[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@purofilion

Orson behaved as though he knew perfectly well that Clara was his great-grandmother.

He absolutely, definitely behaved as if he knew who Clara was. We all (including Clara) leapt to the assumption that this was because she was his great-grandmother. But, as I think I said several pages back, giving the toy soldier to your great-grandmother doesn’t make sense. She’s already about to get it – if she’d married Danny, it would’ve been in his possessions, and quite likely Clara would’ve given the original to her child.

What does make sense is if Orson knew that it was a family duty to pass the soldier on when a certain person turned up – and realised when he met Clara that she was that person.

However, I’m still wondering about the time travelling ancestor. But Moffat being who he is, it could simply be that we haven’t yet met Orson’s time travelling ancestor.

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@joeengland

Logic is going to take a flying leap in the face of an actor having to spend three or four years as the Thirteenth Doctor. Personally, I wouldn’t be remotely surprised if they start ‘counting’ the War Doctor once Capaldi’s finished his run – and we suddenly leapfrog past Thirteen to the Fourteenth Doctor.

Eccleston’s refusal to be in the Day of the Doctor was lucky. Apart from the fact that I think John Hurt was actually a better Doctor, inserting John Hurt meant that Capaldi became the fourteenth actor to play the role on-screen. John Hurt, as the thirteenth actor to play the Doctor, was a one-story Doctor and an ‘unlucky’ Doctor. 😉

Not then numbering John Hurt’s War Doctor meant that Capaldi is the Twelfth incarnation to have a number. He’s the Twelfth incarnation to call himself the Doctor throughout his incarnation.

Personally, I now just call everyone after the Eighth Doctor by the actors’ surnames – that’s my OCD. Hurt Doctor, Eccleston Doctor, Tennant Doctor, Smith Doctor and now Capaldi Doctor.

Alternatively, you could just think of Capaldi as 12A. 🙂

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@arbutus

It was really beginning to seem clear at this point that Danny and Clara probably didn’t in the end have a future.

Agreed. I remain convinced that Moffat, having given us two dissimilar characters who are nonetheless a perfect match (Amy and Rory) was now giving us the opposite: two characters who love each other very much, but are utterly, horribly disastrous for each other.

Clara and Danny both brought out the worst in each other, not the best. In the end, their relationship killed Danny and nearly killed Clara.

Whether Moffat was just doing this for fun, or whether he wanted the Clara/Danny relationship to hint at the way the Missy/Doctor relationship might have been is one of those interesting little questions. 🙂

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@blenkinsopthebrave

Yes, I had rather gleaned the impression (from this side of the world) that there might be much rejoicing and merriment over the Very Australian Coup. 😉

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@ichabod – glad to hear that your sister is doing well. Stents are pretty amazing things, especially since they really do usually reduce the hospital stay to a day or two.

One guy I know was even able to come home that same evening – though that might have had something to do with his wife being a qualified nurse!

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@purofilion

Well, it could be set later in S9 – I was thinking of S9 rather than the finale of S8. But if that ‘Meditation’ minisode has the same backdrop as when Clara phoned him, we’ll know.

Or if it’s that bloody volcano again …

I think they’re not really that worried now about the wedding ring showing – after all, the Doctor’s a widower and they were very careful to make sure he mentioned River in S8. However, I did notice that the poor man had to haul himself up from the low seat by hanging onto a handy bit of set, so it wouldn’t surprise me if the gruelling schedule is also resulting in him losing some weight. 🙂

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

I have to admit if I’m wondering if this ‘Prologue’ is actually set near the finale for Series 9. Or maybe near the end of Episode 1 or something.

It’s got that feel about it, of one of those scenes where you then get a ‘Two Days Earlier’ caption immediately after the titles.

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@phaseshift and @blenkinsopthebrave

It’s the Portable CD Player of Rassilon.

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@ichabod

I think Craig was just clearing the decks for Series 9 – now the prologue is up, Series 8 isn’t the current series any more. 😀

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

The problem with being over 50 is that you can see the next generation making exactly the same mistakes all over again. 🙁

Bloody hell. Short of Dave and his mates being discovered running a paedophile ring from Number Ten, that’s the next election sewn up.

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@jonr – you’ve confused islands, that’s all. Yes, Tom Baker spent six years in a monastery and yes, part of those six years were on a monastery on an island. But it was Jersey, not Skye.

