S33 (7) 14 – The Name of the Doctor

[Anonymous @]

@thommck , @budinacup – “what is the significance of Amy pond having written the book [Summer Falls]?”

I’m back on my high-horse about the meta-meta business of the overall Doctor Who programme AG (After [McGann –> Ecclestone] Gap).  I still think that every detail is carefully crafted for a dual (mirror?) purpose:

1)  It-is-what-it-is-purpose, for casual viewers; and

2) get-yourselves-in-a-theorising-lather purpose, for bonkers theorisers (i.e., us!).

So, on the number 1 level, it was just a book; and having been written by Amy Williams wouldn’t have registered nor indeed was it important to the episode.  Clara and Artie had a conversation about Artie reading it, ripe with number 2 purposes; but nothing which would have confused the casual viewer.

On the the number 2 level, though … wow!  Written by Amy!  (who wrote the epilogue to the book which ended The Angels Take Manhattan – so, she’s firmly established as an author)   Sly name-check on a former companion.  Cover photo which is repeated in a completely different – and much later – episode by way of Clara herself (or really her Fragment) looking much like that character.  Clara and Artie’s conversation – ‘chapter 11 will leave you in tears’ – was utter gold for theorisers debating the significance of ‘chapter 11’.

[wolfweed @wolfweed]

[wolfweed @wolfweed]

[Anonymous @]

@wolfweed – why aren’t these submissions in the ‘Caption competitions’ thread?

🙂

[budinacup @budinacup]

@Shazzbot I think the chapter 11 ref was just a nod to the 11th doc will have you in tears.

im also scratching away at the significance of paintings…… whay are they significant?

[penny @penny]

@Shazzbot yes, I have seen the entire Amy/Rory story arc and I hold to my statement that in that moment the line was rather throw-away in that it was funny to hear the Doctor say it.  It contrasts with what we know the Rory and Amy dynamic to be and I guess that is also one of the reasons that makes it (supposedly) funny.  Also because it plays on stereotypes mentioned above.

By pointing out that there is a narrator behind the emotions of the characters, I was trying to make us aware of the fact that we (the audience) are being manipulated into thinking there are motivations behind the characters’ portrayals of love, when really we are told who really loves who, just as the characters are told (by their older selves) who to love.  Let me emphasize that point, we are told facts about characters emotions.  We could have been shown, but on this point (how the Doctor and River came to love one another) instead we are told.

[Tournikate @tournikate]

@bluesqueakpip –  (I think it was you who wrote this but it so to scroll up lol) first off this was a while back but I did want to say this is my favourite interpretation thus far of this phrophecy
The man who lies will lie no more
When this man lies at Trenzalore.

If that’s another prophecy, are we talking about the Doctor’s death? Or we talking about a situation where – once the Doctor tells a lie at Trenzalore – it’s his final lie. He’s run out of lies; only the truth is left to him.

On a separate note – With this ‘ 13th Doctor reset’ theory’ are we talking like a Star Trek type parallel universe reset where it all branches off and all things are possible OR is is more a ‘we’ve explained the inconsistencies away’ sort of reset where we can put it all behind us and move on with the Doctor Bluntwin Hootwhistle?

btw I agree with @bluesqueakpip about the name never being revealed…just like we never heard 10 say the words ‘I love you’  I think it will always remain just out of reach.  We may come to know and understand the full meaning and importance of his name but we won’t ever know what it is…

[wolfweed @wolfweed]

@Shazzbot – If others are keen I expect some of these Clara pix will be  in the Crazy Captions blog one day.

I’m just sharing a few of them as I’ve been making a load this week & by definition they relate to TNOTD.

Also, if others can photomanipulate Clara into pre 7b scenarios (or whatever), I’d love to see what they do. I’m not claiming that territory – I’m just doing it because no else seems to be yet.

 

There will be 2 new (pre-planned) Crazy Captions  tomorrow to ease the pain of a Saturday with no new Who.

In the last couple of weeks I’ve gathered hundreds of images for future Crazy Captions and for other future blog posts. I don’t want to rush myself into my Total Universal Domination, though!

 

[SatsumaJoe @satsumajoe]

Catching up!

