Theory:Doctor Who television discontinuity and plot holes/The Doctor's Wife

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This page is for discussing the ways in which The Doctor's Wife doesn't fit well with other DWU narratives. You can also talk about the plot holes that render its own, internal narrative confusing.

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• The Doctor is an Earthophile and, we've been led to believe that among Timelords, he is unique in this. So why is the tardis graveyard so full of Earthly debris - wire hangers, theatre velvet ropes, a shaving mirror, etc.? It suggests that the Doctor is perhaps not so quirky after all, Timelord-wise, if the others had also picked up souvenirs from Earth.

House has brought non-Time Lords (like Uncle, Auntie, Nephew, and Idris, for example) to his asteroid, so why couldn't he have sucked in other "Earth-like stuff"? Additionally, given what we've seen of other worlds and species, why would we conclude that we're the only planet that uses wire hangers, velvet ropes, mirrors, etc?

• Why was this episode titled, "The Doctor's Wife"?

It was pretty clearly established that the TARDIS has had unrequited feelings for the Doctor for centuries. The Doctor wasn't fully aware of those feelings even though he returned some affection, in the way that someone has affection for an old trusty possession. Once the Doctor was made aware of the TARDIS' feelings for him, he began to understand and reciprocate those feelings. The term "Doctor's Wife" refers to the fact that the TARDIS and the Doctor have always been together, developing a deep bond, linking them as partners throughout time and space.

Also, from a real world perspective, it's likely this was intended to act as a bit of misdirection in order to throw fans off the scent with regards to River Song's identity, since the episode was supposed to be titled Bigger on the Inside.

Yep, I think they actually said that. Also, that way we wouldn't guess what part the guest actress is playing - if we knew in advance it'd ruin it. IIRC they said that the concept of the Doctor's wife always intrigued the fans and that whenever they wanted to keep something a secret they'd name it that. But I read that interview ages ago, I may be remembering it wrong.

• Since the interface to the TARDIS is telepathic the security code "Crimson, Eleven, Delight, Petrichor" naturally has to be thought to be used .. but .. wouldn't this "interface" actually be a form of communication with the living entity that is the TARDIS?! Which would mean Amy was thinking it at House at the time, so why didn't it just block access?

There are probably many automated components in terms of how the TARDIS functions however, and something like opening a locked door would likely be one of them. House may not have conscious control over those automated functions, or may only have control if them when specifically thinking about it. Kind of like how swallowing is a mostly automated function of the human body, but you can exert conscious control over it if you try to.

This is very similar to an answer Neil Gaiman gave to a similar question. A reader asked, "If the TARDIS's consciousness had been removed, why was the TARDIS still translating? Did House translate for them?" Gaiman answered, "For the same reason the doors opened and closed, and the whole of the inside of the TARDIS hadn't become the same size as it was on the outside. The TARDIS matrix was out of the TARDIS, but translation is an automatic process. (It's like a person in a coma continuing to breathe. Lots of stuff still works, there's just nobody running it.)"

House didn't become "the living entity that is the TARDIS". He had no interest in being the TARDIS; he just wanted to eat it. The TARDIS was still alive, but without its consciousness, and since lots of things in the Whoniverse are "telepathic" or "psychic" without being conscious (e.g., the psychic paper), there's no reason an "unconscious TARDIS" couldn't have a working telepathic security system.

House's original plan was to eat the TARDIS, but once the Doctor told him that there were no TARDISes left, he decided to, at least temporarily, become the "living entity that is the TARDIS" in order to go to N-space to look for more food.

No, he decided to steal the TARDIS. That's not the same thing as becoming the TARDIS. If I hijack an airplane, I can work all the controls from the cockpit, and talk to passenger compartment, but that doesn't mean all of the passengers' controls suddenly go through the cockpit. The only difference here is that the TARDIS doors are opened by a telepathic control rather than a lever.

Looks like we're talking semantics here. The question appears to have been sufficiently answered: House had control over some aspects of the TARDIS, but others were automated and/or not in his control until he knew about them.

