WARNING: Discussion contains spoilers for "Extremis"! If you do not watch the trailers because you don't want to be spoiled, DO NOT read further!
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Why can't the Doctor cure his blindness?
- Ok, so the Doctor is blinded by his unhelmeted spacewalk, and it seems permanent at least as far as the next episode according to its trailer. I find it hard to believe that there isn't some medical technology throughout time and space that can't regenerate even a Time Lord's eyes. On a darker level, regeneration would also fix the problem...
- We don't know exactly how long the trip outside the station took, as it's shown from the perspective of Bill, who's wavering in and out of consciousness as a result. Also, Time Lords, although they can survive the vacuum of space unprotected, still need oxygen to breathe — which likely explains the damage to begin with.
- How about popping off to Karn for a dose of Elixir of Life? Ohila owes him an apology over how badly she treated him in "Hell Bent"...
- As for regeneration, it's possible that he can't do that until certain conditions are fulfilled, which could relate to anything from the Vault to the rescue of Gallifrey in "The Day of the Doctor" (as it's still never been revealed when he participated in that event).
- The TARDIS takes him where he needs to go and, effectively, loves him. Why wouldn't it take him to people who can fix his blindness and bring him back before there's any trouble with the Vault?
- Although he could voluntarily regenerate or wound himself gravely enough to require it, there are several in and out of universe issues with that solution:
- This new Doctor would have to explain what happened to his previous self to the university staff.
- He would probably have to go through regeneration sickness.
- How would Bill handle it?
- Out of universe, it would have MAJOR unfortunate implications to have the Doctor cure himself of a disability via a process that's akin to dying, implying that death would be preferable to disability. Having him manage to still be the Doctor even with a disability is a safer bet.
- It's also possible that the blindness wasn't caused solely by damage to his eyes, but also actual, direct brain damage from lack of oxygen. Meaning the medical technology onboard the TARDIS was able to fix his eyes, but his brain is a different story. And if there's one thing the Doctor wouldn't want, it's foreign objects messing with his precious brain. It's also worth noting that if he does have brain damage, the Time Lords might be the only ones who could fix it, and he's not exactly on good terms with them.
- Now THAT is a decent answer — it's logical and internally consistent with the Doctor's personality and traits.
- As for why he can't use regeneration energy to fix it, the only times the Doctor has been seen using regeneration energy to heal himself was in the early stages of a regeneration or the 15-hour grace period afterwards. On-screen evidence seems to suggest that Time Lords can only use regeneration energy to heal themselves when they're actually in the process of regenerating, or during the grace period afterwards, when they still have leftover regeneration energy in their bodies. And given the above-mentioned
Unfortunate Implications were the Doctor to voluntarily regenerate or deliberately injure himself to the point of forcing a regeneration, he's not going to consider his current handicap serious enough for him to have to regenerate. As for why another Time Lord couldn't heal him, again, he's not on good terms with any other Time Lords at the moment, so that's out of the question. - All of the above assuming that he didn't contract a fatal dose of radiation or similar trauma, and is simply waiting for his body to begin dying before regenerating.
Guarding the Vault ("Extremis" spoilers)
- If the Vault is that important/dangerous in the first place and is Gallifreyan in nature, why doesn't the Doctor call upon his fellow Time Lords to help out now that he's injured? They kind of owe him after the whole "I saved your planet" and "You tortured me for 4 and 1/2 billion years" stuff. Romana might be willing to help...
- That's assuming Romana, Susan, or any other Time Lord/Lady that the Doctor WAS on good terms with survived the ravages of the Time War.
- We also have no idea about the circumstances behind the Doctor guarding the Vault. For all we know, it's not something he wants the Time Lords to know about.
- With The Reveal that it's a fellow Time Lord — Missy — in the Vault, this now makes more sense. The Doctor was supposed to execute her at the order of another alien race, but could not bring himself to do so but used Exact Words — having vowed to guard her body and the Vault she would be interred in for 1,000 years in case she survived, he pointed out she didn't have to be dead to be locked up. If other Time Lords know about this, they may be deeply upset with him for sparing her life, on top of all the other things he's done to cheese them off.
