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@magnetite – he didn’t get everything his way, though. He had to sit through Doctor Who Live – TheAfterparty – and not physically attack the producers responsible. 😈

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@juniperfish – I’ve just realised your ‘two Doctors’ theory was right all along.

Except, the ‘two Doctors’ are caused by the same kind of time-loop seen in The Big Bang, where we apparently have two Sonics (same sonic, but at two different points in its personal time-line).

Throughout Eleven’s run, there’ve been ‘two Doctors’. One: the post-return-of-Gallifrey Doctor who’s on Trenzalore throughout all these events, without his TARDIS, fighting a siege. Doctor Two: ‘the Doctor in the TARDIS’ – the pre-return-of-Gallifrey Doctor. Who doesn’t know.

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@d12345

we didnt found out the doctors name

Errr… yes, we did. After over a thousand years of journeying, from Gallifrey to Trenzalore, his real name is ‘The Doctor’. That’s the one that defines the ‘who’ in ‘Doctor Who?’ He’s The Doctor, the man who makes things better, the man whose job is saving lives. It may have been a mask, a disguise, back when he put it on. But now it’s his real, true, self.

I was expecting fireworks , and i got tenant playing around with a zygon princes
Actually, you got Tennant playing around with Queen Elizabeth I and the point was that she wasn’t a Zygon. For further details, http://www.thedoctorwhoforum.com/sidrat/the-day-of-the-doctor-a-time-structure-analysis/

Why would the doctor want and take eternal life , when he had plenty regenerations left and plenty of time to take the enemy down ?

Sorry, you’re going to have to repeat that one. No mention was made of eternal life. The Time War had reached the point where the Daleks and the Time Lords were fighting hand-to-sink-plunger in the streets of Gallifrey, the High Council had gone nuts and there was a very real danger the entire universe was going to go up in a burst of light (End of Time). The Hurt Doctor decided to end it by destroying Gallifrey and the Dalek armies surrounding it.

that isnt a fixed point in time that cant be changed , i dont know what is .Throught the whole series this is the rule , small things can change , but strong events with lots of people dying is a fixed point in time and cant be changed .

As well as the above blog post, I’ll refer you to: http://www.thedoctorwhoforum.com/sidrat/wibbley-wobbly-timey-wimey/#more-14172

where were all those enemies for 300y
Where were you? Were you nipping out for a cup of tea? Were your family talking over the final scenes? Were you trying to watch it on your iPhone? Texting your mates? What? Because you seem to have missed several attacks, a couple of voiceovers, Tasha turning into a Dalek (and back again) and an entire burning village.

the sky opened and the light came
I suppose they could have sent him a post card…

If you don’t like the Time Lords giving a big two fingered salute to the Daleks, just blame the bolt of regeneration energy on their over-developed sense of the dramatic. They have terrible dress sense as well. 🙂

It’s quite surprising how many people have complained about Clara asking the Time Lords for a favour and their granting it. It’s a genuine case of people’s idea of dramatic convention trumping over their real-life experience. Because in real life, the normal response to ‘Can I ask you a favour?’ is ‘yeah, sure’. Equally, a normal response to someone having a heart attack is to grab the nearby defibrillator.

In this case, the one contact that the Gallifreyans have with their home universe is about to die. Letting that happen would be frankly stupid.

will we found out about river after 5 seasons
She’s the daughter of Rory Williams and Amy Pond, mutated into part-Time-Lord by exposure to the time vortex while in her mother’s womb. She was kidnapped and brought up by the Kovarian faction to be the Doctor’s assassin. She was married to the Doctor, a Professor of Archaeology and died saving the Doctor’s life on The Library. What else do you need to know?

nothing there so intriging

The Great Intelligence did warn you. ‘A minor skirmish’, he called it. ‘In the end, it was simply too much for the old man.’

the lack of main villain and his evil plan

You’re quite correct. There is no main villain, and there is no evil plan. I’m sorry if that disappoints you, but there is absolutely no need for there to be one. There have been many, many stories in Doctor Who over the years where the antagonist was what you might loosely refer to as ‘the forces of nature’. In this case, The Name of The Doctor, The Day of The Doctor and The Time of The Doctor form a trilogy. The central question of that trilogy is: ‘Doctor Who?’

Not in the sense of ‘what are the syllables that make up his original Gallifreyan name’, but in the sense of ‘What does the name The Doctor represent? Did the man behind the name always live up to what it represents? Can he, in the end, simply be ‘The Doctor’?’

If you want a main ‘villain’ for The Doctor Trilogy, it’s the Doctor himself. He’s fighting himself, throughout. The standard Who villains are just sideshows; the main story is the Doctor’s fight to finally stop running away. He’s spent his whole life running; this is where he stops.

Act One: he stops running away from himself. Act Two: he stops running away from what he’s done. Act Three: he stops running away from death.

And it’s because he stops running away that he becomes immortal.
😉

Sorry you didn’t like it.

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@juniperfish and @jimthefish

I’d say the Clara/Doctor schtick was an important part of the set-up for the Capaldi Doctor. Because it established that – yeah, Clara fancies him. The Doctor himself is not unwilling. But nothing has happened. He’s definitely – that phonecall establishes – not her boyfriend, they certainly haven’t slept together.

So, Juniperfish, you can still hold out some hope that Clara will somehow turn out to be family. We’ve just established that: 1) Clara fancied the Eleventh Doctor; 2) The Eleventh Doctor was quite happy to be Clara’s boyfriend (once he’d blown the dust off the manual); but 3) somehow, something, some niggling little ‘no’ in the back of both their minds was stopping that relationship ever starting.

Tasha Lem – I think she’s the ’cause’ to River’s ‘effect’. The Doctor clearly flirts like mad with her whenever they meet; he’s visibly attracted. So, when the Kovarian Chapter run off and try and create a bespoke psychopath, they turn River into a copy of the woman the Doctor has the hots for. 🙂

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@drsmith

Like she was more special than The Doctor’s other companions.

She was more special than the Doctor’s other companions: to him. He says it several times: she was the first face that regeneration ever saw.

What was never mentioned but probably always running underneath: this little girl with no parents almost certainly reminded him of his own little girl with no parents – his granddaughter Susan.

Like Susan, she grew up. Like Susan, she both travelled with him and waited for him. Unlike Susan, he decides that this time, Amy’s husband-to-be is coming on board. But it only delays the inevitable; he loses her, in the end, to her husband and a normal life. A normal death.

He’s got the relationship slightly the wrong way round, of course. He’s not her grandfather – she’s his mother-in-law. But he was right about her being ‘family’ – and that’s who he wants to remember when he’s regenerating. Amelia Pond, his little girl. Who waited.

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So, as we say goodbye to our Madman in a Box, I found myself listening to the following: Murray Gold’s own reflection on mortality, in his tribute to Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart.

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@fiveroundsrapid – have you taken a look at @phaseshift‘s blog post on the topic?

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@thekrynoidman – rehearsals started before the Christmas Break, filming starts in January after everyone gets back.

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@shashank – it’s a good question and for all I know, might be important in Series 8.

The Eleventh Doctor, however, only recruits his previous selves. He doesn’t know there’s a Capaldi Doctor (I think it’s the Time Lord played by Peter de Jersey who has the line ‘All Thirteen’).

The Twelfth Doctor doesn’t need to be recruited – providing he remembers that he needs to turn up to help save Gallifrey. He’s from the future; he should already remember where and when this happened, what the Eleventh knew – and possibly, what he needs to do to turn failure into success.

Oh, and he needs to be able to fly the TARDIS. To remember how to fly the TARDIS.

Sidenote: The Eleventh also appears to have completely forgotten his chat with The Curator and their discussion about Gallifrey surviving. That fits with ‘The Curator’ being another future incarnation of The Doctor; the Smith Doctor – being an earlier incarnation – can’t retain the memory of that conversation, not if the timeline is still being changed.

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@arbutus and @purofilion – there’s definitely some kind of ‘memory’ theme that’s intended (as @rmifaabsbb pointed out). Did you spot the music swelling in the background during the ‘memory’ speech and Amelia/Amy’s reappearance?

It’s the theme from Rings of Akhaten.

