The Day of the Doctor
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janetteB 1 year ago.
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30 November 2013 at 00:26 #22010
@phaseshift – The Doctor deciding to go in and save Clara is a good point; if Clara’s not there, Time doesn’t get changed. In any way – without Clara, the Doctor dies at Trenzalore. But after she’s saved him, he has to decide to ‘be the Doctor’ and save her.
Anyway, just for fun, I’ve gone through the structure of Day of The Doctor – it involves rather a lot of arrows and dotted lines as the characters switch between the time periods.
But what does become apparent as you go through is that the Zygon adventure is constructed in such a way that both parts would have been solved without the intervention of any other Doctor. That is, there is a possible original adventure – one part in 1562 with the Tennant Doctor and one part in 2013 with the Smith Doctor- which doesn’t require any crossing of the timestreams whatsoever.
I’d say that the point that the two halves of the Zygon adventure are designed that way suggests that Moffat thinks of the intervention of the Moment as changing the Doctor’s history.
In addition the Tennant and Smith Doctors remember seeing Gallifrey burn. It’s referenced by both of them – as the alternative that they’ve seen; not a memory of a decision that was never actually made. They saw it burn.
30 November 2013 at 09:44 #22018The other possibility is that by saving Clara (who suggested this was the end of her story in NoTD) this also changed the result of the TimeWar.
@phaseshift – the more I think about it, the more I think that’s a moment of genius. Can I quote you on this for another forum?
Because – yes, of course. If there’s no Clara, the Moment will be used. The outcome of the Time War cannot be changed; later versions of the Doctor will always decide that there is no other way.
Which explains why there can be two time-lines. In timeline One, Clara’s story ends with her saving the Doctor. The Moment never sends The War Doctor forward/backwards/sideways in time – because there’s no point. There’s no Clara to make him change his mind; all she can do is have him supported by his future versions. Timeline One: Gallifrey burns, and always will. The Doctor cannot change his mind.
With the time-line subtly changed to include Clara, we get Timeline Two. The Moment can send the War Doctor off on his time-travels. The time-line can now be altered; Clara’s nudging will combine with the Smith Doctor’s having had 400 years to think of ‘things I should have done’. Timeline Two: Gallifrey is saved from burning.
And the Thirteenth flies in to help save The Day of The Doctor. Clara saw all eleven Doctors and the War Doctor – there are no other Doctors. Now Gallifrey doesn’t burn, there’s a future for the Doctor.
30 November 2013 at 09:58 #22019@phaseshift @bluesqueakpip – It’s interesting actually, that with Clara appearing at all the points in the Doctor’s timeline, and the GI attempting to make changes to all of his adventures, that neither of them appear to have encountered the War Doctor – is that because he only exists within the Time War, which is time locked? Or is the original outcome, burned Gallifrey and all, a result of GI meddling and what we see in Day of The Doctor actually another one of Clara’s Impossible Girl moments – is the Clara in this episode another Claricle?
30 November 2013 at 11:55 #22021No problem with you quoting me in other places at all (subject to you correcting my usual appalling typos to make me look more intelligent 🙂 ) I’m looking forward to the blog with diagrams.
These arcs about time he’s done in the three series have been fascinating, all in their own ways. Some story elements of 7B really do play into what NotD and this are all about. I can see the Christmas special forming the end-point to a trilogy of some kind, so I’m really anticipating it now.
30 November 2013 at 11:57 #22022Just to go off on a tangent, I caught the request by @shazzbot about more episode retrospectives, and I think I agree with the general consensus that early next year may be good. Your previous suggestion of Day of the Daleks is now a must for Pertwee I think. I actually think anyone who hasn’t seen it before will find it interesting to compare the takes on time.
30 November 2013 at 12:03 #22023I think that interpretation was my favourite when we were speculating about the identity of Doctor Hurt. I think the visualisation of the “Time Track” was really fragmented, showing gaps that both couldn’t access because they were locked and/or rewritten. I think it was in the Stolen Earth that Doc 10 said that all the events of the Time War were Time Locked and normally inaccessible, so surely that part of his history would form part of those events.
