Toggle menu
Toggle preferences menu
Toggle personal menu
Not logged in
Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits.

Howling:Eye of Harmony in the Doctor's TARDIS

The Howling
Revision as of 05:12, 14 August 2011 by 173.228.85.35 (talk)
The Howling → Eye of Harmony in the Doctor's TARDIS
There be spoilers about un-released stories here.
Run back to the forums if you're scared.


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)
Cookies help us deliver our services. By using our services, you agree to our use of cookies.