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@puroandson

The eye roll is like ‘twisted’, only use ‘roll’ instead.

🙂

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@pedant

Well, my brother phoned up a few minutes after the episode ended, was told I hadn’t watched it, and then, bless him, proceeded to ask lots of questions that basically gave the entire plot away. 🙄

Sometimes, being the known Whovian in a family can be a bit of a problem.

But I love him really. 😀

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@PuroandSon

Puro: not to worry. I had a ‘reading things literally’ moment and missed the smiley.

Ilion:

So they bought this “yuppie” small house on a small block with a courtyard garden and then less than a year later, Young Ilion (me!) was born.

Good for you. 😉 May you always turn up when least expected and most wanted.

And, as @tardisblue says, there is no need to apologise for the length of your posts. I don’t know if you’ve seen the original of your Mum and Dad’s joke, but they’re referring to this:

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@puroandson

I thought the Sofa was general Who and the pub was politics that sometimes strayed into Who?

Or Who sometimes strays into politics. 🙂

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@mersey (and also @pedant, @puroandson and @arbutus)

As pedant says, the Zygon Inversion is really a metaphor – and part of its metaphor is that the long, deadly war is described in a speech instead of being lived through.

For me, it resonated very strongly with Northern Ireland. Part of the peace is forgiving those who killed loved ones. More than forgiving them, working with them and sharing power with them.

And sharing an ice-cream with the person who shot down your plane. Osgood is obviously a very rare and very great person.

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Whoa, can people try to keep discussion of Heaven Sent in its appropriate forum?

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@mersey

No, not shallow, or naive, or silly. Simply that where we are, in the Paris tantrums, is at the end of the Zygon Invasion – with the massacre of all those UNIT soldiers and the near-massacre of a very large number of Londoners.

And at the end of the Zygon Invasion, our Zygon terrorists see no need to talk. They think they’re going to win. Bonnie doesn’t negotiate, she blows up the Doctor’s plane – which was pretty damn close to reality even on broadcast.

What happens in the Zygon Inversion, condensed into a 42 minute episode, is what happens when our Zygon terrorists finally realise they might lose. Really lose, not glorious martyrdom lose. When they realise that ‘losing’ means the fight might potentially go on forever, and never, ever get anywhere.

That’s the point when the terrorists start to negotiate. After fourteen peace attempts, a lot of defiant speeches, and finally, sheer bloody exhaustion.

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@janetteb and @jimthefish

He said at the Festival that if he’d followed his original plan, he’d have already left by now.

He’s taking it a year at a time – the BBC keep handing him new contracts, and he’s still coming up with new ideas, so as long as that continues…

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@lisa

Favourite bit –

you want to film it in New Zealand for six months and he wants you to film it in twelve days in Cardiff.

😉

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@lisa and @puroandson

Regarding watching Heaven Sent/Hell Bent – I’m going to have to ask your forgiveness on that one, I’m afraid. Currently Monday, and not only is the episode unwatched, I still don’t want to watch it. 😀

Not in a grumpy, miserable, I-don’t-want-to-watch this sort of way, I hasten to add. I’m sure Heaven Sent is magnificent, but the sheer relief I felt on Sunday morning at having successfully NOT watched it was a bit of a surprise. I suspect I disliked Series 8 and 9 far more than I’d allowed myself to realise.

Besides, if I keep forcing myself to watch Doctor Who when I’m not enjoying it, I’ll end up like those certain type of ‘fans’ who post at T’Other place every week, explaining how this week’s episode was terrible, that the viewing figures are falling (with dodgy statistics) because this week’s episode was terrible, and that the producers ought to bring back the Saturnyne from The Vampires of Venice (because this week’s episode was terrible).

After that there’s nothing left but to change my username to MattSmithIsCool and start denigrating the artistic taste of anyone who has the temerity to even think that this week’s episode might possibly be not terrible. 🙂

But I’m not planning on leaving the Forum. I may not be joining in the discussions of Heaven Sent (after all, it’s a bit difficult to discuss an episode you haven’t seen), but there’s still the Sofa, the pub, and there’ll be the Christmas Special (which I do plan to watch) and the rewatches.

Pip

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@phaseshift

Yes, it is like Eccleston. Sad, because it’s the (possibly temporary) end of AG Doctor Who being ‘must watch’ TV for me, and that period has lasted from early in David Tennant’s tenure. Not to mention the effective end of a lot of bonkers theorising. Still, there’s always the next Doctor. 🙂

And really surprising, truthfully, because I like Peter Capaldi’s work and thought he’d be brilliant when he was cast. I think he is brilliant, but – somehow – his Doctor is a performance I admire and respect, but don’t like.

