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    "The Next Doctor" 
  • So Queen Victoria's encounter with the werewolf in 1879 convinced her that there were alien beings with hostile intentions against Earth, and inspired her to found Torchwood to fight them. Was the appearance of a 100-foot-tall robot which crushed half of central London in 1851, before being blasted with an energy wave by a man in a hot air balloon and disappearing into thin air, not enough to convince her?
    • It's possible she was out of London at the time. Or the reports she received didn't make clear the giant robot was alien at all.
      • Time is in flux. All we know is Torchwood could now have been founded in 1851.
      • Both Children of Earth and Miracle Day, which aired after "The Next Doctor", maintain the 1879 date.
      • The fact that nobody, even the Doctor, remembers the 1851 events is lampshaded in the episode itself, so I consider it to be the seeding of a running plot.
      • The citizens were freaked out, so they blamed it on an opium binge. Humans have an amazing capacity of self-deception, because the public will always refuse the existence of aliens.
      • It's reasonable to assume that, without having witnessed it first-hand, and with no surviving evidence as to what actually happened, she wouldn't have a clue what went on. And, technically, the Cyber Mecha wasn't alien in origin, and nor, strictly speaking, were the Cybermen who built it. Sure, parallel worlds still count as Earth.
    • How did the Doctor recognize the Cyberking as a ship, when no such thing has ever been built by the Cybus Cybermen? Let's not forget, these aren't the Cybermen he's been encountering intermittently throughout his life; the only contact he's had with them was in "Rise of the Cybermen" and "Army of Ghosts".
  • Okay, so Ten destroys the Cyberking and stops the Cybermen from upgrading the world. Fair enough. But just how the hell is Earth's history not affected by a huge bloody robot stomping around 19th Century London?
    • It's likely that a crack in time erased those events from history.
      • Indeed. The Doctor all but confirmed that in "Flesh and Stone".
      • Okay, now what? The explosion of the TARDIS has been undone.
      • It's possible that since the TARDIS explosion is now no longer a factor, people will remember the Cyber-King now; having not seen anything beyond "The Big Bang", it's impossible to say for certain. Alternatively, in recreating the universe certain events might have been kept, and others lost; the Cyber-King incident might be one of those incidents which fell between the cracks, so to speak.
  • In the beginning, the Doctor and Jackson Lake grab onto a rope and get pulled around. At first they can't let go because they're midair, but later they're being pulled along the floor, and it's strongly implied that they're going to die, until Rosita cuts the rope and saves them. But why can't they just let go of the rope, seeing that they're currently on solid ground?
    • There's a quick close-up of Jackson's hands holding the rope, and the rope is tangled around his hands, so he can't simply let go.
  • At one point the Doctor assumes Jackson is either the Next Doctor or the Next Plus one. The Doyalist explanation is that the War Doctor didn't exist yet, so is it the case that, unlike the initial way the line was meant to be interpreted, the Doctor has yet to realize that his half regeneration still counts?

    "Planet of the Dead" 
  • When the bus ran out of fuel, why couldn't the Doctor have just asked for UNIT to send in some fuel in a metal box to protect it from the wormhole?
    • Because then the episode wouldn't have had a flying bus in it. One is forced to the conclusion that the flying bus is a Fixed Point In Time(tm), so the Doctor had to ignore any possible solutions (eg, tow the bus out with a steel cable or send in an armored personnel carrier that might have been simpler but didn't lead to flying buses.
      • Or... seeing as how the bus was nearly ripped apart when it went through the gate, the likelihood of a metal box ripping open and thus spilling the gas all over the sand, rendering it useless, was too great for the Doctor to even consider suggesting it.
      • Then put the metal box with the fuel inside another metal box...
      • Oh, please, who thinks of that?
      • WE WILL TAKE AWAY THEIR METAL BOXES!
      • A box filled to the brim with enough fuel to power a bus tumbling through a wormhole. Can't imagine it would be TOO bad.
    • In the light of "The Waters of Mars", there's another explanation: The Doctor deliberately refused to ask UNIT to do any of these things, and didn't give them enough information to think of their own solutions, because in his growing arrogance he'd decided that he was going to be the one to sort the whole thing out single-handed, and no-one else was going to be allowed to steal his thunder.
    • The Doctor could also have just asked UNIT to push his TARDIS through the portal. Since it's completely indestructible, it'd get through the portal just fine. Then everyone can escape quite easily.
      • Hate to point this out, but the TARDIS isn't indestructible. It just has shields which protect it (which, for all we know, only work when the TARDIS is traveling). Plus, I think he knew that, if the TARDIS was pushed through the portal, who/what put it into the portal would also go as well, therefore killing/destroying it as well (how else did they manage to travel through the portal in a bus, if not protected by a magic bubble). I think he just didn't want to have more blood on his hands. Anyway, (I haven't seen the episode in a while, so I might be wrong here) I don't think the TARDIS was close enough to where he was for them to find it, explain why they needed to transport the police box (assuming the perception filter doesn't make it impossible to find it) and get it to his location before he had found a way back. I think that he knew how long it could take them to find the TARDIS and, as such, decided to only ask for it if there was no other way back.
      • The TARDIS can use shields without moving; we saw that in "Bad Wolf" and "The Parting of the Ways". As for how they'd get the TARDIS through without killing anybody, they could just as well use a robot or, as a matter of fact, a bus. (Or more likely a metal truck, because you'd have to fit the TARDIS inside.) UNIT does manage to retrieve the TARDIS by the time the Doctor gets back. I suppose that if they had retrieved it very recently then it didn't make a difference either way. But if they had been holding onto it for a few minutes then yes, they should have thought of pushing it through.
    • Another idea: UNIT could just send in a tank. It's metal so it gets through the wormhole. It's tough so it won't get damaged. It has big treads so it won't get stuck in sand. Send the tank through, have people get inside, and put it in reverse. Take multiple trips if you have to.
      • That of course assumes that UNIT could find a tank in time. The whole experience lasted less than an hour.
  • Why is the Doctor able to use his psychic paper to convince the Oyster Pass (TM) Machine that he has fare money?
    • Rose used it to fool an ID-badge system in "Army of Ghosts". IIRC, the creators said during the Doctor Who Confidential for that episode that they had Rose do that specifically to show that the psychic paper works on machines as well as people. Therefore, working on Oyster Pass™ is "fine" because it has a precedent. Complain about "Army of Ghosts", the precedent, instead.
      • Oh dear. I missed "Army of Ghosts", so I apologize. My point still stands though, I'm just shifting it to "Army of Ghosts" — why does the Psychic Paper Work on a machine?
      • Possible explanation — it's explained that the psychic paper projects anything the user wants it to — perhaps there's a barcode that acts like a master key that the Doctor uses on occasion and may have taught to Rose prior to "Army of Ghosts".
      • It also made me think of the fairies in Torchwood. Considering that they can apparently choose to become invisible to security cameras, it at least sets a precedent that there are ways to trick sensors. In this case projecting the image of what the user wants.
      • Because the paper itself is psychic. It doesn't just take an image from the user's, or indeed the victim's, mind. The paper can use its psychic ability to analyze the machinery and display information, barcodes, possibly even generate a magnetic strip, as required.
  • Why didn't Christina just nab the jewel after The Doctor threw it away? It was only a few feet so it would have been trivial to run over and grab it while he was running around putting the clamps on the wheels.

    "The Waters of Mars" 
  • First the Dalek ignores a young Adelaide, despite their MO being the destruction of all of reality itself at that time. That alone is bad, as they were shown actively killing people who disobeyed them in "The Stolen Earth", so why would it spare that one child?
    • Secondly, the Doctor changes something which he's spent the entire episode deeming a set place in time. As in you can't change history. The kind of thing that, if changed, releases the Reapers, as shown in "Fathers Day". Where were they after the Doctor completely changes the history of the human race?
    • For the first one, her death was a fixed point in time, and the Daleks were somehow aware of that and didn't want to screw things up for themselves by interfering. The second, well, the Doctor is INSANE at this point. There are probably Cosmic Horrors that would run away from him. It's also possible that, given she killed herself almost immediately afterwards, not much has changed. The other two were referred to as "Small people", meaning their existence probably doesn't have a big impact on the timeline.
    • I thought for the first one that the Dalek spared her life because of Davros ordering everyone back to the Crucible.
      • For the first one the Doctor explicitly states that he believes the Dalek recognized her importance to the time stream and left her alone because of that.
    • Even if the Dalek did know that killing Adelaide was a cosmic no-no, Davros was just about ready for "The destruction! Of reality! Itself!". I'm pretty sure that having the entire multiverse wiped out would have the same effect on her future as being killed by a Dalek a few minutes earlier.
    • It's talked about a lot here about the Doctor releasing the Reapers by saving Adelaide, what about the Daleks? Maybe the reason why the Dalek didn't kill Adelaide was because it would bring Reapers into the picture. Invincible bat-monsters eating everything that moves would likely be harmful to the plan, especially if they somehow got to the Crucible. Also, the Dalek likely knew that the reality bomb would wipe out all of existence, presumably including the Reapers, so she was going to die anyway. It seemed like too much of a risk just to kill one little girl who probably won't be a threat.
      • Reapers don't appear for just any sort of temporal infringement or random paradox or fixed point; as evidenced by this episode, the universe can easily accommodate if someone tries to botch a fixed point, hence why it is a fixed point. In "Father's Day", Rose blatantly created several paradoxes and essentially did a Riverdance on her own personal timeline; in other words, she screwed up so badly that the only possible way the universe could fix it, short of overriding the free will of humanity, was send in the reapers to wipe the slate clean.
      • Metaphor Time! In "The Waters of Mars", the Personal Physician of the Universe sat down with his/her patient and said, "What seems to be the problem?" The Universe said, "You see, there's supposed to be a lady dying on this date, or thereabouts, but she's not. It feels like there's some idiot screwing with my fixed points in there." And then the physician took the universe's pulse, checked its tongue, and said, "Just take two aspirin every day for a week, and your fixed point will get right back to normal. Might not be the exact same way it was before, but you'll be much healthier in the long run." The Universe thanked its physician, took the aspirin, and Adelaide committed suicide. In "Father's Day", the Personal Physician of the Universe threw up his/her hands in exasperation. "You should have come on your usual check-up," he cried, "When it was just a matter of two versions of the same person in the same time and place! We could have treated that with antibiotics. Now, I'm afraid that the infection is spread too far. We'll have to amputate the whole leg."
  • So, Tricking Out Time wasn't an option in "The Waters of Mars"? Why does the universe care whether an astronaut dies (with the body never found) or gets TARDISed off to the 59th century?
    • Because the Doctor wanted to defy Time. Leaving history (apparently) the same as he found it wouldn't have been good enough for him in that mood.
