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27 September 2015 at 22:30 #43617
If she turns out to have Time Lord blood she might regenerate!
Something that I’m increasingly contemplating. If you think about it, had Jenna Coleman decided to leave after Last Christmas, the Christmas episode would have ended with Clara’s death from old age. A death from old age which was deliberately mirroring the Doctor’s death from old age in The Time of The Doctor.
Well, that would’ve been a bit of a bloody downer on Christmas Day, wouldn’t it? Frankly, it sounds far more RTD than Steven Moffat. 😈
So I’m wondering if the last thing we’d have seen in Last Christmas was Santa’s gift – of a great, massive, golden glow of regeneration energy rising from Clara’s ‘body’. 😀
27 September 2015 at 22:20 #43615Regarding the brooch: it could certainly have been a mourning brooch – though if it is, you’d expect it to open and have some kind of memento inside it. Admitting that Missy is an entire plantation of bananas, her delivery when she says the Doctor gave it to her seems fond rather than sad. As if she’s recalling a happy memory. It doesn’t quite fit with being given it on her daughter’s death.
Though we are looking at the Wicked Stepmother, here. 😉
‘Dark star’ is an utterly perfect description of Missy/The Master, don’t you think? That also makes me think it was a gift TO Missy, not something in memory of her daughter.
While a brooch is normally a female item of wear, the male Time Lords were occasionally seen with brooches. The Sixth Doctor is the best known example.
27 September 2015 at 15:54 #43550I think the Sonic Sunglasses may have been Moffat’s attempt to create a Doctor Who play item that doesn’t retail for 12.99 on Amazon.
Kids’ sunglasses are, after all, very cheaply available – or you could probably use the 3D specs that you get for 50p. 😉
27 September 2015 at 13:50 #43539But, it is the Christmas episode, so more likely to be a heart-warming tale of family reunion
I think that’s because, unlike RTD, Moffat has a young family. So he seems very conscious that the Who Christmas episode could potentially ruin some children’s Christmases – you don’t leave things on a downer. Explorations of grief and loneliness, fine, but remember that Christmas is celebrating that we’re ‘halfway out of the dark’.
End it with people coming out of the dark. Kazran and Abigail getting their Christmas, Maud and her kids rescuing Dad, the Doctor realising that this Clara has died, but she died before – and a final scene of modern Clara so the kids realise the story hasn’t ended, and somehow ‘Clara’ isn’t dead. Santa getting Clara and the Doctor back together again.
So if this Series is a dark one, the Christmas episode should be the turning point.
27 September 2015 at 09:23 #43524Posting here because this speculation relies on a casting spoiler (I haven’t read the last page of TWF yet, so someone else may already have come up with it).
The Doctor’s already fulfilled the prophecy. River’s the warrior hybrid. Remember those charts in the hospital, in Let’s Kill Hitler, which seemed to show two hearts?
That’s why River’s back at Christmas.
27 September 2015 at 09:13 #43523I can think of two occasions when you’d give the Master a present because of a daughter. One is the birth – though our custom is that the presents are for the baby. Still, even if Moffat’s following that, it’s possible that the female looking brooch was for the baby girl, and Missy’s daughter is now dead.
BUT, Missy said ‘he gave it to me’, not ‘he gave it to my daughter’. That leads me to the other occasion when it’s often traditional to give presents: a marriage. Small presents are often exchanged between the bride’s parents and the groom’s parents.
So: did the Doctor’s son marry the Master’s daughter? And Susan is their daughter?
Because if you reintroduce Susan (or a Susan-descendent) who is related to both Missy and the Doctor, you’ve got built-in interest for the younger generation who’ve only vaguely heard of her.27 September 2015 at 01:05 #43498One that belongs in the BBC Spoilers section. Naughty @pedant!
27 September 2015 at 00:35 #43494Well, if we’re going to have ‘Doctor Who: The Musical’, then we must, absolutely must, have a cover of this song by the Simm Master’s favourite band.
Come to think of it, that song may have been in his thoughts when he regenerated as Missy… 😉
27 September 2015 at 00:09 #43492So I want to know is Clara still inside the Dalek?
Probably not – though if you want to float a bonkers theory that everything that happens in the rest of this series is Clara’s fantasy as she’s slowly turned into a Dalek, we’ve already had it (Series 7, only it was the Doctor’s fantasy). But feel free to revive it. 😉
Realistically, I suspect the reason we don’t see her get out of the Dalek is the same reason we don’t see her get into the Dalek – because it takes a team of technicians to ease Jenna Coleman past all the radio controlled special effects and into/out of the seat.