With your acting background I can’t help but think you’ll watch it just to see if they can pull off an entire 50 minutes of Doctor single hander.

No. 😕 I’ve thought about it during this week, and decided that yes, great actor, yes, great writer, but – I actually don’t want to watch it. It’d be like an award winning performance of Strindberg’s Miss Julie; the quality of the performance and the high regard I have for the writer doesn’t change the fact that I don’t like the play or the characters. I’d be watching it for ‘work’, not for ‘fun’.

In the end I decided the best thing to do was to compromise: I’ll record this and the final episode, in case I change my mind later, then take @juniperfish‘s very sensible advice and plan to definitely watch the Christmas Special.

Given that the Christmas Special includes a character I already know I like. 😉

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@puroandson

Sundays I go to church which I have to say I don’t like at all. Other people bring their ipads and ipods but I don’t. I figure its one or the other.

Yup, you’re right. The place for ipads in church is afterwards, during coffee (where my church usually ends up with a small flock of kids hanging out playing games on each other’s consoles).

Some of our services have either a youth group, where the teenagers can go off during the main service to discuss things and ask questions, or a youth club (same deal, but longer and with games and stuff) before the service. For others, teenagers would attend the main service – but it’s pretty noticeable which services the teenagers attend of their own free will; adult services are pretty dull for youngsters. To be honest, some of them can also be pretty dull for the adults. 🙂

Mum says every child she’s ever taught from that Church ended up failing every subject. I really don’t want to be that person.

Then I bet you won’t be.

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@juniperfish

However, it was never explained satisfactorily how the people saved to the library data core regained their bodies, given that we saw the Vashta Nerada consume bodies to the bone

The people who could regain their bodies were the ones who (like Donna) were trying to teleport out at the moment the Vashta Nerada attacked them. That suggests that Steven Moffat was using the ‘teleport as transmitter of information’ kind of SF teleport, rather than the one which physically splits up your body into little quantum bits and sends it down a wormhole (etc.) to its destination.

CAL had the outgoing information from the teleport, which would normally be transmitted to the destination and then used to reconstruct the body. Since she was also in charge of the incoming teleport information, she could treat the recorded outgoing info as if it were incoming, and so use the teleport to reconstruct everyone. They were ‘saved’ – but the amount of information that needed to be stored must have overloaded her.

What Missy’s Nethersphere and the Library have in common seems to be a Moffatian idea that if the Whoniverse ‘soul’ isn’t kept alive in a virtual reality, or given an Auton/other artificial version, the ‘soul’ reacts to the death of its body by doing whatever Whoniverse souls do upon death. Presumably, you couldn’t then bring the body back to life, or reconstruct it. Whatever you had wouldn’t be the ‘real’ person.

Which is kind of interesting – he’s invented an SF/Fantasy intensive care ward for the soul.

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@puroandson

Welcome back, Puro, and welcome, Ilion. Happy almost-birthday. Very, very glad that you feel well enough to be back, Puro.

Ilion, yes, of course you’re allowed inside a Scottish pub – so long as we don’t feed you alcohol. Have a packet of crisps and some lemonade (old British joke).

🙂

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@pedant and @nerys

Crohn’s can be a very nasty disease indeed. If you’re fortunate, it’s long periods of nearly normal life with periods (flare-ups) of being very ill. If you’re unfortunate – as Melissa and my brother both are – you vanish into a nightmare of complications, hospital stays, and sometimes intensive care. My brother emerged ‘only’ permanently disabled; he was lucky.

Yes, the side effects from the medication can be horrible. If things are bad, it’s not ‘medication’, it’s a cocktail of medication, some of which can be so strong that they have to give you other medication specifically to reduce the side effects. Which gives you further side effects, and then you get more complications because the doctors have misjudged the balancing act for all these bloody drugs.

I think they now know that clinical depression and Crohn’s are very strongly associated, pedant, but I don’t know how well they knew that in 15 BE. But I hope that, underneath all the medication, Melissa knows that she is loved.

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@todeledo

This Murray Gold song was used several times, but its Christmas connection is that it was played at Donna’s Christmas Wedding reception.

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@frobisher

having been imbued with a bit of CapDoc’s regen mojo in The Witch’s Familiar

Nope, sorry. I checked that one out when other people started mentioning it – if you look carefully at the scene in Witch’s Familiar, you can see that Dalek Clara is the only Dalek not glowing with regeneration energy.

