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23 December 2015 at 19:53 #49612
@craig and @blenkinsopthebrave
Perhaps Jacob Marley sent the boys round. 😀
21 December 2015 at 22:13 #49566Nice arrangement, well sung. Downloaded.
19 December 2015 at 20:30 #4952819 December 2015 at 20:04 #49527@puroandson
Son of Puro – My guess with Big Bang 2 is that the universe was largely reconstructed the way it was before – but not entirely. It may be metaphorical – before Big Bang 2 we have RTD’s Whoniverse, post Big Bang 2 we are definitely in Moffat’s Whoniverse.
The one thing I have noticed is that the Blinovitch Limitation effect is demonstrated in The Big Bang, but has vanished in A Christmas Carol. It’s also entirely possible that Gallifrey was genuinely destroyed before Big Bang 2, and genuinely not destroyed after it. 🙂
The thing you have to remember with Russell T Davies is that he was producing the ‘one last go’ for Doctor Who. The BBC was rife with people saying Who was past its time, wouldn’t be a success, give it this one try and then put it to bed. They gave it a good budget, an excellent Head Writer/Producer, and found a heavyweight actor to play the Doctor – but there was no confidence that it would get past Series 1.
So Russell T was not planning for the long term. Not in Series 1, and not in Series 2. He was planning for one last, brilliant hurrah – and then when they did get renewed, he was planning for a series of stories that would let people accept the very quick switch-around of lead actors (and get a renewal into Series 3). I’m not sure he ever got the luxury of planning for more than one series at a time.
Steven Moffat didn’t have that. He had a terrifying first series, with no continuity from the RTD era – but when his new Team TARDIS proved successful, he was in the position of his Doctor Who being routinely renewed. So not only can he take risks, he can tidy up some of RTD’s short-term solutions.
I think the two head writers do have differences in their core philosophies (to me, RTD has always seemed to have a nihilist edge); I do sometimes get the impression that Steven Moffat has deliberately revisited RTD scenes in order to give viewers his own viewpoint. For example, that the end of the universe can be terrifying and ultimately meaningless (RTD) or it can be something that is sad – and beautiful (Moffat).
For most people, I think an afterlife is the ultimate form of cheating death, as it’s a form of immortality for the consciousness.
‘Most people’ being either from the West or from one of the Abrahamic religions? Even there, I think you’d need to distinguish between ‘cheating death’ and ‘defeating death’. And the Buddhists and the Hindus would definitely disagree with you about ‘immortality for the consciousness’.
But basically, what you seem to be objecting to, is that the Whoniverse has different rules to our universe. Which it demonstrably does – because they have time travel, which (in our current understanding) would need faster than light travel. And in our current understanding, faster than light travel is impossible at a basic theoretical level.
And you are objecting to the application of those rules. To be honest, I find this a bit like objecting to Jacob Marley’s ghost turning up in A Christmas Carol.
Amy & Rory we’re killed off by natural causes. If you allow that, then everyone in the universe bar 3 were killed off when the Doctor travelled to the end of time.
And now you’re starting to get it. Yes, they’re dead, Dave. Everybody Dave. Everybody’s dead, Dave. 😀
But it doesn’t matter, because this is a programme about time travel. It’s a programme where medical technology has advanced to the point that you can revive someone who’s been dead for hours. It’s a programme with a VR afterlife that dates back to Before The Gap. It’s a programme where you can see somebody die, then meet them later in your timestream but earlier in theirs, and marry them.
And she’s dead Dave, everybody’s dead, everybody is dead Dave. We just went back in time…
Never liked that book much
I was actually referring to the York Mystery Plays, which are a collection of plays (a ‘play cycle’), written over a short period of time, in the same language, to be acted out in front of an audience.
As opposed to a collection of sixty to seventy books, poems, biographies and letters written over a thousand years in three different languages. 😀
18 December 2015 at 23:04 #49505Having an active SF afterlife is not ‘cheating death’. The Time Lords upload people to the Matrix after death; that’s the SF version of an afterlife. You might as well say that Clarence in It’s a Wonderful Life cheated death because he’s putting in some serious overtime as George Bailey’s guardian angel. 🙂 Likewise, River in The Name of The Doctor is having a very busy afterlife – but she’s pretty damn sure that she’s dead. At one point, she says so.
Same for Danny. He has a virtual reality Time Lord style afterlife, followed by being zombified as a Cyberman. I fail to see how not coming back to life properly (because he gives the chance to genuinely live to the little boy) is ‘cheating death’. He cheats death by staying dead? Or does he cheat death by pointing out that he’s dead in Last Christmas?
If you go back to BG Who, the only dead regular characters who stay dead are Katarina, Sarah Kingdom (both really one story characters), Adric and the robot Kamelion. That’s over seventeen years.
The BG series killed-off-but-revived Peri and the movie-we-do-not-mention killed off and revived Grace Holloway.
Whereas Steven Moffat has killed off River (before we knew she was going to be a regular companion), Amy, Rory, Clara – well, that’s everyone. Really. Technically speaking, everyone the Doctor has travelled with since Steven Moffat took charge is dead. They are definitely dead. They couldn’t be deader. The people we see after they’re dead tell us they’re dead.
But this is a story about time travel. So we see River before she dies, and Clara (or a combination of the Doctor plus Clara) uses time travel as a way to live an awfully long time before she dies.
And this is a story where dead characters can be pretty darn active. That’s not a cheat, that’s a premise within the story.
denying that’s a DEM, by virtue of God being a character that had previously been mentioned and established to have unlimited power, hence that action being consistent with known capacities of known characters.
I really hate to tell you this, but if God is introduced in the beginning of your play cycle, uh, creating the world or something, then please do not be surprised if he turns up near the end of the play cycle to raise everyone from the dead. 🙂
To put it in more Doctor Who terms, if one of the Time Lords reminds you in Act One that the Time Lords can bring people back from the dead, please don’t be surprised if they have brought Clara back from the dead by the middle of the episode…
A Deus Ex Machina is when you don’t mention God at all throughout the play and he unexpectedly turns up at the end to zap the bad guys, or provide a miracle, or hold back the waters of the Red Sea. Tartuffe, by Moliere, has an excellent example of a deus ex machina. Or, rather, a rex ex machina, when the King entirely unexpectedly sends a police officer to arrest the villain and save the good guys.
Clara’s extended detour along the dusty road to death isn’t a deus ex machina. Firstly, it took one and a half episodes to set up, then secondly the remaining half of the episode is spent dealing with the consequences. The writer has very carefully set up limits that don’t prevent the method being used again, but certainly make it something that isn’t going to be easy. The Time Lords themselves don’t like using this method, and don’t like making it permanent. They see it as risky – it’s just that the Doctor was willing to take the risk.
My discomfort with that type of teleport being in the narrative though is that it gives a means of cloning / bringing back the dead, seemingly without limit
The limit is set out in Forest of the Dead; the limit for humans is the amount of computing power and storage space needed to replicate a physical body. CAL is an enormously powerful computer – and saving that number of people nearly ‘kills’ her. River’s team can have their personalities recorded – but the amount of storage available in those communicators means that their physical bodies can never be replicated.
Basically, bringing someone back from the dead via teleport is only possible if you’ve got the recorded teleport data, available storage space – and there’s a distinct hint from both Forest of the Dead and Death in Heaven that the personality needs to be kept going in virtual reality – so also a massive amount of computing power. The Time Lords, it seems, can dispense with the teleport requirement, but still need to keep the personalities running in VR.
Unfortunately I think you’re forced to add some justification of why his original body needs to be destroyed each time that isn’t really supported (though not necessarily excluded) by the script, to avoid the teleport being too overpowered.
I only watched Heaven Sent once, and have no intention of watching it again, so all I can say is that I had the very distinct impression that his original body was destroyed each time to provide the teleport with a power supply. It’s a Matrix joke; he uses his original body as a battery. Doing that burns it up each time.