When the GI and Clara jumped into his Time Stream, I always saw them as two influences on his existence. The malign and benign, who overall cancelled each other out. For me the scene with Hartnell was key to that. From the Doctors wife we know the Doc and TARDIS chose each other in that intial time line. The GI as a formless entity that “whispers” may have been that little voice that told the Doctor to take a different one. With a fully working TARDIS his entire life may have been different. Clara corrected that choice, and the time track continued. The detail changed, but not the flow of his life. I do think that minor changes may have made that intial view of the HurtDoctor to be seen at the end though, and hence my thought that perhaps the Moment couldn’t have forged the link to the future.
30 November 2013 at 12:42 #22026@phaseshift I missed your entire Time Lords blog over the summer I’m afraid! What a labour of love – is it fair to sum up as “the Time Lords are dodgy as f… udge” ? 🙂
Agreed, although I have looked forward to their return for a while now. I’ve always enjoyed the Doctor’s struggles with TL society – his love/ hate relationship with his own culture.
@Phaseshift and @bluesqueakpip = exactly! For anyone who has been following Moffat’s tenure in detail I think there can be no doubt that two time-streams are involved and Gallifrey did indeed burn in one of them.
Just to add to the “Clara as the factor which changed things”, she was the one who figured out that Hurt Doctor was from a time before he had ended the Time War (she saw in his eyes that he was not yet carrying that burden) and that enabled Eleven and Twelve to follow him back in time to Gallfirey at the moment of decision. But even then, as you say, his future selves were simply going to share the load with him and participate in the genocidal red-button pushing decision, until she said “Wait!”
And it’s interesting, isn’t it, that Hurt Doctor, at the time of the decision, was not travelling with a companion. This has been a consistent New Who theme – the Doctor is at his most dangerous when he is companion-less. and they are the ones who often serve as his conscience. Ten was also companionless at the time. So, it’s probably safe to assume that in time-stream one, Twelve was, likewise, companionless during the encounter.
What’s more, Hurt Doctor explicitly parked the TARDIS some distance away and walked to his encounter with The Moment alone, because he could not bear his TARDIS to see his decision either (she being his constant companion, with, as we know, somewhat of a mind of her own).
Remember his blistering speech to Kovarian? The Doctor, alone, is not necessarily “a good man” and that is why he needs to many rules.
30 November 2013 at 13:43 #22029@bluesqueakpip @phaseshift @juniperfish @jamesunderscore
All great posts esp re Clara only being able to help with the otherwise timelocked Gallifrey/TimeWar because she was in the Doctor’s timestream*, and thereby ensuring his future.
Would be great to see TotD knitting together the last 3 seasons big arcs/themes.
*goes off to rework whole theory re why they are not still in the timestream, LOL
30 November 2013 at 16:17 #22040I’ll preface this by saying that I think Moffat does pretty good most of the time, and I’m very satisfied with the 50th anniversary, overall. However, this article raises some good points.
30 November 2013 at 17:16 #22046@curvedspace That is a good article.
However, I don’t think it is entirely correct in its reading of the Moffat era.
Moffat likes to think about the nature of time for a Time Lord. And, in some ways, death has no dominion, or rather, a Time Lord can pretend it has no dominion.
In “The Wedding of River Song” the Doctor has this exchange with Doruim Maldovar:
Doctor “I have got a time machine, Dorium. It’s all still going on. For me it never stops. Liz the First is still waiting in a glade to elope with me. I could help Rose Tyler with her homework. I could go on all Jack’s stag parties in one night.”
Maldovar: “Time catches up with us all, Doctor!”
The Doctor: “Well it has never laid a glove on me!
Then Eleven calls his old friend Lethbridge Stewart only to find out that time has indeed caught up with him, as the Brigadier died a few months ago. The Doctor looks devastated. We do not see the Brigadier happily resurrected, nor any grief over his death ameliorated,as the article suggests is the case with deaths in the Moffat era. Nor can we do so without a substitution, because the actor, Nicholas Courtney, himself died in 2011.
When Rory is taken by a Weeping Angel and Amy elects to join him in “The Angels Take Manhattan” we see the Doctor in anguished grief because a time paradox means he cannot ever visit them in the New York past. They are lost to him forever. Moreover, we see him mourning them in several subsequent episodes, symbolised by the fact that he continues to wear Amy’s glasses. Again, grief is not ameliorated here. Eleven is heart-broken.
Finally, the Doctor is shown to be devastated by the loss of River in “The Name of the Doctor” He tears up when Clara tells him she has seen River (and the Doctor almost never cries) Moreover he reveals that he never went back to visit archived River in the Library because it would have hurt him too much. If that isn’t genuine grief over a genuine loss I don’t know what is.
It’s certainly true that New Who has used time time-paradoxes, time-locks and alternate universes to separate the Doctor from those he loves because otherwise, as he suggests to Dorium above, in theory he could keep visiting them indefinitely prior to the point of their death, or at least until the time tracks became so overlaid with the possibility of meeting himself that it was no longer safe to do so from the point of temporal stability (which would make a great grief stricken story in itself).
So, I submit, that whatever criticisms of Moffat one might wish to make, the idea that he has banished death or grief from the Who universe is simply not correct. He has simply thought about how that works for a time traveller.
(Thanks to http://www.planetclaire.org for the script quotes)
30 November 2013 at 17:25 #22047I think it’s a popular complaint about Moffat that his tenure has seen a decline in overall deaths. It’s not something I really mind, as I’ve seen the show lurch in the other direction too often, with seasons of “everyone dies” and that gets even duller.
I think @juniperfish has made some good points, but I’m less kind about the viewpoint myself. My one big issue is the comparison with the other writers, including Joss Whedon. To be fair to Moffat, that comparison isn’t helpful, as Whedons series have been stand-alone stories with a Start, middle and endpoint. Moffat is a caretaker of a show he feels will still be running when he’s expired. He therefore has to consider the future and give the show longevity.
If you read my blog on the Time Lords, and then the comments – what is the number one complaint? The “Last of the Time Lords” stuff was becoming tired. An issue that had solved a number of “baggage” issues the old show had has become fresh baggage.
Even though through 3 seasons SM had downplayed it (“The regret” of the RTD series had become “forgot” of the new to coin a phrase from the special), people still saw it as an issue. That limits the show. If anything, that is the real danger of killing the show, when it can’t move on.
I think this dynamic doesn’t really change the real regret of the RTD years. His Doctors went through it. You can feel grief at the passing of someone, and then later learn something about them that makes you feel ashamed you wasted your tears. It doesn’t mean that you didn’t go through the grief, and it wasn’t very real to you.
SMs not infallible, and I don’t think he’ll ever please some people, but I think he has a better handle on how to keep the show alive and give it a future than some people give him credit for.
30 November 2013 at 19:04 #22054At least Moffat has a better handle (in my opinion) on death, timetravel and the Doctor than the carry-on at the end of the McGann movie. Now that was a complete cheat if you ask me!
Just occasionally people actually do die – the recent death of Cass (in Night of the Doctor) was particularly shocking because she chose it, rather than travel with the Doctor.
“Subsitute deaths” can be easier to present to a family audience, but no less moving especially to the adult audience who understand the deeper implications – as @juniperfish mentioned above re Amy & Rory and River. I would also add old Amy in The Girl who Waited. I was devastated after that! (Outwith Moffat era there was Donna, whose fate had a massive emotional punch).
30 November 2013 at 19:53 #22058@juniperfish @phaseshift @curvedspace : my favourite thing to do on this site is to hark back to comparisons to the classic series, so I have to say I agree that Moffat is mostly thinking about how time travel affects people’s relationship with death. The comparison I have in mind is to something that has irked me ever since I first saw it: the start of Time-Flight.
So: Adric is dead. We saw the ship explode with him on it at the end of Earthshock. But is he? If the TARDIS had landed on the bridge of the ship and got him off in the nick of time, it wouldn’t have altered a thing. No explanation was ever given for the Doctor’s insistence that Adric was lost. This was the first time a long-standing companion had died, and it didn’t work because they never thought it through. I think Moffat learned from errors like that.
