Howling:Eye of Harmony in the Doctor's TARDIS

We all see the Eye of Harmony inside the Doctor's TARDIS in the TV Movie, apparently its main power source. Now "The Deadly Assassin" also features the Eye of Harmony, but there it resides on Gallifrey. Some have attempted to solve this discrepancy by saying that the Eye in the TVM was not the same as in TDA, but a duplicate that's part of all Type 40 TARDISes. But when you think about it, even that doesn't make much sense, because by the Doctor's time, no one on Gallifrey knew the location of the Eye; it had long ago been lost in the ancient past, and was regarded as mostly mythical. So how could the Time Lords have duplicated something they had so little knowledge of? 82.2.136.93 19:55, August 13, 2011 (UTC)

Well the real world answer is that the TV Movie wasn't very well written and had a lot of plot points that didn't make any sense. The eye being in the TARDIS makes about as much sense as the Doctor's mom being a human, or a human retinal pattern being neccessary to open the eye. In universe, one could argue that as the TARDIS was already a museum piece when the Doctor stole it, it could have been built back in the day when the Time Lords had more knowledge of the eye.Icecreamdif 21:37, August 13, 2011 (UTC)


 * It's not just a duplicate; it's also a link to the real thing. The power to run the TARDIS comes over that link, and the Master fell through that link into the Eye.


 * The idea that it's a duplicate comes from the EDA/PDA novels (The Eight Doctors and The Quantum Archangel). Other novels in that range refer to the TARDIS's link to the Eye. And later, RTD explicitly talked about the link that we saw in the movie no longer being available to power the TARDIS. Of course that was RTD talking off-camera, not the Doctor, so if you really want to, you can argue that the duplicate that we saw in the movie and the link that the Doctor has talked about in the new series are separate things, but that seems kind of silly.


 * The bit in The Deadly Assassin about everyone believing it was lost, some thinking it no longer existed or was always a myth, has never been officially explained. The best and most popular fan answer I've heard is that everyone knew the TARDISes drew energy over a link to something, but nobody knew that that something was the Eye of Harmony. A bit weak, but I don't think there is a really good explanation. (It's also worth considering The Invasion of Time, just a year after The Deadly Assassin, where it seems like everyone in the universe knows about the Eye. Of course the real answer is that Graham Williams didn't remember exactly what Robert Holmes had written a year ago, just as Matthew Jacobs didn't remember it 16 years later, but in-universe, you have to fanwank it to make sense of it.) --173.228.85.35 05:12, August 14, 2011 (UTC)
 * Okay, so how do we explain the Eye in the TARDIS only opening in response to a human retina? I think there's a line in the TV Movie about the Eye not having been opened in hundreds of years, so that would possibly indicate that it had been sealed since the Doctor "borrowed" it from Gallifrey, so the human retina scan would have been in place then, right? 82.2.136.93 10:21, August 14, 2011 (UTC)
 * There are two possibilities.
 * If you go with the idea from the IDW comics that the whole half-human thing was a ruse to fool the Master, the human retina bit was the whole point of that ruse, so it's just not true.
 * If you go with him actually being half-human, as in the EDA novels, either he or the TARDIS reconfigured the lock on the Eye to protect it from other Time Lords, since there are presumably very few other half-human Time Lords around. He'd had the TARDIS for at least 500 years (even going by truncated new-series ages), so there was plenty of time to change it and then for it to go unopened for hundreds of years. (If you don't want to accept any media other than TV, then nothing has ever contradicted his half-human statement, so it's the same as this one.) --173.228.85.35 11:24, August 14, 2011 (UTC)
 * If you go with the idea from the IDW comics that the whole half-human thing was a ruse to fool the Master, the human retina bit was the whole point of that ruse, so it's just not true.
 * If you go with him actually being half-human, as in the EDA novels, either he or the TARDIS reconfigured the lock on the Eye to protect it from other Time Lords, since there are presumably very few other half-human Time Lords around. He'd had the TARDIS for at least 500 years (even going by truncated new-series ages), so there was plenty of time to change it and then for it to go unopened for hundreds of years. (If you don't want to accept any media other than TV, then nothing has ever contradicted his half-human statement, so it's the same as this one.) --173.228.85.35 11:24, August 14, 2011 (UTC)
 * If you go with him actually being half-human, as in the EDA novels, either he or the TARDIS reconfigured the lock on the Eye to protect it from other Time Lords, since there are presumably very few other half-human Time Lords around. He'd had the TARDIS for at least 500 years (even going by truncated new-series ages), so there was plenty of time to change it and then for it to go unopened for hundreds of years. (If you don't want to accept any media other than TV, then nothing has ever contradicted his half-human statement, so it's the same as this one.) --173.228.85.35 11:24, August 14, 2011 (UTC)
 * If you go with him actually being half-human, as in the EDA novels, either he or the TARDIS reconfigured the lock on the Eye to protect it from other Time Lords, since there are presumably very few other half-human Time Lords around. He'd had the TARDIS for at least 500 years (even going by truncated new-series ages), so there was plenty of time to change it and then for it to go unopened for hundreds of years. (If you don't want to accept any media other than TV, then nothing has ever contradicted his half-human statement, so it's the same as this one.) --173.228.85.35 11:24, August 14, 2011 (UTC)


