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8 November 2013 at 12:08 #20225
@scaryb – well, if it is ‘Twelfth Night’, the Doctor and River will have twins. One boy, one girl. The boy and the girl either won’t know about each other, or will both think the other dead.
Clara as Viola? Playing the concealed ‘Cesario’ to the Doctor’s ‘Duke Orsino’. And then – since mistaken identity runs throughout Twelfth Night – I’m going to go for Matt Smith with new haircut playing the boy ‘Sebastian’ as well as The Doctor.
::looks around nervously::
We did say bonkers theories, didn’t we? 🙂
8 November 2013 at 11:25 #20218And all theories about progeny with River … erm, she’s bits of data in The Library’s datacore.
@shazzbot – this is a story about time travel. 😀
We met River long before her parents err… met. It’s entirely possible that we could meet her offspring long after she herself is dead. It’d certainly explain all those hints about ‘love doesn’t die’.
Moffat’s just given us the perfect explanation (well, perfect for bonkers theorists) why River might choose to hide her child from its father. The GI infected the whole of the Doctor’s time-stream from Gallifrey to Trenzalore. If the Doctor had another child, I suspect he’d consider that one of his ‘great victories’; he’d try and turn it into a defeat. River, of all people, isn’t going to allow a child to be used as a weapon in the battle between the GI and Clara.
So any child from River’s ‘being alive’ period would be hidden from Gallifrey to Trenzalore. Which is why I’m starting to wonder whether the Smith Doctor’s final Christmas story is going to be a nativity play. 😆
7 November 2013 at 22:38 #20200Hmmm… well, I’ve finally got space to remember my properly bonkers theories about the 50th. So:
There are Twelve Doctors; we’ll discover that the life of the Doctor runs through a metaphorical clock-face. From Doctor Zero/Doctor Twelve who makes the First Doctor (Hartnell), then round again to the Eleventh Hour (the Smith Doctor). The life of the Doctor is an eternal circle; this is the Eleventh Hour. And Doctor Twelve is also Doctor Zero; it’s whatever he does that makes ‘The Doctor’. The clock hits Twelve – and resets to One.
Rather like @blenkinsopthebrave, I think that Moffat’s planning to break out of the loop. Whatever’s coming is going to be a very thorough game-changer. It will also be something we couldn’t possibly have imagined, but which will make perfect sense in retrospect.
But – is it Hurt who’s Prisoner Zero, or is it our Doctor Formerly Known As Eleven? I think most of us would agree that if the loop goes to its normal pattern, Eleven dies at Trenzalore. As @whisht says, that’s Matt’s TARDIS that’s the tomb.
So: nailing my colours to the mast – the last Fifty years have been a giant loopy thing. Its end creates its beginning; it’s an eternal circle.
Second bonkers theory: the existential loneliness of The Doctor (thanks @pedant) is going to be destroyed. Not by bringing back The Time Lords, but by the Doctor no longer being Last of His Kind. This tends to suggest, to me, that Eleven is the real Doctor Zero; he’s the one who re-starts the Race Formerly Known As TimeLords. Either literally (via a baby with River) or metaphorically (by finding some way to rescue the children).
If there’s a Doctor/River baby, it’ll probably turn up for the Christmas Special. Thank Moffat there’s a Nanny. 😉
Fourth Wall theory: the Seventh Series of AG Who has been a quick metaphorical tour through the highlights of the last fifty years, ably abetted by the Production Team (codename – Clara). Metaphorically speaking, we’ve just hit the rebirth of the show (i.e. our Welsh Clara is busy trying to get ‘Rose’ made).
But if ‘Rose’ hadn’t got an audience, that would have been it. So I agree with people who think we’ve got some kind of ‘Tinkerbell’ moment. Without an audience, the Doctor will die. That’s why the hashtag is #savetheday.
7 November 2013 at 20:13 #20188@everyone – yes, I think that sadly, the Radio Times has now gone into ‘spoiler’ territory.
Reporting interviews that are on the official site isn’t a ‘spoiler’. That’s ‘news’. The BBC site is the official site; a subsection of the production team. It’s up to forum members how much ‘news’ they want to know; but expect people to discuss ‘news’ in the relevant episode threads, in the News thread or On The Sofa.