    • I thought the whole episode was to show the Doctor that even if he is the only Time Lord, time will always snap back into place (that is, the event will happen) at those fixed points, whether he wants it to or not. Also, the Reapers were paradox eaters- i.e. Rose touching her younger self is a paradox, whereas the paradox for Adalaide was fixed almost immediately. Also, is it just me, or are they working up to a breakdown of Houseian proportions (hearing voices, seeing Ood Sigma)? WHO WILL BE HIS WILSON??
    • First of all, Adelaide's death was a fixed point in time because it inspires her granddaughter to become an astronaut, who then meets some alien prince, falls in love, and ends up creating some new golden age and a whole new race or something really big. Sort of like helping Gavrilo Princip with his homework when he was a schoolboy. It may not seem like it's a big deal, but it may put him off the course of his life that would cause him to become a member of the Serbian 'Black Hand,' assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and BAM World War I. Helping kid with homework: small, seemingly insignificant. World War I? BIG. Saving Captain Adelaide Brooks? Smallish. Whole new race and golden age and stuff? That's BIG.
    • Secondly, the Doctor does seem to sort of snap, and there seem to be two explanations: a. This is what happens when he doesn't have a companion to stop him, and b. The universe has been his playground too long, and it's time for him to regenerate.
  • OK, so the Doctor spends the WHOLE time essentially going on about how this is a fixed point in time and how it must happen before he decides to give everyone that is still alive a lift home to Earth... but why did he get so worked up about this ONE point. Presumably, he has been traveling for some time since the Time War and there have been other events where his hands were similarly tied... the Doctor has a big soft spot for saving people but really, he's known these people for five minutes and then all of a sudden has a mental breakdown, realizes he's the God Damn Batman of Time and it's time to flip off the universe? SURELY there have been other points when he'd have more compelling reasons to mess around with the rules. Beyond going on about fixed points in time, there isn't much lead up to this — and not to mention, that he even cites precedent for this — "The Fires of Pompeii" — where he did something almost identical.
    • This is what happens when he doesn't have a companion to act superior to, bounce ideas off of, and tell him when he's gone nuts. He gets a little.. loopy.
    • Those other moments may not have affected him as much because he's rarely been close to breaking point before, as he is here. Sometimes people just snap.
    • Not to mention the prophecy of his own forthcoming death in "Planet of the Dead". I suppose that by this point, the Doctor figures if he can stop even a Fixed Point in Time from occurring, he can avoid his own death. Fair (if desperate) logic.
    • He reveres Adelaide highly, she's one of his personal heroes. Imagine being given the chance to save one of your all-time historical heroes (as he's done countless times before) with what seemed to be no negative consequences. Short work for the Batman of time.
    • I just assumed that the Doctor doesn't go to fixed points in history; the TARDIS is specifically programmed not to land in those points because the Doctor wants to avoid situations like these where he's not supposed to change anything. Anytime he does land in a fixed point it's a freak accident, which is why he freaks out a bit when he realizes where and when he is. So the reason he hasn't been so worked up about similar unchangeable events is because he never personally experienced those events.
    • I think it was a fixed point in time because the Doctor already knew what was going to happen; he had read about the space station beforehand. He basically just stumbles onto his other adventures and since he doesn't know beforehand what's going to happen to the people he meets, he's free to try and save them.
      • No, that would be a paradox.
    • A fixed point in time is some event, big or small, such as a birth, death, or two people meeting, or a battle, or a volcano eruption, or something that the universe has arbitrarily (or maybe not-so-arbitrarily) decreed is NOT TO BE MESSED WITH. Under any circumstances. As such, Hitler is probably a walking fixed point. You try to kill his father, you end up introducing his parents to each other. Time Lords, having evolved on a planet with a gap in the fabric of space and time and having learned to travel in time, have some inner sixth sense that tells them whether time is "in flux", or whether there is a fixed point. The Doctor, upon landing, probably could have smelled that fixed point from a mile away. If anybody tries to mess with a fixed point, events in the future, or even in the past, will alter in order to accommodate that fixed point, because Goshdarnit, the universe wants it to happen! In series 6 and 7, it seems that a fixed point can artificially be created if enough paradoxes are involved. In other words, "Father's Day" is made more clear retroactively; there were enough paradoxes involved with Pete's death that it became a fixed point.
  • Gadget was practically covered in the infected water on his way out of the station. Keep in mind that the Flood virus seems to transmit fairly easily from one source or form of water to the next, not to mention the great efforts that the Doctor and company had taken all episode to not come in contact with anyone or anything that had touched the stuff. So, naturally, when Gadget enters the TARDIS (touching the doors and control panel in the process) or later rolls out of the TARDIS and onto the snow-covered ground outside Adelaide's home, this isn't brought up as an issue. And then the Doctor LEAVES GADGET. Sure, he's a bit out of it, what with Adelaide having just killed herself, but aren't there repercussions to leaving a robot that's still potentially covered in a dangerous virus in an environment that the virus thrives in??
    • Well, we can argue the canonicity of this, but one of the recent spinoff novels establishes that the TARDIS has an excellent filtration system that activates immediately once the door closes (capable of eliminating every last trace of ammonia within the entire ship within 30 seconds or so). It's likely that said filtration system could have eliminated the virus.
    • It's been suggested on TARDIS Wikia that the fire evaporated the water on Gadget.
    • Liquid water evaporates instantly on the surface of Mars due to the low air pressure.
  • Does anyone else think that Adelaide's "importance" is a bit... arbitrary? Sure, she inspired her granddaughter to command the first starship, but if she doesn't, why wouldn't the ship simply be launched with a different commander? Unless she built the thing herself, Susie Fontana Brooke is no more vital to the timeline than Neil Armstrong.
    • We don't know the whole situation, but presumably it was something she did that nobody else would do that makes it important — hell, it was the first starship, maybe she was the only one crazy enough to do it. Plus all her descendants that go out there do important things too, as the Doctor points out — even a whole new species results from a Brooke. Presumably those are all fixed points that just have to happen.
    • For what it's worth, in the original ending Adelaide lived, and the Doctor told her to inspire her granddaughter in person, until RTD thought it wasn't dramatic enough and changed it.
  • In the same vain as the previous quarry, why does Adelaide's suicide "fix" the timeline? We learn that her granddaughter went into space having been inspired by her grandmother's heroic death on Mars; committing suicide on Earth under mysterious circumstances is not going to have the same effect.
    • Here's my best understanding of how Doctor Who Temporal Mutability works. The Butterfly Effect is not nearly as much the case as scientists believe in the real world. Time (to the extent that it's correct to personify it) cares deeply that fixed events happen, and it doesn't care as much about the logic of their happening, even when one fixed event leads to another. So if "Adelaide's death inspires granddaughter Susie" is a fixed event, then by God it's going to happen, even if the logic of it seems strange. (Continued in next bullet)
    • I'll admit I don't find this system very narratively or logically satisfying; my intuitions about history are a bit more Butterfly Effect-driven. But I grant this "Close-Enough Timeline" thing to the show, especially since the fundamental premise of hopping about from one famous event to another doesn't work quite so well without it. (In the very first story, the characters interacted with cave people; by my understanding of history, this would be very likely to mean that a specific distant-future event, like the Titanic, wouldn't happen in exactly the way we know it, unless You Already Changed the Past is in effect, which, in Doctor Who, it very often is.) (Continued in next bullet)
    • In any case, because the cause of the Bowie Base team's deaths (in the old timeline) had been completely mysterious, Susie Fontana Brooke didn't know whether it was heroic or not, so there's that. (Done. Whew!)
    • Actually, we have no confirmation that Adelaide's suicide "fixed" the timeline any more so than her survival would have done. We know that her original death on Mars led to the standard future. We know that her new suicide on Earth leads to a very similar future. What we don't know is what would have happened if she just took the Doctor's advice and lived her life. We didn't have, for instance, a repeat of "Father's Day", wherein the reapers start eating people until the timeline is (relatively) back in place.
      • That's true but even in "Father's Day", the reapers didn't show up immediately and Adelaide killed herself within five minutes or landing, which is before Pete even got Rose back to his apartment.
    • Right after she kills herself, there is a shot of the article the Doctor was reading about her, and it changes. it goes from something like "her granddaughter was inspired to go to space to find out what happen to her" to "her granddaughter goes to space to find out why she committed suicide" or something like that.
  • What was the Flood doing near the end of "The Waters of Mars"? Assuming Maggie (How did she survive the shuttle explosion, anyway?) was cracking open the glacier to free the rest of the virus, what would that have accomplished? The shuttle had already been destroyed, so they couldn't just load it with infected water and leave for Earth, and since the base was falling apart around them it wouldn't have been too long before they were exposed to Mars' freezing temperatures. The infected bodies couldn't be frozen as explained earlier, but wouldn't the rest of the Flood just freeze all over again, making whatever she was doing completely pointless?
    • It seems that the Flood has been frozen for a long time; millennia, if I correctly recall. It's possibly not really thinking far beyond "Finally! We get not to be frozen anymore for a while!"
    • I have two theories, either could be wrong or right, 1) The Flood parasites are literally subserviant, and there is something worse under the glacier, or maybe how they spread from planet to planet, but they need so many infectees to crack the ice fully. or 2) the Flood knew it was buggered with the nuke and was trying to fragment the infected ice so it would get flung out into space to spread.
  • In "The Waters of Mars", how does Adelaide committing suicide still inspire her granddaughter to become an astronaut?
    • It's the same inspiration, there are things out there that are terrifying. So terrifying that Adelaide's granddaughter was determined to explore them? Whether it is because they killed her grandmother or she killed herself BECAUSE of them.
    • Susie's parents probably stressed her grandmother's heroism and actions and downplayed or concealed her suicide when talking about her; assuming how dedicated her parents were to building up this heroic impression of her grandmother, she could have probably gone well into young adulthood without finding out.
      • I doubt that. Adelaide's death, whichever way it happened, was really high-profile. Once she started school, she was going to find out even if they could keep it from her before.
      • Fair point, but that's easily where the "stressed her heroism" part comes into it.
      • Maybe the granddaughter was simply intrigued by the mystery of it. Her heroic grandmother was the commander of a really high profile expedition, but she impossibly killed herself on Earth the day Bowie Base exploded. It would be like finding the dead body of the Captain of the Titanic in London the day it struck the iceberg — people would go WTF?
  • Why does the Mars base have gigantic hallways between sections? First off, they're so long that the episode has a running gag about the need for bicycles. Adelaide mentions that they didn't bring bicycles, or anything else not absolutely necessary, because every pound of cargo requires three tons of fuel. But if their technology is limited enough that fuel is such a concern, why did they build these gigantic hallways? Seriously, they're big enough for a truck to drive through. There's no need for such capacity when the base only holds a few people, and obviously big hallways require more material to build that small hallways. So apparently they brought all these extra materials (and resulting fuel) just so they could build their hallways far larger than they needed to be. It's just bad design, is all I'm saying.
