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In Journey to the centre of the Tardis, we discover that the monsters roaming the Tardis are the characters who will later burn in the Eye of Harmony's chamber and leak back to the past.

The effects of staying in this chamber, according to the Doctor are

our cells will liquify and our skin will burn

Supposing that this doesn't kill you (somehow), do we know why are the burnt versions of the characters hostile? Why would they want to attack their past/original selves?

One could theorize that they're mindless zombies since their brain cells have liquified. But I'm skeptical about that, because they seem smart enough to chase everyone - specially given that some reached the Eye of Harmony before the Doctor did (there were zombies on the other side of the bridge) - almost suggesting they knew that was their destination.

So they seem smart - but smart people don't kill themselves (right?).

So is their hostility actually explained in the episode?

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Their hostility is never explained in the episode. Their behavior could be explained in a variety of ways:

  • They were in agonizing pain and simply attacking anything they saw because the were barely human and crazed with pain.

This answer seems simple enough but it's a bit too simple.

  • They retained some memory of the experience and were trying to prevent themselves from going to the Eye of Harmony chamber.

This is a better fit but still does not resolve why they kept attacking them and how the temporal duplicates kept finding the TARDIS crew.

  • The TARDIS kept redirecting them toward the Doctor in order to get him to resolve the issue. If she wanted she could have kept them away from the crew losing them within the nigh infinite space within her, but she didn't. She used them as a goad to get the Doctor to think about the problem and resolve it.

This is my favorite answer.

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  • I like the idea of preventing themselves from reaching the Eye of Harmony - if they kill their past versions before reaching it, they interrupt the timeline and fix the problem. As for the TARDIS redirecting them, I'm not sure, because the Doctor was already planning to fix the core either way, despite the zombies chasing them or not.
    – Saturn
    Commented May 10, 2013 at 20:38
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    I think the TARDIS knows the Doctor works best under pressure. She has had 900+ years of watching him. I think, like a good wife, she was providing an incentive... Clean this up or I am going to self destruct. I'm not joking. I mean it...
    – Thaddeus Howze
    Commented May 10, 2013 at 20:39
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Speculation follows:

I don't think this was stated in the show, but at a guess I'd say they're trying to kill their past selves to save themselves from the torment of their current timeline. Of course it might be a better idea to just try and stop them, but either

  • They've gone mad from the pain (or technobabbly Eye of Harmony related effects), or
  • THEY come from a version of the time loop where the "monsters" HAD tried to reason with them or tried to stop them in other peaceful ways, and having now seen it not work, they are just trying to kill them to end the torment.
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