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26 October 2015 at 11:26 #45545
A simple statement of opinion. The writing IS the worst
Well, at least this one is funny…
25 October 2015 at 22:47 #4548825 October 2015 at 20:35 #45470@plainolddave
Anyway, I saw nothing in City of Death that would have been untoward with any other companion.
There was certainly nothing ‘untoward’ about it. Merely that the Doctor suddenly decided on a trip to the notoriously romantic Paris for a meal at a nice little restaurant. Pity about the Jaggaroth.
Generally speaking, when a male of one species offers to take a female of the same species to Paris for some Bouillabaisse – it’s a date. 😉
25 October 2015 at 18:15 #45461@plainOldDave
Did Four care about Romana One and Two, Leela or Sarah Jane? Of course he did, but he never got all wound up in it.
We’ll just have to agree to disagree on that one, because my response to the rewatch of ‘City of Death’ was ‘My God, the Doctor is SO taking Romana on a date!’
Personally, I see the Clara/Capaldi Doctor relationship as one of Daughter and Space Dad – so the hugging is fine for me. Kids often hug their parents.
24 October 2015 at 21:56 #45390I really enjoyed this one as well; the A plot and the B plot fed off each other. Highwaywoman hi-jinks because Ashildr had become both bored and conscienceless. Which feeds into the question: how do you deal with being effectively immortal?
I definitely got the impression that Ashildr had met Missy; we also got an explanation of why Missy likes purple – the colour of death.
Clara’s necklace is back again; except it no longer looks like the one in Series 7. That one had a central jewel in the mysterious-bird. This one has three jewels; two on the wings, one on the body. Costume department having fun?
24 October 2015 at 19:28 #45381Look at her perfect parents.
One of whom is dead.
Sorry, you don’t get away with that by a bit of handwavium ‘that’s just a plot point’. In the less-than-perfect childhood stakes, being orphaned (or, in Clara’s case, half-orphaned) comes pretty high up. Her family is completely happy? Yeah, apart from the whole standing-by-mum’s-grave thing – which is definitely, for most families, a bit of a downer, a major crisis, sometimes a catastrophe.
As plot points go, Clara’s dead mother is a driving force in her Series 7 life. It causes her, for example, to temporarily put her gap year plans on hold when Angie and Artie lose their Mum. She’s not completely happy as a Nanny; she’d rather be travelling (she says so). She’s very firm that she’s still going to travel later – but right now, those kids need her. This drives Series 7 Part 2; the Doctor is offering her a means of travelling (what she wants) without leaving Angie and Artie (what she feels is her duty).
Even after the ‘plot point’ of the leaf, Clara’s dead mother is still a driving force through Series 7 Part 2, Series 8 and now Series 9; why does she react so fiercely when Danny dies, when it looks as if the Doctor might die? Because she lost her Mum when she was still a child.
If you’re completely convinced that Clara is ‘perfect’ you’ve probably missed these little points. The writer has given her a normal, middle class childhood with parents who loved her. And it probably was a very happy childhood – right up to the moment when her mother died.
23 October 2015 at 21:02 #45343Happy Birthday @ichabod 🙂
22 October 2015 at 22:19 #45316At least thirteen. Possibly twenty six. Possibly an infinite number of them.
Or possibly the entire population of Gallifrey consists of different incarnations of the Doctor. It’s just that most of them keep it a secret. 😉
22 October 2015 at 14:02 #45302in a conflict between emotional truth and pedantic rectitude, emotional truth wins
Yup. It’s always worth remembering, when you’re about to fire off an anguished BTL missive about how Lancaster bombers weren’t in service at that date, or electric eels live in South America, that this is fiction.’Truth’, in fiction, is emotional truth.
It doesn’t matter what the court of Denmark was ‘really’ like. What matters is the emotional truth of Hamlet. 😉
22 October 2015 at 09:50 #45296@purofilion
as an occasional teacher myself, I notice she’s not that outstanding there (her questions are often closed 🙂 ) but that’s possibly a script issue.
She’s certainly a pretty good teacher, because – in an inner-city, inner-London class – she keeps her class quiet and attentive even when they’re doing Jane Austen. 😈
21 October 2015 at 20:22 #45268Clara certainly wasn’t perfect as a human in her first series (the one with Matt Smith). Yes, she was in many ways a very good nanny – though personally, I wouldn’t like anyone I employed as a Nanny to take my kids on unauthorised trips through time and space. No, she wasn’t a perfect souffle girl – her souffles always collapsed, or came out burnt. Until she got upgraded by the Great Intelligence, she was struggling with anything computer related.