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@mudlark

You have my deepest sympathy. Last month I spent a day uploading Windows 10. A day because, once I’d uploaded Windows 10 itself, I had to find several workarounds to keep my printer and finance program going.

I really, really object to this policy of ‘planned obsolescence’. Ah, capitalism. We need people to keep buying things or the whole pyramid will collapse. Silly me. 🙄

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@cathannabel

I want to slap Esther Summerson every time I read Bleak House – for god’s sake woman enough with the ‘little me’ crap, and sort yerself out!

Esther’s a bit like Fanny Price in Mansfield Park. But I think the characterisation is psychologically credible; both characters are the ‘poor relation’. Dependent for their upbringing and survival on the kindness of charitable relatives – and Esther doesn’t even know that Jarndyce is a distant relative. Furthermore, Esther’s first experience of a charitable relative is of an incredibly cold and distant charity, of the sort which would much prefer her never to have been born at all.

Both of them respond by developing a ‘don’t notice poor little me, except when I’m being incredibly grateful and really, really helpful’ type of character. But it is a survival response to their situation – Esther and Fanny are both quite capable of sending unwanted suitors off with a flea in their ear. Even when, in Fanny’s case, the pressure to accept that suitor is intense. Esther’s also quite capable of taking danger on herself. It’s just that those first few years of being utterly unwanted leaves her believing that her only worth is what she can do for other people.

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

Still catching up – but surely ‘Young Adult’ is just a renaming of the genre known as the Bildungsroman. Probably because, like me, publishers can’t spell ‘bildungsroman’ without looking it up – and the average reader would need to have done GCSE German to understand the word. Is it about the sewage systems of Ancient Rome, they ask the poor bookseller? 😉

Most ‘Young Adult’ novels (or series of novels) are about growing up from a child/adolescent to an adult, anyway. Pratchett’s Tiffany Aching novels are about her growth from talented (and stroppy) child to powerful (and stroppy) adult.

Dicken’s Young Adult novels would be David Copperfield and Great Expectations. And possibly Oliver Twist…

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

Regarding the TARDIS voice interface – she learnt to talk in The Doctor’s Wife, when she was decanted into Idris. It seems that the TARDIS then picked up the idea that the whole talking thing was a good way to communicate with her thief and his pets. Largely in emergencies, or when they’re being particularly stupid. 🙂

In this case, the Doctor is being particularly stupid and all that’s needed (from the TARDIS point of view) is a recorded reminder that he’s where he asked to go. I suspect she’s a little p.o.’d at the Doctor and the voice is supposed to be annoying – we certainly know that she’s quite capable of picking avatars that are intended to be annoying when she doesn’t like someone (Hide).

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

Hello all. Back from the Inner Hebrides, otherwise known as the land of dodgy mobile reception and limited wi-fi. 😉

Ooh, lots to read! 🙂

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

They should be handing the memory worms out just about now…

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@scaryb and @jimthefish

The Buffy-style credits made me giggle – I haven’t seen it before. I agree that it best suits the Team TARDIS era. 😉

I will try not to be too envious of all those getting to see the first episode nearly three weeks early.

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

On other matters, if any of our Scottish contingent are in Glasgow on the afternoon/early evening of Friday 4th, I’m likely to be in that state of limbo known as ‘between trains’.

Possibly for several hours, depending on the ferries. 😕

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@todeledo – you have two broad options. One, start with the first episode of the after-the-gap series: Rose. Since there’d been a seventeen year gap since the last regular episode, Rose concentrates on explaining the entire concept to new viewers.

Or, start with the first episode of Series 5: The Eleventh Hour. New Doctor, new Companion, new Producer, so the series effectively reintroduces itself.

If someone doesn’t know anything about Doctor Who, I wouldn’t recommend starting with anything before-the-gap. Leave that until they’ve got suitably addicted. 🙂

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@arbutus

Now Jenna Coleman is another story.

I will be very interested to see what’s happening with Clara this series, because we know that Steven Moffat was desperate to persuade Jenna Coleman to stay. To the extent that the Christmas Special was written with two endings, to give her more time to make her decision.

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@ichabod

S10 is greenlit and Moffat is signed up for it. That’s why, if the rumoured ‘short series for S10’ is the case, I’d expect it to be for a producer switch over.

If we are having a new producer, I’d expect that a) the new producer is trying to persuade Peter Capaldi to stay for S11 or b) @jimthefish ‘s idea of a surprise regeneration is on the cards so the next Doctor is already in place. Alternatively, they might go for a Companion who’s likely to stay for S10 and 11.

Moffat’s spoken a few times of how flat-out terrifying S5 was – new producer, new Doctor, new Companion.

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@ichabod

Cardiff has become sunnier than usual

That can be their new tourist slogan! To go with ‘Wales. Not always raining.’

it was the plaid damn pants, which I took an instant dislike to

Sorry about that – the Doctor does have a thing for plaid. Those particular pants are very reminiscent of Patrick Troughton’s costume.

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

next year is already rumoured to be some kind of truncated affair

Well, if it’s the producer swap-over year, then it is likely to be another ‘year of Specials’. They effectively need to have two production offices running simultaneously while the new producer gets up to speed.

Or, indeed, it could be a surprise regeneration and a series of specials to get the new woman in. 😈 But to be honest, if there were a surprise regeneration on the cards, I don’t think Peter Capaldi would be even mentioning the word ‘leave’.

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@jimthefish

Well, if he’s now got two series under his belt, it will be ‘sooner rather than later’, won’t it? The Tennant and Smith runs were both three full series and a last series of specials. 🙄

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@janetteb

Seb does remark upon the difficulty in trying to locate any family after Danny’s death.

Which is interesting in itself. So Danny’s in a Children’s Home in the 1990’s – but in 2014 there are NO dead grandparents, parents etc. to greet him in the Nethersphere?

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@pedant

There’s always the ‘two pallets and a mattress’ trick. 😉

Glad to hear that you’ve found somewhere.

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@indigomoose

I feel that whatever explanation Moffat puts forth should bother to incorporate these instances as well.

I suspect there is some explanation forthcoming – otherwise why would Moffat have Samuel Anderson play both Danny Pink and Colonel Orson Pink?

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@purofilion and @ichabod

Well, Islamic zealots are crazy, Christian zealots are crazy, ultra-Orthodox Jewish zealots are crazy, and I have no doubt whatever that there are Hindu zealots and even Buddhist zealots who just as damn crazy as the rest of them.

Yup. Hindu zealots are generally called ‘Hindu nationalists’ or get described as ‘ethnic nationalists’, and yet, are strangely prone to murdering or driving out people who aren’t Hindu. The Tamil Tigers are often described as ‘secular’. I can only presume that their opposition to ethnic Tamils who happened to be Muslim as well as the ethnic Sinhalese (who are usually Buddhist) was a complete coincidence. 😈

The Tamil Tigers are the people who invented suicide bombing, btw.

Buddhist zealots, likewise, usually get called ‘nationalists’. Or it’s ‘economic’. Again, the fact that many Buddhist terrorist movements are led by or consist mainly of monks is pure coincidence. Honest.

Before the non-religious get too smug, I’ll also point people in the direction of racist zealots and Marxist-communist zealots. 🙁

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@arbutus

Because a flapjack is more of a pancake,

Ah, I think we may have a bit of a language problem.

A flapjack (UK and Australian) is a baked oat biscuit, made of porridge oats, butter and brown sugar; some golden syrup is usually added. If you don’t add the golden syrup, they will resemble sweet bricks and you’ll probably break your teeth.

It’s nothing like the North American breakfast pancake. 😀

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@indigomoose and @jimthefish

I’d also like to see John Simm’s Master again – in fact, I’d like a three-way between Sir Derek Jacobi, Michelle Gomez and Mr Simm.

Hmmm… not sure that came out the way I wanted. Or, given both the Simm Master and Missy’s definite S&M tendencies, maybe it did. 😉

Regarding indigomoose’s bonkers theory that Missy is actually Romana – firstly she teases the Doctor with the fact that he knows her, then promptly proceeds to lie about who she really is? Whereas if Missy is the Master, it actually fits into his/her last seen action. The Simm Master was last seen destroying the Time Lords and saving the Doctor. Missy, we find, put Clara on board the TARDIS. And Clara is the girl ‘born to save the Doctor’.

