Headscratchers / Doctor Who 2007 CiNS "Time Crash"

• How does Davison's Doctor know how to complete the "wibbley-wobbley, timey-wimey" phrase? Day of the Doctor implies very strongly that it was coined by Tennant's Doctor, since Hurt's Doctor didn't know it.
  • We might be overthinking this; John Hurt's Doctor isn't likely to remember every single phrase he said four lifetimes ago. It's not like "wibbley-wobbley, timey-wimey" is some kind of complex code that only a select few are capable of possibly coming up with; the Fifth Doctor just happened to say it once, as a quip, in a casual conversation with his future self, then forgot all about it. Then the Tenth Doctor, several lifetimes later, happened to say it again, liked the sound of it, and kept saying it.
    • In multi Doctor stories, the current Doctor is the one that remembers things, so that makes sense as well.
    • If you consider Big Finish and/or the Titan comics as canon, then either Five picked it up during an adventure with River Song in the former, or Three got it from Jo in the latter.
• The Tenth Doctor remembers the exact instructions that he told himself as the Fifth Doctor, but doesn't remember that the Master will return?
  • Because he never told himself the exact time-frame, because the instructions "The Master has come back from being dead", is about as useful to the Doctor as Joker back from the dead is to Batman, plus Timey Wimey, Wibbley Wobbly.
  • 10 said that it was recent, so if 5 remembers all of it until he's 10, he should remember that. Therefor, he should be on guard and should have easily believe Boe when he told him he wasn't alone. Perhaps 8 assumed the Time War would prevent it.
  • Maybe he did remember. When The Doctor found out that Yana may be a time lord, he seemed very quick (to me, at least) to start worrying that it was the Master.
  • Plausible, but it could also simply be that there aren't that many other candidates for 'Time Lords who are likely to survive the Time War' other than the Master and himself.
    • Anyone else want to start a petition to bring the Meddling Monk back? He, at least, was entertaining.
  • The Fifth Doctor simply prioritized what he remembered. The instructions on how to stop the TARDIS from exploding, killing him (twice), blowing a hole the size of Belgium in the universe and, no doubt, doing an incredible amount of damage in the process are something important that he has to make sure he remembers. The discussion about the Master coming back, however, is an off-the-cuff comment delivered as part of a casual conversation when everything's chilled out a bit and isn't stressed by the Tenth Doctor in any manner that gives it any particular importance (It's more "Oh, and the Master came back" rather than "Remember this: the Master will return."). Since, as noted above, the Master coming back from the dead was at this point in the Fifth Doctor's life something that seemed to happen every Tuesday, he just assumed it was a 'same-old same-old' sort of thing and didn't attribute it any particular significance and importance. In the, what, hundreds of years between the two, he made sure to remember the first bit but the second bit simply slipped from his memory.
  • Maybe 5 remembered 10 saying that The Master would come back, but when he dealt with the Master as 6-8 he just figured that that's what he was talking about as 10.
  • I'm not entirely sure, but I think some of the older multi-doctor stories mention that the time differential (or other technobabble) blocks their memories when the event isn't in progress. I.e. Ten didn't remember seeing himself as Five until their TARDISes collided. Presumably, he didn't remember it as soon as the event was over.
  • For all we know, Five just assumed Ten had encountered the Delgado Master or Anthony Ainley's. No reason why the Doctor has to encounter the Master in chronological order, and asking if the guy still has his "rubbish beard" could just as easily be a query about whether their arch-frenemy had finally shaved the darned thing off as whether he'd changed bodies since Five's day.
• How come the Fifth Doctor looks / will look older?
  • Davison looks pretty well-preserved in the publicity shots that have been released thus far, so it probably won't even be a problem.
  • Just last week he stared into the heart of the time vortex and aged 57 years.
  • The scene is called "Time Crash", so expect some time-twisting techno-babble. I'm still gutted that they're doing this as a charity "scene" rather than a big two-part episode, mind you.
  • It was hand-waved away with some techno-babble about time differentials sorting themselves out. And, yes, I know how incredibly geeky it is to be on here five minutes after it ended.
  • Specifically, Tennant had a line about the two of them being in one place "shorting out the differential" or some such.
  • For what it's worth, the Big Finish miniseries "Excelis" (A multi-Doctor, Benny, and Iris Wildthyme story with Tony Head they put together to give fans who refused to accept the movie into continuity something to do while they debuted their Eighth Doctor line) is set, in its first part, just after the events of "The Five Doctors", and has the Fifth Doctor incredibly disturbed and creeped out by the fact that the former selves he's just met all seemed noticeably older.
  • Another possible explanation was offered in a short text story, also starring Iris Wildthyme in which the Eighth Doctor notes that he now has memories of his past incarnations that weren't there before. This also explains why the Doctor's age keeps fluctuating...his own timeline is constantly changing

• Here's a sort of retroactive one. Why doesn't the Ninth Doctor know what he will regenerate into? He met the Tenth Doctor back when he was the Fifth Doctor. Or does it mean he did know and was just listing completely hypothetical effects of regeneration to Rose?
  • He only knows he's met one of his future selves. He doesn't know where in his personal chronology that self will fall.
  • Plus the Time War and circumstances mean he might have forgotten. Like the Tenth Doctor not knowing he'll meet the Fifth.
  • Also Timey-Wimey Ball.
  • Actually, while the events of The Three Doctors and The Five Doctors may have been erased, Ten explicitly solves the plot of Time Crash through a time loop of Five telling him how to solve the Belgium hole. (see below)
  • Why would the events of "The Three Doctors" and "The Five Doctors" have been erased?

• Five and Ten meet up, and Ten saves both their TARDISes by doing what he remembers seeing Ten do when he was Five. And he tells Five to remember what he saw so that he'll be able to do it when he's Ten. The gist of it is that Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine and pre-"Time Crash" Ten remembered the exchange from Five's perspective. Now the conversation ends with Ten telling Five that he had just fought the Master. So why do Nine and the earlier version of Ten think they are (or I guess he is) the Last of the Time Lords? And why is the Doctor taken completely by surprise by the fact that the Master survived the Time War when he remembers telling himself about it?
  • It's an offhand comment in a brief conversation seconds before the Fifth Doctor returns to his own part of the timeline, and there's hundreds of years between Five and Ten. Chances are, he just forgot that part of the exchange.
  • It's possible that when Five became Eight and fought in the Time War, he figured that the war was so big that it caused a few paradoxes. Specifically, he didn't ever expect to experience Time Crash as Ten, because that Ten had just fought the Master, but obviously all the Time Lords died in the war, so obviously that could never happen. It's only when the Time Crash actually occurs that he (as Ten) realizes that no paradox has erased the event.

• Ten mentioned just prior to this special that Time Lords can sense each other. How exactly, then, did Five not immediately recognize Ten as both a Time Lord and a future version of himself?
  • While I agree that the Fifth Doctor did seem unusually dense at that point, presumably the 'Time Lords can sense each other' thing is more applicable to other Time Lords rather than different versions of the same Time Lord. Given how even for Time Lords crossing over your timeline and meeting another version of yourself is something that happened incredibly rarely, isn't really supposed to happen and (from what we've previously seen) mostly under specially arranged circumstances, there's probably a lot of Timey-Wimey Ball effects that screw around with things like that, and the effects are probably exacerbated when there's a good chance the future self you're encountering will look drastically different from you.
  • I figure it's the same as when you have body odor, it's easier for other people to notice than yourself.
  • Even simpler: Are there any Time Lords about...? Hmmm... well, I sense that I'm here as usual, but apart from that, no.