Question about Doctor Who season 8 (spoilers, if it matters)

Cafe Society
1

This is one of those things that’s been bugging me for a while now, and I’m really surprised not to see any other Whovians bringing it up. Maybe it was solved already, or really obvious and I’m missing something. But–

In Dark Water, when Clara hijacked the TARDIS (or thought she did), she slapped a sleep patch on the Doctor’s neck. He woke up on the ground outside the TARDIS. Then he revealed to her that they weren’t sleep patches but rather induced a dream state, and it was she, not he, who had one (she had it on her hand, where he put it after she tried to slap it on him). So everything she saw after that (including the Doctor waking up outside the TARDIS) was a suggestible illusion, brought on by the Doctor. In truth, neither of them ever left the TARDIS.

Okay, flash forward to the Christmas special (aka “WhoCeption”). When the Doctor woke up from his Dream Crab infestation, he was lying on the ground outside the TARDIS, in a place that looked basically identical to the one in Dark Water. I’m pretty sure this happened twice.

So my questions are these:

  • In the Christmas special, why was the Doctor sleeping outside the TARDIS?
  • Is the place he was sleeping the same place that was in Dark Water?
  • If so, is there a connection between the two? Because if there is, it kind of implies that the Doctor was asleep and under the influence of the Dream Crabs throughout the rest of Dark Water and all of Death in Heaven. That’s pretty farfetched and almost certainly not true, but there’s part of me that wonders if this little detail which hardly anybody seems to notice (that the place he woke up post-Dream Crab is identical to the place he woke up in Dark Water) is going to come back and bite us sometime during Season 9.

So…what did I miss? Where did I go wrong?

2

I haven’t seen this season, but the default answer is, “It’s Moffat, and his season-long arcs are not strong on coherence or consistency.”

Also, bump.

3

Somebody with a better memory for detail may come along and correct me, but this is what I think, off the top of my head:

We don’t know. Best guess is, he was having an adventure somewhere vaguely volcano-ish and ran into the Dream Crabs.

Almost certainly not. Just happens to look similar, is all. It’s possible that I’m wrong, that the dream state from the Christmas special didn’t begin and end where we thought it did, but I think it’s extremely unlikely.

I don’t think you missed anything, I think that Moffat has us all conditioned to look for elaborate fakeouts and twists that may not actually be there. Moffat’s long arcs do sometimes run into coherence and consistency problems, but I don’t think this is one of them.

4

I was poking around trying to find answers to this question yesterday, and somebody brought up the fact that not only does the Doctor (Tenth version) have a problem with volcanoes after the whole Pompeii thing, but that there might be a connection between him waking up at the volcano and trying to track down where he knows his current face from (remember, in “Deep Breath,” he asked “where have I seen this face before?”)

Since we know that

one of the episodes in season 9 is going to deal with the connection between Capaldi’s character in the Pompeii episode and the Twelfth Doctor

maybe Moffat’s playing the long game, and we might find out the two are related after all.

Or maybe they just had the volcano set lying around and decided to use it for the “Doctor wakes up” shot. :smiley: