Dark Water

[Anonymous @]

Oh yes, you’re right now I’ve had another look with the pause button.

Pity really. I’d have liked some sort of call back to Journey Blue.

[Anonymous @]

My last post should have been addressed to @spider btw.

[Spider @spider]

@Margaret-Blaine  Yeah, sorry to burst your bonkette bubble! But for the record, I would like some sort of call back to Journey Blue too 🙂  probably not going to happen!  Although having said that, not like we haven’t had characters/actors reappearing as main characters before 🙂

(\(\;;/)/)

[Craig @craig Emperor]

A calendar? I have many pictures of me in what my English friends like to call a skirt (it’s a kilt). I also have a few pictures of me in a very fetching dress I bought in San Francisco for an alternative prom night at Burning Man (women wear tux, men wear dresses). I wore it again at Bestival a few years ago and managed to freak several men out. If you’ve got it, flaunt it! It’s a red dress, I think I need to be a summer month 😀

[Bluesqueakpip @bluesqueakpip]

@lewis97 and @craig or any mod

Can you move post #34483 to the spoilers/trailer section, please?

Lewis – information derived from advance trailers should be posted/discussed in the trailers blog until that part has been broadcast. Some people don’t like knowing anything about an episode in advance, not even the trailer.

[Craig @craig Emperor]

@bluesqueakpip Done. Moved to spoilers, as is a bit difficult to move to Trailers (different part of the CMS).

@lewis97 We’re a bit spoiler averse here. Some people never watch the “Next Time” stuff. Feel free to discuss it though, but only in the Spoilers topic or on the trailers blog as linked to by Bluesqueakpip above.

[Devilishrobby @devilishrobby]

well just a moment  before the big Missy/master reveal I thought Missy was going to reveal that she was a dark future incarnation of jenny then she started on the Missy mistress speak and i was certain as she said it she was going to turn out to be the master.

Hmm thats given me a thought how Sm can bring in the Valeyard because Jenny was  essentially an altered clone of the Tennant doc so why not make the Valeyard a future twisted version of Jenny. Oh my head is spinning with all the possibilities.  and the Clara /Danny situation still needs a resolution,  even the clara/impossible girl need to be finally put to bed so to speak i.e  : I think the clara who saves the day has at least one more task.

[Anonymous @]

@bluesqueakpip

I actually did wonder if Granny Oswald was really there at all…

Yes, there did seem to be something ‘otherwordly’ about Granny.

@lisa

Didn’t she/he get taken back to galifrey with Rasilon ????

Yep, he did.

We’ll no doubt find out next week how he survived and escaped but my guess is that after his fight with Rassilon he stole a TARDIS and went through the crack that leads to Trenzalore before the Papal Mainframe arrived and has been lurking about ever since.

@phaseshift @jimthefish @craig

Sorry to be a party pooper but there isn’t a power in the Universe that could get me to don a frock. Now if it was a nude calendar then my clothes would be off faster than an extremely fast thing. Blimey, it’s twelve years since I last did a nudie calendar! Great fun 😉

[IAmNotAFishIAmAFreeMan @pedant]

The clicky fingers occurred to me too

I don’t think it is a huge stretch to postulate that the clicky-fingers (which Clara did in Day of…, with gloves on) only works for authorised key-holders.

Clara may simply have been assuming that for there to be a key holder there needs to be a key.

 

PS I’ll bet “7 Keys” comes back as a plot device somewhere down thew road)

[Whoville @whoville]

All the bonkers theories on Missy were quite fun, but … really, there’s nothing better than a Master reveal and the Doctor’s look of horror. (You’d think that by now he’d be relieved it’s just the Master again …)

[WPJTPCSPJCDMP1963 @wpjtpcspjcdmp1963]

I just realized something.

Missy Kissed The Doctor in this episode.

Missy is The Master.

So The Master kissed The Doctor.

The shippers’ and the fanfic writer’s dreams have come to fruition.

[lisa @lisa]

That was all super creepy !!! Missy Gomez is great but the Master again ??? Geesh !! I have to admit
that I’m really not entirely happy about this and I will have to be convinced about it being a good
thing. Maybe Missy Gomez can save this situation
But also if the Master can get out of the Galifrey trap then how is it the rest of these brilliant
Timelords are still stuck there ??? Right now I just don’t see how Rasilon et al could let the Master
have ”vacation days ‘

[DrBen @drben]

Oh. Em. Gee.  My head asplode.

i need more time to process, but we were on the edges of our seats the whole time.  The Master wasn’t my first choice for Missy’s identity, but it was fun and a great reveal.  Lots of tears when Danny said “I love you” the last time, with the realization that he wasn’t saying more because he didn’t want Clara to come after him.  (What a guy!) And lots of screams of NO as his finger hovered over the “delete” button.  And the first cliffhanger since I’ve been watching the show in real time – ack!

