Adric's death led to saving the entire human race.
The Doctor is coming, the Doctor is coming!!
- Thread starter bhsup
- Start date
Well, I'm relieved that she's finally gone, and hope that the next companion will be more interesting and not so obnoxious.
As for the story itself, it didn't make any sense... but that's become par for the course. Too bad, as this season started out okay but unfortunately hasn't kept it up.
It would have been a nice touch if they'd gone full circle with her finally answering his question, "Am I a good man?" with "Yes, you are." That's what it would have taken to redeem the episode for me.
Sam_Yeager
Another Original Geezer
I may of course be completely wrong but I really think you're celebrating too early:
- There are still two episodes to go until the end of the season.
- Unlike all the other victims Clara didn't run. One of the other characters seemed to be dropping a hint about this.
- "To be continued" implies there's more to come.
- Unless 'Me' is to be the next companion then we haven't met the next companion yet.
- We still don't know to where the doctor was teleported and why.
My personal supposition is that, somehow, Clara comes back to life but subsequently dies saving the doctor in the last episode.
_random_
Jewel Runner
I suspect the "they" Ashildr was talking about were the Time Lords, based on press releases that say the return of Gallifrey will play a big part in the finale. So I think Clara's death will be setting up a pissed off Doctor, seeing as it was all a result of Gallifreyan scheming. But then her final words inspire him to push onward. I don't think they're gonna do something as hokey as reviving her now, not if the intent is to kill her off again.
As long as she's gone by the end of the season I can live with it... and hopefully there won't be any "ghost Clara" appearances.I may of course be completely wrong but I really think you're celebrating too early:
- There are still two episodes to go until the end of the season.
- Unlike all the other victims Clara didn't run. One of the other characters seemed to be dropping a hint about this.
- "To be continued" implies there's more to come.
- Unless 'Me' is to be the next companion then we haven't met the next companion yet.
- We still don't know to where the doctor was teleported and why.
My personal supposition is that, somehow, Clara comes back to life but subsequently dies saving the doctor in the last episode.
_random_
Jewel Runner
Jenna Coleman has publicly announced that she's leaving. So you've got your wish, and I've got another impetus to drink. Everyone's a winner.
Evie
Pronounced like Eevee
Holy crap.
That episode...that was Blink-grade material right there.
That episode...that was Blink-grade material right there.
_random_
Jewel Runner
Yeah, I didn't want to double post, but hot damn. Capaldi may be the best actor to take on the role of the Doctor, like, ever. While Blink benefited from focusing elsewhere, this may have been the most Doctor-centric episode ever, and frankly I'm not sure anybody else could have carried it so well.
On a more fandomy note, does this complicate the question of how old the Doctor is? Depending on how you define your terms, either he's now several billion years old, a couple of days old, or the same (2000ish) age as he was in the previous episode. There's never been a consistent answer anyway, since the Doctor himself has apparently forgotten his age, but this did throw a fun wrench in that.
On a more fandomy note, does this complicate the question of how old the Doctor is? Depending on how you define your terms, either he's now several billion years old, a couple of days old, or the same (2000ish) age as he was in the previous episode. There's never been a consistent answer anyway, since the Doctor himself has apparently forgotten his age, but this did throw a fun wrench in that.
Spoiler The last line :
Evie
Pronounced like Eevee
Yeah, Capaldi was simply brilliant.
Re that spoiler:
Re that spoiler:
Spoiler :
He's not several billion years old because he's not the same person who lived that experience billions of times over. He's either the same age he was or a couple of days old. I would say that the "Doctor" now running around is a newborn clone, and the Doctor himself is now dead. Dr Who has always pushed the boundaries of personal identity anyway, but that's arguably pushing them a bit too far. Still, it doesn't much matter in the grand scheme of things. It was a great episode and very clever - as always with Moffatt.
I liked the set. I liked the music. I liked Capaldi's acting, especially... someone on another forum mentioned that he thought Capaldi was channeling Tom Baker, in how he said some of his lines and in some of his mannerisms, and I have to agree. There is a kind of Tom Bakerish kind of element to some of Capaldi's more recent performances.
And all these are why I can overlook a completely ridiculous story that has numerous continuity issues.
No, the Doctor is not 2 billion years old. We're just asked to believe that his pattern has essentially been in a kind of transporter buffer for that long (reference to the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Relics" in which Scotty was discovered to have been trapped in a transporter buffer for 75 years while the rest of the universe went on without him). But in this case, the transmat machine has apparently been churning out copies of the Doctor for 2 billion years, each copy only living for a very limited amount of time.
So how long has Gallifrey been waiting for the Doctor since this process started? Has it been 2 billion years there, as well?
And all these are why I can overlook a completely ridiculous story that has numerous continuity issues.
No, the Doctor is not 2 billion years old. We're just asked to believe that his pattern has essentially been in a kind of transporter buffer for that long (reference to the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Relics" in which Scotty was discovered to have been trapped in a transporter buffer for 75 years while the rest of the universe went on without him). But in this case, the transmat machine has apparently been churning out copies of the Doctor for 2 billion years, each copy only living for a very limited amount of time.
So how long has Gallifrey been waiting for the Doctor since this process started? Has it been 2 billion years there, as well?