@scaryb

And then the reveal of the extremely dark, guilty secret in his personal cellar – this person who has done terrible things, but who in some ways is him.  He’s confronted directly with his own death (and the death of the Tardis who has been his one constant) and he becomes more open emotionally than we have ever seen him. Matt has never been better I think.  He plays the Dr as emotional but as drawing a strength from being more honest (to himself) about how he feels.

This reminded me. Amontillado?

@whohar @chickenelly

Crimson, eleven, delight, petrichor.

Maybe it refers to the (Hurt / Tennant / Smith) Doctor’s joy at the Tardis finally taking off from somewhere. Just need the Crimson bit now. Red Tardis anyone?

Red setting? Crimson Horror? Hmm, first three could refer to that episode couldn’t they? Not sure of last one.

[budinacup @budinacup]

@tournikate I have to disagree.

Once his real name became part of a story arc it HAS to be revealed, otherwise whats the point of the arc without the payoff?

10 never saying “I love you” was not an arc, just something he could never say because he loved Rose too much. If he had said it she would have stayed with him and he couldn’t bear that he may have led to the woman he loved dying. So off she went with Meta crisis 10. Now she lives with the man she loves and 10 let her go.

So im am fairly confident that the 50th will be where his name is revealed and it will all change (the game changer we have been promised by SM)

[budinacup @budinacup]

@satsumajoe Petricor is the smell of the TARDIS engine i rekon

[SatsumaJoe @satsumajoe]

@budinacup Oh yeah! Forgot about that in the read-through.

Another thing. Who did take those photos of Fragment Claras? Is that what we’re calling her?

[Tournikate @tournikate]

@budinacup Fair enough.  I can see your point with 10 not sure if I am swayed but good thought.

@craig – I agree with the idea of polls – It would be really fun to see where people sit on some of these big plot ideas any chance that we could get one up and running?

**she asks with much humilty and offers virtual cookies as a bribe**

[Anonymous @]

@budinacup – “Once his real name became part of a story arc it HAS to be revealed, otherwise whats the point of the arc without the payoff?”

Many people on this site have posited, convincingly, that the story arc was never about the Doctor’s real (i.e. birth) name.  ‘The Name of the Doctor’ means the title, the reputation, of the person known as ‘The Doctor’.  I think consensus has been reached that the birth name of the Doctor isn’t the point of the story arc.  The reputation of the Doctor – back to AGMGtW and Madame Kovarian’s ‘endless, bitter war’ speech; not to mention all the way back to ‘The Girl in the Fireplace’ – is always what has been at stake.

You have already started choreographing your ‘victory dance’ once you are proved right and everyone else proved wrong, and we hear Bluntwin Hootwhistle as the Doctor’s birth name.  Be warned, though, that @bluesqueakpip will be Queen of all Galaxies for getting the name right.  🙂

[budinacup @budinacup]

@Shazzbot I really hope i am right. I will be sooooo disappointed if we don’t get to learn the Doctors birth name. I appreciate that there are some people who don’t want to learn his name, so i suggest that they turn over for the last 5 minutes of the 50th 😉

I am going to plump for Chronos.

I am also convinced that we will see Number 9 in the 50th.

i am going to have to work on a whole dance number at this rate!

[Anonymous @]

@budinacup – “I will be sooooo disappointed if we don’t get to learn the Doctors birth name.”

In the words of The Princess Bride – ‘Life is pain, Highness.  Anyone who say differently is selling something.’

We are not selling anything here on this site, nor are we waiting to hear the Doctor’s birth name.  That is a furrow you plow alone, Grasshopper.

 

[IAmNotAFishIAmAFreeMan @pedant]

@budinacup

It was never about the Doctor’s name, it was about what would be done in The Name of The Doctor.

It was not just the ‘secret/ grave is discovered’ phrase that was playing with language…

 

[chickenelly @chickenelly]

*waves at* @whohar

My lovely imaginary granny is fine thank you.  She’s also read the ‘Summer Falls’ book and enjoyed it.  For those who’ve not read it yet, and to avoid being too spoilerific *thinks ooh what a great word, I shall copyright that immediately*.  As I said not too spoilerific©, but it is about the coming of the ‘Lord of Winter’ which presumably is meant to be the Great Intelligence.