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@arbutus – it depends on whether it’s simply post-regeneration loopiness, the Series 8 arc, or an official reboot. But

Do you happen to know how to fly this thing?

hints pretty strongly that the Doctor’s lost at least some of his memory. Combine it with Eleven’s speech about always remembering and – well.
😉

That said, there has to be something more to a new cycle than ‘golden glow required’, otherwise they’d all be doing it. So I do wonder if the reset normally requires something along the lines of a memory backup followed by an upload after the regeneration. The Doctor, never having had the slightest interest in immortality, doesn’t know that. The Time Lords do – but this was an emergency.

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@scatamonky – I’m not sure it’s going to matter how old the Doctor is now. The ‘I’m always going to remember being me’ speech had the feel of one of Eleven’s ‘this is the safest planet I know’ lines. Some sentences he should just stay away from. 🙂

We’ll have to see – but I’m one of the people who’ve been saying ‘reboot’ for a while. I think that since a)The Capaldi Doctor isn’t going to ‘remember’ his previous lives (though he may have access to the 1200 year diary) and b) he’s physically been given a new cycle he’s going to c) not really care how old he is.

His future’s been changed by the Time Lords, which means Trenzalore/Tomb/Great Intelligence now took place as a side trip to an aborted time-line. This doesn’t mean it didn’t ‘happen’ and people don’t ‘remember’ it, just that it’s kind of in a branch line.

Wherever the Doctor’s new grave is, he’s not going to go looking for it. Which means, probably, that it’s in a state of quantum superposition. 🙂

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@scaryb – know what you mean.

The incredibly, hilariously funny thing about the people over at the Graun spitting their little heads off about the regeneration being a Deus Ex Machina?

None of them, not one to date, has spotted the real D.E.M. in the script. It’s not as if Moffat hasn’t played fair, either. In fact, he’s given so many clues that I reckon his latest free game for Whovians is ‘spot the D.E.M’. 😈

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for @rob and @miapatrick

(yes, yes, I know, it should be on the music thread – but it seemed incredibly appropriate)

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@rob – I’d suggest they’re similar because that’s the type of woman the Doctor fancies. Right the way back to Enemy of the World, he’s attracted to mature, confident, slightly dangerous women.

It’s not, however, the type of girl he’ll deliberately take on board the TARDIS as a permanent travelling companion. He wants to marry (this is a family show) the ‘bad girls’, but he wants to travel with family (in the sense of ‘the kids’) and friends.

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There were various little shout-outs. One I enjoyed myself was the ‘explanation’ of why post-Time-War regeneration is so very much more violent than the pre-Time-War variety. We weren’t ‘told’. We were ‘shown’; regeneration was beefed up to be a weapon. A regenerating Time Lord was capable of taking out a Dalek battleship.

I suspect there’s lots of similar stuff in there, once rewatched. I also enjoyed the joke that the Doctor knows all about iPlayer 😀

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Not many coherent thoughts yet – and the sugar high probably isn’t helping. I thoroughly enjoyed it, though I’d agree that ‘not much happened’. Sieges are like that. 🙂

This was a script designed to give Matt Smith an acting sendoff. As such, it was brilliant.

Is Moffat going to end up reclaiming every single species from ‘irredeemably evil’? As well as our friendly Sontaran, we’ve now got Silence who are on the Doctor’s side and a helpful Cyberman. Bring back Dalek Caan, that’s what I say!

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@elouise – also known as the Ship of Theseus paradox.

However, the suggestion from Day of the Doctor is that the Sonic, like the Doctor, retains certain core software from update to update. 😉

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@danmartinuk has written a new Blog: Why I’ll Miss Matt Smith

No spoilers in the blog, but of course, you never can tell about the BTL Comments.

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@blenkinsopthebrave – I’m certain that there’s an alternate universe where Joanna Lumley played The Doctor (magnificently). Her Doctor also had an ongoing affair with Jonathan Pryce’s Master. 😉

Edmund Warwick (Hartnell’s stand-in) doubled for Hartnell a couple of times, I believe, but never got an official ‘Doctor’ credit. He was credited for his work in The Chase, but as ‘Robot Dr Who’.

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@fatmaninabox – you missed out Richard Hurndall, who reprised the role of the First Doctor after William Hartnell had died.

The thirteenth actor to play the role of the Doctor is therefore John Hurt. Peter Capaldi will be the fourteenth actor to play the role.

If you want to get deeply nit-picking, the Sixth Doctor was also played by two actors – Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy.