As the Simm Master exits, so Missy enters. Both trying to save the Doctor’s life. In their own, inimitable fashion, of course. 😈

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@whisht

make it so you can rest a spoon on it

Rest? Rest?

With proper builder’s tea, the spoon should start to gently dissolve. 😉

In support of @mudlark‘s point about the sheer speed of UK kettles, I have now done a short experiment: discovering that one mug of room temperature water takes 56.98 seconds to boil in my elderly and not-very-expensive electric kettle.

Obviously, I will need to repeat the experiment at regular intervals. 🙂

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@Rose2112 and @purofilion

And Ill never understand why everyone there and in the UK has electric kettles.

Because when you drink 165 million cups of tea per day, boiling the water in a pan on the stove takes too bloody long. 😉 That’s about three cups of tea per day for every man, woman and child in the country, and contrary to popular belief, we do not actually feed the stuff to babies in their bottles.

We are moving slowly towards coffee (blame Starbucks – though I’m not really sure that is coffee)- but there’s some suspicion that we’re simply transferring our love affair for strong Assam style tea towards slightly less cups of more expensive specialist teas, like Earl Grey or Chai. Certainly we still need dedicated power stations to cope with the extra demand when there’s a programme break and we all switch our kettles on. 😀

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

My favourite is still the remark of an American guest. Having been ‘treated’ to an incredibly slow moving Test at Old Trafford, they politely remarked:

This is some kind of English Zen, right?

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

I have that mug! I bought it at WorldCon 2014 – it’s firmly labelled ‘not machine safe’, so I’ve never let it near a machine.

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@craig

Ah, yes.
That reminds me of the time my site owner e-mailed me urgently saying ‘I was wondering what the delete table button did, so I pressed it…’ 😕

Rollbacks are wonderful things. 😀

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@purofilion

I’m sure I read, somewhere, that Moffat was paternalistic

I’d say it’s fairly difficult to be paternalistic and/or sexist in a company (Hartswood, which makes Sherlock) where your line manager is your wife and your boss your mother-in-law. 😉

If you notice, though, he is fond of playing with gender roles; Missy is probably part of that. In the Amy and Rory partnership, for example, Amy was the outgoing, assertive, adventurous one and Rory the gentle, caring, stay-at-home one. And quite a few people didn’t like it; I’m not sure how consciously people realised that Moffat had switched gender roles (right down to it being Amy who tries to celebrate the night before her wedding by sleeping with someone else) but the complaints did often centre about Rory being a ‘wimp’ and Amy ‘too assertive’.

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@suzannems

So is Donna Noble. Far more than Clara. Donna really IS the DoctorDonna.

As a rejoinder to Juniperfish’s theory, saying that Donna is more like the Doctor is a bit like saying ‘well, his sister’s more like him than his daughter is.’ 😉

The point isn’t that Clara is trying to behave like the Doctor in Flatline – the point is that she can do it. In the face of an utterly new alien menace, a bolshie supervisor who thinks they should be in charge, and having to rescue a trapped Doctor.

That isn’t acting. Just because I play a character on TV, it doesn’t mean I can actually do that character’s job. Just because Clara is asked to play the Doctor … oh, hang on, she can do the Doctor’s job. It’s a different thing; the one is acting, the other is apprenticeship.

In terms of giving too much weight to characteristics – you should try and find something that actually contradicts the argument, rather than saying ‘I think that was just comic relief.’ When I was contradicting your idea that Missy might have been female before (off-screen), I used two examples from the on-screen text: one that the Jacobi Master refers disparagingly to women, the other that the Doctor is visibly stunned.

It’s always possible that the entire scene was purely comic relief; it does already serve two functions – one being ‘comic relief’ and the other warning us that there’s an egomaniac needy game-player around town. The third possible function is that it points up that Clara is an egomaniac needy game-player. This may have been a long game for the rest of Series 8, where Clara is going to have a disastrous relationship which will highlight all those egomaniac, needy, manipulative characteristics that she has. Or it may have been an even longer game.

Again, how is this different from most people?

Again, if you want to use this line of attack, you need to find specific examples. You can’t just claim that ‘most people’ are manipulative liars who go nearly insane with grief and try to kill their best friend because, for example, Rory isn’t terribly good at lying, isn’t very manipulative and doesn’t try to kill himself and the Doctor when Amy dies. Very practical bloke, Rory. River, equally, takes it out on a Dalek when she thinks her husband has just died, then trots back to join the rest in trying to save the universe.

