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)