26 September 2015 at 23:15 #43484Okay, still talking about Missy and Clara, and an interesting point:
WHY does Missy cover Clara with her own body when the Dalek explodes?
I mean, I get that she needs Clara to operate the Dalek – but for someone who’s being so cavalier with Clara’s life at every other point before then, it’s odd. You’d expect her to use Clara as a shield, not shield Clara herself.
26 September 2015 at 22:22 #43480The line that gave me chills was ‘That was why I gave her to you’. That sounded so very like Mum explaining to Dad why she gave him custody …
26 September 2015 at 21:42 #43472Er was it just me, but the Doctor seems to have acquired a ring on the third finger of his left hand this series?
He had it last series as well, but they seemed nervous of showing it until they’d referenced River. After that, they’re fine with it.
The actual explanation is that Peter Capaldi hates taking his wedding ring off in case it gets lost or stolen – so they covered it up with a more Gallifreyan looking ring.
26 September 2015 at 21:26 #43467nothing has really changed.
Everything has just changed. Everything.
The Daleks have a concept of mercy. Hidden away inside them, like the tiny seed that can grow into a giant oak.
The Daleks aren’t, by nature, totally evil. They want to rebuild their home – so they understand ‘home’. They understand ‘parent’ (and show care for their parent). They have a concept of ‘mercy’. And if they have a concept of ‘mercy’, then (for all Davros insists it’s wrong), they can understand ‘compassion’ and ‘forgiveness’. When the evil engineering is switched off, they can understand beauty and understand that their own culture is evil.
This two-parter is a pair with Into The Dalek – and between them, they’ve just radically changed the entire concept of the Daleks.
26 September 2015 at 21:04 #43458Or Clara is a copy and/or descendent of the daughter, yes.
Though Missy’s attitude to Clara was very much a kind of Spartan mum one. ‘I expect you to survive, if you don’t – you’re not worth keeping anyway.’
I also noticed how the Doctor’s ‘you always look the same to me’ in Last Christmas was echoed by Missy’s ‘he always looks the same to me’ tonight, and that Clara’s survival is becoming increasingly important to the Doctor.
26 September 2015 at 20:48 #43452Now, any bets that Susan was the Master’s granddaughter as well as the Doctor’s? Or even that Susan WAS that daughter?
😀
26 September 2015 at 20:35 #43449Oh, neat.
And it loops right back to The Big Bang, when the Dalek begs for mercy. Which the Doctor, of course, didn’t see.
25 September 2015 at 01:10 #43389Exactly. It’s almost like Danny – and Clara – have been artificially inserted into the timestream.
Though we have seen Clara be concerned over a pupil (Courtney), feeding her charges when she was nannying and generally getting very involved in her work. But you don’t get the little glimpses that you did with Amy and Rory. Amy’s various jobs, Rory on his Stag Night, both of them having a barbecue with mates, the pair of them out shopping: all the times when they were doing ordinary stuff and the Doctor turns up.
Likewise, moving out to Sherlock, we see Watson with his psychiatrist, Sherlock’s parents, discover Mycroft cannot stand Les Miserables, hear more and more of Mrs Hudson’s increasingly dubious past, etcetera.
Moffat can do this: with ease. So why didn’t he with Danny? Why doesn’t he with Clara?
It’s easy to guess why he hasn’t given Clara a life outside work, family and the Doctor: realistically, teachers in inner city schools don’t have a life outside work – at least during term time 😉
Unrealistically, she has been (self?)inserted into the time-stream; she’s the Impossible Girl. She is, I would suggest, not anchored into normal life except insofar as she’s self-anchored. She inserted herself into her parents’ lives; she interacts with her father and his family. She inserted herself into her various jobs; she interacts with the adults and children at work. She pretty much inserted herself into Danny’s life.
That’s probably why she’s so impossibly, oddly competent in whatever situation she finds herself. Leader of punishment platoon against Cybermen? Check. Member of Victorian Paternoster Gang? Fine. Valued UNIT officer? Okay. English teacher? Yup. Maid Marian substitute who can hold her own against the Sheriff of Nottingham, The Prince of Thieves AND the Last of the Time Lords? No problem.