BTW, that article also alludes to Moffat’s alleged sexism because his female characters aren’t very strong (supposedly). Ignoring the matter of them being true or not, isn’t it safer to conclude that, like Douglas Adams, his female characters might be weak because they’re just not his strong point. Adams always admitted that Trillian was a cipher because he just wasn’t very good at female characters. Saying that Moffat’s somehow got a political agenda is like saying that RTD had some sort of bias against endings. That’s obvious nonsense. He just wasn’t very good at them.
30 November 2013 at 20:09 #22061I edited the above because my autocorrect excelled itself and turned “female characters” into “farmable characters”. I won’t sleep tonight for pondering that curious concept.
30 November 2013 at 20:55 #22065@arkleseizure – Moffat’s alleged sexism seems to have taken on a life of its own. It’s become a bit like a Freudian diagnosis – no way, ever, of convincing these analysts that they might be wrong.
I didn’t like the article that much; partly because any argument which lists an entire series of people dying and then says ‘but they don’t count’ is a bit dodgy. Partly because anyone who confuses a plain clothes detective with a ‘nice security guard’ is clearly not paying that much attention. Mainly because they then go on to mention a group of indisputably dead, deceased, no more characters as not being dead. Seriously, Vincent Van Gogh doesn’t die at the end of Vincent and the Doctor? In which universe? Have they confused a flashback to before his death with his not dying?
Anyway, I’m working my way through an essay length blog post in which I do discuss, briefly, why mass genocide becomes a structural problem once you step outside the ‘only adults on Gallifrey’ (a product of RTD’s reading of the Virgin New Adventures, I think) and start looking at the television history.
I may be gone for some time…
🙂30 November 2013 at 21:12 #22066@arkleseizure (and welcome back to the cute little green monster 🙂
my autocorrect excelled itself and turned “female characters” into “farmable characters”
Freud could have a ball with your autocorrect! (I switched mine off cos of that sort of thing; gets you into all sorts of bother)
New blogpost cooking – woohoo! ::overexcited yeti-jumps:: Don’t be away too long 🙂
30 November 2013 at 22:31 #22073Ahhh … TimeFlight. I actually looked at the novelisation of it when I was doing the blog on Target. My mind seemed to self edit what I was reading so it went:
“Tegan, Nyssa …. I just can’t go back on my own Timeline”, protested the Doctor, as he did his happy dance.
I always thought that the SM way of having the fact that the dead (such as Amy) told him they had never seen him before they died makes it almost impossible for him to reverse that decision. It also makes it more real to him (like being told the Brigadier has died). As River said, he doesn’t like to see the damage.
1 December 2013 at 00:23 #22080@curvedspace – That article is cherry picking elements to build a case around. They are completely discounting many examples, as mentioned brilliantly above.
1 December 2013 at 01:29 #22083@bluesqueakpip : Yes, with regards to Vincent and the Doctor, that’s 100% right. It’s abundantly clear that the Doctor has has failed to change history; he’s just enabled Vincent to feel a little better at the end of his life. It all harks back to the rules of the Hartnell historicals. You can’t change history, although you can make the details that nobody knows fit your desires, as Barbara achieved in the Aztecs. That article would claim that Admiral de Coligny lived to a ripe old age because we didn’t see him being slaughtered. (Apologies for raising my obsession with the Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Eve again, but I’d arrange to have the whole thing restaged if I had the money).
I really look forward to your blogpost. What really strikes me is that in the past I’ve defended the RTD Who from Classic series obsessives by insisting that Doctor Who isn’t just the Classic series and should be allowed to move on. Now I find myself looking back to the Classic series to defend Moffat from RTD fans who seem to think that his ideas are sacred. I’m actually looking forward to defending Moffat’s heir on the same grounds I’ve used before.
1 December 2013 at 04:26 #22084Anonymous @
Yes, I disagree with some of the points in the article highlighted for us by curvedspace but I think the writer, in an effort to clamber on the bandwagon criticising Moffat, failed to express the problems of retaining an older show with similar themes such as the idea of The Lonely God or the Time Lord Victorious.
In order for freshness to return, some of that baggage really needs to go and now, with this anniversary special, there’s a perfect moment to do it. As other, better writers have expressed above, the Doctor’s concept of loss is very different to ours and it’s been presented by Moff with dramatic irony which is very tragic for us to witness- and for the Doctor himself- to ‘travel through’. Whether someone ‘dies’ or not in some ‘typical’ manner is a little more complex or challenging for this particular show. Losing Amy and Rory to an earlier NY is just as heartrending as someone dying. As Iamnota fishIamafreeman suggested (Whoa; I’m sure I got that wrong but with practise I’ll get it right!) you don’t have to commit genocide to have nightmares or to carry the scars (of battle), I think that this applies to the Doctor’s rendering of loss: the absence of companions and those he truly loves -even those he met only briefly (AGMGTW) is the worst loss of all as he felt that through his vanity (and need) he caused these losses. For the Doctor, loss is a daily and material issue: it is why he travels so far and changes companions every few seasons! It’s probably why he doesn’t (until this season with Moff-going back to see Craig and his new family) ever return to visit his ;’older’ friends (Sarah Jane with Tom Baker in Croydon for example). He doesn’t like to see the damage-as PhaseShift reminded me. Dead is dead but loss is different -Moff is exploring this concept very well, even when Rory kept dying/disappearing/being wiped from existence etc 🙂
1 December 2013 at 12:22 #22087@purofilion
I like how you put that. Death is a difficult concept for a Time Lord. But we see how it – the irretrievable loss – affects him. Same with the Time War -we see how it affects people. Which is the important bit.
PS Re tagging people – have a look at the Help Tab above. A few people’s tags don’t match their avatars. IAmNotAFishIAmAFreeMan is best called up by @pedant (it’s wibbly wobbly complicated 😉 )
1 December 2013 at 13:55 #22095I’ve just got back from the cinema, where I watched TDOTD again. No big audience this time, just a handful of people. No cheers, whoops or applause – a wholly different experience. Plus showing it at 10.30 am when I hadn’t really woken up was a different spin to when I watched it at night along with the rest of the world after 5 long months of anticipation.
Really, I just wanted to see all that 3D dust again, as it’s not really visible on telly. And to examine the actors’ pores. And the depth of the paintings & space battles… Also to hear the great surround-sound bit where the Zygon is coming for Oswald and the uber-loudness of the explosions. And to see the cinema skits again with their ‘noble past-time of Sontaran cloning’, ‘eating screaming popcorn’ & ‘one-eye-closed Zygon spec-detection’…
As I arrived to buy my ticket (No. 13, last time it was No.1), people were starting to arrive at the church next door and as I left they were also leaving.
Had I been particularly awake I might have thought something along the lines of, ‘Hmm. Dr Who is a bit like my Church.’ But I wasn’t.
1 December 2013 at 14:13 #22096I’ll just put a link here to @bluesqueakpip s blog on the mechanics of the episode. Well worth a read, and with helpful diagrams!
I had no idea that some cimemas were still showing it. That actually sounds like more of a cinema experience I’d enjoy, with only a few people.
1 December 2013 at 14:35 #22098<—- I Am The Secret One
1 December 2013 at 14:38 #220991 December 2013 at 14:43 #22100@phaseshift @wolfweed Perhaps y’all saw that the Doctor Who movie sales were second only to Catching Fire on release day. Pretty spiffy!
In that vein, the 50th Anniversary was the largest TV event Tumblr has seen, with 5.0 million posts, 4.9 million reblogs, 3.1 million likes and 1.0 million contributors (source: Doctor Who Tumblr). It was a social media record-breaker.