    • Not necessarily; it depends on how far ahead you're thinking. Presumably Bowie Base One is intended to be the foundation of a greater human presence on Mars — a larger facility, perhaps even eventually a colony — and is built in anticipation of future development with plenty of space to eventually accommodate upgrades, supplies and a larger population; they wouldn't have built it if it was only ever going to be for these ten (or however many) people. Since building materials presumably weigh more (and thus cost more) to send up than people and things like bikes, you're not going to want to be constantly sending building materials up, since that's going to cost a lot over time and decrease how many other useful things you can send up (such as more people, bikes, etc). If you build it big to start with, then it's built — it might cost a lot to initially get the resources up there, but once it's done you don't need to worry about sending any more building materials to expand it further until it reaches capacity, by which time you've presumably sent up a lot more people and other useful-but-nonessential tools (such as bikes), you've got a thriving community going and you can start drawing upon the resources around you (such as mining, terraforming, etc) to help you expand, thus lessening the amount which needs to be sent from Earth. Built it small initially and equipped solely for the first people there, however, and if you want to expand your operations then you need to send more building materials from Earth, which means less people and other things which could be useful, which means everything develops at a much slower pace. Bikes were presumably a nonessential item, since everyone on the crew could just walk to where they want to go.
  • When the Doctor talks about the prophecy of the four knocks, he states that he "thinks [he] knows what that is, and [he] doesn't hear knocking, do you?". Considering that he was not aware of The Master, what did he think that was?
    • He presumably just thinks that when he hears 'four knocks', he's going to die soon after (he "thinks he knows what that is" is simply Death coming knocking for him, metaphorically speaking) — and since he hasn't heard any knocks, he's confident that it doesn't apply to him just yet.
  • What is it with everyone acting like the Doctor crossed the Moral Event Horizon in "The Waters of Mars"? That he has become some kind of monster that crossed the line or something? Because frankly, I don't see it. He went Screw Destiny to save some lives. That's pretty much a hero-exclusive thing. He went all arrogant and had a bit of an A God Am I thing going on, boasting about saving "unimportant people" and being the Time Lord Victorious (am I the only one who thinks that's an awesome title?), fine. But those were just words. He always had a thing towards the Badass Boast. I'd feel boastful too if I just defied the universe like this. People don't just change suddenly at the snap of a finger. He'd still be the Doctor in the future. Even if he decided to change future events, it'd be likely a nicer universe than one that sends Time-Dragons to eat everyone involved at an inconvenience. Then there's the thing that he risked a different future. So what? That it was a different future doesn't mean it would be a BAD future. YMMV if it's worth the risk I guess, but trying would make him a Well-Intentioned Extremist at worst. And as he said, Adelaide could've just inspired her ancestors by being alive and at home. It's not really so great a change that it could end up in the world being ruled by Daleks or something. And even then, the Doctor would find a way to fix it. Sure, maybe he'd eventually end up changing all of history, but if he had good intentions for it, that'd at least be somewhat acceptable. I don't see him as a future Evil God-Emperor or something, anyway. Now the "the rules of time shall obey me!" thing? Yeah, that's pretty arrogant, I admit and defies typical hero humility rules. But the Doctor always was a bit arrogant. Nothing wrong with that, as long as he stays a good person. Besides, I myself see it as a bit of a "Make the power your own to do good" thing. Similar to what Dark Is Not Evil people try to do? You're tropers, you should know what I mean. The point I am trying to make, even if he went a bit over the edge ego-wise, there is nothing in that episode to warrant everyone acting like he became a monster. If a classical hero is faced with the choice of letting people die for some rules or saving people and breaking the rules, most of them would screw the risks and try to save lives anyway. Again, the Doctor would be a Well-Intentioned Extremist at worst. Maybe that's not his style, but he's not going to turn into the Master overnight.
    • First, yeah, I know what you mean. He was a bit arrogant but overall his actions were justified; he was just trying to save people and he actually did it (though the suicide made it less of a triumph). Basically, the lesson of that episode didn't really mesh with the actual events of the episode, and the fans who say the Doctor did something evil here are mainly parroting the intended lesson. Second, obviously most fans don't think the Doctor is evil, even after this episode, because we're all still watching the show and we still love the Doctor.
    • This, I suspect, is going to be a bit of an essay, but I can't help but feel that some points are being missed in the above posts (and in a lot of these "oh, well Adelaide could have inspired her granddaughter anyway" style arguments in general) that I'd like to address.

      Firstly, if nothing else, unintentionally or not the Doctor drives a woman to commit suicide. We can go backwards and forwards and quibble about whether Adelaide could have inspired her granddaughter in person or whether the future would have been the same or different, or whether she did it to spite him or whether she did it to teach him a lesson or whether she did it because she was broken by the uncertainty the Doctor's actions directly contributed or what her motives were. But fact remains, the Doctor's actions directly contributed towards Adelaide deciding to take her own life. That's pretty bad all by it's lonesome, and not just because it makes what he did 'less of a triumph'. Not surprising that people would take a dim view of the Doctor there.

      Secondly, cliché or not, there's a reason that people say "the road to hell is paved with good intentions". People have gone on to do terrible things having started out with good intentions. The Doctor might not become evil (although I don't believe anyone is saying that he is) and he might not do so overnight, but good intentions or not, he is putting himself on a path that can lead to him committing great evil. Because even if 'all' he's doing is becoming a Well-Intentioned Extremist, that's still pretty bad. Because an extremist by his or her very nature can't see when too far is too far. The Doctor is becoming blinkered, and whether he starts off with good intentions or not, that can have terrible consequences. Because good intentions by themselves don't mean a damn thing; it's what the end consequence is, and the end consequence here is, well, as mentioned above a woman is driven to commit suicide. When your first supposed glorious triumph ends with a woman killing herself, it's hard to see how that bodes well for the future, or how any amount of good intentions makes that okay.

      Thirdly, the Doctor does not just become 'a bit arrogant'. That's an understatement if ever there was one. It's very quietly done, but he essentially decides that being the last Time Lord means he's unquestionable lord and master of all of time and space. That he can do whatever he wants, even fundamentally alter history itself and change the fabric of the universe to suit his will, and if anyone doesn't like it? "Tough." "That's for me to decide." (Yeah, those are direct quotes from him when someone challenges him about all this. Should tell you everything you you need to know about the mindset of the Time Lord Victorious towards people with dissenting viewpoints). Anyone — even the Doctor — both having that kind of power and deciding to use it, quite frankly, a fucking horrific idea. Adelaide is right; no one should have that kind of power or try to use it. Because no one can be trusted with it. Not even the Doctor. There's a reason people also say "power corrupts".

      Fourthly, know who else thinks and sounds like this? The Master. Yeah, the guy who's tried to take over the universe a few times (and oh yeah, once destroyed a huge chunk of it trying to do so) because (a) he's completely nuts and (b) he thinks it'd be better with him in charge. The guy who the Doctor's spent most of the series, old and new, opposing on general principle. When the Doctor starts thinking and talking and acting like one of his oldest enemies? That's not a good thing.

      Fifthly, what makes all of this horrifying (and where I suspect the point is being missed)? As the OP points out, when he's doing all of this, the Doctor's not that different from what he usually does and how he usually acts. But the crucial thing is, he's clearly crossed a line. Yes, he saves lives, but there's a difference between saving lives because it's the right thing to do and saving lives because you want to make the universe and everyone in it your bitch and let everyone know that "I'm the winner!" — the former is admirable, the latter is kind of monstrous, particularly since it's heavily implied that the Doctor is just doing this because he's terrified of his own impending death and wants to prove that he can change it if he wants, not out of any genuine benevolence. There's a different between flaunting the fact that you're the cleverest person in the room and deciding that everyone — except for a few people who happen to impress you — are "little people" who aren't really that important. Who the fuck is the Doctor to decide who's meaningful and who's a 'little person'? There's a difference between boasting a bit about how good you are and calling yourself something like "the Time Lord Victorious" — and seriously, people, that's the kind of thing supervillains and mad dictators call themselves. If you're giving yourself a name that Josef Stalin or Kim Jong-Il would have happily given themselves if they'd gotten the opportunity, you might want to rethink things. The point being, the Doctor's clearly gone from being a lovably arrogant know-it-all to someone who thinks he knows best for the entire universe. That can't end well.

      Sixthly; it doesn't end well. That's the point. Not that the Doctor's gone evil, but that his arrogance and hubris has had terrible consequences. And the key redeeming thing about it is that the Doctor realizes this. He realizes he's gone too far, that whether Adelaide could have lived and inspired the future or whether TIME ITSELF interfered to kill Adelaide, he's let himself get out of control and that a good person has suffered and died — and worse, taken her own life — because of him. That for all his good intentions, for all that he dismissed Yuri and Mia, the irony is that they get to live and the big prize he was after, the reason he was all so glowy and triumphant and smug? Is dead anyway. His arrogance has resulted in exactly the same thing he set out to prevent happening (and remember, he wasn't interested in the slightest about saving Mia and Yuri when it came down to it, they were just the 'little people' he happened to catch as well), only it's worse now because it's directly his fault that it happened. And really, it all comes back to point 1 — for all the arguments we can have about whether the future would or could have been the same if Adelaide had lived or died, ultimately, the Doctor's arrogance led to a woman deciding to kill herself. Even if nothing else, that's why it's bad.
    • The problem with the argument stated above is Adelaide's suicide is only rational, and hence justified, if you reject the idea that she could simply inspire her granddaughter while alive, otherwise it is an unneeded death. You could also believe her suicide was motivated by wanting to send the Doctor a message, but saying that is rational would in itself be begging the question when it comes to how the Doc is unjustified in his acts. The other problem with that is that the Doctor couldn't be possibly aware of whether or not she was going to kill herself, an act which was legitimately unpredictable, so it is very sketchy to say the Doctor is responsible for that.Even taking the suicide into account, the events ultimately turn out better than if the Doctor had not done anything. 1 person died instead of 3 and the human race still developed space travel.

      Yes, the Doctor sees himself as the lord of time. He also uses this term in "The Girl in the Fireplace" and calls himself the highest authority that exists in "New Earth". The show itself goes out of its way to paint him as being godlike figure. To say that the Doctor crosses the Moral Event Horizon or that he is suddenly insane because of that would be arbitrary and special pleading. When it comes to the 4th and 5th paragraph, simply sounding like the Master, a super-villain or a dictator does not make you evil, this sounds like a bad sci-fi version of Godwin's law. Even the term "little people"(or a variation, unimportant) was used before to refer to Donna Noble by the Doctor. Labeling the Doctor completely nuts seems to once again be begging the question.

      The 5th paragraph seems inconsistent with the rest. If consequences are all that matters and intentions are irrelevant, then whether the Doctor wants to be altruistic or a winner should be irrelevant.

