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Just a bit of Episode Title speculation for Heaven Sent/Hell Bent. I think we’ve had one suggestion for the song, but I’ve been thinking about it a bit more since Amazing Grace turned out to be the thematic core of The Zygon Invasion/The Zygon Inversion.

So, I’ve found another candidate: Heaven Sent, Hell Bent by American Hitmen.

Not only does the guitar riff sound very Capaldi Doctor, the lyrics look rather Doctor-and-Clara:

Every now and then the pure they call upon us
For the Cleansing
I gave my better half for all that was meant
The passion for my girl was stolen by
A smoking gun
Although I still look back at times

Her kiss wont shake what the hell I’ve done
I gave up my girl for a smokin’ gun

Because I’m
Heaven sent Hell bent that’s what I wanna be
I’ll low-crawl through this shit
That’s what’s become of me
My body may be scarred but there’s a smile on her face
When staring back at me

So sleep calmly in bed
And peaceful at night
On your behalf I’ll take the violence
For you little girl
I’ll end the fight

Been called a devil I don’t give a damn
Your little angel sees just what the hell I am

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@miapatrick

It made me think about Osgood as hybrid, because it wasn’t just human Osgood’s personality, she acquired the zygons confidence.

Yes, that’s what made me think the Osgood who died was the human, and the Osgood who lived was the Zygon. Ingrid Oliver’s delivering a different performance than even the one in Death In Heaven – an Osgood who is far more mature, confident and ‘expert’.

So mature, in fact, that she turns the Doctor down because she has a job to do on Earth…

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@pedant

I guess you have missed the huge component of modern British political discourse that sees no meaningful difference between the Conservatives and (pre-Corbyn, at least) Labour…

I haven’t actually. What I am trying to determine is if you think that there is no meaningful difference between, say, a politician with a religious faith who does something you don’t like – and someone from a splinter group who believes that their religious faith entitles them to kill people of other religions (including those of no faith).

You have called both groups ‘fundamentalists’. I am suggesting that either you don’t know what the word actually means, or that you are trying to define it in such a way that it means what you want it to mean.

It doesn’t matter if you want to join the very vocal group who play the ‘No True Scotsman’ card with New Labour; we’ll go to the SNP and Plaid Cymru if you like. Or the Green Party and the Conservatives. Or … the point is, are there no meaningful differences between them (in your view), and would it matter to you that they would disagree if you called someone from the Green Party a Tory?

Are the communists?

Don’t try to misdirect the point. You have given me a definition of ‘fundamentalist’ which potentially includes every single practising Christian and every single practising Muslim, because it is a core tenet (a ‘fundamental’ tenet) of both our faiths that we are to put nothing before God. We are to put God above all else. That’s how our faiths work.

In other words, you’ve taken the secondary meaning of ‘fundamental’ (keeping to the fundamentals, the necessary core) and applied it to the primary meaning of ‘Christian fundamentalism’ (or ‘Islamic fundamentalism’) in such a way that your definition tells a lie.

The lie is that every Christian is potentially a Christian fundamentalist, instead of Christian fundamentalism being a minority group. Every Muslim is potentially an Islamic fundamentalist, instead of Islamic fundamentalism being a minority group. And if you say ‘Islamic fundamentalist’ to an average person in the UK, their first thought will be ‘terrorist’.

Okay, now let’s look at ‘and the expense of human decency’.

And if you need to ask what human decency is (which you don’t) then we have a lot further to go than I thought.

So you are trying to privilege it. ‘Human decency’ is something so obvious, so all encompassing, so clearly defined (but, of course, not by you), that all human beings everywhere know exactly what it is. They don’t even have to be told. They just know.

All ‘decent’ human beings, of course. And if someone should happen to transgress the ‘human decency’ limits, this would of course be their fault: they should ‘know’ what ‘human decency’ is, even if nobody can be arsed to tell them.

This is a very naive view. I’m pretty sure that my idea of ‘human decency’ and yours coincide reasonably closely, because we both grew up (mostly, in my case) in post-Enlightenment Western Europe. There’s also a common core between my idea of ‘human decency’ and that of someone from modern China or Ghana or the United States, but there are also often significant differences.

But I also know that my idea of ‘human decency’ would be incredibly different from that of, say, an entirely respectable, slave-owning, non-Christian First Century Roman Senator.

I go back to my earlier question: how do we decide what ‘human decency’ is? Do we all get a say? Do we get to sit down and have a discussion about which parts of ‘human decency’ are non-negotiable in our society, which parts may follow ‘cultural differences’ and which parts are never going to be perfectly followed?

Because we’re not Zygons, so we’re not going to learn ‘human decency’ by some giant Command Module linkage into the brain of Pedant.

So, to sum up.

When a Muslim places there idea of faith above all else, and the expense of human decency that is fundamentalism; when a Christian places there idea of faith above all else, and the expense of human decency, that is fundamentalism

When a Muslim or Christian follows a core belief of their faith (to see God as more important than anything else) they are Islamic or Christian ‘fundamentalists’ if they transgress against an idea of ‘human decency’ that they shouldn’t need to ask about and which is not subject to discussion.