1 December 2013 at 14:47 #22102@phaseshift – It was called an ‘Encore’ showing. Only 15 people in the cinema, so I got the perfect seat, could splay out as much as I wanted & could hear all the dialogue (even noticed one bit I hadn’t before)…
Very indulgent, but couldn’t compare with the atmosphere of a packed, whooping, laughing, clapping (1st time for everyone) anniversary screening…
1 December 2013 at 15:03 #22103@wolfweed – nice one. The communal cinema viewing last Sat was very special, but enjoying cinema sound and vision (almost) on your own sounds pretty cool too. 15 people at 10.30 on a Sunday morning – I’m impressed it got that many!
On the subject of numbers, and following on from @curvedspace‘s post about record breaking Tumblr figs, the official timeshifted figs also suggest a triumph. No 1 TV show of the week (UK) with 12.8m views, inc a massive 2.7m on iplayer.
Factor in DVD sales (Yay! just got my copy (includes Night of the Doctor and the trailers)) and record breaking cinema sales worldwide and you have to think that the suits in accounts are just a bit happy. Even the producers who were having kittens about Moff being overbudget (theory copyright @bluesqueakpip ) must be thinking they can cut back on their therapy sessions now.
1 December 2013 at 17:31 #22109
Cinema Event Special Intro – 50th Anniversary Special(Someone had to commit ‘the worst war-crime’ to obtain this)
1 December 2013 at 18:59 #22111Thanks for finding that – just another fun bit of the whole evening’s experience. Are these clips on the Bluray? Not that it would do me any good as I have a cathode ray TV and DVD player – but it would be good for those who can experience the HD 3D thing – chin, wrinkles and all…
2 December 2013 at 12:43 #22127Coming into this thread a week behind but still ruminating on it. Also been looking for a website to share my thoughts. So here is my maiden post.
1) Loved it. Lived up to the expectation. So delighted there was a prequel. I see no reason, why there should not be a parallel series with the McGann Doctor-before he grows too old. Come on Beeb.
2) I personally would stick with the numbering for identification purposes, but in the Doctor Who life history Smith to Capaldi is the 12th regeneration. This in effect makes Capaldi very mortal and opens new story lines. I am expecting the Capaldi Doctor to have some sort of facial hair-otherwise why only see his eyes?
3) Seeing the Tom Baker character was a nice touch but dubious how it helps the future storyline. It is difficult to perceive how the Curator can be the 4th doctor or how he cannot be some future incarnation. This logic now implies 13 regenerations with a maximum of 12. So Stephen Moffatt has cut his work out for himself.
4) A weapon with software so powerful it becomes sentient-genius, sheer genius. And brilliantly portrayed by Billie Piper. Not the first time, time lord technology confuses past and future-vis a vis in the Doctor’s Wife.
5) Disappointed Christopher Eccleston could not have at least agreed to shooting the regeneration from the Hurt character. When the War Doctor started to regenerate you have no idea how much I wanted to see Eccleston emerge, at least in cameo. I really don’t think that would have broken his artistic principles. We will only know for sure when SM says, “Yeah” or “Nay” but the notion that the War Doctor’s part was originally intended for the 9th doctor makes very good sense to me.
6) I have still to work out the 3 doctors individual time lines, the wiping of their minds and their Tardis’s flight paths to see if there isn’t a continuity error. The Smith character realises that he has to follow the Fez through the portal yet cannot remember other events that he has lived through twice.
7) Theories, stated elsewhere that the Tennant character is between the Waters of Mars and The end of Time are wrong. By the time of the Waters of Mars episode, QE1 had long fallen out with the Doctor in the Shakespeare Code. This therefore can only place the Doctor after Rose Tyler and before he meets Martha Jones.
8) Certain points in time and space are fixed, some are not. Again genius but the concept of Killing all the Time Lords has the same effect on subsequent history as taking them out of time and space and believing they have been killed. Thus an apparent fixed point is not.
9) I think the idea of a new story thread of the Doctor looking for Gallifrey will work. It will need a few series to run and I would like to see the Doctor become increasingly frustrated at his failure of finding it. Just imagine if the Time Lord Art in which the planet has been saved ends up in the wrong alien hands?
10) Struggling to see how the first 7 doctors knew to turn up in the right space time without subsequently remembering. Or may be they did, but could not tell their future selves. Or may be every regeneration knows to turn up at a certain time and certain place once and once only during the regeneration, but in the case of numbers 1-8 not knowing why.