Where she was oddly, strangely perfect was as the Doctor’s Companion. She stayed where she was put, she could do any job required and she could always say or do exactly the right thing to save the day. Clara still is that oddly, strangely perfect companion, even after Trenzalore. As a human, she isn’t and never has been perfect. As a companion, she’s still ‘born to save the Doctor’. And as a person, the Cloister Bell still keeps clanging whenever she’s in danger of dying.
As far as being undeveloped: yes, I think most people would agree that her ‘puzzle’ nature was initially developed at the expense of her characterisation. I think most people would also say that the dynamic is better with Peter Capaldi (I suspect the casting brief had the production team’s ideas about the next Doctor in mind, rather than Matt Smith’s Doctor).
We have been bashed over the head with script-statements that Clara is simply an ordinary human girl. Honest, guv, she’s perfectly human, perfectly ordinary. Really she is. Admittedly, this could just be a frustrated production team explaining that she bloody well is an ordinary human girl, dammit! 😉
Remember that Coleman wanted to leave the show after the Christmas special. And writers didn’t plan to give as any answers then.
Now, at this point I would ask you to remember that Steven Moffat was so keen to retain Jenna Coleman that he first of all wrote an ending to Series 8 that allowed her to return, and then (after persuading her to at least do the Christmas Special) carefully wrote that Christmas Special so that Jenna could not only decide to stay on even while filming, but could (if necessary) be persuaded even after filming while the Special was being edited. That’s a writer who is very, very keen for an actor to stay on.
If they put out a casting call for the next Doctor Who companion, half of British Equity would be delighted to show up. Much as I think Jenna Coleman is a very good actor, and much as I wish her well in her future career – she ain’t that hard to replace. Maybe she works really well with the rest of the team.
Or maybe Steven Moffat hadn’t finished Clara’s storyline.
21 October 2015 at 13:49 #45256I couldn’t stand Clara because she was too perfect.
That’s a plot point to which we haven’t yet had the answer. And it is, I think, a plot point – because Steven Moffat specifically drew attention to it in the webisode ‘She said, He said’.
Clara as a person is very far from perfect. Clara as the Doctor’s Companion is suspiciously perfect; always able to provide exactly what he needs – even if what he needs is way beyond what should be her abilities. She is, as the Doctor said (and then appeared to forget, which is suspicious in itself), ‘too perfect’.
😉
21 October 2015 at 13:00 #45254::tinkle:: ::chink:: ::polite cough::
Any thoughts on which pub we’re hitting next?
😉I believe The Fox Inn in the Highlands (near Loch Ness) is a lovely little place, though getting the Zygons out at closing time can be problematic.
20 October 2015 at 22:53 #45224I think the Oods hang out in Wookey Hole as well. 🙂
20 October 2015 at 15:32 #45207Thank you for that. One of life’s little mysteries is why on earth I find myself arguing most firmly on the episodes I don’t like. 😉
Though truthfully, I think it’s because people often pick up on what I’d see as non-faults. The faults that the scriptwriters weren’t worried about because they’re things that can be made to work. Those eels, for example, which weren’t being presented as native to the local rivers.
The difference between destructive and constructive criticism: destructive criticism is where people dissect what went wrong. Constructive criticism is where people dissect what appears to be wrong in order to make the script work (or to learn how to make scripts work).
Constructive criticism is much harder. It’s easy to pull a script apart, especially if you don’t like the writer.
I’d disagree with @jimthefish – I think Mathieson had a story he enjoyed, but the main problem was that the story he enjoyed was about ten minutes too short. Even with all the arc-heavy stuff, he was staring at a plot of
- Vikings capture Doctor and Clara
- Viking village is, by a massive TARDIS shaped coincidence, raided by aliens
- Village with no fighters left then declares war on raiders
- Doctor tells them his solution – run.
- He is persuaded to stay and help by the baby
- Doctor’s problem is he has no plan – so comedy training scenes
- Doctor realises what ‘fire in the water’ means and thinks up plan
- Raiders defeated by being fooled into running away
- Ashildr dies in battle
- Doctor remembers Pompeii and therefore
- Brings her back to life
Now, you look at that and you can see two script structure problems – one being that the prologue isn’t remotely connected to the main story and appears to be simply a way of having Clara wearing a spacesuit when the Mire come calling. Compare it with The Caretaker, for example, where Clara’s pre-titles adventures all progress the Clara-Danny subplot.
[I say ‘appears’ because the prologue may turn out to be important for Clara’s arc]
But the main problem is the giant black hole of item 6, where the Doctor can’t think of a plan and we wander off into the comedy training scenes because the Doctor hasn’t got a plan. Take out that bit (or shorten it drastically), and there’s a nicely structured ‘Viking’ plot.
