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13 July 2017 at 14:58 #60596
As @janetteb says, there are so many future regenerations – look how they managed to regenerate Paul McGann into a very young John Hurt, by using an archive shot of one of Hurt’s earlier roles, CGI’d in as a reflection. John Hurt’s War Doctor was possible because of the hiatus; any ‘future’ Doctor could equally be slotted in to the sequence the next time the BBC decides to rest Doctor Who for a few years.
For that matter, exactly what iteration of the Master is Missy? The current assumption that the regenerations go Simm-to-Gomez is, until we see the regeneration, an assumption.
Anyway: I’m with the ‘they’re planning a surprise’ camp. I agree that while the ground is now solidly prepared for a woman to play the official TV Doctor, the BBC is probably quite keen to avoid five and a half months of tabloids spinning fake shock and horror for all they’re worth – which might be why the BBC suits would be equally keen on a ‘Christmas surprise announcement’ and don’t seem to be planning some awful gameshow style introduction.
13 July 2017 at 14:04 #60593You could certainly green-screen the actor (m or f) that Peter Capaldi is regenerating into. Anyone seen the Who team near high-security MOD bases lately? Though it doesn’t have to have been done now; I recall that they were finishing off the CGI for the first part of the Hobbit hours before the Auckland Premiere.
Regarding Capaldi Doc meeting his future self – we’ve already done that, in the 50th. The Curator is very probably a retired Doctor, revisiting a familiar face. 🙂 So a ‘future’ Doctor doesn’t have to be the next Doctor, if you see what I mean.
Rachel Talalay may simply mean that they are going to do the regeneration scene as close as possible to broadcast date – and if the next Doctor wasn’t in her shooting schedule, she has no ‘need-to-know’.
11 July 2017 at 21:05 #60547I think the thing I most noticed on the rewatch was how well this programme ages; it’s a tribute to Mark Gatiss’ writing and David Bradley’s acting that it’s much more than a ‘making of’ drama-doc.
The theme running through it may also be the theme running through the Christmas Special. Reluctance to go, even when it’s time. Doctor Who might be the high point of a career – but in the end, you have to go.
And William Hartnell’s journey from jobbing actor to star to being fired is heartbreaking (and David Bradley shows all that pain and bewilderment). It’s especially heartbreaking because Hartnell’s illness meant that he never understood how ill he was.
I think (hope) that the plan for the Christmas Special is going to allow David Bradley to develop the role of First Doctor, rather than simply imitate it. He’s that good in this; I want to see his take on the First Doctor.
10 July 2017 at 15:58 #60531Thanks, Craig. You’re a star.
10 July 2017 at 13:23 #60511Do we have a forum on An Adventure in Space and Time?
While slightly hesitant to mention this just before I head off for a week of dodgy internet access in the Inner Hebrides, it might be fun to discuss David Bradley’s dual performance as William Hartnell/The Original Doctor.
10 July 2017 at 13:18 #60509@jimthefish and @Thane15
I think the ‘problem’ with Rose is not Rose. 😀
It’s hindsight. I remember watching Piper and Tennant at the time and thinking how good they were together – but then we had an entire, series-long ‘but you’re not Rose’ companion arc. By the end of it I was ‘enough about bloody Rose already!’ I’m not surprised Martha was the only Post Gap Companion to date written as choosing to leave the TARDIS.
But Billie Piper, as much as Eccleston and Tennant, is one of the people responsible for Who not just returning, not just surviving, but becoming a blockbuster success. Had RTD only confined himself to maybe two episodes of the Tennant Doctor mourning Rose, we’d probably all remember her much more fondly.
I agree with Jim; the plotline was one Who should probably have followed long before. But it did suit the Tennant Doctor; the Doctor who’s lost everything – and is trying to find a place among an alien people by becoming more like them.
8 July 2017 at 16:40 #60477Bonkers theory 1: It’s someone with a cast-iron excuse for being on set, such as a present/former companion.
Bonkers theory 2: It’s David Bradley (who has worked with Chris Chibnall), possibly for a short run.
Bonkers theory 3: They’re going to delay filming the new Doctor as long as possible, and simply CGI the new actor’s face onto Peter Capaldi.
7 July 2017 at 00:33 #60445I’d agree that we’re in a period of moral flux – one reason I like Steven Moffat’s writing (even though we have very different ideas on religion) is that we both seem to agree that utilitarianism is a dreadful philosophy. 🙂
Yes, the Doctor seems to be restating the idea that virtue should be its own reward – but in a way that avoids the weird loop where it’s argued that no one is really virtuous because we feel good about being virtuous. In this episode everyone except the Simm Master does the right thing because it’s the right thing; other Moffatian points that come up are that dying may not be the worst thing that can happen – to die is not to ‘lose’. And, of course, that a moral society (or person) is one who tries to save its children.