I’d also point out that if that wasn’t the Time Lords original intention (that he die horribly each time), they should have damn well pulled him out the first time he kills himself. Clara does a fairly good job of describing the type of person who’d leave someone to torture themselves for 4.5 billion years: the word is ‘monster’. 😉
18 December 2015 at 21:57 #49499@morpho and @tardigrade
My interpretation of this was that the teleporter hard drive was being reset to the state in which it had the Doctor’s information.
The Doctor hints at the reason this would be the case: he dryly remarks that the victim is the only really essential person in a torture chamber.
18 December 2015 at 00:22 #49479The teleporter (and its limitations) already appeared in Forest of the Dead and was very clearly an information-reconstructing teleport.
But I’m afraid it’s a standard philosophical question about teleports, because the types that work by reconstructing information (rather than some mysterious disassembling, transportation and reassembling of our actual physical atoms) are basically a clone/resurrection device.
You may not like it, but that’s what that type of teleport does. If it works by information transfer, it can clone you. Or reconstruct you after death. Letting an information transfer teleport into your fictional universe (rather than dissassembly and reassembly after a short and possibly rather exciting trip through a wormhole) implies all those things.
I think you misunderstood me; ‘resurrecting’ people and extracting them from their time lines are two separate things – but in combination, it does rather suggest that the Time Lords are able to return people from the dead six times before breakfast.
even if it is yet another deus ex machina
It isn’t. Time Lords doing Time Lord-ey things like Time Lords do is never a deus ex machina. DEM is not shorthand for ‘plot device I don’t like’, or ‘method I think is overused’. 😉 If you want to check out my blog on the subject…
Characters need to stay dead sometimes
It’s actually really, really difficult to have someone stay dead in a fictional universe with time travel, shape-shifting, cloning, and virtual reality – River, for example, as Son of Puro pointed out, has been dead (and staying dead) since her first two episodes. However, her many appearances have involved either meeting her earlier in her time stream, or the use of her ‘virtual reality’ afterlife.
So if you kill off Clara, how do you keep her ‘dead’? She’s got a zillion Claricle-clones wandering around, there’s no particular reason the Doctor can’t visit her after she’s died (in fact, we were speculating whether that was what had happened in the Zygon two-parter), and we’ve seen teleporters used to bring people back from the dead if their information had been recorded and stored. The eventual solution used an idea first seen in 1983; that the Time Lords can scoop people out of their time stream.
But you’re talking about a TV programme that can have Marcus Aurelius playing bass guitar in the Doctor’s band. Virginia Woolf can be on the Doctor’s bowling team. The Doctor’s planet is living billions of years in our future – as Clara says in Hide, we are ALL ghosts from the Doctor’s point of view. We’re all dead; everyone from 21st Century Earth is just as dead as Marcus Aurelius. But the Doctor has a time machine…
The last episode pretty much explores the idea that the Doctor has to let people stay dead. He’s got all these ways to bring people back to life – but the rules say that he has to not use them. What we see with Clara is what happens when he goes all Time Lord Victorious – and realises that nobody can make The Doctor obey the rules except The Doctor.
And the universe, of course. Moffat’s very fond of demonstrating what happens when you break the rules that the universe runs by.
It’s always there, implied and looming: endings.
Yes, but Steven Moffat takes a different view than RTD. RTD has the remnants of humanity running in terror from the end of time; Steven Moffat has Ashildr sitting watching the last stars go out and thinking that it’s sad … and beautiful. Summer is great; winter has its own beauty.
One producer is saying that endings are terrifying; the other says that endings are part of the shape we make of our lives. Moffat’s famous for ‘everybody lives’, but in fact, he kills off his characters quite frequently. He killed off Amy and Rory, for example. But we don’t notice, because when he kills off the regular characters, it’s never the end of their story.
16 December 2015 at 01:36 #49454She was wandering around Gallifrey without getting ‘dummed’, so I’d infer that the Doctor only wanted her to stay inside so she didn’t overhear his conversation with me.
There’s also the friendly American left to look after the Doctor, who’d probably have been a bit more startled if the diner had dematerialised around him.
16 December 2015 at 01:03 #49452A deus ex machina.
Sends lightning bolt in your direction.
No, it’s not a deus ex machina. Clara being ever so slightly dead may be a seemingly unsolvable problem, but one and a half episodes is not a sudden and abrupt resolution. The Doctor may be concealing the resolution from the Time Lords, and therefore from the audience, but he takes 4.5 billion years and then half the next episode to get himself into a position where he can order Clara’s extraction.
It’s not even a previously unknown character ability. The Time Lords have brought people back from the dead before – Rassilon even reminds us he’s been ‘resurrected’ in the episode. (They seem to have brought people back from the dead in job lots during the Time War). And they’ve certainly extracted people from their time streams before – the Five Doctors.
It could be done with anyone, any number of times, and there is no condition given for how long a person could take advantage of it
Well, it could – if you can get past the Gallifreyans, who know that taking advantage of the not-being-dead-ness of extraction could potentially destabilise the continuum. Then you have to stay on the run from them until they figure out that the universe already knows you’re going to take the long way round.
The Doctor had to shoot the General to get past the Gallifreyan guards – and half the audience noticed just how out-of-normal-character it was. So it could be done with anyone, providing anyone is prepared to become Lord President of Gallifrey, order an extraction, and then shoot their way past protesting Gallifreyans (who are probably going to place an even more heavily armed guard around any future extractions, especially if the Doctor is involved). Anyone then has to be prepared to steal a TARDIS and go on the run, and work out how to hide their not-dead companion from the Gallifreyans for the rest of their not-being-dead-ness.
They sound like one heck of a set of limits to me. 🙂
there’s a person going around the universe whose body shouldn’t be able to do a single thing
Uh, huh. And it’s mentioned in the script – as an official handwavium – that somehow, the Time Lords are able to do something ever so advanced with the 0.67 seconds between heartbeats that keeps Clara mobile enough to walk, talk and fly The American Retro Diner In Space. The script mentions, for example, that breathing is now a habit. She probably doesn’t need to eat or drink, either.
Do we know how this works? Nope. Are the Time Lords using such advanced science that we can apply Clarke’s Law? Absolutely.
Does Clara return to her death? Well, firstly, we saw her die. Secondly, Me, at the very end of time tells us that ‘Even the immortals are gone’. She’s the only person left. And Me, of course, is the only one of the immortals with a mortal memory; the one whose trillions of years of age is simply a story that she rereads in her diary.
She’s learnt wisdom. But she hasn’t got the crushing weight of all those years. It’s quite possible she saw that dying star being born – but she won’t remember that she did.
There is going to come some point, Moffat is saying, where even the Sisterhood, and Clara, and the Doctor, and all the other immortals of the Whoniverse – will decide that it’s time to be gone.
14 December 2015 at 22:02 #49426Of course, any interpretation is best left until the story is complete (as @bluesqueakpip
discoveredalready knew 😉 )Fixed that for you… 😀
[#47486
the production team has two episodes for me to make some dramatic sense out of this.
]
14 December 2015 at 01:33 #49401Regarding the ‘high born’ thing – I always placed the Doctor as an aristocrat, but a ‘younger son’. Not the heir, the one who has to go out and make a career for himself.
British boarding prep schools for age 7-13 are very often out in the countryside – there are historic reasons for that, but if you put it into a Gallifreyan context then The Doctor’s Daughter and The Sound of Drums suggest that young potential Time Lords were quite deliberately separated from their parents.
Which would mean their schools would have to be outside the city. And schools for privileged young folk often do deliberately introduce their pampered pupils to a rather more spartan life style than they’re used to.
Culturally, it’s true that British orphanages were generally for the lower classes – but that was because upper class orphans generally got dumped into a boarding school for both term time and holidays (J.K. Rowling uses that practice for Harry, but softens it by making Hogwarts his true home).
So that barn could belong to a Gallifreyan prep school where all boys of the Doctor’s social status would expect to go – or it could be the equivalent of an upper class orphanage; a boarding school for children of the Time Lord class who can’t live at home.
14 December 2015 at 00:51 #49400So, to pin its “ultimate” truths onto Malory’s personal life or authorial intent (both common forms of humanist literary criticism) would be patently reductionist.