11) Seeing all 13 doctors together looking at Gallifrey was a nice touch. I think it is more symbolic, than storyline.
12) My biggest and longest lasting mystery which emanates from the very first ever Dr Who episode still has not been answered. Who were Susan Fourman’s parents? And who was the mother of one of these parents, of course implying that the Doctor has a child. Now that could be a theme for the 8th Doctor.
2 December 2013 at 13:18 #22129Welcome @mikeofmcr.
Agreed, it would be nice to have a mini-series featuring Doc8 and Lucie Miller (from the Big Finish stories). I’d love to see ‘To The Death’ televised 🙂
Just to address your point (7). If you remember, in ‘The Shakespeare Code’ Doc10 claimed he’d hadn’t met Liz 1 and didn’t know why she was annoyed with him. Also, at the start of ‘The End of Time’, he told Ood Sigma that he’d just married her. So this would place Doc10’s storyline between TWoM and TEoT.
Who are Susan’s parents? While most theories would suggest that the ‘mysterious’ woman in TEoT was The Doctor’s mother, I’ve always believed her to be his daughter (ie, Susan’s mother). Whether Moffat will answer this question remains to be seen.
2 December 2013 at 14:17 #22130Re point (7). Thanks. Realise, as being of non-TimeLord stock, I got the Timey Wimey thing a bit wrong. Accept the point in the Doctor’s timeline, it is as you state. In QE1’s timeline The Day of the Doctor occurs before the Shakespeare Code. I don’t know how SM keeps track of it all!
2 December 2013 at 15:34 #22134@mikeofmcr re: 6)
I can’t resist. See my blog post. It has diagrams and everything. 🙂
2 December 2013 at 15:56 #22135@mikeofmcr re: 2)
I really hope you are wrong, according to me there is nothing worse than facial hair… Now I’m even more excited to find out what he looks like 😛
2 December 2013 at 18:43 #22142@mikeofmcr – you’re welcome.
I don’t know how SM keeps track of it all!
Me neither, but I do know that The Moff is responsible for giving me lots of headaches 🙂
2 December 2013 at 18:58 #22145The Moff is responsible for giving me lots of headaches
Me too.
But I strongly subscribe to the theory that he nipped into the TARDIS for a peek at @bluesqueakpip‘s brilliant blog explaining it all – linked in post 22134 above.
Never had a bearded Doctor before. Don’t judge till you’ve seen it 😉 (before long you’ll think every Dr should’ve had a goatee)
2 December 2013 at 19:26 #22149I am expecting the Capaldi Doctor to have some sort of facial hair-otherwise why only see his eyes?
The alternative is possible: that is, he had a beard when they filmed that (he certainly had a beard for filming The Musketeers), but he’s decided on a clean-shaven Doctor.
Or, they were keeping their options open.
9) I agree ‘the search for Gallifrey’ feels like Moffat’s got a years-long (decades long?) search in mind. I’d be quite surprised if we find it at Christmas. 🙂
10) I put forward a theory in my blog post – briefly, they’re changing the timeline, so they can’t retain the memory.
12) Yup. It’s a mystery. 😀
2 December 2013 at 19:49 #22153I hope you are wrong, but hey, what do I know, I might get convinced 🙂 Would have a hard time expressing my change of heart about beards to everyone I’ve complained about, though…
3 December 2013 at 13:20 #22198Hear Dan Starkey say, ”Zygon Juices”…
3 December 2013 at 17:06 #22203Beard eh? Good thinking @mikeofmcr
@scaryb, @elouise The Doctor has been bearded before, remember this
And I’d now like to reveal the Capaldi Doctor’s costume 😉
3 December 2013 at 17:39 #22204How could I forget? 🙂
It’s actually not as bad as feared! Gonna take something being used to, though, after my long tradition of hating beards of all kinds 🙂 Good that we have reached December now 😛
Maybe the 11th Doctor being bearded in Day of the Moon was our warning that this was to come…
3 December 2013 at 18:12 #22206I’ve nothing to add to the general “wasn’t it brilliant!?!”-ness of the comments (to which I agree), except a mild surprise that no one’s yet mentioned the other planet-destroying sentient bomb in a movie.
