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7 October 2015 at 22:00 #44284
One way some other sites have done it is to have a yearly contribution – say, through PayPal. As Whisht says, it doesn’t give people extra rights – it’s understood that it’s just to help keep the site going.
Especially if we’re eating up bandwidth.
7 October 2015 at 00:12 #442326 October 2015 at 23:39 #44230@mudlark and @purofilion
Broadly, Ronald Hutton would argue that the Triple Goddess is really the invention of 20th Century archaeologists and historians with an overactive imagination. The neo-pagans then picked it up and ran with it 😉 Yes, it’s usually tied to Moon symbolism. Everything is usually tied to Moon symbolism. But even if it was the result of an overactive imagination, it does seem to pick up on the three ways women tend to be regarded, so probably an imagination doing some important overtime.
There are certainly lots of triples in ancient religion, but it’s doubtful there was a specific, widespread understanding of a ‘Triple Goddess’ in the Ancient World. However, this is the Whoniverse – and frankly, the Triple Goddess is certainly incredibly popular amongst fantasy writers. If Steven Moffat wants to play around with some kind of archetypal Maidens, Mothers (yes, Missy is definitely a Mother) and Other Ones, he’s perfectly free to do so.
6 October 2015 at 23:25 #44226@lisa – the Triple Goddess is generally portrayed in fiction as Maiden, Mother and … the Other One.
Clara is definitely the Maiden – has been kept as The Maiden, in fact, by Danny’s death. Missy, we’ve just discovered, is genuinely a Mother (in every sense of the word). She’s also defined by the Doctor as Wicked Stepmother.
And by the Doctor going to Ohila for advice, Ohila is placed as the Other One in the Wise Woman aspect.
@purofilion – yes, mauve is a warning colour in the Whoniverse. Purple is also a lordly colour (originally due to the sheer cost of the dye), and the colour of sorrow, mourning and penitence. So I suppose Missy could have picked it because it shares some symbolism with black, or because it seems to be a Time Lord colour (judging by Arcadia, anyway).
The Drum is mentioned as being under a lake in the opening scene, so yes, it’s not an undersea base. An underlake base. And now I’m thinking of Drake’s Drum – which is the wrong country (England) but fits with the idea of an after-death signal.
Okay, they’ve named the base The Drum because it’s a signal drum. So either somebody knows what the base really is, to name it that, or this mental earworm has been working away for a long time.
6 October 2015 at 22:54 #44219Oh, yeah, the hissing is definitely a foreshadowing for Colony Sarff. It’s just that I don’t think Missy is the real villain for Series 9. She’s the pantomime villain; the Wicked Witch/Stepmother.
Because, in her completely loopy mind, this death and destruction really is just a game she’s playing with the Doctor. And what we saw in the Magician’s Apprentice/Witch’s Familiar is how she behaves when it’s too serious for games – and how fast she reverts to the game-playing once the danger is past.
6 October 2015 at 22:08 #44211No, the hissing at Missy is an old British pantomime tradition; the audience are expected to hiss the actor playing the villain. In fact, the actor playing the villain judges their success by the loudness of the hissing and booing.
She acknowledges as much by the bow and hanky wave. The pantomime villain has taken the stage – to be superseded by the real villain of this story, as Colony Sarff enters.
6 October 2015 at 21:56 #44210Somehow I can’t see Missy going for weird green. 🙂
It’s probably just that when they tested the black costume next to Peter Capaldi, they decided the colour schemes were too similar.
But it’s interesting. Having her mention a daughter positioned her Triple Goddess role as ‘Mother’, not The Other One. That’s emphasised by having the Doctor earlier refer to her as ‘The Wicked Stepmother’. Oh, well, as long as he doesn’t call her ‘Mildred’.
6 October 2015 at 21:08 #44206All this chat of snakes/serpents and snake/serpent colonies has reminded me that Michelle Gomez was busily chomping away on an apple in the pre-series teaser. Of course, in the Genesis story, it was Eve who ate the apple, not the serpent.
The other thing that keeps niggling about Missy is that she’s dropped her traditional black. She was wearing it initially, then moved to a Time Lord (sorry, Time Lady) purple with black edging.
6 October 2015 at 20:55 #44205Sorry, I seem to have been less than clear. Leviathan isn’t the same as the dragon in Revelations. It’s the number of heads, you see. 🙂 The serpent in the illustration could definitely be Leviathan, but not the Revelations dragon.
