When he finds the crystal wall he has a moment where he remembers seeing the word bird and specifically says that he "remembers" and that it's always at this point that he remembers, which is when he has his "I can't keep doing this" meltdown. But

A) how can he remember when he's a 3d print of himself as he was at the time of teleporting and cannot have the memories of previous printouts of himself (who are all skulls now it seems) and

B) how can he have seen the word "bird " and the skull halfway though the episode, before he had written it and fried himself and after the The room must have reset itself from the last time (if it hadn't the skull and the writing would have been there when he stepped out of the teleporter at the beginning)

Because at some point, once the carcass has been picked clean, there still has to be a TV show?

Did this episode remind you of the Prisoner Grisonaut? He's not a number you know ....

He's number 12

I don't believe he remembers every previous reiteration of the cycle but it's at that point that her remembers the story of the Bird and the Diamond mountain and realises what he has to do (and that he's done this 1000's of times already).

Hence the meltdown


The word Bird and the Skull are in the Teleport room when the Doctor first arrives just behind the Console. We don't see them when we first see the scene as the Doctor leaves the room without looking there. However the second time we see him appear in the Teleporter the camera pans across and shows us the Skull and Bird

If it takes two billion years, it's not remotely possible. That was, to all intents and purposes, a completely impenetrable wall. What he did to break the confession dial was about as likely as Al Capone getting out of Alcatraz by punching a hole through the centre of the Earth - physics would allow it, but it shouldn't have been feasible. If there was a design flaw, it was resetting the hard drive of the teleporter - but it burns you up either way, so you'll still only ever get one Doctor at a time.

The crystal would have lifted if he'd confessed - far and away the easier option. What he did to get around this was so creative, bloody-minded and self-destructive as to be completely inconceivable. Whoever put him there, whoever automated the confession dial was trying to extract information and trying to extract it quickly, they were trying to force him to admit defeat; the game was specifically designed to be unwinnable on the Doctor's own terms.

Apologies for quoting in the wrong order:


It's still not completely certain what 'their' motivations are (is this how confession dials are supposed to work, or did someone tamper with it?) but I can only one motivation that's essential, and one that's optional:
1) The essential reason. That there are only two outcomes - either give in and confess the Really Important Thing, or make it extremely clear how incredibly serious you are about holding onto the Thing.
2) The optional one - that they, for some reason, couldn't bring the Doctor into the right time period directly (perhaps because time travel doesn't work in the weird art zone) and so they had to delay the process long enough to get him to the right time.

Or a combination of both, I suppose.

Until it was. As proven by the Doctor doing exactly that.

I mean, the Timelords who chose to put him through this torturous scenario clearly knew who they were dealing with, and obviously didn't want him to die in there without first getting the confession out of him. They must have felt that this particular method was the only one that would work. Otherwise why go through with such an elaborate scheme in the first place. Surely they must have considered pretty much every other way of getting the information out of the Doctor and rejected them as unworkable before attempting this rather extreme option.

So they gave him a threat to face that could only be defeated by confessing something, and the means to save himself should he not confess the right thing. As convoluted as it all might sound, that makes sense given what they were after, as far as we currently know. But why include the crystal wall in the scenario at all? Why even have it there? Surely a better idea would be to eliminate all hope of an escape outside of giving the required confession? And better yet, somehow allow the Doctor to maintain his memory of each previous cycle, just to hasten the loss of hope of any escape other than confessing to whatever they needed to hear. Giving the Doctor a back door of any kind was always going to be a mistake, and they must have been aware of that if they knew anything about the kind of person he is. The man spent hundreds of years sat in a clock tower on Trenzalore just to protect a single town, sacrificing the last of what he thought was his final lifetime. He's not the kind of man you give another option to, no matter how far fetched.

So yes, what he did was indeed incredibly creative, bloody-minded and self-destructive, but that would describe the Doctor perfectly when it comes to him having his back against the wall, and the Timelords know this. The second they included the possibility of another way out of there, they lost all hope of the Doctor confessing.

Which is all rather getting away from the original point of what I was saying. That being that I don't actually believe the Doctor spent 2 billion years of real time within the dial at all, instead experiencing a hugely accelerated virtual reality. Making much of my argument in this particular post rather redundant!

Well, to be fair, at that point he has no idea why the stars are a billion-years displaced from where they should be, without feeling time travel. But I grant you, he probably has a suspicion.

It probably would drive you to irrational acts. Do you know what happened to the last guy put in that situation? He tried to punch his way through a wall of solid diamond. What a nutcase.

