The official 2015 Doctor Who (with spoilers for aired episodes only) thread

[Umbran]

But Doctor Who does stuff like that all the time.

Yes. Sometimes they do it badly, and sometimes well. I'm only against the bad bits.

This was a good bit, to me, not just because of the words, but because it is a Trek reference. It says, "we are inserting treknobabble here, don't worry about the content," in a self-aware, slightly self-deprecating way, making a joke of it. That has artistry that a general single line of "It is Time Lord magic!" just doesn't have.

 

[MarkB]

How an *entire planet* hides in plain sight, however, would be hard to call a minor oversight.

It's hardly something the Time Lords would have any difficulty with, though. At the very simplest, they could place the whole planet half a second out of synch with normal time, and nobody would know it was there - that's the trick the Daleks use to hide 26 pilfered planets in The Stolen Earth.

Even if they didn't do it that way, and just cloaked the planet, dealing with gravitational anomalies would be child's play to them. This is the race that harnessed black holes to power their time travel experiments. The TARDIS alone, with some minor help, is capable of towing Earth across the galaxy. If they wanted to nullify Gallifrey's gravitational effect upon surrounding space, they could do so without any difficulty.

 

[Umbran]

It could well have been a real experience that occurred in a closed time loop, in a dimensionally transcendental space. That's the thing, when you're dealing with a race who commands both space and time. It could have taken a real 3+ billion years, in a real physical space, and he could have come out a objective 5 minutes after going in to a person outside the space.

The time isn't the issue. The *energy* is the issue. Since the Doctor specifically used the energy argument to come to his conclusions of how he should operate in the situation, its plot relevant. So far, it looks like the Doctor was *wrong* about the energy, and that's 1) weird that the Doctor gets it wrong and 2) a plot problem. If the space was real and closed, like he surmised, a skull or set of clothes still isn't a big deal - they can easily steal the energy from off camera. But *billions* of skulls becomes a consistency issue. If there was enough spare energy for billions of skulls, the Doctor could have done something much more creative with what was at hand.

Whether he was correct or not becomes moot if it wasn't a real space. A simulated space can break physical rules, a real space can't.

 

[Bedrockgames]

The time isn't the issue. The *energy* is the issue. Since the Doctor specifically used the energy argument to come to his conclusions of how he should operate in the situation, its plot relevant. So far, it looks like the Doctor was *wrong* about the energy, and that's 1) weird that the Doctor gets it wrong and 2) a plot problem. If the space was real and closed, like he surmised, a skull or set of clothes still isn't a big deal - they can easily steal the energy from off camera. But *billions* of skulls becomes a consistency issue. If there was enough spare energy for billions of skulls, the Doctor could have done something much more creative with what was at hand.

Whether he was correct or not becomes moot if it wasn't a real space. A simulated space can break physical rules, a real space can't.

Maybe I missed something, or maybe I am not following your argument, but I think you are adding assumptions to the rules that the show didt indicate. Since the skull was left behind, it obviously didn't need the energy from the skull to do the copy. And a skull being left behind each time explains the presence of the pile of skulls. All we know is it needed energy, we don't know that it needed a 1-1 list of every part of the doctor's body to reproduce it. The energy needed was the fire form his body burning. That probably isn't a whole lot anyways, so I think he was basically just giving it a bit of a spark. This struck me is a a particularly tight episode in terms of explaining things (I'll grant that moon egg was pretty sloppy but this was a very organized and fairly internally consistent episode as far as Who goes). I certainly wouldn't say it was bad writing.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

AFAIK, only the Teleporter itself needed some energy. Not the entire trap. The trap might have its own energy source, but the teleporter needs to work only once, so it isn't recharged. But the Doctor needs food, depending on how long he stays inside and finally gives the confession everyone wanted to know. And the food is something that in turn gives energy to the doctor, so he can use it to run the teleporter again.

And he might not have been running around naked the first time. The first time was the time he needed to figure out how the trap worked and how he could beat it. He might have actually spend much longer doing that, giving a few extra confessions possibly to stay alive to get back from the crystal wall to set up everything.

Of course, the doctor could be wrong on some things. Hey, when he jumps through the window and says "Now I'll do something you won't expect" is kinda wrong - if the system was learning, it had already known this would happen.

 

[Staffan]

The amount of subjective time he spent in there was very, very long, but the whole episode notes how he can sometimes enter periods of extreme mental activity, where time to him passes very slowly while he thinks. So, maybe he's been in there a billion years, or maybe his whole experience in the dial was in that extreme state, so much less external time passed.

Except it wasn't a few billion years in subjective time. Subjectively, he only experienced one go around the loop. He used an objective measure, the stars, to measure how long it had been.

 

[delericho]

AFAIK, only the Teleporter itself needed some energy. Not the entire trap. The trap might have its own energy source, but the teleporter needs to work only once, so it isn't recharged. But the Doctor needs food, depending on how long he stays inside and finally gives the confession everyone wanted to know. And the food is something that in turn gives energy to the doctor, so he can use it to run the teleporter again.

Or he could have taken the power leads out of one of those handy monitor screens and used that to recharge the teleporter. That's surely a more efficient way to recharge the thing than to burn up his own body.

He might even have been able to reprogram the teleporter to work in reverse, thus taking him back to Earth. (And if he really wanted to know who set the trap, there's then nothing stopping him from getting in his TARDIS and heading back into the castle...)

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Or he could have taken the power leads out of one of those handy monitor screens and used that to recharge the teleporter. That's surely a more efficient way to recharge the thing than to burn up his own body.

He might even have been able to reprogram the teleporter to work in reverse, thus taking him back to Earth. (And if he really wanted to know who set the trap, there's then nothing stopping him from getting in his TARDIS and heading back into the castle...)

The reverse the teleport direction might be interesting, but we havne't seen his acitivites in the first 7,000 years - maybe that did not work.

Any solution he could come up with also couldn't take too long - he needs a new confession every 60 minutes or so, and he doesn't actually want to confess something important.

 

[delericho]

Any solution he could come up with also couldn't take too long - he needs a new confession every 60 minutes or so, and he doesn't actually want to confess something important.

I don't think so - he notes in the episode that he could lure the creature to one end of the castle and then run to the other, thus gaining 82 minutes, but he only needs a confession when he gets cornered by it. Otherwise, he can just run away again.

One thing that's interesting is that he also doesn't seem to need a new confession each time - the monster seems to be satisfied by him repeating himself each time through the loop.

 

[Ryujin]

Or he could have taken the power leads out of one of those handy monitor screens and used that to recharge the teleporter. That's surely a more efficient way to recharge the thing than to burn up his own body.

He might even have been able to reprogram the teleporter to work in reverse, thus taking him back to Earth. (And if he really wanted to know who set the trap, there's then nothing stopping him from getting in his TARDIS and heading back into the castle...)

Eliminating himself and getting a 'master reset' was part of the requirement for getting out, as he already knew that it would take a ridiculously long time to effect his escape. He likely could have come up with a different way to power the teleport but given a finite area to work on it wouldn't matter if he'd had 2 Doctors, 20 Doctors, or an infinite number of doctors; they could only be so effective.