Fridge / Doctor Who 2017CS "Twice Upon a Time"

• Bill's avatar doesn't remember anything after leaving the TARDIS with Heather. Unless she immediately died thereafter, this suggests that Bill's avatar isn't the sum total of all her memories, but merely those up to when the Doctor had last seen her. Given everything else the Testimony are capable of, editing down what they present to the Doctor to avoid "spoilers" would be a cakewalk.
  • Or it could serve as a bit of Fridge Horror as further evidence that it was a decoy like the "three markers" made the Doctor especially suspect. They didn't know where Bill went after Heather retrieved her so they were only able to pick out what they did could and make do.
  • The biggest Fridge Horror interpretation would be if something happened to Bill, and possibly Heather too, right after they left the colony ship, which was enough to kill even their water-morphing forms.
  • Alternatively, Bill did deliberately choose to stay in her new form rather than just have Heather "rearrange" her back into an ordinary human straightaway. Perhaps the Testimony saw this as the final death of the human Bill Potts. They do seem to be flexible as to what counts as human and what doesn't on a case-by-case basis since they've also uploaded Nardole, who is actually a Human Alien, and he remembers his time as a cyborg.
    • The Novelization explains that the Testimony only takes human memories and simply mistook Nardole for human when they kind-napped him. He convinced them to harvest his memories too as part of his Surprisingly Happy Ending.
  • Or the Testimony simply didn't know about Heather having saved Bill, and they copied her in the instant before her essence was drawn out of her failing Cyberman body and it collapsed. Hence, she remembers Heather's arrival but nothing after that.
  • It was well-established that Heather could travel through time in her pursuit of Bill in "The Pilot", so it's entirely possible that Bill and Heather spent years, centuries, even millennia traveling together, and then eventually, when the time came, Bill chose to become human again, maybe even to go back to serving chips and living her original life, or maybe in some other life anywhere in time and space. She could have it both ways!
    • According to the novelization, this is exactly what happened.
    • A touch of Fridge Tearjerker on that: Bill is stated in the novelization to initially have her memories restricted to the last time she interacted with the Doctor, which is clearly when she left him in the TARDIS after the Mondasian ship. Therefore, while there is still hope for Nardole, the actual Bill clearly never meets the Doctor again, meaning that she perished without ever knowing that the Doctor survived beyond that day.
• Given that the Twelfth Doctor would have been deeply glad to know that Missy really did make that Heel–Face Turn, why doesn't the Testimony reveal her to him? It's because, despite a No One Could Survive That! explosion on Floor 507 on top of Saxon!Master fatally zapping her with the regeneration-preventing sonic lance, her Joker Immunity kicked in; she is still alive somewhere and thus unable to be uploaded as yet.
  • It is also likely the Testimony only stores human memories, even Nardole's presence does not fully confirm they take memories from other races given he is Ambiguously Human (though this would be a bit depressing if five-billion-plus years into the future we haven't got over such differences).
    • See above for why Nardole was taken.
  • Assimilation Backfire; The Testimony are rightly worried that an uploaded Master would take over and use the Testimony for evil.
  • "Without hope, without witness, without reward". Missy died without anyone (aside from her past self, who would forget due to timey-wimey stuff) witnessing her decision, without any reward or ulterior motivation, and without any hope of acceptance. Having the Doctor learn of her sacrifice would only undermine it.
  • Also, it's entirely possible that she just regenerated into another body.
  • The Doctor speculates that the Testimony's data banks and avatars wouldn't be enough to hold his memories. The Master has been roving around the universe, probably, for just as long as the Doctor. It'd probably take Time Lord-caliber technology to truly re-create either one of them; Testimony may not be up to the job.
  • A Time Lord's mind is decanted into a Confession Dial automatically upon death. Testimony may not have had the chance to copy Missy's, if she had one of those and its essence-copying power superseded theirs.
  • The Testimony's capabilities weren't fully (or really, barely at all) explained. There's no telling who could be in it or how it actually defines "death". The Tenth Doctor certainly thought regeneration was still a form of death, and given how important the Doctor is to humanity who's to say that all of his incarnations aren't included? It is also a bit of a Fridge Horror in that, if each Doctor was in fact "saved" at the time of his demise, he'd literally be seeing a new man get up and walk away and not know at first what was happening.