How’s WhoHar Hall doing now that it’s been sent brick by brick to the Antipodes?

[MTGradwell @mtgradwell]

Is this still the place for bonkers theorizing? Because I have a bonkers theory.

There has to be a first iteration, one in which Clara has not been fragmented into the timeline. Some events still pan out in a way broadly similar to what we have seen, but for instance the Doctor, instead of being aided by Clara at the Asylum, is aided by a random mad Dalek. Because he hasn’t been aided by Clara, the Doctor has no reason to seek her out, so he doesn’t.  When he arrives at Trenzalore, he does so with Vastra etc but without Clara and without her psychic link to River. When the Great Intelligence demands his name, he holds back at first but ultimately surrenders, and speaks his own name. The tomb opens. But the Doctor has left it too late. His companions are dead. And the Great Intelligence enters the Doctor’s timeline, intending to make every other moment in it just as bitter as that one. Without any Clara to leap in and thwart him, the Doctor has no choice. He leaps in, not to rescue Clara this time but to tackle the Great Intelligence himself. Inside his own timeline, he dies and regenerates into the JH Doctor. JH Doctor is still trapped inside his own timeline. He thwarts the Great Intelligence at every turn, but at immense personal cost. At each defeat the GI grows more and more furious, until it is nothing more than a tight ball of hatred, all directed exclusively at the Doctor. Then it dies, or appears to. (Actually, although it is dead, because it has insinuated itself all over the Doctors timeline prior to dying, those echoes of itself remain. They are just echoes, not the true GI itself, and they have been thwarted every turn, and they don’t even have any memory of what made them oppose the Doctor in the first place, they just know that they hate him without knowing why, but they are still dangerous. Dangerous enough to lead the Doctor to Trenzalore yet again, in the next iteration.) The Doctor, exhausted by the fighting, dies yet again, and regenerates for the twelfth and last time, still trapped inside his own timeline. The Tardis (the mostly non-broken one, the one with only a slight crack in its window), sensing that the Doctor is irrevocably dead, or at least irrevocably trapped, places his timeline inside its control room. It then locks its doors, and automatically relocates itself randomly to a nearby spot, as it was programmed to do in any emergency. Not to the opposite pole of the planet in this case, but to a spot about a mile away and maybe a thousand years in the past. There it begins a process of slow decay. End of story, seemingly, but no. The Tardis is programmed to inform River, as next of kin, about her husband’s death. River is startled by this telepathic message, as she is with him when she receives it, enjoying one of her breaks from prison. After a brief discussion with him, in which he informs her about Timelord burial customs, she persuades him of the importance of divulging his name to her ….

I’ll leave it at that point because I’ve got other things to do now. Any good so far?

[Anonymous @]

@bluesqueakpip – in discussion of Clara fainting, I just had an idea …

That underwater blackout in Cold War still bothers me.  Is it possible that Clara Prime started the episode, and Fragmented Clara took over after that?  (or, is it that one Fragment actually drowned, and another Fragment took over?)  Is there any discernible difference between how JLC plays the character and/or the writing of the episode for her character changes, before and after that blackout?

We’ve already established that Clara’s two known fragmentations (AotD and Snowmen) were more vibrant, and confident, than Clara Prime in this half-series so far.  So, a change from Clara-Prime to Fragmented-Clara would be more noticeable than a change from one Fragment to another.

I’m clutching at straws to build my theory that we haven’t been seeing Clara Prime this whole half-series.  I think it’s a good one, and I think the fainting business might be a key to unlocking it.

Or, I could be totally nutzo.  (get down to the bookies, there are almost even odds on the latter!)

[penny @penny]

Just wanted to share this since we have been talking about the River Song timeline: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sv3rDSvmumI

[Anonymous @]

@MTGradwell – that’s more than a bonkers theory, that’s a script treatment!  🙂

Your end bit is tantalising, “The Tardis is programmed to inform River, as next of kin, about her husband’s death. River is startled by this telepathic message, as she is with him when she receives it, … After a brief discussion with him, in which he informs her about Timelord burial customs,”

We still don’t know how River came to learn his real name.  10 says in the Library ‘there’s only one time I could say it; only one time I would say it’ [paraphrased] and this has led to several theories here about when that time is:  their real wedding?  the birth of their child?  when she seals his tomb?