      "Remember, he wasn't interested in the slightest about saving Mia and Yuri when it came down to it, they were just the 'little people' he happened to catch as well"

      Simply, because he thought they were less important than Adelaide does not mean he didn't want to save them. The Doctor says himself that most the people he makes an effort to save are "little people". So,yes it falls largely into Designated Villain territory.This is ubiquitous in Doctor Who, because the show is family friendly, but also wants to send the message that the protagonist is dark and edgy to appeal to the adult audience , the Doctor is rarely put in a situation where he does things that are actually morally questionable.
    • Question: Do you think that the Doctor's 'Time Lord Victorious' moment was unavoidable? I mean, I understand that it's a very bad thing, but do you think it was going to happen eventually for Ten? He has been through a lot of crap, namely Journey's End, that's been pushing him to do this. Seriously, have you SEEN how badly screwed he has gotten in that episode? So can people kinda understand where Ten is coming from here?
    • The problem wasn't that Adelaide committed suicide or that the Doctor was being uber-arrogant, though those are definitely symptoms of the real problem; the Doctor has always been careful to respect the laws of time, avoid paradoxes, and never interfere with fixed points. On one end of the spectrum, you have Time Lord society, who look down on the Doctor for even daring to set foot on Earth and contaminate the time stream, rather than watch it safely from a distance. On the other end, you have the Master, (or, my personal favorite evil Time Lord, the Meddling Monk), who interfere with time for their own ends, or manipulate events to create a "brighter future". (The Meddling Monk's motives really were benevolent!) Normally, the Doctor follows guidelines (don't step on a butterfly) that make time travel a fun, quantum-safe experience for himself and his companions. Once, he was given the opportunity to wipe out the Daleks when they were still balls of flesh in test tubes, but the Doctor at that time refused to, saying he didn't have the right to interfere with time on that scale, even if it would save billions of lives. The Doctor crossed the threshold into "shape the universe into how I think it should go" territory, (which he deliberately turned down in "School Reunion", if you'll recall).
  • When the base team members were frantically running around gathering supplies for the rocket, why does nobody mention WATER? They worry about starving if they don't manage to gather enough food, but dying of thirst is much faster than starving, and the "protein packs" or whatever the food is sounds pretty dehydrated. Nobody says anything about trying to pump the uncorrupted water into tanks, or even mentions it at all. I assume for Rule of Drama, but it seems like a pretty conspicuous absence considering the overall theme of the episode.
    • Interesting point. However, in Apollo and the Space Shuttle, electricity is produced in fuel cells by combining hydrogen and oxygen. A by-product of this is water, which the astronauts then consume. So it's likely the ship produces its own water.
  • One thing I wondered is (yes, taking into account the stress of the situation) is why the other two survivors are absolutley freaked out about the Doctor SAVING THEIR LIVES, as far as we are aware only Adelaide knew of the whole "fixed point in time deaths" thing, the other two just had what they though was the final moments of their lives literally Deus ex machina-ed, and instead of "thank you, you saved our lives, they actually seemed disgusted what the helling him, to be fair Adelaide had her reasons but still now her daughter is going to be traumatised by finding her mothers body with (presumably) a hole in her head, the suicide was stupid, but i kinda get it, the situation on mars probably would of made her warn any of her family doing space travel.
    • The other two survivors didn't really seem to be "ungrateful". This troper just thought they were in shock. You said so yourself- they were in what they thought were the final moments of their lives, then suddenly Deus Ex Machina-ed into a box that's bigger on the inside, and suddenly they're on the streets of London. It's impressive that they didn't just pass out on the spot.

    "The End of Time" 
  • At the end of "The End of Time Part 2" if 10 knows he's regenerating and has said good bye to everyone he's going to say good bye to, why does he take off in the TARDIS? Why doesn't he just sit in a room off to the side and regenerates instead of risk burning it up and crashing?
    • If the TARDIS explodes as it does in a populated urban area, someone else could get hurt. If it explodes as it does in the space-time vortex, the only person at risk is the Doctor. Alternatively, he possibly doesn't expect the regeneration to be quite so violent and explosive.
    • The TARDIS is actually meant to be a safe, neutral environment for a regenerating Time Lord, complete with a Zero-environment room. To Date (July 2016), 11 of his 13 regenerations have taken place in or near the TARDIS, and another one of those, (8 -> War Doctor), was under fairly controlled circumstances. The one time he was all the way across town, (7->8), it was messy. Complete Amnesia. So, Rule of Thumb, the TARDIS is a good place to regenerate.
  • What crime did Lucy Saxon end up in prison for, considering that the previous timeline where the Master rules the Earth no longer existed? It would really depend how evidence of Saxon's misdoings still existed. If there is no evidence of the Master's plot to take over the world, then she is in prison for murder of a head of state, quite serious. If there is evidence left over that the Prime Minister was planning world domination using mind control and allying himself with a hostile "alien" race, then being married to the man isn't a crime, and she would be at most charged with Manslaughter and would be a hero for stopping it in any case. Even in the latter case, what evidence existed that she was involved in her husband's plot? She could just say that she didn't know anything was out of the ordinary. Wait, did the killing of the President of the United States still happen?
    • The killing of the president did happen, it's stated in the news broadcast after the Paradox is closed. Also, despite Saxon's misdoings, she did kill an unarmed captive who never went to trial. The real issue comes with the fact that the Valiant isn't in any real jurisdiction (which is why the Toclafane were met there).
      • Not exactly... the Valiant itself was considered neutral territory. However it could have been hovering in what is considered British Airspace.
      • Given that he was still the British Prime Minister, for all his actions (which never happened now for most of the world anyway) in such a situation the British would have probably had the most valid claim on her.
  • How did seeing the Master('s copies) trigger Donna's memories of the Doctor, despite her never meeting him at all beforehand?
    • She says seeing them change is like the things that happened before. Seeing something that weird happen triggered her memories of the other stuff she saw and experienced with the Doctor.
    • From "Journey's End":
      The Doctor: And how do you know that?
      DoctorDonna: Because it's in your head. And if it's in your head, it's in mine.
    • In other words, she has seen the Master, in a way, and is intimately acquainted with him.
  • In part two of "The End of Time", having turned almost all of humanity into copies of himself, the Master decides, "We can all hear the Drums, they aren't just in my head ... I can use triangulation to figure out where they come from!" Only, all of the Masters are basically gathered at a single location in spacetime. You cannot TRIANGULATE from ONE POINT.
    • Well, they're not quite at one point. Clearly a few thousand miles was enough in this case.
    • Let's not forget that in real life, we triangulate using only Earth-based points ALL THE TIME.
  • In "The End Of Time" part 2 the Doctor dies from radiation. Why didn't he siphon it off like he did in the season 3 opening episode?
    • Also, why doesn't he just go to, say, New Earth or somewhere else with good enough medtech to heal him?
      • Not everything can be cured. Also, radiation poisoning isn't just an illness, it's massive damage and corruption to every single one of his cells. The only way to fix it would be to completely rebuild the cells from scratch — i.e., to regenerate them. Even if he did go to New Earth, he'd probably have to regenerate anyway.
    • I'm guessing that the amount of radiation was too much for him to safely siphon away. but i was wondering that too
    • He received 500,000 rads. That's an awful lot of radiation.
    • Simpler way: Go to the TARDIS (it's in the same building) and travel so as to materialize around Wilfred, just like he saved Rose in "The Parting of the Ways".
      • And by the time he gets to the TARDIS, Wilf's already dead.
      • Not necessarily. The Doctor only said the radiation would be released if a button was pressed. At no point was any time limit mentioned. Also, assuming he can get to the TARDIS, there's another method: find Jack Harkness, and get him to release Wilf.
      • And Jack could be anywhere; as memory serves, he's not even on the planet by this point. Wilf's about to be irradiated, he doesn't have time to look for Jack.
      • Actually, since there was a 6 month timeskip between the end of TW S3 and Jack's leaving... yeah, he's still on Earth.
      • ...You arguing guys DO remember that the TARDIS is a time machine, right?
      • Of course, then he probably couldn't go back on himself because he's "part of events now" or something similar. If time travel solved every problem the Doctor faced that easily, there wouldn't be a show.
      • The rooms act as a vent to channel the radiation through safely; presumably if the button isn't pressed, the radiation can't vent, it builds up and then BOOM. There's clearly a sense that pressure is building up while they're talking.
    • The type and quantity of radiation in a hospital x-ray machine differs from that in a nuclear reactor.
      • This. The specific kind of radiation the machine was generating was a kind he had "played with as a child."
    • The button was to release the other door, not the radiation. That was about to vent somewhere anyway and it could only really go into one of the two booths.
      • No, I'm pretty sure they said that hitting a button would release the radiation. There may have been a time limit in addition to that, but if so it was only implied.
    • Why couldn't the Doctor have found something heavy, like a book or something, and tossed it onto the button rather than going in and pressing it himself?
      • He'd have still had to enter the chamber to put the book on the button. And the door still shuts behind him. And if he'd thrown it on from outside it could have missed or slid off. And, of course, he probably didn't have time to piss around looking for books.
    • On a similar note, WTF was up the design of that radiation chamber anyway? Who builds something like that that can't be evacuated quickly?
      • Yeah, let's explore that. Who designs a system such that, in the event of excess radiation, it vents the radiation into the control booth? That's probably the worst possible place to vent the radiation, because it's the one place guaranteed to have a person in it. And yeah, it had special shielding and such so the radiation wouldn't get farther than that, but if that's what we need then why don't we vent the radiation into some other box with similar qualities? In fact, why don't we vent the radiation into the other half of the control booth?!?!. Just have a thing that automatically closes the door of whichever side of the control booth is currently unoccupied, and vent the radiation in there. And furthermore, why is the venting process waiting for a button press? If it can hold the radiation indefinitely until someone presses the button, why not just hold the radiation forever? And while you're at it, let the guy out of the control booth!
    • This has since been addressed in a way in "The Angels Take Manhattan" the Doctor was told that the person who would bring on his death would knock four times. Once you read something about the future that future must happen, therefore when Wilfred knocked four times it meant that he would be the one to cause the Doctor's death. There is no way around that once the Doctor hears those four knocks from Wilfred.
  • At the ending of "The End of Time", since the Tenth Doctor met Rose at a point in her timeline before she met the Ninth Doctor, how did she not recognize Ten when Nine regenerated into Ten?
    • Because when we saw her interact with Ten for the first time, she hadn't met Ten before yet. Now she has had met him. Time travel is involved. Do not question order of events and memories. Unless you went to a Time Lord Academy, where they presumably learn about this sort of thing.
    • Plus the fact that he was standing in the dark. Besides, do you remember every drunk you spoke to on New Year's Eve / New Year's Day?
    • My ex-girlfriend made me watch The Craft about 20 times when I was a teenager. I watch The Mentalist regularly and never noticed that they share a main lead until it was pointed out to me. Pretty much that.