Is that what you meant to say?

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@osgood1066

as from my knowledge, zygons can’t copy zygons

Having just rewatched The Zygon Invasion – Zygons can now take the image of a loved one from someone’s mind. Therefore, if the Osgood in this episode was a Zygon, she still carried the image of the human Osgood in her mind – so another Zygon could copy that image.

Whichever Osgood it was that died, that loved one was the image copied – because we saw whichever Osgood it was that lived, sobbing in front of her sister’s grave.

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@pedant

[replying to you here, because this is wandering way off topic from The Zygon Invasion]

Oh, that’s pure special pleading, up there with Humpty Dumpty.

Yeah, right. So you’ll be fine when I call David Cameron a Labour politician, will you? Nicola Sturgeon – you know her, the leader of Plaid Cymru?

The person who is Humpty Dumptying is, I’m afraid, you. David Cameron is not a Labour politician (and will undoubtedly tell you so), even if both the Labour and the Conservative parties come under the broader umbrella of ‘Believers in Parliamentary Democracy’, (hopefully). Nicola Sturgeon is not the leader of Plaid Cymru, even if both the SNP and Plaid Cymru come under the broader heading of ‘Believers in Nationalist Self-Determination’.

when a Christian places there idea of faith above all else

I am supposed to.

When a Muslim places there idea of faith above all else

They are supposed to.

when a Communist places their ideology, above all else

I suspect they’re supposed to, as well…

and the expense of human decency

And how do we decide what that is? Do we all get a say? You, the atheist, have just told me, the practising Christian, that your definition of ‘Christian fundamentalist’ is more valid than mine.

So am I to expect that you’re going to privilege your definition of ‘human decency’, as well?

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@osgood1066

we all know it is coming

I think it’s already happened. The worst month of his life?

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@pedant

You’re entitled. 🙂

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@pedant

‘Our house, our rules’ is fine when you know what our rules are, which of them are important, and which of them are unwittingly rude to guests. Like, say, offering them your family’s normal full cooked breakfast on Sunday. 🙂

That isn’t really the issue: it is about asking someone to choose: in or out, with us or against us, black or white, human or Zygon. That is a fundamentalists position, and Osgood rejected it.

Exactly. The Osgoods rejected it. Are they human or Zygon? They’re both. But the right to be both includes the right to occasionally look like a Zygon, no? Otherwise ‘my house, my rules’ is unwittingly saying ‘You are unwelcome guests’. It’s taking a ‘in or out’ view: either you are human. Or you pretend to be human. No other races need apply.

If you want to get off the religion metaphor, then I’d say that demanding Zygons always look human has overtones of ‘passing’ – that era when light skinned African-Americans would move somewhere they weren’t known and ‘pass’ as ‘white’.

‘Christian Fundamentalist’ has a very specific meaning, btw. It’s a very conservative (small c) movement within American Protestantism which believes that the Bible is literally true. The term travelled over to Islam because the ‘Islamic fundamentalists’ also had a very conservative attitude, and a very literalist interpretation of sacred sources. Both groups do also have a very strong ‘in or out’ view.

You may not like the politics of that particular bunch of politicians, and you may feel that their decisions were influenced in some way by their religion encouraging them to see non-Christians as ‘not-like-us’. But none of them are ‘Christian fundamentalists’.

Just some bigoted politicians.

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@pedant

What does it mean to be a muslim?
What does it mean to be a secularist?
And does it really matter?

Well, that’s the big question isn’t it? Because it does.

Basically, the Zygons in this story are in the position of Muslims in strongly secularist states such as France. They have absolute legal equality, providing that they don’t wear a headscarf or ask if there can be an alternative to pork on a school menu, or basically don’t do anything in any way that shows they’re Muslim.

It’s one law for the religious and non-religious alike, which prohibits you equally from wearing religious symbols. Or provides you with equal access to pork casserole for lunch.

Similarly, the Zygons have absolute legal equality provided they maintain a human appearance at all times, pretend they are no different from the humans around them and eat fried chicken like proper Brits instead of Skarasen milk like grandma made back home. 😉

It’s not a genuine equality. It’s an equality which ignores the point that there are presumably situations where a Human and a Zygon will come up with a different answer and behave in different ways; just as you and I will come up with a different answer and behave in different ways – because I’m basing my answer/ways on my Christianity and you’re basing yours on your atheism.

It was undoubtedly the best equality the treaty-makers could come up with at the time – but it kicked the necessity for a good, hard discussion on what, really, is non-negotiable in our society and what, really, is going to be different about us, further down the road.

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@jphhamlore

Why didn’t the Doctor realize this?

He did. If the audio adventures of the Eighth Doctor are canon – and we know that he has mentioned Lucie – he knows perfectly well that a Zygon can maintain human form when the original human has died.

What this really was is ‘updating the audience with the progression since the last TV adventure’. The audio adventures had a much smaller audience.

In-story, I think he wanted to see if Osgood knew this. If she hadn’t known it, she was the human. If she did, either her Zygon twin told her or she’s the Zygon twin.

