Ok bear with me.

I had a thought while watching tonight and its a theory. Probably stupid.

Right here goes, in the Time War, The Doctor used "The Moment" to stop the war and lock Gallifey and Time Lords in time. I thought "The Moment" may have been locking The Eye of Harmony in the TARDIS, therefore taking it from Gallifrey, and therefore the thing that powers time travel and TARDISes will be stop time travel and therefore locking the Time Lords in that one place...

That make sense?

Sorry!

How come it was in the TARDIS in the tv movie?

Wasn't that just a link to the main eye? Meaning every TARDIS has an eye but there's the main eye on Gallifrey. There's many many console rooms many eye?

Well the Doctor was half-human in the movie, so I wouldn't sweat the details.

i seem to remember them saying all TARDIS'es had a link to the main eye

Why has the Doctor had to refuel the TARDIS on such things as the Cardiff Time Rift if he's got a connection to the Eye?


Maybe it's only been Doc #11 (or a latter Doc #10) who has managed to reconnect to the Eye therefore avoiding needing to find other sources of fuel.

That's what I mean!

This.

Good point and good counterpoint!

Shoot, I just happened to have started a separate thread (What do we actually know about the Eye of Harmony) on this just now without having noticed yours, OP. My OP:

I'm an American fan who came in with the Tenth Doctor (my first episode was the Idiot's Lantern), so, while I've seen some Classic Who (including the Deadly Assassin), my mastery of Who lore is still developing.

I know from Deadly Assassin that:


And I know from the TV movie that, controversially, the 7th/8th Doctors' TARDIS had an Eye of Harmony onboard. And I suppose that it is the substance of this controversy that confuses me: was it ever stated in televised media that all Time Lord Time Capsules are powered remotely by the Eye of Harmony on Gallifrey?

If all Time Capsules are powered by the one Eye on Gallifrey, what are we to make of the fact that in the Doctor's contemporary Gallifrey the Eye is the stuff of legend? Do the Time Lords really not know what powers their own technology? This seems unsatisfying.

But note that the fourth Doctor says that all the power of the Time Lords devolves from what he deduces the Eye to be. That being true, it's follows that the technology could have been implemented knowingly on each TARDIS without the Time Lords having recorded its origin in their history.

Of course, I'm well aware of the problem of the TARDIS needing to recharge in the post-Time War universe. But could we be mistaking "the power of the Time Lords" as necessarily meaning the energy source of the Time Lords?

Deadly Assassin also tells us that:


That doesn't describe an energy source to me. Perhaps the Eye actually functions as some necessary mechanism for Time Travel, but not as its energy source?

Unless you Classic-Who aficionados can cite something contrary, this at least seems to reconcile the Eye of Harmony inconsistencies...

I thought so too - I posted this in the episode thread, but it got lost in the general griping about the acting and the script...

"The TARDIS has had to "refuel" on numerous occasions in the new series because with the loss of Gallifrey it had lost it's link to the Eye of Harmony and so doesn't have an unlimited energy source anymore.

So what was that we saw tonight if not a link to the star that Omega engineered into a black hole in order to power all of Time Lord time travel technology?"

I know the Doctor lies and can sometimes be a bit vague, but while I can accept the 8th Doctor saying the Eye of Harmony was "in" his TARDIS as meaning a link to it was there - I can't get why 9 and 10 had to "refuel".

As for the dialogue from The Deadly Assassin... I suppose you could always say that Time Lords who never leave Gallifrey haven't bothered to learn anything about Time Lord history and just think it's all myth and legend.

Maybe there's a strata of Time Lord society that's essentially their version of TOWIE/Made in Chelsea? Idle no nothings that think thing's like the Roman Empire is something made up by Hollywood and that the internal combustion engine is a form of witchcraft?

But has that ever been established in televised media? I don't recall that it has, and suspect you're relying on New Virgin adventures or something like that. Please tell me if I'm wrong, but I think I know for a fact that New Who never said anything of the sort. And the only source I know of for the Classic series on the Eye of Harmony (the Deadly Assassin), definitely doesn't say anything of the sort.

Well obviously if the Eye of Harmony is a massive star at the point of collapsing into a Black Hole then it couldn't physically be located on Gallifrey. More likely is that it is held in some other dimension to which there are entrances in many places- ie. in the TARDIS and on Gallifrey.