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@ichabod

I suspect the scene was cut because it implies too strongly that Clara genuinely died in that alleyway.

I think that while Sarah Dollard probably didn’t intend the reading, a script suggesting that a female companion is more fragile (more breakable) than a male Doctor and therefore should not have tried to be Doctor-like has Unfortunate Implications written all over it.

I come from an era when I specifically, legally, couldn’t even apply for the career I wanted because my gender was too ‘fragile’ for such rough goings on. I know perfectly well that Steven Moffat doesn’t believe that – he’s the writer of River Song, and the creator of a female Master, for goodness sake! But (my opinion), they screwed up with this script.

@juniperfish

Losing a companion is always upsetting

It’s particularly upsetting when one doesn’t like this incarnation of the Doctor.

And I have tried to, God knows. Over damn near two series of the Capaldi Doctor, I have tried to like him. And I just don’t.

I’ve liked Peter Capaldi very much in other parts, I intensely respect his acting ability, I appreciate that his reading of the Doctor is entirely valid. And I don’t like his Doctor. What’s kept me watching was the way he and Clara interacted as she tried to smooth over the social disaster that is the Capaldi Doctor. That, and the fact that there have been some good and even genuinely great stories in Series 8 and 9.

But – honestly? If it turns out Clara died because she was some kind of collateral damage in a war between the Doctor and the Time Lords, then we’re looking at the prospect that the reason we haven’t heard anything about the next companion is because there isn’t a next companion. That Steven Moffat has decided to address the storyline RTD skated over: the idea that the Doctor, in taking people on board the TARDIS, makes them targets.

And if the Doctor is making his companions targets, and he can’t protect them against that (as he couldn’t with Amy and Melody, and now couldn’t with Clara), he isn’t going to dare to have a companion. Until he finds a resolution to that problem.

That would be a very interesting story-line; my personal problem with it is that it leaves me with the prospect of an entire series where I don’t like the main character and he’s not interacting with a regular character that I do like.

Right now, I’m not even sure I want to watch next Saturday’s episode. 🙁

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Puro – Melissa – for me, the only possible reaction is ‘Damm’.

As Juniperfish says, you have to do what’s best for you. I’d love you to stay while you can, but you’re the one who knows if it’s time now to concentrate on home and family.

I’d hug you if I could; at this distance, you’ll have to imagine it. But my thoughts and prayers are with you.

Yours
Pip

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@jphamlore – more like Icarus and Daedalus, actually.

Okay, I’m out of denial and now into furious anger.

Whether or not Clara is actually dead, the production team has two episodes for me to make some dramatic sense out of this. Otherwise it’s going to be a million-and-one viewers lost for series 10.

I’d disagree that this ending was in any way inevitable for Clara; the ‘inevitable’ ending for someone trying to be like an AG Doctor is to knowingly get yourself killed to save someone else. What she got, instead, was to be Icarus; a cautionary tale about flying too high and trying to be a hero too hard.

The woman who saved the Doctor AND Gallifrey deserved better than that. And if Sarah Dollard has seriously written a script that says ‘Don’t try to be the Doctor, girls, you’ll only get yourself hurt. Your job is to be the companion,’ then she ought to be ashamed. However well that appalling message is written.

But as I said last night – I don’t believe it. It feels ‘wrong’.

It feels like a story.

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@Supernumerary

Yes, it was extremely powerful. Very well acted. Well written. Good work all round. But.

It’s like Danny’s death in Dark Water. Basically, Clara appears to have died totally by accident – she misjudged the situation, and it turned out to be a fatal mistake. Danny walked into the road without looking, Clara decided to take Rigsy’s countdown without checking it out first.

Having realised that she’d very stupidly killed herself, she was then extremely brave.

But. Artistically, this was … how do I put it? It was the Who equivalent of ‘the actor’s leaving, let’s kill her off in a bus crash’. It’s exactly the kind of thing where you would normally expect the Doctor to manage to sort it out in the last five minutes. Or even off screen. It’s on the same level as the being-stuck-inside-a-dalek-with-nanogenes, the being-dragged-into-a-sleep-pod and infected with sleep booger monsters, the being-captured-by-zygons…

… and yeah, fine, maybe Moffat has decided to point out to the audience that the Doctor’s companion can get killed by sheer over-confident stupidity.

But then they had to do so much work to make Clara die. Ashildr will protect her – oops, sorry, can’t. Ashildr can take the countdown off – oops, sorry, can’t once it’s been transferred. Transfer it back? One time offer. Ashildr’s in charge of the shade? Yeah, sorry, forgot to talk to my lawyer about this contract…

It feels like a story. A story acted out for the benefit of the Doctor, who has just seen his companion die. A story acted out in front of someone who is capable of mass murder and genocide, carefully designed to push him to the limit of anger and despair.

