The Woman Who Lived

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  • #45896
    Mersey @mersey

    @countscarlioni

    This is a beautiful idea. For me the problem with Doctor-Clara relationship is that that we have so many layers of it that we could not distinguish which is which. It all changed so much that it’s hard to tell what kind of people they are now.

    I don’t know if someone have mentioned that already but the Beethoven’s 5th symphony is known as Fate symphony or Victory symphony from roman number V(ictory). In one if his letters Beethoven wrote about his illness that he would “seize Fate by the throat. It shall not bend or crush me completely”. There is also a story of him telling his assistant Anton Schindler, that the 5th opening theme is “how the fate is knocking at the gates of life”. The truth of this story is undermined, but still it’s present in our culture.

    #45897
    Anonymous @

    @cybercat -Oh I know you weren’t ! It was just my opinion, is all! Sort of an idea that had been percolating in my brain for  awhile and I thought I’d write it. 🙂

    All good.

    #45898
    Anonymous @

    @mersey

    what I like about The 5th is that it’s been described by musicologists like Plantinga et. al. to be a ‘force attacking a wall’ (possibly a reference from one of Beethoven’s ‘arguments’ about the 5ths actual meaning with mates and ‘agents’ –and Schindler whom he loved or abhorred depending upon the beer he’d consumed!) Then a halt and then another “jab” or force attack slamming into another wall. The other motifs examine this and then extrapolate.

    In Who terms, this ‘wall’ could be a void, a new universe? The end of something? A metaphor of something at any rate 🙂 At least we’ll make one!

    #45901
    Mersey @mersey

    @purofilion

    The question is: Will it be a victory or a fate (death)?

    May I ask you what kind of PhD you are? You have extensive knowledge about culture.

    #45902
    Anonymous @

    @mersey

    in Music  – thank you. But I do think I’m dumber now: scores to get in and the students I work with possess an incredible knowledge of diverse musical styles which I certainly lacked. The one thing they have trouble with (for various reasons) seems to be the ability to write and reference!  But still, maybe a small thing 😉

    #45907
    JimTheFish @jimthefish
    Time Lord

    Just to say that on rewatch I enjoyed this far more. I still see vague glimmers of the tenth Doc in this story — I don’t know whether because it reminded me slightly of The Shakespeare Code or whether Tregenna views the Doc through a Torchwood lens that’s bound to be a Tennant-ey. Or possibly because the plot was a bit Waters of Mars-ey.

    The arc stuff is really good though. That ‘purple is the colour of death’ line is so arch as to having to definitely mean something. Not convinced Clara is actually going to die but something bad’s definitely going to happen to her. I quite like the idea that she’s still in the Dalek. It might explain the anachronisms if she’s constructing these adventures to deny that reality to herself.

    I’m still clinging onto my theory that either Clara or Ashildr are going to be aligned to Missy in some way. Maybe what we’re going to see ultimately is not a death or a sacrifice, but a betrayal.

    #45908
    Mudlark @mudlark

    @everybody

    It is late in the day to be joining in this discussion and I don’t feel that I have much of substance to add to what has already been said by others, often very eloquently.  But for what it is worth, here is my ha’p’orth on both The Girl Who Died and The Woman Who Lived.*

    On the whole I preferred the second episode.  The Girl Who Died had some lovely moments, especially the Doctor’s translation of the baby’s crying, with echoes of his translation of the dinosaur in Deep Breath as others have pointed out.  But while the plot had some of the daftness of Robot of Sherwood, it lacked the lightness of touch in the latter and so, for me, it did not entirely work. The mechanics of the resolution – give or take a couple of barrels of electric eels – pretty much hung together;  with the wiring from Clara’s spacesuit (a Chekhov’s duck?), the contents of a smithy and a source of current one could well make life uncomfortable for metal-clad monsters, with a ‘dragon’ cobbled together from bits of derelict ship and a carved figurehead and animated by holographic projection to finish them off.   Nevertheless, it struck me somehow as a bit creaky.  The moral and philosophical thread running through the whole – already commented on at length, were what justified the whole for me.

    In The Woman Who lived the ostensible plot, leonine monster and all, was almost incidental to the dialogue between the Doctor and Me, with its depths and layers of meaning, but even so I found the balance between the two better judged and more satisfying.  That dialogue recalled for me the discussion we had last year about how someone extremely long lived or even functionally immortal might deal with the accumulation of memory.  The Doctor copes somehow, though all we have been told is that he can edit or jettison memories he regards as inessential.  He also experiences serial lives rather than one long, continuous life, which might make a difference.  And of course he is a Time Lord, shaped for long, if not infinitely protracted life.

