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18 January 2014 at 16:58 #24387
@whisht – you know what would be a really funny plotline for Series 8?
If the huge regeneration power-surge needed to create a new cycle did affect the Capaldi Doctor’s memory. And he’s forgotten everything (including how to fly the TARDIS).
In fact, he’s, errrr…forgotten his name. Which is going make things a bit difficult for signalling the Time Lords… ’cause he doesn’t know it either.
Doctor Who?
[I can just imagine Capaldi doing “Yes, I’m the Doctor, everyone keeps telling me! But Doctor Who?”]
18 January 2014 at 13:04 #24374@devilishrobby – good point. I did know, but left it out because I wasn’t sure the Papal Mainframe knew that.
Anyone have any idea if they did? Or was that just part of the Doctor’s evidence chain?
18 January 2014 at 12:54 #24372@barnable – great theory!
Can I just drop in for a moment to correct a misapprehension?
Tasha Lem and the Papal Mainframe could have been wrong. If the PM is a religious order, then we can assume that it is based on faith.
Perfectly reasonable assumption – in fact, you’re making a faith-based assumption right there. 😀
There’s a propaganda-like statement going the rounds at the moment: ‘faith is belief in something for which there is no evidence’.
In fact, faith is belief in something for which there is insufficient evidence.
The reason I’m going into this, Barnable, is that you follow up your statement by bringing in prophecies you don’t need. We all already know the one prophecy there is – which may only be a prophecy from the Doctor’s point of view. Silence must fall when the Question is asked.
As @fatmaninabox points out, both the Doctor and the Papal Mainframe are making decisions based on belief. Which is perfectly normal; people do that all the time. Actually, the Doctor’s belief is based on shakier evidence than the Papal Mainframe’s…
Right. The evidence chain is as follows.
- There is a message being sent from the other side of the crack.
- The message has markers that identify it as being sent from Gallifrey.
- The Time Lords lived on Gallifrey.
- The Time Lords had the knowledge and technology to be able to send a message through space and time.
- The message was translated by the Doctor, a Time Lord.
- The message asks something that is presumably only known to Time Lords.
Therefore, the message is from the Time Lords. Oh, crap!
For the Doctor, you’d need to add that he knows that at least one item of TL tech developed self-awareness – so he has an alternative theory available. Two, in fact. It might be River behind the cracks 😈
Which is why I say that the Papal Mainframe are making their decisions based on less shaky evidence than the Doctor. They don’t know the Moment exists, and they don’t know that River knows the Doctor’s Gallifreyan name. From their point of view, there’s really only one theory possible based on the evidence they’ve got: it’s the Time Lords.
[But if anyone wants to argue about faith and ‘no evidence’ versus ‘insufficient evidence’, I’d suggest that the pub might be more suitable. :twisted:]
15 January 2014 at 21:18 #24336@haggis – I think the question for Let’s Kill Hitler would be: did the Doctor, at that point, realise that he was on his last regeneration?
Or was it the ‘regeneration disabled’ reply by the interface that made him later count it up on his fingers and go ‘oh, ah, right, drat!’
🙂
15 January 2014 at 11:14 #24330@fatmaninabox – your evidence only proves that Star Trek can’t handle kids. As you say; Caitlin Blackwood. Indeed, Doctor Who has innumerable small children getting involved in the action.
Then there’s the famous Children of The Stones, Sarah Jane Adventures, The Tomorrow People. Going back to the 1950’s, there was the ‘Kemlo’ series. Scientifically rubbish, but enormous fun. There’s also Robert Heinlein’s series of juvenile novels. 🙂
15 January 2014 at 09:25 #24324@barnable – agree with @fatmaninabox that the Doctor was very, very firm about no blowing up of planets until everyone left alive and unconverted was in the one room.
Given that he knows the Empire’s policy with regard to blowing-up-of-planets, he may well have known that the Emperor setting off the bomb triggered an automatic rescue.