I think the only problem with Jamie Mathieson’s Viking plot was that it came in way too short – so he, or maybe Steven Moffat resorted to the ever-available delaying tactic of the Doctor STILL not having a plan. And then started expanding those comedy training scenes…
19 October 2015 at 18:38 #45150I think Gallifrey is already one of the entrants in the ‘a spaceman did it and ran away’ theory of human evolution, though I can’t quite recall which story.
But it wouldn’t surprise me terribly if the story of the Gallifreyans and the Time Lords turned out to be an Ouroboros Loop. That, for example, they created Clara – and she created them. 😈
[Later addition]
And come to think of it, that would be a lovely, Moffatian twist. That hybrid warrior race that the Doctor is so terrified of creating?It’s the Gallifreyans themselves. 🙂
19 October 2015 at 18:13 #45143I think Robert Holmes meant the Kasterborous Sector, or System, but somehow ‘constellation’ slipped through and got thoroughly stuck in Who legend.
19 October 2015 at 17:57 #45141I found it jarring that the Doctor had such a giant reaction to Ashildr dying, yet in the previous episode seemed to not really care if O’Donnell died..
He did care: he offered O’Donnell the chance to stay in the TARDIS. She refused. The way she reacted suggested she’d guessed that it was to keep her safe – so, she didn’t want to be safe.
Ashildr, on the other hand, had that helmet put on her by the Doctor. He couldn’t keep her safe, because he needed her to save the village. But had he explained to her how dangerous it was? Or had he just used her – like a battery, not like a human being?
Had he been too much the detached Time Lord, like in Pompeii? Needing Donna to remind him, again, that his job is also to save someone.
Incidentally, this script explains the little blip last week, when O’Donnell didn’t mention Donna. The writers couldn’t mention Donna too early, because the Doctor needed to remember her by himself. 😉
In-story, the explanation is probably that Donna’s identity as Companion was classified Top Secret, for her own protection. Too much danger of UNIT’s keen Doctor fans being unable to resist a chat with one of the surviving Companions.
19 October 2015 at 07:23 #45100his might even be a conversation they’ve had several times before
I get that feeling; that they’ve now had The Talk, where the Doctor explained that the companions who survive him are the companions who choose to walk away.
18 October 2015 at 22:22 #45068I wonder if Clara’s future is one where she has to get the Doctor to accept her death? Because death isn’t the worst thing that could happen to her?
Just wonderin’. Because it was carefully established earlier on that the Norse culture believed an heroic, honourable death in battle was the best death that could happen to you.
Ashildr had died heroically, in battle, trying to save her people. And the Doctor, largely for his own selfish reasons, effectively stole that death from her – and gave her eternal life in its place.
And Clara’s realised before that death might not be the worst thing: when she told the Doctor she was staying on Earth in In the Forest of the Night – because she’d seen what being the last of his kind had done to him, and she was having none of it. Better by far to not outlive your species. And now, now, she is getting an object lesson in what immortality might mean. She understands what it means to lose those you love; she’s already lost her mother and her boyfriend.
I’m the Doctor and I save people.
But does that always mean that he has to save their lives?
18 October 2015 at 21:27 #45059@PlainOldDave
Yes, the difference in usage can sometimes be funny. I once nearly gave a North American friend a heart attack by referring to the upcoming ‘Series Finale’. She was all: ‘What? It’s cancelled? When did that happen.’
I meant the finale for Series 7, not the end of the entire series.
‘Season’ does get used – the Before Gap series is usually separated into ‘Seasons’ rather than ‘Series’. They were at the time, however, generally referred to as ‘the first season’, ‘the second season’ etc.
However, I’ve never heard a Brit use ‘Season’ for the After Gap series. When people refer to ‘Season’ they’re usually either talking about US imports or something like Autumn.
Which is ‘Fall’. Odd thing, language. 😉
18 October 2015 at 16:02 #45032I’d be interested to know your ideas – if you want to take a quick look, I’ve done a couple of blogs on the topic myself and so has @nick.
The first blog (by me) is appropriately called ‘Wibbley Wobbly, Timey Wimey’.
The next one discussed Day of the Doctor – I gave my view first, and then Nick gave his view.
The idea I came up with before the Capaldi Doctor was that the situation would be rather like the one in The Fires of Pompeii. That is, from the viewpoint of the Smith Doctor and all Doctors preceding, the Doctor dies at Trenzalore. Just as, in Pompeii, all the seers see tomorrow being an ordinary day.
From the viewpoint of anyone who comes later in the timeline, the Doctor never died at Trenzalore and there was always a Capaldi Doctor. However, I argued, it would take someone from later in the timeline to make that happen. Which kind of implies (now) that Clara (the one who made it happen) is a creation of the timeline beyond Trenzalore.
Given that that was my argument nearly two years back, it’s interesting that we’re now being reminded of the Fires of Pompeii. Just so we can see where his face came from? Or because of the paradox at the heart of that story?
