| 1 | Click [[Headscratchers/DoctorWho here]] to go back to the main page. |
| 2 | |
| 3 | '''WARNING! THERE MAY BE UNMARKED SPOILERS!''' |
| 4 | ---- |
| 5 | [[index]] |
| 6 | * [[Headscratchers/DoctorWhoS33E5TheAngelsTakeManhattan "The Angels Take Manhattan"]] |
| 7 | * [[Headscratchers/DoctorWhoS33E12NightmareInSilver "Nightmare in Silver"]] |
| 8 | [[/index]] |
| 9 | |
| 10 | [[foldercontrol]] |
| 11 | |
| 12 | [[folder:"The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe"]] |
| 13 | * Why don't the kid age at all in the 3-year TimeSkip? Cyril at the very least should have shot up like a bean pole in the intervening time but he doesn't. |
| 14 | ** That's because for him and his body, it isn't 3 years. They "skipped" to 3 years ahead, they didn't actually wait for 3 years. |
| 15 | ** That irritated me too, it wouldn't have been that hard to set the prologue in say, early 1939 and the actual events in December 1939 or even 1940. Perhaps, to the Doctor, they haven't aged? Or he was seven turning ten and so theoretically wouldn't have to grow too much, considering rationing and things? |
| 16 | * He pilots an airplane. How the HELL does an airplane [[spoiler: fly into the time vortex?!]] How. The. Hell. |
| 17 | ** [[spoiler: Well, when the woman opening the time portal is thinking SOLELY about the airplane, and he's following a time machine that can clear the danger out of the way...]] |
| 18 | ** [[spoiler: The Time Vortex isn't inherently lethal to pass through; there've been cases when beings ride on the ''outside'' of the Tardis without dying. Possibly the Tardis projected an air corridor behind it to carry the plane.]] |
| 19 | *** Not so; Jack did, technically die after riding on the TARDIS, and the Time Vortex proved to be quite lethal to [[IdenticalStranger Ramon Salamander]] in The Enemy of the World. I suppose that the airplane capsule could have protected the man from most of the harmful effects. |
| 20 | *** Being carried along after swallowing the TARDIS whole didn't harm the giant ''T. rex'' from "Deep Breath", even though the Doctor didn't even realize she ''had'' swallowed it. Possibly he enabled Sexy to produce an extended air-shell when necessary after seeing what the unshielded Vortex did to Salamander, knowing that next time it might not be a villain who fell victim to such a fate. |
| 21 | * ...so where was the wardrobe? There was no wardrobe. We were cheated. |
| 22 | ** Wasn't that what the Doctor jokingly called his TARDIS? [[spoiler:Though if you want to be really picky, there wasn't much in the way of a widow, and did the Doctor ever call himself that here?]] |
| 23 | *** Yes, the Doctor called the TARDIS a wardrobe. |
| 24 | *** The ''Doctor'' isn't the widow. The whole idea is that the husband is mistaken for dead, and therefore the wife believes herself to be a widow. |
| 25 | *** The wardrobe is a Chronicles of Narnia reference to how the present is a portal to another world. |
| 26 | *** I believe they meant that the Doctor never called himself 'the Doctor' in this episode. Can't remember if that's true, but it's not really a relevant point, since the title is for the audience, and we know who he is. |
| 27 | *** He called himself that when he first welcomed them to the house, along with that crack about how "Get off our planet" probably isn't ''technically'' a name. |
| 28 | *** Even if he hadn't called himself 'the Doctor' in the episode, he still is the Doctor. That would not have been contradictory to the title. |
| 29 | ** The TARDIS was compared to a wardrobe. |
| 30 | *** The Doctor passed it off as an actual wardrobe that he'd painted to look like a police box. Which was actually one of the more plausible things he'd said so far, so Madge just hand-waves it. |
| 31 | [[/folder]] |
| 32 | |
| 33 | [[folder:"Asylum of the Daleks"]] |
| 34 | * Where does Oswin get the milk? |
| 35 | ** There was no milk. [[spoiler:[[TomatoInTheMirror Oswin is a Dalek.]]]] |
| 36 | ** Oswin has breasts. The ''eggs'' are what are important. |
| 37 | *** Dude, ewww. Neither [[spoiler: were real. The milk is what set off the Doctor's suspicion, the eggs were foreshadowed by the Dalek Rory met, when he tried to give it what he thought were its eggs.]] |
| 38 | *** 1. Lactation doesn't work that way. 2. I'm almost certain that wouldnt actually work for making a souffle. |
| 39 | *** And, y'know, [[spoiler:Daleks don't have breasts.]] ...I ''hope''. |
| 40 | *** ''Recap/DoctorWhoTheCurseOfFatalDeath''. What do you think those rows of bumps are for? |
| 41 | *** ''[[InsistentTerminology They're not breasts, they're Dalek bumps]]''. They can detect ion-charged emissions and operate as aetheric beam locators... and everything. |
| 42 | *** [[TakeThat And they're very firm.]] |
| 43 | *** ''What are you trying to say?!'' |
| 44 | * So the Daleks who capture the Doctor, Amy, and Rory. Some of them are Time War Daleks, and some are from the New Paradigm. I thought the New Paradigm Daleks believe that the Time War Daleks are inferior beings? Furthermore, where did these Time War Daleks come from? |
| 45 | ** For the first part, Daleks are fine with using the lesser races as cannon fodder (see the Robomen, Ogrons, pig slaves and partially-converted humans from this episode.) The Time War Daleks are the rank and file, while the "pure" Paradigm Daleks are the ruling class. |
| 46 | ** As for the second part, Stephen Moffat does seem to have decided not to bother too much with explanations of how the villains keep coming back; think about all those Cybermen we saw briefly last series. In fairness, the explanation would just consist of "We fell through time!", or something. He probably decided viewers could infer that for themselves. |
| 47 | ** Those three particular Daleks were impure, not necessarily the shape or style of the casings they're housed in. The New Paradigm simply bred new, 'pure' Daleks but kept the old casing for the rank-and-file Daleks and used the new casing for the officer class, scientists, strategists, '[=NCOs=]', etc. |
| 48 | *** I, too, thought this was the reason for the mixed casings. |
| 49 | ** As far as I remember (feel free to correct me), there is nothing in the episode to indicate that there are Time War Daleks anywhere. Also, those Cybermen last series were intended to be the Cybermen of our universe, they just didn't bother to change their design. |
| 50 | ** Moffet confirmed that the Time War-style Dalek are the rank-in-file, while the Skittles!Daleks are the officers and ruling class. He did this because the fandom still prefered the older design after Victory of the Daleks came out. |
| 51 | ** The first lot of Daleks in "Victory of the Daleks" were impure because they were survivors of "Journey's End", made from Davros' cells. The Daleks that actually fought in the Time War were pure Daleks. |
| 52 | * Why, when the Daleks care so much about their racial purity in ''Victory of the Daleks'' that they killed the previous Daleks, were they fine with converting a human into a Dalek and putting it in charge of the Asylum? |
| 53 | ** Maybe it's ''because'' of their racism; if there's a human who can do the job of guarding the asylum, why would they make a Dalek endure that? |
| 54 | ** The Daleks who did the converting were presumably the insane Daleks on the planet (or at least were the slightly-less-insane ones); the sane Daleks outside the Asylum didn't seem to be aware of the human in question's existence in the first place. And the insane Daleks' standards on racial purity might simply have fallen by the wayside due to the fact that they're completely mad. My guess is that when the ship crashed, the one of the slightly more functional insane Daleks took it upon itself to convert Oswin for it's own reasons. |
| 55 | *** This one makes sense. "Inmate" Daleks seem to have an "all in this together" mindset, because Imperial Daleks and Renegade Daleks live together in it with no fuss. |
| 56 | * Why were the Daleks in ''Victory of the Daleks'' killed when Daleks are apparently too beautiful to be killed? |
| 57 | ** ''Insane'' Daleks are too beautiful to be killed, being [[TheUnfettered balls of]] [[AxeCrazy hateful rage]] even by ''Dalek'' standards. Your common-or-garden screeching dustbin can be exterminated as they see fit. |
| 58 | ** Only pure Daleks are sent to the Asylum, and even then only when it isn't inconvenient. |
| 59 | ** One interpretation: The insane Daleks were beautiful, but it's like animals in a zoo. You might appreciate their beauty but only when there is a barrier (e.g. a cage, a forcefield) between you and them. If they escape they'd quickly turn from beautiful to terrifying and possibly even a threat to visitors in a few seconds flat and self preservation takes over. Case in point: Look at Rusty from the episode "Into the Dalek", just one series later, who exterminated many Daleks. That may be what the sane Daleks were scared of, homicidal mini tanks who might not discriminate between Daleks and non-Daleks. |
| 60 | * Why put the only control to lower the shield of the Asylum, in the Asylum that you are too scared to go in? |
| 61 | ** To make sure nobody can let them out without getting exterminated by a horde of insane Daleks or mutated by a nanocloud. Add to this the fact that most of them were inactive and half-dead and presumably the main Daleks thought an uprising'd never be a problem. Daleks tend to be arrogant. |
| 62 | * Why were the Daleks able to feel fear in the beginning of the episode but halfway through the episode while Amy is being converted the Doctor claims that Daleks don't feel fear. |
| 63 | ** The Daleks believe that they're the superior beings who can kill anything, and don't want to have to go down alone and fight [[UnstoppableForceMeetsImmovableObject a lot more superior beings who can kill anything?]] |
| 64 | ** Not being able to ''feel'' fear doesn't mean you can't ''think'' fear. |
| 65 | ** Just because you're not afraid of heights, doesn't mean you go jumping off of bridges. Perhaps they had more tactical reasons in mind; beautiful they may be, but useful to the Daleks' conquest across the universe? Not really. There's presumably a reason they were quarantined in the first place. |
| 66 | * At the start of the episode, the Doctor patches in to Oswin's signal, and she talks to him. In a human voice, not [[spoiler:a Dalek's.]] (None of the Dalek Parliament, the androids, the Prime Minister or the Doctor and friends seem to notice a [[spoiler:Dalek]] is speaking to them.) Why? |
| 67 | ** She talks to them throughout the episode. Either she managed to find a way to transmit in her human voice and then forgot she'd done it, or the transmission technology works on brainwaves (which would explain why they can hear the music she plays), and so sends across how ''she'' hears herself. |
| 68 | ** Note: The Dalek puppets are not androids, they're worse than that |
| 69 | ** In 'The Witch's Familiar' in Series 9 it's revealed that a human wired into a Dalek casing sounds like a Dalek to those outside the casing but still sounds human inside, so it's possible Oswin was transmitting via a microphone within the casing throughout the episode rather than one outside which would have made her sound like a Dalek. |
| 70 | * Why ''is'' there a Dalek Prime Minister, anyway? Do Daleks have elections? |
| 71 | ** 'Prime Minister' is, in its more general usage, simply the first of the monarch's advisors / ministers. It's an elected position in the Westminster system of government and those derived from it, but it doesn't have to be. Presumably if there is / was a Dalek Emperor, the Dalek Prime Minister is the next step down. |
| 72 | ** There's little reason to think that the Dalek "Prime Minister" position is at all similar to real-life Prime Minister positions, apart from the fact that it's an office of significant authority. |
| 73 | *** I assume that the Prime Minister is basically an extension of the Emperor, or possibly something like the Classic Series' Dalek High Council. The Emperor can't dictate everything that happens in the Dalek Empire and needs a Dalek to basically be his voice. The Prime Minister would be his representative-just being a mutant in a fancy tube could signify that the Dalek Prime Minister has no real power. Being called a "Dalek Prime Minister" was [[EvilHasABadSenseOfHumor both a joke]] and nod to their involvement with Winston Churchill. |
| 74 | * Shouldn't Skaro be time-locked out of accessibility by its heavy involvement in the Time War the same way Gallifrey was? |
| 75 | ** Adding onto that, why isn't the Doctor more surprised when he sees the Daleks? In most of the New Who encounters with them, there's a moment of "didn't I kill you? How are you back?" And yet he seemed totally unsurprised by the Dalek civilization being exactly the same as it was in the Time War. |
| 76 | *** He ''didn't'' kill them all last time, [[Recap/DoctorWhoS31E3VictoryOfTheDaleks they won.]] It makes sense they'd have gotten more powerful. |
| 77 | ** If the Daleks are back, what about the Time Lords? Doesn't this mean that the time lock did nothing, and we're back to the Time War again? |
| 78 | *** "The End of Time" implies that the Time Lords had gotten ''worse'' than the Daleks. Maybe the Doctor tried harder to stop them. |
| 79 | *** These aren't Daleks locked in Time War, as stated above, they're the civilization built by the ones who escaped with the progenitor device. |
| 80 | ** The ''Daleks'' were heavily involved in the Time War, but that doesn't necessarily mean that ''Skaro'' was; they could have simply abandoned the planet by that point. It does look pretty run-down and decaying. |
| 81 | ** Also, Skaro was ''destroyed'' by "Remembrance of the Daleks" in the classic series; the Daleks probably fought most of the War from spaceships or vassal planets in the Empire, so it might not have been worth time-locking. With that in mind, maybe the Doctor travelled to Skaro-pre-1963 (when it got blown up.) |
| 82 | *** Various ExpandedUniverse material has the destruction of Skaro being reversed. |
| 83 | ** They could've just bomb some nearby planet and called it Skaro. Their planet was already a wasteland anyway... |
| 84 | ** If I were in the Doctor's place, I wouldn't be surprised much by that sort of thing anymore. "Yes, Amy, I did blow the Daleks all up a few months ago and sent them back into the Time War, but honestly, I knew they'd be back. No matter what I do, they come back, so I figured it was only a matter of time before it happened again." |
| 85 | * So where is Davros during all this? |
| 86 | ** For all we know, he died on the Crucible after the whole Reality Bomb thing. |
| 87 | *** Given the events of "The Stolen Earth" and "Journey's End" got eaten by time-cracks, he might never have even made it out of the Time War. Unless they got brought back in Big Bang 2, but then everyone should know about aliens. |
| 88 | ** Even if he survived thanks to JokerImmunity, genetically pure Daleks tend to hate him and only seek his help when they have no other choice (against the Movellans in "Destiny of the Daleks", Caan when he's the last left). |
| 89 | * At the end, the Doctor warps himself into the TARDIS, which is aboard the Dalek ship. But wait, ''why'' is the TARDIS aboard their ship? The Doctor didn't just come aboard on his own; he was kidnapped. |
| 90 | ** Maybe the Daleks decided to bring the TARDIS aboard themselves, after the Doctor was kidnapped? |
| 91 | *** Presumably so, as it's present in the Parliament when they fire the Doctor, Amy, and Rory at the planet. |