    Ashildr/Me, being human, is not so shaped, and most certainly not designed for indefinite longevity, although the alien mechanism which constantly repairs the ravages of time and keeps her in the form of a girl presumably prevents deterioration of her brain also.  @pufferfish and @ichabod have already discussed the capacity of the human brain, which we can assume falls far short of that in a Time Lord. Even so, memory seems to work differently in different people and some people are able to retain a remarkable amount. I once knew someone with an eidetic memory, seemingly able to recall not only every fact she had assimilated, but where she had come across it, chapter and verse, whereas my memory is far less efficient and the data retrieval system seems to work by context and association. But I agree that even in a brain maintained at peak efficiency, 800 years of memories would almost certainly exceed capacity.  On the other hand, Me’s memory still seemed to be in full working order as regards the more recent past, and I got the impression that a good deal of the forgetting had been deliberate erasure, perhaps facilitated by the alien technology she carried within her.

    Whatever the capacity of her brain, there was nothing wrong with her muscle memory: motor skills, honed to perfection, were maintained.

    What struck me more forcibly was the proposition that the passage of time and repeated loss had eroded or numbed her capacity to feel any emotion other than the adrenaline rush of risk taking.  The Doctor’s action in restoring her to life had ultimately taken that away from her.  In this second encounter and its consequences he was the indirect means of her discovering once again the capacity to feel and to find a purpose in her continued life.  Rather as, on a smaller scale, Clara told the Doctor that he had given her …’a reason to …. be.’  Quite a weight of responsibility, whether he wants it or not.

     

    *It has just occurred to me that the capitalisation of Who in both titles could be seen as having a certain resonance beyond its mundane grammatical role.  Who nose  😈

     

    #45909

    This is a bit random and not sure where it popped up from but…

    What if, rather than Clara dying or being “Donna’d”, it is the Doctor who will forget Clara and the Claricles (which is why she has never been noticed in the last 50 years or so….)?

    #45910
    Mudlark @mudlark

    The above ended up a great deal more long winded than I intended, and a lot of it is essentially riffing on points already made by others.  So apologies for length and for lack of adequate acknowledgements.

    #45912
    jphamlore @jphamlore

    As mentioned by others, the leonine character seems to be some sort of other dimension analogy to the Tharils in the Fourth Doctor serial Warrior’s Gate.  If Moffat is trying to appeal to those who were introduced to Doctor Who by the Fourth Doctor, he would be aware that audience would be quite used to near psychedelic time / space travel stories, such as Warrior’s Gate, a serial that had the stunning departures of both Romana and K-9.  Perhaps a portent for the future.

    #45914
    Mudlark @mudlark

    Just a few more random thoughts and observations before tomorrow and the next episode.

    Firstly, the resemblance between the outfit worn by Ashildr/Me in the background of the selfie, and that of Clara’s mother which sharp-eyed @kharis spotted.  It probably is just the writers tweaking our tails – as @pedant said, ‘Beware the chain yank’, and the actors do not much resemble one another.  But what first sprang to mind on reading that post was Clara’s mother’s promise always to be with her, wherever she was.  And if Ashildr were Clara’s mother, we know that at least once before she had to feign death before people began to notice that she was not showing any sign of ageing.

    The use of the word ‘cocktail’ in a context which suggested the modern meaning leapt out at me as an obvious anachronism, and I am with @countscarlioni on that; but I also think that it was intentional. Remember what Missy said to Clara about anachronisms?

    Ingenious suggestions by @brewski and others aside, there seems to be agreement that the earliest documented use of ‘cocktail’ to mean a mixed drink is in America in the early 19th century. There is, as @django said, a possible use slightly earlier, in 1798, but it isn’t entirely clear in that instance what was being referred to.  Mixed alcoholic drinks certainly existed in the 17th century, but the word ‘cocktail’ as used then and throughout the 18th century referred to a horse with a docked tail.  Since those with docked tails were mostly hunters or carriage horses, and the tails of thoroughbreds were not docked, it came, by extension, also to mean horses of mixed or doubtful breeding   Which, come to think of it, might be the origin of cocktail as applied to drinks  😉

    I prefer to think that it was a heavy hint that Ashildr/Me has been doing a bit of time travelling, perhaps with Missy, as suggested already.

    Sam Swift’s joking and bravado on the scaffold has historical precedent, I think.  When people could be hanged for even quite minor crimes and hangings were public, it seems to have been a point of pride among habitual criminals to affect a show of cheerful bravery.

    And finally, a couple of things which gave me goosebumps.

    Me’s words to the Doctor about herself and mirroring him (as @juniperfish pointed out)

    ‘No one’s mother, daughter, wife. My own companion, singular, unattached, alone.’    and

    The patterned view of the Doctor, playing his guitar, framed by the aperture in the Tardis  – just beautiful!

     

    #45915
    Mersey @mersey

    @mudlark Clara’s mother died at the age of 45 when Clara was 19. Maisie Williams is 18. If Ashildr was Clara’s mother why she didn’t recognise her in the first place?

