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11 September 2013 at 12:13 #17161
@jimthefish and @janetteb
he’d be given a script just for the hell of it.
Not just for the hell of it; it’s the actor in me. He’s David Tennant’s father-in-law and a former Doctor himself; if he officially has his own copy of the script, he and David Tennant can legitimately discuss how to play scenes – and quite possibly run the lines.
11 September 2013 at 11:15 #17158The official picture for The Day of The Doctor
11 September 2013 at 11:14 #17157The BBC’s Doctor Who site has the full press release.
11 September 2013 at 11:05 #17156@whisht – The title also reminds me of ‘The Day of The Jackal’.
11 September 2013 at 11:00 #17155@chickenelly: they’ve taken it off. 😉 Sounds a fun list of stuff, though. The science behind Doctor Who programme is definitely on my ‘record’ list.
@janetteb – yes, it does sound a bit spoilery; but possibly not. He is, after all, David Tennant’s father-in-law and is already part of the official 50th Anniversary events. It’s @wolfweed‘s #17105 list of news items that really makes me deeply suspicious. One of them sounds like a very literal take on ‘doth protest too much’.
My current guess (and it is a guess) is that every living Doctor has at least a voice-over line. The only ones not in it will be the ones who didn’t want to be. That’s the reason The Name of The Doctor carefully reminded smaller members of the audience of the many actors who’ve played The Doctor.
10 September 2013 at 21:24 #17143@wolfweed – your TV choice link in #17136 actually linked to a very spoilery youtube clip of the filming.
Can you please be careful? I don’t mind the occasional location still showing that ‘oh, yeah, Matt Smith’s in it (surprise) and Jenna Coleman’s in it (surprise) and they’re in their costumes (I may faint at the shock),’ but I don’t want to see any acting, thanks. The reason I don’t go into the Spoilers forum is that once I’ve clicked on any links, I can’t not watch.
Even without dialogue, that scene suggested a bit more than I wanted to know. 🙁
10 September 2013 at 21:14 #17141@jimthefish and @chickenelly – as young Chickenelly says, I suspect that any outside filming is a) genuinely needed and b) as misleading as possible.
We’ve just had an entire episode where a very dead River Song played a very active part. Which means they can now have an equally dead Smith Doctor playing a very active part; his electronic avatar could be psychically linked to Clara. They could have rows and everything. 🙂
They could have Matt also playing a doppleganger – provided all the scenes sans wig are in a closed off studio.
And they can now bring Mr Capaldi on set, very publicly, and have Mr Smith and Mr Capaldi film their respective regeneration scenes, equally publicly – and then insert those scenes into the 50th Anniversary Special. There’s time for that. They can even publicly film a scene (or two) between the Capaldi Doctor and Clara, just like the very brief scene between the Tennant Doctor and Rose.
They managed to sneak Clara into Asylum of the Daleks, after all. It’s doable. Write something where Peter Capaldi’s mainly: on one set, interacting with other characters by voice, or unconscious. You could film that in a day, especially if you’re able to squeeze in a tele-prompter for any lines.
10 September 2013 at 18:10 #17129@jimthefish – I admit the scenes photographed would be awfully easy to arrange, so probably not a spoiler as such. Matt and Jenna for a day, plus the outdoor TARDIS. I suppose there could be more crew out of shot. And what the heck is Michael Pickwoad doing there? That location didn’t look complicated enough to need the production designer on set.
Do we need a Christmas Special 2013 for bonkers theorising about the Christmas show?
They’ve certainly gone to the expense of a very nice wig, so Mr Smith is almost certainly playing the Doctor. Whether he’s playing the current Doctor is another matter. He could easily be a data ghost – like River in the Name of The Doctor. They could also be using the new haircut to have him playing two easily distinguishable parts. Dopplegangers ahoy!
If they wanted Mr Capaldi in the Christmas Special, a number of regenerations have involved the Doctor having to hole up in a room somewhere. The Tennant Doctor, of course, spent most of the episode peacefully asleep (with Mr Tennant probably enjoying a bit of method acting).
10 September 2013 at 12:59 #17121Possible material for mad speculation: the BBC website is again highlighting the P.S. scene for the Ponds.
