Tailkinker

9th Jul 2013

Doctor Who (2005)

Chosen answer: In one way or another, eight times. He dies twice in the episode "Amy's Choice", once in each of the two dreams, firstly killed by an Eknodine in the Leadworth version of the dream, then again when the Doctor blew up the TARDIS in the other dream to allow them to escape it. He's then killed by the Silurian Restac in "Cold Blood", shortly before his body is consumed by the cracks in time, erasing him from history completely. He returns as an Auton duplicate, restored from Amy's memory, in "The Pandorica Opens" - this duplicate is destroyed in "The Big Bang" when the universe is reset, although some memories live on in the human Rory recreated in the rebooted universe. He died again in "The Curse of the Black Spot", but was successfully resuscitated by Amy. He's seen to die of old age in "The Angels Take Manhattan", then kills himself in the same episode by jumping from a high roof (as does Amy) to set up a paradox to eliminate the Angel threat. He then finally dies off-camera at the age of 82 after having been sent back in time by a surviving Angel, having lived out a long and happy life with Amy.

Tailkinker

25th Apr 2013

Doctor Who (2005)

Victory of the Daleks - S5-E3

Question: When they are talking about the Daleks at the end of this episode, this is what they are saying: DOCTOR: It's not that. There's something else. Something we've forgotten. Or rather you have. AMY: Me? DOCTOR: You didn't know them, Amy. You'd never seen them before. And you should have done. You should. (They go inside the Tardis and it dematerialises, revealing a glowing w shaped crack in the wall.) My question is: What is the Doctor meaning by what he is saying to Amy?

Shadow5

Chosen answer: The Doctor is referring to the events of the two-part finale of the fourth series of the relaunched show, "The Stolen Earth" and "Journey's End". These episodes featured a major Dalek invasion of Earth, something that Amy should remember. What concerns the Doctor, leading to the conversation you refer to, is that she apparently doesn't, because if she did, she'd have recognised the Daleks the moment she saw them.

Tailkinker

25th Apr 2013

Doctor Who (2005)

Chosen answer: This happened during the events of the 1975 story, "Terror of the Zygons".

Tailkinker

26th Jan 2013

Doctor Who (2005)

Chosen answer: This is an instance of the Doctor interfering, albeit indirectly, with his own timestream. He sends the invites to his younger self, Rory, Amy, River and the older Canton because he knows, from his memories of those events occurring, that they are the ones who get invited. It's a somewhat circular situation, but that's time travel for you.

Tailkinker

7th Jan 2013

Doctor Who (2005)

Chosen answer: Given that we hear her voice throughout the episode over loudspeakers within the asylum complex, it seems fairly clear that, when not speaking directly through the Dalek shell speakers, she does indeed sound like her original self.

Tailkinker

7th Jan 2013

Doctor Who (2005)

Chosen answer: Amy and Rory travelled with the Doctor for a long time in their lives, alternating between travelling with him and long periods (some as long as two years) having a normal life at home; Amy specifically states, I think, that they do their best to try to keep their ages at least roughly synchronised with their friends, to stop awkward questions about why they seem to be aging too quickly. This lasts for at least ten years - Amy is 21 when she first starts travelling with the Doctor, while Rory, who by all appearances was in the same class as Amy, and thus is the same age, states that he's 31 in "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship", which takes place some considerable time before their eventual departure from the series (the episode "The Power of Three" alone covers an entire year). By the end of their travels with the Doctor, Rory and Amy are probably about 33 years old. Given that they first started travelling with him in 2010, they would have lived through until around 2021 or 2022, making their appearance on the hillside in 2020, when The Hungry Earth was set, very easy.

Tailkinker

30th Dec 2012

Doctor Who (2005)

Chosen answer: It's not so much that they're necessarily competing (indeed, the Doctor would be appalled to think that they were), it's really just that Amy has, at this point in the series, rather conflicted feelings about the Doctor and Rory. While on the verge of marrying the dependable everyman Rory, she feels an attraction to the Doctor, his exciting life and offbeat ways. As a result of this episode, she comes to realise that she does truly love Rory.

Tailkinker

14th Dec 2012

Doctor Who (2005)

Chosen answer: No, there's nothing to suggest that Octavian isn't exactly who he claims to be.

Tailkinker

22nd Nov 2012

Doctor Who (2005)

Chosen 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.

Tailkinker

2nd Sep 2011

Doctor Who (2005)

Show generally

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?

Shadow5

Chosen 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.

Tailkinker

15th Jun 2010

Doctor Who (2005)

Show generally

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?

Josman

Chosen 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.

Tailkinker

16th Sep 2009

Doctor Who (2005)

Answer: No.

Tailkinker

26th Jul 2009

Doctor Who (2005)

Chosen answer: Yes, it is the same group, although the circumstances of his encounter with them have never been revealed.

Tailkinker

12th Jul 2009

Doctor Who (2005)

Doomsday (2) - S2-E16

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?

Socks1000

Chosen 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.

Tailkinker

24th Mar 2009

Doctor Who (2005)

Chosen 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 of destroying all Time Lords and Daleks, as seen in "Day of the Doctor."

Tailkinker

10th Aug 2008

Doctor Who (2005)

Blink - S3-E10

Question: The main premise of 'Blink' is that the Doctor and Martha are stranded in the 1960s. The Doctor is immortal, so wouldn't he have caught up with the present day eventually, to sort out the problem with the Angels?

Answer: Well, technically the 60's are recent enough that both Martha and the Doctor would live through to the present day, but that's hardly an ideal solution, particularly for Martha, who probably wouldn't relish the idea of explaining to her family and friends why she's suddenly in her eighties. So, yes, technically speaking, the Doctor could just sit around and wait, but that's not really the Doctor's style, is it?

Tailkinker

23rd Jun 2008

Doctor Who (2005)

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.

Tailkinker

25th Oct 2006

Doctor Who (2005)

Answer: "I Could Have Danced All Night" from the musical "My Fair Lady".

Tailkinker

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