The thing that’s really puzzling me about these meta-crisis rumours is that we already know the Smith Doctor has available regeneration energy – River’s bloody furious with him for using it on her wrist. And that was in a Moffat script – Angels Take Manhattan. So yeah, I do wonder if we’re being carefully directed up a blind alleyway. The problem is not that the Doctor’s run out of regeneration energy – the problem is that The-Doctor-Known-As-The-Eleventh dies.

And the Smith Doctor knows that’s him. Which is why he’s okay with using some of that regeneration energy on the minor problem of a broken wrist – and why River is so angry with him; it shows that he knows.

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@RTDFan

Welcome!

Yes, I think you’ll be in the minority if you talk about ‘continuity teams’. Russell T Davies’ comment on canon/continuity was that there’s no such thing. The word was never used in the production office under his watch.

You can see this in action if you compare ‘Dalek’ (set in 2012) with Army of Ghosts/Doomsday – which appears to be set before ‘Dalek’. So how come Van Statten doesn’t remember the Battle of Canary Wharf?

With regards to your complaints about lack of Time War and too much Queen Elizabeth, I can only refer you to nine older pages, two blog posts and a Doctor in a pear tree. 🙂

We don’t yet know Peter Capaldi’s ‘number’, but there has also been some extensive discussion about the Smith Doctor being the real ‘Twelve’.

Or maybe he isn’t. Who knows.

Who knows. 😀

http://www.thedoctorwhoforum.com/sidrat/the-day-of-the-doctor-a-time-structure-analysis/

http://www.thedoctorwhoforum.com/sidrat/the-day-of-the-doctor-a-time-structure-analysis-an-alternative-no-change-view/

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@phaseshift – of course there’ll be explosions. Everything’s better with explosions. 🙂

I dunno whether they’re going to put him as ‘no. 13’ somehow, but I’ll continue to go with my ‘meta-arc’ theory that Matt Smith is the last of the Classic Doctors. We’ve recapped the classic series and Day of The Doctor has recapped the moment just before the 2005 series opens; the destruction of Gallifrey. Time of The Doctor should therefore take us to ‘Rose’; not just a new Doctor but a whole new beginning. A new circuit of the clock-dial.

In fact, Day of the Doctor didn’t just recap the destruction, it rebooted it. Gallifrey isn’t destroyed; Gallifrey is now a fairy-tale kingdom frozen in time, waiting for the Doctor/’prince’ to fight his way through and reawaken it.

Which means the Doctor’s story is one of ‘Voyage and Return’. We’ve spent the first fifty years watching the ‘Classic’ Doctors run away from Gallifrey; now we’re watching our new set of Doctors run towards it. 🙂

That’s a huge conceptual shift, and it reflects the huge shift from the Before Gap series to the big(ish) budget After Gap Series.

I agree with PhaseShift that while the Doctor is going to ‘not go gently into that good night’, he’s not someone who wants immortality. There is, however, now one reason that he might well seek a new set of regenerations – the thought that he’s the only person who can find and release Gallifrey. That’s a much more mature reason; instead of wanting immortality for himself, he wants other people to live. They, however, can only live if he does…

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Parthenogenesis is apparently rampant in America.

@MartyB – rampant heavy petting sounds a bit more likely.  Some sperm seem to be kitted out with jet propelled backpacks.  🙂

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@MartyB – frankly, I don’t even remember eating them. 😀

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Today’s Amazon Christmas Deals includes a couple of quid off The Day of The Doctor.

You have to go into their ‘Christmas Deals’ page.

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@MartyB – where siblings (or other family members) are concerned, there is NO statute of limitations. You will be reminded about the time you hid under the table and ate all the strawberries-and-cream until everyone concerned has died of old age. The fact that you were three-and-a-half when you did it will not be taken into consideration.

😈

Spoilers: yeah, difficult, isn’t it? Especially when the activity stream is going bonkers. But I’ve sometimes looked on there post-episode, and they quite often do turn out to be just rumours (or possibly carefully crafted fakes).

 

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@arbutus – coffee in the morning and tea thereafter sounds pretty familiar.

@janetteb – chai is tea. Just tea with added spices. You should have told them it was special ‘Christmas Tea’. 🙂

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@arbutus – Clara’s nannying job was in the same neck of the woods as the Sarah Jane Adventures.