But for how long can the paradox be maintained? I’d agree that the Doctor looked stricken when Clara asked him ‘Which one of us is dying?’ If you insert a living being into a time-stream, someone who should never have existed, how long will they live?
Possibly, like all those Claricles, precisely as long as they’re needed.
24 September 2015 at 10:28 #43349It is worrisome to me that Clara other than her teaching has no life outside of her travels with the Doctor.
What other life is she supposed to have that we’d see? Seriously? Her family live in Cumbria while she lives in London – and we’ve seen them turn up when Danny died. Her boyfriend died – and while she’s obviously moving on, it’s fair enough that she hasn’t yet acquired another boyfriend. And she has a successful career as a classroom teacher.
If you’re looking for Clara’s ‘moral cause’ on Earth, it’s looking right back at you. She is a classroom teacher in an inner city school whose catchment areas include some very deprived and impoverished parts of London.
@purofilion – I think you’re forgetting that Wilf had already mentioned to the Doctor that he was worried about Donna, because she and her husband-to-be were flat broke. Donna was concentrating on charity work – and wanted to do more – and her husband-to-be was currently unemployed due to the then recession.
It’s fairly typical of the Doctor to miscalculate financial needs by a spare million or so. He does a very similar thing with the Ponds, when he buys them a house and car they couldn’t possibly afford.
23 September 2015 at 16:50 #43316One slightly cheeky thought regarding the Doctor playing his own theme tune when he enters on the tank:
I wonder if part of the reason for this was simply that – after paying for the rights of Nick Cave’s Crying Song and the rights for the ‘Pretty Woman’ riff – they were simply out of money? So they used a piece of music to which they already had the rights… 😀
23 September 2015 at 14:55 #43302@purofilion
Missy must get something out of this, though. Something big.
There is definitely a long-range Missy plan, and it definitely involves Clara. Missy, after all, is the person who introduced Clara to the Doctor. Who made sure Clara was introduced to the Doctor.
Introducing Clara to the Doctor has directly resulted in the Smith Doctor surviving the Great Intelligence’s attempt to destroy the Doctor’s time line, the War Doctor not destroying Gallifrey and the Doctor in general being granted another cycle of regenerations. All of these things involved changing time; the Doctor’s present, the Doctor’s past, the Doctor’s future. So there’s some long-range Missy plan that involves Clara keeping the Doctor alive, saving Gallifrey from destruction (possibly simply because Missy was on Gallifrey) and getting him a new set of regenerations.
What complicates all this is the undoubted fact that we’ve seen the Master risk his life for the Doctor – it was the Simm Master’s exit scene in The End of Time. There could also be the complication of a Spike-like self-interest thing going on – in Buffy S2, when Spike points out that he may be evil, but he rather likes the world, so isn’t going to be on the side of the people trying to end it.
So it could be that what she’s going to get out of it is simply the survival of herself and her playmate, so they can carry on playing those lethal games. The Doctor, after all, is never going to ask for a new set of regenerations for himself, so it’s up to Missy to arrange it. Or it could be that this is tied up with her usual long range, convoluted, nutty plans to rule the universe.
I’m fairly sure, though, that if she’s working for the Time Lords it’s only because she and they both want the same thing – or she can get what she does want by working for them.
23 September 2015 at 13:40 #43298Regarding the CD (Of Rassillon)
If there’s any Time Lady in the entire universe who’ll know how to open a supposedly unopenable CD (even if it is of Rassillon), it’ll be Missy. So I think the big fib she’s telling is not what the disc is. Ohila, for example, looks at the thing as if it’s some kind of CD of Doom. And, as I say above, Missy is having a bit of a translation problem when she tries to explain what it is – which suggests she’s genuinely trying to explain what it is, rather than making up a convenient lie.
The important thing to notice is that this disc has been handled by the Doctor, Ohila and Missy without the slightest problem. However, when Clara picks the thing up, it goes off like a burglar alarm.
Other points I note in the scene – Missy positions the ‘open’ section towards Clara, very deliberately. However, she definitely doesn’t think Clara should open it – the ‘No, no, no, what are you doing?’ has a very strong vibe of ‘you silly child’ underneath it.