And not only is this not unique to the Doctor, I can’t recall anytime that it was even characteristic of the Doctor.

It’s characteristic of Missy. Or at least, the insanity and the taking out your own pain on people you like or love is very characteristic of Missy. Sorry if I was unclear.

S/he treats everyone that way, not just Clara. It says far more about Missy than it does Clara.

Um, actually, Missy doesn’t. She actively kills at least five people during the story. Clara, on the other hand, gets dumped with a bunch of Cybermen and has to find her own way out. Then later on, Missy does probably the slowest-motion, most heavily telegraphed murder attempt ever.

The Doctor has not investigated her entire life; the Tardis started to, but then it got it wrong. It went off onto Danny’s timeline.

The Smith Doctor investigated Clara’s life, not the Capaldi Doctor. It’s in the opening scenes of Rings of Akhaten. He has investigated her entire life, from her parents meeting to her graduation from university and first job.

We also never see the wedding between Clara’s mum and dad. Does that mean it didn’t happen?

We do, however, see a gravestone that refers to Ellie Oswald as ‘beloved wife and mother’. In that case, the off-screen action is supported by on-screen text. In the case of baby Clara, we first see her a few months old. We don’t see a pregnant Ellie, we don’t see a hospital scene, we her and baby Clara in a situation which leaves natural child/adopted child open.

Personally, I’d reckon it was deliberately left open only as part of the Impossible Girl plot, if it wasn’t for Listen bringing up the ‘adoption’ possibility again.

If you want to convince me that she’s the Doctor’s daughter, let’s start with two hearts.

No, let’s start with Chameleon Arches. They’re Gallifreyan technology, come from the Tennant Doctor’s era, and are a way that a biological Gallifreyan with two hearts can be changed into a biological human with one heart. They first appears in Human Nature/Family of Blood.

And for a nice, big plot hole — how did Clara get the leaf back? She gave it to the Old God in Rings of Akhaten.

Why does Clara need to get the leaf back?

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

By the way, speaking from a characterisation point of view, I can’t really see Missy caring tuppence about continuing the Gallifreyan race. Especially since she now knows that the Time Lords emergency survival plan involved sending her seven year old self round the twist. For all we know, the Doctor really is The Last of the Time Lords, because the Simm Master succeeded in killing the entire High Council of Time Lords. 😈

However, I can very easily see her realising the immense potential for manipulation that being the mother of the Doctor’s only not-missing, not-presumed-dead child would give her.

From the point of view of that awkward problem that faces all producers with regard to the Master/Missy – namely, why does the Doctor keep letting him live when he knows the Master’s a mass-murdering psycho – ‘she’s the mother of my child’ might be a more credible excuse. We’ve already seen that the Doctor has now recognised that he has to kill her; it might be handy to come up with something besides ‘I escaped!’ 🙂

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@ichabod

Because she already exists, as normal human girl, when that leaf-thing happened, didn’t she?

Not exactly… it’s a Moffat loop, I’m afraid. Clara leaps into the time-stream and, among other things, causes the leaf to blow into Dad’s face. Which means her parents meet, and marry. If Clara had never leapt into the time stream, her parents would never have met.

There was never any ‘normal human girl’, not really, except insofar as she thought she was a normal human girl – because she really was only born in order to save the Doctor. Missy gives her the TARDIS phone number, so Clara meets the Doctor, which means she leaps into the time stream to save him, which enables her to blow the leaf into her Dad’s face, which means he meets her Mum, which means there is a Clara to meet Missy, who gives her the phone number…

If Clara’s human parents are her biological parents, she’s a genetically human girl. The Doctor and Missy are her metaphorical, not biological parents, because they’re jointly responsible for Clara ever existing. Without Missy and the Doctor, Clara would never have been born. If you like, they’ve jointly inserted into the time-stream a person who never should have existed; an ‘Impossible Girl’. That’s my bonkers theory.