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@janetteb

The BBC have just released part of a short interview with Peter Capaldi – in which he mentions next year.

Warning: if you haven’t watched last weeks episodes, the interview contains short clips. 🙂

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@pedant and @purofilion

I think Osgood turning out to be Zygon Osgood does lead somewhere both important and significant. It gives us (assuming Osgood is genuinely trying to maintain the treaty) someone who’s been seen to be a villain onscreen, but then becomes good.

It opens up an entire, interesting can of worms in Who. We’ve had good people from races who were previously entirely villainous, so that we’re working away from the idea of ‘the evil race of [insert alien of choice here]. But apart from a short scene in The Name of The Doctor, we never saw Madame Vastra or Strax strutting their evil stuff.

But we did see an entire group of Zygons (including Zygon Osgood) busily trying to take over Earth. If Zygon Osgood is now trying to help save the Earth, that’s a big moral turnaround. It’s not, like Dalek Rusty, an engineering problem. It’s not, like the BG Ice Warriors, a turnaround with a completely new set of individuals.

The thing I dislike about ‘we will never know’ is that – unless they give the audience some reason to seriously think Osgood may in fact be Zygon Osgood – we’re all going to want it to be Human Osgood who survived. So we will all, probably, decide Osgood is Human Osgood. Whereas, if our former villain not only has her moment of redemption (in The Day of The Doctor) but now has an entire Two Part Story of Redemption, that suggests that redemption arcs for any major Who villain are now up for grabs for any writer who wants to do one.

More importantly, it tells this generation of small Whovians that people who do evil things don’t have to keep on doing evil. Somebody who chooses to do evil can choose to fight evil. It’s a choice.

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@craig

I was making a bet with myself that our little friend wouldn’t manage to identify any scenes or even episodes.

I won my bet. 🙂

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@pedant

I think it doesn’t matter morally, but it does matter artistically.

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@PixieCutLover

I keep seeing women running to men when things go wrong, men talking about protecting women etc.

Which women, to which men, in which episodes and in what context?

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@geoffers

it’s the zygon osgood

Having it be the Zygon Osgood makes considerably more sense thematically. It’s what I’d call the more interesting choice.

For one thing, that would mean Missy killed someone the audience really did care about; and Zygon Osgood becomes equally an audience substitute. She’s just as upset about Osgood’s death as the audience. Her determination to have the treaty that Osgood was so invested in survive is something the audience would sympathise with. That Zygons can see a human they’ve duplicated as a ‘sister’ also makes the shape-changing double act less unambiguously evil. If Zygons can regard their duplicated original with the same love and devotion that an identical twin can give their twin, it becomes much less sinister.

But if Osgood is human Osgood, then Missy killed someone the audience barely knew, and Osgood is behaving exactly the way we’d expect her to do.

Clues that Osgood is probably the Zygon? Well, Zygons can maintain a shape as long as the loved one survives in the memory – so Zygon Osgood has to keep her dead ‘sister’ constantly in her mind to remain Osgood. We’ve been told that Osgood went a little crazy after her sister’s death – which would fit very well with a Zygon desperately trying to maintain the Osgood form. She talked about ‘lives’ rather than ‘life’. When the Doctor told Osgood she had to be human (and if the Eighth Doctor audio’s are canon, he knows she doesn’t have to be) she corrected him. She went ‘rogue’ from UNIT – which suggests someone who knows more about the Zygons than UNIT do.

There’s another reason I’d go for ‘Zygon Osgood’. If it were Human Osgood who died, then her death becomes another exploration of ‘Is death the end?’ Because even if Osgood’s personal existence/identity came to an end, her influence hasn’t died. While Zygon Osgood maintains her shape, her memory hasn’t died. And if the reason Zygon Osgood is fighting to the death to maintain the treaty is her sister’s death, then Osgood might just manage to change the world – after her own death.

So yeah. We’ll have to see. But I reckon this Osgood is a Zygon. And if she isn’t, she should have been. 😉

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@blenkinsopthebrave

It was definitely mental strength in Asylum, and also in The Snowmen (remember how the Snowmen did a speed melt when Clara imagined them melting?). She runs through the Well in Hide, and it starts to smoke then turns into a full on portal. Probably other things as well, but that’s off the top of my head.

Osgood and Osgood does suggest that there’s a mental link between a Zygon twin and their original – and it’s a long established thing in AG Who that a door once opened can be travelled through in both directions. So if Zygon Bonnie can wipe Clara’s mind, Clara can stomp right in to Zygon Bonnie’s mind.

This might explain why Missy used lies, trickery and outright persuasion to get Clara to do what she wanted instead of using the Master’s rather well known powers of hypnotism. She didn’t want anything like a mental link with Clara.

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@kharis

I don’t know if you know that the BBC has a careers section?

It depends what you want to do – one thing that did occur to me when I read your skillset was ‘researcher’. The traditional entry level job if you want more hands on production/direction jobs is ‘Runner’.

The Raindance page on finding film work might give you a few ideas.

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@steve-thorp

I am having trouble working out the full significance of “Amazing Grace” being played, unless it is a reference to Clara saving him.