If we take the tradition of ‘closest friend’ as genuine, that suggests Missy’s next line:
Well, of course it was sent to me. What have you got to do with it? I’m his friend, you’re just…
could suggest that Missy was about to reveal what, exactly Clara is – but stopped herself in time.
Given Missy’s unique outlook on life, Clara could be anything from Missy’s own planted assassin/spy to part of the Doctor’s close family. But Clara is not, in Missy’s view, the Doctor’s ‘friend’. It should also be obvious to Clara that she’d never be sent the disc.
Since Clara picked up on the unfinished line, it has to be explained somehow, and Missy spots the couple with the dog and describes Clara as the ‘puppy’. However, the next thing she does after the puppy thing is to pull her ear – in human body language that would be a stress reaction; Missy has just said or heard something she didn’t really want to hear.
So: the CD of Rassillon has already been opened (or part of it, containing Missy’s instructions, has opened) – that’s why it’s a plain disc in the prologue but has an obvious opening in The Magician’s Apprentice. I’d say it genuinely is a ‘Confession’ disc (possibly with added extras), but who is the confession really for? And why can’t Clara even touch the thing? And what was Missy about to say before she stopped herself and diverted Clara with the demeaning ‘puppy’?
Hiding in plain sight: since we know the Doctor has just done something terrible with Boy Davros, the misdirection could well be that we’re all supposed to assume the Confession Disc (of Rassillon) contains the confession about Boy Davros.
But suppose it’s another confession entirely?
23 September 2015 at 01:45 #43272If it’s only referenced by Missy, then no, I wouldn’t trust a word of what she says,
True, but she’s pretty obviously struggling with a translation problem. First she calls the CD Player of Rassillon a ‘Confession Disc’. Then, when it’s obvious Clara has no idea what that is, she translates it as ‘Last Will and Testament’.
‘Will’ – instructions for the disposal of an estate – it contains the Doctor’s instructions for after his death.
‘Testament’ – ‘sign or evidence’ – the explanation of why he died and presumably of why his instructions must be followed.Anyway, it’s the explanation and instructions-to-be-followed. To me, the Chekhov’s Gun that is quacking is the ‘it will open on the Doctor’s death’. This disc will open. 😀
I suspect another possible translation may be ‘Suicide Note’, but that probably was a no-no for a family show. However, the ‘Confession Disc’ being a Time Lord’s suicide note would certainly explain why Missy’s suddenly behaving as if she’s temporarily dropped the lethal games. She’s genuinely worried.
23 September 2015 at 00:58 #43271@jphamlore – yes, the Doctor called the Valiant ‘Cloudbase’ and there then resulted geek war between Osgood and Colonel Ahmed over whether Cloudbase was from Thunderbirds or Captain Scarlet.
I suppose this could have been an incredibly subtle clue that Osgood was actually Zygon!Osgood. 😉 She got it wrong.
One of my ‘wish list’ items is a scene with Missy watching In The Night Garden.
22 September 2015 at 22:38 #43257Missy has also mentioned Earth’s ‘great telly’. 😉
If Gallifreyan telly is all like the stuff we saw in The Deadly Assassin, though, it’s not surprising that our television one of the few things she finds impressive about Earth. If either Missy or the Doctor are ever looking for a nice little earner, they could probably start importing box sets once Gallifrey is officially re-opened.
22 September 2015 at 15:47 #43247@purofilion and @denvaldron
To put Who’s falling overnights into context:
Downton Abbey also had a drop of 0.8 million. There’s some comment on how increasingly unreliable the overnights are becoming at the bottom of the article.
22 September 2015 at 14:40 #43246Even if we (cynical viewers) don’t believe they’re dead – the Doctor looks like he does.
Yes, it’s always worth remembering that the characters don’t know that they’re in a TV series or that they have a contract for the whole of Series 9…
😈22 September 2015 at 12:26 #43237@pedant It’s a crackling good story, though Ashcroft might be guilty of hamming it up a bit. 😉
And I agree Charlie Brooker must be going WTF???
The other one I know (the exact identity of the MP circulates, though it’s usually someone who went to a Welsh university) is a tale of getting very friendly with a sheep as a result of losing a student bet.