If he didn’t, it’s still compatible with his behaviour in The Day of The Doctor. He’s willing to set off the bomb to save the rest of the universe from Cybermen – but he doesn’t want to survive it. Especially since there are two kids in the group.
I’ve heard that when Gaiman was plotting out the episode, ‘the’ Clara was going to be the Victorian version and the kids would’ve been on more TARDIS journeys. Personally, I like to think of the whole ‘blackmail’ plot as an intervention by the Great Intelligence. He feeds the photos to the kids so that the Doctor takes them on a joyride and gets them killed.
14 January 2014 at 14:36 #24293some sort of solution where the Doctor/Clara removed or absorbed the Great Intelligence from the Doctor’s time line doesn’t it before they can “leap free”.
@nick. Yes. It does. The solution was called ‘Clara’.
What did you think she was doing in there? 😀
[There was in fact a line or two explaining that spending too long in someone else’s time stream is slightly fatal. The Great Intelligence, it was explained at 90mph, would be scattered along the time stream and would die – but not before doing the damage that Clara leapt in to repair.]
13 January 2014 at 22:17 #24278Did it not occur to them before Clara spoke that they ought to help the Doctor?
Good question: what I would ask (since it’d need a detailed rewatch) is: do the Time Lords have any idea how they need to help the Doctor?
What I mean is: their last view of the Doctor is of thirteen Doctors. The Tennant Doctor’s regeneration to the same face happened when they were completely out of events (whether time-locked or destroyed, they were out of it). Clara’s first ‘Doctor, can you explain the plot?’ discussion about not regenerating and the waiting tomb takes place up on the clock tower, not near the crack.
As far as they’re concerned, the Smith Doctor is the owner of Body Number Twelve – and can regenerate. I don’t think it’s until Clara’s second visit that there’s an entire conversation about dying and a predestined death near the crack.
As @phaseshift pointed out a long time back; it’s important that the Doctor himself doesn’t ask for immortality. In the Whoniverse, that’s always bad; always a sign of impending madness. Thematically, I’d say it’s also important that the Doctor accepts that he’s going to die – it’s the last thing he stops running away from.
I’m sure the Time Lords were smart enough to figure out that there was a problem. I’m just not sure they knew the real problem. They may have been patiently (or not-so-patiently) waiting for the Doctor to tell them all through the events of Time of The Doctor. 🙂
13 January 2014 at 21:42 #24276I for one would really like to know how we got from the Doctor being stuck on Trenzalore with Clara in his own timeline at the end of series 7 to the two “specials”.
That one’s easy – it turns out there was a production problem. Matt Smith injured his knee and it was all he could do to pick Jenna Coleman up. He certainly couldn’t manage the ‘turn and leap for freedom’ that they’d planned to show the exit from the timeline.
Sometimes the best-laid scripting plans come up against real life…
12 January 2014 at 18:14 #24246@monochromedimension – we did look at each Doctor in turn leading up to the 50th. Now, however, I suggest you just wade in. 🙂
12 January 2014 at 17:10 #24238make him an unsympathetic character who gradually warms up; the challenge being to do it properly this time. (And shades of Hartnell as well of course).
I’d prefer it if they went Hartnell rather than C. Baker. Hartnell was never unsympathetic (despite being a bit of a git). I got The Beginnings set for Christmas (Unearthly Child, The Daleks and Edge of Destruction) and – as they made heavy play of in An Adventure In Space And Time – Hartnell does indeed play it with a twinkle. There’s also an obvious love between the Doctor and his granddaughter.
I have no idea how long the memory loss is going to last. Might be ten seconds. 😈 Could be a series-long arc; he’s got to get to Time War Gallifrey to be ‘all thirteen’, after all. But it would be just like Steven Moffat to stick that nice little cameo in The Day of The Doctor – and then have it turn out to be the central point of Series 8. The Doctor has to take part in saving Gallifrey; we’ve seen him take part in saving Gallifrey. But he can’t remember what he did as his previous incarnations, or even how to fly the TARDIS. 🙂
12 January 2014 at 15:13 #24235@scaryb – good article. Certainly I’ve lost count recently of the number of times I’ve been saying that I doubt there are eight million ‘obsessive fans’. Or that I also doubt 2.9 million requests on iPlayer all came from people watching the programme for the second time.
