Ryujin
Legend
Since I first started watching the show, back in the late '70s, I've wondered if Time Lords weren't just humans from a few billion years in our own future, given how attached The Doctor seems to be to our insignificant little planet.
The official 2015 Doctor Who (with spoilers for aired episodes only) thread
- Thread starter Morrus
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Since I first started watching the show, back in the late '70s, I've wondered if Time Lords weren't just humans from a few billion years in our own future, given how attached The Doctor seems to be to our insignificant little planet.
Well, if your objection is the physics rather than the narrative, I think Gallifrey can overcome that. A local gravitational distortion field or something. Let's face it, it's all just magic.
No, that starts getting worse. The whole "for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction" comes into play then - if it is on orbit in our solar system, the sun is pulling on it, but with that distortion field it doesn't pull back on the Sun? Gah.
This would also fly in the face of the danger that Gallifrey posed to the Earth when the Master almost brought it out of the Time Lock. It just gets so, so, ridiculously messy and inconsistent that going there requires us to thrash around staking explanations to make it all work. To what end, when, with infinite magic, they could do everything from a distance as well?
I don't mind them violating the laws of physics and waving their hands and saying "Gallifreyan superscience!" so long as it has some point other than, "Wowsers!" Shock and awe, with no plot difference, is not a suitable reason to tie consistency into a knot.
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Like I said, it's not physics. It's Time Lord tech. Which is magic. They have unlimited time travel and they regenerate when they die, for goodness' sake! Heck, they put entire stars inside rooms in TARDISes! Ignoring gravity is pretty trivial to them.
Well, yes. Again, like I said, the issue is a narrative one, not a scientific one. There's no scientific objection which can't be overcome with a single line of narrative magic.
All that aside, that assumes they are putting Gallifrey in our solar system. Which I'm sure they're not, for all the narrative reasons we've cited. It's a daft plot idea with no appreciable benefit.
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Yeah, that struck me as slightly odd, too.
Questions:
- Who wrote "I'm in 12"?
- Why was the missing hexagonal stone buried?
- Why have an exit at all (albeit an almost impenetrable diamond one)? Why not just not have an exit? Then he'd have to confess to escape.
- He refused for billions of years to confess. Gets free. Then immediately says "I know you can still hear me" and confesses.
- Who wrote "I'm in 12"?
- Why was the missing hexagonal stone buried?
- Why have an exit at all (albeit an almost impenetrable diamond one)? Why not just not have an exit? Then he'd have to confess to escape.
- He refused for billions of years to confess. Gets free. Then immediately says "I know you can still hear me" and confesses.
MarkB
Legend
There's a difference between "could be" and "likely to be". Sure, the Doctor says that it takes a long time for a Time Lord's body to die completely - but how many Time Lords, I wonder, having been dealt that fatal blow could actually summon up the willpower to remain conscious, to drive their dying cells to keep functioning long enough to drag them all that way and then pour their last energy into buying another chance?
Sure, a Time Lord might be aware that death isn't instantaneous for them, but I think most Time Lords would find that feat just as inconceivable as anyone who wasn't familiar with his physiology.
Ryujin
Legend
- Presumably The Doctor in one of the earlier passes, once he figured things out, so that he could set up the following loop.
- There was little else to write on, that would point to digging?
- Because there had to be some tangible goal for the confession.
- Because it was ambiguous enough that it acts as a threat, as well as the truth. The Doctor likes his drama.
Presumably it's a common enough occurrence that it resulted in a cultural practice of "not burying them too soon." That makes it at least statistically significant. At least as common as the reason why for a time it was a historical practice to bury people in a "safety coffin" with access to a bell pull. Given the history of The Doctor as known by his own people, not the sort of mistake that they should make. Unless it was intended to be that way, of course.
Many authors believe that. Many authors also write things that follow Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crud.
In good writing - be it fantasy magic or science fiction superscience, you still have *rules*, even if they are implicit. The author sets expectations in the audience, and if you clumsily violate those expectations, you tend to create dissatisfaction in your audience. Sure, they could write a single line and wave it away, and then major science bloggers who normally laud the show will come down on it like they came down on, "Kill the Moon," for similar reasons: basic fixable laziness on the part of the writers and producers.
Correct me if I am wrong, but you seem to come from this from the assumption that if you find a way to give an audience an excuse to ignore something, then you're okay. I don't think the audience of Doctor Who is generally looking for reasons to ignore things. Many of them are looking for reasons to *think* about things. You won't satisfy them with poorly written one-liners.
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