For extra embellishment, this tale of deep and loving friendship will have happened on the steps of the Student Union. 🙂
22 September 2015 at 12:12 #43234The other possibility is that, like Tasha Lem, he’ll prove capable of resisting Dalekisation. They made a big thing in the prologue of his being stupid; it’s possible he’s too stupid to get rid of the idea that the Doctor’s his friend.
Of course, it depends on whether he’s more than a one-episode character – who’s meant to show us that Davros/the Daleks are now deliberately targeting the Doctor’s friends. They did that before, in Asylum.
I’d agree that ‘time-lines’ has something to do with the solution. We’re being written into a hole, here, where the Doctor can’t have any friends because they have this big target over their heads.
22 September 2015 at 00:10 #43191I’m not trying to demean Clara with the “puppy” designation
Missy does treat Clara rather like a puppy; there’s also an almost Delgado Master/Jo Grant vibe in that both of them start developing an almost friendly working relationship very quickly. I think at the moment I’m going for Clara as the Witch’s Familiar.
Possibly a coincidence that Clara was compared to what looked like a white poodle – Prince Rupert’s white poodle was regarded as some kind of supernatural familiar spirit by many of the Parliamentarian troopers in the English Civil War.
21 September 2015 at 23:59 #43188Just been having my first rewatch (it’s been a busy few days) and I noticed:
Of course Boy Davros ended up believing that compassion was wrong. The Soldier shows compassion and gets killed, helping Boy Davros not one jot.
The Doctor chucks him his screwdriver, lectures him on being the ‘one’ instead of the ‘thousand’ and (seemingly) leaves him to get on with it. If Boy Davros did then escape the handmine, the lesson he learnt was that showing compassion was wrong.
The more helpful adult was the one who didn’t show compassion.
21 September 2015 at 15:26 #43146@denvaldron and @purofilion
Yes, I do tend to stat-crunch. 😉
Currently, we know the overnight numbers. We don’t know their significance. Their significance will become more obvious as the ‘Final figures’and the newer ‘L+7’ come in. Some viewers will undoubtedly have been lost from E1S8, because the first episode was also Peter Capaldi’s first episode and they’re traditionally higher viewing figures than normal.
The final figures represent everyone in the BARB survey who watched Who – or recorded Who and watched it later that week. If Doctor Who lost out because everyone wanted to watch the live X Factor, that will show up (finals usually add a million or so, so if they add more than that, it was probably the X Factor).
The ‘L+7’ represent the add-ons from iPlayer downloads. If television is changing (and Who, with its large proportion of tech-savvy viewers, is in the forefront of that change) then we’ll see a very big add on from iPlayer. That will mean that more and more people simply never show up on the overnights because they watch Doctor Who streamed or downloaded through iPlayer.
Last series the add on from the overnights was usually between two and three million. Since then, more of the UK has moved to unlimited fibre broadband, which makes it easier to watch via iPlayer.
What that all means is that more and more people can decide to watch later, according to the reviews and the word-of-mouth. And the Audience Appreciation Index for The Magician’s Apprentice was 84, just one point short of ‘Excellent’.
At the moment, therefore, I’m expecting that most people simply watched/will watch on iPlayer.
21 September 2015 at 15:07 #43145I do love the Sisterhood of Karn
Me too. I would like more of Karn, please. Mind you, I’d also like to see more of Madame Vastra, Strax and Jenny, but I think that may depend on Neve McIntosh’s schedule.
I think the thing with Missy (and previous versions of the Master) is that we know we’re not supposed to like them – but we all do. There seems to be a lot of effort from both RTD and Moffat to explain why the Doctor is perpetually letting his old friend escape, given that he is probably the second most murderous psychopath in the history of the universe – RTD gave us both the backstory of the lost little boy who had been badly abused by the Time Lords and the man who was good enough friends with the Doctor that he’d die before he’d let Rassillon kill him.
Moffat – we’ve not seen the end of that arc. But we have seen that the Doctor is prepared to kill Missy, but that one of his oldest friends (the Brig) knows that he mustn’t do it. (Hmmm… and it was Clara who insisted he try and kill Missy).
The most murderous psychopath in the history of the universe? Davros. Davros created an entire race of murderous psychos. The Daleks are his children.
Which is a very interesting way to describe the Daleks, given Into the Dalek’s discussion of them being engineered to be evil psychopaths. The Daleks as children with their choice taken away from them; children with no choice but to be evil. Clara with her Space Dad and Wicked Stepmother. Boy Davros as a child, abandoned by the Doctor.