So, not much was explained.  I don’t think the people at 3W were dead at all – they’re transported or something at the moment of death to be turned into Cybermen.  Even the Master doesn’t have the power to take over the Afterlife.  But maybe I’m wrong – what about the boy Danny killed?  (Man, that was a hard scene.)  Ok, more coherent thoughts tomorrow.

[Brandeberger @brandeberger]

Wow, is this the first ever instance of timelord regeneration gender-hop? I’m not sure.

What a fantastic episode, and I wonder if this will open the doors to a future female Doctor. Always thought Jessica Hynes would make a good female doctor.

[lisa @lisa]

Doesn’t look like Danny will press the button cause you can see that young boy being reflected in the ipad
Danny will want to speak to him
I also think everyone is not dead at 3w ? Wondering like DrBen if Danny is really dead and for that matter that boy ??
Maybe they were all saved before their deaths and are just being told that they are dead ? But why save a
young boy – the implication of turning a child into a cyberman is a place that I would hope this show
would not want to go ??

[lisa @lisa]

It occurred to me that Missy is using the timelord matrix technology so how real can all of this really be.
It might be in all of their minds -I mean not exactly reality ? In which case Missy might be not the actual master but maybe a sort of doppleganger or maybe even like the master’s conscious mind in this matrix ?
Btw – if Missy was the woman in the shop wouldn’t Clara have recognized her?

[Serahni @serahni]

One thing of note:  there were a few theories going around, yes, that this series contained a lot of non-reality, right?  That things didn’t feel quite ‘right’ and that people were questioning if bits really did happen or whether or not it was Clara just creating it?  I think that’s what I read people saying.

Well, apparently The Doctor has a patch that makes her dream so vividly, she thinks it’s reality.  >.>  That might be…important.

[Anonymous @]

The three words are going to stick with me for a long time.  Some cracking lines in this episode, ““Sorry everyone, another ranting Scotsman in the street, I had no idea there was a match on!” and the one about Steve Jobs were my favorites.

 

 

 

 

[Juniperfish @juniperfish]

@phaseshift @jimthefish @craig Yes PLEASE to the calendar . It could be Master/ Doctor themed featuring (a different) Missy with each of the twelve docs. I’ll get my Fourth costume together 🙂

@serahni

Well, apparently The Doctor has a patch that makes her dream so vividly, she thinks it’s reality.  >.>  That might be…important

Yes, it might…

I suspect the Master’s “choice” of Clara is that he wanted someone who would fall in love and then persuade the Doctor to try and resurrect that person from the dead. It’s probably by Missy’s design that Danny Pink got run over. Clara was an unwitting trap to lure the Doctor to the nethersphere.

And deeply, twistedly, poetic of course, from the Master-Missy’s perspective – given that the Doctor would also (as far as the Doc was concerned) be “resurrecting” a presumed dead Master-Missy into his consciousness again.

[Rob @rob]

Morning All 😀

Well, that was bloomin’ awesome

Clara is puzzling just like this site over the series too from her post it notes, lol moment

She was really reaching out to Danny when the accident happened and her reactions were brilliant (the writing and the acting)

Time passed and she withdrew into a bubble of self defence, a grief so huge she would do anything to get her Danny back

Moff was trolling big time (Clara post-it notes, Doctor as Jesus the betrayal speech, Master to Missy, the hate/love/hate/love relationship between the Master/Missy and Doctor) I seem to remember in the BG run the Master going for additional sets of regenerations and the Doctor explaining how even though it was possible it can destabalise Timelords, which to me explains the Missy’s/Master’s recent (PG) exuberance

The concept of self emotion deleting Cybermen is awesome (ie Moff can use that to stop the emotion suppressed chip blow up thing)

The other thing is (from my optimistic view) is that the Nethersphere is populated, which surely shows many people have not deleted emotional pain and thus not unintentionally joined the Cybermen

And using one of @purofilion ‘s spare other hands 😉 my other other thing is I really liked the upgrading Cybermen it makes them so much more threatening

Off to Wyntercon in Eastbourne today where apparently you can shot some Daleks!!!! 😮

[The Krynoid Man @thekrynoidman]

I haven’t fully formed my opinion yet, I will wait till part 2, but so far it’s good. The only thing I didn’t really like was the twist, which I already knew so it didn’t bother me as much as it could have. I think that can get past The Master turning out to be a woman, although it still would probably bother me a bit. The kiss however, is something I don’t think I will ever get over. Before you say anything, it’s not because The Doctor kissed somebody who used to be a man. To me it just doesn’t seem like something any of the other incarnations of The Master would ever do.

[Anonymous @]

Well, after re-watching I payed a close attention to Clara’s shelf and noticed that she has John Milton’s book. ( <3 ) I can’t tell if it’s “Paradise Lost” or something else but I think it would be interesting if it really is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise_Lost (Check the synopsis)

 

[The Krynoid Man @thekrynoidman]

@phaseshift There’s no way you could get me in a dress, even for charity. I had to cross-dress for charity once, but even after much persuasion I only went as far as wearing a blouse and a hair band (even then I still acted like a miserable git about it). I guess I’m just a bit of a stick in the mud like that.
Or maybe I just don’t like showing off my hairy legs, I hate wearing shorts for the same reason.