Of course, it may simply be because Time of Angels was repeated on the BBC last week, but I’m sure we can do better than that. 😀
10 September 2013 at 00:17 #17116@pedant and @blenkinsopthebrave
I think the strange thing about the staircase isn’t that it leads to a loft. It’s that it’s a terribly solid staircase. For a loft???
I’d guess myself that the staircase originally led to the servants’ attic rooms – as you say, there’s probably windows on the side of the house that’s away from the camera. But they do seem to have emphasised the oddity of this flight of stairs that appears to lead straight into a ceiling. Both little Amelia and older Amy are framed against the staircase, rather than against the extra door. River later shines her torch straight up it.
As for the figure behind the Pandorica – that one’s filed in my mind under ‘wait and see’, bit like Rory’s ID card with the odd date and Matt Smith in his raggedy Doctor costume dashing through the house in Eleventh Hour. Might be a production error (though they deliberately focussed on that ID badge). Might be something they planned and couldn’t use.
Or they might be shots ‘for later’. I don’t mean they’ll zip back to it, just that we’ll suddenly realise why Rory has the wrong date on his ID badge, or why there seem to be two raggedy Doctors.
9 September 2013 at 16:47 #17104@craig – they did a nice job considering that they practically had to do a scene-by-scene breakdown. And they positioned the movie neatly as the bridge between the BG Doctors and the AG Doctors.
I note that they didn’t mention the half-human thing. 😈
9 September 2013 at 12:21 #17102@juniperfish – Hello! And good to see you back!
I suspect the collective fandom is in denial. Our young-old Doctor is about to be replaced by an old-young Doctor. 🙂
Mind you, the way the last three regenerations have practically had to beat women off with the proverbial baseball bat, I’m not surprised the Doctor’s subconscious is muttering “if you really don’t fancy getting into bed with them, maybe looking a bit older would be a good move?”
9 September 2013 at 11:49 #17101@islek and @scaryb – yes, I remember the grammatical tenses arguments. Broadly, the argument is based on the idea that the Smith Doctor consistently refers to the Hurt Doctor in the past tense. And we know we have a gap in the chain of regenerations – the audience never saw the McGann Doctor regenerate into the Eccleston Doctor.
It provides dramatic tension either way. If the Smith Doctor is the Eleventh, and the Hurt Doctor is his future – well, Moffat’s just spent a lot of time pointing out that once the Doctor knows his future, he can’t change it. If the Hurt Doctor is his future, he’s the Thirteenth Doctor.
Got to be. We’ve got the Eleventh, we know the Twelfth. That would carry the Fiftieth storyline on into the Twelfth’s reign; he’s trying to avoid becoming the Thirteenth.
If the Hurt Doctor is the original Ninth then the Smith Doctor is really the twelfth in the line from the Hartnell Doctor’s First Doctor. This regeneration will be his twelfth regeneration – and it’s sometime between the twelfth and thirteenth regenerations that the Valeyard appears.
I’d prefer to see Rose and Metacrisis Doctor as well – but I suspect the Doctor is now stuck in his own time stream. He ‘falls’ at Trenzalore because he enters his own timestream and can never leave. He’s done the time-travel equivalent of joining the ends together to make a Moebius strip – he can go back and forth between Gallifrey and Trenzalore, but he can’t go anywhere else.
Which would be why we’d meet the Tennant Doctor and Rose. It’s not Clara’s time stream; she can leave. If he takes her back to one of his adventures with Rose, it’s close enough to her time that she can take the slow path back to 2013 and the Maitlands.
Presumably that particular unseen adventure was with Zygons. 🙂
8 September 2013 at 16:41 #17086You did have to love the identical cousin thing
@phaseshift – to be fair, they’ve only ever used the ‘identical cousin’ gag when it’s a meeting with another character who might be expected to notice that these two people with different names are strangely identical. 🙂 It was only mentioned for Eve Myles when her Gwen Cooper character came video-screen-to-face with the Doctor and Rose.
It had to be dealt with immediately for Freema Agyeman because she was playing Adeola to the Tennant Doctor in Army of Ghosts and then Martha Jones to the Tennant Doctor three episodes later. Okay, there was the series break in-between, but that still must be some kind of record.
