Headscratchers / Doctor Who S32 E4 "The Doctor's Wife"

WARNING! THERE MAY BE UNMARKED SPOILERS!

• The TARDIS chides the Doctor because he always pushes her door instead of pulling, like the "instructions" on the police box say. However, those instructions are on the small telephone which you pull open to access, not the actual door you walk through.
  • Well, she has gone pretty loopy from all that travelling. And being a Sapient Ship, she probably has some interesting habits.
    • Or, you know, despite looking like a police box doors, the doors are actual TARDIS doors, which possibly should open outwards, not inwards.
  • Or she's finally got the opportunity to fondly troll her thief verbally, rather than by dumping him off in some of the most cockamamie locations in the cosmos.
• When House is messing with the heroes and removes all the air from the TARDIS, the Doctor speaks and we hear his words. That is not how sound works.
  • He can't have removed all the air or Rory and Amy, at least, would have suffocated. He was probably just slowly getting rid of it so as to make them uncomfortable and - if not persuaded to stop - give them a slower, more "entertaining" death.
  • The Doctor has a respitory bypass system, which allows him to go without air. Alternatively, he has very big lungs. A few seconds without air won't kill you.
    • His lungs are bigger on the inside.
  • Also I'm fairly sure House didn't have a Mouth in the first place, it seemed more like a psychic thing which wouldn't need air either way.
• The long-dead Rory that Amy finds wrote "Kill/Hate/Die Amy" all over the hallway. The red parts I can see how (Blood) but unless he was carrying a can of spray paint when he got trapped how did he write the black parts?
  • It was a hallucination so it didn't have to make perfect sense, though if you want a better answer Rory might still have been carrying the pen from Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon.
    • I bet the Tardis crew all carry them now. Can't be sure they won't encounter the Silence at some point.
  • Even if he didn't, it's hardly the biggest leap of narrative logic to suggest that he might have had or found a black pen at some point in the decades he was supposedly trapped in that section of the TARDIS.
  • Rory acquired spray paint from the same place he got several decades of age and a long gray beard: Amy's hallucination.
  • Is it really that hard to buy that he simply happened to have a writing implement on his person? Especially since "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship" establishes he's known for carrying random stuff in his pockets "just in case".
  • After several decades, he had to have taken a shit at some point.
• At one point, Sexy is getting on the Doctor's case for not opening the doors of the TARDIS the right way - the sign on the door says pull to open, and he pushes. Wouldn't this have more to do with the way the hinges are placed on the door than it does with the Doctor being contrary on purpose?
  • Presumably the door can open either way.
  • Fun fact: The sign on the door doesn't talk about the door, it talks about the little box that contains the telephone.
    • Oh wait.◊
• Sexy is an 11 dimensional matrix. House flew the naked Tardis. House must be an 11D matrix.
  • Sexy is an 11 dimensional matrix capable of traveling through time and space practically without limitation. House flew a box through a rift. I see nothing in the episode to indicate that he could have used the TARDIS in the same way Sexy could. He just needed an intact ship to travel through the rift back to the normal universe, and he'd eaten all the others.
  • No, no, no, no... Sexy is the 11-dimensional mind (more on that in a while) for the probably 11-dimensional body that the TARDIS is. Possibly House can handle that, possibly not, but he doesn't seem all that cautious in his proceedings, merely doing what seems a good idea at the moment. Also, he's kind of a predator for TARDISes, so it makes sense that he can perceive all the dimensions they can hide in (imagine an earthbound predator that hunts squirrels - they can run up a tree! It's an advantage for a predator to be able to follow them there). We can only perceive three spatial dimensions, like a slime mould that only slithers on the forest floor can only perceive two, but that doesn't mean there aren't more, unless you're Aristotle (who once said something to this effect).
  • A real problem is the 11-dimensional mind. Or, to be exact, the fact that this mind perceives more dimensions of time (space's easy, read Flatland and Bob's your uncle). Time, though, is tied to causality. Specifically, consider a sequence of events:
  The Doctor is fixing a thing//The Doctor needs a tool//He asks his companion to fetch it//She does//He goes on working//