They may both, of course, be representations of Satan. But while it’s pretty certain the ten headed dragon in Revelation is supposed to be Satan, opinion is divided on whether Leviathan was simply a really big sea-crocodile.
6 October 2015 at 19:40 #44198[Replying here, because I realised I was referencing the trailer]
The dragon of Revelation doesn’t really fit with the illustration. Too few heads. 😉
The masts, on the other hand, could well be three crosses in the Greek Orthodox style. And there are indeed three Greek Orthodox crosses in the story, on the top of that church (the ‘temple’).
6 October 2015 at 18:48 #44196Thanks for the illustration.
Hmm. Okay. First thought is: that’s a cheery illustration to have in your undersea base. 🙂
It’s not a copy of the Dawn Treader illustrations, but it is in very much that style. It might well be supposed to be the serpent scene – then you’d have the three kids and Caspian, four characters. Except nobody got eaten and the ship has three masts, not the single mast of the Dawn Treader.
So presuming that they’re simply riffing off the style (which would be entirely appropriate, given the developing theme for the series), then what I note is that the serpent, like the ghosts, has black holes where its eyes should be. And while the person in its mouth is in serious trouble, they’re not dead (yet).
That rigging looks incredibly odd (that could just be the artist saying ‘sod realism, I’m painting a Sea Serpent‘…) – it’s the top crossbar that’s the problem. It looks one heck of a lot more like those top crossbars are rigged for radio transmission, not sails.
As well as it being the Doctor in the Serpent’s mouth (again?) you might argue that the four figures are the four currently surviving crew. The three radio masts would then be the three dead people acting as transmitters.
Anyone else fancy some art criticism?
6 October 2015 at 14:52 #44182@bendubz11 – I think that the idea Glastonbury might turn up later is a definite goer, as bonkers theories go. If we’re doing Arthurian stuff, it’s heavily associated with Arthur.
But I suspect Moffat might be playing homage to the tenth anniversary of BBC Wales taking over Doctor Who – and at least partly using the Welsh version of the Arthurian canon – the Mabinogion.
6 October 2015 at 14:18 #44180Even a wibbly-wobbly spacey-wacey way would need some kind of underground trans-dimensional tunnel. We’re talking about 650, 700 miles?
Caithness is the Northeasternmost tip of Scotland. Glastonbury is in the South-West of England. Any alien who crashes their ship in Caithness and then gives directions to Glastonbury is seriously lost. 😉
6 October 2015 at 13:11 #44175Even in the Whoniverse, Glastonbury is nowhere near Caithness. For one thing, it’s in an entirely different country.
I cheerfully acknowledge that they may reference Glastonbury in a later story.
😉
5 October 2015 at 22:41 #44142the TARDIS’s special discomfort with everything that is happening, right down to the Cloister Bell.
Yes, it’s no wonder the TARDIS doesn’t like Clara. Not only was she sent on board by Missy, I swear Ol’ Sexy has had to ring that great clangy bell more times in Clara’s tenure than in the tenures of all the previous Companions combined!
There just seems to be something about Clara that attracts time paradoxes. 😀
5 October 2015 at 21:31 #44135It’s very possibly a Cold War era simulated Russian village in Caithness, or some such. The army tries to simulate current conflicts (or potential conflicts) as accurately as they can, and will go to the extent of building a complete simulated urban area in the appropriate style. It’s not too much of a stretch that there might be an old simulated-Russian-town hanging around on MOD land.
Okay, so we’ve had Battlefield references. Are we now getting Curse of Fenric references? I don’t particularly want a reprise of Fenric as a villain, but I’m reminded that the Doctor’s Companion Ace turned out to be one of Fenric’s pawns.
5 October 2015 at 20:59 #44134they changed electronic/mechanical settings
Ghosts do that. At least, they f@@k up electronics, so Toby Whithouse is entirely justified in riffing off that and making his ghosts able to interfere productively with the base’s electronics.
5 October 2015 at 17:20 #441135 October 2015 at 13:39 #44107Kate makes a very specific reference to the Tower Ravens (twice). Once she describes them as ‘ravens of death’ (Power of Three), and the second time in The Day of the Doctor, she remarks that the ravens need their batteries checking.