It’s one for the Loose Ends pile;  and as much as I personally would like to know, I wonder if it will stay, mouldering, on that pile.  The mystery of the Doctor’s real name will probably (hopefully!) never be revealed, and it could be left to us bonkers theorisers to agree / disagree on when River learns his name.  Why should The Moff reveal all his cards?  Sometimes it’s better to speculate, because otherwise it’s Bluntwin Hootwhistle time.  😀

 

[Anonymous @]

@penny – sorry, your link isn’t available in the UK.  🙁

[SatsumaJoe @satsumajoe]

@Shazzbot

I’m clutching at straws to build my theory that we haven’t been seeing Clara Prime this whole half-series. I think it’s a good one, and I think the fainting business might be a key to unlocking it.

Back in the mists of theoretical time, I had suggested/asked (from someone else’s words) that curious Clara Prime scene in Cold War could be her having an echo step in to deal with Skaldak. Say she had a psychic link with the TARDIS – which she now does and which may have been… included on ‘page one’ in a timestream-y way – and the HADS activation had a consequence. That bit is new.

[Bluesqueakpip @bluesqueakpip]

 Is there any discernible difference between how JLC plays the character and/or the writing of the episode for her character changes, before and after that blackout?

@Shazzbot Not that I can see. And she doesn’t actually faint, as such. The sequence of events is: there is an explosion, the boat shifts violently, she’s thrown forward, goes underwater, sees sonic as she’s losing consciousness.

And while she’s distracted by being (probably) whacked on the head and then nearly drowning the TARDIS does her ‘screw this, I’m outta here’ and the Doctor gets into a furious row with the Captain. She wakes up to threats that they’re about to be shot.

Given what we now know, the Doctor’s decision to reset the HADS might be part of the GI’s interference – it takes his TARDIS away when he most needs it – and the GI might also be subtly changing things so that the Captain suddenly becomes more antagonistic. When Clara’s awake, the Captain’s generally much more reasonable.

[Allon-zee @allon-zee]

I think, but would like not to, that if Clara’s story isn’t perfectly explained yet, it won’t be in the 50th anniversary. The whole point of that story, I think, will be to explore what the doctor means.

We found out here that his name isn’t important, and that the name he chose is a promise he made. But we still don’t really know what that promise is. Sure, we can speculate it’s “the man who makes people better”, as the Master said, or the healer, as they say in A good man goes to war, but we still aren’t sure, or at any rate haven’t heard it from the mouth of the Doctor himself.

I think the whole point of the 50th anniversary will be looking back in a way at what makes the doctor the doctor. We still need to find out what that promise was, and the Hurt Doctor, by breaking it, will give us an insight into that. Moffat’s genius was finding a way, in universe, to explore what being the Doctor really means, across all incarnations and all fifty years. As such, the episode should be about the Doctor, and not a companion, who, even if she has been made important for the whole history in this episode, has really only been around for one season.

[Anonymous @]

@bluesqueakpip – thank you for your detective work on Cold War.  It’s odd, my memory of that moment is that Clara was actively going for the sonic, and dived down underwater to get it … then … cut to her sitting up.  Funny how we remember what we want, eh?

I do like your GI theory on everyone getting closer to MAD whilst Clara (Fragmented or not) is out cold, and everyone relaxing once she’s awakened.  These are the kind of things we should be cataloguing, now that we know there has been, shall we say, ‘interference’ in all of the stories.

@Allon-zee – in normal circumstances, I would agree with you; the next episode would be about the Doctor and wouldn’t take time on a companion who has been with us such a short time.  But two things:

1)  The next episode is a feature-length movie, so at least 90 minutes long.  Plenty of time to address both Doctor and companion stories.

2)  Clara isn’t just any companion who has been with the show a few episodes – she’s gone back into everything the Doctor’s done in 50 years.  This makes her integral to whatever the Doctor’s going to face in the 50th.

[SatsumaJoe @satsumajoe]

@Shazzbot Also just read your Cold War theory post in full. This’ll teach me to not skim posts!