6 July 2017 at 12:57 #60430It’s from ‘To His Coy Mistress’ by Andrew Marvell
Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love’s day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain.…
But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found;
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song;5 July 2017 at 16:42 #60402Though I would laugh my socks off if they’ve decided to make the ‘Thirteenth’ Doctor a one-episode accident prone comedy special. That might explain all the Kris Marshall rumours. 😀
5 July 2017 at 16:37 #60401They flatly confirmed that she’s not the ‘next’ Doctor Who. So unless there’s some kind of ‘David Bradley is the ‘next’ Doctor Who’ thing going on, she’s not the Doctor straight after Peter Capaldi.
5 July 2017 at 15:38 #60398@jimthefish and @nick
I’d say she’s at the very least been seen for a Doctor Who role, or been asked to consider a Doctor Who role, because ‘I can’t talk about that’ is indeed a dead giveaway that there have been discussions about something Doctor Who related.
You can only not talk about something if you’ve been talking about it… 😀
From an acting point of view, being either the Doctor or the Companion has recently turned into a career boost. Karen Gillan’s got a recurring role in the Marvel franchise, Matt Smith is the male lead in The Crown, Jenna Coleman is Queen Victoria. The Star Wars role is supposed to be ‘ensemble’, and Fleabag is ‘cult success’ – if you’re trying to make the leap from ‘ensemble’ to ‘lead’, playing the Doctor would definitely be something to consider. Yes, her career is busy and successful – but pull off the First Official Female Doctor and you move into the UK A list.
Dunno, myself. She may be unable to talk about it because she turned it down. But it would certainly explain the Chibnall interview where he said that he went in expecting the BBC to want to discuss … something … only to find that they were completely on-board with the suggestion.
[Edit: well, the agency denial is pretty clear. I wonder if she did turn it down?]
3 July 2017 at 11:09 #60259@ichabod, @janetteb, @geoffers
The thing is, you could see the whole ‘I don’t remember’ thing as a ploy by Missy. We know from the Tennant/Davison meeting that Time Lords do sometimes remember meeting themselves – if, it seems, it’s vital to remember.
And we know, because it’s in the script, that Missy remembered to bring a dematerialisation circuit. So she might well be trying very hard to create a situation where the Simm Master doesn’t realise that she remembers being shot in the back – and therefore, just like the dematerialisation circuit, she will have planned accordingly.
Missy’s problem then becomes the Doctor’s problem and Bill’s problem. Is the loss of an identity which has begun the process of not being a monster worse than dying? Given that she might easily regenerate back to the batshit crazy monster…
2 July 2017 at 22:56 #60228No, because all the Doctor would know is that she’d relied on him for emergency backup.
If Missy did remember shooting herself in the back, then her decision to stand with the Doctor really is ‘without hope, without reward, without witness’. She makes the decision knowing that this must be why he killed herself. It’d certainly explain the deeply melancholy delivery; she decides to stand with the Doctor knowing that she’ll never make it and he’ll never know.
2 July 2017 at 22:41 #60227I actually think it’s the complete opposite. Moffat started his Who tenure in a situation where not only had David Tennant resigned, but Catherine Tate had been definitively written out and John Simm’s Master was time locked on Gallifrey. He had very few choices other than a complete reboot.
What he’s done in The Doctor Falls is leave both the Master and Missy in a sort of quantum state where they’re neither of them dead/regenerated until Chibnall chooses to open the box. We never saw either regeneration, and while Missy appears to die, so did the Doctor.
Bill’s story, equally, is in a quantum state. It’s either finished or not finished, depending. He’s left Chibnall in a situation where he can carry on with continuing characters if he wants, or go for a complete reboot if that’s what he wants.
2 July 2017 at 15:01 #60199Personally, I think Moffat’s trying to tie Capaldi’s end into his beginning. And his beginning, remember, wasn’t supposed to happen at all. Before the Time Lords took a hand, he’d reached body number 13 (having decided he liked being David Tennant so much he’d do it twice).
Which meant the Capaldi Doctor was in the position of someone who’s not only supposed to be dead, he’s got a potential infinity of change in front of him. There is no longer any end-game to this. There’s no longer any traditional Time Lord session in the Confession Dial, looking back over your thirteen different ‘lives’ and coming to terms with the true core beneath. If you have a finite number of ‘lives’, you can see them as the thirteen aspects of your real self.
But if he you face an infinite number of changes, are you really the same man who set out into the universe with a stolen TARDIS and your granddaughter? Is there any real self, any ‘soul’ that is you, not your current persona? And even if there’s a trace of that first Doctor left, where will it be after the thirty third regeneration? Or the hundred and thirty third?
