The Turing Test [Paul Leonard]
And two days after I complained about the lack of posts about The Turing Test, look what turned up. <3
Every time I check my tracked tags and there’s a new post in both the Alan Turing tag and in the Eighth Doctor Adventures tag, I always hope that someone’s posted about The Turing Test or something related to it. It almost never happens.
![kelleycarries:
“ A man whose face was rarely seen, but who lurked in dark places, as if hiding in the belly of some monstrous leviathan which moved unseen below the surface of human affairs. […] The Doctor must have perceived this shadowy, unseen...](https://64.media.tumblr.com/d09e38cbdbd0579328151f4458b38414/tumblr_mngjzgFLRK1qcejybo1_500.png)
A man whose face was rarely seen, but who lurked in dark places, as if hiding in the belly of some monstrous leviathan which moved unseen below the surface of human affairs. […] The Doctor must have perceived this shadowy, unseen agent as some kind of monster – a brooding presence, throwing his considerable bulk up against all the old orders and factions – and if there was one thing the Doctor couldn’t ignore, it was a monster
a very confused 9 for your dash
You can see he’s thinking, “WHAT THE FUCK?! IT’S THE SAME SIZE ON THE INSIDE!!”
I recently rewatched this episode for the first time since I read The Turing Test, where the Doctor discovers that the TARDIS (who is rebuilding herself after Stuff happened) is just a box, so he throws a fit. I couldn’t help wondering if Nine was thinking about that for just a moment there, before Time being ruptured and the world being destroyed became the main worry.
Apparently Doctor Who Magazine featured these promo comics for some of the Eighth Doctor Adventures.
Oooh, the Time Zero one!
Fact #596
The Time War did not cause the Eighth Doctor to regenerate, rather he regenerated due to shock after his Time War induced amnesia wore off.
IS THIS SUPPOSED TO BE FUNNY
BECAUSE…it is probably completely accurate. *sobs*
It probably is accurate, and not funny at all. *curls up into a ball of emotion*
(via mumblingsage)
Fact #589
The Eighth Doctor met four hundred and thirty-seven versions of Clara Oswald. He didn’t remember any of them.
(via everandeverprolixity)
i really need to get off of the eighth doctor TV tropes page bUT
oh my
(tw: gore/body horror)
Perhaps my favourite example of this is when Eight has a sandbag fall on his chest, and the book describes how it crushes his remaining heart (the other heart having previously been removed from his chest), and drives the broken pieces of his ribs into the floor under his back.
Like, that’s hardcore.
And the best bit is that he’s still alive, even if he’s actually not breathing. I do love Camera Obscura. (And someday I’ll shut up about it. Sometime in the far future.)
The Eighth Doctor and Time War canon
I’ve seen a few posts around saying that Moffat has retconned the existence of Eight when introducing the John Hurt Doctor (we need to figure out a better name for him…) I’d just like to ask, well, how? Eight is obviously still part of the canon. We saw him in Nightmare in Silver and (albeit briefly) in The Name of the Doctor itself. Also, Clara says there are eleven of them, which includes Eight among them.
What has been changed (or seems to have been changed, because all we have at this point are a few hints) is that Eight isn’t the one who destroyed Gallifrey. It says nothing that he didn’t fight the Time War. In fact, all the indisputable canonical evidence (by which I mean the onscreen evidence, and as far as I know, also spin-offs, which by the way I consider canon too) we have is in the TV movie, Gallifrey existed and there was no time-war. By the time Nine turns up in London to find Rose, the Time War has been fought and Gallifrey is destroyed. The only evidence is circumstantial. So Moffat isn’t attacking something which is deeply established in canon, even if a lot of us are very fond of it.
Personally, I’m quite excited by the idea that the Doctor’s past isn’t known properly. I like that we can be so flexible even with the past of a series. I haven’t grown used to the idea of this yet - I still sometimes go ‘eeep’ over it - but at the same time, it’s opened so many new avenues. What I’m least alright with is that the idea of the name the Doctor as a promise and Hurt!Doctor not being the Doctor, exculpates the Doctor himself from wrong-doing (but there’s a hundred examples of the Doctor doing despicable things when he is most certainly the Doctor, so I think the difference is academic). There’s every chance that Eight did fight the Time War, but died during it. After all, it was a war. If he fought during not one incarnation but two, that makes it all worse. And Hurt!Doctor might well have been a very short incarnation.
In conclusion, let’s see where this goes before condemning it. We have about twenty seconds of stuff to base any observations on, and this is bound to be important in the anniversary episode. With any luck, we might learn more about the Doctor during the Time War, regardless of incarnation.
Fear Itself
I’m a little more than halfway through Fear Itself. I thought I had gotten used to Fitz and Eight being coupley all over the place in other EDAs, but this one is just off the scale. They share a cabin, they worry about each other constantly, Fitz goes around thinking that they need to "talk"… This far, the sponge-bath is the least suggestive thing.
(Also fascinated/scared/confused by the fact that I managed to write an internal dialogue very close to that in Fear Itself in The Reminder, a fic which is supposed to be set at about the same time. So I guess I managed to anticipate that pretty well, or accidentally nick it…)