[BadWulf @badwulf]

@thekrynoidman  The kiss however, is something I don’t think I will ever get over.

They all said that about 8 and Grace, and yet now it just seems like another facet of the Doctor’s character, and soon it will be the same about the Master.

It’s a darn sight better than the ridiculous Master of The End of Time, the racist Master of Time Flight, or the pathetic Master of Planet of Fire. (to me at least!).

[BadWulf @badwulf]

Now that the season plot arc seems to be all about stealing souls to power Cybermen, I am less sanguine about the creepy smiling sister at the end of In the Forest of the Night. Although, there is nothing to prevent the Moff from setting up threads in one season that he doesn’t pick up for years.

[janetteB @janetteb]

Have watched finally after a agonising day of delayed gratification akin to having a great mysterious box under the Christmas tree that you can’t open until the allotted time. So many thoughts and right now they are all jumbled so here goes,. So Missy was the Master after all. I confess I was a little disappointed. I hoped up until the reveal she was at least going to be the Rani, just for the sake of variation. But Danny is dead!! Clara returned to us. Kudos to J.C for another brilliant performance.

As I suspected the trailer was a misdirect. Clara is redeemed for lying and did not betray the Doctor, or not yet. We still don’t know why Missy referred to her as “Clara my Clara.” Danny’s “boring” death, I assume was no accident. The car that came out of nowhere was almost certainly sent by Missy. Danny was killed in order to “buy” Clara. “Everyone has a price”, as is stated in Time Heist. Clara’s “price” will be the saving of Danny.

I also wondered if the costumes worn by Clara and Danny in the opening sequence were significant. He was wearing the pink shirt and she the dress that they wore early in the series. (or was the dress last series? I have to follow up, tomorrow. Too late now.)

Finally a theory, Clara will use the toy soldier to reclaim Danny. Would be nice if it turns out that the Doctor gave the toy to Susan and they have to find Susan to get the toy back, in the Christmas special. (I admit. I don’t give up easily 🙂 Would be nice if saving DAnny was the Christmas surprise.

(apologies of any of this has already been suggested. I have yet to read through the other posts.) Will respond to others tomorrow.

Cheers

Janette.

 

[Apopheniac @apopheniac]

Now that the season plot arc seems to be all about stealing souls to power Cybermen

Hello @badwulf – but wasnt the point of the dark water that it contained/only showed actual organic material?  The bones, bodies – but not souls.  So I agree with people who think that Danny isnt dead, and that the Nethersphere contains people who arent actually dead.

Which means, the Afghan boy that Danny thinks he killed isnt dead, either.  Are they all teleported?

Its been discussed that Missy was building an army and certainly the people weve seen “snatched” in this series were in some way involved with The Doctor, in sacrificing themselves for his life.  Except the poor policeman who was just (seemingly) randomly killed, but then he got processed by Seb and not by Missy.  Danny was also processed by Seb and not Missy.  Danny did not, so far as we have seen, sacrifice himself for The Doctor.

Was it @miapatrick who thought the Clara at the beginning was an out-of-time Clara?  I think thats a great theory.  The post-it notes were reminders of … what?  To help her keep the phone call on track?  What was “shut up shut up shut up” all about if not someone who is trying to work to a script and remember the important things to say?  She took the post-it that said “Just SAY it”.  Of all the reminders, why that one?   (“Danny – Ill never say those words, not to anyone else – EVER”.)  Clara says “Those words from me are yours now”.  (I love you)

There is a link between that first phone call and the one in Missys world, where she kept telling Danny *not* to say “I love you”.

I suspect some timey-wimey is going to happen in the conclusion, perhaps because Clara convinced The Doctor to “change time” and things have got a bit out of kilter because of that.  Also miniaturisation will feature, because of the physical size of the Nethersphere erm sphere, and also because one of the post-its said “Miniature Clara”.

 

[IAmNotAFishIAmAFreeMan @pedant]

@janetteb

Danny’s “boring” death wasa  grief reaction. Danny was her anchor in the real, the mundane. And he’s gone. It took her one phone call to become entirely unhinged and a bit of tough love to get her re-grounded.

The notion that things will end badly for Clara is throughly reinforced by the cold opening. He is the last person who will ever hear her say “I love you”.

If she doesn’t end up sacrificing herself for him (possibly in a very timey wimey way) I will be somewhat surprised.

[Anonymous @]

@rob  couldn’t have said it better!

@juniperfish yes I agree too that Missy designed Dan’s death -can we say ‘death’ now?  No wonder Missy stroked her iPad and said: “What a good choice, my Clara”. Interesting: “we got Steve Jobs”, and by default, all the technology. Looks like a lot of issues were ‘default’: emotions, cremation, and cybermen in a cybersphere!