It’s not a selfish desire to remain this personality; it’s an existential crisis caused by becoming effectively immortal – which we first saw in Deep Breath. He wants to stop changing and be true to himself. But the only way he can do that, with his shape-shifting biology, is to not regenerate. He wants to be the man, and play ‘The Doctor’ as a role. But if everyone sees his true name as ‘The Doctor’, has the man been lost, becoming nothing but an ever-changing role, always changing, always dying, always a story rather than a real person?
Which is why the TARDIS has taken him to meet his original self.
1 July 2017 at 20:45 #60132The entire thing about the dematerialisation circuit was basically establishing that Missy does have some vague memories of things s/he thought were really important to remember.
Personally, I’d reckon that getting shot in the back by your earlier self was something s/he might consider important… so there’s undoubtedly a Plan B. Which might be why both the Master and Missy were laughing their socks off. 😀
1 July 2017 at 12:50 #60085@thane15
No, if you go back to the Face The Raven forum you’ll find I was sufficiently negative about the episode that @whisht jokingly asked if I was trolling and @blenkinsopthebrave asked if I were in the stages of grief. 🙂
@nick said a bit ago that he didn’t think Face the Raven could carry the weight of a companion’s death (if I’ve got that paraphrase wrong, Nick, apologies). Which is pretty much what I feel about it; it would have been a good Who episode, but the idea wasn’t originally conceived as Clara’s ‘death’ episode – and it showed. Sarah Dollard had to jump through hoops to explain why there could be no last-minute Doctorial intervention. It never, for me, had the feel of a death that has to happen – or one where you could understand why it happened in this episode, rather than in another episode.
Now here, Bill is mortally wounded because she’s ended up in a scenario where the Doctor’s using her as a ‘test Companion’ for Missy. And Bill herself has said it’s a stupid idea. She’s mortally wounded because Missy just isn’t as good as the Doctor at persuading terrified people not to kill someone. She’s mortally wounded because, when the Doctor does realise how wrong things are going, there simply isn’t enough time left to persuade Jorj not to shoot.
And Jorj has a perfectly good on-screen motivation to shoot her – the Mondasian proto-cybermen only come for humans. No live humans, no terrifying proto-cybermen.
Then when she’s cyber-converted at the last minute, that isn’t an accident, or a misunderstanding, or a lack of communication. It’s because the Master sees that the Doctor is coming down, and wants his Companion to suffer – before the Doctor can reach the deck and intervene. It’s entirely compatible with the Simm Master’s previous behaviour of torturing the Doctor through his Companions.
To me, Bill’s ‘death’ is clearly caused by a sequence of events which trace back to the Time Lord’s educating their children to believe that they are the lords of the universe, and other races are (considerably) less important. The Doctor doesn’t consciously believe that – but in the crunch, he places Missy’s redemption higher than Bill’s safety. The Master definitely believes that – Bill is a toy to be used to hurt the Doctor.
I never got that clear through line with Face the Raven. Clara died because the script said so. It was exactly the same sort of problem that the Doctor solves every week; and in fact, she’d escaped an equally ‘certain’ death the previous week. The episode just couldn’t carry the weight of the death of a major character.
Apologies if you thought I was just being negative; for me, those two episodes should be shown to young scriptwriters to demonstrate the difference between planning a character death and just being told ‘your script is the one where this character dies. Work it in somehow.’
1 July 2017 at 02:19 #60066@tardigrade and @countscarlioni
I’ve got a vague recollection that there was a paper presented a couple of years back which considered the possibility of thermodynamic time reversal in black holes. In the popular press it got translated into ‘time going into reverse’, which might well have caught the eye of one S. Moffat.
What would happen in the Whoniverse if a ship nearly crashes into a black hole while travelling faster than light? Wasn’t that discussed in Prof. Cox’s 50th anniversary lecture on time travel?
1 July 2017 at 00:37 #60065Well, I’ve only just watched this. But that was a much, much, much better ‘kill the Companion’ episode than Face The Raven. Yeah, hubris. Hubris is when you take squishy humans around the most dangerous bits of the universe promising to try and protect them – when the last four you took on your travels are respectively memory wiped, dead, dead, and not-alive.
I suspect tomorrow’s finale will complete the theme of ‘there are worse things than dying’. I wonder exactly how tempted Moffat was to call it ‘Kill Bill’?
19 June 2017 at 17:20 #59302‘complete trust or confidence’ is not the same as ‘absolute trust or confidence’. Which may be why you’re uncomfortable – if you think that having a complete trust is the same as some kind of ‘absolute faith’.
For example, Bill probably has complete faith in the Doctor, but the evidence suggests that she doesn’t have absolute faith in him. That evidence also suggests that her complete trust in him develops according to evidence.