I cheerfully admit that I’ve never read Barthes. But either you’ve condensed his argument over-much, or possibly I’m confusing the religious studies term ‘reductionist’ (explaining religion using non-religious causes) with what it means in literary studies. It appears that you’re saying that Barthes view of those who re-work traditional tales was the now rather old-fashioned view that they didn’t do any actual editing and reshaping?
I think both are plausible readings from the on-screen text.
I’d disagree. I’d say that one (mine, obviously 🙂 ) takes account of the entire text, as seen. The other, @lisa‘s, incorporates selective aspects of the text as seen and rejects other aspects. Then it uses elements of the Doctor’s known character (he’s manipulative), and argues that those elements apply in all scenes, even ones where the face-value interpretation is that he’s showing surprise and confusion.
One is based on what is happening on screen, the other argues that what is happening on screen isn’t what’s really happening. In one type of interpretation you should be able to point to particular lines, particular actions, in the other you need a fairly large input of additional audience interpretation – and a fair amount of ‘that line didn’t mean what it appeared to mean, because the character was lying’.
Now, if you say that both readings are ‘plausible’, you’re arguing from (I think) two particular premises – which are firstly that the only ‘valid’ interpretation is the one that goes on in the mind of the ‘reader’ and secondly that the narrative ambiguity that is assigned to certain parts of the on-screen drama can be applied to all its parts, even in the face of the creative producers of that drama insisting that no narrative ambiguity was intended.
The first view takes a very individualistic view of the audience. You keep using the term ‘reader’ and ‘reading – which is the official term (I use it too), but treats a play or a TV programme as if it was a novel. Plays and TV programmes are not ‘read’ by ‘readers’, they are watched by an audience – and ‘audience’ is a group noun. And the audience, as a group, affects the interpretation of every individual within it.
How often have we had people post on here saying something along the lines of ‘I thought this, but after all the discussions I watched it again and now…’ ? Audience. Communal watching, even if we have to create a community via the Internet. Interpretations that often approach a group consensus, with a number of outlying or alternative views.
There are culturally radical and culturally normative interpretations of texts.
Yup. Group interpretation again, you see. Are we going with the group (normative) or against it (radical, but radical is usually an interpretation within a cultural subgroup)? What’s really interesting is when you get different cultures interpreting the same text. What’s culturally radical to one is culturally normative to another.
But if all interpretations are equally valid, why step outside your own culture to check out someone else’s interpretation? Your interpretation is just as valid as theirs – which means they can’t possibly be ‘right’ and you be ‘wrong’.
This site is actually a home for outlying or alternative views (see masthead) – because the ‘mainstream’ view is often just plain boring (at least, to the fertile imaginations of those of us who like to hang out here). If we posit that the Doctor planned the swap all along, that leaves the Doctor in charge – and allows an imaginative interpretation that he might have also planned some way to later remember Clara – and allows about ten tons of narrative space to fill with fan fics. 🙂 But if we take the face value view that he didn’t plan the swap, can’t remember Clara from Adam (Adam was in Series 1) and we’re probably never going to see Clara again, then the ‘narrative space’ is The Further Adventures of Clara and Ashildr.
The second is the more plausible interpretation. But frankly, @lisa‘s is more interesting.
Equally, ‘narrative ambiguity’ is frequently misused to mean ‘this is the interpretation that I want, and it’s the one I’m going to have’. Sometimes a sonic screwdriver is just a sonic screwdriver. Sometimes the Doctor looks surprised because … well, because something happened that he didn’t expect.
Their job is to produce, not to explain, as Barthes would say.
Of course he would. He was a literary critic. God forbid mere producers of creative work should tell the distinguished academic critics they were talking out of their collective arses with particular interpretations: they could put entire university departments out of business. 😈
Jake Gyllenhal for instance gave an interview saying he believed his and Heath Ledger’s characters were not gay, but just two men who fell in love with each other in Brokeback Mountain. Sure, that’s a valid reading. But another, is that they were primarily attracted to men, but in the time and place they lived, having a “gay” identity was not an option for them. I don’t think we should take Gyllenhal’s reading as the definitive one. He is the instrument, not the ear.
Hmmm… to me, that sounds as if, having been offered a really interesting interpretation of human love and sexuality as something so powerful it can transcend not just culture, but our ‘normal’ sexual orientation – you’ve gone for the ‘comfortable’ interpretation that ‘they’re gay really but they couldn’t admit it back then’.
From an acting point of view, Gyllenhal’s interpretation is far more interesting.
13 December 2015 at 15:17 #49382@juniperfish, @pedant and @puroandson
Hmm. Well, I’ll drop in some comments to the reader/author debate.
Firstly, we’re not talking about readers and we’re not talking about authors. We’re talking scriptwriters, actors and viewers – and that does make a difference.
A scriptwriter provides the skeleton for the final programme. The final programme will be a collaboration between scriptwriter, actors, production team and director – and it’s incredibly common for the ‘final’ script to not be genuinely final. Things get changed right up to the editing stage; nowadays, with playback and recording being so cheap, it’s much more common to take several alternative readings of a scene or a reaction, and then pick one in the editing suite.
Same with playscripts, except that they have a much longer rehearsal period to see if things work and to change them (which is why you often have the first castlist included in a playscript).
So the ‘final’ script that we have is not necessarily Steven Moffat’s final word on Clara and the Doctor; his final word would have been developed in collaboration with Peter Capaldi and Jenna Coleman. Notice how the sunglasses are marked ‘plot point’? Then notice how Capaldi puts them on the console. They aren’t placed, they’re almost thrown. Same with the Neural Block – flung down in frustration.
So I really don’t think that a reading that the Doctor planned the reversed polarity in advance is plausible.
Similarly, I would argue that the Doctor knowing Clara’s observing them on the monitor isn’t a plausible reading. This is not because of the ‘Now.’ That is ambiguous. It’s Peter Capaldi’s playing of ‘I thought you’d be more surprised to see her’ – which he plays as someone genuinely thrown by Clara not being surprised. He did not know she’d work out how to use the monitor – and that feeds back to the Doctor flinging the means for Clara to counter his plan down on the console in two parts, both in sheer frustration.
Yes, he left her the means to counter his plan – but if he didn’t intend her to discover his plan until too late, then he either left her those means by accident, or it was his subconscious rather than his conscious decision.
Or he simply underestimated Clara, by treating her as if she were a child in need of his care.
The author is not the ultimate authority on the meanings of their own text.
I can only speak for actors: our job is to communicate. The underlying assumption of theatre and film is that it is possible to have a meaning that is agreed by both performers and audience. Yes, that shared meaning can be very broad – but the actor is the ultimate authority on the intended meaning of their performance.
And if the audience takes away a meaning from our performance that is wildly different from what we intended to convey – We. Have. Failed.
Well. Either that, or it’s the director’s fault. 😉
13 December 2015 at 07:56 #49369I, too, look forward to a female Doctor. I also suspect it might come sooner than most of us are supposing. Don’t ask me to pin down why, though
Because everything is now firmly in place. We’ve had the suggestion that Time Lords can change gender, we’ve seen a known Time Lord change gender (with the regeneration off screen). Given that particular Time Lady’s gender swap turned out really successful (reassuring the BBC suits, I’ve no doubt), we’ve now seen a Time Lord change gender by regeneration on-screen.
Not only that, but the line ‘That was the only time I’ve been a man’ sets it up that a Time Lord can have a solid run of one gender before a switch.
There’s now no script reason that the Doctor can’t switch genders. There’s also a provision that he can switch back – it’s not a permanent change, and there’s no reason we can’t have a female actor regenerating back into a male actor.
My guess is that they’re planning a gender-open call when it comes to cast the next Doctor; or, if Peter Capaldi’s exit date is set, they’ve got to the stage of ‘shortlist of possible female Doctors’
12 December 2015 at 22:41 #49349@mudlark and @juniperfish
The text has ambiguity. But I’d say that if the Doctor’s planned to leave Clara with the means of adjusting the Neural Block, he’s done it subconsciously. He doesn’t leave the sonic sunglasses and the Neural Block on the TARDIS console together – he chucks the sunglasses when he’s irritated with their analysis, and then pops the Neural Block down when he goes to see Me.