‘Viewing figures aren’t falling’ is another sentence I should have on speed type. 🙂
11 January 2014 at 10:14 #24207@barnable – the ‘spoilers’ forum isn’t for hiding answers; the spoilers forum is for sneaked set photos, twitter rumours about Alex Kingston having been spotted, plot leaks and so forth. Posting here means a number of forum members simply won’t see your post – they don’t come here.
10 January 2014 at 19:20 #24182hopefully the mistake will have been learned from
What, you mean like now holding any vaguely spoilerish location filming in the middle of a high security RAF base or an SAS training ground? Yeah, I think they’ve learned a few things. 😈
Mind you, I do keep wondering who’s the Whovian at the MOD… 🙂
10 January 2014 at 15:02 #24169@brewski – you do realise that some of the Eastern Orthodox Churches still have nudity in baptism?
I think there’s even a joke about it in My Big Fat Greek Wedding – the protagonist’s best friend is, if I recall, very enthusiastic about being godparent to the fiance. [Who has to get baptised if it’s to be an in-church wedding].
The fact that this role means she’ll have to put chrism oil all over a very hot, very naked guy is, of course, completely unrelated to her enthusiasm. 😉
10 January 2014 at 14:08 #24166@brewski. In the show, the hologram was for Clara; she didn’t feel comfortable seeing herself or the Doctor naked. While I’m sure she was ‘aware’ it was only a hologram, she didn’t realise everyone on the Papal Mainframe could see through it. As in, see through it, rather than seeing that they were wearing hologram clothes rather than real ones.
In the wider world, the hologram was for the audience. Otherwise there would’ve been a lot of small children complaining “Mummy, why’ve you put your hand over my eyes? Mummy, I can’t see.” 😈
In terms of the plot, the need for nudity in 50th Century churches (which, whether Moffat knows it or not, harks to Early Christianity – adults being baptised had to be naked) explains why the Doctor’s wearing a wig instead of showing off his new lack-of-hairstyle.
10 January 2014 at 13:57 #24165@phaseshift and @fatmaninabox – it’s good news. It also shows that – whatever the grumblers are grumbling – Martin Freeman and Benedict Cumberbatch are obviously having fun with it.
@juniperfish and @whogirl – Molly’s boyfriend is definitely sus. In The Sign of Three, Molly’s looking considerably ‘older’ than in The Empty Hearse. She looks miserable throughout the wedding. When Sherlock’s consulting her about the stag do, she’s clearly sensitive about the amount she’s drinking.
Okay, so – doing a Sherlock: looks older, unhappy, drinking a lot. This relationship isn’t going well.
10 January 2014 at 12:24 #24159@purplecup and @scaryb We also saw an example of not failing to answer in the early conversation between the Doctor, Clara and the couple. Clara’s asked “What did you say your name was” – and replies truthfully. But not to the question asked. Instead she blurts out “bubbly personality masking bossy control freak”.
The Doctor doesn’t answer with his name, either. He just keeps telling them he’s wearing a wig. 🙂
You can’t fail to answer and you can’t lie. You can, however, not answer the question asked.
Oh, and you can also lie by telling the exact truth – since ‘Rule One’, the Doctor picks that skill up pretty quickly.
9 January 2014 at 21:49 #24126The last thing they’ll want is a blurry image on the internet stealing their thunder!
As when they started filming Series 5 in what they thought was an out-of-the-way location. To discover, to their dismay, that the entire Internet was discussing the new Doctor’s costume almost the second Matt Smith stepped out of the costume van.
They’d wanted to keep Alex Kingston’s return quiet, too. Oops! 🙂
Welcome back, @chickenelly. We’ve missed you.