• How come all of the other Timelords have their time/space machines referred to as TARDISes when it was Susan who named the Doctor's machine as TARDIS, and the timelords who named them TT Capsules?

This has been a plot-hole for a very long time, but I guess we could explain it away by saying that the Tardis translation circuits chooses that word to refer to all of her sisters. She obviously doesn't regard it as her name.

I wouldn't call it a plot hole exactly, but something of a long-standing question about the Doctor's origins and relation to Time Lord society. It has certainly been hypothesized that Susan coined the term and it somehow caught on. Regardless of how it happened, we know from previous stories that the term "TARDIS" is fairly commonly used by both Time Lords and others who know of them. TT Capsule is another more technical term for them. The TARDIS does herself recognise the word as an acronym for Time and Relative Dimension in Space.

In any case, TARDIS is an English translation acronym. So is TT. Maybe the TARDIS can't properly convey a word that can adequately express what it is. And so it uses a variety of words on different occasions. The Doctor also refers to the TARDIS as a 'ship' and a 'time machine'. Other Timelords have called them 'time capsules'.

One other thing that needs to be pointed out: Susan did not come up with the phrase "Time and Relative Dimension in Space". Watch "An Unearthly Child" and all she lays credit to is coming up with the acronym. So maybe she entered the Gallifreyan equivalent of a Blue Peter contest and the Time Lords began using TARDIS whereas before they might have simply used the long form all the time.

Or maybe Susan did come up with the English name, both the phrase and the acronym, but not the Gallifreyan name. In this episode, every use of the word "TARDIS" is either by the Doctor or his companions, or translated into English by the TARDIS. In other episodes, we hear plenty of humans use the word, but they obviously got it from the Doctor. It's pretty rare that we hear other Time Lords speak about TARDISes in English, and when we do, it's almost always the case that the Doctor is the only reason they're speaking English in the first case, and there's no reason not to use his English translations. Really, the only exception I can think of in any media is Ulysses and Penelope; I'm guessing he did in fact make up his own English translation when he first met her, but, being Susan's great-grandparents, it's not hard to imagine they'd pick up her coinage once they heard it.

• In Doomsday, Rose was lost to an alternate universe and it was made clear that due to the nature of this it was not possible for the Doctor to see her again. Also described in Doomsday was "The Void", or the space between universes. However, in this story, the Doctor successfully travels outside of the current universe. What happened to the void? Surely this also means that if it is possible to break free of the current universe then the Doctor could theoretically travel to the alternate universe in which Rose is trapped?

But in The Doctor's Wife, they travel to a 'bubble universe' as the Doctor describes it, rather than a parallel universe.

More generally, there seem to be a lot of locations in the Whoniverse that might qualify as "not in the universe" but that also aren't "parallel universes": E-Space, "the next universe over", the universe before this one (and the one after), pocket universes in higher-dimensional space... and that's just what I can remember off the top of my head from definitely-canonical sources. They're not always perfectly careful to make sure their science doesn't contradict itself, but when they go out of their way to deliberately talk about a different thing, you can probably accept that it really is different.

Or the Doctor could have been lying about the TARDIS travelling to other Universes and could of been just occupied with getting the Daleks and Cybermen into the Void (or Hell, as some people call it).

He didn't appear to be lying about not being able to get to Rose... no, the real explanation is as stated above: there are multiple different classifications to things that are "not in the universe", and parallel worlds is just one of them.

• If all the Tardis (human) needed was to be in the Tardis (object) then why did she need to be in the main control room? Why not send her energy into the archived Tardis control room, then once in control, relocate the main room to the necessary one?

The Doctor implies that she needed to be in the main control room, presumably because the control room being used as the main one at any given time has different access. It also appears that the Doctor is stalling for time once they get to the main control room, to give her physical host body time to "die". It's only after that happens that the TARDIS entity/energy is released and can regain control of the TARDIS itself.