[Anonymous @]

@satsumajoe – does that mean you’ve placed a bet on my sanity?  Insider tip – bet that I’m nuts.  It’s worse odds but you’re guaranteed a return.  😀

[Allon-zee @allon-zee]

I didn’t notice any real change in acting in the middle of Cold War… I would say the biggest change in Clara’s character happened between Hide and NiS : she goes from being very scared to totally in control of the situation. Of course, this could be attributed to her being in a haunted house at the time, not knowing what she’s facing, but one might think that cybermen and a planet-exploding bomb would be enough to scare anyone.

Is it not more likely that it’s just that maybe her character wasn’t totally thought out ? From what we know, every Clara fragment has her own life before meeting the Doctor, so how could he meet a different fragment each time he lands in the same place in the same time-frame ? And remember, the soufflé is the recipe : she doesn’t, or shouldn’t, change much in each fragment…

Nonetheless, I do like the idea, I just can’t see how it can be really explained…

[Tournikate @tournikate]

After all the name talk I found this image and just had to share…made me giggle

[Anonymous @]

@Allon-zee – My theory isn’t that all Claras in the episodes in this half-series have been Fragments; I just wondered if a sneaky one or two had not been Clara-Prime.  It’s been pointed out to me that, whilst previous AG (After-Gap i.e. post-2005) companions tended to stay for a few adventures in the Tardis before going home for some R&R, the tendency of all PG (Pre-Gap) companions was never to go home during their travels – only when they finished (or died, or got left on other worlds) … yet, Clara seemed to ‘go home’ at the end of each episode / adventure.

I started to suspect, after watching TNotD, that not all of the Claras who got into the Tardis for each new episode’s adventure was, in fact, the Clara-Prime.  But I like @bluesqueakpip ‘s idea that it’s not about the Fragmented Clara vs Clara-Prime; it’s more about the influence of the GI and the Fragmented Claras desperately scrubbing away the influence of the GI, and how that affects each episode of this half-series.

And you’re totally correct to bring up General Clara from NiS – I have been leaning toward this as back-up for a theory on Clara-as-future-incarnation-of-the-Doctor.    She takes utter control without hesitation, even bossing around military personnel; she devises strategy and tactics and otherwise is utterly unlike the Clara(-Prime) we’ve seen up until that point.  How weird was that?  Like a complete personality change … except, she’s on that adventure with the Maitland children, so unless Fragmented Clara has stuffed Clara-Prime in the cupboard, it’s hard to reconcile the personality difference with a Fragmented/Prime Clara dichotomy.

Of course, the Occam’s Razor explanation is that the episodes were filmed out of the order in which we viewed them, and JLC simply grew into the role with each filming.  {sigh}

[Anonymous @]

@Tournikate – awwww.  🙂  ‘My name is “Please” ‘, indeed.

Fits nicer in the name tag than ‘Bluntwin Hootwhistle’, though, don’t it?!

[wolfweed @wolfweed]

A dvd/BluRay extra. Not been pulled from Youtube yet, probably because you can’t hear the whispers…

[brotherjohn @brotherjohn]

Re-watched the Doctor’s Wife last night.

For what it’s worth, one of the things said by a Time Lord voice emanating from the distress signal cubes is:

“I don’t know where I am!”

So:

1) people trapped by the wi fi

2) Clara in the Doctor’s timestream, and

3) a Time Lord calling out in a distress signal.

Again, FWIW… my brain is hurting from all the bonkers theorizing.

[chickenelly @chickenelly]

ooh nice link @wolfweed

slightly distracting that after it has been played that there is an image of piglet from Winnie the Pooh in exactly the same pose as Clarence.

Makes a bit more sense too, and we get to see the Whispermen in action.

[Tournikate @tournikate]

<img src="” alt=”For the Forum” />

@Shazzbot I made this one just in case it ends up being the Doctors name… 🙂

[Anonymous @]

@wolfweed – Thanks for that!  And it satisfies my theory that the Whispermen targetted the killer to link him to ‘the lizard detective’.

[Anonymous @]

@brotherjohn – how interesting!  And it goes to show just how long The Moff’s arc really is.  (Well, some posited that Clara was the Corsair prior to TNotD … )

‘I don’t know where I am’ is the background cry of the arc that we will see completed – or will we?! – with the 50th anniversary show.  It would be a satisfying ending if the 50th –> 8th series ‘cliffhanger’ revolved around someone knowing exactly where s/he is.

