Doctor Who

I'll wait until "Hell Bent" to make my final judgments, but yeah, overall this hasn't been a great season for Clara.

I think if it wasn't for Whithouse and Gatiss, it might have been better, although the opener didn't really do her many favors either.

The shroudy thing reminded me of the grooly from this

That story made a great impression on me when I was younger.

Why did the Time Lords use such primitive teleporting technology? Why did the Doctor start talking about the Hybrid in the first place? The shroud did nothing to suggest it wanted to learn anything about the Hybrid. If all the rooms in the castle were reset then why didn't the diamond wall get reset too? Wouldn't the Doctor's actions have been different the first time when there were no skulls and no "bird" written in the sand? Who wrote the number 12 at the bottom of the grave and why? Why did the Doctor need to do all those complicated calculations to survive that fall into the water if he didn't actually DO anything with them?

Because Me was the one sending him.

Because it was the weightiest truth he'd never told on his mind at the time.

Room Twelve is special. The last square on the board. The diamond-hard wall doesn't need to be reset because what damage could be done to it anyway.

Somewhat. Probably just saved himself some time in rediscovering the plan by coming up with the extra clues.

Partly he was bluffing himself. He didn't actually come up with his plan for how to survive until he was already falling. Partly, just because you've figured out how to hit the water surviveably doesn't mean you can stay conscious when you smack into it.

So here's a puzzle for anyone who wants to work it out, how many Doctor's did that take? At the end the corridor though the diamonds looks about 3 meters long, at about Capuldi's hight plus a bit and maybe a meter and a half wide? How much diamond does the Doctor take off which each punch? I'd say maybe a 1cm deep chunk, so all that has to be done to work out how many versions of the Doctor it took is to work out how much diamond that Doctor had to destroy, how much he destroyed with each punch and how many punches (and thus lives) he had to use to make it out.

edited 29th Nov '15 10:53:00 AM by Silasw

Multiple Doctors per day for two billion years. Let's say five dead Doctors per day, for the sake of argument. That's 5 times 365 times 2,000,000,000. Which works out at 3.65 trillion Doctors.

That's a lot of Doctors.

edited 29th Nov '15 11:02:19 AM by TamH70

"Breaking news: Haley Atwell has just been cast as... THE 3.66TH TRILLIONTH DOCTOR!

edited 29th Nov '15 11:13:24 AM by kkhohoho

Each Doctor has got to last at least a full day, considering the whole 'let's wait until night and see the stars' thing. Probably a fair bit longer than that, since he talks about his life now being about finding time to eat and sleep in between monster attack.

Ah, you're right about that. Still, it's a fifth of 3.65 trillion Doctors. Which is still a lot of Doctors.

The guess on the recap page says about a day and a half. Lets call it about 180 iterations per year, times a minimum of 2 billion years. So actually 360 billion iterations, and he gets 2 punches a time.

Radio Times asked Professor David Dobson, an expert on high pressure experiments at University College London.

Of course, while the castle exists in linear time the clones do not, and clone one is no different to clone 27 billion.

The wall does not reset because it is not part of the castle - in the same way as the Nu Who TARDIS doors are part of the outside, so look like the outside of the TARDIS, not the inside.

Why Clara didn't do anything. 1) She's dead 2) She's a construct of the Doctor's intellect to allow him to solve problems. 3) She's not a Time Lord, so despite her posing, she isn't the Doctor and can't do what he does. 4) The shows title. Can people stop bemoaning the show isn't companioncentric.

edited 29th Nov '15 11:27:13 AM by Last_Hussar

According to my handy-dandy calculator, that's 6.13 billion Doctors. Which is still pretty darn high.

edited 29th Nov '15 11:23:52 AM by kkhohoho

It takes him a day and a half just to get back to the teleporter to reset himself. I'd say the iterations take at least three days.

Recap page is WAY too optimistic. According to the calculator function on duckduckgo, its around 730 MILLION Doctors. Which is still a lot of Doctors.

Pah, I can't read.

It should be 730 BILLION Doctors. Which is a Doctor Evil ransom demand.

edited 29th Nov '15 11:29:22 AM by TamH70

Also the first few iterations may have taken a lot longer without clues left for himself.

Whatever way you fiddle with the numbers, you're still looking at a ball park figure of over 3 to 4 hundred billion Doctors. And that's assuming you don't take a wrong turn at Albuquerque. edited to add

I never expected when I started watching Nu Who I'd be ending up spending part of a Sunday night far in that show's future discussing how many dead Doctors there would be totted up in an episode. This show is just freaky.

edited 29th Nov '15 11:37:08 AM by TamH70

I wonder what the first few iterations of the loop were like. Did the original Doctor work it all out or did it take several iterations for the pattern to get going?

A review.

http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2015/nov/28/doctor-who-series-35-episode-11-heaven-sent#comment-64195792

He would've had to figure it out every time, because if he died in any other way but powering the teleporter, he wouldn't have reset.

He could have thought to power the teleporter without reaching the crystal wall. The loop doesn't require him to reach that crystal but it would be a wasted iteration if he didn't.

The first few iterations were probably wastes where got caught early, and then he'd just claw himself back to the duplication room. The Veil disappears after it gets and kills him, and he has a day and a half or so of slow, agonizing death, so he always has time to copy himself even when he screws up.

Keep in mind that Time Lords are considerably stronger than humans, so he could most likely punch through faster than a person.

He must have figured out the plan on the first iteration/ otherwise, what would motivate him to start the loop?

He probably got as far as the diamond wall, realized he doesn't currently have a way of breaking through it, and that he doesn't want to give up his secrets to move it, went off and figured out his plan before implementing it. (And possibly painted the portrait of Clara)

I don't think a human could have made any sort of impact on that wall, no matter how many millenia you allow.

Remember also he only makes 2 or 3 punches on the iteration we witness. The further into the story he gets and the further down the 'diamond corridor' gives him more time to punch, or just the different iterations might make more punches; based on any number of 'Bird' variables.

He could have been dying and hoped the next one would figure out what to do. All I'm saying is that it might have taken a few Doctors before he figured out how to leave the appropriate clues for the loop to proceed the way it does in the episode.