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@craig and @juniperfish

Yes, that’s extremely Sleeping Beauty, isn’t it? The roses growing up outside the TARDIS.

And Anah turned out to be Very Not Dead, didn’t she? Just sleeping. Oh, look, there’s a handy stasis thingy just ready and waiting.

Or Clara could regenerate… 😈

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@juniperfish

I hope this is the real death for her, because I loved it

It could well be, but as I said over at T’other place, this really does feel to me like last week’s episode was incredibly important. Because, again, the characters are being told a story.

Or rather, the Doctor was just told a story; one designed to make him be at his most dangerous and least like ‘The Doctor’. Possibly Clara is genuinely dead – but it wasn’t an accident that she faced the Raven.

One thing does occur to me, though. I’ve been speculating on the hero’s journey, and the need for the hero to lose their mentor. So I thought it would be the Doctor who’d appear to die, so Clara could go on her heroine’s journey.

It appears that when I figured out that the mentor needed to die, I had the wrong mentor…

🙂

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Well, I’ll have to watch that one again. And it could be the ‘denial’ stage, but…

… I don’t believe it.

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@ichabod

But what sort of hybrid ‘warrior’?

A soldier so brave, he doesn’t need a gun.

Inversions. Warriors like the Daleks, or peacekeepers like the Osgoods?

Or even a warrior like Kate Stewart, who’s clearly inherited all her father’s aggressive instincts – but can be talked down into accepting a peace.

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@spider

Apologies, I posted before I saw that you hadn’t seen the names of the episodes. I suppose any discussion based on the names should stay under the BBC Approved Spoilers forum?

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@ichabod and @purofilion

Ooh be careful in referring to future episodes on this thread? Maybe the Spoilers thread is the best, there?

Talking about future episodes is fine. Releasing Spoilers into the wild isn’t. 🙂

However, some things that are technically ‘spoilers’, like episode titles and widely repeated Moffat quotes, are out there in the world already. For example, I suppose ‘Heaven Sent’ and ‘Hell Bent’ are technically spoilers, but you’d have to live the life of a Doctor Who hermit, hidden under the blanket with only old episodes and a sonic screwdriver for company, to not know the titles of the remaining three episodes.

Same with the Moffat quote: though personally, I’m in awe of Moffat’s ability to lie his boots off in the line of duty (i.e. protecting major plot points). I’m not surprised Peter Davison cast him in the Five(ish) Doctors; Moffat’s air of grumpy sincerity while lying through his teeth is quite an acting skill.

Back when we started this forum, spoilers (and the resulting forum) were one of the things discussed – and we decided that what really matters is saying or implying that you know something is a spoiler or know that there is a spoiler. Someone can accidentally mention a factoid that they’ve gleaned from spoilers – but as long as we spoilerphobes don’t know it’s a spoiler, we’re likely to take it as another speculation.

Personally, I started being really adverse to spoilers because some idiot spoiled me for the surprise in Utopia. Then I kept being really adverse because I found that knowing a plot point in advance ruins the bonkers theorising, and that’s a huge part of the fun of Who for me.

The Daleks have had time travel since very early in the BG series, I think. But yes, right now I think we may be about to find out either that the universe does care about the Doctor – or that while the universe doesn’t care, the people in it do. 🙂

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@blenkinsopthebrave

Good one…

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@bendubz11

It just doesn’t make any sense to me

::cough:: Rule Zero: Moffat lies. ::cough::

Though one theme that is running through is that the Doctor is, this series, often looking straight at Clara – or Clara’s duplicate – and failing to recognise who she really is. He asked her to see him – but right now, he can’t see her.

There is something inside Clara, and it’s getting ready to be born. That’s the dalek casing/zygon pod/sleep pod imagery. The other image carries on from Last Christmas – that the real Clara is asleep and the Clara who is wandering around walking and talking is the result of Clara’s dream.

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@bendubz11

It’s a great post – I think it’s just that last little bit that @phaseshift or @fatmaninabox needs to delete.

Anyway, moving swiftly on – I think there’s definitely a link between stories. The biggie, I would bonkerise, is that what we think is the story isn’t the story.

So – what we think is the story is Clara leaving? They’ve made a massive thing of it; heavily emphasised that Jenna was persuaded to stay on for one series only, hinted at some terrible, tragic ending for Clara.