If they bother to mention it at all for Peter Capaldi, they might have his Doctor regenerate, stare at the mirror – and then ask Clara if she thinks he’s got a Roman nose. 😀 Unless Moffat’s got a cunning plan, I think they’ll ignore Frobisher; that character really only interacted with the Torchwood team (and anyway, he had a totally different accent).
8 September 2013 at 15:09 #17080AG Who has generally specialised in identical relatives. We’ve got Gwyneth in The Unquiet Dead
And her identical relative from an ‘old Cardiff family’, Gwen Cooper.
Of course, we’ve also got Adeola Oshodi in Army of Ghosts
and her identical cousin Martha Jones.
They didn’t bother explaining that Amy Pond descends from an ancient Roman family, though the Romans were her favourite topic at school. This was probably because her identical relative was hidden under so much make up you couldn’t tell who she looked like anyway.
But it’s apparent that the Sontarans aren’t the only people in Who to reproduce via clone batch. 🙂
8 September 2013 at 13:37 #17077As showdowns go, River opening up an intergalactic can of whupass supported by the Doctor in the Silents TARDIS looks so cinematic.
@phaseshift: it does, doesn’t it? That’s such a well directed scene; and then it’s capped off by the little ‘Tomb Raider’ joke at the end.
@jimthefish – I would be amazingly unsurprised if Rory and Amy turned up for either the 50th or the Christmas Special – I’m in agreement that their story just feels as if it hasn’t quite ended; it needs a coda. The goodbyes have been said but we’ve been living with their after-effects throughout the second half of series 7.
8 September 2013 at 09:37 #17059I think you’re missing the point here. Let’s summarise the pattern, just in case @phaseshift or any of the other mods need to cast an eye.
You’ve joined up and immediately posted on ‘Peter Capaldi should not be the next Doctor’. You quote another poster from a month back – who didn’t get any bites – who likewise joined up and immediately posted on ‘Peter Capaldi shouldn’t be the next Doctor because he’s played other parts’ and who has a strangely similar writing style.
You’ve had advice from both myself and @tardisblue. My advice was ‘come up with a mad theory’. TardisBlue’s advice was ‘this site can tell the difference between actor and role’. Note spelling of ‘role’. Your response is to continue with a convoluted explanation which seems to consist of ‘I have a remarkable paucity of imagination and cannot possibly suspend my disbelief to accept an actor in a different role in the same series.’ This for a series which has a history of re-casting guest actors in leading roles as a different character and to a forum whose members could come up with five entirely plausible explanations before breakfast.
God forbid you ever book for an RSC season … though I’m glad you like the ‘deliberately takes on Caecilius’s face’ theory.
Now, if you want us to think you’re not the Lesser Spotted One Topic Troll, have a look on our other forums and discuss something else. Alternatively, come up with your own mad theory to explain why the Twelfth Doctor has chameleon arched himself and is now playing Peter Capaldi. 😉
7 September 2013 at 22:17 #17054And she will possibly be the first companion who, in some sense, has dealt with the transition as many times as the doctor.
Yeah, I think she is. Interesting. Possibly Steven Moffat’s feeling is that the audience is now thoroughly up to date on the concept of regeneration. We no longer need the Companion to take the audience through ‘who are you and are you really the Doctor?’ We’ve been reminded, constantly, through the Moffat/Smith era that the Doctor changes bodies periodically.
We especially don’t need it when the regeneration is coming on the heels of a ‘several Doctors’ storyline which may be about ‘is every regeneration automatically The Doctor?’
So Clara’s just as up to date as the audience.
Now with Peri and the Sixth Doctor, Peri barely knew the Fifth before he was replaced by this complete git. In hindsight, this was one of the many, many things wrong with the Sixth Doctor’s era. Colin Baker insists that the Sixth Doctor was supposed to have a development arc; it would have been a lot better if there’d been a Companion who could have flatly told the Doctor (and therefore the audience) that something had gone badly wrong with the regeneration. Janet Fielding’s Tegan might have been ideal – she’d already gone through one regeneration.
Instead they start the new Doctor with an almost-new Companion. And if there was a development arc planned, we – the audience – didn’t know. We might have been slightly more patient if we had known; might have been a bit more prepared to hang around and see if the twazzock who’d replaced Davison’s Doctor was going to mellow.
