Talk:Tesseract (comic story)

Doctor tricking Turlough

I can't remember which story is being referenced here. I checked the synopses for the stories in which Turlough appeared and I didn't see anything matching this description. Any ideas? I thought perhaps this might be a reference to the Earthlink Dilemma novel, which I have never read. 23skidoo 13:03, January 15, 2010 (UTC)

Weird. Totally missed this question until now. I took it to be a reference to Englightenment. When the Doctor declines to take Enlightenment itself, he sets up Turlough to make a moral choice that he could just as easily have prevented Turlough from making. As the Doctor says, to Tegan, "You're missing the point. Enlightenment wasn't the diamond. Enlightenment was the choice." CzechOut ☎ | ✍ 15:36, March 24, 2010 (UTC)

"An as-yet unspecified man"

Using this term to refer to the man Martha married is fine. Linking it to Mickey Smith is not. Unless the story indicates otherwise, we do not know whether she married Milligan and divorced him later and married Mickey, or if she broke off the engagement to Milligan, or what. The story might straighten this out, or it might not as it would have been written and drawn before End of Time's surprise. So let's not jump to conclusions. In all likelihood Don't Step on the Grass will say she married Tom Milligan. And then we just have to assume the marriage was annulled later. 23skidoo 02:04, March 18, 2010 (UTC)

Not sure where you're coming from, here. The lead time on producing comics is not nearly so great as you imagine. An issue coming out on 17 March could definitely not have been started until after 1 January. And that's assuming, of course, that Lee and company didn't have access to an advance copy of TEOT or the script.

Issue 9 clearly seems to be written with knowledge of The End of Time. By having Martha call herself explicitly "freelance", Lee reveals he's seen TEOT. I don't think there's any reasonable reading of the comments in issue 8 but that Mickey is her husband.

Not linking to Mickey is actually introducing speculation, not the other way around. There comes a point where we can be too strict on requiring canonical confirmation of conclusions that are perfectly logical. If two canon sources say she got married (CoE and Tesseract) and another canon source tells us whom she married (TEOT), then it takes a positive reference to some other eventuality to prevent us from saying that she was on the honeymoon with the person we know to be her husband. The fact that we don't have the story of what happened to Tom is not enough to prevent us from asserting that the honeymoon here is with Mickey. If the Doctor says "I tried to fixed the chameleon circuit once when I had an outrageously multi-colored coat and an American companion", he doesn't have to say "in my sixth life" for us to know he's talking about the Sixth Doctor. Same thing here. If she says she's just back from her honeymoon, and we know that at some point in the recent future she is definitively married to Mickey Smith, only a positive reference to another marriage cam prevent us from stating that she spent that honeymoon with Mickey Smith.

Still, I'll wait to relink until the conclusion of the story. But if there's no positive, direct, explicit reference to Tom, the benefit of any doubt has to go with what else has been established in canon. CzechOut ☎ | ✍ 17:34, March 18, 2010 (UTC)

I may be relinking sooner rather than later. Issue 9 definitively proves Lee was writing Martha's return with knowledge of The End of Time, via its reference to Joshua Naismith, and certainly seems to be hinting at Martha's relationship with Micky via the "tin dog syndrome" reference. She couldn't possibly known about the whole tin dog thing without knowing Mickey well enough for him to feel comfortable divulging that embarrassing part of his somewhat distant past (for him, "Reunion" is at least half a decade past). Remember, neither the Doctor nor Martha were present for the SJS/Mickey convo that established the term. The only logical inference is that the term passed from Mickey to Martha, in a relationship that in no way could've been said to have been present in a televised episode, as they never address each other directly or indirectly in JE. CzechOut ☎ | ✍ 15:15, March 24, 2010 (UTC)

Come to think of it, there is the slight reference to being the tin dog in "The Age of Steel". Tennant's reaction doesn't particularly betray whether the Doctor knows what Mickey is exactly talking about or not. Still, it opens the door for some later recounting of the private Smith/Smith convo in "Reunion", so mebbe that ref in "Grass" isn't quite so definitive as the Naismith one. CzechOut ☎ | ✍ 15:25, March 24, 2010 (UTC)