Seb so pale and blank behind the painted-on animation: the self conscious formality of an old ballerina mixed with a creepy, relentless and cheery demeanour; starched shirts, knife sharp creases like a 1980s old fashioned celebrant but with tech!

I also loved The Doctor’s unabashed and unconditional love for ‘Clara, my Clara’. I love his planning; his suspicions of Clara and  possible foreknowledge of her plan: the sleep patches* and the awareness that the TARDIS, conscious in all time and space, was nervous of her and where Clara would inevitably take her Doctor. The idea that a being, like the Doctor, cares for someone so much that he is prepared to lose himself for the sake of another: “a dark day, a dangerous place” allows us to re-work our hypothesis about the extent to which this Doctor is a Good Man.

Harking back to Plato, I remember writing about the Burden of Self, the Four Divine Madnesses. It doesn’t surprise me that Danny and others would want to remove all emotion, be detached from the burden of self: don’t we all want, at some point, to turn off that obstinate, tormenting voice which reminds us so starkly of our own mortality? We have the cuts and bruises of life; but more importantly we have the memory of those things. And, at the point where we become a sentient child, we realise these memories are only ours to know, ours to feel and thus, as adults in this grim world, to ‘delete’ if we must.

I found this very morbid and frightening. Of all the series I’ve seen, the idea of repeating voices, crying out the same thing: “Don’t cremate me!” was one of the most terrifying and nauseating elements to comprehend. The obsessive undercurrent in the Master’s behaviour: his kiss, the raised right corner lip, a perfect counter to the Doctor. In fact, a perfect counterpoint with each phrase: the Doctor’s horror, his normally impeccable speech replaced first by quiet outrage and then stuttering amazement when desperately trying to ‘compute’.

Missy, complacent; an indifference to humanity tempered by sociopathic flirting with her ‘boyfriend’; planned and determined, a faultlessly orchestrated fugue of hideous tomfoolery and inevitable destruction. And with every second Danny’s closer to the ‘delete’ button and then….TO BE CONTINUED…

On what cliff are we dangling? I feel like I’ve already gone to Hell and back. In fact, as for saying or thinking “Go to Hell!”, well, that phrase will never contain quite the same irreverence.

When Clara appeared to take the Doctor to a volcano I was reminded both of Pompeii (The Fires of) and of Gallifrey “endlessly burning, burning”: the magnificent fire light and explosions highlighted Clara’s and the Doctor’s shadows so that they seemed bigger than real life – a metaphor for the importance of choices; of grief; denial; of anger, roaring orange-hot and of course, Hell, itself.

But then the real hell: bureaucratic, sterile and vacant. I loved the stapler and stationary arranged ‘just so’ by Seb, perhaps, in his OCD mode (his own hell, I suppose) where he eternally re-produces forms in duplicate and triplicate. I once thought that with death we would  escape endlessly self-generating paperwork. Now I see that isn’t the worst thing!

One might think Missy as the Master too obvious or even trivial: but other than a TARDIS (as Missy) or a claricle gone wrong, I didn’t have many other ideas. Somewhere I thought Moffat might double-bluff us and he did. He lied. But then he didn’t -not exactly, as @bluesqueakpip said. Now we have a superbly constructed, totally mad Timelady Mistress and the Doctor’s her recipient.

Happy dreams people….  * @serahni  your dream patches are a wonderful connection to the ‘wonderland’ the Doctor may have created for Clara -whilst she was healing…And we heard the bells, a clocktower…so how was Clara Oswald born? Re-born perhaps?

Kindest, puro

[janetteB @janetteb]

@pedant. I know Clara was referring to Danny’s death as “boring” due to grief but in a narrative sense, being hit by a car is rather disappointing. We all expected him to die, (if die he must) as a result of her actions. I rather think that her referring to his death as boring pointed out the meaninglessness of such a death, which sadly is not unrealistic just not “romantic”. I suspect therefore that his death was not accidental as she assumed. Clara’s words are certainly meanginful and hint at @miapatrick‘s suggestion that the phone call is being made by Clara in the future. There appeared to be some time thing happening there. Their clothes, Danny in the pink shirt which he was wearing when they first met and the dress, (which I think was last season or early this season? ) suggested a Danny and Clara from different times. (I was not being critical or intending to be, only suggesting that the manner of Danny’s death did not seem “real” because it was too realistic to be “dramatic”. Maybe I will try that line again in the morning when not so tired.

As for your suggestion at the end there @pedant, That sounds distinctly possible. I suspect that tissues will be required by the end of this series.

I persist in doubting that Orson is Danny’s descendant. A twin or a clone maybe.

 

Cheers

Janette

 

[IAmNotAFishIAmAFreeMan @pedant]

@janetteb

We all expected him to die, (if die he must) as a result of her actions.