But maybe that’s not the story?

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@bendubz11

Honestly, mentioning that you know there’s a link between the two stories is in itself a spoiler. One of the reasons I don’t like spoilers is that they’re a killer for bonkers theorising.

I’ve been trying to figure out the series arc, and now I KNOW there’s a link that can be spoilered. 🙁

Grrr…

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@brewski – it’s plausible that some of the episodes might have been commissioned for ‘unknown companion’, but Moffat was so very, very keen to get Jenna to stay. I’d have thought he’d have dammed the torpedoes and told his writers to write for CapDoc and Clara.

Looking at the episodes to date while we wait for Face The Raven:

The Magician’s Apprentice – Clara behaves as if she’s UNIT’s Doctor-advisor. Basically, she’s in the Doctor’s role until Missy rather rudely points out that she’s not yet in that class. Still the Magician’s Apprentice, not fully qualified yet.

The Witch’s Familiar – first of what I’d call ‘the real story is hidden and unrecognisable’ hints. Clara, the real Clara, gets popped inside a Dalek and the Doctor can’t recognise her. The bright side for Clara is that Missy has at least upgraded her from ‘handy snack’ to ‘useful, especially for judging the depth of deep holes.’ That’s the dark side of apprenticeship, of course, when The Master sends their apprentice to do all the dirty and dangerous jobs. 🙂

Beneath The Lake – last week we had real-Clara inside a Dalek, this week we have the real-Doctor, hidden throughout the episode, inside the suspended animation capsule. He can’t save the day until the right time – until then, he sleeps, unrecognised. Clara is basically Clara-the-apprentice – but accidentally gets left on her own.

Before The Flood – the Doctor’s still, unbeknownst, fast asleep in The Drum. Meantime, he’s very busy in the past – but Clara is showing that she doesn’t want to finish her apprenticeship, throwing a major wobbly at the thought of the Doctor dying. Despite this, she does a pretty good job, even being handed her very own Companion-Who-Wanders-Off.

The Girl Who Died – lots of ‘the real story is hidden’.

The Doctor: I’m not actually the police, that’s just what it says on the box

Then there’s the Mire, hidden inside that big, scary armour. Their leader, hidden inside a hologram. And all of them hidden inside their reputation. Deadliest warrior race in the galaxy? Bunch of wimpy drug addicts, more like. They’re adrenaline junkies, just like the Doctor and Clara – but instead of earning their adrenaline by taking on people their size, they steal it from those weaker than they are.

And, of course, Ashildr, who can tell a story that hides the real story inside an illusion…

The Woman Who Lived – again, the real story is hidden, this time with another villain who’s hiding what they really want. Boringly. 🙂 But Ashildr is also hiding inside Me; the Woman who insists she doesn’t care really does.

The Zygon Invasion – an incredible amount of hiding… apart from a few characters, we still don’t really know who were Zygons in this story. And Clara gets popped inside another pod, and spends much of the episode fast asleep. Like, in fact, the Doctor in Beneath the Lake. The real Clara is not only hidden deep inside Bonnie, the Doctor can’t recognise Bonnie as fake. He can’t see the real Clara.

The Zygon Inversion – things flip around, and we see them from a different direction. The terrifying terrorists are three year olds having a deadly tantrum, the Osgood Boxes are empty, the supposedly helpless Clara is quite capable of getting Bonnie exactly where she wants her and the Doctor remembered the last time he was in that Presidential plane and packed a parachute. 🙂 And jaw-jaw is far better than war-war. The real story was hidden.

Sleep No More – the real story is hidden.

Oh, and Clara is again stuck inside a box, asleep. For a little while.

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@fatmaninabox

I’m pretty sure the Trailers ‘thread’ was a Blog, or rather, a series of Blogs, until we decided that was too inconvenient and replaced it with the BBC Spoilers forum.

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@janetteb and @countscarlioni

I agree. I seem to have come up with a plethora of bonkers theories this series, but haven’t really been able to pick up one through line.

Okay. I’m not sure what’s going properly bonkers in the actual Spoilers forum, but I’m guessing that there are strong rumours regarding who dies in Face The Raven. [Disclaimer: I know nothing]. However, the latest video the BBC has released

absolutely screams ‘The Doctor’ to me. Not Clara.

Three reasons: one, Clara’s reaction is very similar to her reaction in Before the Flood. She’s not scared of dying herself. She’s lost too many people (her mother, her partner) and she’s terrified of losing the Doctor.

Two, Clara is the Magician’s Apprentice. And an essential moment in The Heroine’s Journey is the point where the young heroine loses her mentor – and has to step up and win the battle by herself.