| 92 | * The sane Daleks are afraid that the insane Daleks will break out of the asylum. But how would the insane Daleks escape, exactly? Even if the shield fails, it's not like the planet is loaded with spaceships. It seems like only a scarce few would escape, via the crashed ship and that one teleporter. There might be more means of escape off-camera, but why would there be? The whole place is a prison. |
| 93 | ** Perhaps Daleks have a means of teleportation built into the casings (like the Emergency Temporal Shift). |
| 94 | ** Daleks can also fly, and we've seen them fly in space outside of spaceships before ("The Parting of the Ways"). Presumably they might be able to fly from a planet a short distance into space, enough to overwhelm the Dalek crafts orbiting the planet and steal them. |
| 95 | * If the insane Daleks escaped, would they really pose a threat to the regular Daleks? Would they even ''attack'' the sane Daleks? As far as we know, they'll just travel around and kill random people. And that's something the regular Daleks would likely approve of. |
| 96 | ** Maybe attacking other Daleks is what qualifies them as insane. Perhaps these Daleks basically went on a killing spree of their own kind. I know they weren't attacking each other down in the asylum, but that's not to say they can't have before. |
| 97 | ** Or possibly the threat they pose isn't just physical. Confining them in the Asylum probably also locks the mad Daleks out of whatever communication-network links the sane ones together into an organized military force. If the inmates can get beyond the shield, their crazy psyches may re-join that network automatically and disrupt the sane Daleks' own mental stability, spreading their madness to the entire species. |
| 98 | * Why do the Daleks call in ''The Doctor'' to save them? Even assuming that the insane Daleks pose an extreme threat, this is ''The Doctor'' we're talking about. He is the Predator. He is The Oncoming Storm. Why get him involved at all when there's a serious chance that he'll turn on you? Why not send somebody ''else'' to do the job? I get it; the Daleks are scared. But can't they kidnap some ''other'' people and get them to handle the problem? Can't they even ''try''? I don't know, go grab some Judoon or something. They'd pose less of a threat to you than the friggin' Doctor. |
| 99 | ** So they can kill him when they blow up the planet the moment the shields go down? Whoever they send is going to be almost certainly killed, might as well send the Daleks' Devil. Worst case scenario as far as they're concerned, their asylum problem is taken care of and the Doctor problem is exactly as it was at the start. |
| 100 | *** There's also the notion that they know what Oswin can do and what her deal is, they aren't "afraid," they've just calculated that she can mess with them, which is why they can't go, so they logic-ed it out; the Daleks on the planet are a threat, how do Dalek threats get handled? The Doctor and his companions drop out of the sky and deal with it, so they made that scenario happen. |
| 101 | ** The Daleks call the Doctor ''the'' Predator, because he's the only being who's hurt them so badly that he's forced them to acknowledge he's more dangerous than they are. Anything less than him, they'd never believe capable of standing up to the inmates. |
| 102 | * Why does the Doctor just leave at the end? Sure, the Daleks have all forgotten him now. But they're still a huge threat to the universe. (Heck, they've just demonstrated their ability to destroy a ''planet''.) Shouldn't he do something about that? |
| 103 | ** He's still in the middle of a giant amphitheater filled with Daleks. If he stepped out of that TARDIS at the end for more than the half a second he did, they'd simply EX-TER-MIN-ATE him the same way they would any other random non-Dalek stranger that appeared in the middle of Parliament calling themselves The Predator. |
| 104 | *** In fact, one of the Daleks tries to do just that as the TARDIS dematerialises. |
| 105 | ** As they have no memory of bringing the Doctor there, the Daleks were probably trying to figure out the source of the big blue box that (to their perception) spontaneously appeared in the middle of their amphitheater. Just because it needs to be EXTERMINATED doesn't mean you can't take 5 minutes to figure out what the hell it is first. |
| 106 | * Why reveal Oswin as a Dalek only to immediately re-reveal her as a former human? On a planet allegedly full of insane Daleks. |
| 107 | ** Well, it wouldn't really have made sense if she'd been a Dalek from the beginning. The insane Daleks weren't killed because their hatred was seen as beautiful, but a Dalek that thinks it's a human isn't full of hatred. Although, if they could have made it work, that would have been a brilliant twist. |
| 108 | ** Also now that we've seen the Christmas Special, it might tamper with the plans of having Clara/Oswin be the same "person" through out time. |
| 109 | * Why do they leave Oswin behind in the end? She doesn't seem suicidal, she's in control of herself and we don't see any evidence her mind will degenerate, they had time, and the teleporter would presumably take her. So why don't they take her? |
| 110 | ** I thought the fact that Oswin finally figures out what 'eggs' refers to (i.e. 'exterminate') was a hint that her control ''was'' slipping, at least since she'd learnt the truth; slower than most, perhaps, but that she would eventually become a Dalek. In any case, I got the vibe that it was more that Oswin preferred to die as a human than live as a Dalek. |
| 111 | ** During the intro, Oswin mentions that she has to fortify the door because Daleks are trying to get in. Now that we know that the whole thing is a hallucination, perhaps that door is a metaphor for her Dalek tendencies trying to break in and destroy the human part of her consciousness. In which case, perhaps she will eventually succumb and start thinking like a Dalek. She prefers to die as a human. |
| 112 | ** "They had time"? Daleks are ''slow''. I thought the implication was that Oswin could not have made it to the teleporter before the planet blew up. |
| 113 | * Why do a number of fans seem to have the impression that ''all'' the Daleks in the asylum, or at least several of them, were converted humans or thought they were humans? Was it because of the scene where Amy was hallucinating? That's not evidence. We don't know exactly what kind of effects the nanomachines were having on her mind. It could be that she saw the Daleks as humans because while the machines hadn't gotten to making her consider herself a Dalek, they did make her perceive Daleks as the same species as herself. I don't think there was anything in the episode that implied that there were any more Oswin-style converted Daleks. |
| 114 | ** To be fair, the episode also contains humans crashing onto a planet filled with Daleks and at least one of them being converted into a Dalek. True, it's not directly confirmed that others were, and it's unlikely, but it's also not the most unreasonable conclusion to reach either. |
| 115 | * Hold on: The entire premise of the episode is that the Daleks have no way to penetrate their forcefield, so they need the doctor for help. Now I can forgive the Daleks being able to send the doctor through the impenetrable shield, since they'd need to be able to deposit prisoners somehow (maybe the shield somehow checks whether or not the object in the gravity beam is a lifeform or a weapon). However, how did the Alaska escape pod get inside the shield? And if an escape pod is able to go through the shield, why couldn't a Dalek weapon? |
| 116 | ** The Doctor himself points out that obviously the shield is obviously not entirely impenetrable, and that if something can get in something can get out. However, the Alaska escape pod is presumably quite small, and thus is able to slip through what is presumably a fairly small 'crack' in the shield. While it's theoretically possible that a missile could make it through the same gap as well, they would at first need to find it (presumably not an easy task even for a Dalek) and then aim the missile right at the gap (again, probably not the easiest thing to do). Note also that at the end it takes a fairly sizable number of missiles -- at least twenty, maybe more -- to destroy the planet entirely; a single missile would presumably not do the job. Even if the forcefield is not entirely impenetrable, it's presumably easier just to switch it off and carpet-bomb the entire planet rather than locate the gap in the defences and target a whole load of missiles through that gap. |
| 117 | * Why the beans did [[spoiler: Madame Kovarian make Amy infertile?]] Wouldn't it make more sense to [[spoiler: let her have another baby, in hopes that it would become another Time Lord?]] |
| 118 | ** Madame Kovarian didn't need Amy anymore. Remember that was the 51st century, if they wanted another Time Lord they could just take the DNA from River Song and clone her. Besides i think she didn't intentionally made her infertile, i think that was a side-effect of whatever the Silence did to her. |
| 119 | ** Unless they made her infertile to prevent someone making another Time Baby to combat River! |
| 120 | ** Failing that, she seems like the type who [[KickTheDog would for the heck of it.]] |
| 121 | ** Wait, when did they ever say that Amy was ''physically'' infertile? I assumed it was an ''emotional'' problem. (IIRC she simply says "I can't have a baby", so this could go either way.) Her one and only pregnancy was hijacked by an evil organization; she herself was kidnapped and replaced with a ganger, Kovarian basically haunted her nightmares, and after the baby was finally born it ''melted in her arms!'' (because it was actually just another ganger at that point). Then that very same baby grew up and murdered the Doctor (actually the Tesselecta, but still it was a traumatic moment for Amy.) I figured that the whole experience just made the entire topic of pregnancy unbearable for Amy, even though she was physically capable of conceiving again. |
| 122 | *** Generally, if someone says they can't have kids, they mean that they ''can't'' have kids, not that they don't want them. I'd have thought, if it was an emotional thing, she would have worded it differently, something like "I couldn't handle it". If she meant it was an emotional problem, I imagine the writers would have made that clearer. |
| 123 | *** I don't know, it certainly sounds like she'd been over and over this and had reluctantly decided she couldn't handle it. It just makes so much more sense that the trauma of her first child left her emotionally not ready for kids. I mean, you can adopt or have someone donate their womb or their womb and their egg there are many options there. Alternatively, she could not physically nor emotionally have babies? |
| 124 | *** Since it was never filmed, this doesn't really count as canon, but in [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWU6XL9xI4k PS]], a scene planned for the end of ''The Angels Take Manhattan'', it says that [[spoiler: Amy and Rory did end up adopting a kid in the past]]. So, it's possible she's traumatised by the idea of pregnancy and birth, but clearly [[spoiler: the writers didn't think it was a case of not being able to handle ''raising'' a child]], which gives me the overall impression she couldn't get pregnant. And it's not uncommon for people who are incapable of having children feel like they are worth less, and not view other options as enough. Again, PS ended up being unfilmed, but the BBC have put it out there for us to see, so I think it counts for something. |
| 125 | ** Perhaps Kovarian didn't intentionally make her infertile; the way Amy phrased it made me think that Kovarian, in her endeavors to make sure Amy produced a bouncing baby Time Tot, went a little beyond the normal prenatal vitamins and regular ultrasounds, and perhaps used some experimental technology that, while making sure the baby was healthy (and part Time Lord), had the nasty side effect of tying up Amy's tubes. It's even possible that Amy's physical inability to become pregnant again was completely natural; this troper knows several families that were able to only produce one child, and were forced to adopt later. |
| 126 | ** The way it is worded sounds similar to how I have heard women word it who had some issue in childbirth that meant they could not get pregnant in the future. |
| 127 | * The Dalek from "Dalek" had been put in chains by humans who didn't know its strength. And it worked because it was so heavily damaged. Seeing it break free of those after repairing itself was a nice effect. But why are there so many shattered links in "Asylum of the Daleks"? Who thought it would restrain anyone? Or were the Doctor, Amy and Rory leaving time energy everywhere? |
| 128 | ** The Daleks also have a galaxy-spanning empire and are able to draw upon the resources of far more worlds than Henry Van Statten and his crew were; they're presumably able to find or make chains of stronger or heavier metal than anyone on Earth can. So presumably the mad Daleks initially start off chained up (for example, when they're first being transported from the planet to stop them causing havoc on the ships that are transporting them there), but all metals rust and weaken over time, allowing them to eventually break free. Once they do, however, they're safely in the Asylum, and the other Daleks outside of it don't care whether they break out of their chains or not. |
| 129 | * Is Oswin's appearance an EarlyBirdCameo for Jenna-Louise's new character? |
| 130 | ** This hasn't been definitively determined, although it's practically 100% certain that this will be revisited in some fashion at some point when Jenna-Louise Coleman's character takes on the job full time, so to speak. |
| 131 | ** Perhaps the new character is Oswin's twin? |
| 132 | ** The marketing for "The Snowmen" describes Jenna-Louise Coleman's character as "Clara", a Victorian governess. Obviously we won't know for certain until it actually airs and we get to know her, but the most likely scenario (on the face of it at least) is that Clara is an ancestor. |
| 133 | ** The final answer from "The Name of the Doctor": [[spoiler:Oswin and Clara are both the same person, a girl named Clara who becomes the Doctor's Companion and ends up jumping into his Time Stream to save his life. This action spreads her across his lifetime, causing her to appear in numerous times and places to help him]]. |
| 134 | ** But did the producers have this in mind when they created Oswin's character in Asylum of the Daleks, or were they just impressed with her performance and wanted her back? |
| 135 | *** From what I've seen (elsewhere on TV Tropes...), they wanted Clara as a companion this Season, and Oswin was a ExactWords teaser: "You'll see her on Christmas"-- and the (internal) date of this episode ''was'' Christmas.... And, it helps set up the mystery of the next time Eleven meets her. |
| 136 | *** So the answer is, Yes. |
| 137 | * Why does the Doctor being a Time Lord make him immune to the nanogenes? It just seemed like a cop-out solution to me, especially since it was explicitly stated that nanogenes were meant to make anyone attacking the Asylum part of it's security system. Who would attack the Asylum BUT the Time Lords? And wouldn't the Daleks want the nanogenes to be able to convert any species, not just humans? It's a big universe, after all. |