I’d argue that his obsession with Clara has now reached the point that he can’t give her up, can’t plan to give her up, can only go further and further down a destructive route. What’s next, finding another Claricle to travel with, after he’s left this Clara without a job, without a home, without a pulse and without her memories?
So Clara, who was born to save the Doctor, has to save him one last time. She has to make him give her up.
[Personally, I think a cousin of Danny Pink met this really nice Claricle. The time travelling ancestor is because he’s also descended from another companion. 🙂 ]
12 December 2015 at 20:27 #49343“I can do anything I like!” And we’ve seen how that turned out . . .
Yes, we have. Not just because doing anything he liked created Me out of Ashildr, but because ‘I can do anything I like’ is exactly the attitude Rassilon displays. ‘I can do anything I like’: including creating a bespoke torture chamber for the Time Lord who worked out how to let Gallifrey survive the Time War.
TLs seem to be very poor at the maintenance end of things, like American Airlines.
They’re a regeneration culture. I bet their medicine is poor as well – probably a case of ‘have you considered regenerating?’ for anything more complicated than an ingrowing toenail.
12 December 2015 at 20:00 #49339@pedant and @juniperfish
But also, one thing Moffat seems to be kicking hard again is the idea of a redshirt.
‘Redshirts’ are the epitome of ‘the little people don’t matter’. David Weber, who’s a writer of military SF, calls it ‘war porn’. The type of war-based fiction where the only people who are going to die are either bad guys or nameless redshirts that you don’t have to care about, so sit back and enjoy the violence. 🙁
Given that Weber also has a habit of writing little cameos where he introduces a backstoried character you really like and want to see more of – and then kills them – it may be that the kickback against the ‘redshirt’ and towards ‘in real wars, real people die’ is more general than just Steven Moffat.
12 December 2015 at 17:45 #49333Logically, Rassilon’s mind should have been uploaded to the Matrix.
Since we know that Rassilon describes himself as the ‘resurrected’, and that people scooped out of time don’t have heartbeats, he was almost certainly uploaded to something; then reconstructed out of it as needed. However, he seems to have an independent post-mortem existence in The Five Doctors, stuck in VR in the Tomb of Rassillon, in the middle of the Death Zone.
Given what we’re slowly learning about Rassilon, uploading him to his very own tomb in the middle of a deadly killing zone is beginning to look like sheer common sense on the part of the Gallifreyans. Legend doesn’t tell us whether they also cut off his head and stuck a pair of stakes through his hearts. 🙂
With ‘resurrection’, the Master says a similar thing in Sound of Drums.
MASTER: The Time Lords only resurrected me because they knew I’d be the perfect warrior for a Time War.
We see Time Lord ‘resurrection’ happen with the nameless little boy in Death in Heaven: basically, the Time Lords seem to have ‘resurrection’ technology (which would be a variant on the Whoniverse’s teleport tech, I’d bonkerise) down pat, providing they have enough information to reconstruct the mind and body.
12 December 2015 at 13:04 #49327Regarding whether the Doctor remembers what he learned from Clara: if we see him haul out the prompt cards, he remembers.
12 December 2015 at 12:29 #49324It appears that the TARDIS repair bay is normally unguarded, presumably on the grounds that no one would be bonkers enough to steal a faulty TARDIS.
Oops.
12 December 2015 at 01:39 #49296@puroandson
She’s playing Queen Victoria in, uh, Queen Victoria. So she’s got a) a period drama rather than SF and b) the title role.
Still, he won’t be comparing them to Clara! which will help.
Oh, boy, will it help. You’re probably too young to really remember David Tennant’s Doctor in Series 3, spending what seemed like an incredibly long series missing his previous companion, Rose. Then Captain Jack turned up – and asked about Rose. The only person who didn’t ask about Rose was the Simm Master, and that was because he’d never met Rose…
… anything but that. Really. I genuinely liked the character of Rose, but by The Shakespeare Code I was starting to go ‘get over Rose, already’, and by Utopia it was ‘Can we shut up about flippin’ Rose?’
No. Do not shake the hand of Rassilon (or even the Hand of Rassilon). Rassilon is not a nice President. More El Presidente, in fact.
As @pedant says, silly and wrong is fine. Love to your Mum. 🙂
11 December 2015 at 22:10 #49289I remember in some forum both SM and Capdoc were asked which companion they would bring back and both of them simultaneously said Clara.
Which is exactly why they might have a definite break. 😉 Especially since Clara has been Peter Capaldi’s only companion.
Though it wouldn’t surprise me terribly if Jenna Coleman has a guest spot (subject to work) in Peter Capaldi’s regeneration story, or if Big Finish are even now negotiating the Clara and Ashildr spin off audio series. 😀
11 December 2015 at 21:11 #49287The only experience that we have to go on is Steven Moffat’s treatment of Amy and Rory. Yes, the after effects were felt (deeply) in The Snowmen. But the actors were gone, and stayed gone.
The characters have been referenced occasionally. But there seems to be a firm distinction between the semi-regular continuing characters (River Song, The Paternoster Gang, Missy, now Ohila) and the regular companions. The semi-regulars are fitting Who into an ongoing acting career and can crop up again whenever availability and a good script idea coincide; a regular companion has to establish or re-establish their non-Who careers.
This is a rather long-winded way of saying that Steven Moffat may well feel that a complete break is the best thing both for the programme and for Jenna Coleman. She’s had a very long run as Clara; not only was she the longest running AG Who companion, she had a period between Doctors where she basically had to be the headline actor for the programme.
I’m really glad her agent found her a very different kind of role for her next high profile telly; she needs to very quickly re-establish herself as ‘Jenna Coleman the ‘name’ actor’ rather than ‘Jenna Coleman the ex-Who Companion’.
11 December 2015 at 19:01 #4928311 December 2015 at 15:23 #49279@puroandson
these improv things are best left to mild, warm- up activities and not assessment
Well, ‘be a tree’ would certainly give an assessor some difficulty. You could judge how well the kids have collaborated in creating the performance, and if the unit had been on, say, mime, you could judge how well they understood that style of performance and those conventions.
But it’s tricky awarding any higher level grades for kids when they’re being a statue-still tree. You’re supposed to be checking how they’re using their body language, facial expression, movement, voice. Whether they can interact with other performers, whether they improvise where needed. How they use their voice, whether they can remember lines, whether they can vary the voice to fit the lines.
But if what you’re supposed to do is stand still and/or wave your arms about, then you are basically stuck with the lower level skills – can they sustain the ‘tree’ through the entire performance (Son has failed there, I’m afraid) and can they use their body and incorporate movement.
‘Be a tree’ is an imagination exercise. It’s one of the many, many things that get thrown at a trainee actor to help them learn to play characters who are either in situations they themselves have never been in, or might not even be human.
As John Rhys Davies and Vin Diesel can testify, sometimes the professional actor really does have to play a damn tree.
11 December 2015 at 14:29 #49275Yup. I (and @blenkinsopthebrave) totally called the CD of Rassilon – in fact, I’m pretty sure I also called its status as a Chekhov’s CD of Rassilon.
So the I Totally Called It Award 2015 (Mysterious Devices Category) will now join the I Totally Called It Award 2013 (Plot Arc Category) on my bookshelf. The 2013 award was for spotting that it was indeed all about the children of Gallifrey. 😀
Well, for six months of the year, anyway, because it’ll spend the other six months chez Blenkinsop.
10 December 2015 at 23:46 #49249@puroandson
You have a drama teacher without a shred of irony in them. 😕
Or possibly they are a very devout Stanislavskian Method drama teacher (and don’t have a shred of irony in them), which may explain why they got so offended when you told them the exercise was shite. Stanislavsky includes it in The Actor Prepares, the Imagination chapter.