9 January 2014 at 14:06 #24115@blenkinsopthebrave and @tardisblue
The logic to the minisode – if Moffat had always planned to give the Doctor a new regeneration cycle in the 50th Anniversary year – is simple.
The Eleventh Doctor thought he was going to be the last Doctor. Therefore, it had to be him who took River to the Singing Towers. He couldn’t leave it to a later regeneration, as he didn’t know there was going to be one.
It also means the Capaldi Doctor is a widower – as was, probably, the Hartnell Doctor.
9 January 2014 at 10:13 #24106We’ve had the ‘longer seasons’ argument before. It’s not really possible; Doctor Who has a combination of a leading actor who’s in almost every scene and a genre that needs a lot of post-production. As it is, they film for eight months and they’re still in post-production for months after the principle filming; it wouldn’t surprise me terribly if the last episode of the series was delivered to the BBC a week before broadcast, just in time for the TV critics advance screening.
If you want to see the effect that the schedule has on the leading actor, look at pics of David Tennant in The Christmas Invasion vs. David Tennant in The End of Time. Or Matt Smith in The Eleventh Hour vs. Matt Smith in The Name of The Doctor. In each case they’re barely four years older – and look about ten.
8 January 2014 at 21:53 #24089The practical part of me was puzzled about how a basically agrarian colony, the town of Christmas and its environs, survived with such little light each day.
Ummm… they’re mushroom farmers? Alien-fungi farmers?
I can also imagine some alien variety of lichen adapting well to a brief burst of light. That would support animal life; reindeer like lichen. They also like mushrooms.
The costumes did remind me vaguely of ethnic Lapps – the Sami, the reindeer herders.
8 January 2014 at 21:27 #24084@phaseshift I would be very happy to go through all six episodes of Quatermass and the Pit. As well as being very, very scary, it’s a rare surviving example of a live TV serial.
A lot of the show was pre-recorded on 35mm, then during broadcast they basically pointed another 35mm camera at the monitor. They did a similar thing for Quatermass II (which is why that also survives), but that didn’t work as well. You can see all episodes of Quatermass II, but some bits are what would be technically described as ‘a bit iffy’. 🙂
Quatermass Experiment is lost to those without a time machine; that’s why they did the ‘live’ restage.
7 January 2014 at 15:57 #24033@thommck –
SPOILERS for Sherlock The Sign of Three
-it did remind me rather of Dorothy L. Sayers description of her own ‘Busman’s Honeymoon’. From memory, she said that normally people expect a detective story with love-story interruptions. This time she’d found herself writing a love-story with detective interruptions. 😉
I think the bit with Mycroft demanding Sherlock think harder and more logically will turn out to be important: it may mark the moment when Sherlock turns away decisively from his brother’s approach of ‘isolate yourself from other humans and apply pure logic to solve the puzzle.’
The image of Mycroft is replaced by the image of John – who represents being part of humanity, recognising feelings, and prioritising the saving of life. It’s later reprised by John telling Sherlock ‘You’re not a puzzle solver! You’re a drama queen!’ 😀
7 January 2014 at 14:16 #24032Official ‘begins filming’ photo and article. It gives nothing away, not even the new costume – Capaldi’s still wearing the Eleventh’s costume (minus bow tie).
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/doctorwho/articles/Peter-Capaldi-begins-filming-on-Doctor-Who
7 January 2014 at 11:48 #24027SPOILERS for Sherlock – The Sign of Three!
Tum, tum.
Tiddley tum…
I agree that the happy atmosphere of this episode – which is in fact an Everybody Lives! episode – bodes. There is much boding, especially in the fact that someone who’s read the original stories will know that Mary dies.
I remember thinking in The Empty Hearse that, while we were meant to presume that the mysterious figure was concentrating on Sherlock’s reaction, he wasn’t. The part being continually replayed was Mary crying ‘John!’. The target is Mary. For some reason possibly connected with her knowledge of skip codes.