    #45916
    Mudlark @mudlark

    @mersey  I was simply picking up on something others had discussed earlier.  My tongue was firmly in my cheek 🙂

    #45918
    CountScarlioni @countscarlioni

    @purofilion

    We could argue about ‘true love’ but as Missy says “can you humans understand the meaning of real friendship?” This is true love – as true as any sexual love, and as some Greeks would have it, truer and longer lasting than most other forms which flit and fly by on the ether.

     

     

    Fully agree. Or perhaps along the lines of a father/daughter relationship (though not literally father/daughter), as suggested by others on the site (sorry, I forget who). What father', thinking he was a dead man walking, would not risk the entire fabric of space/time to save hisdaughter’, as the Doctor thought he was doing in Before the Flood?

     

    @mersey & @purofilion

    Beethoven’s Fifth. Good to know this stuff!

     

    @mudlark

    The use of the word ‘cocktail’ in a context which suggested the modern meaning leapt out at me as an obvious anachronism, and I am with @countscarlioni on that; but I also think that it was intentional. Remember what Missy said to Clara about anachronisms?

     

    Yes indeed; not quite the same level of anachronism as a tank in thirteenth century Essex maybe, but perhaps significant in the end. They are adding up.

     

    @lisa

    They are coming out with a Ashildr book.

    I’d certainly order it!

     

    Bring on the Xygons!!!

    #45919
    Arbutus @arbutus

    @countscarlioni   Oh, that’s dark. We’ve even had it foreshadowed by Clara in the Dalek casing. But I can’t really believe that the show, still being a family show after all, would go all the way down that path?

    @purofilion  @ichabod   I’m not so sure that “Am I a good man?” is really an issue here. While Ichi is right and we will probably always be grappling with it by our own standards, I’m pretty sure that the Doctor himself has moved on. I think that in his view, he is neither a good nor a bad man, and that the question itself is irrelevant. He does what is right by his own standards, or tries to. Goodness has nothing to do with it!  🙂

    @mudlark and others    I’m inclined to agree that the use of “cocktail” is strongly suggestive that Ashildr has either travelled in time or been exposed to someone who has! Not only was it an anachronism, but it seems to have been a very deliberate one. Therefore probably a clue.

    #45920
    ichabod @ichabod

    @arbutus    I’m pretty sure that the Doctor himself has moved on. I think that in his view, he is neither a good nor a bad man, and that the question itself is irrelevant. He does what is right by his own standards, or tries to. Goodness has nothing to do with it!

    Agreed — but wouldn’t that be called into question again if he were to see *himself* as the immediate cause of Clara’s death?  We were talking about what happens if he were to kill her himself, under the illusion that she’s some monster or other (as almost happened in TWF, thanks to Missy’s manipulations), and that’s the context I had in mind: a future action bringing back an old, previously settled question.  It would all depend on circumstances, as these judgments usually do in reality, too

    #45921
    CountScarlioni @countscarlioni

    @arbutus    My 15 year old daughter was devastated when Danny Pink died. So, on a personal level, I very much hope Clara is upright and walking at the end of Face the Raven or there will be serious (domestic) consequences. However, it seems that the logic (using the word loosely given it’s Doctor Who) of the series is suggesting it might very well be otherwise. But it seems to me that so much evidence has been piling up on the `dark’ side I’m hopeful her death has become too obvious an end for Clara for it to be realised.  

     

    #45922
    Arbutus @arbutus

    @ichabod   Well, that’s a point. But if they do go in that direction, I hope we see something new in the treatment of it, as we have just spent an entire series on the question. Possibly there are other existential questions the Doctor might be driven to look at?

    @countscarlioni    It wasn’t so much the idea of Clara dying, but of dying in that way: at the hands of the Doctor, her dearest friend, and the one that she, and we, always trust. Danny’s death was presented in the first instance as a happenstance of life, tragic but commonplace, and in the second instance, as absolution and atonement. Either of these is easier to accept than the Greek tragedy that would be Clara’s death at the hands of the Doctor. That was what made that scene at the end of The Witch’s Familiar so horrifying: Clara, trapped inside the disguise of the Dalek, in enemy uniform so to speak, unable to communicate in a clear way, while she listened to Missy urging the Doctor to kill her. That was also where we were firmly, once and for all, shown where Missy/Master stands on the good/evil spectrum– way, way over on the evil side!

    #45925
    ichabod @ichabod

    @arbutus Yes, I’d hope for a different slant too, if that happens. In any case, though, the Doctor will be having some dark thoughts about his own part in shaping whatever sequence of events brings her departure about — unless she goes zooming off in her own Tardis or something (and maybe even then?).  Further thoughts on the “BBC spoiler” page, just in case:

     

    #45927
    CountScarlioni @countscarlioni

    @arbutus    Very elegantly  put. When watching The Witch’s Familiar, I didn’t feel that Clara’s fate was really up for grabs as the Doctor was not going to listen to Missy’s urgings. But the context has by this point shifted mightily and that scene now looks like a clear warning and has taken on a new force.