  • Doesn't the Doctor feel even the slightest bit of remorse when he regenerates into Matt Smith? I mean he was crying, sobbing "I don't wanna go" a few seconds previous, he even resisted the regenerative process and blew up the TARDIS!! Afterwards, not even a "geez I went a bit mad then" or "Well that wasn't so bad" Eleven seems awfully insensitive towards, y'know, HIMSELF. He carries on as if nothing has happened. What a Jerk!
    • He did check out how his new body was before being like "ok enough of that for now there's something else happening... oh that's right the TARDIS is about to crash land". He probably wants to make sure he doesn't crash to much and risk ANOTHER regeneration. He can work out personality/body issues after sorting out the immediate situation.
    • Well that IS kind of what Ten discusses with Wilf in the café. I mean, a 'new man goes sauntering away'... like he doesn't even care about what he did a moment before, it's all like it never was, and that's why regeneration feels like dying. Stopped the scene being so amusing for me TBH.
    • I thought, from all the laughing and giggling, that he was a bit crazy at the moment, and wouldn't really be thinking straight.
    • Regeneration's a traditionally destabilizing process; presumably he was a bit more concerned with making sure he had all the required parts and didn't die crashing (and if we're talking Jerkass behavior, I'm sure if we flipped the situation around Eleven could probably have some choice words to say about Ten's self-indulgence and over-dramatic angst resulting in the fact that Eleven was now starting his new life in a death-dive) than angsting about his last self's death. In all seriousness, I'm not sure that going too far down this rabbit hole will be wise, since pretty much every Doctor who's just regenerated has at at least one moment where he's all but gone "God I'm glad I'm now me, and not that last version of me; he was the worst..." Particularly since Ten was equally chipper after he technically 'murdered' Nine — what a sod.
      • Murdered him? Not saying that the regenerations couldn't be nicer about the previous selves, but isn't that a bit like blaming a newborn for a mother who died in childbirth?
      • Tongue, meet cheek. I wasn't being entirely serious there. Although considering that the OP is asking why Eleven isn't feeling 'remorse' (suggesting guilt rather than simply sorrow) suggests that the OP, at least, views the situation as closer to murder than anything else.
      • With how he first tries to convince Rose that he is still Nine with a different face if it really is that he was a "new man" it could be seen as Ten is thinking "ha I can use the last guy's (Nine) experiences with Rose to totally get in her pants!"
      • 10's entire speech about regeneration meaning that one Doctor dies and a new one walks away gets a lot of flak from the fans for going against all of the established continuity about the different faces being the same person. My attempt at a Sonic Mind Screwdriver, considering the fact that he wanted to permanently drown in "Runaway Bride" but not regenerate in "The Stolen Earth" or "The End of Time", is as follows: he feels that he's getting too genocidally violent (Four didn't wipe out the Daleks, Eight wiped out the Time Lords), he doesn't want to feel that his "better" lives (like Five) are guilty of what he's done more recently, tries to lie to himself that they're different, better people from the Oncoming Storm, and is worried that 11-13 will be even worse. Plus, regeneration probably heals psychological damage alongside the physical, as somebody further down the list points out.
    • In a way, though, he is a different person walking away, to an extent. He has a completely different personality and mindset — and, of course, appearance. He is still the same, though, in that he has his previous self's memories. He can understand what his previous self was thinking and feeling, but now he is looking at such events through slightly different lenses. Typically, though, the Doctors all hold pretty much the same values and morality, and certain likes/dislikes seem to be universal. In this sense, you can think of the Doctors as different people, but these over-arcing similarities make them all the same person.
    • Also consider that by that point, Ten was pretty much insane. I interpreted his sobbing dread of regeneration as yet another symptom of how incredibly broken he was — and Eleven's ability to get on with, you know, not crashing immediately afterward as evidence that the regeneration had healed not only physical harm but also stabilized the Doctor's mental state.
    • Eleven's first episode is all about him discovering his new tastes and preferences. This indicates that his emotional centers were also completely re-wired. He retains objective memories of his life in previous incarnations, but loses any personal stake in them. This could be the reason why Ten made his rounds to all his previous companions before he died, because he knew once he regenerated, his emotional wounds would be healed along with his physical ones, and the only way to do that would be to wipe the emotional attachment that caused the wounds in the first place. As Eleven, he likely avoids thinking about Ten specifically because dwelling on it at all would break him again and he can't afford it.
    • Eleven doesn't feel remorse because he has no need to. Regeneration for a Time Lord is a more-or-less natural process and Eleven isn't responsible for killing or replacing Ten and has no reason to feel guilty about what happened; it's just a natural part of the process that, ultimately, has to be accepted and moved on from. Yes, Ten reacted worse to his impending regeneration than other Doctors did, but that's hardly Eleven's fault; as others have noted, Ten himself benefited from the same process without displaying any indications of remorse or guilt about replacing or worries about being 'insensitive' towards Nine. He'd undergone it nine times before and even if the circumstances weren't what he'd hoped and he had a lot of time to brood on it before it happened, Ten had to have known that he'd undergo it again at some point, so without wanting to sound harsh it's kind of his own problem that he couldn't accept it. After all, presumably none of the other Doctors looked forward to their 'deaths' either, but another way to look at it is that in 'dying' they're giving another version of themselves a chance at life, which is surely something to be celebrated rather than treated with remorse and shame. Ultimately, while it was sad to see him go there's nothing about Ten or the way his incarnation ended which makes him any more special or deserving of such a reaction than any of the others; Eleven has no more reason to feel any more remorse about what happened than Four should have felt about replacing Three, or Eight about replacing Seven, or any of the Doctor's incarnations about replacing their immediate predecessor. It's just the way things worked out.
    • A fairly common bit of self-reflection in teenagers is to illogically despise your 'future' self as someone who isn't really you, and to believe that YOU are the genuine article. And yet when you get to twenty, thirty, forty… it's just another stage of your life, no more true or false than any other. The Doctor isn't really a different person as such, he just has his transitional periods on fast forward. Ten may have despised the idea of becoming someone else, but when he became that someone else, the very thought became irrelevant.
    • 10 likely had such a negative view of regeneration because he was only around for 7 years (he's 907, and Nine was 900). Add to the fact that he just dealt with the majority of all the drama about the Time War(all the Dalek survivors are dead, and the Time Lords too), and I can imagine he doesn't want to go yet.
      • Be careful about taking those ages there at face value; the Doctor is notorious for lying about his age; 3rd Doctor claims he's at least 1000, 4th says 700, then later says 600, and so on and so forth. Half the time, he probably just discounts the years he didn't like.
  • Why does the Doctor keep being surprised to find that he's got legs, arms, a face, etc. when he regenerates, when we've never seen a Time Lord who looks like anything but a two-legged, two-armed, ten-fingered human? Well, except when Romana screwed it up on purpose.
    • The Master in the movie regenerates into a gelatinous snake (not sure if that counts because the doc didn't see him, but it's still something)
    • He's just concerned about a one in a million chance. It's probably meant to evoke the way new parents immediately count the fingers and toes (and doctors immediately check for more serious birth defects). It's probably rare, but if anybody's going to regenerate wrong, it's the Doctor.
      • According to some Expanded Universe Material the regeneration process degenerates with age, maybe the Doctor is just concerned about that.
      • The Doctor is always incredibly loopy just after a regeneration, and they're all pretty eccentric anyway, so there probably isn't any logic behind it at all.
    • To be fair, he's just rearranged every single molecule in his body to essentially become a completely different man. That has to be quite disorientating and unnerving, and he probably just wants to check he's got all the bits he should have.
      • Also, recall that Ten died of radiation poisoning. What's one of the main problems for children born to people exposed to dangerous radiation? Mutation and malformation. Since Eleven had, technically, just been born, maybe it makes sense that he'd be a bit worried about having all his limbs.
      • And Ten isn't even the first Doctor to die from radiation poisoning (Three did as well). That can't be good for even superhuman DNA.
  • I was sold on the Time Lords' plot in "The End Of Time" — in large part due to a brilliant performance by James Rassilon — until the White Point Star was brought in. Why can it follow the Sound of Drums to the Master? Why by throwing it at a hologram? Why as a shooting star? Why does hooking it up to the Immortality Gate — A Sufficiently Advanced medical device do anything at all, other than looking neat? And why oh why leave that vital part of the plan up to a man who blew up a quarter of the universe once as part of a blackmail attempt?
    • The episode does a pretty good job of explaining this as it is, but let me give it a shot. The gem in question acts as a bridge between time-locked Gallifrey in the Time War and modern-day Earth. Since it's from the former but is in the latter, the two time periods then have a connection. But the only way this works is via the drumming sound, which the Master realizes is a signal, and uses the mental power of six billion Masters focusing on the White Point Star to allow the Time Lords to complete the "bridge" as it were and cross time to end up on Earth. As for the hologram/shooting star... well, that's just how they sent it to Earth. Without a knowledge of Time Lord tech, I can't really say exactly how that works, but it wasn't really a shooting star, it just looked like that until the Master discovered what it was. They don't really explain how connecting the White Point Star to the Gate works, but I presume that as brilliant as the Master is, and with alien technology right there, he rigged it up to double as a literal gate for the Time Lords. As many of him as there were, they probably could have done that easily, or perhaps the Time Lords did something on their end. Finally, since you ask why the Master, it's simple — the prophecy was that the Doctor and the Master would have their final battle in the future, on Earth, so the Time Lords knew that the two of them would survive. Also, we know that the Master ran before the conclusion of the Time War, so the Time Lords probably implanted the signal in his head so that it would be safe until they needed it. The only other option was the Doctor, and of course he ran from the Untempered Schism rather than staring into it, so... the Master was the only viable option. Rassilon was so concerned about his own personal safety that he probably didn't really even care who it was that had to live with the drums.
    • But the whole point of the end of the Time War was that Time Lords were completely locked out of time and existence. If that's so, how can they get a physical object thrown into our universe? And if they can get the diamond out of their trap, why do they need the Master in the first place, why not just transport themselves to our universe the same way they transport the diamond?
      • Because a diamond is small, and a Time Lord is big. Presumably there was a 'gap', for want of a better word, that enabled the Time Lords to send the diamond through into the physical universe, but it wasn't large enough to send the Time Lords through.
  • "The End of Time" Part 1. Not even San Dimas Time or the Rule of Drama can really settle this in a way that satisfies me. So the Doctor finds out from the Ood that the Master is returning, so, because he has no time to lose, he rushes back to the TARDIS and heads to Earth with all speed, only to arrive at the scene too late. Which would be fine. If he weren't flying. A freaking. TIME. MACHINE.
    • And the Doctor has been able to perfectly pilot and steer the TARDIS to his intended destination since... when, exactly?
      • Whenever the plot SAYS that he can.
      • Which is practically never.
    • They even reference this in-episode. As the Doctor is leaving the Ood, they mutter something about "events in the past are occurring now", i.e. there's some Timey-Wimey Ball stuff going on because the evil plot (if successful) will culminate in the end of time itself. Probably it's physically impossible for the Doctor to arrive at the scene at the proper time.