If a scientist says that have faith in the process of science, the meaning would typically be something along the lines of meaning that they have a high degree of confidence that it can achieve better understanding in a reliable way, over a sufficient period of time. While scientists have good reason to trust the process of science, based on a track record of increasing returns from following that method over hundreds of years, there is generally a good understanding also that it has limits, and that it can’t, even in principle, answer everything.
Yup. That’s faith. High degree of confidence, check. Understanding changing and developing over time, check. Looking back over the track record, check. Awareness of limits, check. We’d generally add in evidence from our personal experience of God, and our methods of cross checking new theories are rather different, but that’s pretty much ‘faith’.
🙂
19 June 2017 at 16:49 #59300See the answer I gave some moments ago
Which explains hypothesis testing quite nicely. But you are missing the essential point: hypothesis testing requires repeatable events. If your event is not repeatable then you are left with its effects; you can’t investigate it directly.
And you will know that you had inadequate information and will know better next time
Sometimes there is no ‘next time’. That’s one of the big differences between the scientific model and real life; life does not consist solely of repeatable events. Yes, you can work on your theory of bus flows, but the problem is that it doesn’t really help you at our particular bus stop.
‘Faith’ – trust. The difference between ‘faith’ and ‘assumption’ is that in both cases you accept something as true; in the case of ‘faith’ you are confident enough in either yourself or someone else that you accept something as true. In my original story, the reliance was partly on personal experience (or theory of bus flows), but also partly on anecdotal evidence.
Now, in the hard sciences, anecdotal evidence would be considered a possible starting point, but only in the sense that you could use it to create a hypothesis for testing. In the social sciences, anecdotal evidence would need other kinds of supporting evidence to put it into a framework. In history and law, you have various systematic methods to try and cross check the anecdotal evidence.
But in real life, anecdotal evidence is often what you’ve got.
Actually, if you want a document translated you will look for a translator with a grounding in whatever the pertinent field is.
So what, precisely, is your objection to starting Extremis in the Vatican? It’s stated clearly that the Veritas is the work of an early Christian sect. Therefore, by your argument, you will look for a translator with a grounding in early Christian sects – which means you’re probably going to be looking at the Vatican, Harvard Theological School, or Oxford (and will probably end up with some geezer in a dog collar).
From the TV point of view, the Vatican is by far the most fun…
And science does not use the word “prove” in the sense that you are using it (which is the mathematical sense).
Sometimes, pedant, you live up to your moniker. Yes, experimental science regards all ‘proof’ as subject to future refinement – mainly because you could write a terrific history of science using all the various hypotheses that were later shown not to apply in certain circumstances. But ‘proof’, like ‘cell’, is a word with many possible meanings and you’re supposed to figure out which one I meant from the context.
So you can quite easily use a scientific approach to prove if Liz 1 owned the ring,
Well, if you’re going to be pedantic about ‘proof’, I’d have to point out that you’re using ‘scientific approach’ as a synonym for ‘systematic approach.’ Academic history uses a systematic approach and will quite happily use science for corroborating evidence; however, a historical investigation is generally not the same thing as a scientific investigation. The kinds of evidence are very different, for a start.
Nobody has denigrated historians, translators or theologians. But all of them would benefit from listening to scientists.
What was that you said about hubris? They already listen to scientists. The complaint is that certain scientists don’t seem to feel that they need to listen to other disciplines. 🙂
13 June 2017 at 14:33 #59032None of it is anything to do with faith.
Yes, it is. You are standing waiting at a bus stop to prove the hypothesis that a bus will turn up, yes, but that doesn’t stop your hypothesis testing also being an act of faith. If it’s important that you get somewhere else quickly, you will not have time for repeat testing. You have to trust a) the person who told you a bus was coming and b) the evidence of the bus stop. 🙂
So, for Doctor Who: there is a wobbly looking bridge that the Doctor needs to run over. Or he can pick the roadside path, but then the Cybermen might catch up. Somebody yells ‘The bridge is fine; I came over it ten minutes ago!’
Hypothesis: the bridge is safe. Falsification: it collapses and you die/regenerate. Personal account: it’s just been used safely. Personal experience: it looks wobbly.
Since you don’t have the engineering specs (which you’d expect if you were road-testing a science hypothesis), and the Cybermen are enthusiastically planning to delete you, you have to do a faith test. Do you believe that personal account (was it Bill or Missy who gave it)? Is your action of running across the bridge instead of the roadside based on trust or belief?
If it’s based on trusting your personal experience, your knowledge of what a bridge is supposed to look like and your belief that the person telling you it’s safe is truthful (at least in this case), it is an act of faith (in the technical religious sense). But at no point have you had a lack of evidence. You might not have enough evidence. But you have evidence.
