I’m also confused by this idea that Clara goes back to watch over / save all the Doctors… we’ve witnessed any number of instances where the Doctor was clearly up shit’s creek, and it can’t be argued that Clara intervened (even under some hackneyed “she was a nebulous force” or “behind the scenes” fanwank).
So when we saw the Master in the form of PM Saxon turned the world into 6 billion Master clones and had the Doc trapped and aged him to the edge of death… (and he was saved by… umm, people believing in him, and then could fly, or some such)…
Did that all now not happen? Or did it happen differently somehow?
Presumably now the Great Intelligence found some way to stop the people from believing in the Doctor, and Clara found some way to stop that in turn. So things proceeded as they always seemed to.
Pulling out the Augmented Cosmomimetic Ephemerometer:
Take one Great Intelligence, divide fairly equally over the entire universe (let’s disregard the parallel and pocket ones for now) throughout all time past, present and future:
Hey, we’re each up by +.0005 mu-phase intellect points!
(Of course, you may want to check that with your ephemerometer; mine hasn’t been the same since Princess Pepperwinkle poured the root beer into it to make floats.)
The only evidence for the latter is the most recent episode. But that episode pretty clearly states that situation to be the case. After the GI went in, before Clara did, things were going to heck in a hurry because all the Doctor’s victories were being undone. Then Clara went in, and fixed things. She didn’t time-travel to some seminal event and stop the GI before his plan started. She got distributed through time the same way the GI did. Ergo, she didn’t wipe the GI from time, she’s just always there to foil it (in ways neither the Doctor nor us noticed, apart from the Dalek Asylum and Victorian London (and the stealing of the Tardis, the Library, and all the other call-back bits))
Now, when the Doctor pulls her out of the timestream, does that mean her work gets undone? Probably should, but it won’t. He’ll pull out the original Clara and the echoes will still remain to do their job.
Not necessarily. the Doctor said she had something the GI didn’t: him. I took that to mean that if he’d left her in that misty netherworld area where not-Doctor was, she would have died. But he saved her, so she didn’t. He had no intention of saving the GI, but it seems he could do the same for it if he wanted to. (though apparently, he needed Clara to willingly come with him. Maybe the GI wouldn’t have done so anyway.)
That sonic screwdriver drives me up the wall. When they took it away from Peter Davison’s Doctor it wasn’t half the deus ex machina it is now.
Maybe there are non-televised adventures we don’t know about.
But since the GI doesn’t have a body, maybe it was with the Doctor and Clara, but invisible, and so followed them out. If the GI ever makes a return, that’ll probably be the reason why.
I think it was just the opposite - the Doctor was about to reveal his name to everyone there. River stepped in and opened the door for him, because she could do it without anyone overhearing. (Except Clara, but she was distracted.) Either way, the GI gets access to the tomb, but at least now his name is still a secret.
An advantage that the Doctor has is that companions only last a series or three so when the GI comes back in a few years there isn’t a companion to ask, “Isn’t he dead,” though the Doctor has never shied away from giving wibbly-wobbly excuses at breakneck speed.
Um, if there is a Missing Doctor then Eleven is really Twelve which means that when he next regenerates the Valeyard will be created, too. The GI mentioned him for, if I’m not mistaken, the first time in NuWho. Fun times ahead!
The Master said, “The Valeyard is an amalgamation of the darker sides of your nature, somewhere between your twelfth and final incarnation,” not quite sure what that means.
Oh, yeah. And that was understood, at the time, as supporting the belief that the Doctor has only thirteen incarnations, IIRC. But he doesn’t come right out and say it, does he?
River used up all her regenerations to heal the Doctor from lipstick poison. It wouldn’t be too hard for them to say “well, you only needed a portion of that energy to heal from the poison, the rest just gave you 10 more regenerations!” So he could very well have plenty more lives, even if they stick with “Time Lords have 13 lives” thing as canon.
In which case The Valeyard has no motivation (since The Doctor has plenty more regenerations) and thus may not exist. (Or I suppose you could argue that River giving him regenerations proved to him that stealing other Time Lords’ regenerations is possible, thus making him hungry for MOAR).
Alternate possibility: Assuming 11 is really 12, maybe The Valeyard was created when he jumped into the Time Scar, forcing him to confront his past darkness. If he “casts out his inner darkness” (after the 50th anniversary story) or something similar, it gives the Valeyard an incarnation.
That said… Wibbly-Wobbly Timey-Wimey aside, Gallifrey doesn’t exist anymore (and appears to have been kind-of-sort-of wiped from existence in that The Doctor never meets pre-Time-War Time Lords travelling around), so there’s a huge paradox in that The Valeyard can never meet the Sixth Doctor in Gallifrey. But then again, we have Wibbly-Wobbly Timey-Wimey stuff.
Nah, they’ve established that except in cases of extreme duress, the Doctor never crosses his own timeline. Even if he was forgetful enough and tried to visit somewhere he had already been, Sexy would have kept him safe.
The Valeyard can meet the sixth Doctor because he already did. The time lock doesn’t erase previous contact with Galifrey, just any further contact after the war.
But the Valeyard brings me to a plot hole that’s always bugged me about multiple Doctor stories or Doctor-Valeyard stories.
The elder Doctor or Valeyard simply needs to remember what he went through as his former self to know how things will end.
The Valeyard should have know everything the sixth Doctor was going to do, because at one point he was the sixth Doctor, and then use that knowledge to win.
I believe you are thinking again. It’s generally a bad idea when you are thinking about time travel, where consistency is constantly sought but scientists keep coming up with sciencey reasons why That Could Never Happen could happen, and much worse with Doctor Who, where, like continuity, nobody involved has even heard of the word.