Hurrah! Doctor Who brings us a bootstrap paradox treat in Before the Flood Readers please note: THIS IS A POST-UK BROADCAST REVIEW – THERE WILL BE SPOILERS! Jennifer says: Let’s deal with the timey-wimey bit first. The bootstrap paradox or “who wrote Beethoven’s Fifth?” question is a good one. Towards the end of David Tennant’s tenure and during the Matt Smith years, the awesome opportunities of …
True, although "12 Monkeys, Inception, Looper did that."
Gives pause for the author's capability of complexity. I can name a handful of excellent science fiction books that'd likely turn the critiic's minds into jelly, as it's already apparently nearly so upon this modest experience.
Likely, had this contributor reviewed "Predestination", a stroke that'd damage a cupboard would ensue.
sorry, didn't like it. A Doctor who behaved like a gibbering idiot, a substandard monster with a facemask borrowed from "Predator", crap animations with a reservoir dam that looked like it was made from sheet paper...and an unfathomable storyline
In short, a throwback to the worst days of pre-reboot Dr Who
A bootstrap paradox may be acceptable so long as there is a way into the paradox. To take the Doctor's own example, suppose Beethoven did exist, you go back in time and accidentally kill him, and now must impersonate him and "compose" his symphonies yourself. That's okay - you have a route onto the M25 loop of eternity, it doesn't matter that you can't get off. Maybe, anyway - it's as decent a theory of fictional "Time Travel" as anything else.
What I disliked about the episode from small to large, is firstly the Doctor finding the bootstrap paradox a mystery. I would have thought the Time Lords had a pretty solid grasp of the mechanics of all this. Seems a backtracking to learn that they're just dabblers who find such things every bit as mysterious and head-scratching as everyone else. But more significantly, I really disliked the direct talking to us the audience. The show did it a couple of weeks ago again when the Doctor asked us pointedly "where did I get the tea? I'm the Doctor, just accept it". There was at least a thin conceit that he might have been talking to the Daleks at that point though it seemed more like a direct order to the audience. This week's completely abandoned the pretence and made the Doctor our own narrator and presenter of stories.
I do not like that. I like fiction to not acknowledge that it is fiction.
"A Doctor who behaved like a gibbering idiot, a substandard monster with a facemask borrowed from "Predator", crap animations with a reservoir dam that looked like it was made from sheet paper...and an unfathomable storyline".
In other words, you've *never* watched Doctor Who.
Welcome to the majors, kid. You might even manage to work out, however I doubt it.
It's far more likely that you'll be back into the minors, to later wash out next week.
@Wzrd1
"In other words, you've *never* watched Doctor Who."
to the contrary, I can still remember watching the first episode of the Hartnell era
And the story was literally "unfathomable" because theres no way of explaining how a burst dam can create the supposed permanent deep lake the base was in.
If you can't keep up with the flood of thought I suggest you go home and have a long lie down. Maybe re-engage your stream of awareness
Firstly: when a dam breaks, stuff downstream is washed away but not submerged! Building a dam is what submerges villages.
At the end of part one the major question left unanswered was why the one person who hadn't been inside the ship was spared by the ghosts. And in part 2 this was used to dramatic effect to... go and find a phone?!? What a waste of a good plot point.
But mostly I'm just left wondering why the Fisher King was taken to be buried when he wasn't dead - no explanation. And why he couldn't just use the spaceship's communicator to call home for help?
All in all I enjoyed both episodes but feel frustrated as they could have been better. I wonder if the production schedules imposed by the Beeb allow no time for proper review of the scripts so things like these slip through too easily?
At the end of part one the major question left unanswered was why the one person who hadn't been inside the ship was spared by the ghosts. And in part 2 this was used to dramatic effect to... go and find a phone?!? What a waste of a good plot point.
I believe Clara said something about him not having "the signal" in him because he hadn't seen the message, so presumably that meant he wasn't worth turning into a ghost because he couldn't be used to transmit the signal. They did kind of blast through that point rather quickly though!
Middle of cold war, on the border of all our nuclear war....... a dam in Scotland which was near a military base used by the British for training for war with Russia suddenly gets blown up..... Can't see a jittery government not thinking it's the Russians fault, did the Dr cause WW3 which gave us the "ministry of war" reference?