    My 15 year is not interested in the nuances though; she just does not want Clara to die!  

    #45928
    Arbutus @arbutus

    @countscarlioni     Well, I agree with her. I don’t want Clara to die, either. I feel she’s earned a better end to her story. But I also hope that her exit is worthy of the road she’s travelled to get there!

    #45929
    Bluesqueakpip @bluesqueakpip

    @ichabod

    unless she goes zooming off in her own Tardis or something (and maybe even then?).

    I do wonder about that. If you look at the Dalek regeneration scene in The Magician’s Apprentice, there’s one Dalek which is very clearly NOT absorbing regeneration energy. And that’s Dalek Clara.

    Simple explanation: she doesn’t get the regen energy because she’s not a Dalek and not connected to Davros.

    Bonkers explanation: she doesn’t absorb regen energy because she doesn’t need it.

    I keep joking that the reason they haven’t announced the new Companion is because the new Companion is Clara. Only played by a different actress. 😉

    #45934
    winston @winston

    I watched again last night and near the end at the pub a few lines between the Doctor and Me  stood out. Just wondering if anyone else noticed them. To paraphrase..

    Doctor: “Ashildr I think I am very glad I saved your life.”

    Ashildr: ” Oh I think everyone will be.”

    The Doctor looks at her in a perplexed, curious way. For some reason this little exchange peaked my interest because it felt like a hint at something . I have no idea what, just a tickle in the back of my brain.. Maybe one of you clever people will have some ideas or maybe it meant nothing….that happens.

     

    #45941
    ichabod @ichabod

    @bluesqueakpip  I keep joking that the reason they haven’t announced the new Companion is because the new Companion is Clara. Only played by a different actress. 😉

    Good grief!  You are a veritable *devil*!

    #45944
    Anonymous @

    @ichabod @bluesqueakpip

    Isn’t she? 🙂 To think she doesn’t “need the regen energy” -superb bonkerising Pip, by you and others who’ve suggested the same thing.

    I love it, I really do (phew, it’s good to get back to a normal space of thinking here!) and true @arbutus the “good man” question should have been asked and answered and has, in many ways, but I recall, this year, he already asked a similar question again?  I could be wrong, not sure but certainly if he failed to intervene in Clara’s ‘demise’ or prevented himself from stopping her ‘normal’ death (as  mortal human )it would be too terrible! I’m reminded of Donna’s dreadful exit -almost worse than death (though not to herself nor her grandfather nor her rather difficult and complex mother)  at least to us, in the dramatic/ ironic capacity.

    The anachronisms and hints are building up aren’t they? The woman in the skirt in the ghost 2-parter could perhaps be Ashildr -there was a dragon in Ashildr’s story after all -she lives in the dragon’s mouth all the time- ready to be swallowed by time. Equally, young Clara has that same fatalistic urge surrounding her about which the Doctor may know a lot but being less talkative than Eleven is keeping particularly quiet.

    As to the cocktail -I knew nothing about this at all until you wondrous people came up with the history of this -looking at you @countscarlioni, @mudlark @brewski and @django (apologies if I’ve missed anyone). At the time, I had that hindbrain ‘shift’ that you were referring to @winston when I heard ‘cocktail’ but I really was so puzzled by Ashildr’s new confidence and bearing that I was too easily distracted.

    In the end, though, the questions have changed from “who is this doctor and what is his name?’ to “What is Clara?” much like Series 4 when Donna was asked by the soothsayer in Turn Left “who are you? What will you be?”

    There seems to be emotional portents surrounding Clara now – we know Missy’s involved, but to what extent exactly and how is the Doctor involved? -or perhaps how will he fail to be involved? Which may then lead him to some internal rumblings about his status: “I’m the Doctor and I save people!”

    This has been espoused a lot in the last few episodes, so it would be intriguing to see who he does save -or not.

    #45945
    CountScarlioni @countscarlioni

    @purofilion @mudlark

    One final thought on the anachronisms in this episode: at the same time that we got the cocktail and the 2008 Gladwell theory on 10,000 hours to master a skill, the writer was careful to get other facts correct. Ashildr/Lady me tells the Doctor, for example, that the life expectancy in England in 1651 is 35. A quick internet search and check via google books (up popped Mary J. Dobson’s Contours of Death and Dying in Early Modern England) shows that 35 is right on the money.

    #45946
    jphamlore @jphamlore

    Whereas I think in the spirit of the say the serials of the Fourth Doctor, not only does importance of accepting mortality apply to individuals, it also applies to species.  There is a time for a species to live in the Doctor Who universe but also I believe a time for it to die, or at least cease to be of great influence, including Time Lords.   Those who resist accepting their mortality become monsters, and at least during the Fourth Doctor’s reign, monsters were free game for extermination.

    Of course in the new series there are the Tivolians who in some sense are the opposite of conquerors, accepting all invasion, but they are not respected by the Doctor either.