[Anonymous @]

@tournikate – that is really for @bluesqueakpip – Bluey, this one’s for you.  🙂

http://www.thedoctorwhoforum.com/forums/topic/s33-7-14-the-name-of-the-doctor/page/19/#post-10802

[Tournikate @tournikate]

yes absolutely my bad @bluesqueakpip all credit to you for discovering the Doctors true name 🙂

[MTGradwell @mtgradwell]

Bonkers theory part 2

River can’t tell the Doctor why she wants to know his name, because spoilers. It therefore takes quite a while for her to learn it, but eventually she does. She then visits the Doctor’s final resting place, the ruined Tardis, and uses his name to gain access to the control room. She enters his timeline, and in order to avoid creating temporal paradoxes she visits only his 13th and final incarnation. Her purpose in doing so is to say one final goodbye to him. However, she is shocked to discover that he doesn’t know her at all. He’s never heard of anyone called River, and is mystified by her presence in his timeline. He has heard of the Silence, in fact he created them in an attempt to derail his own timeline by bringing about his own death before he can betray his friends and betray the whole universe by leading the GI into his tomb. He created them, but he doesn’t know anything about them kidnapping babies or whatever. They’re supposed to kill him, not kidnap babies. She realizes that this Doctor originated in a different timeline, but has crossed over into hers, perhaps when the dying Tardis made its very last jump.

She asks alternate 13th about how he met his end, and learns it was at the hands of the Great Intelligence. So she asks if there is any way that the Great Intelligence might be thwarted. She learns from him that the GI was defeated once before, by a Victorian barmaid/nanny named Clara Oswin Oswald, but Clara died shortly thereafter.  River resolves to seek out this Clara, and to see if she can do anything about her untimely death.

Alt-13 meanwhile has had enough of this discussion with a perplexing stranger. He dismisses her out of the timestream, back into her physical body which lies just outside in the control room. He then leaves the timestream himself, in the only way he can. He follows it back to near its beginning, on Gallifrey. Back then, all of the timestreams of all Timelords had been kept together in one place, and the resulting thicket was known as the Matrix. There were portals to the Matrix, via which Timelords might enter and exit. Alt-13 exits the Matrix via one of these portals, becoming the Valeyard, and spends the rest of his days trying to get his younger self tried and executed for treason.

Long story short – There then follows an iteration in which Victorian Clara is saved from Death, and it is Victorian Clara who becomes the Doctor’s traveling companion. She attempts to save him, and is scattered throughout the Timelines. In the next iteration it is modern Clara (who, along with Dalek Oswin, did not previously exist) who becomes the travelling companion, while Victorian Clara once again dies. This iteration is the one which we have all seen. This time around the Doctor and Clara succeed in escaping from the Doctor’s tomb, thus averting the Doctor’s previously-fated regenerations into Hurt-Doctor and the Valeyard. They then resume their adventures, carrying on from where we last left them. The End.

[Anonymous @]

@MTGradwell – to repeat my earlier comment, “that’s more than a bonkers theory, that’s a script treatment!  ”

Your thoughts move well beyond what we’ve seen in the UK TV-broadcast episodes so far;  and your thoughts fly far free of how we can tie the latest episode into the series(es) of the recent past.  Have you contacted the DW production team?  You obviously have ideas which affect a greater future timeline than what we as viewers have been shown to date.

This site is ever-evolving, and there may be space for future theories as posited by commenters such as yourself.  You should contact the site creator, and request a blog; you are positing so much more than mere theories, and your ideas could be worthy of their own blog, with specific comments and replies to your very interesting ideas.

[WhoHar @whohar]

@chickenelly

How’s WhoHar Hall doing now that it’s been sent brick by brick to the Antipodes

Unfortunately, Fortescue has lost the plans and is hiding up one of the hotel chimneys to escape my ire. You just can’t get the staff these days.

[WhoHar @whohar]

@mtgradwell

This is very nicely thought out. Jumps out of the page and into your head. I can imagine this on screen.

I do wonder whether the Valeyard will make an appearance in the 50th. Leaning towards not right now.