The story isn’t finished yet…

[lewis97 @lewis97]

After watching the episode again, the name of the doctor who set up 3W was Skarosa – surely not a coincidence that ‘Skaro’, the home planet of the Daleks, features in it… I’m not too sure what to make of it, after all it could just be Moffat trolling fans again. Although it may not mean we’ll see the Daleks next week (now that would be a shock), could it be that Missy has also allied the Daleks which will be something that is revealed in a future story?

[nick1235 @nick1235]

Well some bonkers ideas has just struck my mind, but please do correct me if i’m awfully wrong. 3W? if you read it upside down it will lead to M<span style=”color: #545454;”>Σ  or ΣM might stand for Sigma and M….r, which led Sigma being Theta Sigma doctor’s nickname. I’ll try to keep it spoiler free, cause this episode is a lot of fun and I like it a lot, pretty sad as the season is coming to an end 🙁 </span>

 

Btw Clara after that phone call with Danny in the end, her sitting position change just so she can turn around and realize that C-men, might be slight error but really noticeable.

 

Cheers,

 

Nick

[The Krynoid Man @thekrynoidman]

@badwulf I haven’t seen Time Flight, could you explain how exactly The Master is “racist” in that story.

[BadWulf @badwulf]

@thekrynoidman Tony Ainley is done up in yellowface to make him seem exotic and inscrutable.

Actually, it’s kind of worse than that, it’s more like zombie-warlock yellowface.

[Apopheniac @apopheniac]

Before all of that … before all of the stuff that I did wrong

@janetteb and @miapatrick

Thats the dialogue key to @miapatrick‘s theory, I believe.  Clara is going to do something “wrong” next week, something which endangers Danny instead of saving him.  And she’s calling him from the future, seemingly wracked with guilt.  Which means, of course, that she knows hes about to die.  So why the surprise when he drops the phone?

Things to say … not all of them good.

Im probably over-obsessed with the initial phone call, but I keep replaying it because I think it holds the key to the story.  And I just noticed in the post-its that one is labelled “Truth” but thats not the one Clara pulls.  Instead she grabs “Just SAY it”.

Clara cant tell Danny the Truth.  Even now, even when supposedly shes trying to stop his death from happening, keep him on the phone talking (well, listening, because she keeps saying “shut up”), she isnt telling him the Truth.  She grabs the “Just SAY it” post-it and blurts out “I love you”.  And it might be clever editing, but she runs into the scene of Dannys accident (how did she know where he was hit by that car?), and then the camera turns and there is nothing there.  Whilst a background voice starts saying “By now Im sure youve heard the rumours” …

The fairytale element is quite strong this series.  And the boy-meets-girl/boy-cops-it storyline is something a (young) girl might get very sentimental over.  And The Doctor in this ep made a point of talking about how much older Clara looks since “Danny died”.  Is she over fairytales now?

Im with previous commenters saying that Claras gran doesnt look quite all that real, nor are any of Claras reactions to her gran all that real.  Yes, we all deal with grief differently.  But there is something decidedly “off” about that scene.  Gran says “Who calls you?” in a weird way, especially since Clara was apparently calling The Doctor and waiting for him to pick up.  Gran met (the previous incarnation of) The Doctor but has a strange head turn at hearing 12s voice on the phone.

The prologue will tell us everything about the ending.  Im nailing my colours to the mast on that.

[Mudlark @mudlark]

Now that I have had time for a second watch and to gather my thoughts a bit more …

To return, first of all, to the theme of Orpheus and Eurydice which I mentioned yesterday evening; apart from the very powerful and realistic portrayal of numbed grief, this was the thing that struck me most forcibly during the opening sequences.  Even the volcano imagery seemed relevant since, in the world of Classical antiquity, one of the principal entrances to the underworld was believed to be Avernus, a  volcanic crater near Cumae, and in the eastern Mediterranean volcanic vents and fissures were often thought to be portals by means of which the chthonic powers could be accessed for divination and other purposes.  And, just in passing, Hades, god of the ancient underworld, was one of the sons of Cronos (time).

@pedant   I am with you in thinking that Clara’s words to Danny in the opening, saying that he was the last person who would ever hear her say ‘I love you’ carried a very particular significance. It was such an odd way of putting things, and I had the feeling from the first that what she was keying herself up to tell him amounted to more than a confession of the extent to which she had been lying to him about her travels in the Tardis.   This would make sense if, as @miapatrick  suggested, it was a Clara of the future making the phone call (which might also account for why Clara did not hear the sounds of the accident relayed from Danny’s phone), but I think that there is a lot more still to be revealed about her,  including quite how and why Missy had ‘chosen’ her, along with quite a number of other matters raised in previous episodes.

