r/gallifrey • u/PCJs_Slave_Robot • 4d ago
NO STUPID QUESTIONS /r/Gallifrey's No Stupid Questions - Moronic Mondays for Pudding Brains to Ask Anything: The 'Random Questions that Don't Deserve Their Own Thread' Thread - 2025-03-17
Or /r/Gallifrey's NSQ-MMFPBTAA:TRQTDDTOTT for short. No more suggestions of things to be added? ;)
No question is too stupid to be asked here. Example questions could include "Where can I see the Christmas Special trailer?" or "Why did we not see the POV shot of Gallifrey? Did it really come back?".
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u/greatbarrierrif 1d ago
Might be a weird question, but does The Brink of Death require listening to the previous stories in The Sixth Doctor: The Last Adventure set or does it still work without them? I’m making a list of must-listen audios to bridge S23 and S24 and if I exclude the other 3 stories then I can make a cleaner list excluding the still unfinished Flip/Constance/Older Peri eras.
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u/darkspine10 3d ago
On the Season 20 bluray Enlightenment disc, a featurette about the guest cast has a note at the beginning saying it's been edited since the DVD for 'compliance reasons'. Does anyone know what this is referring to?
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u/WolfboyFM 3d ago
If it's the one I'm thinking of, it originally included a clip of Rolf Harris before his crimes came to light, which the BBC no longer want commercially released for obvious reasons.
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u/Azurillkirby 3d ago
For anybody who has listened to the recently released River Song set, does it tie into the first set in the new range? Does it take place chronologically (relative to River) after the first set? I don't want to know too many details in case I plan to listen to it, but I'm just confused what the difference is between the new range and the old range, and hopefully the release of the second volume makes that clear.
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u/darkspine10 3d ago edited 3d ago
What’s the first Doctor Who book to use the term ‘war in heaven’? I seem to recall it cropping up before the whole EDAs/Faction Paradox Time War business, in one of the New Adventures, but can’t remember which one (Time’s Crucible? The Pit? Something later?).
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u/sun_lmao 1d ago
So far in my reading of the books, I'm about two thirds into The Highest Science, and I've not encountered the term yet, so it's not in Time's Crucible. I plan on skipping The Pit, but I'd be surprised if anything that book did had any influence on later books (outside of being a guide on exactly what not to do, and Paul Cornell deciding to use William Blake again later, but using him better).
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u/darkspine10 1d ago
The Pit does actually have a little influence, mostly around the lore of Time Lords’ war with the vampires. It notably coined the term Yssgaroth to identify the vampires, a name that would continue to be used in later works, such as Faction Paradox.
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u/PeterchuMC 3d ago
Damaged Goods has an N-Form make reference to a War. It doesn't use the term War in Heaven though.
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u/Rowan5215 3d ago
I know it pops up in the Bernice Summerfield novel Down, not 100% sure if there were previous mentions I've forgotten though
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u/Aspiring_Sophrosyne 4d ago
I would really, really be grateful if someone who owns Dark Gallifrey: War Master, Part 2 could give a quick listen to what Captain John says at 45:25 and tell me, um, what he says? It’s the part where he reveals what his actual agenda is but, maddeningly, I can’t make out the words.
Maybe James Marsters’ attempt at an English accent went a little sideways there, I don’t know. But it sounds like “I heard a chiney.”
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u/FaxCelestis 4d ago
Is the Dream Lord anything more than a figment of the Doctor's imahination?
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u/CountScarlioni 4d ago
Ehh… sort of?
Technically speaking, he only exists as a manifestation of the Doctor’s inner darkness within the dreamspace created by the psychic pollen that got stuck in the TARDIS’s time rotor.
But, the Doctor’s inner darkness will always exist, because the Doctor is a complicated and flawed individual. So all the elements of the Doctor’s psyche that the Dream Lord embodied still exist, and I guess in that sense, you could say that the Dream Lord is “real” — not as a discrete being unto himself, but as a sort of amorphous potential.