Oh, and when you get across the bridge safely, you’ll have proof that your faith was justified. But not until you get across the bridge.
Both Kepler and Newton were profoundly religious – they’d have been fine if you wanted something in Greek or Hebrew, but that was because those were the biblical languages.
Nowadays (and this story is set nowadays), if you want a document translated, you go to a translator, not a scientist. If you want to prove that Queen Elizabeth I owned a particular piece of jewellery, the only scientist you could ask would be a Time Lord – a physicist would be utterly useless and you’d need to go to a historian. If you want a piece of religious writing translated, you don’t ask someone who usually does legal documents – they will be adrift in a sea of unknown, probably very technical vocabulary.
Science is one field of knowledge; a very important field of knowledge. But that doesn’t mean that you should denigrate historians, translators and theologians because their fields rely on different rules. There are certain situations where the scientists would be useless.
@tardigrade – you should probably try the OED definition, which has ‘complete trust or confidence’ as the first definition. I’m using the 10th Edition, 1999.
There are always problems when a technical term is deliberately confused with a general definition. Scientists act on ‘faith’ a lot – but that just means they sometimes have to go forward without enough evidence, not that they don’t have evidence. As I just said to pedant, an act of faith can also be part of hypothesis testing. But defining faith as ‘belief without evidence’ is wrong; ‘belief without final proof’ is a lot closer.
13 June 2017 at 00:17 #58992In religion it is used to mean “belief” without evidence,
No, it most definitely isn’t and doesn’t. 😀
Sorry, I was catching up on the earlier posts; the ‘belief without evidence’ meme is a propaganda slogan. It’s roughly as accurate as announcing that computer scientists and game designers believe in fairies because they talk about ‘sprites’ a lot. 😈
You display ‘faith’ in the ‘technical religious term’ sense when you stand at a bus stop waiting for a bus you’ve never seen because someone told you it’ll be along in ten minutes. ‘Faith’, in the religious sense, means ‘trust’, or ‘confidence in’. It’s usually based on evidence – personal/historical accounts, personal experience, observing the experience of others.
To go back to the bus stop, you have two pieces of evidence – a personal account, and your own experience that bus stops are usually places where buses stop. You could be wrong – you might have asked the question of Michelle Gomez and the ‘bus stop’ could be a prop – but your faith is probably not misplaced.
There are a fair few scientist-theologians, but the field of knowledge that is theology more usually demands expertise in academic history, language translation, text criticism and philosophy – as well as the ‘theology’ bit. In Extremis, Moffat quite correctly has the theologians do the translating – and also has them work out what they need to do with that translation. The scientists, bless ’em, would have been wondering what the funny marks meant. It’s not their field. 😀
12 June 2017 at 17:21 #58971I think that Nick’s put his finger on it when he says that the Doctor didn’t even try. The way it was shot, the kid’s hand was still sticking up from the ice, holding onto the sonic. Normally, what you’d expect with a shot like that is that somebody will grab the hand/wrist then either succeed or fail in pulling the character out. But the Doctor went for the Sonic.
And they didn’t need the kid to be still holding the Sonic, either. Easy enough to have him drop it on the ice when he gets grabbed by the hungry ice-whale.
No, the shot was set up to lead us to expect the Doctor to grab the child, but he’s actually going for the Sonic. Then we have the later juxtaposition of a Picard Speech about judging societies by the way they treat their weakest members. Except the Doctor’s just decided one particular weakest member was less worth saving than his screwdriver – and the script hammered home that the Doctor, also, started out as a thief.
Actually, the Doctor is still a thieving git, it’s just that we give him a free pass on account of saving the world a lot. 🙂
Given that he had Bill write an entire paper on free will, I’d say it’s difficult to argue that he becomes morally responsible for Missy’s future crimes. Missy is the moral actor: she will have asked for mercy, promised repentance and then made a free-will choice not to. The Doctor knows that her evil might not in fact be a free will choice – Rassillon made the choice to make the Master.
Furthermore, everyone who knows the Doctor really, really well knows that killing Missy will destroy him. For evidence, I present the Cyber-Brig and his dead wife, who sent a message via Nardole. This ‘friendship’ is so strong, it might as well be called ‘love’.
And even more furthermore :-), the Doctor is himself a reformed and repentant murderer… who is he to condemn?
Repentance and reformation was a sub-theme in the Mars episodes. Depending on when you meet them, the Ice Warriors can be noble heroes or villains; the Colonel was a repentant coward who became a true hero. People can change – but can Missy?
And if she can’t change now, can she change in the future?