Some questions have been answered: the ‘promised land’/heaven/nethersphere where the newly dead found themselves was indeed a virtual reality – inside a portion of the Gallifreyan matrix, and presumably when Missy greeted HFM and Gretchen here it was in the form of an avatar.  I thought when Danny first looked out of the window that what he saw appeared to be the interior of a sphere, and a second viewing confirmed this.  It could also have been the interior of an artificial habitat in space, but that would make less sense in the context. The mausoleum with the tanks containing the cybermen, on the other hand, clearly had a physical reality. It opened onto the steps of St Paul’s, but I assume that, rather than being housed within St Paul’s (which could scarcely have escaped notice),  it was in an alternative dimension superimposed on the interior of the cathedral or with a portal at its entrance.  Unlike @apopheniac, I see no reason to suppose that the people in the Nethersphere are not dead.  Just as Missy says, their consciousness has been uploaded, like that of Time Lords into the Matrix.  From there they can communicate electronically with those, such as the Doctor and Clara, who are in the physical reality of the mausoleum.

Missy can only be lying, or at least grossly exaggerating, when she implies that all the dead on earth can be resurrected as cybermen.  All the people who have ever died on earth may just about outnumber those alive now, as she claims, although given the exponential growth of population in the last two centuries it probably isn’t by a very large margin, but it must be borne in mind that a very high proportion of those who died in the past died as infants or children. And even if a time travelling entity could download the consciousness of each and every one of them, I can vouch for the fact that they could not have harvested all the bodies  – trust me, I’m an archaeologist 🙂

As for Missy herself, she may be the Master redux, but I have a feeling that there remains a good deal more about her and her purposes still to be revealed.

Some random observations to finish with (for now).

Did anyone else spot that the person who was said to have founded 3W was Dr Skarosa 😕

3W  =  www/world wide web.  Hmmm,  is that how Missy has been keeping tabs on the Doctor and Clara?  (well, that and the I-pads).

The mausoleum with the tanks containing the cybermen bore a distinct resemblance to the tanks containing the Silents in The Wedding of River Song.  Coincidence?  I think not.

[BadWulf @badwulf]

@apopheniac …but wasnt the point of the dark water that it contained/only showed actual organic material?  The bones, bodies – but not souls.  So I agree with people who think that Danny isnt dead, and that the Nethersphere contains people who arent actually dead.

A good point. Hopefully we will have some sort of explanation as to how the Mistress was able to transmat people’s still living bodies away, whilst leaving a dead body (some sort of dummy copy?) for people to treat as if it was the real body!

New bonkers theory: The Master transmats people away at the point of death to the nethersphere, but replaces their body with a ganger made of the Flesh (see The Rebel Flesh, The Almost People), that is able to feel everything that is done to the “corpse”, and send that back through the telepathic remote control to the real person, to induce them to voluntarily hit the DELETE button.

 

[Mudlark @mudlark]

Re Dr Skarosa, I see that while I was composing the lengthy comment above  @lewis97 got there before me, so a tip of the hat and an acknowledgement are due.

[BadWulf @badwulf]

@mudlark And even if a time travelling entity could download the consciousness of each and every one of them, I can vouch for the fact that they could not have harvested all the bodies  – trust me, I’m an archaeologist 

Pshaw! – in a show where giant moon eggs can hatch and instantly lay identical moon eggs of the same size, and single-celled life can have all the features of multi-celled eukaryotes yet still be considered prokaryotic, your so-called archaeological remains could easily be faked. :p

Did anyone else spot that the person who was said to have founded 3W was Dr Skarosa 

3W  =  www/world wide web.  Hmmm,  is that how Missy has been keeping tabs on the Doctor and Clara?  (well, that and the I-pads).

It could be, although I thought that the Doctor’s comment about reading it back to front would make 3W look like leetspeak “WE”, indicating some sort of collective.

The mausoleum with the tanks containing the cybermen bore a distinct resemblance to the tanks containing the Silents in The Wedding of River Song.  Coincidence?  I think not.

I thought so, too, but assumed that it was essentially a bit of misdirection on the part of the Moff, rather like the “Time Lady that you left behind”.

[AleX @alex]

Well, wasn’t that amazing? Even knowing the Cyberman would be in the finale I didn’t really got the the skeletons were Cybermen until the reveal! Moffat did really troll me, at first I tought Missy was really an android, then after she told she was a timelord I was thinking she was Rani, I connected the dots just as she was saing she was The Master! This episode was Moffat at his best, for me it was as good as Blink!

The acting, Jenna’s, Capaldi’s and specially Michelle Gomez, all top notch! I was so involved that when I saw it was already over! Can’t wait to next week’s finale! Gonna have to watch it all over again during the week to see if I can catch anything that I might have missed!

 

About the call at the start, I really think it was future Clara calling Danny, not only because of the notes, but because after the accident, she knew where to go (and got there almost the same time as the police)! How woud she know where he was? He said he was close but that was all or am I forgeting something!?

[Mudlark @mudlark]

@badwolf

your so-called archaeological remains could easily be faked

I have excavated – and seen the analyses – of too many Saxon and medieval burials to be convinced by that assertion.  Prove it, I say!  (And, just for the record, the gravedigger scene in Hamlet is exactly true to life/death).