- Not to mention they'd probably execute her on the spot, if they knew she was trapped in a Vault and vulnerable. Either that, or one or more of them would stupidly try to manipulate her for their personal advantage, which has never gone well for either the would-be manipulator or for Gallifrey.
Chasm Forge, cost-effectiveness, and capitalism
- So, throughout the episode, we're told that capitalism is bad, that unproductive workers are disposable goods. Except that who would work for a company that kills you if you become unproductive? The whole point of capitalism is that success is rewarded, and you don't have people willing to work for you if you don't treat them with at least basic human decency. Nevermind the No OSHA Compliance of having to pay for your oxygen tank instead of having it provided for you by the company as part of decent working conditions. It almost comes off as an Author Tract, and feels more Strawman Political than a proper Aesop.
- Capitalism rewards success if you're an upper middle-class university graduate with an MBA, not a bunch of non-unionized (they state "the union" is a myth) working-class space miners who labor for fixed wages while their employers keep the profit. Also, making them pay for oxygen is a perfectly capitalist thing to do, since it would 'encourage' them to work harder to have enough income to keep breathing. In the United States, as of 2017, there's a similar debate going on about health care reform.
- The premise comes off as a bit contradictory: If the living crew is seen by the company as a drain on precious resources, why even go to the trouble of manning the Chasm Forge with a living crew in the first place ? The suits are shown to handle the maintenance equally well, even though they're (supposedly) dumber than humans, so why not just used them as automated workers, no humans needed ? Why go to the trouble of building complex pressurised interiors for the station, if the crew is never allowed to take down their suits due to a lack of breathable air ? Wouldn't the crew notice much earlier they're being duped by the Company, because they can't even take off their suits and rest without them ? And how can the two surviving crew members cheerily promise to "file a complaint", if the Company has been shown to be super-cruel and completely dismissive of the regularly mounting death toll ? The episode's premise wouldn't be bad on its own as a condemnation of greed and employee abuse, but it has some very creaky logic in its entire setup.
- Many real-life companies hire a lot of employees, then crunch the numbers and realize it would be more cost-effective to slim the operation down and rely more on technology to fill the gap. It's the basic principle of downsizing/redundancy. Here, it's just more literal. The miners were never 'duped'. The company only decided to kill them after the station was declared unprofitable.
- That would make no sense, though, as the Doctor's way of defeating the adversaries was to convince the Company they would lose the station and all its infrastructure. At which point, they relented. If the whole station with everything on it was unprofitable, why would the Company care for it at all ? They'd see the Doctor's ploy to blow up the place as doing the dirty work for them. Long story short, the reason the Company is going to all this trouble to kill its own employees starts feeling really contrived the more you think about it. A fully automated station staffed with the suits just makes far more sense than bothering with keeping alive, killing and bringing in new employees. Such a station wouldn't even need what basic life support this one needed to carry. It's a wonder the episode's Company turns any sort of profit at all with their questionable strategy. Automation is already seen as a major trend nowadays, so what's the point to using disposable crew that you have to raise, train and regularly supply if you could do away with all of that by using robotic technology clearly superior to the present day one?
- It wasn't directly the loss of the station, it is noted that the explosion would be visible for most of the galaxy the station was in; a "malfunction" killing a crew can be swept under the rug by a PR team, one of their stations detonating causing an explosion of that size is a lot more likely to harm their PR, which will impact their shareholders.
- Robot vs human labor seems to be a Cyclical Trope in the Whoniverse. Humanity builds robots, gets dependent on them, then suffers through a Robot War / Zeroth Law Rebellion / Terminally Dependent Society collapse. As their civilization recovers, they go back to human workers assisted by dumb-tech mechanisms, which is the stage of the cycle in which this story seems to take place.
- Perhaps it's cheaper to hire human labourers rather than buy or build robots. Profit is everything to this company, remember. And it's entirely possible that there are tasks that must be performed, such as certain kinds of repairs, that the suits' AI wouldn't be up to solving.