| 138 | ** For all we know, the Doctor ''isn't'' immune to them, at least not entirely. It's Amy who suggests that, after all, and she has no exact knowledge of exactly what he's immune to or not; other than what Amy says, it's never directly confirmed either way. It's entirely possible that the nanogenes ''were'' affecting him, only slower than they were affecting Amy, so he took a gamble that he'd be able to get business sorted out and get off the planet before they affected him sufficiently to convert him, and decided to protect Amy instead. And even if possessing biological abilities beyond those of a human hadn't been clearly established as part of being a Time Lord since pretty much the first time we ever found out what a Time Lord was, if not before (regeneration, respiratory bypass system, two hearts...), the OP's objection can be easily flipped; if the Time Lords are going to be the only ones who are attacking the Asylum (or any similar Dalek facility for that matter), then they've got a vested interest in anticipating and making sure they're protected from any possible defences that it might have. And if anyone is going to be anticipating and attacking Dalek defences, it's the Doctor. |
| 139 | *** What if it was affecting him, and Clara wasn't actually a Dalek, the Nanogenes just altered his brain to make him think so. She was fairly easily convinced because, well, she's been a year on a planet full of Daleks where people can be converted. Probably not true at all, just something that occurred to me. |
| 140 | ** To make a Dalek, you subtract love and add hate. Amy and Rory were in a bad place already because their marriage was in tatters. The Doctor figured that his love for both of them (and the universe at large) would be enough to stave off conversion symptoms for a few minutes at least, which was long enough to resolve everything and leave the planet. |
| 141 | ** Possibly the Time Lords developed an anti-nanogene vaccine during the Time War, and inoculated all of their own people including the Doctor. He didn't tell Amy this because he knew the nanogenes would seize upon any possible seed of envy or hostility they found in her psyche, possibly including envy of his immunity; rather, he convinced her they were both in the same danger, but that concentrating on her love for Rory could protect her just as it was "protecting" him. |
| 142 | * Okay, I get that Rory wants kids: but does Amy really think, that the guy who had waited 2000 YEARS for her, would want to have biological children with someone else than be with her? This is also ignoring fertility treatments, surrogate mothers, or even adoption. And besides, if it did bother him, he still has a biological child in River: true, he doesn't see her until she's an adult, but still. I just don't understand why Amy's first instinct is to leave him to have kids with someone else in this situation. |
| 143 | ** It's not exactly uncommon for couples who have seemingly strong relationships to break down after discovering that one of the partners is infertile, and remember that Amy is going through a lot of grief and insecurity about this; it might not be strictly logical of her to think in this way, but then love, grief and insecurity very rarely operate according to strictly logical terms. River is not exactly a conventional example of having a child, since they've missed out on several fundamental parts of the process of rearing their child (such as the whole 'childhood' thing for one). |
| 144 | ** Most likely it wasn't her 'first instinct'. More likely, she thought about it and thought about it until she'd managed to convince herself he'd be happier with someone else. Not logical, no, but as mentioned, she was feeling upset and insecure, and people can convince themselves that people will be happier without them, even when that makes no sense, if they're feeling bad enough. |
| 145 | ** Amy has never been all that rational. Given the amount of trauma she's gone through, the idea probably made sense to her, especially since the only reason Rory became a companion in the first place is because of her. |
| 146 | ** In the clip that appears to take place between seasons, we see Rory leaving the house, throwing his hands up in frustration, and Amy screaming "get out!" While the fertility issue might have been the underlying reason, they definitely said some other less than kind things to each other up to the split. |
| 147 | * Is Amy actually sterile after what the Silence did to her? When she told Rory she couldn't have anymore children, I didn't take it to mean she physically couldn't, but rather she doesn't want more children due to the trauma of what happened the last time she had a child (namely, Amy got kidnapped, her child got kidnapped and Amy missed out on raising her daughter). |
| 148 | ** I think she physically can't. Didn't she say 'I don't know what they did to me', or something? That implies more than trauma. I never got any indication that she didn't want kids, she seemed pretty upset about not being able to have them herself. |
| 149 | ** We may never know if she was physically unable or emotionally unable to have children, or even if the Silence were responsible or not. Because, ultimately, those details don't matter; Amy and Rory are having difficulty getting pregnant, and it's causing a huge strain on their relationship. |
| 150 | * How long has the Asylum been around? I assume it's been there for a long time, considering the plethora of old series Daleks we see contained in there, but wasn't the "Metaltron" Dalek in ''Dalek'' supposed to be the last of his kind? (Excluding the Emperor and the Cult of Skaro, obviously.) I seem to remember them drawing attention to the fact that the Doctor and Metaltron were both the lone survivors of their respective species. |
| 151 | ** When the Asylum is first mentioned, Doctor says that he never believed in it. |
| 152 | *** Specifically, he'd never believed that Daleks would leave their own insane alive. |
| 153 | ** As for the one from "Dalek" being the LastOfHisKind, even if it had known that the Asylum was still around after the Time War, it probably wouldn't have considered a bunch of raving lunatics "real" Daleks, any more than it could consider itself one after it realized how Rose's DNA had changed it. |
| 154 | * Why do insane Daleks stop attacking the Doctor as soon as Oswin deletes him from their database? I get that they don't know who he is anymore, but don't the Daleks want to exterminate everyone? |
| 155 | ** They're insane and, in this case, heavily traumatised; it's not unreasonable that normal Dalek rules would not longer apply in this case. |
| 156 | * Wait, why wasn't Dalek Caan put in the Asylum? He sounded crazy to me. |
| 157 | ** He was also clearly of use to the Daleks (or at least Davros) at the time; their plan of the moment was working off his predictions, which they couldn't have done if they'd just dumped him in the Asylum. Just like the Special Weapons Dalek was used outside the Asylum despite apparently being completely off it's rocker even by Dalek standards as well. Apparently the Daleks will hold off on chucking a mad Dalek into the Asylum if they think they can be useful in some way. |
| 158 | *** Plus, he wasn't ''dangerously'' crazy, as in enough to turn on other Daleks [[spoiler:except for the part where [[HeelRealisation he totally was, but they didn't know about that.]]]] |
| 159 | *** And his insanity wasn't the kind that Daleks would find beautiful. |
| 160 | [[/folder]] |
| 161 | |
| 162 | [[folder:"Dinosaurs on a Spaceship"]] |
| 163 | * Rory tells his dad he's 31. Is that possible? Amy was (correct me if I'm wrong on this) 21 when they got married, and based on flashbacks, Rory seems to be about the same age as her. I know the Doctor's been drifting in and out of their lives for awhile, but has it really been ten years since they were married? It seems like there should have been some acknowledgement that it's been that long. I guess I'm just getting a little confused about the timeline in general. |
| 164 | ** Well, I think it's fair to assume it's ''generally'' a year per series, so normally it would have been two. But then there's two years for after the Doctor's 'death', ten months between this and the last episode, an unspecified time between the Christmas special and the last episode (but long enough for them to go from a happy couple to the brink of divorce; yes, Amy was actually giving Rory up, but how long would it take for Rory to accept the break up and get divorce papers?). Oh, and an unspecified time before the last series and midway through it, and time enough between ''The God Complex'' and ''Closing Time'' for Amy to release a perfume brand and become a model... I was a little surprised to find it was ten years, but there has been a lot of unspecified amounts of time; so after thinking about it, ten years seems reasonable. |
| 165 | ** Actually, Rory has to be at least three years older than Amy, as when she was nineteen in 'The Eleventh Hour', he was working as a qualified nurse, implying that he'd already completed a three-year university degree after leaving school (presumably at age eighteen). |
| 166 | *** That's a very good point, but in ''Let's Kill Hitler'' they were clearly the same age... the writers may not have thought about this properly, but I think ''they'' think that they're the same age, so I think it is supposed to be ten years. |
| 167 | *** Is he definitely working as a qualified nurse? Student nurses work on wards doing the same sort of things Rory does. |
| 168 | *** In ''The Power of Three'', Amy mentions that it's been ten years for her since she began travelling with the Doctor. |
| 169 | *** She also mentions in ''Angels Take Manhattan'' that they've been traveling with the Doctor long enough that their friends are noticing that they're aging faster than everyone else. So did Rory start out that much older, or have they been traveling back and forth through time for a decade and his father is completely aware that his son has been gone for months or years at a time only to return shortly after he left? |
| 170 | * If the Doctor has erased himself from every database ever, then how did the Indian Space Agency know how to contact him? How did UNIT know, for that matter? Everyone seems to think he's dead (or nonexistent), except them. |
| 171 | ** UNIT at least probably had whatever info on him they had from the back when he was rolling around with them (and that is probably in some capacity a fixed point, that or The Brigadier told his daughter about the doctor and UNIT has a few people left from the old days who remember him to. The ISA has no real explanation beyond maybe that commander lady'll show up again. |
| 172 | *** Plus, UNIT is old enough (Earth-time) that it probably has plenty of archived records about the Doctor ''on paper'' from back in the 70s. Torchwood, even moreso. |
| 173 | ** The ISA didn't contact him - he had the psychic paper set to news feeds and went uninvited. |
| 174 | * The premise of this episode is that Silurians, living at the end of the Cretaceous, built the vessel to save a variety of animal species from being wiped out by the oncoming K-T asteroid impact. However, it was established in "Earthshock" that the Whoniverse dinosaurs died out because the Cybermen sent a space freighter crashing towards future Earth, and Adric's attempts to stop it caused the vessel to shift back in time. How could the Silurians have anticipated the mass extinction in time to launch such an ark, if it happened because an explosive-laden space freighter popped up from the distant future on an imminent collision course? |
| 175 | ** Who's to say there wasn't both? The Silurians detect a massive asteroid on collision course with the planet and start preparing emergency procedures like the ark, but before the asteroid collides the freighter pops up out of nowhere and crashes, causing the extinction event. Then, once everything's dead, the asteroid slams into the planet not long after, but there's (almost) nothing left to kill. That way, the freighter is the actual cause of the event, but as far as future researchers are concerned it was an asteroid. |
| 176 | [[/folder]] |
| 177 | |
| 178 | [[folder:"A Town Called Mercy"]] |
| 179 | * So the Doctor's being all crazy and Master-ish, and Amy acknowledges this is by saying "this is what happens when you travel alone for too long" Um. I know she and Rory have their own lives to live, but it's sort of strange that she knows what's wrong and then still decides to leave for a long time again. It just doesn't seem like something she (or Rory) would do, since the Doctor is her best friend and all. You'd think that when he dropped them off Amy would at least take a second and say "hey, you'll be okay by yourself won't you?" And yeah, the Doctor would lie and they'd still leave, but it just seemed really out of character for her to not make sure he's reasonably sane before leaving him. |
| 180 | ** There are some hints that this episode takes place during the events of the next episode (where the Doctor is stuck on Earth for a long period trying to figure out the cube invasion, and keeps taking Rory and Amy away with him when he gets bored). If this is the case, he's going to be hanging around long enough for them to be able to keep him company and make sure he doesn't go off the deep end. |
| 181 | *** No there aren't. |
| 182 | *** There aren't hints? Yes, there are. Specifically; the thing about Henry VIII. In this episode, it says Rory left his phone charger in the king's bedchamber. In the next episode, in the bit where they're travelling with the Doctor, Amy accidentally marries him, and they end up hiding under his bed. They ''could'' have gone back, but that just seems like the kind of thing that was put in as a deliberate clue; I can't see how they'd end up in the king's bedroom twice. |
| 183 | * Why does Amy ask "when as killing been an option"? She knows the Doctor has killed and is willing to kill threats, after all he dumped the Weeping Angels in a time fissure that made them never exist, arranged it so the Silence would order there own death and launched an assault on Demon's run when Amy was taken (at least two of those things occurred while she was watching). |
| 184 | ** It's one thing to manipulate a race into ordering their own destruction or to dump them in some barely-comprehensible timey-wimey thing or to gather a team of allies to rescue a close friend. It's quite another to start pointing guns in people's faces and threatening to shoot them. Since the Doctor doesn't do the latter that often, it's a pretty big clue that he's acting irrationally (for him). The Doctor kills, yes, but he rarely pulls the trigger directly. |
| 185 | [[/folder]] |
| 186 | |
| 187 | [[folder:"The Power of Three"]] |
| 188 | * So, did everyone who wasn't Brian or Rory on the ship die when it blew up? And why were the orderlies kidnapping people, anyway? |
| 189 | ** I ''think'' the implication is that they were being tested/experimented on to find the best way to kill humans, but it's not made explicitly clear. Nor whether or not they were already dead by the time Doctor and Amy got there (but considering Brian and Rory weren't...yeeaaahhh...) |
| 190 | ** A bit of FridgeHorror when you think that if Amy and Rory had listened to the Doctor when he told them to get everyone out (assuming he meant EVERYONE, and not just Brian, which I think he did), that wouldn't have happened. Also add the fact that the Doctor didn't even notice that he just blew several people up...which isn't like him at all... |
| 191 | * Assuming that the people the orderlies had kidnapped from the hospital were being used to figure out how to kill humans (just theory, of course), what was the point of the cubes? It wouldn't have taken them 10 months (or however long it was) to figure out how to kill humans if they had been experimenting on people the whole time. |