Similarly, anything reported on the Ten O’Clock news, or the BBC news website is also ‘news’. Even if the production team didn’t want us to know it, if it’s on the Ten O’Clock bloody news (::cough:: Ian Levine ::cough::) I think we can say the item has gone well and truly public.
@craig The trailer: news, in my frankly-never-humble opinion. Seriously, five million people will probably see the trailer on broadcast, followed by further millions on iPlayer, YouTube, the Official Site. We can be polite about it, but if you’re trailer-phobic – probably best to stay away for a bit.
So long as we’ve got a Trailer Alert so people know – as @scaryb says, things are going to be going crazy very shortly. The real decision is going to be ‘At what point before the 23rd are we closing to new members?’
7 November 2013 at 16:40 #201797 November 2013 at 15:36 #20170@spikeguy86 – ah, that explains it. Sorry for being a little brusque. 🙁
When you watch S5 in order, you’ll realise that Amy not remembering aliens is a major plot point.
7 November 2013 at 15:13 #20165@wolfweed – and Clara, Artie and Angie all seem entirely happy with the idea that the Doctor’s an alien.
7 November 2013 at 15:04 #20163@spikeguy86 – have you read about Doctor Who or actually watched the episodes? Because the answers to most of your questions can be obtained by watching the episodes.
The reason Amy can’t remember the Daleks, for example, is explained later in Series 5.
7 November 2013 at 14:55 #20160@thommck – is this a contribution to the upcoming ‘Doctor Who and Religion’ discussion, or are you trying to get me to explain the precise difference between ‘historical evidence’ and ‘fanfic’? 😈
Which, I promise, could be as bad as seeing @phaseshift become … sarcastic.
(Such explanations tend to wander off happily into the byways of ‘Are there different types of knowledge?’ and ‘How can we know anything?’ You Have Been Warned.)
7 November 2013 at 14:47 #20159@spikeguy86 – it would help if you watch the finale to Series 5. I’m presuming that you haven’t, because the reboot of the universe was … pretty noticeable.
7 November 2013 at 14:44 #20158@nick – The various Claricles, we’re told by River, are copies of Clara.
However, Clara-from-Blackpool, who we’re encouraged to presume is the Original Clara, appears to be a copy of the Doctor. She’s as smart as he is, she’s often a little ahead of him – and also, if Asylum Clara mirrors any Doctor, it’s the Tennant Doctor.
7 November 2013 at 11:13 #20132@thommck – yeah, what I call the ‘mirroring’ is really noticeable in this episode. My bonkers theory of ‘they’re both the Doctor’ has been buggered up by events – so I suppose the question now is whether they’re related in some way?
Mother and son? Father and daughter? Brother and Sister? Grandparent and grandchild? Clone copies where one copy regenerated into Clara?
Or some timey-wimey relationship – in the same way that characters kept spotting that Donna and the Doctor were ‘brother and sister’ because that’s what they’d later become. 🙂
6 November 2013 at 15:52 #20097@danmartinuk‘s blog on The TV Movie is now up at the Guardian. He has included a tribute to @htpbdet.
Thanks, Dan.
5 November 2013 at 23:11 #20084@scaryb – Celia Imrie’s final scene is deeply haunting. For one thing, it’s the whole ‘Mummy and Daddy said they wouldn’t be long’ thing – did they ever come back for her? Or are we left to imagine that they’re two casualties of one of the many, many invasions of Earth that we’ve seen in Doctor Who.
Yes, @htpbdet was pretty close in his ideas about Clara. He thought any ‘specialness’ was largely due to being somehow scattered through time. He was, I think, desperately hoping that she not be part of the (incredibly convoluted) Pond family, but had a suspicion that she might turn out to be related to the Doctor.
5 November 2013 at 09:53 #200674 November 2013 at 23:14 #20059@shazzbot – Ptolemy apparently means ‘aggressive’ or ‘warlike’.
One of those self-fulfilling prophecies, I think. Just as soon as he hits the playground.
Poor Gertrude. She had a real ‘that bloody baby’s playing with my ears again‘ expression at one point.
4 November 2013 at 21:23 #20042@pedant – and possibly someone at the BBC’s been reading this forum and realised we’re all at the pub on Friday night. 😀
4 November 2013 at 21:08 #20039Looking at things in a more cheerful frame, every picture they’ve released emphasises how very like William Hartnell they’ve managed to make David Bradley – and young Claudia Grant is also extraordinarily like Susan.