• The 'Timeline Error'... Was it that the Doctors were there... or was it the fact it was not his time, and the Testimony leave because, since he's been moved to the moment of the Armistice, they no longer need to take his memories, because he's no longer about to die!
  • Note that it's not just any combination of Doctors that draw Captain Lethbridge-Stewart out of the Testimony's intended timeline: it's the Doctor who's on the brink of becoming the Doctor whom his grandson Alistair first met, and the one who's about to cease being the Doctor whom Alistair (in Cyber form) last met.
• When the Doctor sees Bill again he's careful around her, and she retorts that she's not made of glass, she is, but she wants to be treated as a viable human, so it's not just a Stealth Pun when you think about it.
• Some of the episode's elements are similar to Black Mirror: San Junipero — what with the whole preserving a mind after death and allowing that 'person' to live on (Testimony/TCKR) but also in the Doctor's discussions of not wanting to regenerate but to die as who he is now. Comes to light when the Doctor looks at Testimony and realises that he created the Frozen Time and impeded on them, that they're not doing anything wrong, and there's not always something bad happening (even if he doesn't know what to do when there isn't a bad guy), which is charmingly similar to San Junipero having the same discussions and not having something bad happening in comparison to the rest of Black Mirror. Also, as a throw-away, Bill, black and gay, being encouraged to an afterlife that we now see is comparable to San Junipero, by the innocent and charming already-kind-of-dead white brunette Heather — like Kelly to Yorkie?
• How selfish was the Doctor in holding back his regeneration? Both times that he's done so (here and "The End of Time"), the eventual regeneration nearly destroyed the TARDIS, his longest companion. It might shed some light on why he went outside at the end of "The Doctor Falls": if he did regenerate, at least outside he would be less likely to damage her.
  • Especially since his previous regeneration was powerful enough to destroy an entire Dalek fleet!
• Through all the Doctor's travels, his one constant companion has been the TARDIS, even being compared to a spouse. At the end of the episode, the TARDIS seems to deliberately shake the Doctor out through the open doors to hurl her into freefall. Did the Doctor think her old friend was rejecting her? And then, the Doctor sees through the TARDIS's open doors that she got her out just in time, as the time rotor itself cracks apart and explodes, filling the TARDIS with flame and doing who knows what sort of damage to the console room. Despite her own predicament, the Doctor has eyes only for her dear friend, terribly injured (due to her regeneration, so her fault) and beyond her reach to help, possibly dying before her eyes!
  • Worse? The TARDIS is panicking in her attempts to save the Doctor. She's on her side, desperately trying to throw the Doctor out to safety and the Doctor just won't let go! The TARDIS knows the explosions are coming, so notice how, just before the explosion, the console comes away? The TARDIS needs to get the Doctor out, and the only way she can do it is by making the Doctor fall by manually detaching the part of the console and letting gravity and the Doctor's own regeneration induced inability to function do the rest.
  • The TARDIS starts ringing the Cloister Bell the instant Twelve decides to regenerate, and keeps ringing it all the way through his final parting speech. Like any good companion, the TARDIS sees the obvious flaw in the Doctor's plan immediately, tries to call attention to it before he moves forward with it, and does her best to hold together long enough to get through the hell about to ensue because he did it anyway.
  • One interpretation given by a YouTube user was that the TARDIS was none too happy that the Doctor underwent another violent regeneration like in "The End of Time", and threw her overboard in anger.
• The Doctor's situation looks hopeless, freefalling without a parachute from a great height, but she's actually survived such a fall before, plus this time she's in the first fifteen hours of her regeneration cycle so she should be able to heal injuries which would normally prove fatal, possibly permanently so.
  • It's entirely possible that the TARDIS deliberately threw her out, knowing that she would be more likely for her to survive a fall to Earth than if she was trapped in the console room as the time rotor exploded. Given that Ten survived smashing into (and through) a building from the same height, The TARDIS is probably right.
    • We know nothing about Time Lords/Ladies but if their body structure is in anyway comparable to humans then her bone density would be weaker as she's regenerated into a female. That would mean that a fall like that is even more lethal to her than it would be to 12.