| 192 | ** The cubes were there to apply said killing method on a global scale. |
| 193 | *** While that's certainly true, the cubes were sent months in advance so that they could analyze the human race and figure out the best way to kill them. Now, if the Shakri had been experimenting on people from the very start, they would have ''instantly'' noticed that humans could be killed by destroying basically ''any'' major organ. They wouldn't have had to wait that long; they could have killed them all instantly. |
| 194 | *** The wait wasn't just to figure out how to kill people, it was also to lower humanity's guard and ensure that people would feel comfortable carrying the cubes around, spreading them about and keeping them everywhere so the strike would have maximum effect. It was a surprise attack, a time bomb. |
| 195 | *** The Doctor also implied the Shakri weren't quite limited to normal time, either, so waiting for the cube plan to come to fruition likely wasn't a big deal to them. |
| 196 | * Why was the heart-restarting power of the cubes treated like a happy ending? Most of that third of the population affected will now have irreversible brain damage due to lack of circulation. Yay? |
| 197 | ** We'll have to hope that the unexplained power to cause heart attacks also involves a method of avoiding brain damage, or a method of repairing such damage once the heart is restarted. |
| 198 | ** The writer obviously didn't know that lack of circulation for such a short time could cause irreversible brain damage (neither did I), so it's not true in the episode. |
| 199 | [[/folder]] |
| 200 | |
| 201 | [[folder:"The Snowmen"]] |
| 202 | * A minor one, but why did the Doctor seem to automatically assume that he was dealing with an earlier version of Oswin? Particularly when he's so confident that she's not going to die; granted, Clara mentions souffles and he's presumably made the link that she sounds the same by this point, and I can see why he came to the conclusions he did about Clara and Oswin being different incarnations of the same person by the very end, but wouldn't it have been a more logical initial assumption to believe that Clara was an ancestor of Oswin's? |
| 203 | ** He didn't make the connection until he saw her headstone which read Clara Oswin Oswald, all he knows is that souffle girl's name was Oswin Oswald. Plus, what she said to him as she died "run you clever boy. Remember me" is the same thing that Oswin told him before. That's why he made the connection between the two. |
| 204 | ** I disagree with the first replier; there was a pause when she said she liked making souffles, and he recognised her voice; he knew something was going on, he'd made a connection, he just hadn't got enough evidence to realise they were the same person until the end. As for the original question; I got the impression it was less "No, I know she won't die", more "No, she can't die!". The first person who's managed to pull him back into being himself after the death of his friends, who seems to have a connection to someone he met before who died... she's a lifeline to him. He just can't face the possibility that she's going to die, and his insistence she wouldn't die struck me as desperation, not confidence. |
| 205 | *** That makes sense. |
| 206 | ** More to the point, he's a time-traveller, and he's invited a girl who's suspiciously similar to Oswin onto his spaceship. He's done the future self thing before, it was the simplest and most logical guess up until the moment she died too. |
| 207 | ** I wouldn't necessarily say that Clara is an ''earlier'' version, given the timey-wimey nature of things. |
| 208 | ** He met Oswin in the future. He met Clara in the past. Hence, the logical assumption is that Clara is an earlier version of Oswin. |
| 209 | ** Just to go over the sequence of events: the Doctor never exactly saw Oswin, only heard her voice. To the audience it becomes clear that we're probably dealing with a case of [[IdenticalAncestor Identical Ancestors]] or [[IdenticalStranger Identical Stranger]]. Over the course of the episode, with Clara dropping soufflé lines and as the Doctor begins to recognize her voice, he begins to suspect that there may be a familial relationship between Clara and Oswin. But when Clara dies, he's confused; there should be some serious temporal backlash for killing the ancestor of the girl who saved his life a few episodes ago, yet he senses none. "She can't die!" Granted, he's upset, but he's also seriously confused. When he finds out her middle name was Oswin, he begins to suspect that there is something else at work here. |
| 210 | * Clara seems to have UST with the Doc. Isn't he married to River at this point? Maybe she doesn't mind sharing, what with being bi. INCOMING FANFIC! |
| 211 | ** Well, she has no way of knowing he's married, but yes, that did occur to me too. In the Doctor's defense, she was the one making all the advances. Anyway, the Doctor has to kiss all his companions at some point, it's a rule. Better to have it happen now than later, when she will presumably know about River. |
| 212 | *** The kissing companions rule is really only a rule in the New Series. Back in the old days, the rule was literally, "No Hanky-Panky in the TARDIS". |
| 213 | ** Still, there couldn't have been one "But I'm married!" comment? After all, when we last saw the Doctor he was traveling with River and they were very close. |
| 214 | ** Are they really married? Even Steven Moffat has suggested that it's ambiguous whether or not that was a legitimate wedding ceremony. |
| 215 | ** I don't think it matters the validity of their marriage - just how they think of their relationship. |
| 216 | ** Marriage doesn't immediately and completely remove the possibility of UST with someone who is not the marriage partner; hence why people have affairs. |
| 217 | ** Just to point out, this is set after the Doctor's last meeting with River from his perspective, she's gone off to the Library to meet Ten. He's in mourning in this episode over the loss of all three Ponds, not just Amy and Rory. Technically that makes him a widower. [[spoiler: Also series 8 implies that Eleven considered himself/wanted to be her boyfriend.]] |
| 218 | ** The Doctor and River are both time travelers and not exclusive. |
| 219 | * I hate that the father of the children is creepy when he calls Clara pretty, young and flirts, etc. but when Clara holds the Doctor and forcefully kisses him it's ok. Why doesn't the Doctor go "Hey that's so uncalled for have you ever heard of consent? I could be married for all you know and in fact I am" |
| 220 | ** Were we supposed to be find him creepy? He wasn't really ''flirting'', the 'pretty' comment just slipped out, and he seemed embarrassed about it. I saw nothing creepy about the guy; I just saw a man with an unrequited crush on the children's governess which he tried to keep hidden but which occasionally slipped out despite himself. That's not creepy by itself, and considering he was upset rather than angry when he thought the Doctor was her boyfriend - and he'd have had a right to be angry when they'd apparently been together in his house - I'd say it was genuine feelings, he wasn't just lusting after her . You can still be annoyed at Clara kissing the Doctor, but I don't think there was any hypocrisy there. |
| 221 | * Why didn't the Doctor teleport the Tardis to catch Clara's fall the way he caught River in Day of the Moon. |
| 222 | ** He directly observed the fall, fixing it in place. It wouldn't take that long for her to fall all the way down, and by the time he cleared his head and got in the TARDIS it would be too late and he'd know it was |
| 223 | ** First, he didn't exactly watch her to the very moment she hit the floor. Second, it's a time machine |
| 224 | *** Keep in mind that she's not literally falling in slow motion; it takes a human body surprisingly little time to fall from a far height to the ground. By the time he snaps out of his shock and horror over what's just happened quickly, gets back into the TARDIS, figures out where she's going to land and the trajectory she's falling at and all the other factors he needs to know to be able to precisely arrange things to catch her, and sets the controls to dematerialize ... she's probably already hit the ground. The reason he caught River is because it's likely that they're prearranged it in advance, he knew that she was going to be falling and where to best position the TARDIS, and was thus able to be ready it -- an advantage he doesn't have with Clara in this case. |
| 225 | ** The TARDIS and Doctor couldn't leave before she hit the ground, there wasn't enough time. So if he caught her, it would be cutting back on his own timeline, generally established as BAD (though admittedly never explained more than that and a few Reapers.) Plus, when he saved River, the TARDIS was parked on the side of a building Via Gravity screw, and there was nothing to park on in this case. The Tardis hardly ever keeps still when it's flying, and unless he's careful with it, it spins. the door is only on one side, and clipping the edges of it would be even worse than hitting the ground. In short, he would have got one very difficult shot at it if he took off as soon as she was dragged away instead of running out after her, and even then he'd have to fly the TARDIS with the kind of skill even River has trouble with. Sounds pretty tricky... Besides, he panicked and missed his chance when he tried to stop the fall to begin with. |
| 226 | * Is Strax wearing his battle armor ''under'' his clothes or are Sontarans just that bulky? |
| 227 | ** Knowing Strax, he's probably armored under there. |
| 228 | * Why and how did Clara's death and the ensuing tears cause salt water to rain down? I guess it's supposed to be ThePowerOfLove solving the situation, but how? |
| 229 | ** If memory serves correctly, the Great Intelligence had linked with the family's emotions, and their fear was what kept it going. When that turned to sadness, it changed the Great Intelligence's form and cut off what was keeping it alive. It is a bit weird if you think about it, but I think it just about holds up as an explanation. |
| 230 | ** The snow took on forms drawn from people's emotions. What else would sadness turn it into, if not tears? |
| 231 | [[/folder]] |
| 232 | |
| 233 | [[folder:"The Bells of Saint John"]] |
| 234 | * Why would there be an Olympics in 2074? It doesn't fit into the cycle. Sure, he says Anti-Grav Olympics, but we can only assume it was the same Olympics since they were able to call it that. |
| 235 | ** Maybe it's like the Winter Olympics and runs in different years? That would explain why he called it the "Anti-Grav Olympics", rather than referring to a specific event. Or maybe something interrupted the ordinary cycle and they just held it again as soon as possible. |
| 236 | ** Why wouldn't there be? Between Winter and Summer, there's an Olympics every even-numbered year. |
| 237 | ** Not every even-numbered year, just the ones that you can divide by four. You can't divide 74 by four, therefore, unless something happened or some planet holds an Anti-gravity Olympics at different periods than our Olympics, there really shouldn't be Olympics in 2074. |
| 238 | *** Just the ones you can divide by four?? What? The Winter and Summer Olympics are offset from each other by 2 years. Only the ''Summer'' Olympics happen in years divisible by four. The 2010 Winter Olympics, for instance, did not take place in a year divisible by four. 2010 divided by four is 502.5 . |
| 239 | ** What do you mean what? It is true for the Summer Olympics, and the Winter Olympics aren't very hyped. So I've made a mistake, there's no need to 'what' me. I have to admit, I don't know much about winter olympics, but I do know it is also every four years, just not the same four years. |
| 240 | *** How hyped the Winter Olympics are depends where one lives. Yes the Winter Olympics are a smaller event, but in some countries they are a bigger deal, especially if winter sports are more popular in that country. |
| 241 | ** Did he specifically mention it was on this planet? Maybe other planets have their own version of the Olympics held at different times |
| 242 | * Did the Doctor just kill a bunch of innocent people? They've been sucked out of their bodies. They're in the datacloud. We can only put Oswin back if we put ''everybody'' back, so we do. But it's explicitly mentioned that many people can't go back because their bodies have decayed. Thus, sending them back will simply destroy them. And the Doctor is ok with this? He says its ok because he's rescuing people from a "living hell" but is annihilation really that much better? He really should have taken a Third Option somehow. |
| 243 | ** Yes but keep in mind that the clock is running out on Clara. We don't know how long a body can last without the consciousness, and she is the "Impossible Girl." as well as being under the Doctor's protection. As for a third option, there really isn't anywhere for them to go, is there? The wall'o'men at the Shard seemed like a cattle pen to me. It was keeping them alive. If he had released them into the internet or whatever, they might very well have just turned into viruses or been shredded by fire walls. Better to die than to be released into a world where reality as you know it isn't. |
| 244 | ** The Doctor didn't kill them. It was The Great Intelligence. Being in the datacloud means (at least for me) that your consciousness is uploaded, but not necessarily that your kept alive there, not if your body is destroyed. I say this because I don't think what they had in the datacloud can be called life. I mean, they were terrified, not even knowing where they were. They seemed to have been trapped in a single room, and all they could do is scream all day. I think even those who died wouldn't blame the Doctor for what he did. |
| 245 | *** Yeah, it sucks being in the cloud. But the question was why the doctor didn't TakeAThirdOption. Maybe get some of that Flesh stuff and make new bodies for the people whose natural bodies have decayed. Or find a way to transfer some of the people to that simulated reality where River Song winds up in the Library episode. All of this would be difficult to set up, of course, but arguably the doctor had plenty of time. He had already broken into the building and (presumably) contacted UNIT, who arrived soon thereafter. So realistically, you'd figure that he'd spend at least a few hours trying to find a Third Option before just moving everyone out of the cloud. But of course they couldn't do that, because the episode would be too long then. The best reason I can think of for doing what he did is that people's bodies actually decay pretty rapidly and so he only had a few minutes to save Clara. |
| 246 | *** The sheer logistics involved make that kind of impractical; particularly since his primary objective at that point is to rescue Clara. The Third Option in this case requires a lot of potentially fiddly temporal back-and-forthing that could in turn lead to other distractions, since neither the Flesh nor the Library are available in 21st century London. He wants to get Clara and as many other people as he can rescued as quickly as possible. |
| 247 | ** Does the phrase "put it out of its misery" mean anything to you? |