Or maybe not. The scripts were about to get incredibly bad. 🙁
7 September 2013 at 21:26 #17051It’s funny how used you get to the modern effects – I was looking for the AG ‘golden glow’ of regeneration, and had to remind myself that this is a BG story. They didn’t do it like that back then. Presumably, in-story, the newly explosive and highly destructive regenerations are some side effect of either the loss of the Time Lords or the Time War. River certainly uses her regeneration as a weapon.
Was there anything about the Colin Baker era that wasn’t crass? This was Peter Davison’s episode and they put Colin Baker first on the closing cast list? Neither of the AG regenerations did that – both had the outgoing Doctor heading the closing cast list and the incoming Doctor credited at the end of the cast list as ‘and introducing … as.’
In fact, that’s exactly what John Hurt got as well, except in much bigger letters and before the main closing cast list.
I know bats are mammals, but how do you milk them? I mean, it’s a bit tricky milking a cow when you haven’t been taught; where exactly did the Doctor learn to milk a bat? And do we really want to find out?
So, from the sacrificial high drama of the Doctor’s regeneration to … The Twin Dilemma. I mean, seriously, what were they thinking? A brand new Doctor and they introduce him with the biggest pile of – well, if Caves of Androzani was about bat’s milk, The Twin Dilemma was a pile of bat droppings.
@miapatrick – I have mentioned before – in the context of a sadly defunct bonkers theory (:shakes fist: Moffat!) – that Clara has been carefully led on a series of adventures that showed her what the Doctor should be like. It fitted her Impossible Girl mission – she needed to know what the Doctor should be like to be able to rejig the continuity correctly – but it also fulfilled the purpose of reminding the audience what the Doctor should be like, just before his regeneration.
7 September 2013 at 18:38 #17042I don’t seem to have made any comments when this was first broadcast. Thinking back to the time: I needed to rewatch this episode; it was very, very confusing on first viewing. The combination of the time jump between part one and part two and the lack of any explanation until everyone can finally get inside a totally secure place meant I had no idea what was going on.
Which is, stylistically, a nice touch. It put the audience in the same place as the people of Earth (who have absolutely no idea what’s going on) and – when we did finally get information – we got it at the same rate as the characters. They can’t remember the Silence until they see them. They don’t know how they got out of the old warehouse either; all they can remember are vague flashes, a confusion of shouting and screaming and forgetting and being told to look behind them when they knew there was nothing there.
Most contributors at the time realised Amy’s pregnancy was important (snap). This is Doctor Who; the only other reason to mention a pregnancy would be to get the Companion off the TARDIS. I’m not sure if Amy wasn’t the first person in Doctor Who to be (officially) pregnant.
A number also correctly connected the little girl with Amy’s pregnancy. I think that was also snap for me; not sure. What I do remember was my jaw dropping when the little girl regenerated. 😯
Once I’d got past the ‘what the heck is going on’ stage, this was a very good episode, but not as good as The Impossible Astronaut – I think because the plotline was now apparently ‘who are the Silence and how are we going to destroy them?’ And that is pretty much a standard Who plot. In hindsight, that turns out to be the ‘B’ plot – the real plotline was ‘it’s all about the little girl; who is she?’
Which does rather suggest that Clara might be somehow connected to this; Amy was the Doctor’s first ‘puzzle’ Companion. She’s his mother-in-law. River is his second ‘puzzle’ – she’s his wife. And his third ‘puzzle’ is Clara. Three women; if this is a generational thing, we’re looking at Mother, Wife and Daughter.
7 September 2013 at 14:41 #170257 September 2013 at 00:03 #17016@tardisblue – that only explains the Twelfth’s resemblance to Caecilus; there’s still John Frobisher to go. 🙂
As I recall, the Doctor never met John Frobisher. One simple but boring theory is that John Frobisher is one of Caecilus’s descendants. A more interesting theory would be that John Frobisher is a descendant of Frobisher the shape shifting penguin. (Frobisher was a comics character who never appeared in any TV episodes, possibly due to the limited acting range of the average penguin)
Presumably at some point in Earth’s past Frobisher took on the Twelfth’s appearance, and it was during that time he had a part human offspring. Due to some trick of Whifferdill genetics, male Frobishers not only can’t shape shift, but they all look exactly like the Twelfth.