Thematically, it being the Doctor who dies to save Clara would also fit Clara’s long term arc, which is one of people sacrificing themselves to save someone else. Clara sacrifices herself to save the Doctor (and gets rescued by the Doctor), the Doctor sacrifices himself to save Christmas and the Time Lords (and gets rescued by Clara), Danny sacrifices himself to save Clara (but rescues the boy he killed instead of himself).

There’s a lot of ‘stolen death and/or stolen life’ in this series, as well. The ghosts whose death is stolen, the Daleks who can’t die, only decay, Me with her death replaced by an endless life of forgetting everything that ever mattered to her. Even Ramussen, who can’t sleep and can’t die.

Oh, yes, and Three…

… The Doctor quoted the Scottish Play last week. The previous week he claimed to be a king. The Scottish King quoting the Scottish Play? He’s doomed. 😈

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I once made a comment on the Smith Doctor that he (the Doctor, not the actor) thought he was playing the starring role in a tragedy.

The universe, however, knew that he was playing the starring role in a comedy.

Series 5 ended in Rory and Amy’s wedding, Series 6 ended in The Doctor’s own wedding, and Series 7 ended with The Day of the Doctor and the children of Gallifrey being saved. They’re the classic comedy endings – the world is set to rights.

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@mersey

I reckon it’s one of the themes this series, just like ‘afterlife’ was one of the themes last series. There is a reference to either God, gods, messiah, or religious sisterhoods (of Karn) in every series 9 story to date. The Doctor is, of course, our friendly Deus Ex Machina. 🙂

Now, we could be referring to actual gods, or given that the Doctor is our D.E.M., ‘gods’ could be short for Time Lords, returning. Certainly Missy acts like one of the gods referred to in King Lear, Act 4, sc,ii –

As flies to wanton boys are we to th’gods. They kill us for their sport.

It’s also possible that this is the end of Clara’s arc. When Victorian Clara was introduced in The Snowmen, one of the Doctor’s complaints was that he’d done so much to save the universe – and the universe didn’t care.

Enter Clara. 🙂

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@geoffers

the only thing i can think, is that there’s some future/past* significance to the “dust camera” solution.

Or it might be metaphorical. How do we see the Doctor’s adventures when there’s no cameras around?

There was quite a bit of playing with the fourth wall in this episode – the one I particularly noticed was the Doctor’s reply to Clara’s ‘When do you sleep?’ – ‘When you’re not looking’.

Yeah. The answer to an oft-asked fan question. The Doctor does sleep. But only when the audience isn’t looking. 🙂

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@kharis, @purofilion, @catladymeow and @drben

The thing we always have to remember with ‘experimental’ episodes is that Blink and Turn Left came out of Love and Monsters.

That is, if the then producer Russell T Davies hadn’t tried a ‘Doctor-lite’ episode – and then gone ‘okay, that didn’t quite work’ – they would probably never have worked out how to make Blink and Turn Left the excellent episodes they were. The ‘experimental’ episode has to come first.

Doctor Who has never tried a ‘found footage’ episode before. To me, that puts it in the category of ‘experimental’. And as a few people have pointed out, AG Who has also never really had a ‘The Doctor lost’ episode. So, really experimental.

Having experimented, the writers now have a found footage episode to watch: they can figure out what worked in the context of AG Doctor Who, what didn’t.

BUT, and this is a big but, experimental episodes have to be allowed to fail. They have to be allowed to be ‘the worst episode EVER’ (I don’t think this was, by the way). They have to be allowed to be Love and Monsters. Otherwise AG Who will never be able to try anything new, try an episode knowing that they have no idea whether this thing is going to work. They won’t dare.

And we’ll never again get an episode like Blink – which took the baton from the experimental semi-failure and became an overwhelming success.

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@phaseshift

It doesn’t strike you as being linked into this series in the same way as every story we’ve seen so far.

Not in the same way, no. But what play did our Scottish accented Doctor quote? And whose role did he place himself in? The Thane Who Would Be King??

They also managed to tie in the constant theme of ‘the Gods’/’God’ and how they never (according to the Doctor) turn up. Now, last week the Doctor placed himself as being old enough to be our messiah, and then promptly placed himself in the Jesus role of forgiving Bonnie. 🙂 The previous story, he brought someone back from the dead. 😀

Oh, and he jokes to Osgood that his first name is ‘Basil’. Basileus – ‘King’.