I think ‘the woman in the shop’ was a little shout-out to Elisabeth Clara Sladen – that while her actress may have passed on, Sarah Jane herself is still alive and still helping the Doctor.

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@wolfweed – Gallifrey also has teddy bears. Personally, I reckon they just couldn’t detach toddler from toy. Mummy and Daddy may be telling us it’s ‘let’s pretend’, but Daleks are scary. 😈

Good catch on the rabbit, though. Eggs, rabbits, very Easter. First episode of Series 8 an Easter Special?

 

@alloftimeandspace – I took it that ‘stasis’ was just like the pictures. Frozen, unaware. As far as you’re concerned, no time passes until someone ‘adds time’. That was why The General was so sceptical – if someone doesn’t come along to unfreeze Gallifrey, it’s effectively like being dead.

The difference, as the Doctor points out, is that this way – there’s hope.

So yeah, it’s going to be a bit weird when the Doctor finds Gallifrey. “Hi guys, the war’s over. In fact, it’s been over for centuries. Well, millennia, really – finding you was a bit difficult and I took the long way round.”

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Re: the figure in the snow.

What happens at the end of The Pandorica Opens? The universe ends, the stars go out and – silence falls. Even the music stops mid-beat.

Then in The Big Bang we see those stone ‘echo figures’ – after images of races that never existed. So that might be a stone ‘echo figure’ that we see after silence has fallen.

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@bowtiesarecool37 – except that in The Name of The Doctor, there are only eleven Doctors plus the War Doctor. So at Trenzalore, Matt Smith is the last Doctor.

::cue spooky music::

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@arbutus – probably the difference between a nasty dose of flu and getting shot by a Dalek.

In one case your body will produce antibodies. In the other, if you’re lucky enough to survive the initial shot, regeneration is the only option.

The flying killer time monkeys were the antibodies: they were sterilising the local area. Result: exactly what happened. Pete Tyler fought off the ‘infection’ and restored the time-line.

In the case of the Doctor not getting shot at Lake Silencio – as I say in the blog post, the effects are to cause an immediate, massive, oscillation in the time-line. The impact is huge – it’s the equivalent of ‘getting shot by a Dalek’.

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@scaryb – the proof of the Christmas Cake’s in the eating, as they say. 😉 But a skewer came out clean, so I think it’s cooked – even if the texture does feel as if it’s a cross between a cake and a pudding.

If you’re wondering, I microwaved it on the ‘defrost’ setting, very slowly.

Not being an SFX person, I didn’t want exciting displays of arc-ing electricity. So I used greaseproof paper. 😉

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@everyone
You think you’ve got problems? I’ve been trying to microwave a Christmas cake…

😀

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@arbutus – Pete Tyler’s actually quite easy: as @scaryb says, without his death, Rose would probably never have run off with a madman in a box. The Eccleston Doctor would never have been healed from his time as the War Doctor. The Tennant Doctor is, btw, pretty specific about it being Rose who brought him back to some kind of normality.

Rory’s trickier: but you can guess that without his death being a fixed point, Amy would never have left the Doctor (she’d have gone and got Rory instead). The Doctor would never have met Clara. She’d never have become the Impossible Girl. Since we saw Clara as Oswin Oswald before Amy and Rory left, things would have started to unravel in a rather serious manner. 🙂

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@Purofilion – I’m also saying ‘please don’t leave’. I’ve really enjoyed reading your posts and you are an excellent contributor. As @whisht says – you’ve simply wandered into an old argument.

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@thatsbrilliant – I always thought that popping 10.5 in an alternate universe and having him age as a human was simply a convenient device. Namely, to enable future producers to bring back David Tennant in a guest spot after he’d visibly aged beyond his ‘current Doctor’ years.

The ‘revisit old faces’ line is similar; it allowed us to see Tom Baker again. But it also allows us to see any previous Doctor again – as a new incarnation who’s re-visited an old face.

Matt Smith is, after all barely in his thirties. David Tennant is barely in his forties. It’s possible that one or both of them might want to revisit the role when they’re older.