In terms of your tarot theory, the location of the Tower is pretty obvious. But the Tower of London also has a rather tenuous connection with the Arthurian legends – the head of Bran the Blessed is supposed to be buried there. Or possibly not, because the other legend is that Arthur dug it up and chucked it in the sea, on the grounds that he could do the job of protecting Britain.
Bran is a conduit between this world and the next.
5 October 2015 at 13:03 #44106And now I’m thinking – they flooded the base to cool the nuclear reactor. Was/will the flooded village of 2119 be flooded deliberately in 2019 (or whenever) to cool all those on-site nuclear reactors?
Shades of Pompeii. Why is the Doctor wearing this face? Is it because he’s going to have to repeat his Pompeii decision again, and again, and again – but must always remember to save someone?
5 October 2015 at 12:49 #44104For fans of Big Finish Audio: John Hurt will be developing his role as the War Doctor in twelve new audio plays.
Details here.
5 October 2015 at 12:23 #44102What if none of this was an accident.
Oh, it’s not an accident. Dounreay, Caithness, was the site of both the UK Atomic Energy Authority’s and the Ministry of Defence’s atomic research stations. The AEA’s plants have been commissioned, and they are indeed seriously considering decommissioning the Naval testing plants as well. They test nuclear sub engines there.
Remember our undersea reactor? The one where they flooded the base to keep it cool? Definitely built by Chekhov’s Nuclear Reactors, Ltd. 😉
It is most certainly NOT a place you’d want any alien spaceships hanging around, unless they were shaped like a 1950’s police box. 🙂
4 October 2015 at 16:05 #44046Like you, I think the Doctor as ‘Merlin’ ties into the Cartmel Masterplan insofar as it represented the Doctor as somehow more than he seemed.
If I’m remembering the story of Battlefield correctly (@Phaseshift??), while everyone recognised that the Doctor was the Merlin they knew, people kept saying that his face had changed. So, not the McCoy Doctor.
If there’s a Moffat Masterplan, it’s subject to change without notice as actors move on/aren’t available/refuse to appear. But what it seems to be is a development of the Cartmel Masterplan along the lines of ‘This is a story about time travel, dammit!’ 🙂 That is, the Doctor may well be far more than he appears to be. But that’s not his past. It’s his future.
But in a universe that contains Time Lords and time travel, one heck of a lot of people know his future.
Our Doctor, the Doctor we see now, is just John Smith from Gallifrey. He’s a stage magician, a trickster, not some kind of universe-saving demigod. But as he said last week, on a good day, when things go right, he can be ‘The Doctor’.
The Capaldi incarnation is very aware that ‘The Doctor’ is a role he plays. More so than many of his previous incarnations; this is the man who remembers when he wasn’t ‘The Doctor’. He is John Smith. Hence the t-shirts, the pullovers, the basically ordinary clothes instead of a costume worthy of ‘The Doctor’.
He’s not a rock star. Until he puts on his sonic sunglasses. Indoors. 😉
4 October 2015 at 14:40 #44042just read in the paper that due to the falling in ratings, that the 10th season may be done into 3 last specials.
Yes, I’m positive that the BBC is going to cancel their fourth most popular programme. 🙄 It makes so much sense to lose all those International sales, especially after they’ve lost Top Gear as well.
If we are getting a year of specials next year (and it’s still very much in the realm of ‘bonkers theory’ rather than ‘definite information’), the likelier explanation is a change of producer or a change of leading actor. The +7 viewing figures for Peter Capaldi are actually better than for many episodes in Tennant’s first series and the rumours are that the iPlayer downloads are nearing or have exceeded the 2 million mark.
4 October 2015 at 13:37 #44039It’s certainly not in my edition – but if it’s not a direct copy, then it’s definitely in the Pauline Baynes style.
Could be copyright issues or it could be that they wanted that particular scene and then found she hadn’t illustrated it.
4 October 2015 at 09:21 #44016the Doctor’s strange comments about ghosts
They’re not strange: he’s pretty well forced to that explanation. They’re translucent images of dead people which can walk through walls and they only come out at night – what else can you call them? The only question is whether they’re a ‘copy’ like Missy’s digital downloads or the alien has a way of taking the ‘soul’ of the dead person and keeping it a) here and b) under their control.
If you see it as a deliberate movement away from his Third/Fourth Doctor dogmatism, then it makes sense. The Doctor did indeed think there were no such things as ghosts; he’s becoming less and less sure that he’s right.