    • Actually the difference in bone density between males and females probably isn't significant enough to be a factor in this [1]. Men do have increased bone density in certain areas (such as at the hip), but overall only small differences exist. In fact, given the difference in mass between 12 and 13,13 might actually have carried less momentum than 12 would have during the fall, which actually could have been a factor in minimising the force of impact. Alternatively, this is fiction and time lord bones could be coated with invisible, undetectable adamantium for all we know.
• According to the Doctor, only children have a chance of hearing/understanding his name properly. We never did find out under what circumstances the Doctor told River Song his name, but given how mixed up their timelines are, this opens up the possibility that some incarnation or other of the Doctor told River his or her name when River/Melody was a child. Perhaps during those missing years between her first regeneration and when she finally managed to make her way to her parents' hometown and get herself adopted there?
• This means that the First Doctor's last words are now "Here we go! The long way 'round." His last words in "The Tenth Planet" were to Ben, "That's good, keep warm," before leaving the base for the TARDIS.
  • Note that "Here we go" is actually a Call-Forward to all the times that various witnesses to his regeneration process will quip "Here we go again". Which he can't say in its entirety, because this is the first time he's done it.
• This is Twelve's fourth Christmas Special, after "Last Christmas", "The Husbands Of River Song", and "The Return Of Doctor Mysterio". It isn't just when somebody's knocking that Four Is Death.
• The TARDIS managed to park herself seventy feet away from the First Doctor's version of her, along the path he would have to take in order to get from the base to her. Even after all their travels and thousands of years of subjective time (give or take River "borrowing" her, for example), the TARDIS still remembers everything needed about where her Thief regenerated for the first time. It likely made almost as big an impression on her as it did on him.
  • Also, neither TARDIS objected to this. Previous episodes have established that the TARDIS will refuse to park within proximity to another version of herself as a paradox-prevention measure. But other episodes have seen the TARDIS join forces with her past and future selves to solve a problem common to all of them. Here, we have two versions of the TARDIS facing the same dilemma; a stubborn Doctor that refuses to regenerate for somewhat selfish reasons, and needs to be convinced of all the good he'd do if he'd just let himself go. The fact that one of them is also causing a time paradox by refusing to regenerate pushes the issue just far enough past the Godzilla Threshold to make any paradox-prevention efforts on Sexy's part superfluous.
• The Doctor's odds of materializing in the time and place he intended have gotten better in the new series, and theories as to why have included his constant modifications of the TARDIS making it easier to pilot, to River fixing something when he wasn't looking, to the TARDIS getting better at reading his thoughts and figuring out his intentions. In this episode, the Twelfth Doctor pilots the first Doctor's TARDIS flawlessly, telling us it really is true that the Doctor has become a better pilot, able to direct even a much younger, much less modified version.
• Meta-Brilliance: By including One in this adventure, Moffat has given the First Doctor back something no other Classic Doctor ever had, and that had previously been lost ... namely, a Christmas Episode. "The Feast Of Steven" is gone for good, but now One has a new holiday story to be remembered for.
• The First Doctor's sexism has gotten a lot of criticism in- and out of universe, because it makes no sense for a Time Lord whose people can change sexes when they regenerate. But where have almost all of his companions come from? The 1960s. The Doctor didn't just pick up his humanity and sense of morality from them-he also, probably more or less accidentally, picked up some sexism! The only companions he had not from the 1960s were Susan, Vicki, Steven, Sara Kingdom (if she counts as a companion), and Katarina-the latter from an even more sexist period!
• The experience of witnessing the Christmas Truce may have been even more personally moving for One than initial viewing suggests. Nearly half the men on one side of the Truce - the British ones - are dressed exactly like "Dan the Soldier Man": the toy which his mysterious, advice-giving nighttime visitor left behind for him in "Listen" when he was a sad and lonely child.
• Meta example: Bill was named after First Doctor actor William Hartnell. Even though he’s mostly played by David Bradley, the concept of the episode itself, let alone the use of archival footage from “The Tenth Planet”, ensures that this episode allows Bill to meet her namesake.

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