To paraphrase what I once said in a blog, if you spend the entire series complaining that the gods don’t turn up, don’t be too surprised if they decide to put in an appearance at the finale. Alternatively, our favourite Deus Ex Machina is going to get all Scottishly over-ambitious and decide he really is ‘The God In The (Time) Machine’.

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@countscarlioni and @bendubz11

Moffat’s playing a bait and switch, you think? Yes, I could easily see the Capaldi Doctor laying down his life for Clara, not realising that poor old Clara was the ‘bait’ for the ‘switch’.

I could also then see the villain discovering they’d bitten off a bit more than they could chew with Clara. As Bonnie discovered in The Zygon Inversion. 😉

Just one really bonkers theory to chuck into the mix …

… Clara is The Valeyard.

Well, why not? She turns up in what we now know was the Doctor’s real twelfth incarnation (Smith Doctor) and sticks around for his real thirteenth. And gets more and more Doctorish, as if she’s absorbing his very nature. 😈

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Well, that was … weird. I think I liked it, but I’m not sure I understood what the Hell was going on.

Off to rewatch.

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@geoffers, @purofilion

possibly, but it’s more likely that he might just have gone over his notes

According to interviews, Moffat does plan things in advance, but the problem with TV is that the best-laid plans, etc, etc, fall through because of actors availability, script changes, budgets.

Sometimes he just says ‘Bugger it, I’m not changing the story,’ and casts John Hurt instead. 😈

Other times, yes, he does seem to do a rewatch of an episode and it then sparks off some idea.

The Impossible Astronaut was pre-Clara jumping into the time-stream, so it’s entirely possible that there is now one waitress in a blue uniform working at that diner – who wasn’t there when we first watched that story. 🙂

Or it could be yet another of those ‘Clara lost in a dream world’ stories. Rather than the Capaldi Doctor not being able to get Clara out of his head, though, at the moment I’m reminded of Buffy The Vampire Slayer and The Weight of The World. Or Last Christmas. The Doctor is trying to break into Clara’s dream world.

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Just to throw something in the mix: anyone remember all the way back to The Eleventh Hour, where there was one coma patient permanently concealed behind screens? 😉

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@Supernumerary

I’m thinking at the moment that this is going to be an example of ‘What we think we know is not what’s really happening.’

If we’re going ‘the enemy inside the friend’, then Clara’s ‘death’ could well be that the Clara personality is going to get wiped. Clara will ‘die’ because ‘Clara Oswald’ never really existed. That bluff in Death in Heaven really was a double bluff – Clara was unconsciously telling a truth about herself.

Just as ‘John Smith’ died when he had to bring back the Doctor to save everyone, and the Master’s human personality died when he opened the fob watch.

But the personality that’s hidden inside Clara is not the Doctor’s friend. That would explain why there’s been a re-emphasis on Clara’s strength of personality; we might get the ‘Clara’ personality fighting back.

Another alternative: the Doctor thinks Clara is dead because he’s seen something that tells him that there’s a future where she never returned to Coal Hill School, her family, her life. That would explain why he’s so terrified each and every time she travels with him, and why he’s leaving her on Earth for longer and longer periods.

It certainly doesn’t seem that he knows when and where she dies. Which is why I’m thinking it may be a case of Clara appearing to have died: but something else has happened instead. Either she gets stuck somewhere like the Ponds, or she dies – and regenerates.

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@mirime

Another thought on Clara, what if she never left the Dalek (I’m so sorry…)

This is beginning to remind me of the long period of speculation between Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. One major HP discussion site eventually had to put ‘Yes, we have noticed the gleam in Dumbledore’s eye…’ in the FAQ section.

Yup, it’s a great bonkers theory. And you’re right, it’s been said before. 😉

Regarding the solid holograms – it’s possible. She’s certainly solid. But then how did Bonnie copy Clara? From Clara’s memories? And would the Doctor leave a solid hologram by itself while he went travelling?

I think my main problem with Clara never leaving the Dalek is that I’d expect the Doctor to be doing everything possible to find a cure. Instead, he’s acting as if Clara’s oncoming death is something he can’t do anything about.

As if, in fact, he’s seen it in her future.

The Doctor: I can do anything. There’s nothing I can’t do. Nothing. But I’m not supposed to.

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@phaseshift and @ludivine

Yes, I’m looking forward to the Doctor Who Festival on Saturday – Cybermen Stream.

I did get hit by the seemingly inevitable ‘there will be a work clash that you can’t afford to turn down’, but fortunately the final schedule had my little bit wrapped yesterday.