I wonder if we are going to see those two outside of the drama-doc?
4 November 2013 at 20:54 #20037@wolfweed – good, because if it turns out any of the original cast should have been playing a starring role in Operation Yewtree, I really don’t want to know.
😕
4 November 2013 at 20:47 #20035@wolfweed – that broadcast date sounds suspiciously like they’re going to try and cram everything into Anniversary Week.
It’s also a ‘post-watershed’ time slot.
4 November 2013 at 17:59 #20030
For when the shotgun doesn’t work. 😀
3 November 2013 at 18:17 #20008@shazzbot – funny, I thought that as soon as the edit button had vanished… sorry, @whisht. 🙁
3 November 2013 at 18:09 #20003@Shazzbot – I think with the Moffat retrospective, part of it has been that we talked the most recent episodes over quite exhaustively. And we’ve probably all watched them three or four times. That said, I am looking forward to re-watching The Name of The Doctor.
Despite my essay length rewatch comments, I’m afraid my attitude to Bells of St John, good as it is, was ‘oh gawd, do I have to watch it again?’ Rather like @phaseshift and The Eleventh Hour. 😉
But I finally found @wolfweed‘s screeching tires! 😀
3 November 2013 at 17:40 #19997@phaseshift and @craig – One thing I noticed with the Retrospectives was that participation dropped noticeably when we took the individual episodes off the front page and made them ‘portmanteau’ items.
I don’t know if that was coincidence, but I wonder if we should try putting the current week’s episode on the front page in future. Move them into the relevant folder when they’re no longer ‘this week’s episode’.
We did originally plan to leave things fairly clear for November/December. There’s something happening around then – can anyone remember what? 🙂
Anyway, the BG retrospective is, I think, finishing this week and the Moffat retrospective finishes next Saturday with The Name of The Doctor. If anyone would like to comment further on The Bells of St John, it’s here.
3 November 2013 at 16:59 #19993I think it would make a very interesting blog
@Shazzbot – ‘interesting’ in the Chinese sense? 😀
3 November 2013 at 15:45 #19990The reappearance of the Bad Wolf might also mean that the only solution to the problem is an ontological paradox. Another one. 🙂
That is, the only solution is for the Doctor to create the Doctor? In the same way that Rose as Bad Wolf created Rose as The Bad Wolf. Or Clara caused the meeting of her parents.
The other time ‘Bad Wolf’ got used after Series 1, it was to show that Rose was coming back – which meant that the universe was in big trouble. So it could just be that – though that’s a bit Blue Boringers, I think.
3 November 2013 at 14:32 #19986@jimthefish – don’t mention Dawkins. 🙂 I’m not qualified to judge his ability as a biologist, but I do have an MA in Religious Studies. He could definitely do with, shall we say, a little more research before he writes his books. 😈
Modern Religious Education in schools isn’t really about teaching kids to believe in the Christian faith (except for Roman Catholic schools); it’s more about introducing them to the various major faiths, and then to the ethical problems they’re likely to meet as adults. Bearing in mind that most people, faced with an ethical problem, will default to the ethics of some branch of Christianity or one of the other major faiths. So you’d typically go through stuff like ‘war’, ‘the problem of natural and human evil’, that sort of thing. Then you’d look at the various religious/ethical viewpoints. I think you could easily use Who – but you’d quite likely be using it as a discussion starter or as an example of the secular viewpoint.
On the whole I’d say that Gridlock would be a bloody awful Christian allegory. I seem to remember RTD finding it odd that David Tennant didn’t like the ‘sit on your backside and pray’ approach. 🙂
That said, some atheist allegories adapt very well as Christian allegories. Terry Pratchett was quite shocked when his Small Gods was very well received. 😀
3 November 2013 at 13:57 #19983A little bit of background to this episode: the Guardian on how very, very close things came to nuclear war in 1983. These war games would be the ‘sabre rattling’ being discussed in the submarine, at the start of the episode.
3 November 2013 at 09:40 #19974@craig – I know you don’t want too much stuff in the ‘Etiquette’ section, but maybe we should put Standard English in there?
Something like ‘This Forum started off as an offshoot of Dan Martin’s Doctor Who blogs in The Guardian newspaper, when the below-the-line commentators wanted somewhere to continue talking. Consequently, posts use the Standard English used at the Guardian. Read through a few of our posts and you’ll see what we mean.