It’s still about the children of the Time War.
21 September 2015 at 13:48 #43138Yes, Moffat’s themes repeat. Before the 50th the Doctor was going round and round, like a hamster on a wheel, or a Time Lord trapped in a clock face, never able to escape.
But now he’s still going round and round – but it’s a spiral. As in the opening credits. The same problems repeat – but this time, each time, things resolve a little bit more.
On past evidence, Moffat’s Doctor’s plans seem to be just that–the Doctor’s plans alone.
The only additional message that the Doctor has to have sent to Missy with the CD Player of Rassillon is ‘I need you. And we’ll both need Clara.’ I may be being over-optimistic, but my reading of Missy’s relationship to the Doctor is that if he really, really needs her, she’ll be there. If, on the way, she gets to kill lots of people, that’s a bonus.
And then she’ll try to kill or betray him and/or his companion afterwards. After all, what are frenemies for? 😈
21 September 2015 at 13:12 #43134@purofilion
that’s the parlour trick.
I suspect – though we’ll find out next week – that both the Doctor and Missy are playing parlour tricks.
The vortex bracelets. I repeat, bracelets. Two. Why? We know, know from The Sound of Drums that if one person wearing a vortex bracelet grabs hold of another, the vortex bracelet is capable of carrying both. But Missy, for some reason, wants Clara equipped with a vortex bracelet that’s in her control.Question: would a Time Lord be capable of doing a transmat that shows the skeleton last rather than just the normal straightforward vanishing? Almost certainly. And if everyone knows Davros is asking for the Doctor, Missy knows in advance that any faking of her/Clara’s death will need to convince the Daleks. It has to look like an extermination…
21 September 2015 at 12:47 #43132@purofilion
There were several commentators at T’Other Place who seemed to think it meant ‘replaying Series 6’ , plus I’m working my way through posts in-between actual, y’know work. Hence the ‘various people’.
21 September 2015 at 12:09 #43125@various people
The Doctor’s approaching inevitable death.
I know the ‘last will and testament thingy’ does imply ‘the Doctor is going to die’, but why do people keep talking about this as if it’s another Series 6 ‘we’ve seen him die’ storyline.
He’s not facing an ‘inevitable’ death. He thinks he has to go see Davros, and Davros is going to kill him. It’s no more ‘facing an inevitable death’ than writing your death letter is for a soldier going off to a war zone.
The Doctor’s facing death, yeah. He does that practically every week, anyway. This time, the problem is that he thinks he deserves to die. Hence the Confession CD of Rassillon. He’s done the traditional Time Lord thing of confessing why he deserved to die.
Which is, quite frankly, suspicious in itself. When has the Doctor ever been a traditional Time Lord?
Other suspicious things that occur to me: Missy going into danger to get Clara on board can be explained by a last ditch effort to find the Doctor. But why the heck does Missy want Clara after she’s got the Doctor’s location out of her? Was there more to the Confession CD of Rassillon than an unopenable CD player? (Of Rassillon).
And, indeed, Missy’s whole demeanour throughout – she’s definitely not turned good but there’s a distinct vibe of ‘this is so serious we all have to work together’.
Just how seriously has the Doctor fcuk-ed up?
20 September 2015 at 16:08 #43060@Supernumerary
I’m unsure exactly why this is all quite such a big deal for the Doctor, such a big deal that he feels death is inevitable and arranges his will, needs to meditate, completely loses character in the amphitheatre, it all feels slightly forced.
No, it’s the inevitable consequence of the 50th Anniversary. He committed genocide to kill the Daleks, but the thing that broke his hearts was that he killed billions of children. In the Whoniverse of Steven Moffat, killing a child is an unforgivable sin. The Moment knew that. The Moment changed time itself to save those children. Clara knew that. She told him: the Doctor does not kill children. The Doctor saves children.
And what does The Name of The Doctor mean to him? A promise.
Never cruel or cowardly. Never give up, never give in.
And now, faced with a frightened child, he leaves him to die. Never mind that the child is Davros. That little boy hadn’t yet done anything, anything to deserve being left alone in a minefield. ‘The Doctor’ was cowardly, he gave up, he gave in.