It stops making sense when you take linear causality out of it - why would she bring the laser spanner over if she wasn't asked to? How could he commence work if he didn't get the tool necessary? More, our very communication depends on the linearity of time - you can't read these words until they get posted. were And sense if they to make wouldn't sequence order, be able without the entire out of you. Not to mention the chaos that'd ensue if the letters got scrambled, which is only a shade of how a non-linear mind would (probably) perceive her world. So, if Sexy is made for a non-linear living, how can she even comprehend the idea of a question? The whole "answering Rory before he asks stuff" shtick of hers doesn't hold water. This is not a critique of the writer's ability - he just set before himself an impossible task.

• Sexy only took on the form of a police box after she and the Doctor stole each other. If she was being literal when she described herself as being "a museum piece" when the Doctor first saw her, what did her exterior shell look like at the time? She would have been on display as a TARDIS, and a TARDIS is meant to disguise itself to blend in with its surroundings. So what does something with no fixed shape look like when it's supposed to look like itself?
  • A literal museum artifact?
  • A TARDIS on display in a museum would naturally be disguised as the display plaque describing said TARDIS to the museum patrons. Saves on plaques that way.
  • If I remember correctly, one of the comics shows them as boring-looking pastel-coloured cubes.
  • The type-40 TARDIS the Doctor uses was an outdated model when the Doctor was young, making her older than dirt. Sexy was just using an expression to remind everyone of how old she is, not trying to imply that she was literally in a museum.
  • I would agree that the museum comment was metaphorical. It's been said before that she was 'in the shop' getting fixed when the Doctor stole her, but assuming she was in her default state at the time, she would've looked like a long white rectangular...thing (which is what defaulted ones looked like when they were seen briefly in the classic series).
  • We see several TARDISes in the repair shop from which the First Doctor stole the TARDIS in "The Name of the Doctor". TARDISes are bio-grown, and don't reach maturity until they're several hundred years old. The TARDIS was old and outdated by newer models when the Doctor stole her, meaning she was probably around 1,000 years old or more. All TARDISes come with chameleon circuits, so they can be disguised — in ancient Rome a TARDIS might look like a plinth, in frontier America it might look like a teepee. Sexy looks like a police box because her chameleon circuit is broken. (In the 20th century we have seen her look like a pipe organ, a painted cabinet, and a fancy gateway.) The Ninth Doctor explained that he hadn't fixed the chameleon circuit because he LIKES the police-box look.
    • To be fair, compared to the other forms the TARDIS has taken when the chameleon circuit has worked, the police box is the least confusing to enter/exit.
    • According to several comics/novels - and in show hints - the Chameleon circuit is not actually broken and the TARDIS just took that form because, being able to see all of time and space, she knew the Doctor would like it and manually shuts off the Chameleon Circuit each time to keep the Doctor happy.
• As the Doctor gets to talk directly to the TARDIS for the first time ever, why didn't he ask her what made her explode at the end of the last series?
  • I do believe the Silence blew it up. If not, he's too busy saying "HOLY RASSILON IT'S THE TARDIS IT'S MY TARDIS WAIT UNTIL I TELL THE MASTER oh wait he's dead..."
  • Didn't he already put two and two together back in the opening episodes?
  • There's no concrete evidence that Sexy knows who or what blew her up. Not to mention that she wouldn't be comfortable with talking about it. At all.
    • I think she probably does assuming that she was blown up from the inside or the explosion was caused by something anywhere near her. Of course, she's not very good at keeping time linear so perhaps it didn't occur to her that she needed to tell that information.
    • Or, as the TARDIS can see all of Time and Space at once, she probably saw that he'd learn eventually, so she had no need to tell him.

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