travel back to Elizabethan England? We never see or hear of it again afterwards. |
| 445 | ** The Doctor keeps it as he doesn't want UNIT getting it. |
| 446 | [[/folder]] |
| 447 | |
| 448 | [[folder: The Dick Van Dyke quip]] |
| 449 | * Isn't it BreakingTheFourthWall for 11 to call 10 "Dick Van Dyke", since it's a reference to Creator/DavidTennant not using his real accent as the Doctor? |
| 450 | ** LeaningOnTheFourthWall at best. That may be the real explanation for the joke, but in-universe, maybe he calls him Dick Van Dyke because he's clumsy or something. |
| 451 | ** In-universe, the Eleventh Doctor is just saying that the Tenth Doctor sounds silly when he talks. There's two main reasons why Dick Van Dyke is made fun of for ''Film/MaryPoppins'': the first is because he's clearly using a fake accent, and the second is because the way he talks sounds ridiculous. In-universe, the Eleventh Doctor just means the latter, but the RealitySubtext means that the audience picks up on the former meaning as well. |
| 452 | ** Based on what happens in ''Film/AnAdventureInSpaceAndTime'', it's possible the Doctor actually knows he's a fictional character, and hence his BreakingTheFourthWall may have been intentional. |
| 453 | *** Since ''Film/AnAdventureInSpaceAndTime'' isn’t taking place within the Doctor’s timeline/continuity, how does this follow? |
| 454 | ** The cleanest Watsonian explanation is that Ten is faking the accent the same as David, and Eleven would know this and is needling him about it. |
| 455 | ** Re-watch the scene: Ten had just commented on War's "posh gravelly thing" (i.e. John Hurt's voice), and had rather badly imitated ''War's vocal tones'' as he did so. While Smith may be mocking Tennant's feigned accent [=OOC=], what ''Eleven'' is poking fun at in-Verse is Ten's bad War impression! |
| 456 | ** The expression "Posh" figures in the Dick Van Dyke film ''Chitty Chitty Bang Bang'' (1968). Lionel Jeffries, as the father of Van Dyke's character performs a song entitled "Posh!" |
| 457 | ** There's a possible FridgeBrilliance / [=WMG=] here. The Tenth Doctor is notoriously vain, as is pointed out by the very same incarnation mocking him here. He's the type of person to put on affectations to make himself seem cooler -- for example, it's heavily implied at a few points that the spectacles he wears on occasion are "brainy specs" designed to make him look smart but which he doesn't actually need. So it's entirely possible that, just as David Tennant uses a fake south London accent in his performance as the Doctor, that the Tenth Doctor ''also'' puts on a fake accent for appearance's sake. |
| 458 | |
| 459 | [[/folder]] |
| 460 | |
| 461 | [[folder: No milk for the Zygons?]] |
| 462 | * In their original "Terror of the Zygons" appearance, Zygons needed their pet sea monster, the Skarasen, to provide "lactic fluid" to sustain themselves. The ones in "Day" don't seem to have any such creature with them in Elizabethan times, nor do they bring one with them into the paintings. (You'd think Kate Stewart would've mentioned it if it wasn't ''just'' humanoid figures that'd vanished from the Gallery pictures but ''also'' a freaking huge monster, plus they'd need a gigantic mural for even a baby Skarasen to climb out of.) Did they leave one hibernating in Elizabethan times to rouse later, or have they managed to overcome their milk dependency since their encounter with the Fourth Doctor...? |
| 463 | ** Depending on how charitable one is with stories, the Loch Ness Monster has been claimed to have beeen sighted since the 6th Century. What that means for the length of the Zygon presence on Earth I have no idea, but it does show that the beastie has either a tremendous lifespan or a stable gene pool to reproduce from. It's equally possible a certain backwards-thinking Time Lord established an extensive Skarasen population at some point to meet the needs of the [[Recap/DoctorWhoS35E7TheZygonInvasion imminent Zygon refugee population]]. |
| 464 | ** Plenty of cows on Earth. The Doctor's doing just fine with earthly milk for his tea, why would the Zygons be unable to get used to it? |
| 465 | [[/folder]] |
| 466 | |
| 467 | [[folder: Is the Time Lock gone?]] |
| 468 | * During the "first time around", the Doctor used the Moment to seal away the Time War in a Time Lock. However, during the "second time around" we saw in this episode, the Doctor does not use the Moment, instead sealing Gallifrey away in a safe place. So since the Moment was never used, does that mean the Time Lock was written out of existence? Is the Nightmare Child, the Skaro Degradations, and everything else in the Time War now free to attack the universe unopposed by the Time Lords? And how would the events of the previous seasons remain the same since Dalek Caan gained near-omniscience by flying through the Time Lock when he wasn't supposed to? Shouldn't that event have ceased to exist now that the Time Lock never existed? Shouldn't the erasure of the Time Lock massively change everything up until this episode? |
| 469 | * Simplest explanation is that there probably ''is'' still some kind of Time Lock surrounding the specific events of the Time War and these particular entities; it's just that Gallifrey was actually spared and locked away somewhere else outside of the Time Lock. It's most likely that the Tenth Doctor's memory was just simply failing him regarding exactly ''how'' the Time Lock was activated, since his memory of him saving it with his other selves was wiped just like the War Doctor's; he assumed he did it with the Moment, when in fact he did it differently. |
| 470 | * The Time Lock wasn't the Moment's doing, IIRC it's something the Time Lords established early in the War so that the Daleks couldn't attack Gallifrey's past. |
| 471 | [[/folder]] |
| 472 | |