 * I just remembered, the EDAs _do_ establish that what the Master fell into is the link to the Eye on Gallifrey. In The Gallifrey Chronicles, the Master talks to the Doctor through the same link that's used to channel energy back to the Eye of Harmony at the center of the warped bubble of spacetime where Gallifrey used to be. (Of course the Master also had a new body in Henrietta Street, and was embedded in the fabric of the TARDIS in Sometime Never…, but leave it to him to find three different ways of surviving permadeath…) --173.228.85.35 17:56, August 14, 2011 (UTC)
 * And one more even less-related thing: According to RTD, when the cracks in time were closed, so were all of the time rifts, which is why Torchwood has no reason to return to Cardiff. So… where is the TARDIS getting its power from now? --173.228.85.35 18:36, August 14, 2011 (UTC)
 * Isn't there a line in one of the novels or something about the Doctor's TARDIS being well over 5000 years old? Then again, the average Gallifreyan lives for well over a thousand years, so that's probably not really enough time for the location of the prime Eye to be forgotten by the majority of Time Lords. 213.121.200.42 11:32, August 15, 2011 (UTC)
 * in the doctor's wife, it is stated that the doctor has had the tardis for about 700 years Imamadmad 12:02, August 15, 2011 (UTC)
 * "Eye of Harmony" could simply be the Timelords' name for Black Hole. TARDISes could have mini black holes with a very weak gravitational field. The Eye of Harmony on Gallifrey was presumably a much larger black hole. It would have been gravitationally shielded so it didnt swallow up the planet, hence it would be impossible to locate it exactly. And actually it *is* theoretically possible to generate power from a black hole, by capturing the Hawking Radation which is emitted from it. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation#Black_hole_evaporation) 187.58.98.57 12:12, August 15, 2011 (UTC)
 * Isn't there a line in one of the novels or something about the Doctor's TARDIS being well over 5000 years old? Then again, the average Gallifreyan lives for well over a thousand years, so that's probably not really enough time for the location of the prime Eye to be forgotten by the majority of Time Lords. 213.121.200.42 11:32, August 15, 2011 (UTC)
 * in the doctor's wife, it is stated that the doctor has had the tardis for about 700 years Imamadmad 12:02, August 15, 2011 (UTC)
 * "Eye of Harmony" could simply be the Timelords' name for Black Hole. TARDISes could have mini black holes with a very weak gravitational field. The Eye of Harmony on Gallifrey was presumably a much larger black hole. It would have been gravitationally shielded so it didnt swallow up the planet, hence it would be impossible to locate it exactly. And actually it *is* theoretically possible to generate power from a black hole, by capturing the Hawking Radation which is emitted from it. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation#Black_hole_evaporation) 187.58.98.57 12:12, August 15, 2011 (UTC)
 * "Eye of Harmony" could simply be the Timelords' name for Black Hole. TARDISes could have mini black holes with a very weak gravitational field. The Eye of Harmony on Gallifrey was presumably a much larger black hole. It would have been gravitationally shielded so it didnt swallow up the planet, hence it would be impossible to locate it exactly. And actually it *is* theoretically possible to generate power from a black hole, by capturing the Hawking Radation which is emitted from it. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation#Black_hole_evaporation) 187.58.98.57 12:12, August 15, 2011 (UTC)
 * "Eye of Harmony" could simply be the Timelords' name for Black Hole. TARDISes could have mini black holes with a very weak gravitational field. The Eye of Harmony on Gallifrey was presumably a much larger black hole. It would have been gravitationally shielded so it didnt swallow up the planet, hence it would be impossible to locate it exactly. And actually it *is* theoretically possible to generate power from a black hole, by capturing the Hawking Radation which is emitted from it. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation#Black_hole_evaporation) 187.58.98.57 12:12, August 15, 2011 (UTC)