Well, by the time we actually finished, this morning. 🙂

So I will now be at the Excel Centre on Saturday, clutching my ticket. I’m really looking forward to hearing the writers – Saturday is Steven Moffat chairing, Sarah Dollard and Peter Harness on the panel, with Mark Gattis on the MFX show explaining how the monsters transfer from script to screen.

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Just a bonkers Clara thought, based on my comments a few weeks ago that Clara stays when she feels she’s needed.

The Doctor’s now told her she’s no longer needed. She was needed to pull him back to making the right decision in The Day of The Doctor. She was needed as his conscience, his ‘carer’, the person who cares so he didn’t have to.

But now, she’s in his head. Now, she can stand there and watch him lead someone else into making the right decision – and she doesn’t need to say a word. The Doctor can get through the whole of The Woman Who Lived, lead Ashildr to making a right decision – and never needs Clara there at all. He could stand in front of another Big Red Button – and know, without Clara, that he shouldn’t press it.

Clara was born to save the Doctor – but the Doctor no longer needs saving.

Her job’s done.

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@blenkinsopthebrave

Oh, gosh. I’ve already got into one major row about religion on this site this week; I’d really prefer not to get into Religious Row II – Grace Abounds.

He is anguished and he is tortured, as he explains with great conviction. And that is my point. Those inner consequences are nowhere in evidence when it comes to Bonnie/Osgood

The Doctor doesn’t feel forgiven. He can forgive Bonnie – it’s his ceasefire that she’s broken. But who can forgive him? Only another Gallifreyan, only someone on that planet when he pressed/nearly pressed that big red button. Except everyone on Gallifrey is now trapped in some other universe… apart from Missy, who doesn’t care about those 2 billion plus children.

Since the Doctor doesn’t feel forgiven, he’s still anguished and tortured. Since Bonnie does feel forgiven, she’s not. She may, however, be remorseful, because she’s demonstrating a very practical attitude towards repentance, namely:

• an acceptance of responsibility for her wrongful and harmful actions, (she personally orders all the Zygon terrorists to stand down)
• a repudiation (disowning, renunciation) of the character traits that led to the wrongdoing and the resolve to eliminate the renounced character traits, (she stops being ‘Bonnie’ and becomes ‘Osgood’)
• the resolve to make reparations—compensation to the victim—for the harm she has caused the victim and to make them whole again. (Since the dead are dead, that’s a tricky one. However, she can order that there be no further deaths and then dedicate her life to stopping future ‘Bonnies’ and so hopefully prevent other deaths).

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@blenkinsopthebrave

But what about, well…consequences? By the end of the story Bonnie has become Osgood 2, and with Osgood 1 she is content, and on the side of the angels.

Yup. That’s (Amazing) Grace for you. 🙂

The Doctor is either (Timestream 1) the mass murderer of over two billion children OR (Timestream 2) the nearly-mass-murderer of… Yet, here he is, content and on the side of the angels. I must have missed the 5000 year prison term for mass murder/attempted mass murder.

Grace is full and complete forgiveness, of everything, however heinous. It doesn’t have to be earned, it doesn’t require punishment for crimes committed, and it doesn’t have to be deserved. But if ‘grace’ is genuinely in operation, the person who’s been forgiven will start making some pretty major changes in their life.

Like, for example, a terrorist dedicated to making Zygons live in their own shape committing herself to living as a human for possibly her entire life. Not just living as a human; not letting anyone know, ever, whether she’s Zygon or human. Because that’s the only way she can stop other people doing what she’s done.

It wasn’t made overt in the script, but the implication is that while ‘Bonnie’ may be copying adult forms, she’s a bonnie wee bairn. She’s one of the young generation of Zygons – which means she must be about two years old. No wonder the Doctor kept talking about tantrums; she really was a toddler having a massive wobbly. Only this toddler was equipped with a rocket launcher.

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@geoffers

now, i don’t know if this has been posited elsewhere

Yup. Extensively. Very intensively, in fact, before Capaldi’s casting was announced. I think most of us ‘Clara is the Doctor’ theorists took the Death in Heaven scenes with Clara claiming to actually BE the Doctor as Moffat’s ‘no, she bloody well isn’t.’ 🙂

But it could have been a deliberate misdirect, because too many people had figured it out too early. But I agree, Clara is too damn like him – has been ever since Asylum of the Daleks, where Jenna Coleman’s performance read like she’d been told to play it like David Tennant. 😉

At the moment, I’m going for some variation – she’s his daughter, granddaughter, a projection of the Doctor, a causal loop mirror for the Doctor. Or something more sinister: a ‘make your own Doctor’ program?

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