In the episode, The Sheriff takes away The Doctor's Sonic Screwdriver, but we never see him retrieve it? Did I miss something, or does The Doctor really lose his sonic?
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3Doesn’t the TARDIS have a supply of them? e.g. when the green one got half-eaten by the flying shark, and he never got that one back, but he still has ~a screwdriver. I don’t know if he retrieved it from the Sheriff, but I’m fairly sure it doesn’t mean he’s lost it.– alexwlchanCommented Sep 8, 2014 at 7:09
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6Except that in Day of the Doctor, a big thing was made of it being the same screwdriver all the time.– Daniel RosemanCommented Sep 8, 2014 at 7:18
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3@GeorgeT - He just says that it's the same software. Presumably that gets uploaded into a flash drive on the screwdriver and periodically updated by the TARDIS whenever he plugs it in to charge.– ValorumCommented Sep 8, 2014 at 7:49
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2@Liath - I want to steal Crow.T.Robot's answer and pretend I wrote it– ValorumCommented Sep 8, 2014 at 7:54
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6"The Day of the Doctor" didn't say that they were all the same screwdriver. It said that they were all the same software, but in different cases. The War Doctor explained pretty explicitly that whatever he scanned would be embedded in the software architecture, and it's not too difficult to think that the TARDIS functions as a sort of cloud storage in this case. It's technology that we ourselves have, so the Doctor having it too is far from a stretch.– AmyCommented Sep 8, 2014 at 12:30
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1 Answer
In the following episode "Listen" we see the Doctor using a sonic screwdriver that appears identical to the one he had in the Castle at Sherwood. In the absence of a scene (or a word-of-god answer) that explains how he recovered this screwdriver, we're left with one of four possible options;
- The screwdriver may have been in the portion of the castle that didn't fly into space. Retrieving it would have been a simple matter of walking in and picking it up.
The Doctor may have retrieved the screwdriver from the wreckage of the ship. It's reasonable to assume some pieces of the ship survived the explosion. The screwdriver would presumably have been stored in some kind of sealed box or vault which would have increased its chances of survival.
We know from Eleventh Hour that the TARDIS is capable of creating sonic screwdrivers on demand. It would have been a trivial matter to make him another one to the same specifications if the previous one had been destroyed:
DOCTOR: All right, then. Back in time for stuff. (A sonic screwdriver rises from a slot in the console.) Oh! A new one! Lovely. Thanks, dear.
- In one of the prose novels; Alien Bodies, the 8th Doctor explains to his companion Sam that Time Lord devices can be retrieved from the flow of time, even if they've been destroyed. This is basically a hand-wave (and never mentioned again) but is still part of the established canon:
‘That was the mark five screwdriver,’ the Doctor muttered. ‘This is the mark one.’
‘The mark one?’
‘Yes. It was destroyed centuries ago.’ A pause. ‘Then how...?’
The Doctor motioned for her to be silent. He didn’t feel up to explanations right now. In front of him, the remnants of the antibody began to liquefy. ‘It’s a Time Lord tool. Time doesn’t work the same way for Time Lord tools.’
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And, of course, we now know that 13 built her own screwdriver in a warehouse instead of being like all the lazy guys that came before her and relied on the TARDIS to build one for her.– FreeManCommented Jul 23, 2021 at 16:54
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1@FreeMan - Yes, that was a particularly low point in an otherwise dire series– ValorumCommented Jul 23, 2021 at 16:58