Anyway, the reason for my disbelief when you said Son had to be a tree is that ‘be a tree’ is now acting slang for a totally ridiculous rehearsal/improvisation exercise or incomprehensible directors note. Most actors who play trees (professionally) always find it incredibly funny that they are, in fact, being paid to ‘be a tree’. 🙂
It is traditional that at some point during acting training the students will be asked to be trees (at some point during acting training you’ll probably get asked to be a yellow watering can), but it’s normally expected that everyone (students and teacher alike) will be desperately trying not to laugh while rustling their leaves and imagining the squirrels running about in their branches. 😉
10 December 2015 at 16:05 #49235@mersey and @puroandson
Yeah, I was a fir tree elf in a school play – but like you, that was when I was much younger than Son of Puro. 🙂
10 December 2015 at 14:38 #49226@Morpho
The Master has worked with the Time Lords, the Valeyard, the Daleks, the Cyberman, and the Doctor.
Yes, but they are not the person who tortured him by using him as a living transmitter since age seven.
I can easily see Missy doing a deal with the General, the Gallifreyan army, the Daleks, the Cybermen, the Doctor’s mum – and the Doctor, frankly, is her bezzy mate/bezzy enemy, so doing a deal with the Doctor has never been one of her problems. I just have huge problems with a deal between her and Rassillon when, the last time we saw them, the Master was doing his damndest to at least cause Rassillon an awful lot of pain and definitely to ruin his plans.
Basically, it needs a) Missy to a ‘let bygones be bygones’ sort of person – and as a highly talented escape artist, I’m doubtful that ‘deal with Rassillon’ is her only route to freedom.
And b) Rassillon needs to be really, really stupid. 🙂
10 December 2015 at 13:50 #49223@puroandson
“pretend to be trees” ‘task
Puro – or Son
Please, please, tell me your drama teacher didn’t really ask you to pretend to be a tree. That was an example, right? Of some exercise that you found stupid?Please?
10 December 2015 at 12:40 #49217@Morpho
I think my main problem with your bonkers theory is a characterisation one: it just strains my suspension of disbelief that Missy would (post End of Time) do any deals with Rassillon that didn’t involve a lovely big knife to stick in his back. Frankly, I think the only reason Rassillon’s not dead is that Missy wants him to die very slowly, knowing that he’s lost everything. 😈
So, to hand you the ‘knife’ –
– when Missy tampers with the Confession disc, she creates a ‘back door’ escape route.
Since it would take 4.5 billion years to punch through that wall, she knows the Time Lords won’t realise it’s an escape route. Since she knows her bezzy mate pretty well, she knows he’s stubborn enough to take 4.5 billion years to punch through the wall. Especially if it’s a ‘rescue Clara’ situation.
Which means the Doctor is going to arrive on Gallifrey in a state of being both slightly nuts and very, very, very pissed off. 😀
9 December 2015 at 19:33 #49173He may have some way of telling their elapsed age if he picks them up again, but he has no way of telling whether the ages on the gravestone are the right elapsed ages. As I said, the gravestones – by giving an age, not a date – are giving him a message.
The message is ‘we are not giving you our final address’. Final address in time, that is.
And that is a message that figuring out some way of picking Amy and Rory up and flying off in the TARDIS with them, until he returns them to their date-of-death in New York – just didn’t happen.
Mind you, I’m not saying they didn’t do exciting stuff in the States (we know that Amy became a good enough writer that her children’s books are still popular in 2012), and River was pretty specific that her vortex manipulator could slip through where a TARDIS couldn’t. River obviously knew damn well where her parents ended up; it’s quite possibly why she was hanging around in 1930’s New York as a detective.
But the reason the Doctor was so grief-stricken at their graves was that he knew it was their graves; his prophecy in The God Complex had come true.
They couldn’t stop travelling with him – and the only possible end to that was him standing over their graves.
9 December 2015 at 15:58 #49153He could have rescued them – except he can’t, because he knows he didn’t. The gravestones are themselves a message – they have no dates that he could zero in on, just an age.
And Amy and Rory had already said in an earlier episode that they don’t really know their own ages any more, because of all the time they’ve spent travelling with the Doctor. They can’t travel to the time when they’re supposed to die, because they have no idea what date those ages represent. The Doctor has no evidence from the gravestone about when they actually died – and as soon as he goes to find an obituary, he’ll find details that tell him ‘you never came back’.
So he goes and reads the final page of the novel. At least that way, he’s going to hear it from Amy, just as Rory’s father was given the news directly in a letter from Rory.
9 December 2015 at 13:24 #49144Why can’t we make out own Threads, like any other Forum?
Because the rules of this site are that only moderators can create threads. If you ask, politely, they will either direct you to the appropriate thread or – if they think you’ve spotted a genuine gap – they will create one for you.
In this case, if you want to talk about the Smith (Eleventh) Doctor, the ‘general discussion about a particular Doctor’ thread is The Faces of The Doctor. You can talk about any of the Doctors there.
The list of individual episodes for Matt Smith’s Doctor is here. If there’s an episode missing, just mention it in website comments – this forum started up partway through the Smith Doctor’s run.
9 December 2015 at 11:59 #49139Perhaps it was the General communicating through the crack at
Trenzalore?
It was definitely Ken Bones doing the voice-over. So either ‘keep hiding’ is The General’s plan, or he took the Doctor’s and Clara’s flat refusal to say his name as an instruction from the Doctor to keep hiding.
[later addition]
The idea that Rassillon might see the Doctor as his rival for control of Gallifrey – because The General is following the Doctor’s orders over his – explains why Rassillon chose to torture the Doctor into revealing the nature of the hybrid.
If you ask someone to tell you the answer, they retain power. You don’t know, they do. That, for President Rassillon is dangerous, because the person he’s asking is a war hero former President with his own power base. The army are following the Doctor’s plan, successfully, but Rassilon’s own plan was defeated by the Doctor and the Master.
But if you torture them to get the information, them giving it to you is their defeat. You’ve broken them.
Which would be why the Doctor knew that to give in was to lose.
8 December 2015 at 21:13 #49096Yes, it’s a bit hard for me to see how Missy could not be involved, since she was the one with the confession disc.
Missy only has the confession disc from the (unknown) point at which the Doctor sent it to her, to the point when Colony Sarff confiscated it on Skaro. After that, the Doctor has it until he gives it to Ashildr at the end of Face The Raven.
Presumably it then gets sent to the Time Lords who are, well, Time Lords. They’d get it in plenty of time to reprogram it and see that the Doctor’s teleport delivers him inside it to be tortured, because they’d make that time.
The torture is completely in keeping with Rassillon, because Rassillon has canonically done it before (to Missy when she was a little boy) – and in that case, too, he did his torture at arms length, by remote control, for the ‘greater good of Gallifrey’. Sending a small boy insane was an unfortunate side effect of using him as a signal transmitter, just as there’s no one important outside the Capitol and the Doctor could have got out at any time if he’d only told them about the hybrid.
Actually, y’know, just asking people doesn’t seem to be one of Rassillon’s things.
Missy’s perfectly happy to torture the Doctor, but she prefers it to be more hands on and/or on video stream. And it’s for fun. She was looking downwards when she mentioned a ‘brilliant idea’, so I’ve always presumed that Moffat was making a joking reference to his own The Curse of Fatal Death. Missy is about to spend 936 years in a sodding sewer. 😉
Honestly? I suspect Missy’s ‘escape’ has a lot to do with The Moment. Without Clara, the Doctor will never change his mind about destroying Gallifrey. If it wasn’t The Moment, then maybe The General.
But it really doesn’t need to have been anyone; whether she’s Missy or The Master, her ability to escape from the inescapable is easily equal to the Doctor’s. 🙂
8 December 2015 at 20:25 #49091Yes, but Clara’s wasn’t the only death in Face the Raven. Her complete faith in the Doctor’s ability to get them out of anything died too. The whole point of the ending is that she’s now making her own decisions; getting yourself killed is a particularly brutal way to discover that you might not always make the right ones.