Coming from Caithness, I can flat out state there is *nowhere* with geography like that in the area; it's actually known for *not* being littered with ridges and valleys, unlike most of Scotland. The idea that there would be a dam there of any scope is preposterous. It's like claiming that people in Norfolk walk around with ferrets in their trousers - it's lazy and flat out wrong, but because it's 'the north' compared to That London...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caithness#Geography
That really spoiled it for me - lazy, lazy research. Had they said 'Glencoe', or literally *anywhere* else, or even used a bit of common sense and seen where Scottish Hydro Electric had sites as a justifiable reason for having the landscape to support a dam, then that'd be different; Shen is the most northerly, but even that's in Sutherland, a solid 80 miles outside of anywhere in Caithness.
Sounds childish - and it is - but it's been gnawing at me for a full week now and it just strikes me as really lazy writing.
Steven "Thurso born, Wick educated, got out while I could" R
Theres a difference between a shallow loch and something you can build a dam on.
I will correct myself though;There actually is a dam in Caithness. it's a monster of a thing thanks to those ridges and valleys.
Or, you know, it's a 20ft sluice on a reservior.
Caithness just doesn't have that geography - it's like showing palm trees growing all over Gloucester; there's fantasy and there's laughably whipping the suspension of disbelief from under you...
DOCTOR 5: Supernova and black hole at the exact same instant.
DOCTOR: The explosion cancels out the implosion.
DOCTOR 5: Pressure remains constant.
DOCTOR: It's brilliant.
DOCTOR 5: Far too brilliant. I've never met anyone else who could fly the Tardis like that.
DOCTOR: Sorry, mate, you still haven't.
DOCTOR 5: You didn't have time to work all that out. Even I couldn't do it.
DOCTOR: I didn't work it out. I didn't have to.
DOCTOR 5: You remembered.
DOCTOR: Because you will remember.
DOCTOR 5: You remembered being me watching you doing that. You already knew what to do because I saw you do it.
DOCTOR: Wibbly wobbly
BOTH: Timey wimey!
Two minutes to Belgium!!
Or in this case 139 years to a small Scottish military training base and a funeral ship sending a message from a wounded warrior (the arthurian) Fisher King.
We already saw from the opening double bill of this series that being vaporised and being teleported can be interchangeable - so Missy could've teleported Osgood instead of vaporising.
What I hope is she gets her onside, to be her companion, having seen the Doctor do it so many times (and seemingly enjoying having Clara as her companion at the beginning of the season). There'd need to be some good reason for Osgood to take the 'bad guys' side, but a chance to travel through time wouldn't be too far fetched to believe for her character - and let's face it, motivation can be ropey as hell in the writing for this show, so long as the plot needs it, some people will do things quite out of character.
"Apparently, you've forgotten an earlier episode, Clara is inside of *all* of The Doctor's time.
This one included.
You know, I'm not sure that she is.
Remember the Doctor's tomb on Trenzalore is from the Doctor's final battle and "the fall of the Eleventh". So at that point in "The Name of the Doctor", the 11th Doctor is the one who dies at Trensalore, because he's actually on his 13th Regeneration (if you add the 10th's faux Regen in "Journey's End" and the War Doctor). So Clara only sees the timeline of the 1st to the 11th Doctor, because that's all there is at that time.
Then of course we actually go to Trenzalore in "The Time of the Doctor" and this time he doesn't die, but gains a whole new Regeneration cycle from the Time Lords. So there's no tomb on Trenzalore any more, and there's a 12th Doctor (or a 14th Regeneration) with a kind of "tacked-on" timeline that Clara never saw.
Apologies for the Fanwank.
In fact (he says, replying to his own post), this was probably all caused by the Moment, because up until the time that it persuaded the War Doctor to save Gallifrey ("Day of the Doctor"), Gallifrey had in fact been destroyed. So it wasn't around in "The Time of the Doctor" to give the 11th Doctor a new Regeneration Cycle, and he died for good. No Capaldi.
I remember visiting a large IT room at HMS something in Portsmouth. At huge expense the room walls had been specially built to make it a Faraday cage**, but they then needed to get wires & stuff through so someone cut a 3 foot by 2 hole in a wall. The operators loved it since they could now listen to the radio.