| 248 | ** The way I see it, it's kind of like the cybermen. Trapped, no actual body, etc. The cybermen actually ''blow up'' when they realize what happened to them; that's how bad it is. I think the people in the cloud would rather die than be stuck there. Also, it seems something's going on with their minds as well? They all keep repeating "I don't know where I am." It's possible the mind deteriorates after awhile in the cloud as well. As for taking a third option, I don't really see how the Doctor could. He can't simply build people new bodies, otherwise he would have done it for the people turned into cybermen. Regarding the flesh, don't you actually need to dip the person in the [[BuffySpeak flesh-liquid-stuff]] to make flesh bodies? That wouldn't work considering their bodies are dead and decaying. |
| 249 | * When the slimheads dramatically turn around so they can suck your mind out...why doesn't anybody think to run away? Or like, just run circles around the slimhead, so the dangerous part is never facing you. |
| 250 | ** Well, keep in mind that only Clara has been caught by them twice, and it's a very striking image. The manager, though, does try to get away, but I assume the Spoonheads have some variety of counter measure. A compulsion field, a "LOOK AT ME" device to keep the prey ensnared. |
| 251 | ** In addition, once it begins sucking your mind out... well, your mind is being sucked out. Add that to the shock and fear, and even if the victims weren't actually being held in place (which they may well have been), they may simply not have been able to think straight enough to run. |
| 252 | *** Well yeah, but I was talking about why people don't run away ''before'' the mind-sucking process begins. It takes a slimhead like 5 full seconds to turn around. |
| 253 | *** How would they know it was just that part they had to stay away from? OK, yeah, you could guess that the back of its head wasn't a good thing, but for all they new it was just showing them it was a robot before it killed them. Freezing up in fear is a natural reaction. It also seems probable that if anyone attempted to run they would be pursued; there's no reason to think the robot wouldn't just have cornered them, then grabbed them and force them to look. They've got arms, and since they're robots designed specifically to capture people I imagine they're pretty fast and strong. |
| 254 | ** I'm pretty sure the only way to escape is not to click on the Wi-Fi connection in the first place, or at least that's what the opening scene implied to me (apart from the blatant Apple [[Platform/AppleMacintosh MacBook]] Air placements all over the scene, which imply that that scene was just an Apple advert instead). Once you've clicked, it's over, I presume. |
| 255 | *** No, clicking the thing just means that they can ''see'' you. Getting your brain sucked out comes later. If you manage to avoid the slimheads indefinitely, you'll be ok. |
| 256 | *** Yeah, but once they've seen what you look like, they can follow you on CCTV across London, so probably you would have to avoid a large number of these robots chasing you, and I think you would have to escape from London as well, and that is if you can beat the shock that seizes you when you see someone's head turning around in 180 degrees while their body is staying still. So I think it you're pretty much doomed if you click on the Wi-Fi. Still, maybe it is possible to do all that, it's just too damn difficult. Also remember that the second time Clara was also shocked because it was the Doctor who turned out to be this Wi-fi robot in disguise, so we haven't actually seen anyone who was used to these robots trying to get sucked in by them. |
| 257 | *** They do seem to evaluate Clara before they upload her ("She's clever, but lacking tech skills," or something along those lines), which implies they might have a selection process of some nature, and they do seem to have some concerns about over-harvesting. Given that, it is theoretically possible that someone might click the link and be unacceptable. It does seem pretty clear, however, that most people who click the link get harvested. |
| 258 | *** I'm pretty sure the guy at the beginning said that not everyone who clicks the link gets harvested, but that if they decide to come after you, you can't get away. So while clicking the link doesn't automatically mean you'll get caught, it ''does'' mean you'll get caught if they decide to come after you. So yeah, if they want you, you're doomed. |
| 259 | *** Moral of the story: don't hook up with strange Wi-Fi networks... is this what we're telling kids in the 21st century, now? Don't take candy from strangers, and don't hook up with their wifi! |
| 260 | * Why did they put computer-knowledge into Clara's head? She had already clicked on the wi-fi thing. As far as I can tell, it wasn't necessary for her to know anything else at that point. The slimhead could just show up and suck her brains out. |
| 261 | ** Well, everyone serves as food for the Great Intelligence. Maybe they add bits of knowledge to people to make them tastier? |
| 262 | ** At best guess, the Great Intelligence's long game (since, well, it clearly has one) involves the Internet / modern technology in some way; as we basically learned in the previous episode, since the Great Intelligence is basically the mind of a Victorian scientist merged with a mimetic sentience that only mimics things, it probably needs both as many clever minds and as much modern tech-savviness as it can get. |
| 263 | *** Just to clarify, the Great Intelligence is an interdimensional entity with the capability to control people's minds, or even their bodies. Many of the Great Intelligence's exploits are made with the goal of achieving some sort of physical form. Perhaps in this episode, he decided to put a twist on it- get rid of everyone's physical form, so that everyone can be a floating consciousness along with him! |
| 264 | ** Possibly they hadn't initially intended to feed her to the G.I., but to recruit her to work in their office. Then they realized the Doctor was involved, so changed their plans. |
| 265 | * The Doctor "never takes the TARDIS into battle"? Since when, exactly? And in any case, they weren't even going into battle yet, just driving to a cafe for breakfast. Out of character, of course, there are at least two justifications for the bike: |
| 266 | ** Spoonhead!Doctor probably couldn't have piloted the TARDIS, and the helmet allowed a nice dramatic reveal. |
| 267 | ** [[RuleOfCool The Doctor and Clara Oswald on a frigging motorbike]], and [[RuleOfCool The Doctor driving a motorbike up a skyscraper]]. |
| 268 | ** Most of the time, the Doctor ''doesn't'' take the TARDIS into battle; he just parks it somewhere and leaves it alone while he sorts out what needs to be sorted out. It's only under usually very rare and extreme circumstances, usually involving the Daleks or the end of the world / universe, that he actually pilots the TARDIS into potential danger. |
| 269 | *** I kind of took it as he doesn't take the TARDIS into battle '''anymore.''' Look at what happened the last time: he got caught in a paradox, came dangerously close to ripping New York apart, and lost Amy and Rory forever. The TARDIS is one of the few things he has left, maybe the combined affect of losing Rose, Donna, Amy, and Rory in various ways finally convinced him to be a little more careful with her. |
| 270 | ** In "The Day of the Doctor", there's a scene where the War Doctor ''does'' take the TARDIS into battle. It's likely that the ''non''-War Doctor has sworn off doing so as part of his rejection of everything that [[spoiler: he thinks]] the War Doctor was. |
| 271 | * How exactly did Clara get hooked up to the Doctor in the first place? Even he's astonished (since the TARDIS is, of course, not a real phone box), but she just says that a woman at a shop gave her the number and said it was the 'best helpline in the universe'. So who the hell is working at that shop who has the number for a phone that's not really a phone that belongs to an alien living 800 years in the past? And how did she know to give it to the exact girl that alien was looking for? It's a pretty glaringly big detail that was never actually explained. |
| 272 | ** It's possible that this will be explained in a later episode, but most likely, it was River; it does fit her MO, so it's hardly a great leap to suppose it was her. |
| 273 | ** The Doctor brings this up in the series eight premiere, looks like it's going to become a larger plot point. [[spoiler: It seems at this point is was Missy, the creepy woman in "Paradise" in series eight who calls the Doctor her boyfriend.]] |
| 274 | * You have a time machine! Just go to the shop at the time and place where Clara got the number and see who she got it from! ''Easy-peasy!'' |
| 275 | ** He can't. It's already established that he wasn't there. Going back and being there would change Clara's need to find him, thus creating a paradox. |
| 276 | ** It wasn't established he wasn't there, just that Clara didn't see him there. He could go back in time and, for example, just peak from behind a corner or use a hidden camera to find out who gave the number to Clara without her noticing him, thus avoiding any paradox. |
| 277 | [[/folder]] |
| 278 | |
| 279 | [[folder:"The Rings of Akhaten"]] |
| 280 | * Did the native people know the caged vampire wasn't the Grandfather? The Doctor only presumes they don't. If that's the case, [[WhyDontYaJustShootHim why didn't they just kill it?]] |
| 281 | * If "potential futures" can kill the Godfather, why wouldn't picking a child out to be killed early do that? And wouldn't the Doctor himself have a potential future, on top of all the memories he crammed into it? |
| 282 | ** The Doctor's speech implies he's seen too much to really think of more than a few very finite possibilities. |
| 283 | ** Maybe it has something to do with how something is presented? Since this society is clearly psychic to some degree, how powerful an offering is may depend on how the person is thinking of it. The Doctor didn't think in terms of potential futures, Clara did. |
| 284 | ** It's also possible that the Godfather was already weakened from the Doctor's story, and it was merely the intensity of Clara's potential future that finally caused the killing blow. |
| 285 | *** [[spoiler: Or, as we now know, her potential ''millions'' of futures]] post-"The Name of the Doctor". Damn, lotsa calories in one leaf, there... |
| 286 | ** As for the child, they're eaten by the vampire, not the Godfather personally: perhaps the vampire's purpose is to make it more digestible. |
| 287 | *** I figured that the Grandfather was like a sort of feeding tube for the Old God. |
| 288 | * Now that the Sun's gone, do the seven planets get a case of NoEndorHolocaust? |
| 289 | ** No, since it was a planet, not a star. There's still a possibility that the mucked up gravity could cause problems, but it's much less than there would be if it was a star. |
| 290 | * I'm not sure whether Akhaten was a sun or a giant planet. Brown dwarf? |
| 291 | ** Definitely a planet. The Doctor says the people of the system beleive all life began on "that planet." |
| 292 | * So the Grandfather feeds on stories/souls. When the Doctor offers his story it's obvious he's drained as he falls to his knees, but he didn't die and he doesn't appear to have lost any memories. So if Godfather "ate" Mary and/or the planets, wouldn't it just read their minds instead of destroying everything? Or are Time Lords just that physically/mentally strong? |
| 293 | ** The Doctor didn't die because the Grandfather didn't finish eating his story; doing so would presumably take some time, since he's lived for so long. If it had tried to eat Mary, it would have finished a lot quicker since she's just a child. |
| 294 | *** But if you don't finish eating a cookie, there's still a big hole in it. So surely the Doctor would have lost some of his memories or done more than just sag to his knees? Maybe I'm taking the eating metaphor too seriously, but it seems weird that: a)The Doctor somehow knew his story wasn't enough if the planet hadn't even finished eating it, b) He's unharmed but the leaf is disintegrated. |
| 295 | *** In answer to point b, at least: first of all, the Godfather feeds off psychic energy, so I don't think he wasn't eating the memories themselves so much as the feelings behind them. Secondly, a Time Lord body is considerably stronger than an old leaf. I assume that people die when all the psychic energy has been consumed, and then the body begins to deteriorate like the leaf did. As stated above, the Godfather couldn't finish, and just left the Doctor drained of ''some'' energy, whereas the leaf had a smaller story and was consumed in seconds. |
| 296 | * Why wasn't the translator working for Clara? |
| 297 | ** The Tardis doesn't like her. |
| 298 | *** We don't know that for sure, Clara just said that. |
| 299 | ** Who said it didn't? Only one alien didn't speak English, and that's just the Judoon situation. It's no different from Martha being unable to understand the Hath in ''The Doctor's Daughter''. |
| 300 | ** All this is confirmed by ''Cold War'': the TranslationConvention works fine for Clara on a sub full of Russians. |
| 301 | ** It did work. The alien seemed to understand her when she barked. |
| 302 | * Is it just me, or was this leaf a completely different leaf from the one in ''The Bells of Saint John''? That one had a very definitive "maple" shape, and a duller color. This one was brighter, and had more rounded edges instead of maple points. Also it had a shorter stem. Could the props department really not find the same leaf? |
| 303 | ** This is listed as a production error on the ''Doctor Who'' wiki... so, yeah, apparently they couldn't find the right leaf. |
| 304 | * My question is how did the leaf survive that long? Clara appears to be in her early to mid twenties. Add to that the time that Clara's mother was pregnant, and assuming her parents dated and were married for at least a little while before having her, that leaf (which was technically already dead since it fell out of that tree) is decades old. Add to that it wasn't preserved in any special way, simply held in a book where it'll be touched, handled, and moved around, it should have deteriorated a long time ago. Maybe it ties in with the "different leaf" question above: maybe Clara's mother was secretly replacing them all along and simply not telling her. |
| 305 | ** Books are surprisingly good at preserving leaves. My girlfriend has a leaf in a book that's been in there for about fifteen years. |
| 306 | *** That's nothing: natural history museums have leaves that are ''centuries'' old in their collections. |
| 307 | ** It is (half-recalled and possibly-if-not-probably inaccurate information to follow) something to do with the oils in paper helping to preserve the leaf, and / or the fact that the leaf is essentially sealed in by the book and consequently not exposed to any elements that would act as a degenerative agent. |
| 308 | *** Possibly Clara's parents had it coated with a preservative, given its sentimental value to them. |
| 309 | [[/folder]] |
| 310 | |
| 311 | [[folder:"Cold War"]] |
| 312 | * Why can the armour can be summoned if an Ice Warrior is supposed to remain inside? |
| 313 | ** There are numerous reasons. Ice Warriors might remove them in private, it might be in case they have trouble finding their suit. It is probably just a disgrace to remove them in a battle-like situation. |
| 314 | ** Possibly they keep a few spare suits nearby when there's a battle on, so that Warriors whose suits are severely damaged can summon a replacement. The disgraceful-to-strip tradition would've arisen from this practice, as having to swap suits would mean you'd messed up badly enough to have your first suit disabled. |