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Welcome to @alloftimeandspace. If you love to talk about an obsessive interest in Doctor Who, you’ve found the right site. 🙂

@arbutus – the slug got classed in my mind as ‘Special Effects Failure’. The mistake, to my mind, was giving it those big eyes, which immediately made it look ‘cute’. Possibly they’d tried a previous version which was voted too terrifying and then ran out of time.

Other than the special effects failure, it was a great episode and one I’ve rewatched more than once. Diana Rigg was, as they say, well worth the price of admission. Equally, Rachel Stirling also gave a cracker of a performance – it always adds something when you get real-life relatives playing the appropriate parts.

[Though I do wonder whether the scene where Rachel Stirling gets to call her mother every name under the sun was both therapeutic for her, and a bit painful for Diana Reed.]

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@wolfweed – he’s already met the Slitheen when The Pandorica Opened.
🙂

[Yeah, I had to look it up as well. But I think they hauled every usable alien-costume out for that episode.]

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@wolfweed – alas, I think it’s just a combination of the Pond naming traditions – Augustus, Amelia, Anthony – with the Williams family (middle name is the paternal grandparent’s).

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@wolfweed and @ardaraith – I’m wondering about Anthony. I’ve been wondering about Anthony for quite a bit; ever since they publicly announced his existence by releasing the storyboard, but chose not to film it.

I mean Anthony Brian Williams, the adopted son of Amy and Rory Williams. Those are very much the sort of pictures you’d expect from a kid brought up by Amy and Rory – possibly with visits from River – and primed with bedtime stories about The Doctor.

It could just be a nice little call-back to the Ponds, at the end of Matt’s run. ‘We’re all just stories in the end’?

Or it could be that there was another reason beyond the thematic that they had to drop that scene – namely, Anthony is more important than just being a coda to the Pond-Williams story.

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@gctv and @martyB

I’m just going to throw a little thought into the ring. Both of you would, I think, agree with Marty’s girlfriend:

She couldn’t understand why so much was at stake that an entire planet, and all the innocent people on it, would be blown up

Exactly. Now, place all the fans with detailed knowledge as ‘The Doctor’. We know all the background, the stories, the serial numbers of every Dalek ever made. We understand exactly where the Doctor was coming from – all that long war between Time Lords and Daleks, the way the High Council had gone nuts and were planning to destroy the entire universe to save themselves, some idea about the terrible destruction. We know why he’d choose to press the button. Oh, and we’d like to see more of the Time War.

Now place all the people watching for the Fiftieth Anniversary as ‘Clara’. Reasonable knowledge of the Doctor, at least in the UK – long scarves, police boxes, regenerations, Daleks and wobbly sets are part of our cultural heritage. [There may never have been a genuine wobbly set – it doesn’t matter.] But they have little knowledge of the Time War – they might have watched the Christmas Specials, not much else.

They will come to exactly the same realisation that Clara comes to in the course of the story. No matter what the Doctor thinks, no matter what he’s come to believe, it’s not worth killing all those innocent people. It’s not worth killing those children. ‘The Doctor’ doesn’t deliberately kill children; ‘The Doctor’ is the person who saves them.

Using the Moment is unnecessary. It has to be unnecessary – the Doctor wouldn’t go to the extent of ignoring an entire ‘life’, pretending that person never existed, if it wasn’t for that niggling little thought in his head – I made a mistake.

Basically, Marty – your girlfriend and Clara are right.

😉

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@purofilion and @scaryb – it was something that occurred to me when news of John Hurt’s casting leaked. Acting’s a notoriously superstitious profession, largely because it’s so chancy. Whether Hurt was an emergency fill-in for Eccleston or not, they may have used it to sidestep the whole ‘Thirteenth Doctor’ problem.

Because: the thirteenth actor to play the Doctor is a one-story only Doctor. He’s also the ‘unlucky’ Doctor; the one who got handed the ‘day it was impossible to get things right’ when he destroyed Gallifrey.

That means the actor with the long term role isn’t the thirteenth actor. Furthermore, because the War Doctor never regarded himself as ‘The Doctor’ (except for about thirty seconds before regenerating back into ‘The Doctor’) – Capaldi can legitimately be ’12A’ instead of ’13’.

If we’re going by number of regenerations and do count the Tennant to Tennant one, then Capaldi’s ’14’.

Confused? Good. That may possibly be the point.