However, another popular theory is that Clara is the Doctor’s biological daughter/granddaughter. Since everyone on-screen keeps insisting that Clara is human, definitely human, perfectly normal, nothing to see, move along please 😉 …

… we’d be needing the Chameleon Arch. Which has, of course, been used by both the Master and the Doctor – and Missy/Master is just bonkers enough to use it on a baby. Since no one has ever mentioned adoption, you’d also need some kind of Tensa-like ‘forget she’s adopted’ field. Missy, of course, is very good at hypnosis.

[Either theory would explain why Clara has these amazing powers to save the Doctor, change his minds about Gallifrey, and persuade the Time Lords to give him a new set of regenerations. Because either way, she’s the product of the future where Gallifrey exists and Missy can escape from it to meet her in the shop – which is also the future where the Capaldi Doctor exists to give the final touch to the calculations. ]

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@jphamlore – Missy’s appearance isn’t aristocratic. It’s Victorian governess. Now, let’s see – who’s the governess/nanny/teacher around the Doctor. Oh, yeah. It’s Clara. 🙂 Personally, I’m going for ‘Space Dad’ and ‘Space Mum’ for Clara – in that Clara has two perfectly human parents; but she would never have existed if the Doctor and Missy hadn’t interfered in her life. But in honour of @juniperfish, who is firmly insistent that Clara is the Doctor’s daughter/granddaughter, I’ll make the following points:

1. Clara is so like the Doctor, she can actually be the Doctor when she has to be (Flatline).
2. The Doctor describes Clara (mistakenly, because Missy set up the restaurant meeting) in Deep Breath as an ‘egomaniac needy game player sort of person.’ Which means that, without realising, the Doctor’s just described Clara as being very like Missy.
3. Throughout Series 8, we see that Clara is quite capable of lying to and manipulating the people she most loves.
4. She’s also capable of going damn near insane with grief; she’d willingly kill herself and the Doctor to punish him for not bringing Danny back.
5. In Death in Heaven, Missy treats Clara very much the way she treats the Doctor; dumps her in a dangerous situation and leaves her to get out of it by herself. 😉
6. In Listen, the TARDIS takes Clara to the children’s home where Danny is staying. The Doctor, who has investigated her entire life, appears perfectly happy that a little baby Clara might be in the children’s home and has just forgotten about it.
7. We never did see Clara’s mum in hospital just having given birth. We first saw Clara at home, a few months old. It’s compatible with adoption.
8. In Night Terrors, we also see that adoptive parents can forget that they are adoptive parents.

And finally: Moffat has played this game before; it’s not the first time he’s had the adult child turn up before the parents become the parents. 😈

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@suzannems

If the writers, et al., are not trying to suggest that the Master has been a female before, what is the meaning of her calling the Doctor “My boyfriend?”

I quite simply thought that he (the Doctor) had been his (the Master’s) boyfriend. Men can have boyfriends. Besides, ever since the Simm Master, I’ve thought (and said) that the Master was basically ‘that ex-boyfriend who turns out to be a psycho stalker’.

Of course, since they’re flat-out playing Missy as the Doctor’s very own stalker, it’s possible that the ‘boyfriend’ bit was entirely in his/her head; the Doctor only ever saw the relationship as a very close friendship.

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@Purofilion

It makes a lot of sense if you see ‘sexual attraction’ as something that also changes with regeneration. I’d argue that the Doctor isn’t presented as an invariably straight male – Capaldi’s Doctor certainly seemed to want Psy to give him a call. 😉 Other Doctors have played up the ‘asexual’ angle, to the extent that some fans still desperately insist that the Doctor is asexual (in the face of a granddaughter and four marriages).

So the Tennant Doctor was attractive to anything and anyone. He was also attracted to Rose – but wouldn’t let himself act on it, because of the age differential. The cases where we know he acts on it are a) Nurse Redfern, when he was human and b) Queen Elizabeth, when he thinks she’s a Zygon (poison sacs in the tongue. Just saying).

But I think you could argue that the Tennant Doctor stays away from sexual relationships with humans after School Reunion/The Girl in the Fireplace, when he realises just how badly he hurt Sarah Jane – and then has a particularly brutal re-introduction to the brevity of human life when compared to his lifestyle.

@suzannems – oddly, we’ve been arguing off-screen events on another topic. What happens off-screen? Well, the answer is that we don’t know and have no way of knowing unless reference is made to it on-screen. Missy seems pretty comfortable as a woman, so she might have previously regenerated as a woman.