Um… witness protection programme? Is that why she’s an ‘orphan’? Was that the reason for the shennanigans with the bank gang – it was really obvious that the reasons they were getting off/knew of raids in advance was that the police are compromised.
Mary dying will also provide a through-line for the three stories. Sherlock starts – in The Empty Hearse – not understanding John’s grief in the slightest. He thinks John will be happy to see him back and doesn’t understand that John might be angry that his best friend put him through such needless pain.
In The Sign of Three we see that Sherlock, in fact, had no idea that he was John’s best friend. He ends up working with John and Mary on something entirely human – organising a wedding.
So if Mary dies, we can suspect that Sherlock might well grieve for Mary’s loss – but he’s also going to learn exactly what he put John through, because he’s going to have to support John this time. That’s His Last Vow; he swore he’d always be there “for all three of you”.
Now then – some bonkers theorising*. We had a nod to the character of Billy the Page Boy this week, with little Alfie(?) the page boy. That established that, surprisingly, Sherlock is good with kids.
While I have a horrible suspicion that they might well follow Doyle and have both Mary and the unborn baby die – they might not. Billy appears in more than one story, all the plays (Charlie Chaplin’s first role was as Billy) and many of the films. That means the later Baker Street dynamic is Holmes, Watson, Mrs Hudson – and a child. And they’ve had Sherlock vow to be there for the child, as well.
It follows on from the running gag of Holmes and Watson as effectively a couple; moving to the next stage of being a ‘couple’ with child. It makes sense within the Sherlock world because Watson doesn’t have any reliable relatives – as a newly single Dad, it’s going to have to be his friends (Sherlock, Mrs Hudson) who rally round. Moving back to Baker Street could make sense – because Mrs Hudson might offer to do the child-care while Watson’s working.
The producers also don’t have to worry too much about the technicalities of baby-wrangling. If they ever manage to book Cumberbatch and Freeman for Series 4, it’ll be a couple of years down the road. They’d be needing toddlers by then – and if there’s a Series 5, child actors.
Thoughts?
*Might as well live up to our motto, even if there is only one upcoming episode to theorise about. 🙂
7 January 2014 at 10:55 #24022Yes, it was Matt’s knee; knee problems plus carrying actress aren’t a good combination. I bet Jenna Coleman was wondering if she was going to be dumped on the floor any second. 😉
They were originally thinking about a dramatic run/leap – which would have made it obvious they’d got out of the timestream. Instead they had to settle for a rather less dramatic suggestion of a turn.
BFI interview, I think.
5 January 2014 at 18:54 #23970@devilishrobby – it wasn’t clearly explained. However, given that the Master was resurrected to be a soldier in the Time War, it’s generally presumed that the Rassilon played by Timothy Dalton was the Rassilon.
5 January 2014 at 13:55 #23958@whisht – yeah, it’s this evening. The deadline is midnight – that’s when Misrule officially ends.
4 January 2014 at 21:36 #23938@arbutus – yes, I’m thinking about your comment. The reason I didn’t reply on the blog is that I have a vague idea the reply involves a whole new blog.
I’d say that – yes, you’re right. There’s no way of changing the Doctor’s death without the Time Lords. It basically needs the ability to change the future without changing the past that led up to that future. However, the past – in this case – was created by that future. As you say, without Clara jumping into the Time Stream, the Doctor won’t even survive long enough to reach Trenzalore.
So the changed future needs people sufficiently advanced in time-manipulation that they can create and maintain a paradox throughout Clara’s lives. Whether the paradox is shunting the Doctor’s death into another alternate time-line is something I haven’t thought through yet. 🙂
Another possibility is that the Time Lords haven’t just kept Clara alive and with the Doctor, they’ve actually created her to handle the whole situation. It’s Clara, after all, who persuades the Doctor to save Gallifrey rather than let it burn.
If you love him, and you should, help him!
