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

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Holy moley, looks like there's going to be a major climate change in Doctor Who!

I loved that. It was awesome. Although...

The Doctor's dead now. They need to rename the show. That's just a clone of him. If he claims to be 2000 years old (or 2 billion?) he's telling a big porkey - as of now he's about 6 hours old.

Do you reset the count every time the Doctor used a teleport in the many years of this show? Is there anything distinguishable about the Doctor after his first teleport into the confession thingy compared to the millionth time?

 

[Ryujin]

The Doctor's last line is "The hybrid [...] is me." Or is it "The hybrid [...] is Me" ?

Since the first is grammatically incorrect, I'm going with the second

 

[Guest 85555]

Yeah - like, if he'd had another power source available, could he have cloned up a load of extra Doctors?

It's kind-of hard to tell how literally to take the whole confession-wheel experience. I think it literally happened from the Doctor's perspective, but whether it took place out in normal reality or was all part of some self-contained pocket universe is less clear. Is the Doctor now billions of years into the future, or did that time only pass within the confines of the device?

Yeah, that is the other part of it. The Confession Dial, and the fact that it was all occurring inside it, gives it a much more trippy "what is real and what is imagination" kind of feel. Those might not have been literal events occurring in the dial, but just figments produced by a self-loathing doctor who wanted to impose a kind of purgatory on himself for letting Clara die.

Great episode in my view, largely because it generates so much discussion like this.

 

[Umbran]

Do you reset the count every time the Doctor used a teleport in the many years of this show?

Yah. We had this discussion in another thread Morrus had on teleporters, even. What counts as the self?

Of course, we could just take the whole experience as metaphorical, within the dial, so that *even the teleporter* is part of a mental construct, not real.

We now know why they call it a "confession dial" at least. It is there to extract confessions - presumably so that no important information can ever be lost from a Time Lord.

And, well, if they bring back the half-human doctor idea, maybe at least we'll get to see Paul McGann do a guest appearance!

Though, I'm going to guess that hybrid is Me is the way they'll go. They reminded us of it too often for it to not be relevant.

 

[Morrus]

Is that when he gets the confession dial? In which case are we seeing events in order this year? There was also that "longest month of my life" reply in the Zygon episode. Is there some funky timey wimey stuff going on here?

 

[Umbran]

Is that when he gets the confession dial? In which case are we seeing events in order this year? There was also that "longest month of my life" reply in the Zygon episode. Is there some funky timey wimey stuff going on here?

I don't think it is that complicated.

Mayor Me is hired to catch the Doctor for someone. At that time, he hands over his confession dial to Mayor Me as well. He gets the dial back after his ordeal. We don't need time to be terribly bent for this to be consistent.

The Doctor mentions that the equipment he sees in the castle is consistent with a heavy-duty, long range teleporter, which could take him up to one light year from his place of origin, which was on Earth. That probably doesn't get him to Gallifrey. I'm guessing instead of teleporting any major distance, he was *put into the dial*, which Mayor Me then handed over (presumably now, ultimately to the Time Lords). The Doctor uses the dial's own internal logic against it, and breaks free rather than give his confession, and he picks it up after he exits it.

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.

We shall see. If he gets his TARDIS back, exactly how long it took will be moot, really.

 

[Morrus]

Yeah, you're probably right.

 

[MarkB]

The Doctor mentions that the equipment he sees in the castle is consistent with a heavy-duty, long range teleporter, which could take him up to one light year from his place of origin, which was on Earth. That probably doesn't get him to Gallifrey.

Or that could be the next big twist. We know that Gallifrey is "back in the sky", somewhere. How ironic would it be if, after the Doctor had scoured the Universe for it, it turned out to have popped up within our own solar system, maybe cloaked the same way Skaro was at the start of the season.

 

[Morrus]

Or that could be the next big twist. We know that Gallifrey is "back in the sky", somewhere. How ironic would it be if, after the Doctor had scoured the Universe for it, it turned out to have popped up within our own solar system, maybe cloaked the same way Skaro was at the start of the season.

I'd find that a bit silly. Other than the Doctor's personal attachment to our planet, there's nothing special about it. Why our solar system? Or even our galaxy?

 

[Umbran]

Or that could be the next big twist. We know that Gallifrey is "back in the sky", somewhere. How ironic would it be if, after the Doctor had scoured the Universe for it, it turned out to have popped up within our own solar system, maybe cloaked the same way Skaro was at the start of the season.

How ironic? No, how dumb. That would be "the moon is an egg" level of bad science. The cloak didn't stop Skaro's gravitational effects - you could *stand* on the cloaked surface and not float away. Within our own solar system, a body the size of another planet would have major impact on the orbits of other planets, and be quickly detected by Earth from those effects.

So, let's hope they *didn't* go that route.