And he was cruel. To leave a frightened child alone in a minefield – that’s cruel. That deep hatred of the Daleks, of Davros – it made him cruel. We’ve seen that before – but the targets were always Daleks, who are cruel right back. But now, we see where that unreasoning hatred has finally led him. He was bitterly, horribly cruel to a child.
So when Davros comes a’calling, he feels that he has to go; doesn’t deserve anything else.
completely loses character in the amphitheatre
Ah, yes, well. This being a family show, with many small children watching, I think they weren’t allowed to say that the Doctor’s response to all this was to get completely smashed and go on a three week bender… 😈
20 September 2015 at 13:34 #43045@Supernumerary
Sarff, being a big talking snake who refers to Davros as ‘Dark Lord’, is of course also very Harry Potter.
I suspect the tone meeting went something like this:
STEVEN MOFFAT: Next, we introduce Colony Sarff. He’s a colony organism, who normally speaks and acts as if he is one person, but can break down into the colony’s separate beings. They’ll look rather like snakes.
PRODUCTION TEAM MEMBER: So this is a walking, talking colony of snakes?
STEVEN MOFFAT: Alien snakes. I’m thinking his face might look like something snake-like coiling round…
PRODUCTION TEAM MEMBER: So he’s going to be a big, walking, talking snake?
STEVEN MOFFAT: Colony of snakes. I want it to be a really terrifying and unexpected moment when he breaks into his component snakes.
PRODUCTION TEAM MEMBER: So until then, he’s going to look like a big, walking, talking snake? ONE big walking, talking snake?
STEVEN MOFFAT: Um, yes?
PRODUCTION TEAM MEMBER: Bit Harry Potter, isn’t it?
[PAUSE]
STEVEN MOFFAT: Let’s just have him call Davros the ‘Dark Lord’, shall we, and hope everyone thinks it was one of my little jokes…
🙂
20 September 2015 at 12:31 #43041@Supernumerary and @mudlark
Good spot. Yes, poor old Bors was almost certainly dalekised by the snake.
20 September 2015 at 09:18 #43028Re: ‘puppy’. Remember this is Missy. She’s trying to twist the knife with Clara. So she describes the relationship as demeaningly as she can.
What do a lot of childless people say? ‘My dogs are like my children‘. 😉
19 September 2015 at 23:37 #42996speculations that Clara is the Doctor and Missy’s daughter.
Did you notice that Missy got described as ‘the Wicked Stepmother’ this week?
Space Dad and Wicked Stepmother. If they’re not Clara’s biological parents, they’re definitely being positioned in the parental role.
19 September 2015 at 23:00 #42991Some thoughts, because I really, really should be doing some work…
I’d say Steven Moffat is definitely messing around with Terry Nation’s version of the Daleks – but Terry Nation based the Daleks very firmly on the Nazi’s and made it very clear that the Daleks were a bunch of racist gits.Fifty two years on the conception of a race that has to be evil is itself looking more than slightly racist. That wasn’t Nation’s intention: he wanted the Daleks as a parable on the evils of racism and xenophobia.
I suspect time is going to be altered, just enough to make it possible for individual Daleks to be on the Doctor’s side, or for at least some Daleks to understand the concept of ‘peace treaty’. Maybe not in this story. But before Moffat’s tenure is over he’s going to leave future producers with a Whoniverse that has no such thing as a completely evil race.
Playing the long game, this is. First of all the Time Lords change the Doctor’s future, so he regenerates into Peter Capaldi. Then the Capaldi Doctor meets a ‘good’ Dalek (Dalek Rusty). Now the Capaldi Doctor (who should never have existed) meets the boy Davros. Presumably if he hadn’t, Young Davros was about to get horribly injured (but not killed) by the hand mines.
Unfortunately, the first time Capaldi Doc meets Boy Davros, he funks it. The idiot was taken there (where he needed to go, not where he wanted to go) to help the child. Time has been changed enough that Davros remembers the meeting with the Doctor, but not enough that Davros has changed (see Kazran in A Christmas Carol – time can be changed, but changing people is really hard).
