Howling:How did The Doctor and Hila survive traveling through the Time Vortex?

It was a big plot point in Planet of the Dead that the people needed to be inside the bus to travel through the wormhole back to Earth. Then Captain Jack held on to the outside of the TARDIS while it traveled through the Time Vortex and it's only because he was immortal that he survived. In Vincent and the Doctor, paper fliers that were attached to the outside of TARDIS were burned off when it traveled through the Time Vortex.

So, in Hide, how did The Doctor and Hila jump through the Time Vortex with just a rope around them and not only use it to travel to a pocket universe but simply survive at all? Every time (that I'm aware of) that we've seen The Doctor or anyone else outside TARDIS was explained by an air corridor surrounding it...the Doctor never actually leapt into a wormhole before. Badwolff ☎  22:06, May 24, 2013 (UTC)

I don't think the wormhole in Planet of the Dead was ever identified as being the Vortex. It was never explicitly said not to be the Vortex, either, but they may have been different. If so, they could easily have different properties.

In Vincent and the Doctor, the posters were indeed burned off when it traveled through the Time Vortex. However, "when" isn't "because". Things have previously traveled through the Time Vortex, while stuck of the outside of the TARDIS without getting burned. In Silver Nemesis, an arrow was stuck in the side of the TARDIS & was carried through the Time Vortex undamaged. In that story, the arrow had a gold-plated head & was later used to kill a Cyber-Leader who was about to kill the Doctor.

It's possible that the reason for the difference is that the posters weren't burned off by the Vortex but by the TARDIS. It's solidly established that the TARDIS is sentient & that she can & does make decisions for herself. She might simply have wanted rid of the posters. It's also established (in The Doctor's Wife) that the TARDIS can do things like archive things that haven't happened yet & has a perception of time that's far superior to the Doctor's, never mind ours. She might have kept the gold-plated arrow in Silver Nemesis because she knew it'd be used to save the Doctor's life.

The fact that the TARDIS is a decision-maker means that any attempt to analyse these things on a mechanistic basis is completely stuffed!

That doesn't apply to travel through the Vortex in the absence of the TARDIS, of course, & we've seen several instances of this.

One method is the use of a vortex manipulator. After the Master stole the TARDIS in Utopia, the Doctor, Jack & Martha used Jack's vortex manipulator to get back to 21st-century Earth, reversing the journey Jack made on the outside of the TARDIS. We saw their arrival at the start of The Sound of Drums & they were uninjured, even if not very comfortable. If the Vortex was what (temporarily) killed Jack, the vortex manipulator must protect its users somehow.

In Hide, the portal was opened by Emma, using a crystal from Metebelis III to enhance her power. Here again we have a possible source of protection. In any case, the Doctor knows quite a lot about the Vortex & he'd simply not adopt a method of travel that'd kill both him & the person he was trying to rescue.

There's far too much "if" & "maybe" about most of this. The one really solid fact is that, when the TARDIS is involved, mechanistic analysis won't work. The rest of it may provide things to discuss but it certainly doesn't provide actual answers. --89.241.67.98talk to me 00:33, May 25, 2013 (UTC)

The wormhole in Hide wasn't the time vortex, so there's no need to worry about what effects it would have in this case (although, even if the Doctor were clinging to the TARDIS through the time vortex, it may be capable of putting a protective "bubble," so to speak, around itself like it does when its doors are open in space. It would certainly do this in order to protect the Doctor, and it likely neglected to offer Jack the same protection because of its initial abhorrence toward him). As for why it didn't disintegrate the Doctor and Hila like the wormhole did to that one guy in Planet of the Dead, it may just be that the two wormholes possess different properties. If I recall correctly, the wormhole in Planet of the Dead was created artificially by tearing open a hole in spacetime, so I could understand why it would be more volatile than the one in Hide, which was seemingly a natural phenomenon. Ensephylon ☎  06:51, May 25, 2013 (UTC)

Yes. We've no good reason for thinking these things, for which the Doctor used different terminology each time, are the same kind of thing. If they're different phenomena, they'll have different properties. Even if they're closely related phenomena, they might have. Take a much simpler & better understood set of phenomena, electromagnetic radiation: X-rays, visible light, radio waves, ultraviolet, gamma rays, microwaves &c are all exactly the same kind of thing. They differ only in frequency but they have very drastically different effects on living tissue (& on electronic systems, too). --89.242.70.240talk to me 10:15, May 25, 2013 (UTC)


 * I appreciate both of your responses which brought up some factors I hadn't considered. But you're probably right, @89, it's best not to get too bogged down in continuity details when Doctor Who is really about story-telling, not teaching physics. I was just hoping there was a reasonable explanation I had just missed when watching the episode.


