In this month's DWM Moffat has revealed that the Doctor doesn't realise yet that the Time Lock no longer holds. The barn in Listen and the Day of the Doctor is in the Wastelands of Gallifrey according to Moffat. The Moment not only unlocked the events leading up to the supposed destruction of Gallifrey but allowed them to change, which is why Clara was able to visit the young Doctor, because the Time Lock is fractured.

I wonder how this will play out in future storylines?

Slayer2012

But the moment and it's effects were only present from the time the doctor stole and subsequently attempted to use it - aka from John hurt in the barn onwards. There would be no effect on anything to do with the doctors life or Gallifrey before hand. To me this just sounds like Moffat coming up with more excuses to play around with the doctors history and trample all over it, just to create gimmicky scenes set in his past to where there only point is to drum up publicity. He should focus on making the doctors present interesting and more coherent than he sometimes makes it before playing around in the doctors past seemingly just to amuse himself.

I think that's a bit harsh. Obviously, as with any producer/Showrunner/whatever their responsibility is to entertain as many people as possible, but with this programme there is a heck of a lot of backstory, and C21 Who is there to recognise and celebrate the past, but embrace the future. (Made MYSELF queasy with that last sentence!) SM and RTD are lifelong fans and will play around with past icons and ideas. Is that self indulgent? Possibly, I guess.

But it's generally working for me.

It must be in the wastelands of Gallifrey... Because the sky is blue... :/ what a silly error. The shot looked lovely in the Day of but seriously. He could have said a satellite or something...

No all of Gallifrey and it's entire history was locked or he could just have gone back to before the war and warned them and met other Time Lords if it was so easy to go back don't you think he would have by now.



All of this was explained

Meh, Gallifrey's sky has been blue before

It wasn't completely absent, however.

http://dailypop.files.wordpress.com/...barn.png?w=640

Thanks CD. It just bothered me about the sky but... That's better.

I don't see how that holds. The Moment is a time-manipulating device - if it's capable of isolating the Time Lords from the future, it should be more than capable of isolating them from the past. Similarly, it should be able to provide exceptions and ways between if it deems necessary.

That makes sense.

Still, I think Moffat is commenting on how we have seen the Time Lock portrayed so far.
It's been a bit of a sieve, allowing various characters to fall through time: the Doctor, a lone Dalek, Dalek Emperor, Dalek Caan (with a boatload of Daleks and Davros) and now presumably the Master/Mistress.

Perhaps the Moment is selectively allowing these to fall through time (and out of the Time Lock) or it is progressively loosening the lock, so that Gallifrey will completely pop out someday.

OK. Not for the first time I am quite confused about all this Time Locking business and the timey-whimeyness of it all.

I thought that since the events of the Day of the Doctor were shown that the War Doctor had always hidden Gallifrey in a pocket universe rather than destroying it but that he became unaware that he'd done that as he regenerated shortly after and simply thought that he'd destroyed it, Doctor 10 forgot the events of the Day of the Doctor when he returned to his time stream, and Doctor 11 only remembered what he had done because everything in the Day of the Doctor happened in his time stream so he retained the memories.

But now this latest quote from Moffat seems to imply that the Doctor changed his own personal history with the events of the Day of the Doctor, and whereas he originally did destroy Gallifrey he now didn't.

Err, I think? Is that right or have I misunderstood?

Seems right, and in line with what Moffat's thinking. The Moment isolated Gallifrey and all the horrors of the war behind an impenetrable wall, then allowed the Doctors in long enough to change the events and allow only Gallifrey out into a pocket universe - in theory, Gallifrey can be retrieved and the Time Lock sealed again.

No, I think you were right the first time. I've only seen the quotes and comments here, but it sounds to me like he's only opening the door for possible future stories to take place on Gallifrey of the past.

It's not a problem to say that the Time Lock is no more but I think it is an error to suggest that the Moment was what removed the Time Lock.

The Doctor was mourning the loss of access to his people from his first appearance as the 9th Doctor. This was after the events in Day of the Doctor when the Moment was activated. Are we to believe that he spent all that time feeling he was the last Time Lord in the Universe - never encountering other Time Lords, never sensing other Time Lords - if, in fact, the time lock had been released before he had even regenerated into Christopher Ecclestone?

The Doctor died on Trenzalore because he was fighting off an army of foes who wanted to prevent the Time Lords from returning through the cracks from the other Universe that the Doctor had imprisoned it in.

That timeline could only have happened after the events of Day of the Doctor where Gallifrey was imprisoned in the first place.

If the reference to allowing events to be changed is referring to the events on Trenzalore then that makes no sense as the events of Trenzalore are a result of the Moment being activated and what followed so there wouldn't have been any need to change anything. The Doctor dying on Trenzalore would never have happened anyway!

I'm all for the time lock being gone. There's no reason that the Time Lords, following their encounter with the Doctor and Clara on Trenzalore could not have forced their way back through the cracks and removed the Time Lock once they found that the Daleks were no longer a threat. It was always implied that the Time Lords created it in the first place, to prevent the Daleks going back in time and erasing them from existence. However, I get the feeling from Moffat's quote that he has made his timey-wimey plots so complicated that even he doesn't understand them!