    To me the meaning of the Gallifrey Falls No More painting is that the palace shown never existed in the physical Gallifrey.  Actual Gallifrey was all dingy and decaying, with wastelands outside the capitol.  What that palace is is an idealized Gallifrey, an ascended Gallifrey, a Gallifrey that has obtained Enlightenment and has left this worldly plane.  The Curator is a Bodhisattva who temporarily renounced his own ascension to assist others to ascend.  That is the Doctor, a Bodhisattva.

    #45951
    Mudlark @mudlark

    @countscarlioni

    the writer was careful to get other facts correct. Ashildr/Lady me tells the Doctor, for example, that the life expectancy in England in 1651 is 35.

    Another interesting and perhaps significant point;  I don’t think that anyone in 17th century England would have considered mortality in that statistical light.  Lady Me, who had seen so many generations live and die, might have had a different perspective, but in a contemporary setting would not have had the means to gather the data.

    I have found that people are sometimes misled by such statistics, though.  The figure quoted is the life expectancy at birth, and it is skewed by a very high mortality among infants and young children in the general population.  Once, when I was researching family history, I totted up all the baptisms and all the burials of children recorded in all the 17th century registers for a parish in Lancashire in which some of my ancestors lived.  I do not have the exact figures to hand, but they were horrendous – if my memory is at all accurate, the number of baptisms was little more than 20% higher than the number of infant and child burials.  These figures are not valid for the country as a whole, of course, and the method statistically crude even for one parish.  I would have to check the details, but I think more sophisticated demographic studies of the population as a whole have shown that anything between 40% and 50% of children died before reaching adult years.

    #45952
    Mudlark @mudlark

    Re life expectancy in the 17th century.  I have just done a quick check and about 12% of children in England died in their first year. The mortality rate for all children was higher than I remembered – about 60%.  For someone reaching the age of 20 or so, average life expectancy was 59/60 – and of course there were plenty of people who lived into their 70s and beyond.

    #45953
    PhaseShift @phaseshift
    Time Lord

    You know, the mischievous side of me looks at the picture of Ashildr dressed in a similar way to Clara’s mum (excellent spot by @kharis) thinks of the bootstrap paradox, and wants to suggest Clara gets physically changed, has to swap clothes and ends up stranded back in time, where she stops a man being run over by a car, resolving her unwarranted guilt feelings over her failure to save Danny. Love blossoms, etc. A child is born.

    Essentially this borrows heavily from the Red Dwarf episode Ouroboros in which Dave Lister realises he is a bootstrap paradox.

    LISTER
    The in-vitro tube, the one that Kochanski’s got. The frozen embryo – it’s me! At some point after the baby’s born we must go back in time and leave me under the pool table at the Aigburth Arms. We wrote Ouroboros on the box to explain! I’m my own father… and Chris is my ex-girlfriend and my mum!

    CAT
    You should write a letter to Playboy, bud. I bet you anything it’d get printed.

    #45959
    blenkinsopthebrave @blenkinsopthebrave

    @phaseshift

    Let’s not forget “The Flipside of Dominick Hide”

    #45963
    JimTheFish @jimthefish
    Time Lord

    @bluesqueakpip — that’s an excellent theory and I think you could well be right on the money there.

    #45968
    Bluesqueakpip @bluesqueakpip

    @jimthefish

    It’s a scene in The Woman Who Lived that reminded me of it. The one where the Doctor says that the immortals shouldn’t travel together – but strangely, only then mentioned Captain Jack.

    Okay, Catherine Tregenna, Captain Jack is a character she’s written for so it’s a nice little Torchwood ref – and non fans are more likely to recognise the more recent character. But was anyone else waiting for him to say ‘Romana’? Romana, the Time Lady he effectively trained?

    It felt like the same kind of omission as in Before The Flood, where O’Donnell missed out Donna because the reference was going to come next week. It also felt like a set-up for the Doctor’s future acceptance that, immortal or not, the Magician’s Apprentice has to eventually finish her apprenticeship and set off on her own Fool’s Journey. 🙂

    #45982
    Arbutus @arbutus

    @bluesqueakpip      Agreed. I too was expecting to hear Romana mentioned. I like the idea that that opening title (which has engendered some disagreement as to who is being referenced) might actually be in itself a foreshadowing of the end of the series!

     

    #46012
    Anonymous @

    @arbutus @bluesqueakpip

    That is awesome theorising and I hope (really hope) that’s how it works out.

    #46176
    Kharis @kharis

    @lisa Brilliant!  Remember ME!

    <span class=”useratname”>@countscarlioni  That was a heartbreaking song, and certainly could be the direction we are going.
    </span>

     

    #47163
    catladymeow @catladymeow

    this two part episode really hit home for me.  Lots of food for thought.  Thoughts I have been having for decades now.  How does a person feel when they outlive all those they love, time after time.  Do they stop loving after a while?  This is one of the premises to the novel I am currently working on.  An immortal (or seemingly immortal) race in a fantasy setting, and how do they react to living among ordinary humans.

