Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-1711089-20140322010838/@comment-188432-20140514002304

Let's say you have a house at 100 Tottenham Crescent. If you're shown the beginnings of a fire there, and then the edit fades to its smouldering ruins, the dialogue doesn't have to say, "100 Tottenham Crescent burned down" for us here at Tardis to say, "100 Tottenham Crescent burned down".

A better example is the regeneration from Eight to War Doctor. Now, if all you have is The Night of the Doctor, you actually don't have enough evidence to allege that Eight turned into War, because you aren't shown the regeneration using the traditional visual language used by these events. Every other regeneration is a direct transformation from outgoing actor to incoming one, with the face more or less in a locked-off close-up. Night wasn't like that. McGann drops out of shot, and all you see is a reflection of someone who might, sorta-kinda be Hurt. So, with just Night around, it's possible to imagine that something else happened — that there was a narrative reason for the odd editing.

But once you get to The Day of the Doctor, it becomes clearer that nothing else could reasonably have happened but that Eight turned into War, who turned into Nine — and that the reason for the odd visual language of regeneration was down to practical, behind-the-scenes issues: Moffat needed to allege that Hurt was young upon regeneration, but Hurt himself wasn't young at the time of filming.

So, although we want to be careful in not going too far away from the source material, it is possible for us to assert things that have not been specifically relayed through dialogue. And it's possible, as certainly was the case with much of The Rings of Akhaten for dialogue to add confusion, rather than resolve it.

If in doubt, it's always a good method to make a plausible account of things you see on screen — never going beyond what is in the sum of the dialogue and visuals — and then to make a behind the scenes notes in which you explain why there might be some doubt attached to your explanation of events.