We’re all, rightly, being deeply cynical about that. Rightly given what we’ve seen the Time Lords to be. But it could be that – as is not uncommon in fairy tales – the Time Lords can’t be saved until they’ve learnt to love.
4 January 2014 at 14:06 #23918@scaryb and @nicelyuseless Compared to the present US congress/senate, our current parliament is a haven of civilised discourse. I remember the BTL shock at the New York Times when they reported on the formation of the Coalition. The shock wasn’t just at the very idea that Conservatives and Liberals might decide to work together; it was also that all three parties were conducting an aggressive but reasoned argument about it.
Yeah, resorting to ad hominem is bad; but a situation in which every policy must be aggressively defended – against a bunch of people looking to pick every hole they can find – isn’t necessarily a bad one. 😉
4 January 2014 at 13:22 #23915@purplecup – it’s in one of the blogs, that’s why you can’t find it. Tasha flying the TARDIS is a genuine, original, no previous owners Deus Ex Machina. 🙂
So it got talked about under the ‘Deus Ex Machina’ discussion.
3 January 2014 at 23:34 #23896Actually, I rather like Martin Freeman’s joke (quoted in this week’s Radio Times, other listings magazines are available).
we were standing in two inches of freezing water on the coldest January since records began .. fantasising about where future episodes could be. Murder in a Palace? The Adventure of the Dry Room? The Sunshine Killings?
It’s such a glamorous life, being an actor. 😀
3 January 2014 at 23:23 #23895Ummm… @juniperfish – the first episode included an empty house, a collection of murder victims that included a businesswoman and a student, and the villain being –
– well, I won’t say, in case someone hasn’t watched it yet. But definitely not well heeled.
The second episode involves Chinatown, a graffiti artist and a fringe circus. Also some bankers, who are not. liked.
The third episode involves a lot of work in a lab at an NHS hospital (Barts), a car rental agency, the Baker Street Planetarium, and a swimming pool. I grant you that there is an art museum; we also see the homeless network.
The fourth episode is directly taken from A Scandal in Bohemia; so instead of being a story about the ex-mistress of a member of the Royal Family (politely bowdlerised to some minor Bohemian princelet), it becomes a story about the dominatrix used by members of the Royal Family.
The fifth episode is directly taken from The Hounds of The Baskervilles. Sir Henry actually gets downgraded to being merely well-off, instead of the titled baronet owner of a stately pile. We also have an extensive tour round an army base.
The sixth episode includes the Diogenes Club (directly from Doyle), the Bank of England, The Tower of London … and Pentonville Prison. 🙂 Also, the NHS hospital (again).
So saying Sherlock has spent a lot of time in fine restaurants, gentlemen’s clubs, art galleries, the well-heeled homes of high end dominatrices, Buckingham Palace… is a bit unfair.
Mostly, those places are directly from Doyle. Or justifiable within the story: is Watson really going to take Mary to the local chippie when he’s planning to formally ask her to marry him? No. He’s going to take her to the best restaurant he can afford. The joke is that, because of Sherlock, they eventually end up in a kebab shop.
In fact, we see a lot of local chippies. And lunchrooms. If I was asked to characterise the London of Sherlock, I’d say it was the sort of middle-class, slightly arty London which is likely to be familiar to two middle-class writers. Which is fine, because as @jimthefish points out above, the London of Sherlock Holmes was largely the middle-class London familiar to a young Dr. Doyle.
Doyle did occasionally wander into telling stories about the more picturesque and touristy areas of poverty stricken London (yeah, Victorian Limehouse was wall-to-wall opium dens – not). Moffat and Gatiss seem, if anything, to be a bit more careful; sticking to what they know and not sensationalising what they don’t.
3 January 2014 at 19:20 #23873Awwwww… lookit the widdle baby Matt …
My lord, the series does age them, doesn’t it?