But this explains Dalek Rusty, last series. We had to be introduced to the idea that good Daleks are even possible. I seem to recall that the BBC’s programming game also included a helpful Dalek. Way back at the beginning of Jenna Coleman’s run, there was also helpful Dalek Oswin. 🙂
Did Missy ‘escape’ from Gallifrey? Or did the Time Lords send him/her back into the universe? Clara saved the Doctor’s life, Clara persuaded the Time Lords that the Doctor needed help, and Clara-the-time-traveller is a creation of Missy…
19 September 2015 at 21:59 #42982Did anyone spot whether Missy and Clara were still wearing their vortex manipulators? If so, and Clara’s was slaved to Missy’s control, that’s how they escaped extermination.
Can I also give a rousing cheer to the ‘next episode’ trailer editor, who finally managed to do a preview that didn’t include major spoilers?
19 September 2015 at 15:02 #42948@purofilion
You’re quite right – but it was Little Amy’s Theme, Caitlin Blackwood’s theme rather than Karen Gillan’s.
I’m not sure whether it’s significant. It may be, but it may be that they used music from stock for the webisodes rather than having Murray Gold compose anything new.
19 September 2015 at 11:00 #42913@Purofilion
Wortherington or a Worthington
Ben Witherington, probably. His text is still in use; there’s a more recent survey by David Gowler, but it’s very biased towards the text-interpretation end of the spectrum and you’d never dare hand it to undergraduates as their sole text. Like I said, ‘footnotes at dawn’; Wright’s 3000+ page several volume study, for example, doesn’t get its own chapter. No, he gets placed in the Jesus Seminar chapter as a mere ‘critic’.
I suspect he pissed Gowler off at some conference. 🙂
I get what you mean about the discography. A lot of the UK uni’s have recently had to impose restrictions on footnotes: they’ve always been very strict on word limits for main text, but footnotes (which didn’t used to count for most places) were getting increasingly long.
Bibliographies still don’t count (long bibliographies are good), but footnotes now must not exceed 10% of the word limit…
18 September 2015 at 22:13 #42859No, it’s officially official. It’s on the front page of the BBC’s Doctor Who website, which is the point I normally stop regarding things as spoilers.
18 September 2015 at 13:50 #42851@purofilion
heck you’re up late or early?
Yeah, I was up very late, due to having an essay on ‘Should Christians engage in the quest for the so-called ‘historical Jesus’? due in by 12 noon.
It was one of those essays where the answer is ‘Yes’, then you think ‘okay, only another 2,499 words to go…’ 😉
Though bits of it were fun; there’s some real ‘footnotes at dawn’ academic catfights in the battles between the ‘we can judge the validity of the history by critiquing the texts’ crowd and the ‘it might possibly, just possibly, be helpful to go out and actually look at the history of First Century Palestine’ crowd. 😈
18 September 2015 at 05:31 #42801@purofilion
which signposts for me the inevitable: that, perhaps, it’s soon?
Quite possibly. There certainly are more than a few hints that way. However, I remain interested in Steven Moffat being so keen to retain Jenna Coleman for Series 9 that he was prepared to write a script with an alternate ending just so that he had to the last possible second to persuade her to stay.
To me, that suggests that he has a very particular arc in mind for Clara and that it hadn’t finished by Series 8.
Re: the Toy – I have the simplest theory in the world for that. It came from the toy box in the orphanage. Rupert then keeps it because he remembers it as ‘special’ somehow. It gets passed through the family to Orson. It is handed to Clara. It ends up on Gallifrey, with SmallDoctor.
And that’s it. It’s a linear journey, not a loop. The Toy is made in some factory on Earth in the 1980’s, and ends up on Gallifrey in whenever-it-was. It never gets returned to the orphanage to restart the journey.
17 September 2015 at 15:47 #42780@purofilion
Because who is she really?
Clara is the illegitimate Time Lady daughter of Missy and the Doctor, chameleon arched into a human being as a small baby and adopted by the Oswald family. A perception filter means that neither they or Clara remember that she is adopted.
The Doctor disapproved so strongly of her relationship with Danny because at some level he realised that Danny was in fact not only the twin brother of Orson, but that both boys were the long-lost twin sons of his grand-daughter Susan. Clara was, therefore, in grave danger of becoming her own Great Aunt.
Since all of the above is a Moffat loop, none of the conceptions (or the adoptions) have actually happened yet.
😀
16 September 2015 at 14:22 #42748@pedant and @blenkinsopthebrave
The rumours are also being reported (as rumours) on BBC News’ Entertainment and Arts page. I can only suggest that spoilerphobes go into a state of Total News Lockdown. 😀
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