| 315 | * Why do the Ice Warriors suddenly have such advanced technology in their suit? |
| 316 | ** FridgeBrilliance, as a Grand Marshal Skaldak has the best armour. |
| 317 | ** Same reason the Daleks went from being trapped in the confines of one ruined city on one planet by static electricity to Time Lord-destroying universal conquerors; escalation over time. |
| 318 | * Why did the ship take so long to come? |
| 319 | ** Maybe most of the Ice Warriors remained on Mars in suspended animation, and it took time to wake and send a ship to Earth. Skaldak had not anticipated for his people to be in suspended animation, but the Ice Warriors made sure they would wake if such a high-ranking figure called. |
| 320 | ** The Doctor also says Ice Warrior societies still exist, just dotted around the Universe and not on Mars. It took them a little longer to find his signal and get a ship out there to help. |
| 321 | *** I would go with this; Skaldak would have known approximately how long it would take to get a response from Mars, and when that time passed, he assumed they were gone, not believing the Doctor when he said they were still alive elsewhere. Naturally, the response from Mars would have come faster than from wherever the ship came from. |
| 322 | * How come we could hear the Russians speaking perfect English before the Tardis arrives? And, for that matter, after it vanishes stranding the Doctor and Clara? |
| 323 | ** First one: TranslationConvention. Second one: The Doctor is part of the Tardis translation circuit. Being near either one works. |
| 324 | [[/folder]] |
| 325 | |
| 326 | [[folder:"Hide"]] |
| 327 | * What was the purpose of the cold spot? After the Doctor marked it with chalk, it seemed like it became totally irrelevant. |
| 328 | ** Since sudden temperature shifts and oddities of that nature are reputed to be a common phenomenon in haunted houses (assuming, of course, that you believe in them), I think it was just to emphasise the creepy nature of the house and that something wasn't quite right; I'm not sure it had any other significance than that. |
| 329 | ** Presumably it was the place where the pocket universe was most closely linked to the real one, and it was chilly in that forest as well as foggy. |
| 330 | ** It is a direct reference to the Shirley Jackson novel 'The Haunting of Hill House.' In that book the nursery 'is the heart of the house' (The psychic says these exact words in the episode) and has a cold spot in it. |
| 331 | [[/folder]] |
| 332 | |
| 333 | [[folder:"Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS"]] |
| 334 | * How could the brothers have possibly convinced Tricky that he was an android for so long? Even if he did believe the whole "flesh coating" story, he would still have to eat, sleep and go to the bathroom, and he would still feel pain (even though he claimed not to). Is he just the most gullible guy in the world or what? |
| 335 | ** I reckon they said that the eating and going to the bathroom is part of the "flesh coating", since eating would be for providing the necessary fuel for the "flesh coating", which I presume is supposed to be organic. They might have said that he is undergoing maintenance while he is sleeping, and that's why he needs to sleep. As for the pain... he might have convinced himself that he only imagines the pain. He does seem quite gullible, to be honest. |
| 336 | ** In fairness, many people would be a bit gullible after losing all their memories in an accident. He might not just have forgotten about his life and family, and with no-one else around to contradict the other two... I don't think it's too unbelievable. |
| 337 | * Was there a reason that everyone was turned into evil ash zombies in the future, rather than plain old ordinary dead corpses? Some say you can't die in the TARDIS (even though [[Recap/DoctorWhoTVMTheTVMovie Grace and Chang Lee managed it for a bit]]), so that might be an explanation, but it's weird that there didn't seem to be an explanation given. |
| 338 | ** I don't think they would have stayed like that for ever. I think the evil ash zombies are the results of their "cells liquifying and skins burning" that the Doctor mentioned would happen if they stayed in the Eye of Harmony room for more than one or two minutes. Since the TARDIS was leaking time, I think Clara and co. from the future were suspended in time, that's why they were still alive (since they were in the act of burning alive), just like when we saw past Clara panicking. I hope the explanation makes sense, since I am not that convinced (I mean, why did they have weird distorted voices from being burned?). The bottom line is, the ash zombies (credited as Time Zombies lol) were probably echoes from the future the same way there was a Clara and Doctor echo from the past. |
| 339 | ** They got out of the TARDIS engine room a second or so too late. Short enough to survive, long enough to be so horribly burnt they'd wish they hadn't. As for their distorted voices, ''their vocal chords have been burnt/liquified.'' That would, I'd imagine, cause some distortion to their voices. |
| 340 | *** Well, I thought their vocal cords being damaged would cost them their voice pretty quickly, but maybe it does distort their voice the way they were distorted in the episode. Then again, standing in the same room as an exploding star probably would've burned them much faster, but it doesn't matter since I was only half joking anyway (though for that purpose I should've mentioned the wonderful red eyes instead - probably the result of their eyes burning/liquifying). The point is, since the Time Zombies were leaks from the possible future and not being from the present, they stayed alive by virtue of being time anomalies in the first place. They weren't meant to exist as they did, only they probably passed somehow through the crack in time or came to being by a similar unnatural method. Also time probably gets weird in the TARDIS if the engine explodes anyway, so maybe we should just accept that weird things happen in weird circumstances. |
| 341 | ** Becomes FridgeHorror if you consider that the same thing probably happened to River during the Pandorica story-arc. |
| 342 | * Why did the zombies try to trap the Doctor and co. in the Eye of Harmony room anyway? What part of being burned alive causes a person to think "You know what, I'll trap my past self here just to make sure I get burned alive"? |
| 343 | ** They were driven mad from pain. They didn't know what they were doing. Which does bring to mind the question of how dangerous they really were, but the Doctor seemed to think avoiding them was a good idea. |
| 344 | *** Insane horribly-burnt zombies staggering around lashing out at everything they see due to their mindless, endless agony? I'd keep my distance as well. |
| 345 | *** They WERE dangerous, though: they burnt one of the brothers to death with just a touch. Of course, a bit of FridgeHorror when you consider that the future zombie selves may have actually been ''begging for help''. |
| 346 | * The Doctor's name is the Biggest Secret in the Universe. So why does he have it written down in book that anyone can just pick up and read? |
| 347 | ** My best guess is that particular library is usually off-limits, but all the security measures went haywire because the TARDIS was haywire. (Still would have been nice if we had ''seen'' the malfunctioning security stuff, but whatever.) |
| 348 | *** As of "The Name of the Doctor", [[spoiler: it can be assumed that it is because his name ''isn't'' the "biggest secret in the universe." His name is merely the key to his tomb. His biggest secret, however, is the existence of the "lost" Doctor played by John Hurt.]] |
| 349 | [[/folder]] |
| 350 | |
| 351 | [[folder:"The Crimson Horror"]] |
| 352 | * Why would you dump the reject bodies in the canal? Doesn't that just raise the risk that somebody will find the bodies and investigate Sweetville? (Which is exactly what happened.) |
| 353 | ** Maybe she was just too cocky about it. After all, she ''did'' manage to kill the first guy who came to investigate. Perhaps she felt that she'd be able to kill anyone else who followed in his footsteps. |
| 354 | * Why do they have machines that convert crimson people into normal people? |
| 355 | ** Perhaps it's to convert the Adam and Eve doll like pairs into the human robots, and the Doctor altered it. You'll note he's clearly using the screwdriver to do something or other. |
| 356 | ** They have machines to turn Crimson People back to normal because they need a way to turn Crimson People back to normal. Mrs Gillyflower is building a master race. Her plan was: 1) Immunize people she considered of good stock to survive the toxin she was going to unleash (it had the effect of "preserving" those people), 2) Launch the rocket, spreading the toxin and killing everyone who wasn't immunized, 3) Use the chambers to reanimate the preserved people, thus restarting humanity with her "Adams and Eves". All the Doctor did with the sonic was simply turn the machine on. |
| 357 | * Remember that guy who died in front of the Doctor? Why did he burst into the Doctor's cell just before he died? What was he trying to do? |
| 358 | ** He was looking for the Doctor, but fell into the vat of venom on the way. |
| 359 | ** Did he even know about the Doctor? I thought he was just investigating because of the dead people in the canal. |
| 360 | ** Maybe he was just running around at random, trying to escape before he died. |
| 361 | ** He knew the Doctor. He was helping the Doctor investigate, then the Doctor went missing, so he went in. |
| 362 | ** The better questions are: A) how did Edmund even get up to the Doctor's cell, accessible only via staircase, while dying of leech venom? B) how did the Doctor's presence in the cell remain undetected by Mrs. Gillyflower and her minions despite Edmund having burst in, since it seems unlikely that Ada would be able to remove his body on her own? |
| 363 | * Why did the old lady stick the people she'd converted into glass jars? Was she giving them purified air or something? |
| 364 | ** The glass jars were a sort of preservation device (like cryostasis pods) that were meant to keep the people that she deemed "pure" safe while the poison killed everyone else. Mrs. Gillyflower and her chosen people would have waited the poison out from within Sweetville. |
| 365 | * The Doctor kisses his married straight male companion on the lips, the companion grimaches but say nothing and none of the viewers freaks out about it. He later kisses his married gay female companion on the lips, the companion socks him because of it and everyone freaks out over it and some likens it to rape. Why? |
| 366 | ** Well, people tend to ship the Doctor with his female companions. So when the Doctor kisses a companion that seems ok, because that's what fans have been imagining all along. But people aren't so quick to ship the Doctor and Jenny, because Jenny and Vastra are shipped together (and canonically married.) So it seems really weird when the Doctor kisses Jenny. |
| 367 | ** Double standards. |
| 368 | ** People ship him with female companions? It said male companion. |
| 369 | *** Yeah, I think that first replier missed the point that the situations are almost identical except for the gender and sexual orientation of those involved; Neither Rory nor Jenny are attracted to men, and they are both married, and they both got an unwelcome kiss from the Doctor, so yes, it's absolutely a double standard to be upset over one and not the other. |
| 370 | *** If anything, it's because Doctor Who fangirls love anything remotely gay between two males but get up in arms about anything heterosexual. That's just the internet for you. |
| 371 | *** Heteronormality. A Straight Male that accept a casual kiss from another man with a shrug can be proven to be open-minded an cool. A Gay Female that accept a casual kiss from a man with a shrug is instantly labeled Straight and Cured or Bisexual and all her earlier girlfriends instantly transformed into " An experimental phase" that can now be saftly ignored. |
| 372 | *** I'm not entirely sure what point is trying to be made here, but Rory did not shrug the kiss off, he was visibly disgusted. The point that the original entry is making is that both times the Doctor kissed someone who wasn't into men, didn't want to be kissed, and reacted badly. It is a double standard to complain about one and not the other, ''especially'' when the one being complained about is the one where the Doctor actually got slapped for what he'd done, as opposed to getting away with it. It is not OK to kiss someone who is clearly uncomfortable with it just because they are a straight male. |
| 373 | *** Plus, the idea that a straight man can kiss or be kissed by another man comfortable in the knowledge that people will still assume his heterosexuality (and further his 'coolness') seems questionable at best, to be honest. If anything, straight men are, for whatever reason, traditionally far less able than many other groups to demonstrate such types of affection with other men without someone questioning their sexuality. |
| 374 | * How did the kids find those pictures of Clara from all across history? Google may be great, but it won't respond to "Historical photos that look like my nanny and her boyfriend". And what would prompt the kids to make a search like that in the first place? |
| 375 | ** The boy stumbled upon one of them at school. Maybe they just have good facial recognition software for the rest. |
| 376 | ** Another possibility; we've seen there are websites dedicated to the Doctor, and they would probably include pictures of his companions too. Maybe he stumbled on one which happened to have pictures of Clara. |
| 377 | ** Certain search engines allow you to use an image as a criteria; perhaps that put a picture of Clara into the Google search engine, and found pictures that were similar, but a few hundred years off. |
| 378 | * "Take us on a trip with you or we tell Dad you're a time traveler." How the ''hell'' does that make any sense? Especially the photo evidence, there is a thing called Photoshop after all. Clara should've just flipped them the bird and strolled back in the TARDIS. |
| 379 | ** She cares about them. She's not going to just say "Screw you" and stroll off. Not to mention that she's a pretty bad liar; if the kids brought it up to their dad, she'd end up confirming it somehow, like she did with them. |
| 380 | ** And....? Is him knowing really anymore dangerous than the kids knowing? |
| 381 | ** Probably not ''dangerous'', all things considered, but given how interactions between companions, Doctors and companion parental figures have gone in the past it would more than likely subject Clara to more awkward questions and confrontations than she probably wants to deal with. And since there's an easy way to avoid both awkward questions and the kids driving her crazy by constantly going on about it, and given that she's clearly not the type of person to just tell them to piss off (seeing as (a) like the poster above says, she clearly likes those kids and (b) isn't obnoxiously and insufferably rude about things), she might as well just suck it up and convince the Doctor to take them on a quick jaunt. |