If English isn’t your native language, say so and think of this as a place to practice your best English. ‘
3 November 2013 at 00:05 #19972Part Two. The Doctor and Clara on a motorbike. They start at the South Bank, just down from the London Eye. Go over Westminster Bridge (fine). Past Parliament, past Horseguards. Through Admiralty Arch into Trafalgar Square, and then end up near St Paul’s. As routes go, it’s not insane, but it’s very strange. On the whole, I’d prefer to think this is a bit of GI influence, taking the Doctor past the maximum number of tourist cameras.
Yes, the tyre screech. It comes just as the Doctor stands up to go into the cafe and just before everything goes haywire inside the cafe. Given that the cafe antics are clearly aimed at keeping the Doctor inside, while the Spoonhead gets to Clara, was the tyre screech supposed to be the Spoonhead arriving?
That said, there’s also an awful lot of police sirens. I know this is central London, but the sound effects would be entirely compatible with some kind of ‘incident’ going on in the street below.
Okay, another strange route. From St Paul’s to the Shard is via London Bridge or Southwark Bridge. The Doctor’s crossing Waterloo Bridge, which would have him travelling quite a long way in the opposite direction.
Deus Ex Machina – The Doctor (the Lonely God) is relaying through the Spoonhead (a machine). This, audience, is what a real Deus Ex Machina looks like as the bike reveals a previously unseen attribute which can be used to save the day. The God is arriving in a machine (and also on a machine).
Tables turned. The Doctor is superb at hacking machinery – always has been. He has, after all, centuries of experience. Incidentally, the CGI image of people being downloaded across the world suggests secondary stations in Madrid and Marseilles.
UNIT, linking back to the GI. And we discover Miss Kizlet was another child used by the GI; in fact, all the ’employees’ were re-programmed.
I think I quite like the twirling circles rather than the rotor moving up and down – but I also think the point is that the TARDIS has now got its very own set of loops. Three circles, moving in different directions. The end will always be the beginning, they will always repeat. There is no end to this loop.
Clara’s leaf is page one. But she made it blow into her Dad’s face. The end and the beginning; time and again, they’re the same thing.
2 November 2013 at 23:13 #19968I think all post #19960 needed was a ‘bwah ha haaa’ to make it perfect. It’s strangely appropriate that we’ve been watching Part 4 of Tomb of the Cybermen tonight.
So you are mad. Just wanted to check.
🙂
2 November 2013 at 23:08 #19967Not only a cold opening, but a little joke by BBC continuity. They bring up the GI Wifi symbols before the episode starts.
The dangers of wifi – and our habit of trying to piggyback on any available signal.
Okay, souls. In Series 5 we had Rory’s heart and soul being loaded into an Auton; so much so that the Auton was Rory. In Series 6 we had Amy’s ‘soul’ being relayed to a ganger version of herself; and the Doctor sees her as having ‘really’ been travelling in the TARDIS with them. In Series 7 there’s River’s ghost – who is really River, the various Claricles, and Clara-from-Blackpool. Whose ‘soul’ gets uploaded and downloaded in this episode like it’s got some kind of celestial travelcard.
What is established in this episode is that bodies cannot live without a soul. The Doctor may have had loads – but all his bodies have the same ‘soul’. And if you make a copy of a soul – to him, that’s the same person. That’s how he reacts to GangerDoctor, that’s how he reacts to GhostRiver. Bodies are boring; what matters is the soul.
But if the soul is removed from the body, the body will die. The soul can survive – but without a virtual reality, it will be lost and unhappy. Trapped in a kind of limbo: “I don’t know where I am.”
The structure is very similar to The Angels of Manhattan; in each case we have a ‘cold opening’, and then we have a time jump. Cumbria, 1207.
I confess that I have no idea what’s so important about Clara and Cumbria. She’s from Blackpool – which is in Lancashire. This monastery isn’t likely to be anywhere near Blackpool. There are bits of Lancashire which are now in Cumbria, but Blackpool isn’t one of them. So is it something about the Doctor and Cumbria? He’s the one who keeps going there/mentioning it.
Establishing that Clara is astonishingly computer-illiterate for the Facebook generation. Almost Victorian, in fact. Is she an English graduate? There’s a lot of books in that house.
I do like the joke with the phone cord. Presumably the TARDIS rerouted the call, created an external phone, and extends the cord as needed.