Well, the Moment was the only reason that Ten and Eleven were able to visit War in Day. (Wow, what a weird sentence.)


Yes. Much like in Day of the Doctor, all three of them spent ages trying to figure out how to get through a locked door without checking to see if it's actually still locked. The Time Lords are still behind the door, have always been behind the door. Moffat does like his metaphors...

I don't doubt that the war was locked, and I think it was in Eccleston's time. But the Moment has the power to rewrite large tracts of history, as evidenced by the fact it was able to remove the events of the war in the first place. Changing things again so that Gallifrey is saved and leaving the door unlocked again is child's play in comparison. The Doctors from War to early-Eleven remember things as they were, and aren't aware that things have changed.


Well, there is that simple matter of the entire universe being swallowed up by the cracks, of course.

It is complicated, not because of Moffat, but because the concept is, by necessity, nebulously defined.

Sure, I'm not saying the Moment didn't have power over the Time Lock. It definitely released it on that occasion but I have trouble reconciling the idea that it was a permanent release at that point, rather than just a temporary exception limited to the Doctors.


Yes, but it wasn't just him not thinking to look. He said at one point that he could sense other Time Lords and knew that he was now alone in the Universe. In episode 2 of the first season he travelled to the far future where it was common knowledge that there were no other Time Lords in the Universe. It just doesn't seem credible that he spent hundreds of years in a Universe where other Time Lords were whizzing around again without ever noticing them!


When did it rewrite anything? The firm implication was that Gallifrey had always just been hidden and not destroyed.


But the cracks were only there because the Silence blew up his TARDIS in an attempt to stop him getting to Trenzalore and releasing the Time Lords from their imprisonment. So that must already have been part of the Time Line before the cracks and before the Universe was rebooted.


I guess you could say that the Moment was responsible for ending the Time Lock if we assume that it did so after Gallifrey came back from the pocket Universe. I just don't buy that it did so, before then. Or that it changed anything. Everything must have happened the way it happened in the first place for anything to make sense. The only thing that changed was the Doctor not dying on Trenzalore and that can have had nothing to do with the Moment because his dying on Trenzalore was already established in the time line that existed after the use of the Moment.

Moffat in DWM

That's my point, though. Moffat says that events were allowed to change but nothing was changed!

If Gallifrey really had been destroyed then there would have been no war on Trenzalore to stop the Time Lords coming back, no TARDIS being exploded to stop the Doctor getting to Trenzalore, therefore, no cracks in the Universe, no pandorica, no painting in the Gallery, no impossible girl...

The Doctor that the Moment fished out of the timeline would not have existed!

So, since it couldn't have been the destruction of Gallifrey that changed, what is Moffat referring to?

But it's been established that things don't always happen in the right order... Maybe the relative points from Gallifrey's point of view or maybe the Papal Mainframes point of view are different...

I've spent the day looking at 5 different A Level exam specifications and this thread has blow all of them out of the water for confusion.

Thanks Moffat.

While it's true that cause can come after effect in some cases with Time Travel (e.g. escaping the Pandorica) such causality loops don't represent a change to the time line they are just part of it and are considered to always have been.

Actual changes to the time line, however, ripple through to affect all other points in time that depend on them. Hence why universes started blinking out of existence when the GI jumped into the Doctor's timestream and started erasing his past accomplishments in NotD.

Everything that happened to the Doctor, from the first time we met Amy and saw the cracks in her bedroom wall was all based on the fact that his TARDIS was blown up to try to prevent him getting to Trenzalore and let the Time Lords back into the Universe. So the time lords being saved had to have been part of the time line from at least that far back and his death at Trenzalore was established as part of the time line based on our seeing his grave and Clara having not encountered any Doctors in his timeline other than the 11 we knew about and the War Doctor.

Since the events of DotD preceded the whole of the 11th Doctor's tenure, none of Matt Smith's adventures could have happened unless Gallifrey was already saved. The Moment could not have been the thing that changed the future.

But then, of course, we have the issue of the 12th Doctor's eyebrows turning up in DotD, even though it had been established that he must have died on Trenzalore for the events of NotD to have happened.

It is my belief that when Clara jumped into the Doctor's Time Line at the end of NotD, that's when the future changed. Her experiences changed her. Her experiences in the Doctor's past led her to try to appeal to the Time Lords through the crack and persuade them to help the Doctor with a new set of regenerations. That's why we saw the 12th Doctor appear as one of the Doctors helping to save Gallifrey in Day of the Doctor because, after Clara jumped into the Time Line, the Doctor's death on Trenzalore became unfixed. He now had a future beyond that.

However, that just means that, this time round, DotD happened with the 12th Doctor appearing. Originally, however, the timeline must have featured the events of DotD happening pretty much the same just without the 12th Doctor appearing. It must have already happened that way for any of Matt's adventures to have happened as they did!