Doctor deduces crystal is immaterial

The Doctor orders Benton to retrieve the glowing crystal, confident it can be handled safely despite Stuart Hyde's earlier horrific aging incident. Benton fails to lift the object, insisting it is fixed in place, but the Doctor realizes the crystal is not physically present in the lab. He deduces it exists in an interstitial temporal state, bound across millennia to its Atlantean counterpart, revealing the Master's weapon to be a non-corporeal temporal entity rather than a tangible artifact. This moment forces the team to confront the true nature of Kronos and the escalating threat it poses. key_dialogue: [ DOCTOR: Sergeant, now you're a strong young man. Go in there and pick up that crystal, will you? BENTON: Doctor, Stuart was DOCTOR: It's perfectly safe at this low level. Believe me. BENTON: If you say so, Doctor. DOCTOR: Benton goes over to the machine and takes hold of the crystal. DOCTOR: I do. BENTON: It's fixed down. DOCTOR: No, it isn't, you know. You can see it isn't. BENTON: Well, I can't shift it. DOCTOR: No. No, of course you can't. And do you know why you can't shift it? Because that crystal isn't really here at all. It's made the jump through interstitial time. It must to be linked to that other crystal all those thousands of years ago. Or rather it is the other crystal. RUTH: But then where is the original one? DOCTOR: Where do you think? In Atlantis, of course. ]