    Perhaps this is the number one reason I am so in love with the Doctor.  He’s pretty much immortal, and yet, through it all he keeps caring, keeps loving.  One of my friends used to say she hated Tom Baker as the Doctor because he never touched his companions, until Romana the second (the one he married IRL Lala Ward?  My memory is not clear on her name).  Me, I love how zany he was.  Until she mentioned it I had not noticed that.

    So how does one decide which doctor is the favorite or the best one of all of them?  Your own personality, likes and dislikes lead you to decide for yourself.  I love Sylvester McCoy, and always will.  He and Ace were a great team.  I loved the way he talked.  Of the older series, he’s the one for me.  Of the new series?  I have not decided.  I like them all.

    #47168
    Anonymous @

    @catladymeow

    Another writer on the Forum -welcome to you. That’s fantastic. I really wish you well with that. I believe we have a few published writers on this Forum which is great-  they add a creative perspective, which I can only dream of!

    I agree, this was a great episode. I think opinion was divided as to whether it “promised more than it delivered” compared with the first of the 2 -parter but I think it was rather wonderful.

    One person on the site dislkes the way this Doctor and those in recent years were ‘touchy feely’ -they claimed, as an alien, he shouldn’t have the emotion of humanity nor should he approach relationships (including the dreaded ‘hugs’)  in the way we ourselves do.

    I like that he does have a sense of what humans need- to touch is essentially human if not common to most in the animal ‘kingdom’ -the idea we become something more when we’re recognised thru a handshake, a touch on the shoulder, a veritable pat on the back which is important and I commented on this thread, or another, how teachers today are generally not permitted to touch students unless, say, in music, it is to position a student’s hands correctly on the violin bow, for example.

    I myself never saw more than one McCoy episode but I fell in love with the show via Pertwee -a very distant Doctor, who, in his manners,  unusual dress and didactic technique reminds me more and more of my late father and of other men, of similar age, around which I grew.

    I’m loving this season. It resonates with me on a level similar to that of Season 5 when Smith first appeared out of the swimming pool and into Amelia’s life, a house with extra rooms, a crack in the wall and the “you’re Scottish, fry something.” Smith had me hooked from that moment on!

    He still remains my favourite Doctor although I’m beginning to think the word favourite just doesn’t work with this show at all. There’s so much happening within every season -excellently chosen actors and scripts, a veritable collision of triumphs and rattlingly fast paced and illusive dialogue which, upon further viewing, sustains months of debate and provides, like the classic novel, so much depth upon re-reading and review and as we often debate the genre of Who (“is it Sci-fi, fantasy…?” or perhaps just its own genre?) we could decide to throw out the ideas of this and that being the ‘best’, the ‘worst’ the most fondly recalled etc…

    I know this is how our mind instantly and irrevocably works –  to collate, to tender scripts, ideas for remission, omission and constant prioritising but I wonder if therein lies a flaw. As this show is fond of breaking boundaries and of taking leaps into the unknown I might decide to move away from a belief in one Doctor or one episode over another.

    It is as if the entire show is one long and beautiful life -the Doctor’s. He’s one and many all at once. Splitting him into this actor and that brings forth great debates about style and technique (which is wonderful) but it would be interesting to set aside that notion,  perhaps, of what is better or prioritised for a different method altogether.

    @lisa I wonder if you agree with that or get my meaning (I’m not being very clear at all!)? This is a programme which extends its capacities every season as @bluesqueakpip so eloquently wrote regarding how this week’s particular episode was so unusual in its experimentation and breaking down of barriers.

    From experiments and great risks come the invention of spectacularly new things -I’m thinking, in particular, of scientists discovering X-Ray, Rogaine and penicillin. In television, if showrunners can take risks (as did Joss Whedon and, later RTD in 2005) there’s an awful lot to learn and if those people take away a criticism and create something utterly new (like Buffy’s ‘Hush’) it could embed itself not only in future episodes but influence other less creative telly so that it becomes, in the words of the Doctor “the best it can be” and I think one fail -or something which appears to ‘fail’ may only do so if one looks at the whole creation from minute 1 to minute 50.

    I prefer to see the oddities of success -the one little thing which made that episode special despite other cracks breaking open. I noticed that the lion creature wasn’t really successful, to me, in this episode and yet I didn’t let that disturb the other processes at work -the way people interact is most important to me. I think @arbutus you made reference to that recently. Learning and experimentation is gutsy and vivid; just as the 2 part format of this season exhibited so well in The Woman Who Lived is also an experiment -giving us much more content and espousing the concept that 1+1 = more than 2. So that in two episodes we discover a little movie from which characters are fully developed without the constraints affecting modern story telling where the moment of resolution is more predictable.