That mature man looks considerably more than five years older than the boy in #23865
3 January 2014 at 11:26 #23833@craignixon – I lived in Romania. Do you think that counts?
🙂
2 January 2014 at 13:42 #23813@craignixon Some girls here were on the Internet before it became the World Wide Web… 😈
[Eeeeh, I remember when I were a lass. We ‘ad ter do our own calculations in them days, with nobbut a piece o’ wood an’ a bit o’ clockwork to ‘elp us]
😀2 January 2014 at 10:00 #23805@fatmaninabox Somebody on one of the Graun blogs has already spotted that ‘thirteen possible scenarios’ matches rather neatly with the ‘thirteen lives’ of the Doctor.
I thoroughly enjoyed it – particularly the scene when Sherlock explains how it was done. Only to have the insane theorist say ‘Well, that’s a bit… boring, isn’t it? I would have done it differently’. 😀
1 January 2014 at 22:43 #23794@arkleseizure – I think he likes us, though. 🙂
1 January 2014 at 15:57 #23771I’d agree with @phaseshift and @juniperfish that time is passing in Gallifrey’s bubble universe. Going by Hide, it’s probably not passing at the same rate.
I’d also go with Phaseshift’s idea that there was very likely a Civil War following the end of the Time War: though it may have been short, sharp and conclusive given that the Master was last seen trying to kill the High Council…
The Doctor could be so convinced that the Gallifreyans now want peace because the High Council was so clearly nuts. Whoever’s now in charge of Gallifrey, they’re willing to wait to come home. They also trust the Doctor. Neither of those things suggest that the High Council faction won.
Like Juniperfish, I’m still wondering about Clara’s obvious connection with the Doctor. Even though she’s obviously a real person with a real life, she still seems ‘programmed’ to save the Doctor. Descendent? Or somehow designed by the Time Lords?
As I said somewhere up above; that whole ‘boyfriend’ comedy routine was crafted to show the audience that Clara and the Doctor don’t have a boyfriend/girlfriend relationship – even though they both fancy each other.
1 January 2014 at 10:58 #23764@gothamcelt – actually, laughing at Hitler was a technique used both in the Second World War itself and later by Mel Brooks.
31 December 2013 at 22:34 #23747@deadmeat3171 – ah, but do the Time Lords realise that the Doctor has married again? Or, even if they do, do they realise his dead wife is leading a busy and active afterlife? As far as they know, the only person on this side of the crack who knows his birth name is – the Doctor. (Actually, Clara’s also seen it – but she’s forgotten that she knows it. I don’t know if that hidden knowledge will later turn out to be important).
The GI, who had access to all available information about the Doctor, clearly didn’t realise that anyone else could access the tomb.
Incidentally, we now know why the Doctor’s name was the password to the Tomb. It was (supposed to be) locked to everyone except the Time Lords.
As to ‘how do the Time Lords know it?’ there is, on Gallifrey, a woman who may be his mother (End of Time). There’s also possibly Susan, and possibly his ex-wife (Susan’s grandmother). All of those people might know his name. His wife because it seems to be part of the marriage ceremony, his mother because she probably gave him that name, and Susan because she’s family. 🙂
31 December 2013 at 19:51 #23741Given that the Doctor has a rather large number of enemies, I think he might be keen on not letting them know that they could kill him for real this time …
That almost certainly wasn’t the fourth Doctor (given that his regeneration never reached that age) – it was almost certainly a future Doctor who’d decided to revisit that face. In which case the ‘changing time streams’ rule comes into effect; the younger Doctor (the Smith Doctor) will forget the conversation.
It’s rather like the War Doctor having a moment of realisation that he didn’t destroy Gallifrey before he has to think that he did. In this case, the Smith Doctor has a moment of realising that he did save Gallifrey and he’s not going to die at Trenzalore – before he has to go off and face his death.
31 December 2013 at 10:25 #23684Happy Birthday to us.
Well done, Craig (and all mods, past and present) and thank you for all your hard work in the past year.