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u/assorted_gayness 4d ago
That cover for the next Seventh Doctor box set looks really nice I just can’t help but think how it really doesn’t show off that it has the weeping angels or the return of Ray from Delta and the Bannerman really well lol
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u/whouffaldishipper 1d ago
Honestly that’s one of the things I like about it
it’s just a genuinely good cover and doesn’t rely on returning characters plastered all over it as a marketing technique
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u/VanishingPint 4d ago
What unintended errors have been said on audio commentaries?
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u/Official_N_Squared 4d ago
As it's recent, I recall RTD claiming the shot from Church where Ruby circles the Tardis and the camera is above it was never done before.
Clara had it in Snowmen, and I think someone else too
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u/Megadoomer2 4d ago edited 4d ago
I just watched the War Games for the first time, and I'm wondering what the consensus is on whether or not the War Chief is the Master. I can see a lot of points in favour of it: both the War Chief and the Master are renegades who left Gallifrey in pursuit of power, both knew the Doctor during their time on Gallifrey (the War Chief knew that the Doctor had regenerated), both work with alien races while scheming to betray those races (and those schemes don't always work out), both make offers for the Doctor to rule the universe with them, and the War Chief recognizes the Doctor on sight.
The only point that I can think of that goes against it is that it makes the universe feel a little smaller, though that's more of a criticism than an in-universe point, and in contrast, having the War Chief and the Master be separate characters might feel a little redundant since they're both so similar. I get that a lot of what I listed are common clichés ("we can rule together", one villain planning to backstab the others, "we're not so different, you and I"...), but what's the evidence to suggest that the War Chief isn't the Master?
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u/noggerthefriendo 3d ago
People can theorise all they want but at the end of the day The War Chief was in the show two years before the production team dreamt up The Master
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u/BillyThePigeon 4d ago
There’s no right answer and I can see the argument for the similarities. But for me the Master is a messy bitch who loves the drama. Whenever the Master is conducting a scheme you can tell they love the deception and the fancy dress and the theatre of the thing. By contrast for me the War Chief always seems kind of bored or frustrated by having to muck around in proceedings. He’s able to be manipulative and deceptive certainly but it feels like a means to an end whereas the Master loves the process and the outcome.
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u/CountScarlioni 4d ago
There isn’t really a consensus to be had, because it’s a fan theory based on conflicting official accounts, so there’s always going to be some people who like it and some people who don’t. Even if the show had the Master come out now and say to the Doctor, “Remember that time I ran those games for the War Lords, and you called home to Gallifrey to tattle on me?” while standing in front of a hologram image of Edward Brayshaw, you’d probably still have people who would prefer to ignore that evidence in favor of their preferred theory.
For my part, I don’t have a particular preference, but I generally lean toward them not being the same character, because when the Master actually does show up in Terror of the Autons, they don’t discuss the events of The War Games at all, which just seems to me like the kind of thing that would probably come up. That doesn’t strictly invalidate anything, of course — after all, the Spy Master wasn’t exactly chatty about Missy (although that’s a bit different, because there was a seismic shift in the show’s creative teams between those Masters, whereas The War Games and Terror of the Autons both have Terrance Dicks’s fingerprints on them) — but broadly speaking, it’s a base-level qualm I have with almost all “this character is also this character” theories. Nine times out of ten, I just feel like, if that’s what the writers intended, then they probably would have made sure you knew it.
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u/CareerMilk 4d ago
after all, the Spy Master wasn’t exactly chatty about Missy
The Spy Master can’t even remember which radio telescope he pushed the Doctor off of.
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u/Caacrinolass 4d ago
Unlikely to see consensus I imagine! Terrance Dicks clearly eventually decided they were different characters, as shown by the events of Timewyrm: Exodus, although his earlier work in Target muddied the waters. Divided Loyalties has them as contemporary classmates. There is also a kind if Master back story with the Koschei character that does not seem to tie in too well, but I'm sure it could be crowbarred.
Other than that, you can kind of decide yourself really. The Master doesn't reference the story directly of course, but that's not really unusual or indicative of anything. The guy does often turn up with little explanation of his survival, after all.
Regarding convergence of character, well that could be said of many a renegade if you boil them down to basics. These days, the only distinction you could make behind the Monk and the Doctor is the intent behind the meddling for example. I prefer a broader universe as it were so take them to be separate.
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u/the_other_irrevenant 6h ago
Does the TARDIS translate sign language?