In The Doctor's Wife, it was also stated that the TARDIS was already a musuem piece when he was young. Whenever he went back to Gallifrey in the classic series, other Time Lords were amazed by the fact that an old type 40 would still exist, and would often want to take a look inside etc. because they were so amazed at how old it was. It is possible that more modern TARDISes don't contain an Eye of Harmony or link to they eye or whatever, and have developed a new system generating power. I doubt that "Eye of Harmony" is the Time Lord word for black hole, because they didn't use the term at all in The Three Doctors, when all of their power was being drained by a black hole.Icecreamdif 17:02, August 15, 2011 (UTC)

But the Eye of Harmony is not a regular black hole, is it? It's a singularity that's been specially adapted by Gallifreyan technology, right? Even without the prime Eye, the Time Lords could have designed the Eyes inside TARDISes using the same principles. It wasn't until after the prime Eye's rediscovery that all the mini-Eyes were linked up to it. Alternatively, just how many people in TDA don't know the precise location of the prime Eye? I find it a bit hard to believe that the Lord President and the High Council would have lost it so easily. 82.2.136.93 09:22, August 16, 2011 (UTC)

The link to the Eye on Gallifrey in the TV Movie could be unique to the Doctor's TARDIS. It seems to me that TARDISes are usually powered by the TARDIS Heart, which is seen in "Rose" and "The Parting of the Ways", et al. During the Seventh Doctor's tenure, it was frequently implied that the Doctor was some kind of reincarnation of the Other, a contemporary of Rassilon and Omega, the founders of Time Lord culture, from Gallifrey's distant past. It's my belief that while the "spirit" of the Other resides inside the Doctor's psyche, it only occasionally rises to the surface so he can remember his life as the Other; one such time was during his seventh life (This would explain why the Doctor often thinks of himself as just a Time Lord, while at other times he's aware that he's much more than that). I think the First Doctor might have been partially "possessed" by the Other when he initially fled from Gallifrey with Susan and the Hand of Omega (The Other might well have psychically prompted him to take the Hand, having foreknowledge of his future), and if the Other had been involved in the creation of the Eye, the First Doctor could've utilised that knowledge to build the link to the Eye that we see in the TVM, as a source of extra power. After the Other's spirit went dormant, the Doctor might've forgotten about the link/blocked it from his memory, until his seventh and eighth lives. I seem to recall a line of dialogue in the TVM that the Eye in the TARDIS hasn't been opened for hundreds of years, so I reckon the First Doctor is a prime candidate for its builder. Being linked to the prime Eye on Gallifrey, the TARDIS's Eye would probably be effected by any changes to the prime Eye, which could explain the need for a human retina pattern. Maybe. 82.2.136.93 11:05, August 16, 2011 (UTC)