If those were his skulls at the bottom of the water how did the teleporter get powered up all those times?
He burnt his dying self each time to power it, which left a skull lying on the floor. which his next self would find and and eventually place it on a windowsill to fall into the sea below. Each skull was the remains of his last self, millions upon millions. That was the point of his plan: the Veil would kill him in front of the wall, but as a Time Lord he’d still have enough dying strength to crawl to the teleport room and burn himself to power the teleport to generate a new body for the next round.
Looks like Peter Jackson might actually be going to direct an episode (video includes PJ and Capaldi):
… and a Dalek…
I’d hoped that would be a nice surprise for any viewer.
[quote=“Baron_Greenback, post:603, topic:731754”]
Looks like Peter Jackson might actually be going to direct an episode (video includes PJ and Capaldi):
[/QUOTE]It’ll be three times too long and have pointless characters not in the original script.
I first saw the bit with the bird going after the mountain (or something very like it) in The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett.
Diamond is incredibly hard, but also very brittle; that’s how jewelers cut it. I guessed it would have been something like that, like the Doctor was sussing out the fracture lines.
The brute force bashing is much more powerful, narratively.
Janet Fielding eloquently discussed that very subject, and put it in the context of gender disparities in entertainment, in a panel with Sarah Sutton in (I think) 2011:
My read on it was that a lot of the suffering was the Doctor’s self-imposed penance for Clara’s death. If you think about it, the Time Lords only intended the Doctor to suffer through the castle once, for a few days of reflection, confession and punishment. Harsh, cruel even, but not utterly disproportionate. It was only the Doctor’s refusal to submit and desire to suffer and atone that made go through torment billions of times over. I suppose in a way it was the Passion of the Doctor.
But did the Doctor suffer over and over? My take on it is that he did only go through the castle once. Sure, he did it several billion times, but each run-through was a ‘new’ Doctor, having been ‘reset’ by the mechanism in the castle. So although we saw him suffer through billions of years of torment, for him it only ever lasted a few days (unlike Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day, who lived every minute of the however-many days he spent in Punxsutawney).
But this wasn’t like Groundhog Day where the day repeated over and over but he was fully aware. He actually only suffered through one day and died, until the day he won.
How, we don’t know, but he explicitly states that when he comes to wall, then, it all comes back to him, he then remembers each and every death … hence the desperation of “can’t I lose just this once?”
I took that as him figuring out what was going on, and realizing that he must have died a whole bunch of times, but not actually remembering those deaths. “This place is my own, bespoke torture chamber intended for me only, and all those skulls in the water… How could there be other prisoners in my hell?” sounds more like an inference than a recollection.
I agree; he doesn’t have any recollection of his past “lives” and deaths, and each time the castle resets he has to learn it anew, but by the time he reaches the wall he understands the significance of Bird and realises how many times he’s done this, and how far he still has to go. He pretty much figures it out at the same time the viewer does, that all the skulls were his, and that in order to break down the wall he’ll have to die, crawt and then burn in order to provide the next, and the next, and the next…
But this
sure does sound like he, at that point, then, remembers it all. Every time. Not just infers it all. Remembers it all.
That’s the poignancy, the full scope of what he is doing. Not just billions of separate Doctors each having a very bad weeks, but at the end each deciding to do it again with the full memory of how horrific it has been and will continue to be for … a … very … very … long … time.
My friend Scott and I had an intense discussion about this ep.
We concluded that each time the Doctor had the re-experience, it was actually a new generation of the Doctor, much like when a species has children. Each generation of species evolves. Innate intelligence changes, internal roadmap is modified, efficient behavior and problem solving ability is improved, much like Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day. The Doctor learns from his previous mistakes even though he doesn’t remember making them.
2 billion years later, he become the Hybrid prophesied by the Time Lords, not because he merged with another species, but because he improved himself through 2 billion years of evolution. He retained the body because of the reset he kept programming. Thus, while his body did not go undergo change, his mind and soul did. He is now a 2 billion year-advanced version of a Time Lord.
The Time Lords intended this as a prison to force him to confess the secret of how he became a hybrid, but he had no such secret. It only came to be after his 2 billion year evolution. Thus, the Time Lords’ prophecy was self-fulfilling. They engineered their own doom.
But how would he evolve? I thought each Doctor was a copy generated from the “hard drive” in the teleporter, and therefore identical.
Yes. This. But somehow he managed to accumulate momories, which he was only able to recall in the last instances.
That’s a bit Lamarckian.
Didn’t he also say it took a day and a half to crawl back to the tube to regenerate?
So it wasn’t really moments. Although to some one who was over 1000 years old at the start of the day( and 2 billion at the end) maybe 36 hours is just a moment.