Think I may watch it again tonight.
Man.
3 December 2013 at 18:39 #22207::facepalm::
Brilliant remembering. I think I must’ve had some of what Matt’s had – forgot one of my favourite films! (Did you see my much earlier post btw, about a particular scene in Speilberg’s TinTin (co-scripted by one S Moffat) where Capt Haddock thinks he is a prisoner in a cabin, trying to think of ways to escape – only to find the door is unlocked! 😉
3 December 2013 at 19:24 #222083 December 2013 at 19:38 #22209@elouise if memory serves me wasn’t Capaldi beardless on the reveal show though thinking about it he may still have had a goatee. Oh by the way just seen the beebs Christmas line up advert montage with several interesting shots from the Xmas special, one had Clara introducing Matt smith’s doctor as her boyfriend to her family lol
3 December 2013 at 19:50 #22210I’ve only just reached the 4th Doctor so wouldn’t know, I’ll watch out for it though, no doubt 😉
I missed the show, partly because it wasn’t sent in my country and partly because I was away from everything called internet in that weekend :/ Lets hope he won’t have a goatee 😛
That sounds promising, for every day that passes I look more and more forwards to Christmas, might even survive the ice and snow and the storm they are promising this Friday!
3 December 2013 at 23:13 #22223I almost envy you, going into the Fourth Doctors ere fresh. Lots to enjoy.
How could you object to a beard like that though? He looks like a cross between Santa and Gandalf, which is fitting really, because that’s how I viewed the Doctor as a child. 🙂
4 December 2013 at 09:06 #22232I’m enjoying it very much, of course 🙂
And that’s easy, I was always scared of Santa when I was little, so it’s not very appealing! I’ve only been watching it for around a year, so I don’t have any childhood memories of the Doctor, it does, as you mentioned, mean that I get to watch everything for the first time 😀
5 December 2013 at 10:09 #22274Finally managed to re-watch this. Other than it’s utter, utter brilliance, and the fact that although the 3D must have been amazing, it didn’t spoil the 2D viewing experience.
Three points occurred to me.
Firstly, though it was very underplayed, there is the fact that the Doctor/s was under and obligation to help the Zygons as refugees rather than simply treat them as an invading force. Their planet was destroyed by the time-war. The situation was not unlike that of VOV, creatures fleeing the crack in time- except that it was. It made me wonder if this was the kind of thing the McGann doctor was doing- helping people affected by the time war rather than fighting in it- before he regenerated into a warrior.
It appears that the regeneration into a warrior wasn’t as complete as might have been expected. Hurt was, all the way through, a Doctor. Other actions of his might have been referred too, but nothing that had aged him. I’m interested in why Smiths Doctor is, by implication (from River) older than Tennants. From this I wonder if it is the effect of letting/making himself forget how many children were killed. Looking at Smith Doctors more worrying traits (Using his name and reputation as a weapon, telling the enemy to run rather than running himself) it’s as though he had almost taken on some power internally, from what he had/thought he had done. (Clara’s surprise as his involvement in the moment still makes sense, because I think Amy and Rory (and River) had managed to wear some of this out of him- I can’t remember if he ever said ‘basically, run’ in front of Clara.
Everything that happened in this episode was set up. The same software (I have no problem with the different sonic screwdrivers. They have a kind of cloud they constantly upload to). The memory wipe- not just for the Zygon situation, but the role memory would play in the entire episode. And the 3D painting- stasis- As @bluesqueakpip says, that pretty much told us from the start- who would have painted it, and as well- this is how…
And it’s been said again and again, but the Hurt Doctor voicing the criticisms of modern who: The screwdrivers (‘what are you going to do, assemble a cabinet at them?’) the hand-waving. ‘Timey-whimey. The youth. the kissing. (to be fair, though, his immediate predecessor started that one…) but ultimately recognising the doctor-ness beneath all this.
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