Skip to main content

Is The Doctor omniscient? Or was he bluffing?



When Rose possessed the Time Vortex, she said she could see all of spacetime:



Rose: I can see everything. All that is, all that was, all that ever could be.


The Doctor: That's what I see all the time.



The Doctor said he sees all of Spacetime all the time. Is this true? I think NO, because seeing everything is a kind of god-like superpower and there are times when The Doctor just doesn't know anything about the situation.


But, on the other hand, bluffing without reason isn't The Doctor's style. Why would he say this about his fake omniscience?


Out of universe, this looks like immaturity of the writers when they set up the franchise. While this happened in season 1, Doctor Who was a decades-old franchise having lots of established materials. Everyone knows The Doctor isn't omniscient. Why did writers add that line?



Answer



I think the quote is ambiguous. It could be taken as omniscient conscious awareness of everything throughout spacetime, but it could also be taken as a more limited awareness concerning any specific event in one's spacetime vicinity--seeing not only what actually happens at that event (what 'is'), but also some of the past sequence of cause-and-effect that led up to it (what 'was') and the alternate possibilities for that event that could have happened but didn't (what 'could be'). And even if Rose-as-Bad-Wolf is actually talking about all events throughout spacetime, one could interpret the Doctor's statement as meaning that he has the same type of awareness about any specific event in his vicinity, without this awareness being as broad as hers.



Consider this similar statement from the transcript of "The Fires of Pompeii", in which Donna is trying to convince the Doctor to save the population of Pompeii from being killed in the volcanic explosion that's supposed to happen the next day:



DONNA: But I'm history to you. You saved me in 2008. You saved us all. Why is that different


DOCTOR: Some things are fixed, some things are in flux. Pompeii is fixed.


DONNA: How do you know which is which?


DOCTOR: Because that's how I see the universe. Every waking second, I can see what is, what was, what could be, what must not. That's the burden of a Time Lord, Donna. And I'm the only one left.



In this context it seems quite possible that he just means that when he's in Pompeii the day before the explosion, he can see the various possibilities and necessities for what's going to happen tomorrow. Or perhaps it's a bit like vision where we can choose to focus our attention on things near us or things far away, but with limits on how much fine-grained detail we can see for faraway things like distant mountains--he could have a very broad sense of the type of future that would arise if the volcano was prevented from exploding by the Pyrovile aliens in that episode, without seeing the details of every life and every event in that possible future.


This is all fairly speculative since I don't think the nature of Time Lord "vision" has ever really been spelled out (maybe some of the non-TV stories dealing with the concept of the Web of Time could give more hints), but the point is that both quotes are ambiguous and don't necessarily mean he has complete conscious awareness of every detail of spacetime at every moment (in fact there are many scenes of him not knowing things or arriving in a new time and being excited to learn what's out there, so I think we can safely rule out that type of omniscience).


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Did the gatekeeper and the keymaster get intimate in Ghostbusters?

According to TVTropes ( usual warning, don't follow the link or you'll waste half your life in a twisty maze of content ): In Ghostbusters, it's strongly implied that Dana Barret, while possessed by Zuul the Gatekeeper, had sex with Louis Tully, who was possessed by Vinz Clortho the Keymaster (key, gate, get it?), in order to free Big Bad Gozer. In fact, a deleted scene from the movie has Venkman explicitly asking Dana if she and Louis "did it". I turned the quote into a spoiler since it contains really poor-taste joke, but the gist of it is that it's implied that as part of freeing Gozer , the two characters possessed by the Keymaster and the Gatekeeper had sex. Is there any canon confirmation or denial of this theory (canon meaning something from creators' interviews, DVD commentary, script, delete scenes etc...)? Answer The Richard Mueller novelisation and both versions of the script strongly suggest that they didn't have sex (or at the very l...

Why didn't The Doctor or Clara recognize Missy right away?

So after it was established that Missy is actually both the Master, and the "woman in the shop" who gave Clara the TARDIS number... ...why didn't The Doctor or Clara recognize her right away? I remember the Tenth Doctor in The Sound of Drums stating that Timelords had a way of recognizing other Timelords no matter if they had regenerated. And Clara should have recognized her as well... I'm hoping for a better explanation than "Moffat screwed up", and that I actually missed something after two watchthroughs of the episode. Answer There seems to be a lot of in-canon uncertainty as to the extent to which Time Lords can recognise one another which far pre-dates Moffat's tenure. From the Time Lords page on Wikipedia : Whether or not Time Lords can recognise each other across regenerations is not made entirely clear: In The War Games, the War Chief recognises the Second Doctor despite his regeneration and it is implied that the Doctor knows him when they fir...

story identification - Animation: floating island, flying pests

At least 20 years ago I watched a short animated film which stuck in my mind. The whole thing was wordless, possibly European, and I'm pretty sure I didn't imagine it... It featured a flying island which was inhabited by some creatures who (in my memory) reminded me of the Moomins. The island was frequently bothered by large winged animals who swooped around, although I don't think they did any actual damage. At the end one of the moomin creatures suddenly gets a weird feeling, feels forced to climb to the top of the island and then plunges down a shaft right through the centre - only to emerge at the bottom as one of the flyers. Answer Skywhales from 1983. The story begins with a man warning the tribe of approaching skywhales. The drummers then warn everybody of the hunt as everyone get prepared to set "sail". Except one man is found in his home sleeping as the noise wake him up. He then gets ready and is about to take his weapon as he hesitates then decides ...

warhammer40k - What evidence supposedly supports Tau as related to the Necrontyr?

I've heard of rumours saying that the Tau from Warhammer 40K are in fact the Necrontyr. Is there anything that supports this statement, in WH40K canon? I just found this, on 1d4 chan 1 : Helping Necrons? Or are they Necrontyr descendants? An often overlooked issue is that Tau have no warp signatures, just like Necrons, hate Warpspawns and Warp in general, just like Necrons, have the exact same skull shape,stature and short lives, and the overwhelming need for Technology and beam weapons, JUST LIKE NECRONS. GW may have planned a race that simply prepares a pacified, multiracial galaxy for Necrons to feast upon, supported by Ethereals that have a C'tan phase blade. Then there is a reference of "dark seed in east" by the Deceiver, so the tricky C'tan might give Tzeentch the finger in the JUST AS PLANNED competition. Or maybe GW just has so little creativity that they simply made a new civ conforming to an Old One's standards without knowing it. Is this the connec...