    There is more to evaluate from plot to arcs to smaller characters -who, in a one episode trial, might be immediately forgotten yet now they’re elevated into something fuller, no longer diminished. They’re new, brisk and vital which I love -I think @soundworld, you would know what I mean? That love of detail, seen in The Woman Who Lived as well as last week’s episode means we can unpick much more and create connections between and across different episodes ensuring themes are brought forth with greater clarity.

    Another experiment (these 2 parters) and I think it’s worked -certainly, in a musical parallel, we’ve a sense of drive, forward momentum, motifs reappearing, re-worked like a small, indistinct Mozart sonata which turns the genre upside down to reveal more motifs when we least expected them, like a little gift and a collection of workable ideas sustained til the coda.

    Anyway, I did go off topic there. Forgive me all!

    Puro

    #47241
    Whisht @whisht

    So….. I woke up today with an idea drifting through what counts for a waking mind. In fact two ideas.
    Both quite bonkers. And wanting to connect, but I’ve not managed to yet.

    So, for the first bonkers thought – Ashildr is finding Claricles throughout Earth history.
    She’s meeting them and… what? Does she learn their stories? Does she right them down?
    Does she in fact right stories about the Doctor, how he (yet again) saves a planet, saves people.

    Let’s say that the pages ripped from Ashildr’s diaries are these stories, learned from the Claricles.

    Who would rip out stories about the Doctor? and why?

    River? She is a historian I guess.
    Missy? She is a nutcase I guess.
    Clara?

    Perhaps Clara needed to collect them as a book of tales and tell the children of Gallifrey about the good deeds that the Doctor did; how he saved people and was ‘a good man’.

    Why?

    Well, perhaps because they think of him as a monster, the monster who would destroy them.

    And the other bonkers theory?
    Perhaps Clara gets to Gallifrey as a witness to the Doctor’s good deeds.

    And perhaps because The Doctor wasn’t given extra lives as a gift, but rather so that he could live to face the judgement of the Gallifeyans. To survive to face a(nother) Trial.*

     

     

     

    * btw I have no desire to see another Trial of the Doctor! And really, I should’ve left my bonking this morning to just the storytelling Clara, looking after kids; propogating stories…..

    #49956
    Anonymous @

    I thought I’d promote a review my good friend Stephen and I did for this episode. Our aim is to make funny Doctor Who reviews for those who enjoy dry humour but keen analysis that often harks back to past episodes and compares and contrasts. We don’t get many views but we’re proud of what we do and would appreciate any attention given to our work. (Think of it as a style similar to RedLetterMedia!)

    – Bird Gnomeahawk

    #49962
    ichabod @ichabod

    @birdtomahawk  Thanks for your reviews!  This one in particular I found very interesting — particularly the observation that most of the Doctor’s major reflections and equals (more or less) have been women in S9 — Ashildr, Clara, Missy.  It hadn’t occurred to me to see it that way, but I think you’ve got hold of something important there.

    #49965
    Anonymous @

    @ichabod Thank you very much indeed! It is an interesting point made by Stephen rather than myself. I should apologise for semi-spamming multiple threads with these but you know how it is with getting views!

    #49969
    ichabod @ichabod

    @birdtomahawk  Oh, don’t apologize; it could have taken way too long to find your reviews otherwise, and we need them now, while S9 is still clear in our heads (well, as clear as these things get).  As for the source of that observation, trust Steven Moffat to know pretty much what he’s doing.  Thinking about his work from a writers’ p.o.v. just blows my teeny mind every time . . . I want to be like *that*, next lifetime (but will probably be a piano tuner or a French teacher instead; whose nose).

    #51138
    KBranagh @kbranagh

    I just saw ”The Woman Who Lived ”
    Not good as ”The Girl Who Died” but still a very important piece of the arc(?) of the season.
    Nice to see Ashildr again so soon but maybe is too convenient that Doctor casualy meet her two weeks after, in another timeline.
    Maisie Williams…very strong performance in this episode, she’s already fitt in very well in the Doctor Who universe! I like the open ending of her caracter as protector and guidance of the companions! I’m glad that she’s not become like a sort of Davros 2.0

    I’ve noticed one thing in this season… ok, we know that Clara….well, she the best companion ever…but the doctor is so over protecttive with her this year! I don’t remember Smith acted like this with Amy.

    #51140
    ichabod @ichabod

    @kbranagh    the doctor is so over protecttive with her this year! I don’t remember Smith acted like this with Amy.

    No.  I think this is new, and it’s kind of the point of the relationship as it develops: the basic problem of extreme disparity between a devoted pair (on whatever level[s] you choose to see that devotion).  He has found “someone he can’t bear to lose”, having pretty much reshaped his 12-self with her as his fixed point during S8 (not to mention the Impossible Girl kerfuffle, which was, thankfully, left behind in S8 so that Clara could become a more real, rounded, human character, warts and all).  And yet, because she’s a mere human, he knows from the get-go that he *must* lose her.  So love morphs into an obsessive fixation on doing the impossible: somehow preventing that necessary end, while at the same time inviting her company on the adventures she craves that bring exactly the kinds of dangers that can end her already short life.