Evie
Pronounced like Eevee
Complicating matters further, there's no guarantee at all that Gallifrey is running on the same time frame as the real universe outside Gallifrey's pocket universe.
So there is:
-How much time it was in the Castleverse
-How much time it was on Gallifrey
-How much time it was on Earth
And it's entirely possible all three answers are different.
So there is:
-How much time it was in the Castleverse
-How much time it was on Gallifrey
-How much time it was on Earth
And it's entirely possible all three answers are different.
I'm not sure I see the problem here. If you accept that the "transporter" works by storing the pattern of the individual as information, and destroys the original before recreating a new person in a new location from the same information (and this is how "transporters" are often thought of in SF), then there's no reason at all why it couldn't do that repeatedly. This is a staple of thought experiments in the philosophy of personal identity. Of course it raises serious questions about which, if any, of the copies are identical with the original, but that's a different issue.
There's no reason why it would be. I thought it was made clear that the prison is a bubble universe with its own spacetime, as indeed is Gallifrey. So I would guess that the exit from the prison would be set to deposit the Doctor in Gallifrey at a particular point in time (local time) irrespective of how much time he'd spent in the prison. The Gallifreyans might not even know how long he'd spent in the prison or what he'd done there - perhaps they can't see into it - which I would take to be implied by the fact that (a) no-one intervenes to stop his escape, and (b) he feels the need to send the message that he came "the long way round".
That whole "2 billion years" thing is what I found ridiculous, period. If we're talking about how long a pattern can remain in a transporter buffer and not be degraded, the Star Trek version puts it at "75 years if you're really, really lucky" (Scotty survived, but his colleague did not). Now I know that physics is handled in both series with technobabble (yes, "reverse the polarity of the neutron flow" and "wibbley-wobbley-timey-wimey" are examples of Classic and nuWhovian technobabble) so what one show says isn't how another show interprets the same principles.
But 2 BILLION YEARS???!!!
Sorry, no. That stretches my suspension of disbelief to the breaking point long before we get anywhere near there. As someone on TrekBBS said, those skulls in the water should have been a huge mountain of skulls, reaching well above the water line if the Doctor has been reconstructed and killed over that many years.
I'm not bothered by the idea that a transporter/transmat "kills" the original and reconstructs a copy. That's a philosophical argument that's gone on for decades, and the only part of it that I agree with is that at least in some fanfic stories, original works of art are not allowed to be transported, because once their pattern is in a computerized transporter buffer, what's to stop someone from reconstructing them over and over? The original would fail to be unique.
The Doctor recognized that the stars were 7000 years out of kilter, then he kept on mumbling about how many years had passed, based on the stars he saw. Well, the reality is that some of those stars wouldn't have just shifted position in 2 billion years - some would have died, and others would have been born. Does the Doctor have encyclopedic knowledge of the life cycle of every star in the universe?
_random_
Jewel Runner
Bones decompose. We don't know enough about the environment of Hell to say how fast that would happen, but we also don't know exactly how much time each Doctor spent there or how long it was before he was replicated again. Besides, the technology is implausible to begin with. It seems silly to complain that not only can it do magic, it can do it for a long time.
Evie
Pronounced like Eevee
As far as that goes, how long the data can stay in the computer is explicitly noted to be a short time. However, it's one of the rooms that constantly reset whenever the doctor enters them. In this case, the reset throws it back to its condition when the doctor first entered it (via the teleport)...including having a copy of the doctor in the teleport computer.
While this would normally pose the question "but where is the data for resetting the room kept, then?", in a show that's all about time travel, in a device that is known to be constructed by time traveler, I don't think the question is quite so applicable.
This. It was explained quite clearly.
And yes, "every room gets reset" is basically magic, but so is teleportation, and for that matter time travel, regeneration, and "bigger on the inside".
Given that he's a time traveller, who's been spending literally thousands of personal years jumping about throughout the entire timeline of the whole of history, and whose knowledge has been repeatedly shown to be inhumanly vast, yes, he probably does - or at least every star in the galaxy.
Besides, given that he's also been repeatedly shown to be able to do impossible calculations in his head, he wouldn't even need that amount of knowledge. He only needs encyclopaedic knowledge of all the stars that are visible at some baseline point in time, as well as their trajectories relative to each other, and the life cycle of stars in general. Then he can extrapolate roughly how much time's passed by looking for stars and patterns he recognises based on rough projections forward. That would include the ones he would expect to have disappeared after a certain amount of time. And he would expect new stars to appear at certain locations at certain points, since stars don't materialise out of nothing but form out of nebulae, and he'd know where those were.
I have to say, the Doctor's ability to work out roughly how much time has passed by looking at the sky is surely the least implausible aspect of the entire episode, given who he is!
So it's all just magic, then. Or just lazy writing, as happened with the Matt Smith era. Whenever the writers wrote themselves into a corner, they trotted out the phrase, "I lied. The Doctor always lies."
Plotinus, I know how stars form, thank you. I first started studying that stuff when I was 12.
If the rooms automatically reset, how was the Doctor able to punch his way through the "diamond"? That should have reset back to 0 along with everything else. He shouldn't have made any headway at all.
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