- The idea that it's cheaper makes no sense, though. Let's say that the company kills unproductive workers, but lies about the nature of their deaths. "There was a radiation leak" or "A solar flare shorted out the smart suits". Well, the company now has a reputation for not being able to keep its workers safe on the job, meaning no one will want to sign up with them, AND possibly have their stock drop due to the negative publicity. To say nothing of the compensation that the surviving family members would be owed.
- Indemnity clauses in the workers' contracts probably shield the corporation from all liability in the event of worker death or injury, or shift it over to whatever subcontracted hiring service recruited them in the first place. That's how plenty of Real Life companies get away with subjecting employees to horrifically-unsafe working conditions without exposing themselves to lawsuits. As for "negative publicity", people in that era surely know that space is really freakin' dangerous, in itself. The corporation can blame it on human error on the dead workers' part, and nobody's likely to question it.
- The point of the story is that in this crapsack hypercapitalist future, human lives have become so undervalued that the spacesuits are more valuable than the workers who wear them. That is why there are living workers on the station. Indeed, it's possible that people like the miners are so destitute that they have to take any job offered, even if the company doesn't have a great worker safety record.
- I'm assuming the OP has (like most of us sitting in our comfy chairs editing TV Tropes) never been in a situation where they are so desperate for work they will literally take the first job available, regardless of how dangerous it is. You only have to look at Real Life to see many examples of the poor working in unstable mines, sulphur pits and rubbish dumps in order to make a living. Not everyone has the luxury of refusing work, and people like the company are waiting to exploit that.
- Oxygen presumably isn't that expensive on habitable planets, but on a space station it's a limited resource, and can be limited still further via price-controls. By manipulating how much oxygen costs on their facility, the corporation can keep its employees forever in debt, desperately working themselves to the bone just to keep breathing. That empty suit specifically says the station would vent the air from the TARDIS's air-shell to maintain the local market-value of oxygen, not to hoard and sell it. The mining outpost is a "company town" in the old sense: its workers have no alternative but to pay grossly-inflated prices for their physical necessities, because they have no ship and can't leave.
- If there was no bug or malfunction in the system, and the station is really trying to operate as cost-efficiently as possible, why do the automated suits kill the living humans before they run out of air? Wouldn't it be more efficient to force them to work for as long as they have air left, to squeeze every bit of profit the company can make out of them?
- Dealt with right at the start when the station sucks back all the air that came with the TARDIS. It is so they can "sell" the unused air to the next set of suckers. No sense having the workforce continuing to suck down a monetized resource while doing nothing.
Isn't the whole station in a vacuum?
- When they're inside the station, the suits use force fields to keep the oxygen in, but they need helmets outside the station because the force field bubbles aren't rated for vacuum. Except that the station is kept depressurized; it should be the same vacuum on the inside as on the outside.
- The station is pressurised, it just filters all the oxygen out of the air.
- They probably need gas pressure within the station in order to process the ores that they're mining, as many metallurgical processes simply wouldn't function in a vacuum. They just don't use oxygen to achieve that pressure.
Does the Doctor get a raw deal by being blinded, given his actions?
- Did anyone else find the morals of this story a bit confusing? Putting aside the pro-capitalism/anti-capitalism message for the moment, the episode goes about how the Doctor is in the wrong here and deserves to suffer for it, because he dragged Bill and Nardole into a dangerous situation. Sure, on paper that makes sense, but the way it's displayed doesn't fit: from the start he was upfront about it being dangerous and he was only there to try and save the workers. Ignoring the fact that rescuing people at his own expense is who he is, which they both should know by this point (heck this entire event wasn't just random exploration, he literally responded to a distress call knowing lives were at stake), they want to leave before it becomes apparent how dangerous the situation, heck before their own safety is even in danger, the Doctor responds by arguing they can't abandon the remaining workers and so they stay then it turns out to be more dangerous than they had any way of knowing yet somehow its his fault. If they were so against staying, why couldn't Bill and Nardole just have waited in the TARDIS until he's done saving them (this was before they lost access to it after all)? Also leaving four people to die, while Nardole can make arguments about the bigger picture, doesn't that make Bill look kind of callous? Just two episodes back she was utterly distraught at seeing two people die (including one who was a petty thug).