    Sometimes I think that Moffat and Capaldi decided to take the amorous attachment of Smith and push it to its logical conclusion: if you push it far enough, love becomes obsession, and obsession is destructive because that’s what it does — it turns the object of your obsession into an object, not a person.  It’s a weird form of idolatry, and perverts honest person-to-person love into something — well — perverse.  And that’s where they meant to go with it, as a kind of answer to the Harlequin Romance (Mills and Boone) strain of fandom, perhaps.

    So yes, his effort is not only wrong-headed (she, the *person* keeps saying she doesn’t want to be protected, but obsession doesn’t listen); it’s also doomed.  Which reality he defies right at the outset, in TGWD.  The doomful note is sounded early and loudly, and boy is it fulfulled!  And yet, without the blood and horror of classic tragedy, since it all actually resolves like a comedy.  Lovely.

    #51142
    winston @winston

    @ichabod  @kbranagh   I agree that CapDoc is very over protective of Clara in this series. I think he also sees that her loss of Danny has made her vulnerable and reckless to the extreme and he feels the need to protect her from herself. Even if she doesn’t want his help or protection.

    #51144
    ichabod @ichabod

    @winston  Oh, absolutely — Danny’s death, however heroic, left her in bad, bad shape, and in a way, of course it IS the Doctor’s fault (at least as much as it is hers).  If he’d stepped aside and let her make the choice for Danny sooner, she’d have probably lived a reasonably happy life with Danny, so all this sturm und drang has been brought down upon her by — his protection, of course, which he has to increase to deflect the inevitable crash.  Something is owed there; and, as she’s “the puppy” in terms of comparative longevity (Missy wasn’t wrong about that, only not entirely right), he really does have a “duty of care” as long as Clara is with him.

    Their story is also a kind of rebuttal of the whole sub-genre of romance fiction in which the feisty, pretty, talented young woman becomes the apple of the immortal vampire’s eye — or the angel’s eye, or the demon’s eye, or the werewolf’s eye, etc. ad nauseum.  If the magical thingummy really does love you truly, madly, deeply, but he’s gonna live almost forever and your family only makes it to 100 in good century, there’s no way that true, mad, deep love is going to work (this is assuming that the thingummy can’t turn you into an immortal thingummy too, like, say Ashildr, and even that has its own problems).

    And a re-affirmation of the central truth the show honors: that love it or hate it, everything changes.

    #51182
    KBranagh @kbranagh

    @winston @ichabod

    Thank you for yours intervein.
    This is another reason why the Capaldi saga is my favourite, more real and adult rappresentation of the Doctor.

    I’m still on episode 6 but i have the terror that the Doctor decide to leave Clara at home for good(a reverse situation of season 8) I hope not, i love Clara..i want her on the show for another couple of years.

    #51186
    winston @winston

    @kbranagh    I agree about Clara. She is a good companion for this Doctor.

    While I have enjoyed the maturity of the CapDoc series , I also loved the playfulness of the 11th ,the flirtiness of 10 and the shell shocked 9th. So I am ready for whatever happens in the future and I know I will like it.

    #51189
    ichabod @ichabod

    @winston  While I have enjoyed the maturity of the CapDoc series , I also loved the playfulness of the 11th ,the flirtiness of 10 and the shell shocked 9th. So I am ready for whatever happens in the future and I know I will like it.

    Well put, thanks (though the flirtiness of 10 drove me away).  We’ve now had one hell of a mature story, wrenching and shocking and featuring a darker vision of the Doctor that was “real” enough to be ungraspable as such by many fans (“whaddaya mean, dark, *that* wasn’t dark compared to xxx episode, and nobody died dead dead dead!”).  It was spiky and contentious and rather chaotic and clumsy at times, and desperately moving when it needed to be, and I loved it.

    But a change in tone and focus after a year to ponder and discuss would feel right, and would honor the “DW always changes because that’s its nature” spine of the show.  Maybe a broad-canvas space opera style arc, as opposed to the intimate closeness of S8 and S9?  Maybe a marvelous quest story, or a cat and mouse arc with Rassilon the Enraged, something along those lines.  I can’t say that I know I’ll like it, because that remains to be seen.  I’ll watch just for Capaldi, if nothing else, while we’ve still got him.

    In any case, sooner or later down the line will come another series that’s perfect for *me*, and that’s fine.  Why begrudge anyone their delight in something that turns me off?  That’s what baffles me about the whiners and haters, but hey, their problem, not mine.  It’s just the lesson the Doctor himself just learned (yet again), bringing itself to bear: things end, because they have to.  Not to worry, since things also begin — what’s that great line from “Closing Time”?  “Every new beginning is some other beginning’s end.”

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