Also just wanted to add that with all of the TV blogs out there that I read, it's rare when I follow the comment threads as well. The Medium Is Not Enough is one of those exceptions. Not that I could ever claim to know you folks, but I look forward to reading the thoughts of all these familiar names as much as I do the posts by Rob which inspire those comments.

And today, having seen the episode just last night, this has been one of the most interesting discussions I've read; pretty heady stuff!

"Of course, simply because the Doctor says something is true, doesn't mean it is true. He can be mistaken, too, as he was in this case."

I've long held the belief that the Doctor also lies when it suits his purpose. His age was changed with the reboot and if we demand adherence to other details from the past, something like that has to be addressed in some way. Therefore, he lied about his age.

Same goes for other things, like travel between dimensions to the parallel worlds, etc.

(Finally saw this episode last night, and loved it. But like Bob, I also thought that "he could have saved them but taken them somewhere far from 21st century Earth". He was just too caught up in his hubris to realize there were other options.)

Off to fix my crux capacitor!

"Blimey, a lot of heat is getting expended on this post isn't it? Not quite 'great blonde elevator' comment thread length but darn substantial. I like your last reply to SK btw Rob. Well put."

Well, thank you. Maybe we should have a "which 10 made-up laws of time would you like to share an elevator with?" meme.

Well done everybody else too. This one had legs.

Blimey, a lot of heat is getting expended on this post isn't it? Not quite 'great blonde elevator' comment thread length but darn substantial. I like your last reply to SK btw Rob. Well put.

It's taken me for fricking ever but I finally reviewed it -

http://womanwhotalkedtoomuch.blogspot.com/2009/11/doctor-who-waters-of-mars-children-in.html

FWIW, I'm on the same wavelength as SK: you can't tell a good sci-fi story without a bit of arm-waving, but you need to be careful where you put it, and in this episode a very weak bit got put right at front-centre with the whole emotional weight of the piece hanging from it.


It's not really about logic - none of Who works if you start thinking about that too deeply - but for me at least it musn't feel so utterly arbitrary and trivial in its consequences.


The powers and vulnerabilities of vampires, werewolves and the like are equally arbitrary, but they have the weight of many years of storytelling behind them and for the purposes of creating drama they are as convincing as everyday things like gravity, taxes and tooth decay.


The dodgy time travelling logic of Blink didn't matter, because the prime power of that came from the very simple, very chilling idea that maybe statues move when you're not looking. And maybe they're out to get you.


This was just a naked plot device: "it's important that you die, so that I can experience powerlessness and then the consequences of ignoring the rules". And of course so that he can become a tragic hero who must eventually die because he can go on no more. Yada, yada, yada. ;)

"The Blinovitch Limitation Effect was a throwaway line when it first appeared, so it's hardly surprising it wasn't explained (indeed, that was the joke: the Doctor says 'oh that can't happen because of the B.L.E.' as if Jo knows what he's talking about)"

Not exactly. It was throwaway, but it was designed to plug a gap. Jo asks the Doctor why, if they cock up, they can't just go back in time again and fix their balls-up as well. The Doctor says 'Ah, that's because of the BLE,' Jo asks 'What's that?' and before the Doctor can say, he's interrupted.

That's bigger handwaving that "fixed points in time" by miles and it was jokey and we accepted it, just as we accepted the first Doctor's "but you've discovered television, haven't you?" explanation for why the TARDIS is bigger on the inside than the outside.

Without timey-wimey things, there wouldn't have been Day of the Daleks, Mawdryn Undead, Remembrance of the Daleks, Blink, et al. Mawdryn Undead wouldn't have happened at all without an arbitrary made-up Timey Wimey rule. Ditto Father's Day - what happens when paradoxes happen as a result of time travel? Big beasties pop up, that's what. Who says? We do.