The Faraday cage in The Flood also had a nice big port hole that they could look out of, I could not see copper wires criss crossing the glass.
** Presumably to stop the Ruskies from snooping on the computers, naval pay rates are secret!
While it doesn't surprise me one bit you would think that if somebody were to try to tempest-harden a room they would be worried about the wires transmitting a signal also. I am actually frightened that people incompetent enough to cut a hole in a Faraday cage could end up making decisions which could cost lives. I thought that wilfully aiding the enemy would be a court-martial offence or was everybody involved a complete and utter moron?
That's why, when building a Shielded Enclosure, you use two different bits of kit.
A SELDS (Shielded Enclosure Leak Detection System) to check for RF permeability in the welds and a LISN (Line Impedance Stabilisation Network) to look for signals being radiated down the power lines.
I actually own both of those, though I have no idea why. I should probably find a gullible doomsday prepper to sell them to.
Why did the fisher king not just hill the undertaker and fly away in the spaceship ? and if for some reason he can't pilot it the fore the undertaker to do so for him, a lot easier than all this "phone home" stuff.
Oh and the whole orions sword line up to point to earth ? WTF they are never lined up on earth . . . . its why they are in a not so straight line. . . .
I am sure I read an article in New Scientist around 20 years ago regarding time travel which suggested that time travel is only possible if the causal chain of the present is not altered -- so you can go back and kill the grandparent of somebody who has no causal relationship upon your existence and your having made a time machine but you cannot kill the grandparent of anybody who is in your causal past.
I think the article used an analogy of a pool table with time-travel wormholes in the corners and that the ball could not go back in time, come out of a wormhole and alter its course so that it went into the wormhole which caused it to go back in time. I also seem to recall there was some quantum mathematics involved so this wasn't just saying "it's a paradox therefore it can't happen".
You could make something happen which looks the same to outside observers. In this case the holographic ghost and nobody knew who was inside the casket. One of the Matt Smith specials had a shrunken Doctor inside a robot Doctor and the robot doctor got shot by the astronaut.
You can't even do that though because you are affecting the causal chain which led up to the present circumstances. In the same way that events which have no impact upon each other do not have to take place in any order therefore don't really take place in the same time stream events which have a causal relationship cannot be changed in order therefore time travel within that causal chain is impossible.
There is no paradox because, physically speaking, it breaks the laws of thermodynamics and quantum physics -- at least that was the gist of the article I read.
Edit: By the way, this isn't so much a criticism of Dr Who as it would be pretty dull without time travel within causal streams but more a criticism of there still being a thing called "bootstrap paradox" referred to when as far as I was aware it had been proven not to be possible.
Well it actually isn't a paradox, because all the events are logically self-consistent and non-contradictory.
A paradox involves non-resolvable contradiction. Thus the Grandfather Paradox - I go back in time and kill myself as a baby, so there's no grown-up me to go back in time to kill me as a baby, so I survive to grow up...
This is a paradox because each event contradicts itself and cannot logically take place - If I live to grow up and travel in time, then I do not live to grow up and travel in time.
"Father's Day" did involve a paradox in that the earlier versions of the Doctor and Rose saw later versions of themselves, that those later versions did not originally see.
"The Big Bang" didn't involve a paradox since Rory used the sonic from the future to get the Doctor out of the Pandorica, and that Doctor then went back in time and gave Rory the sonic. If the early Rory had decided not to release the Doctor from the Pandorica, or the later Doctor had decided not to give the sonic back to the the earlier Rory, then that would have been a paradox.
I don't know why this is so difficult for some people to understand. Personally I learned about such self-consistent time loops as a kiddy back in the 70s by reading Harry Harrison's "Technicolor Time Machine" and "The Stainless Steel Rat Saves the World" .
For a very interesting concept of a whole civilisation who naturally live in a vast loop of time, read the children's book "The Tree Wakers" by Keith Claire. Maboria is a world (or universe) that exists within the same recycled thousand centuries of time. They are never born, never die, and luckily for them do not get bored as they only remember back a few hundred years. Unluckily for them their loop of time intersects our linear one some time in the early 1970s so they have to put up with a rather hippyish storyline, but the underlying concept is quite sound. Amusingly Maboria has exactly 10,000 vintages of wine.
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