Forum:How Earthshock ended

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I watched the final part of the episode Earthshock a few days ago, and I saw Adric detonate the bomb in space, causing the freighter to explode in space. Which means the freighter never crashed on Earth.

I am only mentioning this because I saw that the Tardisdex says that the freighter crashed onto Earth, and I want to make sure that I have the right information before I try to edit the article named Adric.

So, has anyone besides me noticed this? Chericola ^{talk to me} 10:08, April 4, 2012 (UTC)

I think that's what visually occurs, but I chalk it down to a limitation of 1980s visual effects that make it look like it was in space. It's sent back to 65 million BC (and early on there's foreshadowing about the dinosaurs' extinction), so presumably, that's the DWU's equivalent of the dinosaur-killing asteroid that impacted Earth. -- Tybort (talk page) 13:40, April 4, 2012 (UTC)

Conversely, I don't think that's what visually occurs. There's always some amount of visual metaphor involved in special effects of things none of us have seen in space. But I think we should start from a position of trusting that the effects in DW, though primitive, do actually tell the story. I think we should try in most cases to believe that what happens on screen is what happens unless is a dream sequence or another, obviously abstract representation. In this case, there is no credible reason to believe that the model unit were incapable of timing a simple model explosion.

So what does happen?

Here's the evidence:

• Clear shots of the freighter's viewscreen show rapid movement towards the surface of the planet. We are shown over and over again, and indeed immediately before the "event" that Adric is getting closer to planetfall.
• The Doctor cites the cause of the explosion on the ground as the breaking of anti-matter vessels. Presumably, since the cause of the explosion that wipes out the dinosaurs has to do with an anti-matter/matter reaction, the mass that hits the ground is relatively unimportant. Even if this is a depiction of the freighter actually exploding — and I don't think it is — the freighter could break up in low Earth orbit and still do the damage described.
• If you believe that Adric is detonating a bomb, you've totally misread the scene. He's trying to break some cyphers — the three logic codes which are are preventing the crew from removing the Cybermen's navigational override. Solve the math problem and he can pilot the ship away from Earth. That's the last goal of Adric's life. A math problem. He gets one solved, and this frees up navigation just enough to send the freighter back 65 million years. (Why? Don't worry about. Eric Saward clearly didn't.) So he at least averts killing the Earth as Tegan knows it. At first the Doctor doesn't like this, because he thinks it will just mean the Earth won't have ever existed like Tegan knows, meaning she won't have existed herself. But then the freighter's course stabilises at 65 million years. This means that the freighter is actually the heretofore unknown event that wiped out the dinosaurs. In modern DW language, it's a fixed point in time, so it's meant to happen. Adric gets the second puzzle solved. But it's not entirely clear how this helps things. In any event Beryl Reid now tells us that "it's only a couple of minutes before we enter Earth's gravitational pull". So the freighter is presumably not all that far away from ther surface. But he's prevented from further mathematical juggling when the injured Cyberman takes the console out. So Adric accomplishes precisely nothing by refusing to stay on the escape shuttle. At no point is there a purpose-built bomb in the story.
• We see no disintgreation upon explosion. We have no idea how big the chunks are which hit the ground. Because the special effect depicts no traditional explosion — the model is wholly intact — we could just be seeing the freighter encountering the heat of re-entry. It kinda looks like this when you slow it down. Because basically there's the "event", then there's a film effect. It goes "explosion", "fade to white", "fade from white". In the actual explosive moment, and you can see this pretty readily on frame advance, the light is thrown into an arc, which I'm taking to be the curve of the Earth's atmosphere. What muddies things here is the fade to white. That's not a part of the depiction of the event; that's a filmmaker's visual shorthand. You can tell it's a genuine fade to white, cause there's a fade from white on the other side. But it was a bad choice. If it had been a fade to black/fade from black, all this would have been much clearer. In any case, at no time do we see the freighter actually "blow up". It's always shown completely intact in one piece. There are a few sparklers out the backside of it, but it definitely doesn't explode onscreen. Therefore, given all avaialable evidence, the only thing I can imagine we're seeing is the point of contact with Earth's atmosphere. And that's as good as showing us the moment of impact, because once the freighter enters Earth's gravitational pull, it's all over. There's no escape from that.

For me, though, the clinching proof is actually in Time-Flight. There, Tegan directly says that the freighter did crash into Earth, citing Adric's presence on the freighter as unimportant to this fact. And that's an end to it. The freighter crashed into Earth, anti-matter vessels burst, anti-matter met matter, big explosion, dinosaurs wiped out.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 12:57: Sun 08 Apr 2012 

That is a very detailed explanation. And it makes sense. Maybe the freighter did crash on Earth, but I am sure that there were bombs on the ship. Strange, it did seem as if the ship disintergrated in space.

Then what was Adric holding near the end, just before the final impact? I thought he was holding some sort of detonator to detonate a bomb, but that shot was so quick that it could of been something else. Chericola ^{talk to me} 00:56, April 12, 2012 (UTC)

I haven't seen the episode recently, but if you look at the page on Adric, in the "Personality" section, it states "He died holding his brother's belt." Could that have been it? Boblipton ^{talk to me} 01:00, April 12, 2012 (UTC)

Well, I wouldn't necessarily say there were bombs per se. The whole deal is that the Cybermen have aimed this freighter at the Earth. They've locked it on course with this triple mathematic lock. If the freighter hits the earth, then the natural workings of the ship — let's just call it the engine — will break apart. Since the ship is powered by anti-matter, this means that anti-matter will come into direct contact with matter and you'll get a big explosion. This was a trope of the Davison years incidentally. It happens here, it threatens to happen in Arc of Infinity— Eric Saward loved a dash of anti-matter. This is kinda the "joke" of Time Crash, and why it's so appropriate that Davison is once again facing an anti-matter problem "the exact size of Belgium".

So, no bomb. The ship itself is a bomb. It's basically just a 9/11 terrorist plot by the Cybermen.

Bob is absolutely right in recalling what the Adric article says. Adric is indeed holding his brother's belt, and in that last moment we recall Full Circle. His brother, who died heroically in Adric's introduction story, gets another mention in Time-Flight part one, which helps to cement the point of what Adric is carrying. You really shouldn't try to understand Earthshock part 4 without Time-Flight part 1, because Earthshock ends on a cliffhanger that's resolved in Time-Flight.

The fact that you had no idea what he was carrying says something about the JNT years. It makes perfect sense to those of us who watched the shows chronologically. But in this day and age, where we get the stories one at a time on DVD, it really makes no sense. However, as "JNT continuity references" go, this one at least only referenced a story from a year before, and was emotionally effective. Certainly, though, it would have been even more effective had the character been one with which the audience could identify. If it had been Rose, for example, holding some little trinket she'd gotten from Pete in Father's Day, right before she died a fiery death, we'd be bawling our eyes out.

As things stand, however, the most that a lot of viewers can say is that it's a great little nod to Full Circle on paper. But it's too little, too late. Adric needed attention paid to his character development long before this point. And we probably needed to see the belt a couple of other times before this final moment.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 00:53: Mon 16 Apr 2012