@craig, @phaseshift or any of the mods should be able to help you set up a guest blog.
Diagrams are optional. 😉
18 October 2015 at 13:50 #45022some way needs to be found to expunge this from the Dr. Who universe.
Really? We’ve already seen an early version. By one Jamie Mathieson – the Mummy uses a version of this kind of tech. We’ve also seen Liz 10, who appears to be effectively immortal (and, like the Mummy, is not exactly happy about it). The nanowotsits that we’ve seen in numerous episodes, on the other hand, seem to be capable of knowing when to back off.
The Mire have immortality. And their commander is a drug addict. Might be a bit of a clue to the direction this is going in, and it might explain why the other advanced civilisations don’t have immortality, even when they’re pretty obviously capable of keeping their citizens going forever.
That the Doctor received a second set of regenerations shows that the Time Lords do have the capacity to be immortal. But they don’t do it.
17 October 2015 at 23:23 #44965So – not only did it fail my ‘cup of tea’ test, I decided to pause and do the washing up in the middle of the rewatch.
Okay, obviously not going to be one of my favourites. 😉 But I think I’ve identified the genre: origin story.
Some thoughts: the Capaldi Doctor does indeed think he knows that Clara is going to die on one of these adventures – he keeps giving her the same choice he gave O’Donnell. Get a new hobby, leave. And she’s wearing a blue shirt, like the figure in the serpent’s mouth last week.
Snake theme: Colony Sarff, the serpent mural with someone in its mouth, now the virtual reality dragon.
Things are not what they seem: Missy is (apparently genuinely) still the Doctor’s friend, Colony Sarff is really a load of snakes, the Fisher King is really dead throughout Beneath the Lake and the dragon is really a puppet.
17 October 2015 at 21:51 #44951At some point, in my less than copious free time, I need to check if the Cloister Bell is ringing whenever Clara is in danger of dying. I really don’t remember it ringing quite this much before: it used to be ‘end of the universe’ stuff.
And if it is still ‘end of the universe’ stuff, that says rather a lot about Clara…
17 October 2015 at 21:33 #44947@Miapatric
did they establish about the power of those helmets
I thought that was established when ‘Odin’ turned out to be a holographic projection. They took the Mire’s power to create deceiving images and turned it right back at them.
I’m undecided at the moment. Yes, this episode has established one heck of a lot for the series arc, but the story in it left me feeling distinctly underwhelmed. I wonder how much of Steven Moffat’s co-credit is for series arc stuff, and how much is that he had to do more than the usual level of re-writing.
Or possibly Jamie Mathieson found himself with so much pre-arranged plot, he just couldn’t make the wretched thing quite gell.
But I’m afraid it failed my ‘I want to go and make a cup of tea in the middle of the episode’ test. 🙁 Maybe it’ll be better on a rewatch; some episodes are slow growers.
17 October 2015 at 18:16 #4493816 October 2015 at 18:15 #44873@juniperfish and @ichabod
I think the Doctor’s occasional sexual attraction to humans was almost certainly a side effect of being ‘last of his kind’. There are, after all, other examples of Gallifreyan/Human relationships, and other cross-species relationships in the TV stories. But to be truthful, I always took the ‘really tight skirt’ as purely an after-image of ‘Mr Clever’. It wasn’t supposed to be nice OR to be said out loud – which is why the Doctor slapped himself immediately he realised he’d said it.
I do think that the pre-Time War Doctor would never have gone back to Gallifrey – and even the Time War era Eighth Doctor was trying to avoid both Gallifrey and its War, until he had it forcefully borne upon him that it couldn’t be avoided.
But I think the post-Time War Doctor has been so traumatised by the destruction (at his hand!) of Gallifrey and its possible rescue that he won’t really recover until he can walk on its soil and talk to its surviving people. As Clara bluntly points out, he’s got survivor’s guilt.
@lisa
It’s a long-standing fan trope that the Doctor must have fled from Gallifrey – and not just out of boredom. As @jimthefish has pointed out, the First Doctor and Susan seem frankly terrified of being found. There’s also the Name of the Doctor point that nobody but an idiot (or someone very, very desperate) would steal a TARDIS in such need of repair that it took him nearly a thousand years to get the navigation system under control.Missy’s seemingly throw-away reference in The Magician’s Apprentice might contain some clues; Moffat also has hinted about the ‘lonely little boy’ and resolved the secret about his name by saying that – now – his name really is ‘The Doctor’. But something, in the Moffat corpus, made that name into such a deep secret of the Doctor’s past that The General knew it would be a great password. And River, it appears, also knew it would be an unbreakable password to his tomb.