  • Why did the Gauntlet of Rassilon (for lack of a better name) take so long to charge up when Rassilon tried to kill the Doctor? At the start of the episode he vaporized the Time Lady who spoke out against him in a second, and when he undid the Master Race he again did it with a simple gesture that took only a second, if that. So why does it suddenly take half a minute or so to warm up during it's third use?
    • Perhaps, it holds a number of "shots" and has to be recharged before it can be used again, and he used the last "shot" undoing the Master Race.
    • On top of that, it probably had something to do with the fact he was being pulled into the time lock at the time, as he appears to be physically struggling to fire it while its previous uses were pretty much a simple flick of the wrist.
  • Did the secret conspiracy that resurrected the Master in "The End of Time" actually know he was actually an evil Time Lord? They certainly weren't present on the bridge of the Valiant and they consistently refer to him as Harry Saxon rather than the Master. Even though Saxon is probably notorious in this planet for murdering the POTUS on live television (They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot?), why would there be a sinister cult dedicated to resurrecting a dead Prime Minister? I know that some ardent chaps in the Monday Club can get a bit obsessive about Mrs. Thatcher, but this is kind of silly (and not in the Camp good Doctor Who style of silliness).
    • They DID know he was the Master. When Lucy tells them that his real name isn't Harold Saxon, the woman in charge yells they know that his true name is the Master. Presumably he also told them about his true nature... with a few embellishments to make sure they would stay loyal.
    • It's pretty clear that they were worshiping him because they knew he wasn't just a dead Prime Minister, even if they didn't actually know he was a Time Lord. And let's face it, it plays right into the Master's ego to set up a cult devoted to worshiping him that he can manipulate if necessary.
      • Who knows what the mind control powers of the Archangel network can do?
      • Weren't the effects of the Archangel network reversed when Jack destroyed the Paradox Machine, though?
      • No, that had been going on for at least a year prior to the decimation. All the destruction of the Paradox Machine did was reverse the invasion of the Toclafane. The Network was what got Saxon voted in as Prime Minister in the first place.
      • And the Master can mind control people WITHOUT the Archangel network.
      • True, the network just amplified it.
    • My theory is the Master has made a cult for himself ever since he arrived on Earth, during the 1970s. All for the purpose of ultimately extending his life. This was just the first time he needed them. Hey, if the Doctor is seen by some as a deity, the Master could do the same.
  • After "The End of Time", was anyone else worried that there might now be a higher rate of cancer amongst the old companions?
    • I don't get it. What do you mean? The Doctor's already established as absorbing radiation into his system.
      • He's incredibly radioactive, and the last time he was radioactive he didn't absorb it, he expelled it. I think I was quite sleepy when I wrote that, though, so there may have been something I missed. Or it could have been from thinking about Watchmen right before hearing the Doctor Who theme, with no other underlying logic. The radiation should have been dangerous, though, since he went and visited all his old companions without first expelling the lethal-to-Gallifreyans level of radiation.
      • Although he did either keep his distance or keep the time he hung around incredibly short.
      • And with Time Lord physiology etc., maybe he's just "holding it in" somehow, so the radiation he's absorbed doesn't leak into the surrounding environment.
      • I remember hearing somewhere that being exposed to radiation doesn't actually make you a source of radiation.
      • That is precisely true.
    • Maybe he did. Nicholas Courtney, Elizabeth Sladen and Caroline John have died due to cancer. The Brigadier is confirmed to have died in-universe in 2011. So maybe it was due to the nuclear radiation absorbed by the Tenth Doctor in the End of Time. It also leads to the possibility that Sarah Jane Smith and Liz Shaw died in-universe for the same reason.
      • Or maybe they were exposed to the Third Doctor, who also died of radiation poisoning...
  • In "The End of Time Part 2", why does the Doctor suggest the Gate transformed the dead into clones of the Master as well? This bothers me because a) the Doctor didn't even know what the Gate was and had to be explained, and b) the Gate is designed to heal (or in this case mutate), not resurrect the dead. Is this another part of the Tenth Doctor's Guilt Complex, simply him apologizing all over again.
    • When did that happen?
    • The Doctor and Wilf were on the Vinvocchi ship, looking down on the Earth. Wilf said that his wife was buried down there and asked the Doctor if the dead had also been transformed into the Master. The Doctor response was: "I'm sorry" and Wilf said "It's not your fault." They didn't outright say it but it was obvious what they were both thinking.
    • I don't think that the gate resurrected the dead, i think it just changed them to make their bodies into the Master, so essentially, its like digging into a grave and putting a mask over them. Defamation is the best word i can think of
    • Yeah, no-one said anything about resurrecting the dead from that speech, just that their physical cadavers were altered.
    • Probably the Doctor doesn't know one way or the other if the dead have been defaced. But there's significant chance that they have been, so he says "I'm sorry".
  • In "The End of Time", the immortality gate is used to turn humanity into copies of the Master. It is then used as the gateway for the Time Lords to break into the current time-line. So how exactly was the Master supposed to use it to turn the Time Lords into himself? Especially after telling Rassilon his plan beforehand.
    • I think it's stated he adds a "Time Lord template" or something to the machine once they go through, and then he presses go.
  • It's been well demonstrated that the Master is a messy eater in his current state as of this story. So, why were those two skeletons at the start standing perfectly upright with no apparent damage at all?
    • I assumed he didn't actually eat them, rather he just absorbed energy from them like he did the cult at the prison. The completed process just left bones, since he didn't finish the cult thanks to Lucy's intervention.
    • He thought it was funny? It would fit his sense of humour.
  • In "The End of Time", when Gallifrey starts to materialize, it looks to be about ten times the size of Earth. That means that Time Lords must have much stronger muscles than we do if they're able to walk and stand up and so on normally. Now given how much time the Doctor spends on Earth, it's easy to imagine that he decided it would be worth his while to train his muscles to exert only a fraction of their strength so he could move normally in a lower gravity; but, like Superman or John Carter of Mars, he should retain the ability to use his full strength whenever the situation calls for a very high or long jump, or something. We saw the Master jump around like he was on the moon for a bit, but we've seen many more times when the Doctor and other Time Lords seem as bound by Earth gravity as humans are. The only other explanation (and this works only for the Doctor) is that he's spent so much time in Earth-like gravity (on the TARDIS and almost every planet he visits, his human companions get along just fine) that his muscles have atrophied to the point where Earth gravity is all they can handle; in which case going to Gallifrey would cripple him, at least while he was on the planet. Not an issue these days, since Gallifrey's not there anymore, but as recently as the end of the 1996 movie returns to Gallifrey occurred regularly. Also, Time Lord bones must be much, much denser than human bones, or they'd be shorter than Sontarans. I can't think offhand of the Doctor ever having broken a bone, can anyone else?
    • Not necessarily, gravity goes by mass, not volume. Well yes it's logical to assume that a bigger planet has more mass, the fact that Gallifrey is bigger then Earth, yet all evidence says it has Earth-like gravity, means we can only assume that Gallifrey's mantle and/or core is much, much less dense the Earth's resulting in the two planets having roughly equivalent mass.
      • I had thought that, but Galifrey is a terrestrial planet the size of a gas giant. It looked to be about the size of Saturn, maybe a little smaller, and gravity on Saturn is far greater than Earth — and would be greater still if Saturn were a terrestrial planet; those are much denser than jovian planets because they contain a greater proportion of heavy elements. If there's any doubt of that, look at just how many odds and ends we see Time Lords use are made from metal; if Gallifrey were significantly less dense than Saturn, it would have almost no metal and the Time Lords would use it extremely sparingly. (Though I suppose they could mine it from other planets or asteroids or moons, but not until they'd managed to get into space in the first place.)
      • Gas giant? Saturn!? Unless you're pulling this from somewhere other than what we SEE in "The End of Time", that's patently ridiculous. Saturn's easily ten or fifteen times larger than Gallifrey, if not more so! (Also, Gallifrey barely looks more than three or four times larger than the Earth, but that's neither here nor there.)
      • Two things. One: judging for what we see in the episode, Gallifrey is nowhere near the size of Saturn. Saturn has about 9 times Earth's radius. Gallifrey seems only about three Earth's radius, that will make it, knowing volume increases with the cube of the radius and assuming identical density, 3^3 = 27 times as massive as Earth. Two: Surface gravity not only depends on mass but also on radius, because a greater radius means you are standing a greater distance from the center of mass, and if you remember high school physics, gravity equals the product of the masses divided by the distance squared. So, three times more radius means nine times less gravity. This makes Saturn surface gravity, contrary to popular belief, a bit LOWER than Earth's because it has a big radius and a very low density (even Jupiter's is only two and a half that of Earth, not the tens or hundreds of times most people believes). Concluding, gravity in the surface of the Gallifrey we see in the episode would be 27/9 = 3 Gs tops, and that assuming Earth's density. If we allow for half the density of Earth, it would be reduced to 1.5 Gs. This would make it only a little less dense than Mars, so it's not an impossible density for a rocky planet, not sure how much iron would you find on its crust though, less than on Earth for sure, but maybe enough for the Time Lords' necessities. And a gravity 50% percent higher would be uncomfortable but not bone-crushing for someone accustomed to Earth-like gravity.
      • Exactly. To put it in "simpler" terms: surface gravity is based on central mass (kg) divided by radius-squared (m^-2), but looking at density (kg m^-3) instead gives surface gravity proportional to density x radius. Thus, since Gallifrey appeared to be about 3 times Earth radius, it's average density wouldn't need to be lower than 1/3 that of Earth to maintain similar gravity (27 times as many cubic meters x 1/9 the strength of each due to being further away from most of them would only require 1/3 as much stuff in each cubic meter to equal the same total).
      • Heck, they're Time Lords. I wouldn't be surprised if they manipulated the planet's gravity to be different than the laws of physics would normally dictate.
      • This being Doctor Who, normal science in many cases can be ignored. Considering this, we could just presume that Gallifrey is made of a metal-rich crust and nothing within. Well, not nothing but a very not dense space, with all the density in the crust. To explain how they have grass and such, maybe Gallifrey is composed of a 50m layer of dirt, then maybe 1km of various metal and then next to nothing. I know this makes absolutely no sense, but this is Doctor Who - when does it ever need to make sense?
      • Same troper as above; maybe Gallifrey started off as dense as Earth and obviously larger. However, over millennia and with the use of time travel the Time Lords managed to take so much from it is has become sufficiently less massive to have the same gravity as Earth. This also makes no sense in real life, but again it's Doctor Who.
      • It's smaller on the inside?
    • Is it possible it's perspctive?
  • How is it that the Master can shoot electricity out of his hands, jump around like Superman, etc.? Has he done that before, or are these new powers he got from his resurrection?
    • His resurrection got interrupted halfway through, he's leaking bioenergy.