Ummm… Steven Moffat has been on an Alpha course? 😈

I’ve been making that joke since last year; but he does seem to be very interested in addressing the question of whether death is actually The End, or whether the reason there’s such a longstanding human conviction that it isn’t is because … it isn’t.

I’d say the most important thing about John Newton, who wrote the lyrics, is that he was a complete bastard (who later learnt not to be a complete bastard). He was a slave trader, who got caught in a storm and asked God to save him. When God did, he converted to Christianity and wrote the famous first verse:

Amazing Grace/How sweet the sound/That saved a wretch like me/ I once was lost, but now am found/Was blind, but now I see.

The last line was distinctly optimistic. 🙂 He didn’t write the other verses until about 25 years later, by which time he’d stopped being a slave trader, become a priest, and needed something in a hurry for a sermon.

I’d say the possible linkages to Who are: the song is by a complete bastard who found redemption. A slave trader who became one of the important people in the Abolition movement. The enemy inside the friend, the friend inside the enemy, the hardworking parish priest and abolitionist who was hiding inside the cynical and dissolute slave trader.

Can monsters find redemption? Can the Zygons change? According to Amazing Grace (and the life of its writer), the answer is ‘yes’. It would also link to the life of the Doctor. If he is the complete bastard who did/did not murder billions of children, can he find redemption? Can he change? Again, the answer’s ‘yes’.

Another linkage would be to the ongoing question of ‘life after death’. If all the ‘mayflies’ die, is that really the end of them? Amazing Grace (especially verses 3 to 7) is a very strong statement of faith that it’s not.

Which is yet another possible linkage: Amazing Grace’s strong statement of faith in an afterlife makes it an incredibly popular funeral hymn. If the Doctor knows Clara is going to die soon, that might be another reason for him to be playing it.

And finally – New Britain, the tune for Amazing Grace, is out of copyright and requires no royalties. That might be a very important point. 😀

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@denvaldron

I’d imagine that in the forty (or thirty) years since we last saw the Zygons, they’ve discovered how to produce lactic fluid in the lab.

More canonically, Strax claims that he’s gene-spliced himself to produce magnificent quantities of lactic fluid, so it’s reasonable to suppose that the Skarasens are now happily swimming undisturbed on some unnamed planet.

Alternatively, Inverness villages and the Fox Inn are packed with Zygon milkmaids. 😉

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@lisa and @purofilion

My take on the soldiers going into the church was that UNIT, as it often is, is being used metaphorically rather than with any attention to whether it is actually behaves in an effective military manner. After all, the pension budget for UNIT has always been a little on the microscopic side. And they practically faint if their weapons work. 😉

So the point being explored was (possibly) ‘somebody’s mother, somebody’s son’. Everyone on the opposing side is somebody’s mother, somebody’s son. Can a soldier still kill them?

Yes, because they’re carefully trained to. But suppose they were ordered out to kill their mother, their son? Would they do that?

No, because they’re not robots. We saw that with the drone pilot, suddenly shocked into remembering that she’s killing people, not ‘targets’. And then we see it again, with the UNIT troops.

But then, having made the point that if we genuinely remembered that our opponents are ‘somebody’s mother, somebody’s son’, we wouldn’t kill them – Peter Harness carried it on to the next line of the argument; what happens if the people on the other side still want to kill you? What happens if they don’t see you as ‘somebody’s mother, somebody’s son’? What happens if they don’t see you as ‘people’?

That was the meaning of the scene for me; it carries on from the solution in the 50th. Both sides managed to make a treaty, because neither side knew who was human or Zygon – and so both sides could see each other as simply ‘people’.

And this is why we don’t know whether Kate is a Zygon, whether Osgood is a Zygon, whether Jac is a Zygon. It doesn’t matter who is a Zygon and who isn’t, because the people in UNIT are traitors, all, to the idea that Zygons and humans are fundamentally different. They all signed up to the treaty. They all agreed that the ‘other’ was ‘people’.

I suspect a lot of people in UNIT are Zygons. Knowledge of advanced tech, other alien races – UNIT would snap them up. But if they see their future as being part of Earth, rather than conquering Earth, the ‘Truth or Consequences’ group would see them as ‘traitors’.

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@mersey

MH17 flew over my country and crashed on the territory of my neighbour.

And I have stood in the kitchen of my home and seen a terrorist bomb explode. I’m not talking on television; I mean in real life. I’ve had my parents’ friends murdered by terrorists. I do understand that watching fictionalised versions of these events can be a horrible reminder.

But. Sometimes a horrible reminder is what’s needed. Sometimes you need a scene where a generation of children are shown, bluntly, that those really cool looking surface-to-air missiles, those cool BFG’s, aren’t just for killing targets in a video game and aren’t just for killing monsters.

They can just as easily be aimed at the people you love.

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@mersey

I think it’s too serious issue to make of it family entertaintment even with such strong message.

I disagree. I live in an area where children are being groomed by terrorists. This is too serious an issue to NOT make it family entertainment, because families need to find a way of talking about this. Before their fifteen year old child decides to head off to Syria – which has happened, locally.