| 382 | ** The key thing about it is that they know for a fact it's true, she accidentally confirmed it to them. If she'd said no and accused them of being liars, that would have wrecked her relationship with them and they would never have trusted her again. Seeing as she's their nanny for a living and cares about them a lot, she probably wouldn't even consider battling them like that. Plus, they're immature kids - there's no telling how many people they would have told and there are ways of confirming that photos are real. She needed to keep them sweet as they probably wouldn't have stopped at their dad. |
| 383 | [[/folder]] |
| 384 | |
| 385 | [[folder:"The Name of the Doctor"]] |
| 386 | * If Clara has been showing up throughout The Doctor's history, how come he doesn't remember her? I mean, the Great Intelligence said he was going to turn the Doctor's "every victory into defeat", so she must have saved him on many occasions. There appear to be some times where The Doctor does register her, for instance when she convinces him to steal 'his' TARDIS. So why doesn't he remember a girl who convinced him to steal a different TARDIS? Has he forgotten? Did someone wipe it from his memory? It also seems to leave us with the conclusion that a human just randomly lived among Time Lords 'a long time ago' in order to convince The Doctor to steal the correct TARDIS. My point is this: If Clara has genuinely been helping The Doctor over the 50 year course of the show, there would have been some indication of her presence. |
| 387 | ** She does say that he doesn't notice her most of the time. |
| 388 | ** The first one we saw, on Gallifrey, was probably just forgotten. It ''has'' been over a thousand years and almost a dozen regenerations, after all. Also regarding that Clara: Some fans believe she managed to get reincarnated as a Time Lady that incarnation. But even if that's not true, I believe humans were allowed on Gallifrey before the Time War heated up again, so while her presence would be odd, it's not ''impossible''. |
| 389 | *** Humans weren't allowed on Gallifrey back then, as the Tenth Doctor said in "School Reunion" to Sarah Jane. Not until "The Invasion of Time" when he left Leela there. |
| 390 | ** He ''did'' instantly recognize that Victorian-era Clara was a potential companion in "Snowmen". Possibly One's millennium-old memory of her was giving him a subconscious nudge in that direction. |
| 391 | * Is Clara aware of her purpose when she's helping The Doctor all of those times? Because in Asylum she almost killed The Doctor when she was a Dalek, but stopped at the last second. She must be pretty useless as a tool to save his life when she doesn't even realise that she's meant to be saving him. She even claims that sometimes the Doctor doesn't even register her, in which case what good could she have possibly done? And how did she even realise what she was meant to be doing if The Doctor couldn't even speak to her? Does she sometimes remember and sometimes not? In which case, what happens to The Doctor when she doesn't remember and doesn't help him? Presumably he dies. The End. Game Over. |
| 392 | ** Presumably, Original Clara knows, but she's simply undoing the damage the Great Intelligence caused, stopping him before he could interfere in the original series of events. Her goal is not to save the Doctor as often as possible, but to repair his personal timeline after all, and she wasn't in the original timeline until the eleventh Doctor, so she'll avoid being seen. The exception of this are the times she knows the Doctor has already seen here, willfully creating a copy there that doesn't have her memory beyond a few catchphrases. Since we see her interact with the first Doctor, restoration of the timeline does require occasional direct interference (Maybe the Great Intelligence switched around the [=TARDISes=]?), but it would be spread over a thousand years of experience, and Clara could have looked different enough (younger, older, fatter, thinner, dyed hair, burn accident, cyborg) that the Doctor wouldn't recognize her. |
| 393 | ** The Claras that we see calling the Doctor by name could be copies that saved him more than once. They didn't know him in their initial near-encounter, but after they'd helped him the first time -- tugged his coat from behind so he didn't step in front of the bus, glanced out a window to freeze a Weeping Angel about to pounce, fixed a broken control panel he'll use to open an escape route, whatever -- they got curious about this weirdly-dressed guy and asked about him. Next time he pops up in that Clara's time, she knows what he's called, and now can save him deliberately. |
| 394 | * If Mr. G. Intelligence was linked to the Whisper Men, couldn't it have sent one of those into the time-scars to mess up the Doctor's life and die instead? Not to mention how its personal grudge against the Doctor ("only" being beaten twice, the second time still managing to feed and grow stronger and then painlessly escape) seems like a bad case of [[SoreLoser sour grapes.]] |
| 395 | ** First, the problem was that the Whisper Men were the GI. Sending one of them in is what he ''did''--it's just that one had a human face at the time. And it killed all of him. Second, as I understand it, they fought more in the original series. But you are right, to those of us who have only watched New Who, it does seem kinda silly for him to be so angry over two defeats. |
| 396 | *** The new series GI (sentient snow merged with a human) seems a bit different from the classic one (a literal paid-up member of the Lovecraft Mythos.) Still, since it's never stated in the new series and he went from snow to wi-fi to time-traveller, he could well have managed [[FromNobodyToNightmare to get that powerful eventually.]] |
| 397 | ** I actually imagine it would be pretty painful. To be thwarted once (plus the old series times) would be bad enough, but the last time the Doctor didn't even realise who he was fighting, or how much effort he ended up destroying - the GI had to erase the memories of a person he'd been feeding off for decades, as well as all the employees, and presumably go find someone new to start all over again with. Even if he got away painlessly, the sting of having years of work gone in one day, the insult of the Doctor not even ''realising'' that he'd done that, and an already proud personality... not everyone would get so angry, but I can buy it as a reaction. |
| 398 | ** Across old and new series and other media the GI has been defeated around half a dozen times depending on how you count canon. And for a creature that is nothing more than intelligence, continually losing battles of intelligence to the same man has to be downright infuriating, don't you think? |
| 399 | ** In addition to the above, the Great Intelligence seemed to be something of a DeathSeeker in this episode, which I assume is because living as a disembodied psychic consciousness that never succeeds in its goals because of one man isn't exactly pleasant. |
| 400 | * How was River there at Trenzalore? Post-Library River? |
| 401 | ** Yes, this was the already-dead River. She was an interface linked to Clara through Vastra's mental conference. |
| 402 | * How did the Doctor and Clara get outside? One minute they were wandering through the giant TARDIS, and then suddenly they were outside, between Madame Vastra and the Whispermen. Did I miss something? |
| 403 | ** They weren't in the giant TARDIS when they arrived to Tranzilore. They saw the giant TARDIS and talked about it. They only entered after the door was opened. |
| 404 | ** What the Doctor and Clara took was a secret entrance that ran through the bottom of the TARDIS and probably led up to the front doors. |
| 405 | * River implies that there's something spooky about the fact that she can still be mentally present even after Clara "dies". But she wasn't ''just'' linked up with Clara; she was also linked with Vestra, Jenny and Strax. They're all present, so...mystery solved? |
| 406 | ** None of them can see her, so apparently she isn't talking via any of them. |
| 407 | ** She linked to them, sure, but they made it clear enough that the continued connection was not standard. She specified that she kept the link open with Clara and she seemed to think it important so it's safe to assume she didn't maintain the link with the others. |
| 408 | ** FridgeBrilliance: Maybe there'd been a Clara "saved" in the Great Library's databanks, and she helped virtual-River to establish a stronger connection with her than with the others? |
| 409 | * IIRC, Series 6 specifically brought up Trenzalore as "a place where no one may speak falsely, or refuse a question." Like the location itself just compels people to divulge their secrets somehow. But...Trenzalore doesn't do that! The Doctor is perfectly capable of refusing G.I.'s questions, and G.I. has to resort to standard coercive techniques ("Tell me or I'll kill your friends!") which would work just as well in any other location. (Granted, any other location wouldn't have the Doctor-tomb that G.I. wants, but that's a separate matter.) Why doesn't Trenzalore match up to the description from last season? |
| 410 | ** Poetic license. They never said that not being able to speak falsely was a property of Trenzalore itself; that was merely an assumption drawn from a vague prophecy, which I assume was the point. The GI's coercion was most likely what it was referring to (as the Doctor would not have been able to lie because a lie wouldn't open his tomb, and he wouldn't have been able to fail to answer because if he did, his friends would die, and he wouldn't let that happen), and the passing on of the myth probably obscured the [[BuffySpeak literal-ness]] of that fact. Plus, the prophecy states that the Question will be asked ''when'' no living creature make speak falsely or fail to answer, not ''where''. "Where" it will be asked it already covered by "On the fields of Trenzalore." |
| 411 | * In Series 6, the Silence try to get rid of the Doctor, because "Silence must fall when the question is asked." That question, we're later told is "Doctor Who?", i.e. "What is the Doctor's real name?". So now we're on Trenzalore and G.I. asks the big question. What exactly was the Silence trying to prevent here? The "baseline scenario" I have in my head is that the Doctor simply answers the question (no interference via River), and then the tomb opens, and the G.I. super-kills the Doctor (and there's no Clara to rescue him). If that had all happened...the Doctor would have died. But that's exactly what the Silence was trying to do in the first place! It's like they went to all this trouble to kill the Doctor because....because otherwise somebody ''else'' would have killed him. I don't get it. |
| 412 | ** Well, the Silence simply planned to ''shoot'' the Doctor, whereas the G.I. planned to super-kill him. The latter form of killing fricked up the entire universe and caused the stars to disappear. Perhaps ''that'' is what the Silence was trying to prevent. |
| 413 | ** Indeed, the Silence want to prevent him from reaching Trenzalore and answering the Question. The logical assumption is that if he ''does'' make it to Trenzalore to answer the Question, the GI will gain access to his tomb and super-kill him, which will unravel all the good he's ever done. Simply killing him before he reached Trenzalore would not only prevent the universe from unraveling, but would also preserve all of the worlds he's saved. It's the lesser of two evils, essentially. |
| 414 | ** Maybe it's really important that River said the name, instead of the Doctor. Maybe if ''he'' had said it then some terrible consequence would have followed. (Though the destruction of the stars is bad enough by itself!) |
| 415 | ** I assumed "silence" referred to all the stars and most of the universe dying... The world goes silent, everything is dead because the Doctor has always been there to save as many as he can and without him ever existing, all of those people and things die and fall silent. |
| 416 | *** Well if the Silence were indeed trying to stop the Doctor from going to Trenzalore and being super-killed by the GI... Well they were taking a pretty damn big risk there I must say. Considering how their first attempt at killing him involved ''retconning the universe itself out of history and making him sacrifice himself to bring it back''. And do consider that if the GI was indeed "turning all the Doctor's successes into failures"... this would also include turning the fact that he restored the universe after the Silence destroyed it into a failure. So the universe would be even ''more'' doomed. Not to mention that this plan also assumed a very specific set of circumstances, wherein if even a single thing went wrong, all would be lost. Forever. In short, if this was the huge disaster the Silence were going to such insane lengths to prevent... then the Silence are kind of idiots. |
| 417 | *** We don't know that the Silence had intended to cause the cracks so as to leave the Doctor with no choice but to retcon himself out of history; in fact, that idea makes little sense to me because if the Doctor never existed, then how would the Silence even know that they succeeded in forcing him to erase himself? They wouldn't be able to remember why they did what they did, because the Doctor would have never existed to begin with. The cracks, to me, seemed more like a misfire on their part - they wanted to kill the Doctor, so they set out to blow up his TARDIS. This will result in one of two things: 1) He'll be in it, and he will die, or 2) he won't be in it, but his ship will be destroyed which will at least keep him from getting to Trenzalore for a long, long time (and for a side of speculation, they may have drawn the TARDIS to 26 Jun 2010 because it was far back enough in the past from the events on Trenzalore for the Doctor to either die of natural causes before those events took place (as the battle that led to his grave's creation would likely have been very high-profile and widely-known about; specifically the time period in which it took place, so if he died before that point then his grave couldn't have been made), or for the Silence to think of a new way to kill him while he was Earth-bound. The cracks were probably just the result of the Silence underestimating the damage that a TARDIS explosion could cause, but regardless, yes; the Silence are stupid, paranoid religious extremists, and that's really kind of the point. |
| 418 | ** Resolved in "The Time of the Doctor": [[spoiler: The cracks in time were partially created by the Time War, and were a potential way for Gallifrey to escape the Time Lock. The cracks would be unlocked if the Doctor gave a password- his name, which only he would know. Sort of a signal like, "it's safe!" The Silence were a religious cult, who did not want Gallifrey to come back; they feared that the Time War would continue in normal time and space and destroy the universe. They sought to kill the Doctor so that no one could possibly release Gallifrey.]] The Doctor's tomb had nothing to do with their plans, aside from its location on Trenzalore; merely a coincidence that it required the Doctor's name to open. |
| 419 | * From the exchange from "The Wedding of River Song", for reference: |
| 420 | -->'''The Doctor''': I need to know about the Silence.\ |
| 421 | '''Dorium''': Oh. They're a religious order. Great power, discretion. The sentinels of history, as they like to call themselves.\ |
| 422 | '''The Doctor''': And they want me dead?\ |
| 423 | '''Dorium''': No. Not really. They just don't want you to remain alive.\ |
| 424 | '''The Doctor''': That's okay then. I was a bit worried for a minute there.\ |
