Thirteenth Doctor - First Season - Thoughts? (SPOILERS WELCOME)

Tonguez said:

I really like the antimatter engine description as it cemented this Doctors "engineer" credentials, which is a great development for the character away from the past gobblydygook to something grounded in technical know-how.

Pregnant man was trite but not offensive, he was afterall an Alien and I assume his species is essentially Hermaphrodite to some degree, thus allowing him to have a functioning uterus - exactly how the fertilised ovum gets there boggles the mind however.

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It doesn't seem that mind boggling. If you can imagine a male having a functioning uterus, it's not that hard to imagine that the alien species must have some kind of genitalia that detects the sex of a fertilized egg and deposits it accordingly.

Sorry, guys, I'm not buying your "ambulance" explanation. An ambulance picks up a patient and goes directly to the hospital in a trip of a pretty short duration - certainly not one requiring sleep shifts on the parts of the EMTs. The "ambulance" space ship had only two doctors on board, yet the TARDIS was four days behind them. So in those four days, were the two doctors each performing rotating 12-hour shifts? If so, why were they both awake and "on shift" at the beginning of the episode? If not, how many hours of the day do the poor patients on board have to go without medical supervision while the two doctors are sleeping?

The concept was poorly thought out - as indeed was most of the episode.

Johnathan

No one sleeps unless it's part of the story. Have you not noticed this? In a highly advanced society like this one a space ambulance can be managed by less crew. Early on they may have had dozens or hundreds of crew. Maybe they're like US doctors in modern hospitals working insane multiday shifts.

Nutation said:

The description of the antimatter engine was surprisingly accurate and articulate. Usually, Dr. Who just throws around big words that sound impressive.

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It was neat. It just had one problem - it doesn't really make sense to produce the antimatter aboard to use it later as energy source - producing antimatter costs more energy than you would get out of it, so if you produce antimatter to immediately consume it again, just use your energy source for the antimatter production.

It makes sense to have antimatter production facilities that use solar light or other energy forms to produce antimatter, because the energy density is pretty fantastic. So your ship can hold a lot of fuel that it alone could never produce over its service.

Richards said:

Sorry, guys, I'm not buying your "ambulance" explanation.

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It's not my explanation, it's right there in the episode. They say that their only duties are to keep patients alive and stable until they reach proper medical facilities, not to fully treat them. They're not doctors, they're paramedics with access to highly advanced mostly-automated medical systems.

MarkB said:

It's not my explanation, it's right there in the episode. They say that their only duties are to keep patients alive and stable until they reach proper medical facilities, not to fully treat them. They're not doctors, they're paramedics with access to highly advanced mostly-automated medical systems.

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Except that they were explicitly referred to as doctors. The situation was similar to a forward operations military medical unit, as depicted in the movie/TV show M.A.S.H., except that their base was mobile. Or like a hospital ship as HMY Britannia was designed to operate as, in time of war. Stitch people back together well enough that they don't die, so that they can live long enough to receive more advanced care.

MarkB said:

True, but I feel like the Doctor's "no guns" policy was played up in this episode to the point of being just a knee-jerk reaction. Yeah, the hotel guy's actions were clearly not motivated by mercy, but when the poor creature is dying a slow and painful death from suffocation, a bullet to the brain seems a lot more merciful than the Doctor's apparent intention of standing there sympathising with it while it slowly expired.

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Good point. But it isn't like the Doctor had much time to do anything. Perhaps she would have come up with a kinder way of alleviating its pain.

billd91 said:

It doesn't seem that mind boggling. If you can imagine a male having a functioning uterus, it's not that hard to imagine that the alien species must have some kind of genitalia that detects the sex of a fertilized egg and deposits it accordingly.

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Folks need to read up on biology a bit before going into such things. You folks are making this way too complicated, and you are trying too hard to bind an alien species that only superficially looks human to human mechanisms and structures. I mean, think for a second, if a male can bring a baby to term, it quite obviously doesn't mean the same thing as "male" does in humans.

Even on Earth, not all species determine sex of a child based only on the chromosomes of the fertilized egg. For some, for example, *temperature* during incubation of an egg is the determining factor. Heck, some species on Earth can change sex after they are born! So, stop thinking in terms of sex determination by the fertilized egg itself!

So, the number of possible mechanisms are large. How about simply - the male and female each have different levels of some hormone (or equivalent) that determines the sex of the child. Done.

Tonguez said:

See, suspension of disbeleif failed for me on that small artifice, because you can't have a giant spider happily clinging to a roof in one scene and then suffocating from its weight in the next - if square-cube law and the spiders weight is an issue, then make sure that gravity applies to spiders on the ceiling too!! [

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Science interjection - you've got it a little messed up.

Arthropoods have two separate issues as they get large.

One is weight - the materials used in exoskeletons are not particularly strong. It cannot carry the same weight that bone can - so, if they get too big, arthropod exoskeletons will break legs, and the like. This can be gotten around by fundamentally changing the materials used in the skeleton, but then you're no longer really an arthropod. You're something else. But regardless, you can't just make a garden spider grow the size of a horse or larger and expect it to bear up its own weight. It will crush itself.

The other is oxygen - their oxygen problem is related to size, but *NOT* to weight. Arthropods do not have lungs and a closed circulatory system to move oxygen through the body. They have an open circulatory system, in which oxygen isn't so much pumped through the body, as it more diffuses through, with only a little mechanical help as the animal's muscles move. If the body is too large, you can't diffuse sufficient oxygen into the interior tissues from the surface of the body in this manner, and tissue deep in the body would die. This is what seems to have been happening to the ballroom spider.

Interesting point - this mechanism is in part dependent on the percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere (actually the partial pressure of oxygen, but close enough for this discussion). So, raise the percentage of O2, and the bugs can be bigger. Back tens of millions of years ago, the percentage of 02 in the atmosphere was higher than it is now. And bugs got bigger. MUCH bigger. Still within the limits of the exoskeletal materials, still way bigger than the centipedes you see around today. Bigger than coconut crabs, which are the largest land arthropods these days, who can weigh as much as a house cat and whose legs can span three feet.

Ryujin said:

Except that they were explicitly referred to as doctors. The situation was similar to a forward operations military medical unit, as depicted in the movie/TV show M.A.S.H., except that their base was mobile. Or like a hospital ship as HMY Britannia was designed to operate as, in time of war. Stitch people back together well enough that they don't die, so that they can live long enough to receive more advanced care.

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Rewatched last night and the vessel is explicitly referred to as a Rescue Ship designed to keep patients alive while they are transported. It’s the ships systems that do the emergency healing/resuscitations with the doctors just there to monitor the patients ‘pods’