As @jimthefish said elsewhere, it’s also a format that can be used by schools as an entertaining discussion starter.

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So the Doctor’s alive, some version of Kate is alive, but we’re only seeing Jenna Coleman play Zygon Bonnie. They are teasing us, aren’t they?

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@jimbomcmaster

That’s a significant rise in population.

It was stated that they were sent to various communities worldwide: 20 million Zygons is about a quarter of one percent of the world’s 7.3 billion population.

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@juniperfish

I don’t think it was meant to be ‘adult-subtle’. I think this was fairly and squarely aimed at the kids; as I said on T’Other Place, the battles for this war are often being fought in the playgrounds. Rather than a load of information leaflets, Peter Harness is telling it as a story.

Is Osgood human or Zygon? Both. Is a child British or Muslim? Both.

But yes, @phaseshift, had you seen an advance copy? 🙂

As for Zygon Bonnie, I’m afraid I spotted the switch the moment it happened. Be interesting to know if the Doctor has too: if Zygons do partly become the person they copy, is he hoping for the ‘Clara’ part to come to the fore?

But I bet this was a fun episode for Jenna Coleman. 😀

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@doctordoctorwho

Is this ‘BBC Approved’? Because there’s kind of a big hint about that in the title of the forum.

If you want to natter about ‘my mate saw something while they were filming,’ that’s not BBC Approved. BBC Approved means ‘it’s on the website, or it’s a cast/crew interview.’

You need the Spoilers forum.

@phaseshift or @fatmaninabox or @jimthefish, can you do your deletion stuff? Ta

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@denvaldron and @Purofilion

I agree with DenValdron – the climber can be saved, but only if the Doctor hasn’t seen him die. The fall has become ‘fixed’ by the action of the Doctor seeing it.

I talked about this in my blog Wibbley Wobbly, Timey Wimey – specifically, it’s the bit where the Doctor visits Blackpool and breaks his arm – but doesn’t, because he’s read the book. Which means it’s never written. Which means he doesn’t know to avoid Blackpool…

Myself, I call it a zig-zag rather than a figure eight. A more recent example is Dark Water, where the Doctor tries to explain that same paradox to a grieving Clara. You can’t prevent something you know is going to happen, because how will you know it’s going to happen if you’ve prevented it?

Regarding the climber – no, the Doctor wouldn’t stop him falling before he’s ever fallen. He might, however, be able to save the climber by opening the TARDIS doors and letting him fall into the swimming pool. Providing he does that in a place where his earlier self wouldn’t have seen it, that’s fine. 🙂

Similarly, the Doctor has to act to make Vesuvius blow up on schedule. He can’t save all those people. But he can save one terrified family, whose fate he doesn’t know.

That a fully trained Time Lord can break the zig zag (or the figure 8) if they want to is shown by Waters of Mars. That it’s potentially catastrophic is shown by The Wedding of River Song.

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@jimthefish

It’s a scene in The Woman Who Lived that reminded me of it. The one where the Doctor says that the immortals shouldn’t travel together – but strangely, only then mentioned Captain Jack.

Okay, Catherine Tregenna, Captain Jack is a character she’s written for so it’s a nice little Torchwood ref – and non fans are more likely to recognise the more recent character. But was anyone else waiting for him to say ‘Romana’? Romana, the Time Lady he effectively trained?

It felt like the same kind of omission as in Before The Flood, where O’Donnell missed out Donna because the reference was going to come next week. It also felt like a set-up for the Doctor’s future acceptance that, immortal or not, the Magician’s Apprentice has to eventually finish her apprenticeship and set off on her own Fool’s Journey. 🙂

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@phaseshift

Apologies – I was typing while you were posting and didn’t see your #45936

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@PlainOldDave

There’s. One. Dr. Who. SERIES.

Which the BBC calls ‘The First Season’ to ‘The Twenty Sixth Season’, and then calls ‘Series 1’ to ‘Series 9’. It’s not complicated. At least, it’s not complicated if you’re British; we have streets that change names halfway down and house numbers that are No. 1 on one side and No. 234 opposite, so a numbering system for a TV series that uses one system in 1989 and a different system in 2005 isn’t terribly problematic.

However, the fourteen year gap between the ‘Seasons’ and the ‘Series’ is sufficient to make the 2005 series a reboot. Fourteen years – that’s nearly an entire television generation. Nicking the Wikipedia definition of ‘reboot’, because it’s 3 am over here:

Reboots remove any non-essential elements associated with a franchise by starting the franchise’s continuity over and distilling it down to the core elements and concepts…

The backstory provided to explain the ‘gap’ shows that we’re looking at a reboot, as do the structural changes (from serials to mostly stand-alones, episode lengths of 50 minutes, and much, much more money). Using the Wikipedia definition, it’s possible to see that the Time War backstory removed everything except the core concept of the time-travelling alien in a TARDIS shaped like a blue Police Box. It rebooted the series.

The ‘continuity’ could then be slowly re-introduced later, once they’d got an audience. I’d point out that Star Trek: The Next Generation contains a considerable amount of shared history and characters with Star Trek (The Original Series), but while they’re set in the same dramatic universe, they’re not considered the same series.

