Listen: Breaking the Time Lock?
Guest contributor Richard Forbes offers some alternate theories on Listen’s ending.
During the (absolutely brilliant) closing moments of Listen, fans were treated with a surprise: the TARDIS landed in the former residence of none other than the Doctor himself, “Post-Junkyard” as it were… before he was even the Doctor, or seemingly an adult. There, our reassuring and charming schoolteacher from Blackpool, does what she does best and consoles the prepubescent Doctor, who is overwrought with nightmares after she scared the bejeebers out of him, of course (good one, Clara).
Predictably, fandom “got to its work,” as Steven Moffat would say and asked an interesting question: how did the TARDIS land, presumably, in Gallifrey? It has been previously established that Gallifrey is “time-locked”. You can’t fly a time-machine into Gallifrey’s time-stream.
I doubt this is a “plothole”, per se, but instead, something Moffat will return to later – it was too obvious for him not to notice. How the TARDIS returned to Gallifrey here, could have major implications for a future… purely hypothetical …. (multi-doctor) return to Gallifrey, possibly? Maybe!?
Anyways, this hasn’t discouraged me and others
Wildcard Theory: There was no time travel at all…
A random aside, but a theory all the same. How do we know that the TARDIS time-travelled at all? The usual visual display units of the TARDIS were malfunctioning and, interestingly enough, the Doctor groaned quite a lot while the TARDIS was in flight and the sounds that the TARDIS made were unusual and not sounds we’ve heard from The TARDIS before.
What if the TARDIS never landed in a physical location, it landed inside a memory, a recollection… a bad dream of the Doctor himself?
Time-travel has always been possible in dreams. – Madame Vastra.
Rummaging through the sad and awfully lonely childhood of the Doctor as he relived it in his own mind, Clara might have been unknowingly telling the truth when she said “this is just a dream”. But remember, very clever people can hear dreams.
Were you tinkering with the TARDIS Again, Doctor?
The TARDIS isn’t supposed to go this far, but some idiot turned the safeguards off. – the Doctor
One potential theory is that we’ve misunderstood what the Time Lock is…. perhaps it’s not a spatiotemporal lock emanating around Gallifrey, but built into time-travel devices of Gallifreyan origin to “block” Time Lords from travelling to Gallifrey’s past. The only known “survivors” of the Time Lock, prior, to The Day of the Doctor were, of course, Daleks – Daleks who had developed their own “temporal-shift” and “time corridor” technology.
I know, I know – that’s silly, why would you ever want to prevent you from visiting yourself … and your parents… and? Exactly, it can’t be ruled out that the Time Lock was never a defense mechanism built for the Time War, but in fact a defense mechanism built to prevent Time Lords messing about in their own time stream. Travelling to meet yourself and violating the causal laws of the progression of time itself also played a role, of course, in Listen.
With this theory, it’s possible the Doctor simply tinkered with the TARDIS enough that the old “safeguards” had been removed, disabling the time lock and allowing the TARDIS to fly both to the end of the universe and his early childhood.
That’s No Moon…
Or maybe it was a moon. A colony? Who knows, eh?
A popular theory suggests that the TARDIS did not land on Gallifrey – this implies that the Doctor didn’t always live on Gallifrey in his youth. The barn, then, that the TARDIS landed in, lay outside of Gallifrey and the Time Lock – perhaps thousands of light-years away from Gallifrey.
However, the time-lock prevents the perversion of time events, not necessarily just intruders to the physical space of Gallifrey. It would be rather silly for Time Lords to simply find the perimeter of the Time Lock, travel back in time to the edge of that perimeter and then fly a ship to Gallifrey from there. That would be a major, exploitable security loophole for the Time Lords to just conveniently leave open.
Nonetheless, this theory fits nicely with Moffat’s recent teasing about the Doctor and the speculation which surrounded the “blue sky” where the barn stood in The Day of the Doctor. Some might also believe that the Doctor would have activated The Moment away from Gallifrey, as opposed to doing so directly – although the Doctor certainly seemed to believe he was going to die in The Day of the Doctor.
A Fixed Point in Time
This is an old, reused cop-out, but hey, let’s at least consider it.
If Clara hadn’t consoled the Doctor… would the Doctor become the Doctor? If the Doctor hadn’t learnt to embrace his fear and not let it consume him, would he ever have become the man he did? I would argue that the Doctor being consoled is more of a fixed point than anything else in the entire universe. Think of just how much the universe would have been affected if Clara hadn’t sat down that evening to share some of his own wisdom to our young (albeit terrified) hero.
If that event was pre-established and vitally important for the course of history itself, perhaps the laws of quantum mechanics simply took a lunch break for the evening. Better an anomaly, than a total spatiotemporal collapse, no?
You Clever Boys
These events should be time-locked. We shouldn’t even be here. So something let us through. – the Doctor.
Another plausible theory is that when the Moment disabled the Time Lock, it didn’t just disable the Time Lock for the TARDIS for those specific instances – it disabled the Time Lock for the TARDIS for every instance of Gallifrey’s history, enabling the Doctor, present and future, to visit himself even.
Since Capaldi’s Doctor appeared in The Day of the Doctor (Remember? Eyebrows?), we can certainly presume that the readjustment of the Time Lock’s “security permissions” included him too – but just how extensive was that security upgrade?
Alternatively, I have to wonder if the “something” that let the TARDIS through the Time Lock is still present … acting as a bit of a guardian angel to the Doctor, even now. We were led to believe that that something was The Moment, but it’s never explicitly said that The Moment is what let the Doctors visit Gallifrey in The Day of the Doctor. All that The Moment says is “you clever boys” – that doesn’t confirm anything in particular. Which brings me to my final proposition…
The Doctor’s Wife
After all of this time, do you really think that the TARDIS would be stopped by a mere “Time Lock”? The Doctor has, time and time again, underestimated all of the great women in his life, I don’t think we should too.
Let us not forget that it was the TARDIS’ home too that was at risk of being destroyed in The Day of the Doctor and that it was the TARDIS, above anyone else, who heard the sorrowful, even regretful musings of the Doctor when he was alone. In science fiction, generally writers like to keep to the rules that they establish for themselves, but what if there were a rule even greater than the logic and mechanics of the Time Lock: the TARDIS always brings the Doctor where he needs to be.
My personal theory is that the TARDIS brought Clara to the Doctor because that was what he needed. The TARDIS wouldn’t just let her Doctor cry alone. Clara was the right person to sit down and console him – echoing the very same wisdom that the Doctor himself had shared with her earlier. Therefore, the TARDIS brought Clara to him.
But that’s not the question
What’s the question then? A child is crying on a distant planet – he cries in a barn alone, so that the other “boys” won’t hear him. The question is: why can’t he stop crying?
Children cry because they want attention, because they’re hurt or afraid. But when they cry silently, it’s because they just can’t stop. Any parent knows that. – The Doctor.
The woman enters the barn saying “you know why” – nobody bothers to help him, because everyone knows why he is crying. Something major has happened in his life, something that everyone is aware of and this something has reduced him to tears and has kept him afraid presumably ever since.
What could that possibly be? Food for thought.