As for the moon egg, I thought I had provided a very satisfactory exposition of the pseudo-science behind that: the ‘egg’ the space dragon laid was not moon sized; it was a super-dense egg – a neutron egg, if you like (which accounted for the increase in mass of the moon without increase in size)  which inflated to moon size after it had been laid.   I concede on the matter of the eukaryotic prokaryotes, though 🙂

 

[PhileasF @phileasf]

That was really good.

‘Don’t cremate me!’ I think being conscious inside a dead and decaying body would be so horrible I’d be thinking ‘please cremate me!’ I think the Doctor’s right, anyway: that aspect of 3W’s operations is a fake. They just want to persuade everyone to stop being cremated, so their bodies can be turned into Cybermen.

I also suspect much of what Danny and, presumably, other dead people are being told is a lie, intended to persuade them to allow their personalities to be deleted.

Here’s my attempt to make sense of it all:

Missy is harvesting the dead to turn them into Cybermen. Their bodies are kept in tanks and ‘upgraded’. Their minds are processed in the Nethersphere, which is like Gallifrey’s Matrix. In the Nethersphere, the emotions and other personality traits of the dead are deleted. Presumably there is some advantage in deletion being voluntary, as they seem to be trying to make Danny delete himself.

All this is being done with the cooperation of many of the world’s governments. The governments provide the material and financial resources and prevent people being cremated. There appears to be an intention to ‘sell’ the idea to the public – Missy’s sales pitch. The deception of the governments, and the intended future deception of the public, is based on the lie that consciousness persists after death and always has, as supposedly proved by the voices heard in TV static. Therefore no-one should ever be cremated, and the dead should instead sit comfortably in an exoskeleton in a tank of water… No doubt the Master’s famous hypnotic skills were useful in selling that last idea.

How does the apparent explanation of the Nethersphere fit in with Missy collecting the dead from other times and places, as we’ve seen in previous episodes? Is she collecting everyone everywhere everywhen, which would be a pretty big job, or only people who die on present-day Earth, and a handful of people she sees dying while stalking the Doctor?

To the bullet points:

– The idea that the dead remain conscious isn’t as new as Dr Chang seems to think. It’s the premise of Philip K Dick’s novel Ubik, which may be an influence on this episode. In Ubik the dead are frozen and you can visit their tanks and talk to them on the telephone. The dead experience a continued existence in a sort of dreamworld. Philip K Dick was in turn inspired by the Bardo Thodol, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which apparently also contains this idea of consciousness continuing for a while after death, as the soul is prepared for reincarnation.

– My Missy-is-Handles theory is looking a little less likely. It was fun while it lasted. Unless the Master was Handles too…? No. Sigh, Handles is off the theory table.

– For a while my other favourite theory — Missy is the Doctor’s wife from before he left Gallifrey — seemed like a winner. The episode seemed to be baiting that theory, or perhaps the Missy-is-River theory, with The Time Traveller’s Wife on the Doctor’s bookshelf, the kiss, the complaint of abandonment, ‘Two hearts’/’And both of them yours’.

– A lot of the Doctor / Master relationship for the past 44 years just got translated by Captain Subtext’s Helmet of Truth. (This is an idea from an episode of Steven Moffat’s Coupling which I saw last night, ‘Her Best Friend’s Bottom’, in which a scene is played with the subtext translated into text by Captain Subtext’s Helmet of Truth.)

– Some are wondering how the Master got away from the time bubble in which Rassilon and co are imprisoned. But there’s a long tradition of the Master escaping from certain death with no explanation, and I suspect that tradition will be honoured in this case too. Once we actually saw him get ‘burnt to a crisp’, as the Doctor put it, and when he was later seen to be all right he didn’t explain why, even when it was pointed out that he was last seen being burnt to a crisp. Like the Doctor, he just always gets away.

– The scenes surrounding Danny’s death had a dreamlike quality, in the way they seamlessly segued from Clara arriving at the crash scene, to Clara standing in the road looking at the tributes left by Danny’s friends. Maybe this was just economical storytelling, or maybe it was expressing the sense of unreality that can come with sudden changes in one’s life. But it seemed to invoke the sudden time-shifts that Donna experienced when she was living in the computer-generated world in Forest of the Dead.

I think @miapatrick is right: this scene will turn out to be out of sequence, and we may see it, or parts of it, again, when it will seem very different in a new context.

– Dream patches. Those are the sort of thing the Dream Lord might use…

– On the way to the ‘afterlife’ the TARDIS noise seemed more prolonged than usual — it sounded like a callback to the BG series, and the extended TARDIS noise that was heard occasionally. This seemed to imply it was going further than usual — and yet, its destination was seemingly just modern London.

– Danny’s flashback to his really bad day seems to be intentionally induced by Seb. This lends some credence to the idea that the season is in Clara’s head, and we’ve been seeing her involuntary Nethersphere ‘flashbacks’.