I don't think there's anything wrong with arbitrary rules in your entirely made up universe, any more than there's anything wrong with having your vampires not show up in mirrors, your werewolves allergic to silver, et al. It's your universe. Do you really need to explain exactly why your vampire hero can't go out into the daylight? Do you need to explain the photons and how they react with the dead cells in vampire skin, creating an exothermic reaction? Or can we simply assume that because the vampire says it will be bad, it'll be bad?

Fixed point in time could be explained by numerous bits of quantum mechanics if you really, really wanted (interference with the troughs in overlapping universal quantum wave functions simply causes them to go out of phase, creating destructive interfere that sums over histories to zero; if all of history is only here because we are the observers who observe the past and resolves the wave functions, interference with the observers at a fixed point causes all of the past to be rewritten as well, causing wave functions to no longer collapse).

But "bad, bad things, like the stuff we saw in Father's Day, Logopolis, et al" but worse were the general implication and I'm happy with that. It's implied, it's not spelt out, but that's okay. Maybe it will be one day, maybe it won't be. It's a Macguffin as bad as Notorious's uranium but I'm willing to go with it, at least.

Generally we don't have to take it as read that when the Doctor looks a bit terrified bad things will happen, though: there's generally some suggestion as to what those bad things might be, like a monster rampaging around the place or some mysteriously dead bodies.

The Blinovitch Limitation Effect was a throwaway line when it first appeared, so it's hardly surprising it wasn't explained (indeed, that was the joke: the Doctor says 'oh that can't happen because of the B.L.E.' as if Jo knows what he's talking about). And in 'Earthshock' (or rather, 'time-Flight', which is where the 'can't we go back for Adric' discussion is) it's again not a major dramatic crux and swept under the carpet as quickly as possible -- which is the best thing to do with these kind of wibbly time-travel things, sweep them under the carpet and get on with a real story with real jeopardy (that's how the old series played it, most of the time) because if you look at them too hard -- as for example when you make them the focus of an episode -- it becomes all too obvious that they are just arbitrary made-up rules.

It's the same as how you don't do an episode about how the Doctor can't stop the holocaust. There's simply no dramatically satisfactory answer to that question (the novel which tried to address it only succeeded in proving that) so the best thing to do is just accept that your audience realise that would be in bad taste and move on.

The problem with the Ood at the end is that if it is foreshadowing universal disaster then it looks fearfully like that disaster will be another one of the Davies era's no-logical-causality 'this is what's happening now, we know it doesn't follow on from the last scene, but just accept it because Murray Gold is playing strings at you.'

"But rescuing people is a clear and obvious good, while the 'Laws of Time' are abstract and arbitrary and the kind of thing the Doctor breaks all the time anyway."

For what it's worth, I was convinced of the wrongness in messing with time. For me, the choice between saving people and keeping the timelines the same wasn't at all clear cut (well, except that he could have saved them but taken them somewhere far from 21st century Earth and hence done both but nevermind). Actually I think I agree with the line Adeleide took- a good future is worth a sacrifice.

As an aside, I am not sure why the Dalek, intent on destroying reality, would spare Adeleide.

"But it is part of the crux. Both those things you identify rely on there being some reason why he shouldn't save them -- some 'bad side-effects' or some 'evil result'. But what these bad side-effects are or what that evil result might be is not convincingly shown."

We take it as red, generally, that when the Doctor looks a bit terrified, then bad things will happen. We've already had Father's Day show what happens when one law of time set up by the Time Lords gets broken. Isn't it kind of in the same area by implication?

The effects of the Blinovitch Limitation Effect weren't explained for a decade. Why Adric couldn't be saved at the end of Earthshock isn't explained without it and then only implicitly. Yet it takes until Mawdryn Undead for the explanation to turn up. Doesn't mean Earthshock or the ending of Earthshock was bad.

Who's to say (apart from Rusty and co until December 25th) that the Ood turning up at the end following the Doc's cock-up (a la The Watcher in Logopolis - we got the Cloister Bell later didn't we, or was that in the End of Time trailer?) isn't the herald of the universal disaster that's still to come?