Of course, as with all bonkers theories, this may be blown out of the water by the Capaldi Doctor making a big thing of being ‘Thirteen’. 🙂

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@purofilion – he’s not the thirteenth Doctor. That said, there could easily be something at Trenzalore that takes the last of his regeneration energy.

But he’s got regeneration energy; River was so very annoyed when he used it on her broken wrist. There’s also the scene in The Impossible Astronaut where we get a light show to simulate regeneration. I suppose it’s possible he’s the twelfth-and-a-half. That the first Tennant regeneration took sufficient that he’s worried he may not have enough energy left to complete the cycle.

I have said for a while that the Smith Doctor behaves, somehow, as if he’s not planning to regenerate. On the other hand, his enemies behave as if they’re desperate to stop him regenerating. Then there’s all those Dread Prophecies of Evil – the Beast, the Valeyard etc, etc.

It would be beautifully ironic and terribly Moffatian if – just as he’s discovered a reason to live (finding Gallifrey) – his enemies team up to make sure he keeps his date with that tomb on Trenzalore. 😀

Regarding what Moffat has or hasn’t said: there’s a fairly easy confusion that could’ve been confused even more by certain not terribly reliable newspapers. Peter Capaldi is the fourteenth actor to play The Doctor.

William Hartnell; Patrick Troughton; Jon Pertwee; Tom Baker; Peter Davison; Richard Hurndall (played the First Doctor after William Hartnell’s death); Colin Baker; Sylvester McCoy (played both the Sixth and Seventh Doctors); Paul McGann; Christopher Eccleston; David Tennant; Matt Smith; John Hurt (as the War Doctor, between McGann and Eccleston) and Peter Capaldi.

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@toinfinityandbepond

Clara doesn’t say that she doesn’t know who she saw: she says “There was an old man looking for you. I think it was the curator”.

If you’ve read the novelisation of Summer Falls (and Clara did – she says so in Bells of St John), you would know perfectly well who The Curator really is. 😉

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

Ah, the Berlin wall and the Inner German border … though I admit I don’t have many childhood memories of East Germany. The ones I do have seem to consist of being violently car sick by the side of the road.

I don’t think it was always the same road; I think I was just going through that stage of being travel-sick that some kids do.

Just to show you how old I am, Germany was still split into East and West when I was old enough to do the Inter-rail student thing of travelling around Europe on trains. The friends I was travelling with wanted to go to Denmark (which was fine) via a train-route through then East Germany (I was not so enthusiastic). We’d just visited Amsterdam (guess why). And one of my friends decided that they wanted to take some of Amsterdam’s most famous product (no, not the beer. The other most famous product) through to Denmark.

Through East Germany.

They were one of those incredibly confident teenagers who are convinced that nothing bad is ever going to happen to them. In the end, I resorted to trying to convince my other (slightly more sensible friend) that, basically, smuggling pot through East Germany was probably the least intelligent plan we could come up with. This was in a holiday which had so far included accidentally wandering into an S&M brothel, thinking it was a bar.

Fortunately I managed to convince them – and rather than them trying to convince my other friend, they took the practical route of simply nicking the pot and then getting rid of it.

I suppose it would’ve been a bit embarrassing if we’d then sailed in our sealed train through East Germany into Denmark … but as things happened, we got the full-scale ‘border guards’ treatment from the East Germans. Police through the train, over-excited Alsatians, luggage searched, the lot.

But when we finally got there, Denmark was very nice. 😉

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@elouise – the telescope in the Observatory is pretty big.

Didn’t the First Doctor win eighteen elephants or something in a bet?

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

if I wrote tLoH I’d have everyone wondering which episode I was referring to… which I may do in the future as I’m a tad mischievious!

@whisht – oh, please don’t. It takes me bloomin’ ages to decipher the initials when they refer to genuine episodes. Stick in a LeGuin novel, and I could be staring at the screen all night! 😈

@scaryb – I was also really impressed by the spread of demographics at the Excel and the cinema. It wasn’t just all ages, it was all ethnicities and nationalities as well.

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@jimthefish and @scaryb – I don’t think I’ve ever seen The Aztecs, though I may have read the Target novelisation.

It would be nice to see an historical Hartnell that didn’t involve cavepersons (with or without blacked-out teeth). 🙂

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