Howling:Eye of Harmony in the Doctor's TARDIS

The Howling → Eye of Harmony in the Doctor's TARDIS

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We all see the Eye of Harmony inside the Doctor's TARDIS in the TV Movie, apparently its main power source. Now "The Deadly Assassin" also features the Eye of Harmony, but there it resides on Gallifrey. Some have attempted to solve this discrepancy by saying that the Eye in the TVM was not the same as in TDA, but a duplicate that's part of all Type 40 TARDISes. But when you think about it, even that doesn't make much sense, because by the Doctor's time, no one on Gallifrey knew the location of the Eye; it had long ago been lost in the ancient past, and was regarded as mostly mythical. So how could the Time Lords have duplicated something they had so little knowledge of? 82.2.136.93 19:55, August 13, 2011 (UTC)

Well the real world answer is that the TV Movie wasn't very well written and had a lot of plot points that didn't make any sense. The eye being in the TARDIS makes about as much sense as the Doctor's mom being a human, or a human retinal pattern being neccessary to open the eye. In universe, one could argue that as the TARDIS was already a museum piece when the Doctor stole it, it could have been built back in the day when the Time Lords had more knowledge of the eye.Icecreamdif 21:37, August 13, 2011 (UTC)

It's not just a duplicate; it's also a link to the real thing. The power to run the TARDIS comes over that link, and the Master fell through that link into the Eye.

The idea that it's a duplicate comes from the EDA/PDA novels (The Eight Doctors and The Quantum Archangel). Other novels in that range refer to the TARDIS's link to the Eye. And later, RTD explicitly talked about the link that we saw in the movie no longer being available to power the TARDIS. Of course that was RTD talking off-camera, not the Doctor, so if you really want to, you can argue that the duplicate that we saw in the movie and the link that the Doctor has talked about in the new series are separate things, but that seems kind of silly.

The bit in The Deadly Assassin about everyone believing it was lost, some thinking it no longer existed or was always a myth, has never been officially explained. The best and most popular fan answer I've heard is that everyone knew the TARDISes drew energy over a link to something, but nobody knew that that something was the Eye of Harmony. A bit weak, but I don't think there is a really good explanation. (It's also worth considering The Invasion of Time, just a year after The Deadly Assassin, where it seems like everyone in the universe knows about the Eye. Of course the real answer is that Graham Williams didn't remember exactly what Robert Holmes had written a year ago, just as Matthew Jacobs didn't remember it 16 years later, but in-universe, you have to fanwank it to make sense of it.) --173.228.85.35 05:12, August 14, 2011 (UTC)

Okay, so how do we explain the Eye in the TARDIS only opening in response to a human retina? I think there's a line in the TV Movie about the Eye not having been opened in hundreds of years, so that would possibly indicate that it had been sealed since the Doctor "borrowed" it from Gallifrey, so the human retina scan would have been in place then, right? 82.2.136.93 10:21, August 14, 2011 (UTC)

There are two possibilities.

If you go with the idea from the IDW comics that the whole half-human thing was a ruse to fool the Master, the human retina bit was the whole point of that ruse, so it's just not true.

If you go with him actually being half-human, as in the EDA novels, either he or the TARDIS reconfigured the lock on the Eye to protect it from other Time Lords, since there are presumably very few other half-human Time Lords around. He'd had the TARDIS for at least 500 years (even going by truncated new-series ages), so there was plenty of time to change it and then for it to go unopened for hundreds of years. (If you don't want to accept any media other than TV, then nothing has ever contradicted his half-human statement, so it's the same as this one.) --173.228.85.35 11:24, August 14, 2011 (UTC)

I just remembered, the EDAs _do_ establish that what the Master fell into is the link to the Eye on Gallifrey. In The Gallifrey Chronicles, the Master talks to the Doctor through the same link that's used to channel energy back to the Eye of Harmony at the center of the warped bubble of spacetime where Gallifrey used to be. (Of course the Master also had a new body in Henrietta Street, and was embedded in the fabric of the TARDIS in Sometime Never…, but leave it to him to find three different ways of surviving permadeath…) --173.228.85.35 17:56, August 14, 2011 (UTC)

And one more even less-related thing: According to RTD, when the cracks in time were closed, so were all of the time rifts, which is why Torchwood has no reason to return to Cardiff. So… where is the TARDIS getting its power from now? --173.228.85.35 18:36, August 14, 2011 (UTC)

Isn't there a line in one of the novels or something about the Doctor's TARDIS being well over 5000 years old? Then again, the average Gallifreyan lives for well over a thousand years, so that's probably not really enough time for the location of the prime Eye to be forgotten by the majority of Time Lords. 213.121.200.42 11:32, August 15, 2011 (UTC)