| 425 | '''Dorium''': You're a man with a long and dangerous past. But your future is infinitely more terrifying. The Silence believe it must be averted.\ |
| 426 | [...]\ |
| 427 | '''The Doctor''': What's so dangerous about my future?\ |
| 428 | '''Dorium''': On the Fields of Trenzalore, at the Fall of the Eleventh, where no living creature can speak falsely or fail to answer, a Question will be asked. A Question that must never, ever be answered.\ |
| 429 | '''The Doctor''': "Silence will fall when the Question is asked."\ |
| 430 | '''Dorium''': "Silence must fall" would be a better translation. The Silence are determined that the Question will never be answered, that the Doctor will never reach Trenzalore. |
| 431 | ** Tracing through the innuendo, double meanings, and vagueries it seems that, much like with the secret/grave quote, we were told everything but didn't know how to listen. That is: |
| 432 | *** The Silence call themselves "the sentinels of history". Surely this is because their goal is to stop the GI from screwing up history. |
| 433 | *** The Silence don't really want the Doctor dead, but they don't want him to remain alive. Even the Doctor had trouble seeing a difference at the time, but it seems that the Silence didn't really have any animosity toward the Doctor (or at least didn't start with any) but they didn't want him alive because of the consequences it would bring. |
| 434 | *** The Doctor is a man with a long and dangerous past. At the time this appeared to just be a reason for people to hate or fear the Doctor, but now it is clear that this, too, is far more literal: messing with the Doctor's long past is very dangerous indeed. The future is terrifying because that future is screwing up the past. |
| 435 | *** "The Fall of the Eleventh". Is this the GI finally defeating the Eleventh or is it the Eleventh visiting his own grave and the grave is being referred to poetically as his fall? If it's the former it's clear why no living creature can speak falsely or fail to answer: I'd like to see you try to stand by as your friends and allies are dying in agony. It's not a property of Trenzalore; it's a property of the Fall of the Eleventh. If it's referring to one's own grave, there's a certain poetry to that as well. It's likely the former, rather than the latter, though. |
| 436 | *** Think literally: how does the Eleventh get to Trenzalore when the TARDIS refuses to fly him down? [[FridgeBrilliance He falls onto it.]] |
| 437 | *** ^ But the Doctor ''does'' stand by while his friends and allies are dying in agony. He begs and pleads, but he doesn't actually answer the question. And he has a good reason to remain silent: If he answers the Question, G.I. will super-kill him, which will consequently kill ''almost everything else in the universe'', including the very same friends that are being threatened (or some of them, anyway). Now we can imagine that the Doctor would have answered the question anyway, eventually. But that still leaves us with the absolute nature of "no living creature". I can imagine ''several'' living creatures which would refuse to answer this question, even if their friends were being murdered. The Master, for instance, would be quite willing to sacrifice others in order to avoid super-death for himself. It seems to me that the only way to get around that discrepancy is to interpret the prophecy with poetic license, as suggested earlier. |
| 438 | *** Oh, for sure. There's a poetry to it regardless and it's likely seen some embellishment over the years. This is undeniable. But, at the same time, the Master doesn't care for anyone the way that the Doctor does and so, in finding it impossible for him to be in the same situation, we find it impossible to even discuss what the Master would do. We know that he has no trouble sacrificing others, but would that still hold if it were possible for him to care the same way the Doctor does? Who knows? |
| 439 | ** At any rate, it seems that the question regarding the Silence's motive is answered fair enough and that the exact words explain the "no living creature can speak falsely or fail to answer" question. The real question, then, is whether "no living creature" will prove important. After all, the one who answered the question was definitely no living creature. |
| 440 | *** And that may be the solution: the line from the prophecy ''wasn't'' a statement that there was no choice, but a statement that there '''was''' ... for River. Virtual-River ''could've'' chosen not to say his name, or she could have lied to Clara about what would happen if she followed the G.I. into the timestream, but she didn't. She chose to spare the Doctor from his moral dilemma and to be honest with Clara, thus allowing Clara to save him and, with him, the universe. The Silence had interpreted the ''entire prophecy'' backwards. |
| 441 | ** Resolved in "Time of the Doctor": The Silence weren't worried about the GI or the Doctor's Tomb; merely a coincidence that the tomb required the Doctor's name to open. The Silence were worried about the events that led up to the Doctor's death in that timeline. |
| 442 | |
| 443 | * Why does G.I. invite anyone into the tomb with him? If he'd simply gone inside and used his whispermen to guard the door, he could've super-killed the Doctor and there would have been no interference from Clara. Was it really so hard for G.I. to imagine that one of the Doctor's friends might follow into the timestream, performing a HeroicSacrifice in order to save the Doctor? |
| 444 | ** Because the Whispermen ''are'' him, and disappeared when he stepped into the timestream. So they wouldn't have been able to stop anyone anyway. Add on top of that the fact that the entire reason he's doing this is because of pride, and it's clear he ''wants'' the Doctor to know what's about to happen. Even if he had anticipated a HeroicSacrifice, he would have assumed that he was more than capable of handling a billion echoes of a human girl. |
| 445 | ** He may not have realized that the re-writing of history wouldn't be instantaneous, and expected them all to vanish as soon as he stepped through. |
| 446 | * When G.I. first approaches the timestream, the Doctor clearly yells out "Somebody stop him!". But nobody actually tries to stop him. This is especially weird because we saw Jenny demonstrate her unarmed combat skills just a couple episodes ago. (The Crimson Horror.) Now granted, the Whispermen can pass through your flesh like ghosts, so maybe it's impossible to fight them. But you'd think somebody would ''try''. |
| 447 | ** The last person to try and fight them (Strax) almost got the [[Series/OnceUponATime Cora treatment]]. The others were probably too hurt/dazed/scared to try anything. |
| 448 | * Why is River doomed to fade away? Has something gone wrong with the hard drive on the library planet? |
| 449 | ** I thought she was only going to fade away from where they were, because she was only there through the mental link with Clara? I don't recall anything about her disappearing completely, just that this really was the last time she could ever see the Doctor. |
| 450 | *** But if she's still safe and sound on the hard drive, why would this be the last time she can see the Doctor? What's to stop him from visiting the library planet sometime and saying hello? For that matter, what would stop him from holding a conference call like they did earlier in the episode? I thought the implication was that River was about to "die", in some sort of permanent sense. |
| 451 | *** My memory isn't perfect here, but I do seem to recall that the deal that the Doctor made with the Vashta Nerada was that they would give him time to get everyone out of their 'forest', and then no-one would ever come back. They are still there, that is why the Doctor cannot go back. The conference call point is a fair one, but maybe it's just too painful; if he got into doing that, he might never be able to say goodbye, and he might be tempted to do the same with others; he has a hard time moving on as it is, without giving himself an extra temptation. |
| 452 | *** He says it in the episode; because it hurts him too much to see her after she's dead. |
| 453 | * So the Silence wanted to kill the Doctor to prevent him from reaching Trenzalore (there the GI would "super-kill" the Doctor when the Question was answered and all the stars would go out), right? So why blow up the TARDIS in season 5 and cause the universe to end? |
| 454 | ** Maybe they didn't understand the repercussions of blowing up the TARDIS and just thought it was an easy way to kill him? |
| 455 | *** Three seasons on, and we still have no idea why they want him dead. We don't even know their motivations. |
| 456 | *** That's not so true. We've been told rather explicitly that they want him dead so he wouldn't answer the Question and we've been told a bit less explicitly other parts about that. See above where the conversation with Dorium is reproduced and discussed for a bit more on that. |
| 457 | ** I think it's safe to say that they didn't realize that blowing up the TARDIS would rip apart the universe. Presumably, they were thinking that if there was no TARDIS, there would be no grave for the GI to enter. |
| 458 | ** I have a theory that the entire big bang 2 was their plan. If it had not been for Amy's memory powers, then we would have had a pretty nice universe but where the Doctor never existed. |
| 459 | *** This makes very good sense- though I'm not sure how exactly the Silence would have been able to engineer it so exactly. |
| 460 | ** It is entirely possible that what the Silence is concerned about has nothing to do with the events of this episode, but rather whatever battle has yet to happen in the Doctor's future that presumably leads to his (and the TARDIS') death at Trenzolore. |
| 461 | *** Confirmed. |
| 462 | * In "A Good Man Goes to War", the Doctor has a baby's cot on board the TARDIS, which he says was originally his. But in "The Name of the Doctor" we see the Doctor and Susan stealing the TARDIS, and they don't have any luggage -- certainly nothing as big as the cot. When and how did it get on board? |
| 463 | ** Who's saying he took it with him originally? The Doctor's visited Gallifrey countless times, even dropping by Lungbarrow once. Even before that, who's saying that it was used in his youth? It's the [[WeirdnessMagnet Doctor]], having been regressed into infancy at some point in his past, so it would be needed by a sentimental companion isn't a stretch. |
| 464 | ** Just to heap Pelion upon Ossa: Given what happens in "Remembrance of the Daleks", he should also have the Hand of Omega with him when he's escaping in "Name". That's much bigger than a cot, and he can't have gone back for it between "An Unearthly Child" and "Remembrance". |
| 465 | ** What we saw was the Hand of Omega inside a coffin, not the Hand of Omega itself. |
| 466 | ** Furthermore, there's no telling how much time passed between the First Doctor scene of "The Name of the Doctor" and "An Unearthly Child"; he could have slipped back for the Hand later on, or even gone back in time to swipe it from Gallifrey from a point before he left or before he was even born. |
| 467 | ** Should a Time Lord, a member of a species known for making things bigger on the inside, really have the contents of his luggage judged simply by its ''external size''? |
| 468 | *** Good point. Let's not forget The Doctor's sometimes bottomless pockets. |
| 469 | ** For that matter, One could have sneaked into the repair bay a few times before, with luggage and supplies for their upcoming journey, prior to his bringing Susan there. |
| 470 | * Why did River open the Doctor's tomb if the Great Intelligence wanted to destroy him? Did she feel that the GI would've somehow discovered her anyway, and forced her to open it after the Doctor's friends all died? |
| 471 | ** She didn't want him to have to face the choice between the Great Intelligence killing his friends or being forced to open the tomb, and so made the choice for him presuming that he would be able to pull a rabbit out of a hat and defeat whatever the Intelligence was up to -- something that would also be much easier if his friends were still alive to help him. |
| 472 | *** Basically, buying him time before things got really messy. |
| 473 | * When the Great Intelligence is pointing about the Doctor's darker nature by pointing out people he's killed "The Sycorax Leader, Solomon the Trader, Daleks and Cyberman." Um, Mr G.I? Those aren't very good examples-the Daleks [[OmnicidalManiac routinely, unrepentantly and are programmed to try to kill everyone]] [[AbsoluteXenophobe but them]], and the Doctor only killed the Sycorax Leader out of self-defence. Not to mention the Cybermen [[FateWorseThanDeath would probably be better off dead.]] Except for Solomon, these aren't good examples of the Doctor's darker nature. |
| 474 | ** Though in all fairness, the Great Intelligence is a black-hearted monstrous villain himself. |
| 475 | ** [[FridgeBrilliance And, being an entity of pure intellect itself, the GI probably ascribes value to other beings' lives based ''solely'' on how smart they are, totally disregarding other potential merits like loyalty, bravery, integrity, etc.]] |
| 476 | ** Plus, while none of those may have been particularly nice, the point the Great Intelligence is making isn't that the Doctor's an evil kitten murderer who only preys on the innocent. He's making the case that the Doctor has a pronounced tendency to solve his problems by eradicating large numbers of sentient beings and thus has a lot of blood on his hands, not that any of these beings were necessarily innocent. |
| 477 | * When Clara is traveling through The Doctor's time-stream, how come we never see her saving the Ninth Doctor? I know there's a clip of her helping Ten at the Library (even though it was cut for some reason), but no Nine, why is that? |
| 478 | ** Due to only one season of footage of Nine, they probably couldn't find a good enough scene where he was alone to use. Otherwise, maybe it had something to do with Eccleson's animosity with the show. |
| 479 | [[/folder]] |
| 480 | |
| 481 | [[folder:"Clara and the TARDIS"]] |
| 482 | * It's implied that the TARDIS screws with Clara over the course of ''at least'' a day, as the first duplicate she sees says she's from "tomorrow night". The number of doubles that then appear, some of whom sound quite deranged, suggests this occurred over the course of, at least, several nights. Where was the Doctor during all of this? Although a past series of mini-episodes, "Night and the Doctor" had established that the Doctor ''does'' go on solo adventures while his companions sleep, you'd think by now he'd have shown up, especially given the fact none of the Clara's appear concerned about his absence (though to be fair the later ones may well be too tired to care). |
| 483 | ** We're in the TARDIS where anything can and has happened. It wouldn't be outside of her abilities for Clara(s) to experience several days in the space of seconds to an outside observer. |
| 484 | * The series has never been consistent with depicting what happens when a person from a point in time meets himself from another point in time. Several episodes, such as 1983's "Mawdryn Undead", indicated that physical touching can be catastrophic. Other episodes, such as 2005's "Father's Day" (when Rose holds herself as a baby) suggest nothing happens. We see one Clara double brush by the "original" Clara, and two others state they shared a bed, so presumably this falls into the latter category, but it's still an inconsistency. |
| 485 | [[/folder]] |
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