For some reason, in both this and the last series, whether there is some kind of life after death is under discussion. And, for some reason, the Doctor currently wants to find out. The likeliest explanation is that he’s nipped forward to look at Clara’s future (in Listen, maybe) and found out she dies. Right now, he doesn’t know how to save her.
Or it may be more after-effects of the Time War. Whatever: he badly wants to believe that the people he’s lost aren’t gone, forever – but as a Time Lord, he’s been taught all his life that death is the end.
Maybe Moffat’s doing the same thing he did with religion in Who – moving us away from that dogmatic scientism: towards a more agnostic/neutral ‘honestly, folks? We really don’t know.’
4 October 2015 at 00:40 #44002Purely from a logistical point of view, they’ve not only cast Sophie Stone, they’ve also had to cast another actor, Zaqi Ismail, specifically to play the role of her translator. And yes, Toby Whithouse has woven Lunn in beautifully – but that’s still two actors to pay.
Then they had to explain why the Doctor, who speaks all languages, suddenly can’t speak BSL.
So I suspect Cass being profoundly deaf is very important to either the plot, or the ongoing series arc. At the moment, my guess is that she’s the one person who can’t be a transmitter.
But it certainly ties into the series arc: remember last week when we found out that Daleks literally cannot express what they want to say?
3 October 2015 at 23:35 #43998And on a second watch – that’s why Lunn doesn’t get killed by the Pritchard ghost. He’s never been inside the spacecraft, so never got implanted with the ‘earworm’.
It’ll be interesting to see if Cass is similarly immune – because they’re playing her as no spoken language at all – or if she’s in danger, and will sign the message.
3 October 2015 at 22:49 #43996Oh, yeah, the big, huge, carefully shown painting in the base of the ship and the monster?
It’s an illustration from the Voyage of the Dawn Treader, part of C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia.
Cue the Doctor as Aslan, Missy as the various evil witches, and Clara as one of the kids?
3 October 2015 at 22:26 #43991If they are having a ‘Merlin’ arc, a Battlefield reference is absolutely essential. The Doctor is very specifically equated with Merlin in that story, to the extent that he admits to Ace that a future or alternate version of himself may well be Merlin.
Sadly, at this point, Doctor Who was being watched by about two fans and their pet Dalek*, so it’s not terribly surprising that you haven’t seen it. Or that they didn’t reference it more specifically, but just included some fan-spottable references.
*Well, about 3.1 million viewers. But I think most of them were Zygons.
3 October 2015 at 21:57 #43986And, of course, the Ace of Swords. I didn’t spot that one; the Battlefield references are definitely all over the place.
3 October 2015 at 21:50 #43985Yes, ‘projections’ would certainly explain how we could have a Doctor-ghost without the Doctor genuinely dying.
@juniperfish – what I think they may be harking back to is a purely Whovian reference. Battlefield, where the ‘Lady in the Lake’ was Ace. ‘Merlin’ was quite specifically referenced as the Doctor – this was the Cartmel Masterplan era, as @denvaldron explained so brilliantly.
We’ve got the underwater spaceship, the sword reference, the UNIT connection, a deaf character instead of a blind one, the base filling with water and trapping the Companion and the nuclear engine (which, I strongly suspect, has been supplied by Chekhov’s Nuclear Reactors, Ltd.) 🙂
3 October 2015 at 21:17 #43978Okay, so last story we had a cliffhanger with Clara, Missy and the TARDIS dead, and this week we end up with the Doctor dead.
My wild guess is that the Doctor isn’t actually dead … but there’s definitely an ‘apparently dead but not really’ theme developing here.
Otherwise, lovely ‘base under siege’ stuff. It had me reverting to watching halfway through the door near the end.
3 October 2015 at 13:48 #43962Just a riff off Genesis of the Daleks before we tootle off to undersea adventures:
last time the Time Lords tried to re-engineer the Daleks, they sent the Doctor. Suppose this time, they sent Missy?
She does mention fighting the Dalek Supreme. And it would fit with Missy’s attitude towards the Doctor if she’s decided that she can’t do this herself. Because what needs to happen is a kinder, gentler Dalek, and kinder and gentler isn’t really her thing. 😈
Okay – so that would explain:
- Why Missy is so keen for the Doctor to survive that she sends Clara to him in the first place.
- Why she seems to have a very detailed knowledge of the Dalek engineering constraints.
