Watching the older ones certainly helps, and there’s a lot of terrific stuff in the original Who {as well as some utter dross} but I dislike the “not a true fan” stuff.
[QUOTE=The Hamster King]
Furthermore, we know from the Fourth Doctor that Gallifrey has a repository of the memories of dead Time Lords called the Matrix. When the Fourth Doctor was president of Gallifrey, he actually had to go into the Matrix and it was a deadly, surreal dreamscape.
[/QUOTE]
I think there was definitely a reference to The Deadly Assassin in Heaven Sent, as well as a clue to where he was: TDA was another Doctor Alone story, and in both they were trapped in Time Lord generated artificial reailties and psychologically and physically tormented to breaking point.
I have just realised though that the Doctor could at least have saved wear and tear on his hands if he’d just brought the spade to the diamondanium wall. Or even the soup spoon.
Anyone catching up on the old stuff should start with Pertwee and the Unit Years, then Tom Baker up to Leela: that’ll tell them all they need to know, and they can catch up with Peter Davison, Patrick Troughton at their leisure, then McCoy, the rest of Tom Baker, and Hartnell and Colin Baker as they see fit.
The Doctor has obviously never played any point-and-click adventure games, then: never discard anything you pick up, no matter how useless it seems, until you get to the final puzzle chamber. Oh, it’s so obvious now! Why did I drop the spoon when I could have Used it on the Diamondillium wall?
The Veil shimmers and disappears. With a grinding of immense gears buried deep beneath your feet, the castle shudders into motion, levels turning like the cogs of an immense clock. Passageways shift as you feel the room move below your feet, and as you glance out the window you see windows whir past and towers rise and fall as each floor grinds slowly into new, labyrinthine configurations. You open the door through which you entered the room, to discover that the corridor has vanished and in its place is a cavernous draughty banqueting hall, a welcoming fire blazing in a vast stone grate. On a worn oak table in the centre of the hall there is a bowl of soup and a spoon.
> EAT SOUP
You eat the hot soup, and new strength flows into you.
Who was saving the universe for the billions of years he was banging his hand against a wall? Will Time Lord fashion FINALLY dump the cowls? Will Timothy Dalton be back?
How could the loop have ever started? A key part is the stars being in the wrong place for when he thinks he is, and his figuring out why that is. But when the whole thing started, the stars would have been exactly where he thought he was.
Timeless decision theory. He came up with the whole thing as he lay dying after the first time. He knew that the castle was mechanistic, and so if he had the same responses, he’d behave the same way. And because he was a Time Lord, he could predict his future actions really, really well. So he crawled up, did the teleport thing, and scrawled out the word “BIRD”, knowing that having seen it, every future iteration of him would look at the wall and know what they had to do.
Also, since there seems to be some confusion, the castle only resets its rooms. It doesn’t clean up the skulls, because they’re outside the castle. The stars keep going, because they’re outside the castle. The diamond wall is likewise outside the castle, or at least outside what it can reset.
Yes one assumes he figured it out without the stars clue and without the clothes there the first time and that once bird was there it cemented the outcome. Stars just made it suspicious to im a bit earlier. Stars that were outside the castle and outside the disc that he is inside of but still visible. And the skulls manage to spread out enough or decay quickly enough that his does not his head on them when he dives out after several million years of it … and the painting was old to begin with and never got any older. Uh … better to not overthink this.
Trying to remember but did Me flip him the disc just before he teleported?
Okay, sat thru the previews. Cowls, yes. Dalton, no. Color me disappointed.
When he first saw the Veil on TV, there was something with red bullet points projected on the wall next to it. What did it say? Why didn’t he (apparently) read it? Was it the rules of the game that I don’t usually bother reading, either? Even so, I know enough to keep objects I find, and that he could’ve finished faster if he tried STRIKE VEIL WITH SPADE. And doesn’t the TARDIS have some Plan B protocol to get itself out of such jams?