That’s the difference in our views: you seem to think that Clara is going to be the junior partner in the Clara-Ashildr relationship. Whereas, my reading of the final scene with them is that the dynamics are very firmly ‘Clara Who’ as the person running this TARDIS, Ashildr as the Assistant.
8 December 2015 at 19:45 #49086I’d say the other way round; the level at which he knows what the diner is and who Clara is, isn’t the logical one. It’s the ‘something missing in the count’ one. The way they got into Trap Street.
He’s connecting the ‘something I’m not getting’ feeling he has in the diner with the ‘something is missing in my memory’ feeling he’s been having. So he talks about the memories he can no longer remember and plays the tune he associates with that feeling. But it’s a feeling, not logical recognition. An association with the story, and with the emotional feeling of the music.
Something he can’t quite ‘get’. Ever.
8 December 2015 at 19:34 #49085Except the episode has taught Clara there are some things that simply cannot be done, that would endanger time and space itself.
Ummm… yes?
I’m really not sure what you’re trying to say here. Apparently Ashildr is going to be so focussed on limits, that Clara will give up?
Or that Clara will have to choose to return to Trap Street? As she says in the end of the episode, she knows she has to do that. But she’s going to take the long way round.
Probably 4.5 billion years or so. 🙂
8 December 2015 at 17:40 #49074Frankly, given Clara’s success in getting the Doctor, Bonnie, Ice Warrior Field Marshals and assorted other aliens to think more like Clara, I suspect she’s considerably more likely to Clara-ise Ashildr rather than the other way round.
Ashildr may have lived over several billions of years, but it’s been stated quite firmly that she can retain only limited memory of that time. Clara, equally, has lived several billions of lives – but has limited memories of them. So they’re pretty equal in knowledge.
In the final scene with Clara, Clara is positioned in the ‘Doctor’ role. She’s the one operating the TARDIS (Ashildr is still reading the manual), she’s the one who decides where they’re going. Ashildr is now the companion.
Or the apprentice. 😉
8 December 2015 at 15:11 #49069My default assumption with Time Lords is that if it’s a different actor, they’ve regenerated. 🙂
Incidentally, I did love the Doctor’s description of Time Lord death as ‘man flu’. Is this a tacit admission that he tends to milk his own regenerations for all they’re worth, lying in bed and getting people to bring him cups of tea?
Missy … cut some sort of deal with Rassilon to help entrap the Doctor in return for her freedom
The idea of Missy and Rassilon doing a deal strains even my bonkers theorising suspension-of-disbelief. I can just about manage to believe that Missy might possibly cut a deal on the grounds that – once the Doctor is trapped into returning to Gallifrey – she’ll make damn certain he returns ready to go all Time Lord Victorious on their arses. I suppose in that theory, she used the time she had the confession disc in her possession to adjust it as torture chamber, thus ensuring that the Doctor would not be a happy little Time Lord when he finally got back to Gallifrey.
But my mind boggles a bit at the idea that Rassillon would be quite such an egomaniac as to believe Missy would ever do anything but stick a knife very firmly in his back. She now knows he’s the person who tortured her into madness (for the greater good of the Time Lords, of course).
Another problem would be – why Trap Street? Given that Missy, in the two episodes she appears in, both has access to the Confession Disc (to send it to the Time Lords) and has access to the Doctor. The whole of Trap Street appears to be a set up to have the Doctor put on a teleport bracelet and hand the confession disc over. We see Missy trick Clara into a Vortex bracelet, so why didn’t she do the same with the Doctor? Then all she’d have to do is send the confession disc over, abandon Clara in the 11th Century and skip off singing merrily.
I’d have to watch it again, but I think the Doctor doesn’t even realise that the picture on the TARDIS and the waitress in the diner are the same person. He twigs that Clara’s organised the meeting (and the return of his TARDIS), I’m sure, but I think the memory delete is so complete he now has no way of recognising Clara Oswald. Not even if he’s face to face with her. Not even if he has a long conversation with her. Not even if he sees her picture.
After all, if the idea is to protect Clara from ever being traced through the Doctor, it has to be impossible for him to even recognise her or ever work out who she is.
8 December 2015 at 14:11 #49068I think what we’re arguing about is who the hubris belongs to. You think it’s the pupil’s hubris, I think it’s the teacher’s hubris.
Arrogance has always been the Doctor’s flaw; he was arrogant. I would argue that he arrogantly presumed, in the face of mounting evidence, that he’d always be able to pull his ‘apprentice’s’ chestnuts out of the fire.
If he became increasingly concerned, what, please, did he do about it? Apart from encourage her to hang out of the TARDIS wearing the Sonic Sunglasses, which really was an accident waiting to happen. Basically, I can see three possibilities: either he was incredibly arrogant about his ability to protect her, or he was subconsciously treating her like a Time Lord who could regenerate, or he knew she was not going to live long anyway.
I’d agree that the Doctor was bloody furious with himself and thought Clara’s death his fault – but I’d say that he failed in his ‘duty of care’ to an apprentice by not teaching her about stuff like safety precautions for more fragile humans. Even minor things like not sticking a rope around her waist when she was hanging out of the TARDIS – which spoke volumes to me, even the first time I watched Face The Raven. She could’ve been killed then. We didn’t need the rest of the episode. 😉
Icarus – are you confusing the myth of Icarus with the myth of Phaeton, which is definitely about hubris? The myth of Icarus is about moderation – don’t fly too high, don’t fly too low (and listen to your old dad). In other words, the myth of Icarus is about limitations, and about not aspiring to be like the gods (and the Time Lords seem to play the role of ‘the gods’ in Moffat’s Whomyth). Phaeton’s the cocky young twat.
8 December 2015 at 12:45 #49063She didn’t lie to the Doctor about where Galifrey was except for timeframe. So how did she know?
The Simm Master was last seen shooting regeneration energy bolts at Rassillon, as the link between Earth and Gallifrey closed and the Council were drawn back to Gallifrey. Since we next see a weak, aged Rassillon on Gallifrey, I think we can bonkerise that Missy knew where Gallifrey was because that’s where she’d escaped from.
The Simm Master might also explain why Rassillon is so very aged and far weaker/ineffectual than we’ve ever seen an actor previously play Rassillon. Given that Rassillon ‘made’ the Master, by sending him insane as a child, it’s entirely possible that the Simm Master’s revenge wasn’t to kill him, but to go as far as he possibly could towards destroying Rassillon.
Between the Master and the Doctor, I’d bonkerise, the Gallifreyan memory of Rassillon isn’t going to be of the Strongman of Gallifrey, the terrifying dictator-President who was nonetheless the best leader for Gallifrey’s desperate straits in the Time War.
The memory will be of a weak old man who was sent packing by the very people he’d tortured.
8 December 2015 at 01:26 #49031@Morpho
There is no question that the Doctor said his mother was human. The question is whether he was telling the truth when he said it. 🙂
Rule One: the Doctor lies.
And frankly, if the Time Lords (especially Rassillon) knew that the Doctor had a human mother, why were they even asking him who the hybrid was? Given their well established status as a bunch of racist gits, they’d have assumed the Doctor to be the hybrid straight off.
8 December 2015 at 00:57 #49029Did you check the sign on the door as you came in? Invisible Clara wrote ‘listen’? Bonkers enough for me!
@Morpho
I think the main arguments against the Doctor being half human are that a) we’ve never needed it and b) it comes from that wretched Movie That We Do Not Mention. Also, I always feel faintly uncomfortable when we get a half human alien, because it always has this subtext of us humans being the greatest thing since sliced bread. We’re not: as someone said up the thread, we’re hybrids who are half good, half evil.So I’d go for Me having picked up a rumour based around the Eighth Doctor’s lie, rather than fact. In fact, I’d go for @arbutus‘ theory that Moffat is teasing, given that the ‘Doctor is half-human’ idea was considerably more disliked than the sonic sunglasses ever were. 🙂 However, there is indeed some reason the Doctor started hanging around Earth and humans so much – which is why he’s looking so grim when she talks about the rumours.
a devious plot by Missy to break the Doctor, and one that worked out, from her point of view, quite spectacularly.