| 473 | [[folder: Contents of the Black Archive]] |
| 474 | * The Black Archive has a ContinuityCavalcade of dozens of items seen in previous stories. Thing is, some of those items shouldn't be there. The [[Recap/DoctorWhoS30E13JourneysEnd Supreme Dalek]], explosives from [[Recap/DoctorWhoS30E3PlanetOfTheOod "Planet of the Ood"]] and [[Recap/DoctorWhoS33E10JourneyToTheCentreOfTheTardis "Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS"]], [[Recap/DoctorWhoS31E4TheTimeOfAngels River's shoes]], [[Recap/DoctorWhoS30E17E18TheEndOfTime the restraint chair]], and as the icing on the cake [[Recap/DoctorWhoS32E10TheGirlWhoWaited Old Amy's sonic probe]] are all visible at some point. However, the explosives and River's shoes are from episodes set in the future; the Supreme Dalek was destroyed on-screen and then left in an exploding space station; the restraint chair was left on the Vinvocci's ship; and most glaringly Old Amy, and consequently her screwdriver (built from Amy's phone) was {{retgone}}d from existence. How on Earth does UNIT possibly have these things? |
| 475 | ** There have been a lot of Supreme Daleks, the explosives are a common product that some alien race or other could've had on hand when they caused trouble on Earth, the restraint chair may not have been the only one Naismith had at his estate, and River is revealed in "The Husbands Of River Song" to have taken the TARDIS joyriding behind the Doctor's back, so who knows ''how'' many spare pairs of shoes she's left all over Earth's past, present and future? But yes, the sonic probe is a tough one; maybe Amelia and Rory Williams tried to cobble one together late in life, based on what they recalled of old-Amy's design? It probably wouldn't have worked - they'd have died some time before cell phones became available as components - but UNIT clearly knows about the Ponds, so might have commandeered the blueprints and built one later. |
| 476 | ** They're NoodleImplements. We're supposed to wonder, that's partly the point. Besides which, as mentioned above, it's not like any of those objects is completely incapable of being reproduced in some form. All of them can be reproduced or replicated in other circumstances in some way. |
| 477 | [[/folder]] |
| 478 | [[folder: Why Did the 11th Doctor Forget the number of kids on Gallifrey]] |
| 479 | * One reason people suggest is that the 10th Doctor was able to subconsciously recall that they saved Gallifrey (check the [[Fridge/DoctorWho50thASTheDayOfTheDoctor Fridge page]] under Fridge Brilliance) and so no kids died by their hands. |
| 480 | ** FridgeBrilliance: that was one of the memories [[spoiler: absorbed by Akhaten]], possiby what the Doctor was referring to with ''I have lost things you will never understand''. |
| 481 | ** Another reason to explain the 11th Doctor's forgetting how many children there were on Gallifrey that day. The War Doctor believed that it was the 10th Doctor's guilt that led to his heroism, and the ultimate extreme of that was the Time Lord Victorious, it was after this that he realized that hanging onto the guilt was making him as bad as the War Doctor, ignoring all his rules and regard for the big picture to save individuals and so forced himself to let go, allowing the 11th Doctor to let go of his guilt (referring to the war merely as a 'Bad Day' about a week at most after his regeneration) and, as a result forgetting the number of kids on the planet. |
| 482 | ** If we're asking about specifics, then the novelization by Steven Moffat expands on this by revealing that, soon after his regeneration, the 11th Doctor found and (unconsciously) used an abandoned robot used as a therapy tool for children; he told it the worst thing that ever happened to him and, in doing so, the robot wiped his memory of it. If we're asking motives, then it simply comes down to the fact that the Doctor either had to let go of the guilt at some point or let it gradually consume him. No one can live with that kind of guilt and trauma forever without either eventually moving on or letting it overwhelm and destroy them. The 10th Doctor chose to hang on to the guilt, the 11th Doctor chose to let it go. |
| 483 | ** Or he's lying and in denial. |
| 484 | [[/folder]] |
| 485 | [[folder: War Doctor's TARDIS]] |
| 486 | We see the inside of the War Doctor's TARDIS and it looks like an amalgam of the classic TARDIS design and the 9-10 Doctor TARDIS, implying a gradual transition from the old design to the new one. The flaw here is that shouldn't it resemble the 8th Doctor's TARDIS, the large cathedral like space seen in the Movie? The Doyalist reasoning is obviously that they couldn't afford such a massive set for about 2 scenes when it could never be used again, but what was the Watsonian explaination? I'll admit I have little knowledge of EU stuff like the Big Finish audio stories, did the 8th Doctor restore the TARDIS to a more traditional look during his run, or is the idea that the War Doctor is the one who did it, and if so, why? |
| 487 | ** This is something there's no real way of answering with any degree of certainty or satisfaction, because there's no possible way of knowing any of this without some form of WordOfGod or Wild Mass Guessing. The best anyone can do is state that, as the Doctor has been known to change the TARDIS interior from time to time to suit his moods or preferences, presumably either the Eighth Doctor or the War Doctor did so again. Beyond that, it's entirely your own call to make. |
| 488 | ** Also the movie has a touch of BroadStrokes regarding it's place in canon. The plot point of the Doctor being half human on his mother's side has never been revisited and indeed is rather contradicted by a fair few things from before and after. |
| 489 | [[/folder]] |
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