Well now how does that make sense?
MUST … STOP … OVERTHINKING.
I think the implication was that he got back the dial once he’d escaped the trial that was inside it. The dial itself was a pocket universe that contained the castle. Bigger on the inside.
Thus his message that he took the “long way around”. Makes sense to me.
Hey, now. Do that, and you miss Nyssa.
Don’t miss Nyssa.
She confiscated it, along with his key, before teleporting him into the dial. The dial was then sent to Galifrey.
The trouble with Nyssa is you get Adric as part of the package.
I think that’s very plausible. But if they have access to his fears, why do they need him to tell them his secrets? Seems odd that you can plug one thing from his mind, and not the other. One possibility is that this might just be how the confession dial works: you’re either destroyed by your own fears, or you confess your sins and secrets. But the Doctor just refuses to play by the rules. So the Time Lords didn’t necessarily have to do all that much tampering. It’s also possible that the dial is always linked up to Gallifrey—it’s in some sense a pocket of local spacetime you can carry around in your, well, pocket.
Also, did I imagine that, or did he say there’s a TARDIS on the other side of the wall?
Anyway, that was definitely a fantastic episode. Scary, too: afterwards, I stepped outside for a moment to catch some fresh air, and when I opened the door, in the darkness, there stood a hooded figure, only visible in outline. Turns out it was just a neighbor out for a smoke, clad in a blanket against the cold, who now knows the [del]girlish shriek[/del] terrifying battle roar with which I ready myself to face evil.
Would he have made a dent in a substance x times harder than diamond, with his bare fists, over any period of time up to and including infinity?
Think of it in terms of erosion. As any student of geology will tell you, erosion always wins.
He thought so. It said “Home” and there was a vague box shape. In fact he was wrong, and it was Gallifrey.
I noticed that, too. There was some text on the wall that he didn’t read. Maybe he did read it on BBC, but not BBCAmerica to make room for commercials?
It is his confession disc, scaring your last confessions out of you as you finish dying is what it does. “They” just placed him inside it ahead of his time and arranged to be able to hear his confessions.
And Tegan. Which could be a pro or a con depending on how much you like lavender flight attendant uniforms
He did read it. The text was the same as the story he was speaking when the episode started, about something that is always following you slowly.
The waters of Mars woulda had that wall wore down in a million years tops…
Yeah; the point of the trap was that he’d exhaust all his lesser confessions staving off the Veil until he got to the wall, and would then be forced to choose between death and telling them about the Hybrid. Being the Doctor, he figured there was a way around that which exploited the set-up of the system. A very long way around, and a very satisfying piece of writing: I love that the way out wasn’t a hand-wave or an arse-pull, the exit was consistent with his entry and the choice would cost him an awful lot of pain. Truth or consequences.
It’s a wall of diamond. I’d just wait for De Beers to come and take it away. Probably take a year, tops.
It’s actually harder than diamond. Besides, DeBeers would force a Sierra Leon citizen to do it for them.
Yes, that’s exactly what made the episode so great, well put. They established the situation, and stuck to its rules, rather than ditching them at the last minute when everything seems hopeless—until the Doctor reverses the polarity of the neutron flow.
Tegan was great on the rare occasions when they let her be more confident and aggressive. They spent too much time trying to make her the damsel-in-distress sort of companion, so she came off as whiny. She would have worked a lot better as a headstrong troublemaker like Leela or Ace.
Tegan and Nyssa as the brawn and the brains would have been a kick-ass team of companions, and would have nicely complemented Five’s shy sweetness. But the presence of Adric (and an unwillingness to let the girls be heroic) scuttled the dynamic.
A helluva citizen, though.