Rycbar123 – again, there’s a hint of a loop about all this. It sounds like Clara’s phrase is simply the password acronym – but was the acronym created from her statement at Trenzalore? And 123 – this is the third Clara that the Doctor has met (assuming little Clara on the swing was the same one).
I note that the Doctor seems to have had a shower since 1207 – his hair’s a lot fluffier and he looks about nineteen.
Finally our first sight of the villains. Or the apparent villains. “my conscience says we should probably kill him” – such a lovely line. And the first hints that not all is as it seems. Employees being hacked, ‘our client’.
The Doctor’s first meeting with Clara isn’t going at all well. Clara’s a bit like Rory in a lot of ways and one of the ways is that she’s reacting sanely to this total lunatic. That must be why the spoonhead got in from upstairs, btw, because the front door was being used to have a shouting match with mad monks.
Mirroring, again. The spoonheads mirror conversation in the same way that the snow mirrored Walter.
You can see Matt Smith using different fingers on his Sonic, as if he’s changing setting to uncloak the Spoonhead. He can’t type, though 😉 And The Client knows The Doctor.
There is something odd about that leaf. You can see it in the Doctor’s reaction.
Another little loop; the Doctor invents the quadrocycle from his future knowledge of the quadrocycle.
Clara’s grey pullover – vaguely reminiscent of a starfield seen from the viewpoint of someone travelling through it (I’m thinking of the ‘warp factor’ screensavers that were popular at one point).
Again, the scene downstairs is reminiscent of Clara’s ‘only sane woman’ approach. Something weird has happened and she’s happy to accept that this strange man saved her (that might well be because she does, at some level, remember who brought her back from being uploaded). But she is not willing to get inside a box with a strange bloke. And why does he bring a box?
There’s such a thing as being too keen.
Dalek pathweb – a bit telepathic. The GI’s wifi web – also telepathic. If people are exposed to enough wifi the GI can control them.
As well as introducing Clara, this is a quick re-introduction to the Doctor. Alien, thousand years old, flies a TARDIS, can’t fly jet planes. Clara, meanwhile, has a firm grasp of essentials. Hang on to your cup of tea – you may need it.
Part Two to follow.
2 November 2013 at 20:30 #19944Great episode. I agree that it’s nice to see the Doctor getting things wrong however far back you go. Improvise madly and call it a plan has a long history.
It is interesting, given all the complaints about ‘the power of lurve’, to see that defeating Cybermen by using human emotions goes so far back. Also nice to see young Victoria getting a nice dig in at the Captain, after he was such a sexist git last week.
Anyone who thinks ‘The Brotherhood of Logicians’ is a good name is completely mad – the name itself is a give-away that several screws are loose. The documentary was fascinating and explained a lot of the casting – an SF take on ‘Curse of the Mummy’s tomb’.
1 November 2013 at 23:05 #19854Summarising the bonkers theories for tomorrow’s rewatch.
- @juniperfish came up with a theory that the GI may represent the ‘Dark Side’ of the Doctor’s character. That’s still a goer, I’d say, at least symbolically. The GI and Clara become the ‘bad and good angels’, so to speak, playing out the two sides of the Doctor within his timeline.
- Juniperfish also wondered whether Clara’s leaf connects with River’s forest (the only water in the forest is the river). While we found out pretty quickly what the leaf was about, it’s still a good spot that the TARDIS’s cryptic line connects Amy, River and Clara.
- Various people noted that this is yet another episode with two Doctors – the real Doctor and the Spoonhead Doctor.
- @haveyoufedthefish correctly suspected that we’d be viewing the events of the last 50 years in a new light and that the Doctor’s history might be being nudged in various directions by beings split/reflected through time.
- Haveyoufedthefish also spotted that ‘Bells of St John’ might refer to John Donne’s ‘ask not for whom the bell tolls’. Given that we now know we’re heading for regeneration, this is almost certainly correct.
- The theory that Clara might be a reflection throughout time, while partially proven, is still up for grabs. We’re certainly meant to think that Clara-from-Blackpool is the original, but is she? (that one’s mine).
- Circles and seasons (which are another kind of circle) repeat.
- I did a fair amount of numerology in more than one post – which I suspect is meta rather than text. The lives of the various Claras mirror important dates in the show’s existence because Clara in-universe takes on the role of ‘producer’ of the Doctor’s life. She’s his showrunner.
