Doctor Who (2005) - 58 questions

Question: (episode 3-9, "The Family of Blood") Where is the scene with the Doctor binding Father of Mine in chains suppose to take place?

Answer: I don't think we're ever told. You just see him being tied up and hear Son of Mine in the voice over.

Question: ("Turn Left", 4-11) Why aren't the effects of Post-Runaway Bride historical episodes like "The Shakespeare Code", "Daleks in Manhatten" and "The Fires of Pompeii" shown?

Answer: They only have 45 minutes in any given episode, so they chose to limit the storyline to those events that the Doctor was directly involved in in the present day. We see that many of the events still unfold as before, just with less pleasant consequences - the Sontarans are still defeated, albeit at the cost of the Torchwood team, the hospital where Martha worked is still returned to Earth, but after everybody dies this time, after Sarah Jane Smith intervenes. Events shown in the historical episodes were presumably also resolved in some less effective manner, but well enough not to affect the present-day timeline to any great degree.

Question: Could somebody please tell me how the 'Last Great Time War' started and ended?

Answer: Few details have been revealed within the show itself, although Russell T Davies has given a few pointers in an article that he wrote for a Doctor Who annual. He suggests that the Daleks consider the War to have begun with the Time Lords sending the Fourth Doctor back to interfere with their creation, as seen in Genesis of the Daleks. The Daleks took this personally and first tried to replace prominent Time Lords with duplicates, in a similar fashion to their attempt to infiltrate Earth as seen in Resurrection of the Daleks. A peace treaty was attempted, with both sides offering compromise (the Time Lords, for example, handed over the Master for execution, as seen in the 1996 TV movie), but ultimately failed, leading to escalation and eventually the declaration of full-scale war between the races. The war apparently lasted for several years, if a war that takes place on a temporal level can really be said to have a set duration, before the Doctor brought it to its apocalyptic conclusion. Exactly what he did has never been revealed.

Question: In "The Stolen Earth", is The Doctor refering to an old episode when he says, "Someone tried to move the earth before"?

Answer: Yes. The Daleks tried to destroy the Earth's core and replace it with an engine to pilot it through the universe in the first Doctor story "The Dalek Invasion of Earth."

Question: Why are the vast majority of stories set on modern day Earth as opposed to the 1963-1989 series where nearly every story was set on an alien planet?

Answer: One of the 'quaint' aspects of Doctor Who of old was the utter cheapness of the BBC in spending as little money as possible on the original series. Visits to 'alien planets' were laughably poor looking, clearly were Earth like with a few 'alien' touches, and it was something that writer Russel T Davies didn't want to return to.

Question: Does anyone know why the BBC isn't showing these in the States at the same time they're released in the U.K.? The Christmas Special JUST aired on BBC America on the 27 June. I find it odd that they don't just release them on both stations at the same time.

Answer: BBC America is a separate entity. It is not a "station" of BBC. It airs shows from other UK networks (ITV etc). So, for one reason, it must arrange its schedule to show the shows it wants to show. For another reason, the shows shown on BBC in the UK are paid for by taxes on UK TV sets. It wouldn't be very fair for BBC America not to pay for the rights to show the shows after all there are a lot more of us than them. All these payments and broadcast rights must be worked out for every show. In addition, BBC can sell to other networks as well (e.g. Dr Who and Primeval on SyFy, and Dr Who on PBS are generally another year behind BBC America)

Question: What exactly made Jack Harkness immortal? I know Rose brought him back to life, but how? The Doctor mentions something about him being a fixed point in time and space, but what exactly does that mean?

Answer: In the series 1 episode 'The Parting on the Ways', Rose stared directly into the heart of the TARDIS which infused her with the time vortex. This power enabled her to disintegrate the Daleks and also allowed her to bring Jack back to life. However, Rose was not fully aware of how her powers worked and by bringing Jack back she also removed his ability to die. The Doctor referring to Jack as "a fixed point in space and time" refers to the fact that Jack cannot be removed from existance through death as a normal person could.

Question: If Davros created The Daleks from his own cells then why don't they fully trust him? He's been shown to manipulate The Daleks on the genetic level, so couldn't he use that to some way make them more obedient?

Answer: When Davros created the Daleks, he conditioned them to hate everything that was not a Dalek. They decided that although he was their creator, he was not one of them.

Question: Is the character of the 10th Doctor based on Ian Rankin's 'Inspector Rebus'?

Answer: No.

Question: My understanding of The Daleks is that they draw their power from their vertical shoulder slats. The new paradigm Daleks have no shoulder slats, so where are they drawing their power from?

Answer: Don't know where you got that information from, but there doesn't seem to be much around to support it. Models of Dalek shown in very early episodes of the original series got their power from external sources, but since then they have operated entirely on unspecified internal power sources concealed within their armour. No reason to think that the new Daleks are any different.

Question: How exactly does the 8th Doctor regenerate to the 9th, and how does the Tardis console change?

Answer: The circumstances of the regeneration have never been explored, although it has been implied that it may have been as a result of the cataclysmic events that brought the Time War to an end. As for the TARDIS interior, TARDISes are closer to being living beings than true machines, having something of the nature of both. Having taken damage, they heal, with the resultant configuration potentially being quite different to what went before - something of an analogy to the regenerations undergone by their Time Lord owners. It seems likely that whatever events transpired to cause the Doctor to regenerate could also have caused the damage that led to the TARDIS' reconfiguration.

Question: This is actually for Doctor 1 but I couldn't find it anywhere. I heard it somewhere that they were going to do only 10 series, but when Doctor 1 fell ill they put in the idea he can regenerate. Is this true? Also is this why a lot of the later episodes were destroyed?

Answer: The show was intended to be ongoing, with no particular plan as to how many series might be involved. But you are indeed correct that William Hartnell's failing health was the principal factor that led to the concept of the regeneration being introduced, with Hartnell himself suggesting Patrick Troughton as his successor, a suggestion that was taken up. This is not, however, why many episodes from that era are missing. At the time, it simply wasn't standard policy to keep episodes indefinitely after transmission, due to the limitations in storage space, and thus many early episodes were simply wiped.

Question: I've heard the Doctor can only regenerate 12 times. So after the future twelfth Doctor leaves, will they just stop making any more episodes of Doctor Who?

Answer: Recently, the producers have stated that they may or may not keep the idea of only 12 regenerations in the series. Alternately, when River gave The Doctor her remaining regenerations, he may have gained up to 10 additional ones.

Question: What was the reason Doctor Who stopped airing from 1989 until 2005?

Answer: The show, at the time, was suffering badly in the ratings, mainly from a poor time slot, which put it directly up against a highly popular soap opera. The series was also going through something of a bad patch anyway - Colin Baker had proved controversial as the sixth Doctor, leading to his eventual dismissal from the role, a prior eighteen month hiatus had lowered public interest, and a number of issues behind the scenes were deemed to have had a detrimental effect on script quality. While things arguably improved somewhat in the final couple of series with Sylvester McCoy's seventh Doctor, the damage was done and, although pre-production work had already started on the next series, the decision was taken to suspend production.

Question: Why wasn't Pete sucked into the Void when he came back to rescue Rose? Also, how did he even know when and where to teleport to, or that she even needed saving at all?

Answer: He was only there for a fraction of a second, so the Void didn't have a chance to drag him in. As for knowing when and where, it's one of those last-second rescues that fiction revels in. Improbable, but dramatically satisfying.