 * Whether it was a wormhole or the Time Vortex, I still can't believe that The Doctor just jumped in! According to the episode transcript (http://www.chakoteya.net/doctorwho/33-10.htm), he said he needed to "dive into a different dimention" but the transcript does call the passage a wormhole (not an official source, of course).


 * Of course, this doesn't explain how the TARDIS was able to travel there..twice! According to the Doctor: "The Tardis could get in there all right, but entropy would bleed her power sources, you see? Trap her there until the entire universe decayed back into the quantum foam. Which would take about three minutes, give or take, you know." So, I guess we can assume that between these two trips, the TARDIS spent less than 3 minutes in the pocket universe. Pretty speedy! Badwolff ☎  21:16, May 27, 2013 (UTC)


 * Badwolff: There may indeed be a reasonable explanation but you didn't miss it, it simply wasn't given.


 * My point about the TARDIS, though, wasn't that continuity ought to be sacrificed to story-telling but that it doesn't have to be. What the TARDIS is capable of doing ought to be consistent. What she actually does do needn't be, because she can choose what she does. That she can act of her own volition was established in February 1964 (at the latest), when she played what was effectively a game of charades to get across the message "Out of time" in The Edge of Destruction, the 3rd story of Season 1. --89.240.242.61talk to me 22:36, May 27, 2013 (UTC)


 * You know, I think the burden rest on the fans to either accept everything at face value or work on making things "make sense". I was just thinking about another discontinuity. In Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS (TV story), the TARDIS punished the characters when that magic metal was taken. Yet, in The Sound of Drums (TV story), the Master can turn it into the Paradox machine without any seeming interference from the TARDIS...it doesn't act like the sentient machine in Series 3 that we see in Series 6 & 7. Just some of the discontinuity that comes with having a lot of different people writing for the show. Badwolff  ☎  22:59, May 27, 2013 (UTC)


 * I'm not sure I understand what the problem is here. The TARDIS entered the pocket universe via the time vortex (as we saw; in fact, it was the first in-narrative appearance of the new Series 7 vortex), and carried the Doctor and Hila out through the wormhole. What's left to explain or "make sense" of? Ensephylon ☎  01:06, May 28, 2013 (UTC)


 * Ensephylon: It seems you missed the Doctor getting into the pocket universe, in the first instance, without the TARDIS. He jumped through the wormhole wearing a harness attached to a rope. You also missed seeing that Hila got out without the TARDIS. She was pulled through the wormhole using the rope the Doctor had taken with him. (I was 89 earlier.) --2.96.24.42talk to me 14:48, June 1, 2013 (UTC)


 * No, I saw all of that, but as suggested above, there is a key difference between the wormhole in Planet of the Dead and the "reality well" wormhole in Hide that could account for the difference in the properties that are exhibited by them, and as 89 said, wormholes could be like electromagnetic radiation - they all fall under the same umbrella as far as what they are, but are divided according to their respective properties. Ensephylon ☎  05:16, June 2, 2013 (UTC)


 * Ensephylon: OK, but what you said about the TARDIS carrying the Doctor and Hila out (which she didn't) made it seem as if you'd not seen those scenes. Since they were the problem that Badwolff raised & we were discussing, if you'd missed them -- phone rang at the wrong moment or something -- you'd not have known why we were discussing them. BTW, I know what 89 suggested because I am the 89 who suggested it; my ISP assigns me wildly different IP addresses at different times, so I happened to be 2 yesterday afternoon.