  • Dear god, why did it take the Doctor forty minutes to die at the end of "The End of Time"?
    • You don't necessarily die instantly because of radiation exposure, no matter how high it was. Some perfectly normal people kick around for years... There's still the odd person here and there suffering from Hiroshima, isn't there?
      • Perhaps, but they weren't at the bomb's ground zero, they were several kilometers away.
    • Because that's how long the radiation took to kill him. Hey, it took Five about four episodes to die, so... besides, did you really want the Doctor to regenerate immediately and without any emotional value or closure to the whole thing?
      • If it would save us from twenty minutes of Wangst-ing, Yes!
    • I personally think it took at least a day, since he had to do a lot of research first. Figure out where everyone is, determine a nice way of helping them out, plan out the actual helping process, and finally execute the helping. He probably released flying time monkeys at least once, incidentally: there's not really any way of knowing about Luke and the car without previously observing the event. Noticing the Sontaran may have required similar time traveling, or just plenty of running.
      • The TARDIS is alive though, and if you believe the theory that it knowingly takes the Doctor to points where he's needed, it may have chosen those points in time of its own accord.
      • Or — you're forgetting those TV-like things that allow you to watch historical events. They cropped up once or twice during the First Doctor's era, I haven't seen them anywhere/anywhen else but they could very well still be around. He could've found out about stuff that way.
    • The Doctor should have died almost instantly from this particular radiation, since all the facial wounds vanish due to regeneration immediately after he gets irradiated. The regeneration had started, which means the radiation had killed him already, essentially. The real question becomes "why did the regeneration take forty minutes to reach ultra-explody glowyness, and why was the Doctor outwardly unharmed by the radiation until the very end of that scene?"
      • Time Lords do have a certain amount of control over their regenerations (the Master was able to stop his and Romana could seemingly choose her new appearance). It's possible that the Doctor "held it in" for a while, releasing enough energy to heal his wounds and keep him stable while he said his goodbyes, and then released it all in one big burst. It'd also explain why this regeneration had enough energy to completely trash the TARDIS.
      • Think of it this way; it's like when you really need the loo. You can hold it in, you can fight for as long as possible, but it's going to happen. And the more you hold it in, the more forceful it is. Metaphorically, the Doctor was just holding it in until he'd got some paper.
      • You paint with words.
  • In "The End of Time", one of the Masters tells the actual Master "Night has fallen on Earth", which is all nice and dramatic and they go do the Big Plan. But won't it be day on half the Earth no matter what?
    • Having just rewatched it, I'm pretty sure he only says "night has fallen." But the Master's vain enough to consider where he is to be the center of the Earth (or universe) anyway.
      • It wasn't just a metaphor?
  • Also in "The End of Time", Wilf knows about the "knocking four times" prophecy. What would have happened if he'd considered that and knocked three times?
    • He would have slipped and bumped his head on the glass.
    • Odds are with all that had just happened, Wilf wasn't even thinking about it. And even if he was, the Doctor thought he'd just escaped the prophecy. They both thought it was referring to the Master, after all. But yeah, it was going to happen no matter what, so had Wilf tried to avert it, it would have happened somehow.
    • Wilf initially didn't actually know he was in danger; he had no idea he was in a Nuclear Reactor, he just thought he'd gotten himself locked in a room and the Doctor could easily get him out of it. Hence, he had no reason to think that he was risking the Doctor's life; hence, he had no reason to not knock four times. In any case, no matter how many times he knocked the Doctor would still have to get him out of there, and would still die doing so; it would just mean that the prophet in the earlier episode was slightly wrong.
    • Remember how in "The Sound of Drums" it was a minor plot point that a side effect of the Archangel Network was to subliminally compel everyone to tap out that very beat? The conditioning just hasn't worn off yet.
      • There's probably a study out there or something about the average number of times people knock when approaching a door... I would expect four to be the average.
  • The Doctor makes an awesome entrance through a glass roof in "The End of Time". Except... the Fourth Doctor took a much shorter fall in Logopolis and had to regenerate.
    • Obviously he's worked out and done (shorter) practice falls to practice bracing himself since then to prevent losing a regeneration to something like that.
    • There's a number of reasons that could account for it — younger body being more durable, godlike forces keeping him alive until the final four knocks, regeneration causing him to be a more fall-resistant species, Four landing at a really bad angle...
    • In the radio drama "The Paradise of Death", Three survives a long fall by "bone relaxation". It was still an insanely stupid thing to do: if Ten had misjudged his jump even slightly, the Master and the Lord President would have wondered briefly what that strange splat on the roof was and then gone back to chewing the scenery.
    • I think his plan was to regenerate, and use the violent burst of energy to his advantage. The TARDIS was just outside the room, after all. Then he freakishly survived, which almost ruined everything because he was too stunned by the fall to fight.
      • Deaths after falling from a great height are in reality very, very tricky things. It's not always just about how high you fall, but also about how you land (stunt doubles are taught to fall on their sides where possible — because there are no important bits on your sides). Some people survive falling from much greater heights, while others are killed toppling down a set of stairs. I've even heard of a woman who survived a parachute jump from 10,000 feet when her parachute failed to open, because she managed to hit a single telephone wire on the way down, slowing her down enough to avoid death, and only suffer a couple of broken bones (she also used the relaxing technique mentioned earlier) — incredibly lucky, but possible. And Ten hit a pane of glass. This makes a lot more sense than the radiation bit, I reckon...
      • ... and Four fell on his back, so probably hurt some "important bits" landing. QED.
      • ...but Ten fell onto his front, so he would also hurt important bits.
      • ... But the front has more substantive muscle in the way, and it's a bit easier to break a fall on the front (from a height, anyways). Four may well have suffered a spinal or cranial injury from falling on his back, which is substantially less likely when falling on his front. And he has the pane of glass for deceleration. People have survived falls at terminal velocity because they hit something that let them decelerate a bit more slowly (trees, snow, and so on — after terminal velocity will be reached, this actually makes it easier to survive from HIGHER falls, because there's more of a chance to "target" yourself) — it's not the fall that kills you, but the sudden stop. Anything that makes the stop less sudden might just save you.
      • Ten going face first through the window as his final physical act compelled whatever forces that control regeneration to give him a killer chin in his next regeneration to compensate...
      • Four's fall was a lot steeper than it looks on the screen in Logopolis. According to the original script and novelization, the plunge to the ground was a clear 120-foot drop!
  • How inane was the alleged Sadistic Choice in The End of Time Part 2? Shoot the Master, and Rassilon is sent backwards in San Dimas Time to be immediately killed by an earlier version of the Doctor. Shoot Rassilon, and Rassilon is shot. The only difference between the two options is whether the Doctor kills the Master and Rassilon, or just Rassilon. Why would he even consider shooting the Master? Well, aside from him being an Omnicidal Maniac, but we've established that that doesn't matter.
    • I presume you mean 'why would he shoot Rassilon?' since you yourself have established that he's got a valid reason to shoot the Master; to send Rassilon and the other Time Lords back into the Time War. As for 'why shoot Rassilon', after years of angst about being the Last of the Time Lords and how he doomed his entire race to die, I'm not surprised that for all his talk he'd hesitate a bit before dooming them to their fate after laying eyes on them for the first time in years. He's probably tormenting himself with second-guessing loads of possible third options he can take ('maybe if I kill Rassilon, they'll become sane again and stop this madness about ascending to gods so I don't have to send them back to the Time War and I don't have to be all alone again', that sort of thing. Vain hope maybe, but I imagine it would be difficult to wipe your entire species out for the second time in a row in a cavalier fashion, no matter how inevitable.
      • The Master seems to think shooting Rassilon will also break the link; i.e. have exactly the same effect as shooting the Master, except without killing the Master. But that works as a Fan Wank if we assume the Master was wrong.
    • My query is... why didn't the Doctor just shoot the machinery/white point star right from the beginning?
    • My question actually comes from a different part of the same scene — Rassilon, to prove he's a real douche, decides that the Master has Outlived His Usefulness and prepares to kill him. Only the Master hasn't outlived his usefulness- the drums in his head are keeping the link open, and as seen several minutes later, breaking the link instantaneously dooms the Time Lords. So if 10 hadn't turned up at all then Rassilon would've Idiot Balled himself out of existence and taken the Master with him, and 10 wouldn't have died rescuing Wilf.
      • With the machine active, the Master might not have been integral to the link anymore. All we know is that when it was destroyed, Gallifrey and the Time Lords vanished. Whether killing the Master would really have done the trick is still an open question.
      • It's possible that Rassilon would of kept the Master alive long enough for them to start the Final Sanction, and kill him then.
  • It's been established that Donna must not remember anything about the Doctor, or else her mind will burn up and she will die. So Donna starts remembering, and her mind starts burning up... and then she zaps everyone around her somehow and then she falls unconscious. Then later she wakes up without memories, but oddly she only wakes up when the TARDIS makes its characteristic noise. How did this happen?
    • Ten erased her memories once, presumably that safeguard he told the Master about re-erased her memories if she ever started to remember. It is a coincidence that she woke up when the TARDIS started up.
  • Was any one else pissed at the revelation that the Time Lords had tried to commit genocide? the Time Lords were, as Giles the Krillitane pointed out, a race of dusty old senators. They were essentially Star Trek's Prime Directive taken to the extreme; willing to borderline execute the Second Doctor for simply trying to explore the universe. Now we see that they were no better than the Daleks — how is it possible for us to now feel sympathy for the Doctor during his emotional speeches about Gallifrey and all it's wonders now that we know they were willing to destroy everything we hold dear? between this and the fact the Time Lords started the damn war (by sending the Fourth to end their creation) the Time War actually comes off as less heroic battle to save the universe from the Daleks and more the Daleks were acting in self defense.
    • Well I'm not sure on the specifics of what the Time Lords did when, but (a) the Doctor already called out the Time Lords for being dicks (in the old series), so it's established that Time Lord society is corrupt, and (b) Time Lord history goes back for a billion years (according to Rassilon), so all those emotional speeches could be referencing some previous time before the society turned corrupt, and/or certain aspects of that society which aren't as bad as the stuff referenced above. In fact, IIRC most of those speeches were about Gallifrey itself, with natural wonders like red grass and stuff. Obviously the red grass can't be blamed for crimes committed by Time Lords.
    • Yeah, the Doctor doesn't really reference the Time Lords themselves, it's more him missing the planet, and a sense of loneliness, and one or two good souls he knew there... but as for the rest of those stuffy bureaucrats? Yeah, wiping them out was a public service. If you were to run into a Time Lord, don't run up and hug it and ask it for sage wisdom; statistically, that Time Lord is a psychopath (Monk, Master, Rani, Omega, etc.). And the rest don't really leave Gallifrey at all. The exceptions are Susan and Romana, and whatever happened to them is ambiguous.
    • And it's hard to have sympathy for the Daleks, for obvious reasons. Even if they're involvement in the Time War was essentially self-defense, they've proven themselves to be Space Nazis on a thousand other occasions.