The Doctor is the constant in the anthology, and his basic character CAN’T change as it is one of the constants the serial is based on

No, the constant that the serial is based on is that the lead character is an alien called – well, actually, that hasn’t been very constant. Either ‘The Doctor’ or ‘Doctor Who’. Take your pick. And there was a moment when he was only half-alien, but he was probably lying.

The other constant is the TARDIS – except for the Pertwee Seasons where it wasn’t working and he was stuck on Earth with a job at UNIT.

What’s constant about the Doctor’s core personality?

1. He’s very curious
2. He likes to travel, though he may not always be able to
3. Ummm….

Mostly, he’s very brave – but not always. Mostly, he’s very compassionate – but not always. Is he a good man? Tricky.

But “my opinion” is conclusions based on facts.

At the moment I’m afraid my opinion is that I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that you wouldn’t know a fact if it slapped you in the face with a wet haddock. You keep stating things as a ‘fact’ which are not factual.

Such as, for example, the idea that the character of the lead in a continuing series can’t change. That’s out-of-date even in the US, and it was never the case for The Doctor in Doctor Who. It is not a fact. It’s an opinion about what makes a good continuing drama.

Or that the numbering system of a television series can’t be changed. Again: opinion.

But not ‘fact’.

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@ichabod

unless she goes zooming off in her own Tardis or something (and maybe even then?).

I do wonder about that. If you look at the Dalek regeneration scene in The Magician’s Apprentice, there’s one Dalek which is very clearly NOT absorbing regeneration energy. And that’s Dalek Clara.

Simple explanation: she doesn’t get the regen energy because she’s not a Dalek and not connected to Davros.

Bonkers explanation: she doesn’t absorb regen energy because she doesn’t need it.

I keep joking that the reason they haven’t announced the new Companion is because the new Companion is Clara. Only played by a different actress. 😉

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@PlainOldDave

There is no such animal as ‘Series 35’. If you’re going to be ridiculously pedantic, can you at least be correct in your pedantry?

The series which started in 1963 was identified by story and ‘season’ – First Season, Second Season etc. Pick up any Who reference book that dates from before the After Gap reboot and you’ll find that they use that nomenclature, right the way up to the Twenty-Sixth Season. The series which started in 2005 was identified by story and ‘series’ – Series 1, Series 2, etc.

It makes it very easy for the BBC (and fans) to quickly identify the original Before Gap programme and the new After Gap reboot. Doctor Who ‘First Season’ is referring to the Lambert/Hartnell stories, Doctor Who ‘Series 1’ refers to the Davies/Eccleston stories.

If you’re watching Doctor Who’s Ninth Season, you should be watching Jon Pertwee’s Doctor. If you’re watching Doctor Who Series 9, you should be watching Peter Capaldi.

You are either watching Series 9 (S9) or the Thirty Fifth Season. You are not watching Series 35.

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@purofilion

I tend to say ‘actor’ whether the actor concerned is male, female or Sontaran. But I do sometimes use ‘actress’ – it seems to suit some women actors, somehow.

Certainly not something to worry about. 🙂 Hope the hospital visit is going well, and enjoy John Simm’s ‘if the Producer tells me to chew the scenery I’m going to bite huge chunks off and spit them out defiantly’ performance when you get to The End of Time.

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@plainOldDave

If it’s a reboot, why did the Beeb make a 50th Anniversary special?

If you believe that, could I make a suggestion?

Could you watch the show? The more recent version of the show.

If it’s the same show (and it is – but not in the sense of ‘set in aspic’), then it becomes difficult to critique along the lines of ‘The Doctor should be like this’ when clearly The Doctor wasn’t like this for many of his regenerations. It’s also a little tricky replying to you when some of the things you say about what the Doctor ‘should’ be seem to not know what happened during the various 50th Anniversary Specials.

For example: the Doctor always runs. But which direction is he now running in?

Incidentally, to say that the Hartnell incarnation struggled is laughable. The entire reason for the BBC desperately trying to find a vaguely plausible reason that The Doctor could be replaced by another actor was that Doctor Who was a howling success – but William Hartnell, poor man, didn’t realise how ill he really was. He was struggling to remember the lines and increasingly taking it out on the production team.

An Adventure in Space and Time is a nice drama doc for the Hartnell period.

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@PlainOldDave

A more accurate description would be that the creators of Series 27, Series 28, Series 31 and Series 32a ignored a basic tenet of fictional character development:

Fictional characters do not radically change worldview and motivation mid-story.

Rubbish.

Sorry, but there’s no other way to reply to that. Characters in fiction can be dynamic or static. Static characters don’t change. Dynamic characters do. Examples of plausible major worldview changes mid-story would be a political or religious conversion, or the impact of a war.

It would be perfectly plausible to have a major or minor character change drastically mid story because something reveals to them that the government they’ve served loyally all their life is both evil and corrupt.