@Purofilion
It seems (from Last of the Time Lords) that all children of the Time Lord class (possibly all Gallifreyan children) went through this ceremony. The Doctor claims that he ran away – and that might explain the little dig Missy gives him in the Witch’s Familiar, if everyone knows he ran away rather than look into the Ultimate Schism of Rassilon, or whatever it’s called. 😉 It might also explain why he feels such an outcast. He doesn’t have to have been bullied; simply that he was the Boy who Ran, the kid always at the bottom of the class, the one who needed a retake to pass his degree.
He was never the ‘proper’ Time Lord that he was born to be – and he and his mate acted out by becoming 100% Rebel Time Lords.
It might be the ritual. The Doctor certainly talks of insanity as a known side effect, and you have to ask – what kind of society would subject its kids to a ritual known to drive some of them certifiably insane? Or it might be the effects of the Time War on a society that’s already going down some pretty unpleasant paths; a ‘perfect storm’. But the ritual was never Steven Moffat’s idea – that was first described in one of Russell T Davies’ scripts
15 October 2015 at 15:05 #44838@purofilion
generally bad (and a touch nuts)
The direction Steven Moffat seems to be going in is that the way the Time Lords will be remembered is that they ALL went nuts.
Even the Doctor went nuts. The Hurt, Ecclescake, Tennant and Smith Doctors were all, in their various ways either going nuts, trying to recover from being nuts, or just nicely nuts with a side helping of fruit cake. 🙂
I’m pretty confused about the War Council, too. But ‘Listen’ positions officers as including ‘people of Time Lord class who didn’t get into the Academy’ – which fits with the British Upper Classes notion of the army until the reforms; it’s where you send the younger sons too thick to do well in the Church or politics.
This explains an awful lot about the Citadel Guards (etc). However, I suspect the War Council of Gallifrey and The General were simply late developers. 😉
15 October 2015 at 13:33 #44836@purofilion
Oh no, Pip, I’m pretty sure last week you really wanted to see all the TL back, no?
Hee!
The confusion (and Steven Moffat seems increasingly insistent on presenting it as a confusion) is that we call the Gallifreyans ‘Time Lords’. We all do it. Even the Doctor does it (which is another clue to the way he’s been taught to see ‘Time Lords’ as the only people who are real people, rather than, say, puppies).
And they’re not. Most people on Gallifrey aren’t Time Lords. Judging by Listen, most of the War Council weren’t actually ‘Time Lords’ – they were army officers, not Academy graduates.
And it’s made rather pointedly clear that while the Council of Time Lords has a plan that involves destroying the entire universe, sending a small boy insane and killing anyone who disagrees with them – all for the ‘good’ purpose of saving the Council of Time Lords – the War Council and their soldiers want to save, y’know, everybody on Gallifrey? And its plan consists of ‘defend the damn planet’. Even if that involves a last minute dash into an alternate dimension that they may never escape from.
Day of the Doctor starts with the Doctor positioned with the Time Lords ‘greater good’ ethics (his plan to end the Time War partly involved burning small children clutching their teddy bears to death – never ‘good’) and ends with him positioned with the War Council’s ‘defend our people’ ethics. Ironically, the boy who wanted to be a Time Lord rather than a soldier finds himself siding with the soldiers.
The good soldiers. An underlying point in the Zygon subpoint is ‘What is a good soldier?’ UNIT as ‘Earth’s first line of defence’ is a good organisation. UNIT as ‘We’ll blow up London to stop you getting your hands on alien goodies’ is a bad one. The War Council, from what we see of them, are good, honest soldiers.
I don’t see an end to the Time War while the Daleks and the Time Lords remain the same: but I do want Gallifrey and the Gallifreyans back.
But ‘Gallifreyans’ and ‘Time Lords’ are not necessarily identical. 🙂
15 October 2015 at 11:45 #44833As a Time Lord, even one with better than average instincts, he might have had a very different notion than we would of what a good man is
I think @phaseshift would probably be better at this one than I am – but I don’t think the dominant culture of the Time Lords is portrayed as a good one, or one that is likely to produce good individuals.
The evidence is that they’re trained in detachment and non-interference – but that ‘detachment’ has been obtained by seeing all other races as ‘lesser’, ‘inferior’, ‘puppies’. There’s story-logic in there – the Time Lords are generally more intelligent and longer lived. But the Doctor, on his travels, has found out that there’s more to being ‘good’ than intelligence and long life.
I would make a guess that as Steven Moffat has made the Daleks less SF Nazi’s, he’s made the Time Lords more 1930’s/WW2 Germany (and there was that little swastika on one of the kids in Day of the Doctor…). That is, a civilised, decent and sophisticated culture where a combination of a rising ideology and bad events turn it into a perfect storm of evil. Right now, the thought of the Time Lords coming back is enough to make almost every culture in the Galaxy go ‘Oh, shit!’