12 June 2017 at 14:54 #58965I wonder if the other thing that has changed in the relationship – apart from Missy’s sense of it – is that the moral dynamic has changed. Pre Gap, the Doctor had a sense of moral superiority over the Master. Yes, fine, he was a thief and a rebel – but he wasn’t a mass murderer.
Oops. Or as Missy would say, ‘awkward’. Clara may have helped him out of the loop where he perpetually committed genocide, but the implication is that he now has that memory of being willing to kill billions of children. He is Missy’s equal; both mad, both murderers. The only difference between them is that the Doctor found a way to undo his greatest crime – with the help of Clara, who Missy sent to him.
Which is, incidentally, what was so worrying in Thin Ice. ‘The Doctor’ finds a way to save children, save the innocent. The man who doesn’t can no longer call himself ‘The Doctor’ – this has been a Moffat theme since The Beast Below, where if The Doctor had lobotomised the Star Whale, he’d have had to find himself a new name. ‘The Doctor’ doesn’t kill the innocent. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s one child or a billion; a child was dying in front of him, and he grabbed the easily replaceable sonic screwdriver. Then he makes a big speech about the way society deals with its most unimportant members; the disconnect is huge (and almost certainly deliberate).
12 June 2017 at 13:41 #58963A somewhat delayed reply, but…
(hope you’re more convinced now, @bluesqueakpip (but look forward to discussing if you’re not)).
Alas, no. To me, Peter Capaldi is just not ‘The Doctor’. A Time Lord, yes, fine. Alien, definitely. But he’s not ‘The Doctor’. For me, Peter Capaldi’s playing the Gallifreyan who really lives behind the role of ‘the Doctor’. But I don’t enjoy watching that. 🙁
It’s rather weird, because I keep trying to watch Who and keep finding this bloody great blank space where the Doctor should be, filled by some strange Time Lord I’ve never seen before. I dunno if it’s intentional; there have been hints this series that something’s very wrong – so if it turns out that there was an underlying plot line behind it, it will just have to go down as an experiment that didn’t work for me.
Oh, and I hasten to add that I really like Peter Capaldi’s work. I’ve seen him in loads of stuff. I had to watch Paddington last month, and he was effortlessly Mr Curry – so I don’t quite get what’s going on with his Doctor.
12 June 2017 at 00:08 #58941Possibility A: It’s all (another) nefarious plot by Missy, using the Doctor’s friendship as a weakness to get under his guard.
Possibility B: Moffat used the events in The End of Time to work in a character change for the Master/Missy. The Master found out that his old friend really didn’t want to kill him, the Doctor found the Master didn’t really want to kill him – and the Master found out that Rassillon was the one really responsible for sending him bonkers. The result is that Missy is now genuinely the Doctor’s old friend – except she’s still a psychopathic mass murderer who treats the universe as her own personal shoot-em-up game.
I’m fairly convinced that Missy is the Doctor’s friend; far more so than when she was the Master. However, she expresses that friendship in a fairly inimitable style. For example, we know that she sent Clara to the Doctor; Clara saved his life (Missy-the-friend)- but she knew his love for Clara would (nearly) destroy him (plain-old-Missy).
If we theorise that Missy was responsible for the re-programming of the Disc of Rassillon, then you can see that style in the backdoor provided for the Doctor. There’s an escape route (provided by Missy-the-friend), but the escape is going to take a million years to carry out (plain-old-Missy).
So she’ll rescue him, if need be – but there’ll always be a sting in the tail.
11 June 2017 at 20:46 #58928@blenkinsopthebrave
Matt Smith was the earliest – he was announced almost an entire year before David Tennant’s last appearance and his first scene. Peter Capaldi was announced in August 2013, and Matt Smith’s last appearance was in December 2013. But Capaldi’s eyebrows had already appeared by then. 🙂Tennant was announced 15 April 2005, Christopher Eccleston’s last appearance was 18th June.
From that lot, I think we can presume that if they can manage to keep it secret, they will announce the new Doctor as late as two months before their first appearance – probably because they reckon that the news will leak as soon as they have to film that first scene.
11 June 2017 at 17:01 #58919There’s a reasonably large ABB (‘Anyone But Boris’) contingent in the Tory Parliamentary Party. 😈
It’s difficult to say who’d stand against May because Tory Leadership Contests often include MPs who are testing the waters for the next leadership campaign and MPs who are angling for a major cabinet post rather than the actual leadership – running for the experience and buying people off so that they stand down in your favour is an accepted part of the Tory leadership process.
Which is how David Davis became Secretary of State for Brexit. 😀
Personally, I’d expect Mrs May to last for another few months, then use ‘ill-health’ as a fig leaf – she is diabetic. However, it’s always possible that she’ll prove a sh*t-hot negotiator – in which case she’ll last until the next election.