The Doctor is and always has been a dynamic character, not a static one. The difference with the Doctor is that the dynamic state in the Before Gap seasons largely happened at each regeneration. During each regeneration, the Doctor was largely a static character. Which is why the really interesting character development in the Before Gap seasons usually took place at the beginning and end of an actor’s run as The Doctor.

In the After Gap series, each regeneration is still largely static, but there’s been more of a slow move towards the kind of dynamic character change that audiences expect nowadays.

In the case of the first series of the After Gap stories, there had been a long gap since the previous TV story (which is why we tend to call it the After Gap series on this forum). During that gap, the new Head Writer decided, the Doctor had not only fought in the Time War – he’d lost it. In fact, he’d killed everyone on his home planet in a (failed) attempt to end the war and at least save the rest of the universe.

This is an entirely valid backstory reason for a radical change of viewpoint and motivation.

I’m sorry that you don’t like romance – it’s a genre that’s produced some of the great classics of literature. It can only add to the depth and complexity of Doctor Who if the programme is allowed to admit that, since its hero is a married man with grandchildren, romance might sometimes cross the Doctor’s path. But your idea that

he simply doesn’t work as a romantic lead

is purely your personal opinion. It’s not backed up by the fact that both David Tennant and Matt Smith’s Doctors could work very well as ‘romantic lead’. Admittedly Smith’s Doctor was the type of shy romantic lead who’s always seriously wondering whether his nerves will get the better of him and he’ll end up nipping back to his workshop and inventing a new type of screwdriver – but he did manage to kiss the girl in the end.

Reader, he married her. 🙂

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@plainOldDave

it’s a comfortable haven from an ever-changing world;

I’d disagree. Certainly my parents never watched it when they were growing up. It was a very young show when I was a child, not some traditional haven.

As @jimthefish says, when Pertwee was on, the other shows I remember being on at the same time were Jason King, The Champions, James Bond in the cinemas. Man from UNCLE and Mission Impossible were the US imports. Pertwee’s Doctor very much tapped into that ‘heroic and slightly super-powered government agent saves the world’ (every Saturday at tea time) genre.

Tom Baker, on the other hand, tapped into the anti-authoritarian student vibe that was accompanying the massive expansion of higher education in the 1970’s. You can’t go back to Baker – he was very much of his time. Just as you can’t go back to McCoy. An actor such as Capaldi can, however, choose to incorporate certain aspects of their performance into his performance. The man he’s playing may have grown, but he was still once those versions of ‘The Doctor’.

I don’t think you can say that 50 years of Doctor Who support your view that romance isn’t a justified plot point when Series 2, Series 3, Series 6 and Series 7a of the After Gap Series all had an ongoing romantic arc. As Jim says, times change – we had to go through that arc to get the Doctor to a place (effectively, he’s a widower) where he can say that his Companions are far more like surrogate family than they are romantic interests. He is, after all, married, even if his wife is dead.

But we had to move through that arc to come out the other side. And the Doctor is different for it, more willing to acknowledge that losing his ‘family’ hurts like hell, every time.

But that’s the current arc. Probably. 🙂

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@denvaldron

Hmmm… yes, I agree you could see the second and third McCoy series as Absurdist in the sense of Pinter or Stoppard. There’s frequently a sense of a menace in the background that we, the audience (and our audience avatar, Ace) can sense but don’t really understand. Ghostlight is definitely a story of people trapped in an incomprehensible world.

Including the cast. 🙂

For myself, I tend to distinguish very sharply between the stories that were either written for Colin Baker or were written for ‘generic Doctor’ and those written for McCoy. In the first series, I think they were just desperately going for comedy – as you say, spectacle and schtick. In the second and third, they (or, more likely, Andrew Cartmel) realised that they hadn’t cast a comedian; they’d cast a comic actor.

And comic actors can play dark as well as funny.

McCoy in his second and third series is ‘my Doctor’. I’m rare among Whovians: I didn’t imprint like a baby duck on My First Doctor. Instead, it was Sylvester McCoy – with that odd, funny, dark, manipulative and somehow powerful little man – who made me look at the TV screen and think ‘that’s the Doctor. That’s how I see the Doctor.’

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@starla

Potentially using a lucid dreaming aide, from Dark Water. You know the one that induced the very real dream state where Clara believed she was destroying TARDIS keys?

The argument against the lucid dreaming aid is that – unlike the real dreams in Last Christmas – the only people in that induced dream were the people really present.

That could be a coincidence, of course. Or it could be that the ‘dream patches’ have just as much a medical use as real sleeping tablets do. They induce a dream state so that you can work through some problem; you can hear someone else talking to you because that someone is probably your therapist.

The alternative is that the Doctor had them around because he does hallucinogens when he’s bored and can’t think of what planet to go to, and didn’t want to explain that to Clara. But we all know he would never do that, because he’s not that sort of person. Despite the guitar and the shades.

That unfortunate little problem previously, with the dream pollen getting into the TARDIS rotor, was entirely accidental. It just drifted in. Really, it did.
🙂

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@loneshark

Check out the Dream Lord (Amy’s Choice) for the answer to that one. 😉

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@plainolddave

This is Doctor Who, not a chick flick.