- Why she uses Clara to both test the limits and show Clara the limits.
- Why she encourages the Doctor to kill Dalek Clara – she wants Clara to beg for mercy, so the Doctor hears a Dalek begging for mercy (knowing Missy, I can entirely believe she’s heard a Dalek beg for mercy).
- Why the Doctor, who was looking for a bookshop, suddenly finds his TARDIS diverted to an important moment of Skaroan history.
Her plan in Dark Water/Death in Heaven also depended on people being constrained by engineering, incidentally. And the Master was so bloody terrified of the Time War Daleks that he literally ran to the end of the Universe to escape them. As Missy points out, it’s normally the Doctor who does the running. 😉
2 October 2015 at 23:27 #43944@lisa and @others
The Radio Times story does contain a comment from Patrick Ness which spoilerphobes might prefer to avoid.
2 October 2015 at 21:05 #43942a replacement for the Sarah Jane Adventures,
A lot of people are saying that, but my slightly satirical take would be ‘Doctor Who meets Press Gang’. Putting it under the BBC3 banner aims it firmly at older teenagers, whereas Sarah Jane Adventures was under the CBBC banner – so pre-teens and early teens.
They also seem to be basing it around Coal Hill’s Sixth Form (which we saw in The Day of the Doctor, and, indeed, which Susan seemed to be attending back in 1963). That does have the advantage of natural turnover of the young actors as they enter/leave Sixth Form.
Wonder if they’ve cast Ellis George again? There are also a couple of other young actors who seem to be recurring Coal Hill schoolkids. But again, setting it in the Sixth Form makes it really easy to import actors we’ve never seen before.
I would say that if Jenna Coleman is in it, she’d be the lead. But, I get the feeling she wants to move on. If Clara a) survives Series 9 and b) is still teaching at Coal Hill, she might be an oft mentioned but seldom-seen presence, rather like The Doctor was for the Sarah Jane Adventures.
30 September 2015 at 23:56 #43866Then I’d guess she was promised a bang-up exit! As for why, why not?
Yes, but that’s … boring now, isn’t it? Boring-ers. Blue boring-ers! 😉
More seriously, she had a bang-up exit. Her potential exit in Death in Heaven was heartbreaking, and her other potential exit in Last Christmas was bitter-sweet. So from her point of view, I’d think it’s more than a bang-up exit; it’s some kind of show-off plot-line or series of stories.
And it ties in to Clara’s ongoing storyline, somehow.
That ‘hybrid’ jab of Missy’s – she flicks her eyes directly at the Doctor when she says it. Or is she looking directly at Clara?
The way the scene is shot, the director has quite deliberately chosen to make it unclear.
30 September 2015 at 22:32 #43858What still bothers me is how is Clara born in her Claricle forms?
No idea. 😀
Seriously, what has always puzzled me is how Clara’s Mum also turns up for the Claricles. At least, we see Ellie Ravenswood (or the Victorian version thereof) with little Victorian Clara. And Oswin Oswald was dictating her diary to her Mum, as well.
See, I can understand how leaping into the Doctor’s timeline can scatter infinite versions of yourself all over the universe. But how the heck do you drag your Mum along with you? It’s certainly a neat trick.
I can’t help feeling that it somehow connected with Ellie’s ‘I will always find you’ line. Wherever the Claricles went, her mother always found her.
I wonder what arguments Moffat and Capaldi used to convince her to sign on for S9?
The two traditional arguments are a) more money and b) an interesting plotline. Since this is the BBC, not US TV, we’re probably talking b). 🙂 My question would be ‘why did Steven Moffat want so badly to convince her to sign on for S9?’
Jenna Coleman is a lovely and talented actress, and I’m very glad that her agent has been sharp enough to find her something both high profile and NOT science-fiction for her next role. But Companions aren’t actually that difficult to replace.
So why was Steven Moffat so very keen to keep her on? Is there some plotline for S9 that absolutely needs the Companion to be Clara Oswald?
Definitely a field for bonkers theories…
30 September 2015 at 15:00 #43847@purofilion
And how come Moffat always looks well rested and bouncy?
He recently said in an interview that they’d been able to afford to completely redo his writing room, so that it was now big enough for the boys to come into and be with him when they came home after school.
This is, I suspect, the secret. While he’s working like crazy, he’s working at home – and basically as a family business. The boys are his beta readers for Who and his wife is his producer on Sherlock.