    • He's doing what countless bereaved relatives have done regarding their deceased loved ones; choosing to remember the good qualities rather than constantly tormenting himself with all the horrible stuff. And considering he's the one who stopped them from destroying everything we hold dear at great personal cost to himself, who exactly are we to bitch about how he chooses to remember them?
    • The majority of Time Lords were probably the dull-as-dirt professional-actuary types that bore the Doctor but don't especially anger him. The Doctor, traumatized over the loss of his people, usually thinks of those Time Lords when he remembers home — stuffy old uncles who gossip like hens and intrigue over who gets the good parking space. Less monsters to fight against and more a bunch of losers to shake your head at and smile. But then there are sociopathic monsters like Rassilon, Omega, the Master, Borusa, Goth, Morbius, the Rani, the War Chief ... probably the Time Lords as a whole are no more evil than humans, but they're so powerful that any Time Lord who goes bad has the power to do incalculable damage. In a society made up of apathetics and megalomaniacs, the megalomaniacs will tend to be the ones in charge simply because no one else is willing to take up arms against them.
      • Besides, if every Time Lord was a psycho, no non-intervention policy would ever be able to keep them in line. The fact that they had one and it worked means that most Time Lords just weren't much interested in anything outside of Gallifrey, either due to apathy or due to a general consensus belief that "one must conquer Gallifrey first."
    • If it helps, there's also the below little line the Doctor said to Wilf. It's pretty reasonable to assume the Daleks started the warGeeky Note , and the Time Lords "upped their game" as things started to get more serious.
      Wilf: But I’ve heard you talk about your people like they’re wonderful!
      The Doctor: That’s how I choose to remember them! The Time Lords of old. But then they went to war! An endless war! And it changed them. Right to the core.
  • Couldn't the Doctor have unlocked the radiation chamber with the sonic screwdriver?
    • No, in the episode he holds up the sonic and says "Even this would set it off."
  • So... Martha is married to Mickey now. What happened to the guy she was originally engaged to in "The Sontaran Strategem"? (You know, before she had ever even met Mickey, who was trapped in a parallel universe at the time.) And does it bother anyone else that Martha and Mickey don't really have anything in common except for being black and having traveled with the Doctor?
    • She fell in love with that guy based on how he was in the Year That Never Was. It's fairly safe to say, such a relationship failed. Don't downplay how important "traveled with the Doctor" is. Very few could understand them. Also, perhaps most importantly... Smith and Jones.
    • I believe that Martha and Mickey were supposed to appear in Torchwood season 3 (or what became Children of Earth, anyway) and their meeting / developing relationship was supposed to be a plot there; unfortunately neither actor was available, so it never happened. As for the Unfortunate Implications, they have indeed been noticed and raised before.
    • As has been suggested below, there had been major Dale invasion since the Atmos incident; it is very possible that Tom died. Meanwhile Micky has been presumed dead for 2-3 years at this point; presumably he's gonna have had to reach out, either to UNIT or Torchwood to get him set up as alive again without the whole "Where the hell have you been for 3 years?" Issue, and catch him up with what he's missed. Therefore it's possible that he'd be around to help Martha with her grief, and one thing may have led to another
  • When did Rassilon go bad? In "The Five Doctors", he seemed pretty well against immortality, arguing that only a true madman would ever look for it — only to go right ahead and do precisely that in "The End of Time", indeed appearing quite insane. It's deliciously ironic, but I wonder just what caused the change.
    • I believe there's a few Expanded Universe stories where Rassilon turns out to be a wrong'un, and in the same story the Second Doctor ominously notes that there are conflicting legends about Rassilon, some suggesting that rather than a rosy-cheeked white bearded father of Time Lord society he was actually a sadistic lunatic. In any case, though there is a bit of a history of seemingly benevolent Time Lords going off the deep-end into madness-inspired supervillainy (most prominently, Borusa — again, in "The Five Doctors").
    • There is a theory that Rassilon wanted to get potential Time Lord dictators out of the way with his Game. This meant they couldn't oppose him.
  • How is it all the clones of the Master are capable of organizing under the original Master with no indication that they are going to undermine his plans? I understand that they are all copies of him, but still somehow they are all independent individuals and have free will, but how come are they are all willing to help him and work together, apparently without any ulterior motives or hidden agendas? The Master is exactly the kind of person who would betray himself if he could. He wouldn't want to share anything with anyone.
    • Means to an end. The original Master had the bright idea to bring back Gallifrey. The rest are willing to take his orders long enough to make that work. After that it could be open season.
  • It was established in "Partners in Crime" that the Adipose we see on-screen are babies; we still don't know what adult Adipose look like. So that Adipose in the bar when Ten goes to see Jack... so do the Adipose still look like babies even when they're fully grown, or does that planet allow BABIES to come to a tavern to drink?
    • Considering Adipose are walking lumps of fat, why assume alcohol would even affect them? Could be that booze is entirely baby-safe for their species.
    • Maybe mom and dad Adipose were just off screen hitting the slot machines and left baby to be watched by the bartender?
  • Given what is written in the Heartwarming Moments and Tear Jerker pages, does anyone really believe the Master did a Heel–Face Turn or Redemption Equals Death? The Master is a monster and always has been. The Doctor only thought otherwise because of his loneliness.
    • Based on the Master that emerges in Series 8, while he/she is still a complete whackjob the new Master clearly wants to do some repairing to her friendship/relationship with the Doctor. So I take it that's as good a turn as can be expected from the Master
      • However if the Master/Rassilon fight ended with the Master regenerating, Rasillon is either really mad still or maybe he's regenerated too, which may be even scarier than when his face was that of one that played James Bond and Heathcliff.
    • The Master, let's be honest here, has been a major beneficiary of the Draco in Leather Pants effect, particularly since he regenerated into his John Simm form. While the scene in question is clearly played out as the Master doing a good thing for sort-of-good-or-at-least-not-entirely-bad reasons, it's not entirely surprising some would take a slightly more rosy-eyed view of his actions than was perhaps warranted.
  • Wasn't Martha engaged to that guy she met in "Last of the Time Lords"? Why did she end up marrying Mickey in "The End of Time"?
    • Not every engaged couple makes it to the altar. Martha got engaged pretty quickly, too. Things must have just not worked out, possibly because she couldn't share her alien experiences with him or because she went after him largely because of his actions in the Year That Never Was.
    • Between the time of Martha's engagement to a man with a tendency towards Heroic Sacrifice and her marriage to Mickey there was a Dalek invasion. Do the math.
    • Davies said that Milligan was the rebound guy. Remember how her telling Donna and the Doctor about him focused on ways he reminded her of the Doctor? By the time she's on her honeymoon with Mickey in Children of Earth, it's been a year since "Journey's End", plenty of time for her to break up with Tom and get together with Mickey.
      • I also want to point out the fact that "Milligan" is really, REALLY close to a "mulligan", or a retry, as it were...
      • It's been a year for the Doctor. But it's a time travel show. Who knows how long it's been from her point of view.
      • It can't have been too long — maybe Martha broke up with Tom between the Sontaran episodes and the finale episodes, or maybe it was after "Journey's End", but either way, once they're back on Earth, they're back in the normal timestream. When Torchwood pop up in "The Stolen Earth", it is made explicitly clear that the episodes take place after series 2 of Torchwood because reference is made to the deaths of Tosh and Owen. It's not known how much time passes between "Journey's End" and Day One of Children Of Earth, but it can't be more than a year or so, since they tend to try and keep the stories reasonably present-day and they haven't replaced Tosh or Owen yet. The clip of the Doctor saying goodbye to Martha and Mickey probably took place much later in their timestream, because they are already married and having adventures again, but in Children of Earth, Martha's absence is explained as her being on her honeymoon. There IS time for them to get together, but it's not much - especially when you realise Martha didn't know Mickey before "Journey's End", so it's not like she had any more time with him than she did with Tom. Still seems a bit Pair the Spares to me.
    • We don't know how much time passed in between Martha breaking it off with Tom Milligan and marrying Mickey. It could be several years for all we know. There was no context for it in the scene when the Doctor saved their lives.
  • If the Doctor wanted to know what happened to Joan Redfern, why didn't he, instead of visiting her great-granddaughter in the present day, travel back in time to see Joan herself? If he was afraid that meeting Joan in person would cause her too much pain, he could've simply observed from a distance, like he did with Donna.
  • In "Last of the Time Lords", the Master was mortally wounded and could've regenerated, but instead he chose to die to hurt the Doctor. Shouldn't he, then, be angry at the cultists for resurrecting him, instead of gloating to Lucy how he's managed to cheat death?
    • Why would he? The Master is a) a prime example of Immortals Fear Death, so one of the reasons he died is because he knew he had a backup plan, and b) actually dying got him out of the Doctor's view, so he could be resurrected without the Doctor interfering.
    • His options after being shot were 1) regenerate and be the Doctor's prisoner or 2) die just to spite him and get the last word. A resurrection later that set him loose wouldn't negate his earlier reason for wanting to die.
  • What would've happened in "The End of Time" if Rose had stayed with the Time Lord Doctor instead of with the Metacrisis?
    • The 2009 specials that followed were basically about the Doctor descending into a very dark place to the point that he needed to regenerate to get a fresh start. Not much would've changed in "The Next Doctor". In that special, Rose probably would've figured out who Jackson Lake truly was simply because she didn’t feel the same kind of attraction she does towards the Doctor. In "Planet of the Dead," Rose and Christina wouldn’t have gotten along, as Rose would never let that aristocrat boss her or the Doctor around. "The Waters of Mars" would have ended completely differently. Since Rose always grounded the Doctor, he would never have become the Time Lord victorious. Like the Doctor and Donna had in "The Fires of Pompeii," they would have had a moral crisis knowing they’d be letting people die if they left, probably even have a bit of an argument over it. But like Pompeii, the Doctor would choose to keep the timeline intact.
    • "The End of Time" would go down very differently. The Oods' “he will knock four times” prophecy would still happen. However, Rose would have been the one who let the scientist out of the chamber. The Doctor and Rose would have been talking to each other through the glass, and she’d be rightfully freaked out. The Doctor would try to soothe her, telling her he’s going to figure it out somehow. He would start to psyche himself up to enter the other chamber, knowing that Rose would be furious at him for regenerating again, only for Wilf to barricade himself into the other chamber, using the pistol to jam the door. Despite the Doctor begging for Wilf to get out of there, Wilf would refuse and sacrifice himself to free Rose. He'd insist that this is his honor, that he could see just how in love the Doctor and Rose are and how they need to be together, then press the button, freeing Rose and killing Wilf. Depending on whether they restored Donna's memories, they'd either tell her the truth or they'd tell her and her mother that her grandfather died trying to save someone during the chaos when Gallifrey appeared in the sky, and have a situation where Donna always misses them as they leave flowers at Wilf's grave.


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