I agree with @purofilion, that’s rude. Also incorrect: ‘Doctor Who is whatever it feels like when it gets up in the morning.’ (Steven Moffat, I think). If they want to do a doomed romance in the middle of an alien invasion, they can. They have.

And if they want to have a regeneration where the Doctor is lost and lonely and so very much alone that he reacts by falling hard for one of his human companions (even if you argue that it’s the first time ever), they can do that too. You can’t argue that ‘the Doctor doesn’t do that’ because the Doctor is right there on screen doing that. You can certainly argue that it’s not consistent with his past characterisation – but then the Head Writer will point to the destruction of Gallifrey, and the Doctor being the last of his kind.

He is behaving differently than before because his situation is different from before. He’s changed. He’s grown. And, as the Capaldi Doctor hints, maybe he’ll later see it as a mistake.

But right now, on screen, he’s doing teary eyed blurge. And later on, he’s going to make other emotional decisions that the pre-Time-War Doctor would never have made, because he’s not that man any more.

And that’s another reason the show has lasted fifty years: because generations of writers have been able to look back at some great portrayals of the Doctor and say “You know what? He’s not that man any more.”

Change. It’s built into Doctor Who’s DNA.

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@plainolddave

Davison found his Doctor in The Caves of Androzani. I’ve always thought Troughton’s advice to him was unfortunate – if he’d had a fourth series with just Peri … But given the scripts they did have for Colin Baker’s first series, maybe not.

McCoy is deeply underrated, largely because his first series was bloody awful. He was a brave enough actor to decide it wasn’t working and rework his Doctor almost completely for the final two before the gap series.

Eccleston – I rate him highly as an actor, but his performance made a lot more sense to me when they retconned it for the Day of the Doctor. Not ‘The Doctor’, but a man trying desperately to become The Doctor again. Likewise, Tennant’s humanness can be seen as an alien trying to adopt himself into another species, since he knows his people are all gone.

Matt Smith – definitely worth watching. It’s quite astonishing how such a young actor can play such an old character. The Smith era effectively recapitulates the life we never saw on Gallifrey. Friends, marriage, loss and widower hood. Capaldi’s effectively at the same point Hartnell was (Clara being the ‘granddaughter’) – except that he’s not running from Gallifrey, he’s running to it.

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@arbutus and @jimthefish

I’m quite sure his missus will try. She tried valiantly with that bloody fez; hopeless.

Sometimes you just can’t pry the prop away from the performer. 🙂

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Just to warn everyone: it is half term in the UK, so we might get a few more of the Underbridge family deciding to drop in.

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I’ve seen every episode that the BBC has not lost.

Of course you have. You have also mixed up the icon that goes with the user name, seem to be slightly confused on which current writers created which story line and haven’t said anything about Series 9 that couldn’t be discovered from a quick trawl of ‘Best Trolling Topics for Doctor Who forums’.

This forum expects better from its trolls. Both lame and lazy.

Now, where was my pointy stick…

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@seeoswald

You haven’t actually watched the show, have you?

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@jimthefish

As Robert Heinlein had a character say in one of his novels: the best way to lie is to tell the truth and nothing but the truth – but not the whole truth.

Moffat’s done that before, when he announced he was done, finished with the Master. 🙂

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@spacedmunkee

Yes, I got caught by that one, as well. Still, at least it’s only The Mirror – who seem to be the first port of call for the ‘disinformation’ team at BBC Cardiff. 😈

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@missy and @ichabod

I certainly wouldn’t call her acting ‘woeful’ – the online fandom seems to be developing what I call an ‘Internet Shitstorm’. That is, somebody picks on something not that great, somebody insists it’s not just ‘not that great’, it’s positively bad, someone then insists it’s AWFUL (with caps) …

… and before you know it, the poor actress or writer has (according to certain sections of the internet) delivered the worst performance/script in the entire history of the universe and should never be allowed to work again. 🙁

I’m really sorry to say that I was expecting the Internet Shitstorm for this episode, because it’s by a woman writer. Interesting that they’ve picked on the eighteen year old co-star instead. Maybe because Catherine Tregenna already has writing credits for Torchwood?

My assessment of Ms Williams is that she’s really good – for an eighteen year old. The areas where she was struggling were the scenes where she was asked to play something that’s probably outside her current emotional experience. She gave it a bloody good go, though.

Actors like Matt Smith, who can convincingly play the emotional depth of a 900 year old when they’re in their twenties, are rare. Even Matt Smith had a visibly better emotional range in his final series than he did in Series 5 – my example would be the Name of the Doctor, where the Doctor’s grief and pain were very affecting.

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@seeoswald

Sorry, but this is not a comment about the writing of the text ‘Doctor Who’.

As a helpful hint: you can identify the writing (if you don’t happen to have a script to hand) by listening to what the actors say (while in character) and by paying attention to the setting and action within a scene.

Anything about the cultural environment of overseas sales areas (including the poor state of geography teaching in the US) is not a comment on the writing of Doctor Who. Comments on writing require evidence taken from the text itself.

Your marks may improve in future if you learn to distinguish between a text and the cultural environment it is produced in.

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