@miapatrick

This episode – I felt it was preaching to the converted

Worse than preaching to the converted. It was the relatively powerful (the Doctor) preaching to the relatively powerless (the Companions, and by extension the kids in the audience). It was also hypocritical, because the programme had flown its main cast out to South Africa to m…[Read more]

Another positive: Mandip Gill was doing some really good acting – completely horrified by one of the gruesome deaths. I wonder if she’s leaving at the end of the series? Or is going to turn on the Doctor? Either way, it feels like something is being set up – maybe a Tegan-style ‘I can’t cope with this any more, Doctor’.

Um. That script needed another draft. After the last two weeks, this week was very … well, I hope tonight was the ‘Oops, that one didn’t work’ episode.

Okay, positives. The actors were giving it their all and the direction was pretty good. The Moral of The Week was using a sledgehammer, but at least avoided landing the kids with ‘we’re all…[Read more]

@blenkinsopthebrave and @vervain

I’m kind of inclined to a sleight-of-hand that involves a Moffat loop. Mainly because Chibnall was so careful to re-establish that the Doctor can solve a current problem after the solution to the problem has already happened.

I’d say the Capitol is in shreds, Gallifrey is burning – but ask if the Gallifreyans…[Read more]

@Juniperfish

When I rewatched I noticed that Barton’s anger against his mother was planted in his very first scene. Yaz and Ryan, he thinks, have been granted an interview because it means there’ll be an article about him in the paper his mum reads. At the time you think it’s ‘legacy media’ he dislikes, later you realise it was his mum.

Have…[Read more]

@phaseshift

it was the recycling in this episode that really stopped me getting into it and grading it higher.

Agreed that there was a lot of recycling, most of which seemed to be the Master recycling previous ‘greatest hits’. It’s whether it’s, y’know, recycling created by the BBC saying ‘we don’t like the direction of the last series,…[Read more]

@lisa

I think the ‘timeless child’ picture is a flash from the Doctor’s own buried memory – but we might have to agree to differ on that one until we both have more information.

@galaxymage
Welcome to the forum and to our bonkers theorising!

I think that Daniel Barton was watching when the Master banged his head against the console.

or that…

[Read more]

@Mudlark

I agree that the element of ‘melodrama villain’ seems more conscious in this Master. Doctor Who is melodrama (in a technical sense), but Sacha Dhawan seems to be doing the melodramatic villain as if it’s now an act the Master’s putting on for an audience. The top hat. The Nazi uniform. The scene in the plane hangar when his ‘I’m going to…[Read more]

@lisa

I’m betting that we are all being manipulated into thinking that the timeless child is a child.

The Doctor’s memory flash, or race-memory flash definitely looks like a child to me.

@Blenkinsopthebrave

True, we are supposed to forget about the fact that if he was on Earth for 77 years he (presumably) managed to miss all the other Masters who were around London and the environs during the ’70s and ’80s, not to mention Prime Minister Saxon. But, as Mrs Blenkinsop wisely reminds me: “You are not supposed to ask those quest…

[Read more]

@phaseshift

Sorry to hear that. Disobedient kidneys can be a Bad Thing, so I hope it’s now under control. Lovely to see you back

So far I’m up to two-thirds of episode 1 of Dracula and it seems very good. However, I also had a gift of Season One of Star Trek: Discovery, so after months of no telly at all, I’m suddenly in the position of trying…[Read more]

@mudlark

He recovers immediately and demands that the Doctor kneel, but even as she complies it does not feel as if he is really in control.

Yes. He makes her kneel to him, call him Master, just like previous incarnations would have done – and then he needs to talk to her and kneels down to do that.

He kneels to her.

@miapatrick Having now watched it, I think this may well be a post Missy incarnation. When the Dhawan Master talks about the buzz that killing gives him, then adds that he knows ‘I’m in the right place, doing what I was made for’ – the look in his eyes is completely haunted.

He may also be referring to the Timeless Child reveal, that he’s…[Read more]

@missrori

I’m not sure Chibnall is going to radically alter the Who Mythos into a Big Lie thing.

No, I don’t think he is. I have read the LeGuin story and the emphasis is not on the Big Lie itself as much as it’s on the choice people have to make, whether to continue in the lie or walk away. And I suspect I’m thinking of it because, in their d…[Read more]

@MissRori

Frankly, this episode is coming off as rather bitterly timed.

That is, surely, precisely the point at which a non-religious hero like the Doctor needs to point out that darkness doesn’t win in the long run. Noor is heading off to die in Dachau, possibly one of the darkest endings possible for her own story on Earth – but in the wider…[Read more]

@badwolfalice

I don’t think it was a questionable choice at all – it links with the communications tech we meet fighting the Nazi’s being Noor Inayat Khan. O is perfectly happy to be a Nazi, despite this incarnation’s skin colour. Noor is risking her life (and will later lose her life) fighting the fascist doctrine that would call her ‘inferior’.…[Read more]

Ooh, it is nice being able to theorise about non-character arcs again. Mind you, Chibbers is a character driven writer, so my current bonkers theory is kind of character driven.

It’s noticeable that a lot of people seem to be picking up that the Dhawan Master is somehow not entirely what he should be. There was a lot of ‘is he helping the…[Read more]

Okay, that was good. Couple of thoughts

This second episode is all about the Doctor going back in time and putting an ‘escape clause’ in the Master’s Evil Plan (TM). Which kind of makes me think that Gallifrey is currently a Schrodinger’s Gallifrey – neither dead or alive until the Doctor works out if there is an ‘escape clause’ in the Master’s…[Read more]

@miapatrick and @badwolfalice

Another possible suggestion is that this Master does come after Missy, but ‘everything you know is a lie’ includes what he’s doing right now. Not my idea – someone on T’Other place suggested it.

I think either is possible – a few people have noted that the Dhawan Master seems very much riffing off the Simm Master’s…[Read more]