- Bill got creeped out and wanted to leave before they found out there were still survivors on board. They didn't find out there were survivors until after they were cut off from the TARDIS, upon which she doesn't have a problem with trying to help. As for Nardole, he wanted to leave from the start because he takes his self-appointed duty of keeping the Doctor focussed on guarding the Vault very seriously.
- Even still, the overall moral that the Doctor's somehow wrong feels a bit hard to swallow. Considering the situation, is not wanting to abandon several people to die really so bad he deserves to go blind?
- Essentially, what's going on here is that it's not that getting involved and rescuing the miners on Chasm Forge was wrong. The thing is that, as Nardole points out, the Doctor has a duty to be guarding the Vault, not gallivanting off of Earth into dangerous situations where he could wind up dead or injured (as actually happened). Remember, the TARDIS is a time machine — there's always time to go answer distress calls, he didn't have to go answer that one right away. Basically, not only was the Doctor, in the course of doing one right thing, neglecting something else important, it's another case of Twelve's awful luck striking again.
- The TARDIS has long been established not only as sentient, but as taking the Doctor where he needs to go. And it seems to know the importance of making sure the Vault's not unattended for too long, given its behavior so far this season. If guarding the Vault is THAT important, why does she 1) seem to want the Doctor to take Bill on as a companion in the first place at the end of "The Pilot", 2) make the detour on the way back from the future, setting up "Thin Ice", and 3) not keep the Doctor from going to the space station until a later date (maybe having it pop up as a "reminder" on one of the screens sometime)?
- The Doctor's blindness isn't karmic punishment for his mistake any more than Clara's death in "Face the Raven" was; it's just a consequence he knows he must accept (as she did, even as he could not), and proof of the true depths of his goodness and his maturity. As discussed here
, because exploring the station was his idea, he knew that he must also accept responsibility for whatever happened to Bill and Nardole and the Vault; this is reflected in his It's All My Fault rant. So when faced with the walk in the void he was willing to be the one who suffered, even died, instead of Bill. He knew he might have to face terrible consequences, but accepted it. This is probably one reason why he refuses to let anyone but Nardole know about his blindness: He is NOT going to let Bill feel guilty if he can help it. And having made the right choice in this situation, showing Bill what true heroism is, perhaps down the line when he needs help...
Why doesn't Nardole give up his helmet?
- Isn't Nardole a robot? "The Pilot" implies he is: a bolt falls out of him and he creaks as he shows Bill to the Doctor's office. Later comments from the Doctor about robots jokingly imply he'll replace Nardole with a robot servant that gives him less grief. So if he is a robot, why didn't he give his helmet to Bill instead of the Doctor?
- He's a cyborg, not a robot: Remember that in "The Husbands of River Song" he was decapitated by King Hydroflax's robot body and held hostage. The Doctor built him a new robot body that looks like his old one, but his head is still organic, and thus still needs oxygen.
- Also, the Doctor clearly knows he got Bill into his mess, so even if Nardole were to offer to make a Heroic Sacrifice on her behalf, he wouldn't hear of it.
- As of The Pyramid at the End of the World, we know that parts of Nardole other than his head are organic. It's actually specifically mentioned that he has human lungs. Therefore, he needs oxygen to survive.
The "rescue ship" that wasn't
- The idea that the "rescue ship" was bringing their replacements makes little sense. A mining base like theirs, production would depend on the ore present on the asteroid or moon or whatever that they are mining, and how easy it is to get to. If production is down, it's not likely to be because the workers themselves are doing anything wrong. Moving the base to a new site makes a lot more sense than replacing the workers with another batch of human workers who likely have roughly the same abilities and training, but may be less experienced.
- The Doctor flippantly called them "replacements," but that was just an assumption, and not an important one. They might be a black-ops cleanup crew sent to make sure there's nothing incriminating that might get the company in trouble. Or maybe it's a much smaller crew that specializes in moving giant space stations from unprofitable rocks to profitable ones.
- It's probably a lot easier to recruit workers for a fixed period of labor at a time than for an open-ended one, like "however long it takes to exploit this lode of copper". The replacements may have been sent simply because the miners' contract was coming to an end, at which point the "Deactivate your wearer" command kicked in because it's cheaper to kill everybody than to transport them back home.