As devious plots by Missy go, she couldn’t have been more honest and less devious about it. She flat-out told him what she was doing in Death in Heaven, and then gave him a further massive hint in The Witch’s Familiar. And it’s also a very ‘hybrid’ plot: Clara is the enemy inside the friend and Missy, who sent her, is the friend inside the enemy.
That is, Clara is both very bad for the Doctor and very good for the Doctor. Very bad for him because he becomes obsessed with her, with protecting her, with keeping her alive – but very good for him because Clara saves him. Keeps him alive. Moves him away from the War Doctor, and back to being ‘The Doctor’. Every time.
It makes you wonder what Missy meant when she said ‘I want my friend back.’ Does she want the Doctor to be more like her, so they can be friends again? (I nearly typed ‘fiends again’, which is oddly appropriate). Or does she want her friend, the Doctor, back again, instead of this PTSD afflicted war veteran who’s replaced him?
Does she even know which one she wants? The friend inside the enemy, the enemy inside the friend.
how the hell could she carry that huge library around with her?!
Ashildr was obviously not only an early adopter of the diary, but an early adopter of the kindle e-book. 🙂
That is a message that exists only in your imagination
They said that to Arthur C. Clarke about communications satellites. 😉 Anyway, arguments from incredulity aside, the title of the first episode in Series 9 is ‘The Magician’s Apprentice’ and then in the final episode of Series 9 we see Clara flying off in a Type 40 TARDIS (with dodgy chameleon circuit), on the run from the Time Lords, with a companion.
The argument for ‘hubris’ seems to be based around the idea that this ‘apprentice’ thinks she can be the Doctor – and can’t be. But the whole point of an apprenticeship is that you’re ‘apprenticed’ to a trade you can do. And by the end of the series, the ‘apprentice’ is Clara Who.
It can certainly be argued that the reason for the ‘accident waiting to happen’ is that the Doctor never really encourages Clara to think she’s in genuine danger, this-could-actually-kill-you danger. He encourages her to think that she’s completely safe – as long as she’s with him.
You see that in Face The Raven, in fact, when he has her hanging out of the TARDIS. Or Sleep No More – which is a previous episode where Clara said ‘we’ll fix this’ and the Doctor ends up insisting that ‘we’ will sort it out. Or The Girl Who Died, when he rescues Clara from having her brains devoured and being asphyxiated in deep space (not necessarily in that order).
The ‘fatal flaw’ doesn’t belong to Clara. Which may be the real reason the Doctor was prepared to spend 4.5 billion years getting her back.
I agree with you entirely that the Doctor genuinely doesn’t recognise Clara – the acting on both sides suggested that to me, as well.
7 December 2015 at 18:56 #48995On the third page! 🙂
@Morpho
It sounds as if, having agreed to treat the Eighth Doctor’s audio adventures as canon, Moffat’s going full tilt for the audio canon explanation of the Sisterhood – which is that the Sisterhood aren’t just neighbours of Gallifrey, they’re exiled Gallifreyans. Rassillon didn’t like their religion, so they had to do a runner.Regarding the barn, I’m guessing it’s either the Doctor’s old prep school, or alternatively, his old orphanage. The barn seems to have been the ‘safe place’ for the boys – at least, it was set up as a full scale bedroom in Listen. So, probably the place they all knew they could go to if they were miserable, homesick or being bullied, rather than having to sleep in the dormitory with the others.
So it became the place the Doctor went to when he was at his very lowest.
The soldiers seemed to exit the room sharpish while the regeneration was in progress. I’d guess that the Capitol may have regeneration-proofed-walls.
@puroandson
The fact that the Doctor, can’t remember his Clara is a classic tragedy.
Agreed. And in fact, that the Doctor can’t remember Clara is a tragedy resulting from his fatal flaw – arrogance. Not only was he, personally, responsible for Clara’s survival, but he, personally, would destroy the universe if he could only save her – and then he, personally, would decide what was best for her and remove her memories. Whether she wanted it or not.
So, as a result of all that, he gets his own memories removed. And it turns into a comedy – as you say, from the Doctor’s perspective this is both tragedy and comedy. Instead of the great Time Lord Victorious, moving time itself to save the girl, he ends up in a situation where Clara has bring him back home, find someone to look after him, fetch his TARDIS, give him a cup of coffee and listen to his sob story while he sorts himself out. 😀
@rorysmith
My headcanon is now that the diner in Impossible Astronaut was in fact Clara and Me’s TARDIS. They planted it there after being told in this episode that a) the Doctor had been in it before and b) it was on the other side of the road.But they moved the control room and replaced it with a toilet.
Interesting that you could view this as a comedy…
Yes, classical comedy. Dante’s Divine Comedy isn’t exactly a barrel of laughs, and Winter’s Tale is so dark at points that it usually gets lumbered with ‘tragi-comedy’. But in its ending, Hell Bent finishes with Rassillon banished, the soldiers told of their need to reform, the Doctor freed of his obsession with Clara, and Clara and Me running off together to get married.
Well, I might have extrapolated that last a bit. 😉 But it’s a classical comedy ending.
And Clara certainly hasn’t learnt responsibility- she’s off without proper adult (TL) supervision,
That’s the whole point. She no longer needs Time Lord supervision. It’s a classic comedy ending, where the child becomes an adult who no longer needs supervising. The apprentice is now herself the magician. She shows it throughout – once Clara returns to the story, she spots what’s wrong with the Doctor, she tells the Time Lords off (very accurately), she’s aware that staying alive could become a problem, she’s realised that staying with the Doctor is potential disaster – and she works out a solution to what is both her and the Doctor’s problem.
The Doctor, meanwhile, has an equally classic ending – he gets the equivalent of a magic potion in his eyes, to stop him turning the whole thing into a tragedy. Pure karma – that the man who forgets, who arrogantly deletes unimportant people’s names and faces from his memory, is forced to forget someone he wants to remember.
I don’t agree that Clara’s death was due to “bad luck.”
Well, they certainly had to do a lot of work to make Clara die. Ashildr’s protection? Not valid. Ashildr’s ability to take off the countdown? Suddenly not valid. Transferring the thing again? Only works once. Ashildr has a contract with the shade? Yeah, sorry, there’s this exclusionary clause titled ‘Clara Oswald’.
Look at all that, and you suddenly realise that Clara wasn’t taking a stupid risk at all. She had Ashildr’s promise of protection, and Ashildr appeared to be in charge of the Raven. Take that into account and it would appear that Clara’s chance of survival was much better than Rigsy – and Rigsy had a family to think of.
Clara and the Capaldi Doctor were certainly in a hybrid relationship; they loved each other deeply, they were in many ways very good for each other. They kept each other alive. But they were both unable to walk away from the other – and in Moffat’s Who, if you can’t leave the Doctor, he will end up standing over your grave.
why is it that the dial ends up being out in the dry lands of Gallifrey when the Doctor exits it?
Because he wasn’t supposed to get out through that particular exit – he was supposed to confess about the hybrid and have the Time Lords let him out (or, knowing Rassillon, not let him out). Exactly what the Wall of Wotsitium really represented in the circuitry is unknown, but if it was the ’emergency exit’, then I’d imagine part of its function would be to teleport the Confession Dial to a random and presumably safer location.
7 December 2015 at 16:29 #48989That would be hubris.
Ah. So the message you want Moffat to send to millions of small viewers is to not aspire?
Don’t be like Icarus, kiddies, all that flying close to the sun will only result in a fatal flaw. We should all trust in the Time Lord classes – they know how to do this stuff. All you have to do is say ‘Yes, Doctor’ and hand him his test tube. Pity that you weren’t born a Time Lord, but we can’t all go to Eton. 😉
I think ‘hubris’ was not, and never was the message. It’s not arrogant to aspire to be the Doctor – to be someone with an exciting life whose work is also genuinely important – if you’ve saved the Doctor and also helped him save Gallifrey instead of destroying it. It’s a perfectly reasonable aspiration (and it’s always been fascinating just how many posters in other places really, really object to Clara being like the Doctor).