However, the Doctor is obviously desperately trying to work out who this woman is … and is so blank on the possibility of it being the Master that the thought of the Master changing sex clearly never occurred to him. The Jacobi Master also refers disparagingly to being shot by a woman, which doesn’t sound to me like he’s been one himself.

On the other hand, the Doctor mentions another friend who switched between genders. So is it genuinely fluid and unremarkable? Or is it, in Gallifreyan society, something a bit eccentric? Or is it like the Tennant Doctor regenerating into the apparently-twelve-years-old Smith Doctor – one of those slightly embarrassing regeneration accidents?

Discuss.

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@Purofilion and @suzannems

It’s unlikely that the Master was ever a Missy before, because the Doctor is completely stunned by it – errr… later. I don’t know how far you’ve got in the box set watching.

There was quite a lot of discussion when Capaldi was cast on how they were going to deal with the Caecelius/Frobisher thing. They dealt (off-screen) with his being recast as Frobisher by saying unofficially that Frobisher was one of Caecelius’ remote descendants, rather like Freema Ageyeman playing her own cousin.

But you can’t play that trick when one ‘face’ belongs to a Time Lord. 🙂 Or can they? There’s another case in Series 8 when two entirely different characters wear the same face…

@lisa I’d guess that Time Lord transgenders simply go through a controlled regeneration to the other sex. Or, more generally, it just happens. Though Michelle Gomez has made a couple of jokes along the lines of ‘Is Missy still the Master when you take the skirt off?’ 😈

But from the child point of view, it does mean that Doctor Who has long-running gay characters, straight characters, bisexual characters, long-running interracial relationships and now a long-running character who’s switched gender. If kids do have to be given that little talk about how Uncle John is now Auntie Johanna, it means they’ve already got the conceptual framework to put it in – rather than never having heard of such a thing in their little lives. That is, I think, a good thing. 🙂

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@ichabod

I think ‘Sherlock’ has currently got the sexuality of the characters absolutely right. That is, the question mark is over Sherlock.

Watson is definitely straight; but Watson is also someone not-scared of loving a man very deeply. He just won’t be sexually attracted to that man.

The running gag is that any strong love between two men must mean (in the 21st Century) that they’re a gay couple.

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@ichabod

Or there’s me. It’s an in-story view. 😀

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@mudlark

Sylvester McCoy, as well. 😀

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@purofilion – it’s actually a fairly old aphorism – C.S. Lewis has a variant in his Screwtape stories, and I think possibly Baudelaire as well. Right now, however, The Usual Suspects has the best known version.

@ichabod – no, Mycroft really is called ‘Mycroft’. The usual excuse for upper middle class families landing their offspring with names like that is ‘family name’. However, his parents (especially Mum) call him ‘Mike’.

So having been given the option during his childhood of the perfectly sensible ‘Mike Holmes’, he goes for ‘Mycroft Holmes’. 😉 It may also be a bit of a shout out to the super-computer ‘Mike Holmes’ (for those who haven’t read the book, he’s named after Mycroft) in the Heinlein novel The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress.

Sherlock, as he admits to Watson, is William Sherlock Scott Holmes. That’s using Baring Gould’s idea; presumably Baring-Gould was following a theory that nobody in their right minds would give a child ‘Sherlock’ as his first name, but ‘William Sherlock’ was a Dean of St Pauls and a theologian.

Possibly the fictional Holmes family are descended from the real William Sherlock. 😉

I have a deep respect for the Sherlockians; they started this literary game of bonkers theories based on evidence within the text.

@mudlark

But when he got the telephone call from Clara he promptly decided ‘Don’t be a monk; monks aren’t cool’

Which happens to be the usual reason for realising God isn’t calling you to be a monastic… 😈

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@jimthefish and @mudlark

I think my favourite part in Series 3 was when we visited the Holmes family at, er, home. To discover that ‘Mycroft Holmes’ and ‘Sherlock Holmes’ were originally ‘Mike Holmes’ and ‘William Holmes’. Their parents had called them by perfectly sensible versions of their names; the boys were having none of it. 😀

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@jimthefish

I think at the rate he’s accepting roles in anti-slavery films, he’s trying to change it to being synonymous with the fine tradition of opposing slavery. 😉

[Author]

Posts