- We still have no bloody idea who the woman in the shop is.
- Or what, if any significance @whisht‘s mysterious screeching tires have in the background of the cafe scene.
- We wandered down many happy byways for DELSA, before somebody (months later) finally realised it’s an acronym for ‘Sladen’ (DELSA on an N-velope)
- @scaryb became responsible for a pun even worse than one of @wolfweed ‘s. The newly computer-literate Clara plus the computerised Great Intelligence together become: CGI.
1 November 2013 at 19:32 #19814So, in the interests of research, I went to The Dean Swift for lunch with a couple of friends.
Good choice, @shazzbot. At least, if it’s as nice Friday evenings as it was Friday lunchtimes. Friendly staff, good range of beer. I had a very decent cider (because of the coeliac thing). I can see why they’d want a largish party to book – the dining room upstairs is relatively small and if we end up with a large party we’ll probably take it over.
We had the (tasty) cooked bar snacks rather than a full lunch. The lunches other people were having looked good, though. The one minor caveat was that the tea and coffee weren’t anything to write home about – but really, do you judge a pub by its coffee?
Verdict: very favourable. Definitely went on all our lists of places to eat/have a drink when near Tower Bridge/London Bridge. 🙂
1 November 2013 at 19:17 #19812@phaseshift – yes, I was watching on 3rd January 2009. Then I spent the next year saying: ‘Matt Smith’s gonna be fine. Don’t worry about it.’
🙂 You’re quite right, though – there were an awful lot of people who thought Steven Moffat had gone stark raving mad.Mind you, I was in the ‘who the !@*K is Matt Smith?’ category; I hadn’t watched either the Sally Lockhart dramas or Party Animals and needed to catch up on his work. But I had spent over a decade of my career making very fast decisions on whether an actor might be a ‘possible’ for a part. And there was a moment in that interview (I think it was when Matt Smith talks about his sense of mischief, which is at 1:48) where, just for a second, I could see ‘The Doctor’ peep out from behind his eyes.
So I knew what the producers had seen and I knew why they’d cast him.
It isn’t just that Matt Smith’s Doctor is completely bonkers, it’s that he effortlessly ‘is’ the Doctor. Everyone thought it would take several episodes to win people over, but most of the audience were sold the second he popped his head out of the TARDIS in The Eleventh Hour. The reviews next day were jokingly saying ‘David who?’ Because Matt Smith was the Doctor.
Part of the fun of this period has been seeing Matt Smith grow as an actor. It’s not just that the actors in the AG series got a greater range to play; it’s that the writers have been confident that their Doctors can play whatever range they’re given, handle any storyline – however complex. Smith’s performance in The Eleventh Hour is wonderful; his performance in The Name of The Doctor has a maturity, a confidence and great depth. He always, from the beginning, had a strange maturity for someone in his twenties; the ability to make you believe this young looking Doctor was a very old man. But he’s grown; it doesn’t seem implausible that this Doctor has spent centuries in this body.
One of the great periods of Who, this era. Strong stories, an inventive and unpredictable leading man, and a strong support cast to back him up. As we approach the end, I look back and go – ‘you know what? This was fun!’
31 October 2013 at 23:27 #19770@fatmaninabox – now, that brought back happy memories of Return To The Forbidden Planet. 🙂
31 October 2013 at 23:09 #19764@miapatrick – well done you! The best I ever managed – on my data retrieval course – was a nice letter-and-certificate.
The book token should come in handy. 🙂
31 October 2013 at 15:50 #19734By the way, if anyone is still hunting for tickets for the Celebration, the latest contest is in this week’s Radio Times Magazine. Prize is two tickets on the Friday.
31 October 2013 at 12:44 #19710I think my bonkers theorising about the Zygons consisted of ‘they’re mainly there to prevent spoilers’. Because if you’ve got Zygons in a story, you can’t tell what character the actor is really playing.
On a side-note, I did rather admire David Tennant’s jokey “What am I allowed to say…yes, I’m in it. And I’m playing a character I may have played before…”
The important thing, to me, is that they haven’t updated the costume. Given the advances in prosthetics since we last saw the rubber glory of the Zygons in their native form, they’re either mostly using them in shapeshifting form, or it’s a misdirection. For example, when we meet the Tennant Doctor (if we do) and Rose, they’re fighting the Zygons. Who get defeated in the first five minutes, and then we go on to the rest of the story…
30 October 2013 at 14:38 #19586@blenkinsopthebrave – I certainly didn’t think you were being disrespectful. I was doing pretty much the same thing – trying to carry on with the bonkers theorising, because I knew @htpbdet would’ve hated us to stop.