30 September 2015 at 14:41 #43846Everything – everything – Moffat writes is about the exploration of character.
I’d agree with that one. He’s a very fine writer of dramatic character, which is not at all the same skill as portraying character in a novel. The script is the skeleton of characterisation; it’s meant to give the actors something they can build on.
I’m not at the level of the series regulars in Doctor Who – if I ever got a part in Who it would be the character with two lines who dies horribly showing how the monster works. 😉 But every time we get an ‘X was acting out of character’ comment, I go and take a look at the back story. And, honestly, so far I have found the through line every single time. It’s always there. There’s always a reason for the character to be behaving like that. And unlike some writers (Joss Whedon comes to mind), Steven Moffat is always careful to tell his actors spoilery details about their character if he knows it should impact on the way they play things.
So, yes. He explores character, and he seems to be very aware of what his actors need to do in order to do their part of the job: which is to communicate what that character is feeling and experiencing to the audience.
29 September 2015 at 15:15 #43776@purofilion
As I said, I may be fighting a losing battle there.
But I can’t tell you how annoying it can be to spend five minutes trying to work out an episode title – and then discover that the letters I read weren’t actually in the order that they were written in. 😉
29 September 2015 at 13:39 #43774No, the Clara walking away walks back sadly to her flat. Only to discover that she can’t get into her bedroom because the nightmare date now has 50% more added nightmare – Space Dad hiding in her bedroom to make absolutely sure she doesn’t get up to anything. 😉
In other words, Clara Walking Away is walking back to the beginning of the episode.
29 September 2015 at 11:38 #43767from when she was born
No. We go through Clara’s timeline from when she was a small baby.
There are no shots of a pregnant Ellie, and the first shot of baby Clara is not the famous and oft-written Hospital Scene, with Proud Mum In Bed Holding Baby. It’s of Dad holding Baby Clara in their house.
Clara may indeed be a normal human girl – but those scenes are written to leave the possibility of adoption open. The adoption possibility also gets referenced later in Listen, when the Doctor seems to think it’s plausible that Clara once lived in a Children’s Home.
29 September 2015 at 11:31 #43766@everyone
I may be fighting a losing battle here, but the only Whovian acronyms I can read instantly are RTD (for Russell T Davis, who I now see as having the nickname Ar-Tee-Dee) TARDIS (for TARDIS) and I’ve now learnt to handle AG and BG (bit like BCE and CE, only with Gap). BTL has recently been added! Yay!The problem is that, apart from the TARDIS (a word in caps), I read acronyms as individual letters and have learn, slowly, to associate the letters I’m reading with the concept they represent. And there’s just too many damn episodes for me to do that easily with episode titles.
So, basically, my reading will go: TWF – Tee double-you eff – what the heck is TWF? -it’s probably an episode – oh, The Witch’s Familiar.
Apologies for the long explanation, but even ‘Witch’ and ‘Magician’ would be a lot easier, if the problem is trying to type on those little virtual keyboards.
Thank you. 😀
29 September 2015 at 11:20 #43765@purofilion
For instance, we don’t know if Davros’ tears were entirely false.
We don’t know if his congratulations on the survival of Gallifrey were entirely false. If Davros’s most intense motivation is the survival of his people, it’s possible that he still has the empathy to realise that the Doctor being the last of his people would be the most terrible fate imaginable. And still has enough compassion left to realise that, however much he may hate the Doctor, he doesn’t hate him that much.
It also hints at a possible resolution for this wretched Time War.
[Can you tell I want the Time War to be over, finished, ended? In terms of writing holes, that’s the huge great deep one that we got landed with. Simply because it was a concept RTD came up with when he thought his new Doctor Who would only last one series – and now we’re ten years and nine full series in and it’s a giant black hole.]
::ahem:: Anyway, if Davros still has sufficient empathy to be glad that the Time Lord he’s about to trick and kill at least still knows his people will survive him, then possibly the Daleks also have sufficient empathy to (eventually) realise that perhaps – if both sides most basic desire is to want their people to survive – some kind of Mutually Assured Destruction Treaty is possible.
28 September 2015 at 21:17 #43731I think Missy’s characterisation has been consistent since the closing scenes of The Last of the Time Lords; nobody kills the Doctor except Missy! 😉
I agree that part of it is simply wanting her friend back, but I wonder whether Moffat’s also built on the Master’s discovery that it was Rassillon and the Council of Time Lords who were responsible for his madness. It’s as if the Master originally thought his madness was partly his former friend’s fault. And now that Missy knows it isn’t, a large dose of resentment has simply disappeared.