Then it becomes important for the Doctor whether he’s a good man – and if he can be a good Time Lord. If he can, there’s nothing inherently bad about his people. He can bring them back. Is he a good man? Or are his people good Daleks?
So The Witch’s Familiar fits neatly into ‘Am I a good man’, because it asks the reverse question. Are the Daleks irredeemably evil? Is there such a thing as a good Dalek? Can there be a good Time Lord?
Personally, I have a bonkers theory that the Time Lord culture (as opposed to the Gallifreyan people) isn’t going to survive this – the answer will be ‘No. There can’t be good Time Lords. But there can be good Gallifreyans.’ The Doctor really is the Last of the Time Lords – and will be remembered as one of the few good ones.
14 October 2015 at 23:06 #44797I think my favourite bit of the story was when GhostMoran was chasing Cass.
There was this lovely, stereotyped ‘poor little deaf person, going to get slaughtered because she can’t hear the monster’…
… and then it suddenly turned into ‘Sod being a victim!’
Lovely bit of work. 🙂
14 October 2015 at 17:30 #44783@purofilion @ichabod and @mudlark
I think it was more the potential damage than the actual damage. Remember, before the Doctor went back in time to sort things out, he had evidence in Under The Lake that the ghosts were trying to call a rescue sub to turn more people into ghosts.
What he had (as he said when he pulled his UNIT rank) was a potential world-wide epidemic, if he didn’t stop it immediately.
13 October 2015 at 18:54 #44707the ghosts did not appear in any profound sense to represent the person-hood of the dead they resembled.
I think it ties in with Toby Whithouse’s earlier God Complex. There, the never-seen alien society has created something that takes people’s deepest beliefs and uses them to feed a monster who doesn’t even want to be fed…
Here, the Fisher King has taken people’s very sense of self. Whatever it does obviously needs their ‘dying’ energy, that whatever-it-is that exits stage left when a person turns from a living being to a dead body. And it obviously does need that dying-energy, because O’Donnell doesn’t turn up as a ghost until she’s actually (and not potentially) dead and the harmless-if-icky Prentiss needs to be murdered before he can be used.
Further, the ‘ghosts’ look like the person, even if the body of the person concerned (Moran) is currently small crispy bits on the base floor. So it’s taking dying energy, it’s using some kind of self awareness, or self-image, and then it’s discarding the bits that aren’t needed.
Same sort of idea as the God Complex. In both cases something deeply personal, deeply important is taken, twisted, used for another’s purposes. The question is whether the essential being was still, in some sense, safe and beyond reach or whether the hollowing out of the Fisher King was a theft of parts of their ‘soul’.
13 October 2015 at 14:53 #44691I’ll just add that it also ties in to another of Moffat’s long running themes: ‘death’ does not equal ‘defeat’. It’s not the worst thing that can happen to you: it’s simply the last thing that will happen to you.
13 October 2015 at 14:48 #44690certainly nothing of the essential personality of the individual which might be termed a soul.
I think that’s what’s angering the Doctor so. Moffat does seem to be allowing the Doctor to develop a concept of ‘soul’ – all those conversations with dead people, no doubt. 😉
Because Doctor Who can’t really use a religious meaning, Moffat seems to be using ‘soul’ as shorthand for ‘copy of the individual which is so good you can’t tell it from the original’. With added question mark: the ‘question mark’ being ‘was the ‘copy’ always in truth the original?’
So Rory-the-auton is a copy – but fights his programming in the same way that the ‘real’ Rory would. Then, later on, the ‘real’ Rory remembers being an auton for 1000 years…
The copy-River in the Library acts like the real River.
Danny in the Nethersphere is an electronic copy – but reacts to Clara and the boy in the self-sacrificing way that the real Danny would’ve done. Then dream-Danny (another copy) starts acting and talking not as Clara wants him to, but as if he’s the real person. And the dream-Danny remembers what the electronic-Danny did.
In all these cases there’s a continuity of both memory and essential personality. It’s as if there is such a thing as a Whoniverse ‘soul’, but that ‘soul’ can be contained in a physical body, an electronic avatar, or a dream-existence.
Even Missy doesn’t mess with that directly. She simply (like the Devil) tempts the souls she’s electronically co-opted, encouraging them by lies, by mental torture and by physical torture to effectively commit soul-suicide.
So the Doctor’s anger and fury might be because the Fisher King has co-opted the ‘souls’ he’s taken, has taken a person’s death – and instead of retaining the memory and essential personality, has simply converted it into a physical avatar with no option but total obedience. There’s not even Missy’s coerced choice.