 * Badwolff: When I said "What the TARDIS is capable of doing ought to be consistent," I did mean "ought to be". I wasn't saying it always is consistent. As you point out, it tends to vary depending on who's writing the story & sometimes varies in ways it probably shouldn't. In the case of the Master, the most plausible explanation is that, as a Time Lord, he has the ability &, as a nasty so-and-so, he has the willingness to compel the TARDIS to do what he wants. If the reason's good enough, even the Doctor will make her do things she really doesn't want to do -- like taking him to Trenzalore! She did put up quite a fight in The Name of the Doctor, after all. --89.240.253.132talk to me 13:22, June 2, 2013 (UTC)


 * You know, @89, I'm beginning to think that much of TV is about images rather than expository text. Either Moffat or the writer (can't remember who it was) liked the image of the Doctor jumping into the reality well with a rope around him so they wrote that in. And gave a reason why the TARDIS couldn't go to the pocket universe...until they needed it to travel to the pocket universe at the end (and twice!). Likewise the plot hole that the Doctor drops into the forest, unhitches himself and then when it's time to get Hila back, he attaches her to the rope...which is now lying in the middle of the house, it's somehow moved from the forest location.


 * I'm almost beginning to think that they get a rough storyline outline they want to tackle (or, in the case of Dinosaurs on a Spaceship, just a title). Then they must storyboard it, tell the production team, location scouts, costumers what they want the episode to look like, how they visualize it. And it's later that they write out the episode, providing exposition explaining what is going on and why and create snappy repartee between characters. It's like, for example, in The Bells of St. John, Moffat must have wanted to have The Doctor drive up the side of a skyscraper and then came up with a motorcycle having some "anti-grav" controls that would allow this to happen and wrote in a scene with a motorcycle.


 * This might seem obvious to other people but it changes the way I see the episodes evolving. First comes a loose storyline (which characters appear and what happens), then create a visual picture of what the episode should look like and finally, they write in all of the timey-wimey stuff that would allow the story to happen in the DWU. This is not how I, as a viewer, have seen the shows so it now makes me more forgiving of plot holes because, in the end, they are just a device to make a portion of the story seem plausible to viewers. It's not the crux of the story, it's thrown in at the end (probably after consulting sources like this Wiki) and so we can expect these inconsistencies to continue to happen. Badwolff ☎  19:25, June 2, 2013 (UTC)


 * Badwolff: The rope was "in the middle of the house" only because the house was a projection created by Emma. The Doctor actually said as much to Hila, although he was muttering & the line could easily be missed (I only heard it the second time I watched). That dialogue explanation was reinforced by the house vanishing when Emma collapsed. The location was always the same & was always in the forest. That's why the Doctor was suddenly back in the forest when Emma collapsed. It's not a plot hole -- but it probably was an instance of the situation not being made clear enough in the production.


 * Without watching the DVD again (on the same screen I'm using for this), I can't recall the exact words but the Doctor remarked to Hila that Emma was being clever by projecting the house to show them where to find the rope -- because they had lost their bearings.


 * The TARDIS stuff, though, does seem like a plot hole. She can't go there but then she can.


 * That also obscured something extremely unusual in DW. It obscured it so effectively that I've not yet seen it remarked on in any of the discussions: Clara piloted the TARDIS herself! --89.241.77.88talk to me 20:57, June 2, 2013 (UTC)


 * @89, I did not see that AT ALL! The pocket universe was created by Emma? I don't see how it could be a physical manifestation. But that's like another string that if you start pulling, the whole plot will fall apart.


 * But that is a stunning plot twist that didn't come across and I've seen this episode 4 times. Sometimes, I need to go and read the transcript to get every detail of information that is uttered. Badwolff ☎  22:14, June 2, 2013 (UTC)


 * Badwolff, "The pocket universe was created by Emma?": Not the pocket universe itself, just the projection of the house. --89.241.77.88talk to me 22:22, June 2, 2013 (UTC)


 * At least, I don't think the pocket universe itself was created by her. The projection of the house definitely was. I assume her empathy let her sense that the two of them (Hila & the Doctor) had got lost, so she provided a landmark to help them. --89.241.77.88talk to me 22:30, June 2, 2013 (UTC)


 * @89: No, Clara didn't pilot the TARDIS at all; it piloted itself. All Clara did was hang onto the console. Also, regarding the point about the TARDIS not being able to/being able to go to the pocket universe being a plot hole; it wasn't said that the TARDIS couldn't go there; in fact, they said just the opposite, which is why the Doctor (and the TARDIS) explained that if it did go into the pocket universe, it couldn't stay long without the entropy draining its heart. Ensephylon ☎  03:45, June 3, 2013 (UTC)