Missy steps very hard on that aspiration, but Missy is the villain.
Hubris – if you believe someone else will always save you, that’s not hubris.
Clara: We can fix this. Can’t we? We always fix it.
That (with hindsight) is the traditional last moment of childhood. It’s the moment when you discover that you, personally, are really, really going to die – combined with the moment you discover that your parent isn’t all powerful, and can’t fix everything.
The hubris is the Doctor’s, if anyone’s. He let Clara think he is the Space Dad who’s able to fix everything, and he goes through a 4.5 billion year torture chamber – then risks the destruction of the universe – in order to fix everything. Then he wants to remove Clara’s memories, to keep her safe. He has ‘a duty of care’ – like a parent to a child, or a teacher to a pupil.
But she’s not a kid any more. 🙂
7 December 2015 at 15:49 #48984Aaaand more of page 2 🙂
@misterhoo and @puroandson
Apologies if someone else has already replied to your query – but The General stated quite firmly that Clara’s physical death is a ‘fixed point’. We’ve seen before what happens when someone’s death is a ‘fixed point’ – Rory, who simply could not die until he finally reached the place and time he was supposed to die.
Which means that Clara has that final qualification for ‘Doctor’ status – like Ashildr, she’s no longer an Ordinary Human Girl (TM), but one of the distinctly non-fragile Immortals. Incidentally, when Ashildr says that ‘even the immortals are gone’, she’s probably giving a Moffat sized hint that Clara will eventually return to face the Raven. Ashildr would probably be gone herself – but someone has given her a ‘meet the Doctor here’ set of space-time coordinates (and quite possibly a lift).
My assessment of the time conundrum is that the Doctor’s 4.5 billion years takes place in a second or two of Galifreyan time (they’re Time Lords, time is their thing). So the Confession disc has its own time. Internally, 4.5 billion years take place. Externally, probably the time it took to be sent from Trap Street to Gallifrey.
Gallifrey has been moved in time, rather than in space, and is now hiding so far in the future that not even the Daleks have got there. The Doctor then moves on a few billion years further. But for the people of Gallifrey it’s two years since the end of the Time War; the people who live in that village have now moved back and the woman has just managed to get the barn back in shape. It seems the Doctor isn’t the only old boy who likes to visit.
The Sisterhood of Karn had the feel of characters being set up for later use. It may simply be that they want to set up the Sisterhood as a second string to the Paternoster Gang’s Doctor Support Group after Clare Higgins did such a stand-up job in Night of the Doctor – Neve McIntosh was awfully busy in 2015. I’d agree that Ohila seemed to be largely there to make sure whatever went down was witnessed (and she really does sound incredibly like the Doctor’s old headteacher).
I’d really beware of that prophecy. Science mostly advances by exploding previous theories, and that ‘prophecy’ seemed to be carefully set up as a theory about the future. Additionally, last time we actually saw Rassilon (James Rassilon) in The End of Time, he was listening to the prophecies of the batshit crazy Priestess of Pythia. It wasn’t that her prophecies didn’t come true, it was more that they later got rewritten. ::cough:: The Moment ::cough, cough::
So Rassilon has a history of going overboard (in the mass murder, torture and abuse of small children sense of ‘overboard’ – he really is a monster) on the basis of a literal reading of prophecies that should not have been read literally.
the corrective nature or counterpoint to Donna in this.
Yup. Absolutely. Whether the Doctor genuinely knew or not that his memory would be the one wiped, he effectively got karma’d for Donna’s fate. 😉
The moment that the Dalek followed the ‘Exterminate!’ with ‘me’ was probably the most chilling bit of the entire Cloister sequence. Another reminder that there are people trapped inside those killing machines.
@variousposters
I really do have the feeling that Jenna Coleman and Maisie Williams may already be in negotiation with Big Finish…@mudlark
I was kind of expecting there to be a post war revolution on Gallifrey, but it was lovely to see the Doctor and Clara kicking it off. The Doctor by exiling Rassilon and the remaining Council of Time Lords, Clara by telling The General and her soldiers, to their faces, that they’ve become monsters.7 December 2015 at 14:23 #48979Okay, now working my way through page 2. 🙂
I still think Clara should have died.
They didn’t earn a final death. Which makes considerably more sense now that we know it was ‘really’ a regeneration. For a classical tragedy, a death has to result from a fatal flaw in someone’s character. The ‘fatal flaw’ is presented as Clara behaving like the Doctor. She dies because she did what the Doctor would do.
At which point you go ‘hang on. Since when has acting like the hero been a fatal flaw?’ And it’s made worse because Clara didn’t get the ‘heroic’ death either. She was saving someone who, it turns out, quite possibly wasn’t in that much danger.
River’s death, in contrast, is earned. It’s also heroic rather than tragic; River dies to save both her husband and their life together, closing the loop that made ‘River Song’ out of ‘Melody Williams’.
Clara dies by sheer bad luck – but this is drama. There’s no such thing as ‘bad luck’; only authorial decisions. Her death is tragic – but it’s not classical tragedy. She meets her death heroically – but she didn’t get to die saving somebody else, so not classical heroic either. And the onscreen death of a full time companion in Doctor Who, something that happens very, very rarely, deserves either the heroic or the tragic death.
What Clara got was the Whovian equivalent of Danny’s death. Forgetting to check the road before stepping out in front of the monster. Now, they earned that for Rory. He was so fatal-accident-prone, it was completely believable that he’d make his exit by yet another fatal accident (that only killed him decades later). It was carefully set up that Amy would rather risk death than lose Rory.
But the set up for Clara was different. Clara always dies. And it’s always real. But it’s never the end of the Impossible Girl.
7 December 2015 at 01:35 #48897Working my way through comments, so only on page 1. Apologies if other people have already raised these points.
To complete the emotional arc of the story, Clara has to face the raven.
No. That’s the emotional arc of a tragedy. As I’ve said before, it’s the Doctor who thinks he’s playing the starring role in a tragedy. However, the universe – in the person of the current producer – knows he’s playing the starring role in a comedy.
It’s not that people don’t die in comedies, but that the comedy ending is one of growth and wholeness. So if Clara spends her arc growing towards being the Doctor, the comedy ending is that she flies off in her very own TARDIS – a Doctor. Like Winter’s Tale, she had her time where the audience thought her dead. But that death didn’t come in the final act. 🙂
Comedy ending: Series 5: marriage, Rory and Amy. Series 6: marriage, River and the Doctor. Series 7 and associated Specials, the saving of the children of Gallifrey and the rebirth of the Doctor. Series 8, Father Christmas saving Clara and the Doctor’s relationship (and their lives) and now Series 9 – the adopted daughter sets off on an independent life and her Space Dad can be simply ‘The Doctor’ again.
Clara’s final ending is death, because she’s human. But comedies concentrate on the life we lead before we die: which is Moffat’s big thing. Moffat’s writing a classic comedy, not a tragedy.
Face the Raven would have been a very bad ending to Clara’s arc (my opinion), because the writer really had to work overtime to kill her – Clara’s death relied far too heavily on sheer bad luck. If it was the final death of a companion, that would’ve been … unsatisfactory (again, my opinion). And, as I’ve said, creating an arc that sets up a female companion who acts more and more like the Doctor – and then gets killed by acting like the Doctor – yeah. Unfortunate Implications. 😕
When we see Face The Raven in hindsight, as the ‘regeneration’ story of Clara into Doctor Clara, it makes more sense (the Doctor’s regenerations often occur through sheer bad luck).
Clara’s death is, as the Time Lords know, a fixed point. But what they didn’t realise is why. It’s a fixed point because, without that death, Clara can’t become the human equivalent of a Time Lord.
Incidentally, I think Rassillon was supposed to be weak and ineffectual. If you notice, all the monsters in this story are weak and ineffectual. As @puroandson points out, the real monster is The Doctor himself, becoming The War Doctor again.
The man who was so sure he was right, he killed his own race.
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