What the Fisher King has done is worse than murder: because what if the reason that there is, seemingly, a continuation of memory and personality into all possible types of ‘body’ is that there is a life after this life? What if the Fisher King hasn’t just stolen people’s lives – but stolen their deaths?
It’s that age old question of ‘What if death is just the next big adventure?’ [Which may well have a bearing on Clara’s fate.] If it is, then the Fisher King just stole it from all those people.
12 October 2015 at 18:30 #44608I agree that we’re being led-by-the-nose in the direction of ‘tragedy’. I don’t recall seeing the Doctor quite this hysterical about companions-in-danger before. So I think that he knows Clara’s future. He thinks she dies young.
To paraphrase what the Doctor said in this episode, he’s talking to Clara when he’s seen her dead on a slab. He’s seeing her as a ghost. That actually ties in with Hide, when Clara points out that everyone is a ghost to the Doctor, because he’s time-travelled past all their lifetimes.
My bonkers theory is that he’s hoping that what he saw isn’t what he thinks he saw; that Clara only appeared to be dead. Or, that he’s trying to change time in such a way that it doesn’t change the course of events. Like, for example, his ‘ghost’ turning out to be a hologram-ghost. But he thinks he knows Clara dies – and he doesn’t know how or when.
This series has so far deliberately called back to the Before Gap series, to the extent of reminding us that Sarah Jane was dumped in Aberdeen. Of the other companions who left during the Tom Baker era, Harry decided the Doctor didn’t need him and UNIT did, Leela stayed on Gallifrey and Romana stayed in E-space to make her own way in the universe.
Are you noticing a pattern? The Tom Baker companions all survived the Doctor – apart from Sarah Jane, they left because they’d decided it was time to move on.
Now, Clara’s been given two main characteristics. Firstly, she stays as long as people need her. Those inner-city kids at school need good teachers; she stays at Coal Hill even in the face of Danny’s death and a collection of sad memories (she’s rather obviously highly respected by UNIT – but UNIT only get priority when the world is in danger). She stayed with the Doctor as long as he needed her – right now, the situation is reversed. He no longer needs her; she needs him.
Secondly, she’s becoming a human version of the Doctor.
Put those two together, and it becomes very possible that Clara’s ‘exit’ is one where she will stay somewhere permanently because they need her to be the Doctor. She’s reported dead, because she never returns to 21st Century Earth.
In my more bonkers moments, I keep thinking that Clara is reported dead – not because she is dead. But because she regenerates. But that’s another theory. 🙂
12 October 2015 at 17:40 #44605@sarah-jane109
If you are genuinely not a troll, but simply someone who is very angry and pissed off at the direction of the current series, then I should probably explain that you have followed a textbook pattern for trolls.
You’ve made a first post that’s almost entirely a list of contentious statements, designed to provoke an angry reply. Then you’ve insulted the forum as a whole. Your second post insists that you are not a troll, and that it’s all our fault for not tolerating your ‘critical thought’.
So – if you do not think of yourself as a troll, then I should warn you that you are behaving exactly like one.
In the meantime, our strapline is on the masthead. This particular forum specialises in bonkers theories about the programme, not strong verbal or written attacks on whichever poor sod happens to be in the Head Writer’s chair. If you should decide to watch an episode through to the end and then come on here with something slightly insane, you’ll find us very happy to engage.
12 October 2015 at 07:34 #44588Capaldi can play the guitar, so put one in his TARDIS and let him rock out a bit. Why not?
It also fits thematically into the larger story, just as they only used Matt Smith’s ability to play high-level football where it was relevant within a story. The Doctor was effortlessly better than Craig at everything Craig did.
Thematically: using Capaldi’s guitar skills recasts the Doctor as ‘rock star’. Not ‘comes down from the sky and tears down your world’, more ‘turns up, trashes a few hotel rooms, does the gig, buggers off’.
But Clara isn’t a Doctor or Missy style Time Lord rock star. If you look at her career, it’s a succession of long term jobs where she stays as long as they need her.
12 October 2015 at 01:19 #44538Haven’t actually watched Interstellar …. 😈
Seriously, having wasted an awful lot of time trying to explain time paradoxes to people wedded to a linear view of time, my experience is that many people just plain don’t get them.
12 October 2015 at 00:52 #44535@Supernumerary
Why bring attention to it here
Bit of a bonkers theory here, but I think the point that needed bringing to our attention was a point people do often miss. Namely, a causal loop is capable of spontaneously creating something without a creator. And it’s not just ideas that can be spontaneously created within the loop; physical objects can also have no beginning and no end.
And Clara is the result of a causal loop. She caused herself. Further, we never saw her mother pregnant, and we never saw any hospital scene or photos of a newborn baby Clara in the hospital. We first see Clara at home, with Dad, as an obviously not newborn baby.