At least, I find it difficult to imagine previous Master’s telling that ‘the Doctor escapes’ story in quite the admiring way Missy did.
28 September 2015 at 20:57 #43728No, he set it up two or three script pages before.
Nope, sorry. It’s definitely not a Deus Ex Machina. Using regeneration energy for someone other than themselves is a previously known character attribute of Time Lords, so the only thing that needs to be set up within the episode are the revolting sewers.
The set-up is in two parts.
First part: Missy and Clara arrive in sewers, Missy explains that the sewers on Skaro are decaying Daleks and pokes one with a stick. It reacts. That’s about ten minutes/script pages into the episode.
Second part: Missy pokes holes in a Dalek, leading to the discovery that the decaying Daleks are even more pissed off than the normal Dalek, and will kill the younger Daleks if they get a chance. That’s fifteen minutes/script pages in.
Resolution: Comes at 38 minutes/script pages in.
So as @pedant says, what we’re looking at here is a Chekhov’s Dalek. Set up in the first ten minutes, false resolution very soon afterwards, real resolution at the end (ish).
Regarding Clara: I’ve given my back-story explanation, as have others. It is the job of the writer to write a character in such a way that the actor can make sense of the characterisation. It is then the job of the actor to convince the audience about that characterisation.
If Jenna Coleman didn’t manage to convince you that Clara was so terrified that she developed fear-induced stupidity, I’m afraid that’s Jenna Coleman’s fault. It’s an acting failure, not a writing failure.
It’s not the fault of Steven Moffat; he’s not obliged to write scripts that include flashbacks every ten seconds, or lines explaining Clara’s Dalek phobia, just to help an actor convince the audience that they’re terrified out of their wits.
Or, as @arbutus said, it may be simply the way the people in the audience are all different.
28 September 2015 at 15:42 #43703Instead of treating The Witch’s Familiar as a single episode, why don’t you try treating it as a chapter in a continuing story?
If Clara has any residual memory of being mutated into Dalek Oswin, she will be terrified – especially when she realises that she can’t even say her own name (Oswin had managed to hack a lot of the control systems before the Doctor met her and could say her own name). This Clara’s got Dalek nano-genes doing uncontrolled stuff in her brain, and Missy has just admitted that she has no idea what damage will be done getting her out. Implying, incidentally, that no one has survived to get out.
That Clara is terrified is shown, not told when she fires multiple, uncontrolled shots during that first scene inside the Dalek. Additionally, in Into The Dalek, she’s seen how unreasonably and cruelly the Doctor can react to Daleks. She had to slap him to make him realise that Daleks could be anything but evil; now she’s inside a Dalek herself. And the Doctor has a gun, and has just been told that this is the Dalek who killed Clara.
Personally, I think my vocabulary at this point would consist of ‘wibble’. 😉
For Clara’s behaviour to be a ‘plot pawn’, it would need to have never been previously set up; completely against previous characterisation. But the behaviour has been previously set up – just not in this episode. Clara has good reason to be absolutely terrified – especially of facing the Doctor as a Dalek.
And as @mudlark points out, Clara has been known to make decisions that are obviously stupid when she’s scared.
28 September 2015 at 00:25 #43641do time lords and ladies have pockets that are bigger on the inside, or what?
Yes. Remember Vampires of Venice, and Matt Smith removing the biggest torch in the world from his pocket?
The Doctor drinking a cup of tea gag can probably be explained by those ‘bigger on the inside’ pockets.
the tardis’ new ability to re-assemble itself from its scattered atoms
It’s not a new ability – it’s from Frontios and it’s well over thirty years old, in fact. Though I admit I would never have remembered where I’d seen it before if it hadn’t been for one of the Graun’s BTL’ers mentioning Peter Davison and the roundels scattered around various walls. Yeah, the TARDIS has done this before.
27 September 2015 at 23:03 #43629Could people try to spell out at least some part of the episode names unless they are in an absolute, tearing, have to be out the door in the next two minutes hurry?
Currently TMA is giving me flashbacks to the Open University (@Miapatrick will understand), SiTL sounds like a small village in Poland and I keep reading FoTD as ‘fetid’.
Many thanks. 🙂
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