For what's it's worth, it really doesn't make much difference whether it's a virtual world or not, the experience has been shown to be indistinguishable. For a race with spatial and temporal dimension manipulation technology, doing such things with real matter is almost trivial.

Hehe, swear I've seen that somewhere before! Was the story ever televised?

extra time ?
he could've just written it as he went along on a wall somewhere , I'm not suggesting he write book , just a message .

I don't get how the skulls in the sea can be the Doctor. If he is able to reset himself and his memories, where do the skulls come from? They can't be the Doctor. It's not possible.

well its not a reset , it's like printing off the same document millions of time . the building resets itself but the doctors are all real .

I do wonder how many there are tho - if it was 2 billion years , how many skulls is that ? I reckon each one lasted about a week , that's , gulp - 100 billion ?

I suspect it has been a couple of billion years, I think the Ashildr from Hell Bent's trailer will be 2bn years old, purely cos I can't imagine anyone going to the bother of simulating day by day star patterns for that length of time!

The exit needed to be visible to tempt the Doctor into one last confession, and the blockage needed to be something a billion Doctors could never get through but something the dial could slide aside the second he confessed. Making the door a 20ft thick diamond seems like a robust enough physical barrier - even if he had the shovel, the Doctor wouldn't survive two billion years, each regeneration dies of old age after a couple of thousand, he shouldn't have lasted that long. You know the phrase "never in a million years?" Never, in a million years, could the Doctor have escaped from his personal hell. That is not skimping on the security.

It's designed to extract a confession. I don't think the Time Lords (or whoever) could have anticipated such a demented escape, and I think it makes the Doctor's escape a lot less interesting and less dramatic if he's just following the failsafes the Time Lords deliberately left him. Nobody builds an escape route into a torture chamber, however convoluted! The Doctor escaping without confessing was a mistake.

Thinking it's more than that I think each cycle lated about 1 day so it must be in the trillions by the time he broke through.

It was certainly more than one day.

He took a day and half just to crawl from Room 12 to the Teleport room, prior to that he spent at least a day searching the Castle and running from the Veil. Probably even longer as he mentions grabbing some sleep at one point and the Doctor can go a long time without needing to sleep.

So I'd say each cycle was at least 2 and half days long but could have been much longer.

If they were all the Doctor's skulls, then surely they'd have broken the surface of the water and became sky high after less than 1% of the time had passed,

It could be the portal to Gallifrey, protected by the wall, takes him back through time, so he arrives on Gallifrey whenever whoever designed the trap wants him to, no matter how long he has been in the dial?

I have no conclusive proofs. But I am satisfied for the following possibilities:
The central room was reset. Not necessarily the sea.
Most rooms had a shuffling so while the room contents were reset, not necessarily the cogs and pathways.
The confession dial is bigger on the inside. Timelord technology and all that.
We didn't see a limit to the sea by boundary or other land, perhaps it is very deep and very large. You could definitely collect two billion skulls in that volume. It's not a stretch mathematically. If it requires a bigger volume of water, fine, it's a bigger volume of water. Tada!
The Veil wore a veil. Not sure why that's important.

actually thinking about it - some of the skulls would have eroded after a while and crumbled .

Maybe Time Lord bone is tougher than we think.
After all it's possible for a Time Lord to punch through extra super hard crystal walls - ok it takes two billion years but still... that's some strong ol' bones he's got there.

well that was what I was wondering - was there some good reason why he used his bare fists rather than a shovel or something ? Have we ever had any indication of how strong he is ?

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I think it's along the lines of ...

The word prompts him to recover any memories he implanted into his next "clone" via the contacts he places on his temples before he fries himself. Up until he sees it he can't remember.

The reason that's there is because unless there had to be some way of varying things should he "die". If he simply died then whoever arranged it wouldn't get any information. Hence the gradual change in the stars to prompt his realisation that something is going on. It might be a kind of matrixed copy of his mind being tortured or a living one.

As far as I can tell, the Doctor remembers nothing at all from previous iterations. The teleport device creates a new Doctor as he was at the moment he was first teleported, from the transporter "buffers". Each time, he works it out from scratch, realises what the escape route is and must recreate the same clue for the next copy to follow. The word "bird", written in the dust, is the only clue he has time to pass on to the next one as by then he's already dying and has just enough time to make it back to the teleport room and operate the lever. The only thing that changes, infinitesimally each time, is the crystal.

the thing is - when he gets to the wall and realises what he must do he says to Clara that he remembers it all now , every time , etc.
when I watched it first I just thought he was complaining about always having to be the hero , but watching it a second time he seems to be actually saying that he now remembers all the incarnations .


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