Nice front page, Craig and @phaseshift. 🙂
31 December 2013 at 09:59 #23683@devilishrobby – yeah, I agree. The Doctor’s a bit of an optimist in saying ‘they’ll come in peace’. However, it’s perfectly possible that he’s saying that in the sure and certain knowledge that he’s not the only Gallifreyan who wants peace. In Night of The Doctor he says ‘I’m one of the nice ones,’ not ‘I’m the nice one.’
Moffat’s developed a very nuanced approach to ‘evil aliens’, so I can easily see him developing away from regarding ‘The Time Lords’ as a monolithic block. There are signs of that in The Day of The Doctor, when the Time Lords of the War Council and the Time Lords of the High Council have totally different aims and plans. The High Council wants to destroy the universe to save themselves; the War Council are very busy defending the planet and their soldiers can be clearly seen trying to get the civilians to a place of safety.
But the Time Lords have definitely got an image problem. You can see that in the wide-scale reaction of ‘no way would the Time Lords give the Doctor new regenerations just because they love him!’
I mean, honestly? This is a guy who’s just saved their entire planet, and nobody believes they’ll happily save his life back? Yeah, the Time Lords have a serious image problem.
The only way they can get back without causing a war is by solving the image problem.
Oh, and the Dalek problem. I presume there’s some reason Mr Moffat effectively went ‘ah, oops, no, I can’t have the Daleks forget the Doctor…’
31 December 2013 at 09:12 #23680is it possible for the doctor to go looking for it or will it be shut off like rose is?
Good question. Judging by Trenzalore, the problem isn’t that the Doctor can’t find it, or they can’t send a message through. It’s that the Time War will restart if they come back.
I’d say Moffat’s given two presents to the producers of the next fifty years. Firstly, he’s sorted out the regenerations rather than leaving it for the next producer. He hasn’t made the Doctor immortal – but given that the actor playing the Doctor tends to stay an average of 3 or 4 years, it’s likely that the problem’s next going to hit in the run up to the 100th Anniversary.
Secondly, he’s not only flipped the scenario of the first fifty years (the Doctor is running away from Gallifrey) around (the Doctor is running to Gallifrey) – but he’s brought the Time Lords back in a manner which means that they can be used as and when.
If you don’t want the Time Lords in your story, they’re stuck behind the cracks, in another universe. If you do want them in your story, introduce a crack.
The Time Lords are back – but in a way which means the writer can easily justify them not being able to interfere.
30 December 2013 at 08:38 #23649@rmifaabsbb
I think that’s a good, entirely possible solution.3)’s always possible, but Moffat’s said in an interview that he planned for the new Doctor to appear. That suggests he’s sketched something out that explains why he must appear at Gallifrey; we can now guess, after all, that there may be as many as twenty-five Doctors floating about the universe.
29 December 2013 at 19:28 #23610Your critical insights are astonishing; ‘boring and unintersting’. Why didn’t I think of that? Yes, of course. The Time of the Doctor as an existential meditation on the nature of old age and approaching death. ’50min of big nothing and 5 final minutes of resolution’ indeed. Deeply, deeply profound.
I await your blog post – The Time of The Doctor and Waiting For Godot: ‘Waiting For Daleks’ – with interest.
29 December 2013 at 16:55 #23601@scaryb – the nakedness did have one plot function – it meant that Clara’s Dad had a justifiable reason to act shocked, startled, embarrassed and slightly confused.
Which means that we can’t tell whether or not he recognised the Doctor.
29 December 2013 at 09:25 #23584@nicelyuseless – I have a strong suspicion Mr Capaldi’s asked to be Twelve rather than Thirteen. 🙂 The BBC are certainly calling him the Twelfth – but if it worries you, you can always call him the Capaldi Doctor.
Yes, he flicked switches. He starts off completely confident, goes to the TARDIS console, flicks switches and presses some buttons – then seems to realise he has no idea what he’s doing.
Regeneration trauma: two seconds ago he knew how to fly the TARDIS. Now he realises he doesn’t. I’d guess the reaction he got from the TARDIS told him that those were the wrong buttons/switches. 🙂
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