• Idris states the Doctor stole the TARDIS 700 years ago. She later says there are instructions on the TARDIS door which he has been walking past and ignoring for 700 years, but the Doctor had already had the TARDIS for a long time before the chameleon circuit broke (in the original series serial An Unearthly Child) and the instructions became a permanent feature

There is nothing in An Unearthly Child to indicate exactly how long they've been travelling. It is known the Doctor and Susan visited a few other places before landing in London (ref. TV: The Edge of Destruction), but these visits could have taken place over the course of only a few weeks or months (indeed it's been suggested that some companions like Peri and even Rose experienced all their adventures within only a space of months, rather than years). So the police box shape could well have been adopted within the first year of the Doctor travelling in her. Assuming the TARDIS isn't rounding up or down.

But I think the Doctor is 400-ish years old in An Unearthly Child.. Well, not in that episode but at some point he tells his age.

She could be confused, since she's constantly confused about what's in the future and what's in the past (in the cage she says "like a 9 year old trying to build a motorcycle in his back yard" or something like that - a line she'll later tell the Doctor - and then realises she's confusing times) so maybe she's confused about the Doctor's age at the moment. But that's obviously not what Mr. Gaiman meant.

The Doctor's age can't be used as a guide as the series reset his age to 900 when the series returned in 2005 (in TV: Time and the Rani the Doctor gives his exact age as being in the 950s range, and not only his entire "life" but also that of the Eighth Doctor must be factored in; the novels have him well over 1000 years of age during the Eighth Doctor era). If anything, the TARDIS' 700 years statement is likely the most accurate because she would have no reason to lie, round up or down, or make such a mistake. The Doctor gives his age for the first time in one of the first stories in which the Second Doctor travelled with Victoria and Jamie, and he estimates 450 years. The First Doctor never revealed his age.

• The TARDIS tells the Doctor to not get emotional and then remarks "Hmm, that's what the orangey girl says". But she wasn't actually present when Amy told the Doctor this.

She's the Tardis; she knows EVERYTHING to do with the Doctor... well, more-or-less, anyway. She can also see the future, remember, she says "Now is the point in the conversation were you open the lock" showing that she knows what is coming, so she probably saw Amy say that because she can see the future and then just repeated it.

Or maybe it's in present simple form? i.e. that's what the orangey girl always says?

The TARDIS is telepathic. If the Doctor knows it, the TARDIS almost certainly does, too.

If you listed to what is said, the TARDIS states "that's what the orangey girl says, not said. It means Amy has told the Doctor not to get emotional before, and the TARDIS is simply quoting her.

You really can't get hung up on verb tense with the TARDIS, as we see her jumbling past/present/future throughout this episode. The line almost certainly refers to Amy saying it in this episode, as with most of the lines she quotes. She also wasn't there to see when "the little boxes will make you upset", but we know what she was referring to. She's seeing all of Time & Space, regardless of whether Idris was physically there or not.

• When did Nephew board the TARDIS? Seriously. Amy and Rory boarded before House took control. They remained in the control room until after the TARDIS left the asteroid. So House couldn't have let Nephew in. Is he somehow supposed to have broken into the TARDIS earlier and hidden until needed? He was present when the Doctor and the Ponds left to go exploring and the Doctor sent the Ponds to the TARDIS almost immediately, so there isn't that big a window of opportunity for that to have happened either.

We never saw Nephew again on the junkyard planet after Idris' first "babble" session in the jail cell. He obviously entered the TARDIS before it left and before Amy and Rory went in; House would need to have a physical being to assist him and with the other two barely holding together, but the Ood evidently intact, it was only logical (had Idris not be TARDIS-field, she'd have been the one hiding in the TARDIS). If House is able to eat TARDISes and dismantle them - not to mention extract the matrix - he can certainly figure out how to pick a TARDIS lock. And there's nothing in the episode that says House took control of the TARDIS after Amy and Rory went inside. He more likely had control of the TARDIS the moment he removed the Matrix, and probably would have eaten the TARDIS right away if not for the Doctor blabbing about the Time Lords being dead, there being no more TARDISes, and the fact Idris didn't die immediately like she was supposed to.

• At one point the TARDIS/Idris says "river the is forest the in water only the", which is reversed to "the only water in the forest is the river". How does she know? Melody/River has been conceived, but she wouldn't know her name or the specific wording of River's reveal.