The problem with the Doctor’s timeline being accessible is that it – at some point – has to be made inaccessible, otherwise the issues surrounding it remain.

[MTGradwell @mtgradwell]

@Shazzbot, @whohar: Thanks.

@Shazzbot

I haven’t contacted the Dr, Who production team – I only had this particular theory at about 7p.m. and this forum was the first to get it, receiving the first part more or less as fast as I could type. I didn’t know until it was all typed out whether it would even be any good, though now that it is up there I do get the feeling that it does work reasonably well. But it’s really just a piece of idle speculation – the real production team will have already shot the next episode, I suspect, and that is bound to be substantially at odds in some respects with what I have supposed, making any possible reconciliation difficult.

@whohar yes the timeline has to be made inaccessible, but hopefully not until after 11 and Clara have escaped from it. Changing the password probably won’t be enough. Maybe relocating the broken Tardis to an abandoned timeline would suffice, and that’ll happen automatically if the Doctor changes the future significantly e.g. by failing to actually die on Trenzalore. He still has to die somewhere, somewhen, though, but once again the actual location will become a closely guarded secret. If Gallifrey is somehow restored then it might be kept there – and become inaccessible when Gallifrey is lost again.

[blenkinsopthebrave @blenkinsopthebrave]

Have been thinking about what I didn’t like about TNOTD.

Practically everything was brilliant, from Hartnell at the beginning to Hurt at the end, but having now seen it a few times, I still feel that the very first scene with the repairmen on Gallifrey did not feel right. Why? Well, it seemed too…modern and colloquial…in terms of the language: “What kind of idiot…” Somehow, for me that jarred with the setting…Gallifrey, and especially with the knowledge that somewhere in the complex at that very same time Hartnell’s Doctor was about to embark on his journey. As someone who remembers Hartnell’s Doctor from the age of 11, I was strangely shocked that someone would refer to him as an idiot.

The second thing about it that did not work for me was that the repairmen did not seem very…well..,Gallifrey to me. It seemed to imply that Gallifrey was just another planet with high-falut’n Timelords who fly around in Tardises at one end of the social hierarchy and blue collar repairmen at the other end. I don’t know…that did not gell with my sense of Gallifrey as it has been represented and alluded to over the years. Perhaps I always envisaged Gallifrey as a planet composed entirely of Timelords.

The final thing that jarred was that the brief scene with, and dialogue of, the repairman reminded me of the hackneyed stage technique in old fashioned plays set in a fine country house where the curtain opens with the servants quickly providing  a potted summary of the household and setting the scene for the entrance of the main characters. True, all that was accomplished in one sentence, but that was because we all knew about the main character when he appeared on the scene. It reminded me of that hackneyed playwriting technique.

Everything else in the episode? Brilliant. Utterly brilliant. But…for me at least…the opening with the “servant beneath stairs” just didn’t work.

What a complaining old bugger I am turning into!

[PhaseShift @phaseshift Time Lord]

@blenkinsopthebrave

It’s funny you should mention the bit about the repairmen. I’ve been watching some of the BG episodes and today I’m watching “The Deadly Assassin”.

I’ve just watched the bit with Castellan Spandrell reviewing the Doctors records with Engin, and his line “I’m surprised to see you here. Doesn’t your work usually concern the more … plebian classes” leaps out at you. Looking at the repairmen I think you have exhibits A and B in what Engin would consider “Plebs”.

[chickenelly @chickenelly]

Oops @blenkinsopthebrave

I didn’t mean the above post, I was thinking about you and Mrs Blenkinsop crying buckets watching Vincent & the Doctor.

 

[Bluesqueakpip @bluesqueakpip]

@blenkinsopthebrave and @phaseshift

Yes – I watched most of the Gallifrey episodes on first broadcast (barring Trial of a Time Lord, where I gave up early on and didn’t come back until Colin Baker was replaced). I definitely got the impression that the ‘Time Lords’ were Gallifrey’s aristocracy, and there were also a good number of ‘lower class Gallifreyans’.

If that’s the case, then introducing the repairmen might be part of the plotline for the 50th Anniversary. When the Doctor destroyed Gallifrey, he didn’t just kill the TimeLords – he killed everyone – including those who had no hand in what the Time Lords had done.

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