Difficult. @Shazzbot, you’re not the only person still being very teary-eyed today.
29 October 2013 at 22:59 #19553@drtennant – The War Games.
29 October 2013 at 10:19 #19511@htpbdet – my condolences to your family. I’ll miss you, though we never met in person. You were a great person to debate with, both on the Guardian blogs and then here, on this forum.
I hope we entertained you, in your last illness. I know, from your posts, that you were surrounded by a loving family. I’m glad that you were able to see your son and the McGann Boy married, even if not on the day you’d hoped.
Now it is time for you to be with the rest of your family. We, left here, will miss you. You will be with those you’ve missed so much.
Rest in Peace.
28 October 2013 at 17:15 #19472@debs – some people are saying that it will be broadcast on Rai4
28 October 2013 at 16:00 #19464The cheek is that they are charging a £2 premium on top of the normal 3D surcharges for something that will be being shown at the same time on TV for free!
@thommck – really? Are you sure?
When I booked for the 02 (also Cineworld), I got the normal Saturday night 3D price. Plus the normal ‘regular booker’ discount.
I’m not too worried about paying the normal price for the 3D big screen cinema version – after all, most British cinema is usually a case of ‘do I pay or do I wait until it’s on Film4?’
I suspect the BBC went for the UK chains that have experience in simulcasting live events; Cineworld, for example, do the New York Met, Royal Opera, RSC and National Theatre.
28 October 2013 at 11:07 #19449It was fifty years ago this week…
…that they started work on filming the Daleks.
27 October 2013 at 11:36 #19405Or, @masterguns, you can pop over to our Moffat retrospective and zip through Steven Moffat’s episodes from Silence in the Library onwards.
It won’t tell you everything, but it’ll give you a quick (ish) overview.
27 October 2013 at 00:17 #19395@wolfweed – yes. I like the idea that Clara is somehow a descendent, because that takes us back to the beginning. The Doctor travelling with his family. But there’s that damn snogging to get over (and the tight skirt). It’s extremely obvious that he and Clara fancy each other; if they are related, you’ve got to find a child-friendly way of explaining that the clear attraction between them is actually them recognising the family relationship.
That is, they love each other because they’re family. But because they don’t know they’re family, they’re reading it as romantic love. I admit that if there’s one person who could get round that, it’s Steven Moffat.
But I wonder – from the teaser – if Clara represents ‘The Companion’. She’s in the line of Susan and Sara Jane not because she’s a relative, but because they are in the line of Companions trying to protect The Doctor. It was in Dalek Invasion, I think, where the Hartnell Doctor says that he thought he was looking after Susan, but it was really her trying to look after him. There’s a mirroring with Clara, where the Doctor thinks he’s the one protecting her – and really, she’s the one protecting him.
Really, really good catch with the Punch and Judy show – I wondered what that was doing in there. As well as The Constable, the puppeteer is often called ‘The Professor’, which is both a nickname used for The Doctor and River Song’s title. Mr Punch is also notorious for failing to look after and then killing his own child; we keep seeing the Doctor in Series 7b failing to look after children. It’s one of my pet theories, of course, that we’re going to find that the crime that really hangs heavy on the Doctor is not that he killed the Time Lords – it’s that he killed their children.
I think we just have to say that The Doctor is a very dangerous person; I’ve seen arguments that this ‘don’t travel alone’ is a Star-Trek-isation of Who. That it makes the Companions, instead of the Doctor, the moral centre in the same way that Star Trek generally had Truth, Justice and the American Way of Life represented by the USS Enterprise. But ‘don’t travel alone’ has always been there even though it wasn’t explicitly stated until AG Who; the Doctor doesn’t start out as morally superior – though he certainly thinks he’s superior. It’s Ian and Barbara who start to change him into a hero. Then he starts picking up various waifs and strays, who often need him to act like – well, ‘responsible parent’ is a bit beyond him, but certainly like that slightly disreputable uncle who’ll do his best for you. 🙂
26 October 2013 at 23:40 #19392Part Two
Right. Apart from observing that Richard E. Grant is busy acting Matt Smith off the screen, let’s think about what’s happening here. Clara was born to save the Doctor. In Asylum of the Daleks she saves the Doctor by saving his life – and by wiping the Dalek database.