I’m now reasonably sanguine about the result. Good things: the country may be divided, but didn’t go for an ultra-right wing landslide. The youngest voting generation has learnt from its brutal lesson in the EU referendum and is now turning out to vote. The DUP may be getting concessions – but it’s more ::cough, cough:: socially conservative tendencies are likely to be off-set by the more socially liberal Scottish Conservatives – who also have a nice little voting bloc to extract concessions with.
But it’s definitely interesting times. You can feel the geological foundations of British politics shifting steadily underneath us all.
24 May 2017 at 23:51 #5800724 May 2017 at 13:03 #57985British Threat Levels:
Low: Have a cup of tea later.
Moderate: Have a cup of tea now.
Substantial: Have a cup of tea with a biscuit.
Severe: Have a cup of tea with a chocolate biscuit.
Critical: Add whisky to tea.Fortunately, all my relatives in Manchester are fine. Stay safe, folks. 🙂
15 May 2017 at 12:55 #57508Probably resolvable on Gallifrey
I suspect medicine on Gallifrey isn’t that good – except for possibly stuff like obstetrics. Why have complex medicine when you can regenerate for everything – including a broken wrist? 🙂
So it becomes a question of ‘Why can’t the Doctor use regeneration energy to heal his sight?’ Given that he shied away from the question of regeneration when Bill asked about it, and also that the Thing in The Crypt/Vault seems to have some kind of energy coming out of it – is he using his regeneration energy to keep the Thing in there?
That would also explain why Nardole is so worried about him getting killed – the Doctor is much more vulnerable than usual.
8 May 2017 at 13:41 #57260Yes, I think it’s a little production joke: Clara was positioned as the Doctor’s ‘daughter’, Bill is positioned as ‘granddaughter’, therefore the picture of her mum – as a little joke – really resembles Clara.
I dunno if we’ll see Susan herself, but Moffat really has re-taken the Doctor through his entire life cycle. We’ve seen him acting like a big kid with his parents (in law), first dates, getting married, having a surrogate-daughter – and now ‘Grandfather’ has a grand-daughter. Full Circle. Back to where he began – except nowadays its a university rather than Coal Hill School, because the Doctor’s journey is more a spiral (see credits) than a circle.
7 May 2017 at 20:55 #57226@blenkinsopthebrave and @pedant
Don’t forget that this was the Doctor and Bill’s imaginative reconstruction. It’s entirely possible there was a (now deceased) Junior Parent to take care of the six year old and Wooden Mama, and then the boy took over when he was older.
7 May 2017 at 08:42 #57205That photo of Bill’s mum reminds me very much of Clara; it looks like a face merge between Jenna Coleman and a model. I’m pretty sure we’re looking at a production joke, though.
But what if one of the Claricles was black? The Claricles we know of were all utterly identical to Jenna Coleman (for obvious reasons), but did they have to be? Because Bill’s mum fits the Claricle/Clara pattern of dying young… 🙂
6 May 2017 at 20:00 #57165Oh, yes, Bill’s Mum.
Remind you of anyone?
6 May 2017 at 14:53 #57160Yes, there’s something very odd about the death of young Spider. Firstly, it’s unusual in Who that we see a child dying. Secondly, the Doctor doesn’t appear to care; which is really unusual – part of the reason that we don’t often see children dying is that the Doctor prioritises saving the kids. Yet he relates to the other kids, reads them stories, makes sure they’re all right after he leaves. As you say, he’s outraged enough about Bill.
But with Spider, he grabs the Sonic, but not the child’s hand. Why?
Unfortunately I’m up to my eyeballs in coursework for the next few weeks, so I don’t have as much time as usual for pondering. But, I dunno, it seems ‘off’, somehow.
Given that Spider was a one-off character, I’m wondering if the Vault and the new-looking Sonic are connected. Especially since the TARDIS (and new Sonics) were fully available at that point in the story.
6 May 2017 at 12:54 #57151The inference being No Clara no Doctor.
My bonkers theory: Clara was the avatar of the Production Team. 🙂 It was, after all, the 50th Anniversary Season. At the time I remember going through each episode in the Clara section and pointing out that you could summarise each plot by a summary of a period in the history of Doctor Who, the series.
Why did the Doctor survive everything that could be thrown at him? Because the production team, also known as ‘Clara’, made sure of it!
3 May 2017 at 01:09 #57045Hi,Ed!
That sounds to me like Pyramids of Mars – in one of the episodes the Doctor had to solve a series of logic puzzles. Corridors were involved and the Doctor’s Companion was Sarah Jane Smith.The puzzles ended up with two robot mummies (don’t ask) who acted out the old classic of The Guard Who Always Tells The Truth and The Guard Who Always Lies. The Doctor was allowed only one question…
Hope that helps. 🙂
30 April 2017 at 20:04 #56945Regarding the cameo brooch – we certainly wouldn’t give it a man, but these are Gallifreyans. As the Smith Doctor said once, they have no dress sense.