And now, my last attempt at bonkers theorising before next week (unless I come up with something else before then):

Clara will die and be put in the matrix. Possibly because she thinks she can get Danny out.

Her slightly unreliable memories of her adventures with the Doctor will be extracted by Missy or Seb. We will realise this is what we’ve been seeing on TV. (I just realised this is similar to the idea of ‘The Trial of a Time Lord’ from the BG series… So this season might be ‘the 6th Doctor done right’ in more ways than one.)

The Doctor has suspected this surveillance-from-the-future-using-Clara’s-memories for a while, and he has from time to time given Clara a memory worm so she won’t be able to tell the watcher-from-the-future certain things — about the Doctor’s plans for detecting and defeating him or her, for instance. Hence the bizarre end of Mummy on the Orient Express, where Clara wakes up on the beach.

The Doctor has occasionally given Clara dream patches, so some of her memories will be so bizarre as to cast doubt on all of them, thus making the intelligence extracted from her less useful.

Clara becomes a Cyberman. This is why her face is too wide (in her slightly distorted recollections). This is why she smells bad. This is why she looks happy and sad at the same time.

Danny is saved, but only by being transplanted into the future, where his continued existence won’t create any paradoxes. He becomes Orson, a pioneer time traveller, so he can meet Clara one last time, when she comes to visit him at the end of the universe. But to avoid paradox, he is condemned to deny he knows her, and to live the encounter exactly as it happened to Clara when she experienced it.

[blenkinsopthebrave @blenkinsopthebrave]

Wow! Missy IS the Master! Blenkinsop triumphant! Hurrah!

Of course, this does ruin my hitherto unbroken record of wrong predictions…

[blenkinsopthebrave @blenkinsopthebrave]

OK, now some thoughts on this excellent episode.

A brilliant episode for so many reasons. For one thing, Moffat takes us (and 10 year olds) into some very dark waters indeed, and much of the episode is very uncomfortable and challenging (particularly for those who have recently lost someone close) but by the end Moffat brings us back to Doctor Who (and everything it represents) as the revelation that Missy is the Master reassures us that the Doctor will be triumphant, Danny will be rescued and true love will save the day. (which is also blenkinsop’s prediction for next week.)

[MTGradwell @mtgradwell]

@brandeberger

Wow, is this the first ever instance of timelord regeneration gender-hop? I’m not sure.

It’s actually long-established canon that Time Lords can change gender on regeneration. Look up e.g. “The Corsair”.

[ScaryB @scaryb]

@blenkinsopthebrave

Hi fives on the Missy/Master call – there are some cookies and jellybabies beside the sofa for all those who guessed write. And your expulsion notice from the Failed Theorists Club is there too – effective immediately!

Also well done re your call on the comparisons with A Matter of Life and Death. I think this will continue next week with some sort of bargaining being done for Danny’s life, with Orson being key to it (assuming Orson is his descendant).

[The Krynoid Man @thekrynoidman]

Well I must say all of you are pretty reasonable about this. Over on Planet Mondas one user is saying that anyone who doesn’t like the idea of the Master being a woman now is “sexist” and “transphobic”, even though most of the comments about it were neither of those things.

[ScaryB @scaryb]

Still puzzling over the phone call and time sequencing at the beginning.  Clara from the future is intriguing idea.

And we’re back to phone calls again. As has been said – Clara prime’s first contact with the Doctor is through a phone call (the no provided by “the woman in the shop”). In that episode (Bells of St John) Clara was also uploaded to the internet (3Ws again – www). The Doctor got her back again, but she had acquired extra computer skills.

I loved the acting and direction in this. While Clara’s sense of dislocation could be part of a bigger plot, it also worked for me to convey the hurt and numbness of sudden bereavement. The world carries on (announcements, tribute flowers, even lovely Granny Oswald) while the bereaved feel frozen, a stone in a river that keeps on rushing past.

The volcano – a nod-back to Fires of Pompeii?

We’re certainly not done yet, and has been pointed out – there’s a massive amount to be covered in next week’s episode. Are we going to get a cliffhanger at the end of that, to lead in to the Xmas episode? I’m not yet convinced this is going to be all about cybermen.

Clara (and the audience) has still to find out that she has been used by Missy, and for what purpose. Or does Clara already know and is covering up? Has she/will she make a deal with the devil/Missy for Danny’s life?

[blenkinsopthebrave @blenkinsopthebrave]

Have been reading everyone’s posts (and thanks @scaryb!) and I may have missed someone already noting this, but at the cliffhanger, when Danny’s finger is hovering over the Delete button, we see the reflection of the little boy from Danny’s very bad day appear as a reflection on the iPad. Not sure how that will play out next week (so long to wait!) but it was a lovely and poignant touch.

To go back to my very early thoughts on A Matter of Life and Death after “The Caretaker”, I would repeat one thing I said then about the representation of heaven in the movie–it was all in the mind of the main character. It wasn’t real, and neither is this nethersphere, I suspect.

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