In this story she ‘saves the Doctor’ by saving ‘The Doctor’. If we presume that ‘The Doctor’ has reverted to classic ‘Time Lord’ mode; is no longer living up to ‘The Name of The Doctor’, then Clara saves him by bringing him back to being someone who ‘keeps the promise’. The man who makes things better; he starts to investigate the snow, to interfere in a possible alien invasion. And he’s investigating because, well:
The Doctor: D’you think I’m gonna start investigating just because some bird smiles at me?
Err, frankly, yes. The Doctor has always had a weakness for a pretty face. He’s no particular objection to travelling with men, but he’s a sucker for the girls. As David Tennant once said, he likes his companions to be easy on the eye. 🙂
Clara’s bedtime story, btw, is ‘The Doctor’ as a mirror image of Doctor Who. Doctor Who is, after all, the show that gives kids bad dreams. 🙂
And finally, ‘The Doctor’ is back, as he destroys the Ice Governess. And puts his bow-tie back on. It’s cooler.
Lovely set of entrances for the Paternoster Gang. I still think it’s somehow significant that the Doctor grabs a drink as they prepare for battle – investigating was fine, but he has to nerve himself up to fight?
That first shot of the new TARDIS is fantastic, with the Doctor presenting it to Clara as the new TARDIS is presented to the audience. Given that the TARDIS exterior is a function of the Chameleon Circuit – is the battered exterior, looking as though it badly needs a new coat of paint, Old Sexy’s empathic representation of her Thief’s state of mind? The way he feels, right now, is old and battered.
Why is Clara crying? Well, if she does have a subconscious memory of the other Claras, she knows deep down that this Victorian Clara dies. This also feeds back to Oswin on the Alaska, so suspicious that the Doctor is going to leave without her. Why? Because she, too, knew that the Doctor will remember her as having died.
But this is the Clara that the Doctor really wanted to travel with; he picks up Clara from Blackpool both to find out who she is and to try and stop her dying. Clara’s really representing all the AG Companions here – she keeps dying. The Doctor not only can’t prevent her death, can’t protect her, she dies because of the mistakes he makes. Here it’s because he forgot that frozen water vapour wouldn’t really stop a being that can reconstruct itself from ice.
Whether he genuinely forgot, or this is all part of the GI’s reboot, is another matter.
He can’t accept that Clara’s is dying. He’s lost too much, he’s reached the point where he deals with yet another loss by complete denial. She’s not going to die (and a nice glance from Dan Starkey, who manages to convey without any words that he knows it’s hopeless). He’s going to save the world, and then she’s going to come away with him.
But in fact, Victorian Clara’s death is completely necessary; if she hadn’t died, the Doctor would never have found Blackpool Clara. And it’s Blackpool Clara who has to step into the time-stream and create Victorian Clara. It’s a classic time paradox – Victorian Clara has to die in order to live at all.
Final part: the GI vs Clara battle – except no-one knows that’s what’s going on. The GI adjusts things so that – instead of the Doctor winning – the GI revives, reanimates Simeon, and kills the Doctor. Clara then uses Victorian Clara to turn the snow to tears – just in time to save the Doctor. Looking at the script, you can guess that the original time-line had the Doctor succeeding at the moment he wipes Simeon’s memories; the GI becomes formless until the events in Tibet.
The Doctor: It rained.
Yup. He has a sliver of ice in his heart in Hide; here he’s entirely frozen. Until the tears fall and the ice begins to melt, when he can start to move on. I think that it’s not until The Name of The Doctor that we finally see him cry – is it at the news of his own approaching death? Or at the mention of his dead wife’s name?
Clara was born to save the Doctor. Here, she dies to bring him back to life. This particular Christmas Special is the introductory episode for the main story – and I’m not entirely sure that we’ve got all the answers yet. 😉
26 October 2013 at 21:43 #19388Oh, gawd. Isn’t it in the Three Doctors (i.e. the Tenth Anniversary Story) that the Troughton Doctor loses his recorder and goes on and on about it throughout the entire story?
I won’t reveal the spoiler -let’s just say that the recorder is a Chekhov’s Duck – but yes, if they’re using the same idea, that hatstand could turn out to be rather important.
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