At one point gold eye-shadow for men appeared to be the height of ceremonial fashion. (The Deadly Assassin). The Sixth Doctor, whose taste apparently went full-on Time Lord, was fond of brooches as well – he wore a cat brooch. The Fifth went for celery … so the manly Gallifreyan has no problem with wearing eye-shadow, brooches, fob watches, rings, or jackets that look like an explosion in a clown factory.
So the brooch could be a typically Moffatian red herring; maybe this isn’t the first time Missy has been a woman, or maybe it is – because Gallifreyans would see that brooch as unisex. 🙂
[Just don’t mention the taste in hats, okay? No wonder River kept shooting the things.]
30 April 2017 at 09:02 #56912@thane15
What are your thoughts, bearing in mind your study, regarding a darker skinned Jesus?
That I seriously doubt he looked like Robert Powell? 🙂 Probably more like James Callis, yes, and maybe even darker skinned. One of the things I like about the Gospels and Epistles is that we generally haven’t got a clue what colour the people were, even though some of them are named as coming from African towns. They never give a physical description: like most Greek biographies they’re primarily interested in the message, the deeds and the important events.
There’s a very nice pack we sometimes use in classes for beginning Christians called ‘The Christ We Share’, and that has pictures of Jesus from all different cultures. They range from black to white to Chinese to our Western Victorian blonde bloke in a dress preaching to remarkably clean children. 😉
My favourite is one I saw in The Church of the Annunciation, Nazareth. It’s a very beautiful mosaic of a Japanese Baby Jesus, with a Japanese Madonna, both in formal Japanese dress.
29 April 2017 at 23:15 #56879since the Thames in the early 19th century was little more than a gigantic sewer,
Which probably explains why the TARDIS provided a really heavy and totally enclosed diving suit. 😀
28 April 2017 at 20:57 #56840Really not sure why people hate the Doctor playing the guitar. He’s played the recorder, formed his own rock group (with Marcus Aurelius on bass guitar) and seems to know how to play the harp. Which is also a Gallifreyan instrument as well as a human one.
Music is clearly part of a young Time Lord’s education, so why shouldn’t he relax with a guitar this regeneration?
26 April 2017 at 14:11 #56758@zeyra
This forum is supposed to try and keep a polite and civil atmosphere. We don’t always succeed, but we’re supposed to try. 🙂Both @phaseshift and I felt that saying something offensive about someone else’s country doesn’t follow site etiquette and doesn’t help to maintain a polite and civil atmosphere – especially when it’s directed at a new poster. Hence the fight.
Or to put it another way, if posters want to say something about every nation having shameful deeds in their past, they can, but they should start the discussion with examples from their own country. 😀
26 April 2017 at 12:35 #56754Don’t worry about it. It’s nothing you’ve done.
26 April 2017 at 12:15 #56753Hopelessly out of touch. So far I’ve watched both episodes of this series on Iplayer.
26 April 2017 at 10:37 #56748You may perhaps be unaware that the crime of manslaughter exists precisely because it is possible to cause a great deal of damage without intending it.
However, someone who unintentionally offends would never be aware enough to say ‘no offense’. That’s a get out of jail free phrase used when the poster knows exactly how offensive they’ve just been.
As to why both Bastille Day and Australia Day are celebrated; they’re celebrated because they’re the beginnings of their respective modern countries, with all their faults and virtues. Just as we have birthday parties even when children can be appalling little brats. Most countries don’t begin in sweet tranquility; they begin in blood and mess and yells – like any birth.
26 April 2017 at 10:03 #56746Probably the same sort of people who celebrate the invasion of someone else’s country, and the establishment of a prison. No offence.
It’s very easy to revise history so that it becomes a tale of oppression and victimisation. I mean, heck, you can rewrite the Doctor as someone drenched in blood and in the death of civilisations. He crashes in from the sky and tears your world apart.
But it’s the view of those who wish to tear down, not to build up.
26 April 2017 at 00:16 #56730I did suggest on the Guardian that the mind wipe was really to save the Vardy from the justifiably furious humans. They killed people’s mums. Yes, they were following their programming, but the Doctor’s assessment of sentience suggests that they don’t have to.
So they’re probably guilty of manslaughter (robotslaughter?). Put the two together, and the Doctor is probably trying to administer his own bit of justice. In a way that also stops the humans committing some vigilante roboticide; humans have a strong sense of fairness. It isn’t fair to punish people for something they can’t remember doing. 😉
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