I wonder whether the previous two Doctors had disconnected the TARDIS from the Eye in case it ripped open the Time Lock to Gallifrey, but after The Master/Mr. Saxon did that anyway The Doctor worked out it was safe to use it to power the TARDIS again.

Is that the same way that a four-storey library couldn't be contained withing a small, blue box?

I'd always assumed - the benefit of seeing episodes like The Deadly Assassin as a child - that the Eye was actually physically located on Gallifrey, under the Panopticon, held in place by some sort of whizz-bang TARDIS-style Rassilon technowizardry. Not necessarily using those words as a child, obviously.

Gary

I think you're right to a point. Wherever it/they are (on Gallifrey/On Gallifrey and all the TARISes), it/they would have to be housed in the Time Lord dimensionally transcendental spatial geography/pocket universe/timey-wimey whatever. But your point only means whether there is a single Eye of Harmony, or as many as there are TARDISes, plus the Eye on Gallifrey, they'd have to be stored thusly. Has it been established canonically that there was only one to which all TARDISes linked? Can we take as canonical the TV Movie's implication that each TARIS has its own Eye? And is it mentioned in Canon absolutely that the Eye is the TARDIS' power supply?

We know that the Doctor's TARDIS isn't unique, there are (or were) many of them.
That being the case, they can't all have contained the Eye of Harmony, as there's only one Eye of Harmony!
I think the idea that all TARDISes were linked to the single Eye, wherever and whenever it was located, was originally true, but after the Time War when Gallifrey was supposedly destroyed, the Doctor imported the actual Eye into his TARDIS, which was then the only one still in existence.
So the Eye we saw in JTTCOTT was indeed the real McCoy (no pun intended!) as no other TARDISes now exist to rely on it for power.

So that was THE eye, moved to the TARDIS?

Which kinda links to my original post about could that have been the "Moment"?

But why do we know that? Again, going back to Deadly Assassin, The Doctor says the power of the Time Lords devolved from the Eye oh Harmony. That's an awfully specific word to use. What if they been using the technology since Rassilon but its origin was lost in Myth. When the Doctor figures out what it is, they start calling every implementation of the technology an Eye of Harmony. Otherwise it's rather hard to believe that the Time Lords had been building Time Capsules powered by something they didn't even remember to exist!


The importing theory could work, though it doesn't explain the pre-war Eye in the TV Movie TARDIS, or the need to recharge the TARDIS at the Time Rift in Season 1. I'm extremely hopeful that someone here can tell me exactly where the notion of the Eye of Harmony as a power source comes from. The language in Deadly Assassins doesn't necessarily suggest that.

We have to put this all down to a continuity error!

it was one of the few things I enjoyed about the episode actually - the idea that the Tardis was powered by a star at the point of collapsing into a Black Hole.

it made good sense. perhaps all Tardises have a similar powersource but he calls his the Eye of Harmony. Maybe some other Time Lord had the Eye of something else - a list of stars called the Eye of...

The Eye of Discord on the Master's Tardis perhaps????

The Eye Of Harmony should never have been thought up in the first place!!!
It's creating all sorts of crap!

Can't they disregard it - like the half-human Doctor?

Well ultimately, you're right of course. I just always wonder to what degree fans are bringing in material from the spinoff media when they clamor about something like the Eye being in the TARDIS. I read today on the TARDIS Data Core site that the whole TARDIS-Eye-as-a-subse-to-Gallifrey's-Eye thing comes from the novel The Eight Doctors, for instance.

And again, there's this from Deadly Assassin:


You wouldn't exactly describe a coal or nuclear plant as "balancing all things." It's an odd way to talk about an energy source. Your right that, for all we know, the writer had "[cryptic legendary language]" down as a placeholder in the script the same way that someone might write "[technobabble]," and we're likely looking for meaning where there was only ever improvisation. But, assuming the maintenance of continuity is desirable, I'd love to peg down the exact constraints in televised canon that the writers face.

I'm just going by my very limited knowledge! I made the OP as an idea I had while watching it.

I'm glad it's been a talking point!

Doesn't have to be a continuity error. What if there is some timelord trickery going on so that THE one and only eye of harmony was indeed in several places at once. Just like in the last episode when Clara was in the same room as the others, but a second out of sync with them. It was behaving like there were 2 rooms.

And as for fuel,maybe it needs other fuel sources for other things, and not just the 'main' power source. Like cars need to top up their water or their windscreen wash, as well as petrol/diesel.

That could work. ? I think.