Now, Clara apparently thinks that she caused her own conception, that she has a beginning (just one she caused). But suppose she didn’t? Suppose she’s Beethoven’s Fifth, or the Fez in Day of the Doctor? Suppose, like that music, or that fez, she has no real beginning? She just is.
Why bring a massive amount of attention to the loop? Because people mostly didn’t get the fez, and they really struggled with the causal loop in The Big Bang. They can follow it, but many people don’t understand it. If the Causal Loop is about to become a major plot point, it needed a full-on backstory exposition speech.
11 October 2015 at 23:31 #44527Yes, I was noticing that with last week’s prompt cards for the Doctor and this week’s funeral director card. Both of them written and shot on the assumption that people can and will rewatch – and are easily able to pause and check out little details.
And the entire two-parter really is written on the assumption that you might want to go back to Part 1 after watching Part 2.
Catering to fans? Or an acknowledgement that this show is supposed to be fun? We’re watching for fun, we’re discussing bonkers theories for fun, and sometimes the cast and crew are adding in those little details because it’s fun.
I bet they enjoyed writing the cue cards (‘I’m sorry I should have known you didn’t live in Aberdeen’ indeed!) 🙂
11 October 2015 at 21:14 #44509Prentis’s outfit was specifically that of an undertaker
His costume isn’t actually that far out of its time – the only thing you couldn’t see in a modern funeral is the black ribbon trail on the rear of the hat. I suspect it’s simply a case of the alien dressing appropriately but getting it slightly wrong.
Bit like the Doctor, really. 😉
11 October 2015 at 13:42 #44487By the way, did anyone notice the nice little joke that Clara is now so like the Doctor that she gets her very own companion-who-wanders-off?
😀
11 October 2015 at 08:33 #44478OR, they’re not replacing Clara. Just the actress who plays her. 😉
More seriously, I’m wondering if young Joivan Wade is being considered as a possible new companion, and then they’re going to cast a new female companion after they’ve finished filming the Christmas Special.
10 October 2015 at 22:28 #44438I’ve decided that I’m just going to imagine that the Doctor’s 1000 year diary reached the end of its pages (it was only supposed to last 12 regenerations) – and he’s moved on to a video diary format. 😀
10 October 2015 at 21:34 #44425Yes, I thought of Clara as soon as he said that. Where did Clara come from? She is a bootstrap paradox.
@pachyrhinosaurus – I’m hoping they keep the heavy electric guitar theme for the rest of Capaldi’s run. It would be funny if, at one point, we discover that the ‘Doctor Who Theme’ was, all along, some Gallifreyan punk rock riff that a very young Doctor used to play in his band. 🙂
9 October 2015 at 13:00 #44373@purofilion
I wouldn’t say he lacked faith: his faith lay with Amy
No, his faith in Amy had been destroyed in The Curse of The Black Spot. He trusted Amy to give him artificial respiration. She did – but she gave up. Just before he starts coughing up the water.
‘Destroyed’ is probably too strong a word, but much as Rory loves Amy, one of the underlying themes in their relationship is that he never has faith in her love for him; he always doubts it. And in fact, Amy lets him down quite a lot, despite Rory being the person she loves most in all the universe.
It’s worth noting that Black Spot was originally supposed to be Episode 9 – which means that we’d have had a demonstration of why Rory doesn’t have complete faith in Amy in Ep. 9 and why he doesn’t have faith in the Doctor in Ep. 10.
9 October 2015 at 12:40 #44372Regarding the base – it’s entirely possible it’s an experimental military base and then they discovered what looked like an awful lot of oil underneath it.
It’s certainly odd that there seems to be no on-site means of evacuation. That suggests that somebody knew that the base might need to be cut off. That’s also suggested by the ‘cooling of the nuclear reactor’ method being ‘flood the entire base’. Again, somebody knew that sections of the base might need to be completely cut off.
How much of this will be explained tomorrow, I don’t know – but this ‘advance knowledge’ might be explained by the Doctor’s rather dangerous foray into the past. He may well have left UNIT with an unpleasant bit of foreknowledge – that they have to send this particular group of people to an underlake base, even knowing that they’re sending at least some of them to their deaths.
8 October 2015 at 13:15 #44320Catching up, so apologies if someone else has pointed this out.
This is also substantiated by a comment Steven Moffat made on the subject
The Zeroth Rule of Who: Moffat lies. We have it in writing (the DVD notes for Series 5); he will lie to protect a plot point. Currently I’m rather suspicious of his explanation of the Sonic Sunglasses (‘just because we could’).
But Clara isn’t quite over Danny. She’s partying like crazy and brushes off the Doctor’s suggestion that she start dating again. And you just know things are getting desperate when the Doctor suggests that he would actually feel happier if you had a boyfriend…
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