😀
6 September 2013 at 21:26 #17014Just a heads-up to those watching the BBC3 repeats – they seem to have decided to start racing through S7 part 2. Cold War is on tomorrow, Sat 7th Sept, at 7pm.
Hopefully they’re racing through because there are goodies planned for October, but don’t hold your breath…
6 September 2013 at 20:56 #17013Nice try. Wrong Doctor Who forum.
Please check out our mission statement: “theories more insane than what’s actually happening”.
We would be deeply interested in your theory as to why the Doctor Who universe seems to have an abundance of characters who look remarkably like Peter Capaldi. I think ‘the Twelfth Doctor has stepped into his own timeline and been scattered throughout time’ and ‘the Twelfth Doctor is a Jaggaroth’ have already been taken.
But ‘so and so shouldn’t be in Doctor Who because they’ve been in it before’ isn’t an insane theory. Sorry.
5 September 2013 at 12:47 #16981Which sonic screwdriver?
That is, are you going to make your own, or use one of the toy ones?
If making your own, I’d probably look into stuff like the infra-red locks they use for dog/cat doors. Put the tag in the screwdriver, and the door lock in the TARDIS.
5 September 2013 at 11:18 #16979@wolfweed – wot, no Crazy Captions?
Suggesting the following (from Masque of Mandragora)
Still not ginger!
3 September 2013 at 22:40 #16945Addendum: a quick look on TheTrainLine for the Monday 25th November had them giving me the ‘do you want to sign up to be notified’ message – so I’d guess they haven’t yet released the cheapies for Monday.
3 September 2013 at 22:36 #16944@Shazzbot – have you tried a single ticket there and a single ticket back?
The problem may be that the cheap APEX tickets go on sale 12 weeks beforehand – so it may be that they haven’t yet released the cheap tickets for the Monday.
Have a look at the singles – if there’s a huge difference between Friday and Monday, it might just be that they’re releasing Monday 25th November on the 9th or something stupid. TheTrainLine usually has some system where you can sign up to be sent an email alert when they go on sale.
3 September 2013 at 21:42 #16940@miapatrick and @Shazzbot – coaches won’t work, I’m afraid. They don’t take dogs.
Unless you’re going to a dog show, of course, in which case there’s often a specially booked coach full of dogs (and attached humans) from all the Ruralshires, deepest England, heading with grim determination towards either a) giant field, middle of Nowhere or b) giant exhibition centre, middle of Somewhere.
Which digression is of no help at all, because as far as I can work out there’s no show closer than Beds on the 23rd. Honestly, you’d think there was something on in London that had booked the Excel centre…
🙂
Okay, getting more serious: @Shazzbot, have you checked if you can get a cheaper ticket by breaking the journey in two? Or buying two singles? For example, it’s often cheaper to get one ticket to a major station where they have the ‘headline’ deals. Then get singles each way.
A return from York is nearly £98, but if you get two singles, you can drop it down to between £50 and £60.
3 September 2013 at 13:33 #16929London now has its own Death Ray
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/sep/02/london-skyscraper-melted-my-car-says-motorist
Burning question: is the architect a Zygon?
2 September 2013 at 17:42 #16914Further information on Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD – Channel 4 are going to broadcast it on Friday nights, three days after it first airs in the US. So it premieres here on 27th September.
1 September 2013 at 20:42 #16896I still can’t see anything in it that merits its such high placing in the story rankings.
@jimthefish – I said over on the Faces of The Doctor thread that Caves, for me, was the story when Peter Davison finally ‘got’ who his Doctor was.
So it would deserve its rating – for me – because this is the ‘nothing in his incarnation became him like the leaving of it’ story. It’s well acted, it’s well directed, it’s well written: and it shows Davison’s Doctor at his finest. What’s not to love?
Okay, apart from the Magna Monster, which is really, really terrible, unbelievably slow and only seems to eat people because of some strange ability to freeze its victims with sheer terror.
But even AG Who has that problem: the special effects for both the Dalekised humans and the spoonheads took so long that Amy, Clara and Miss Kizlet could have been out of their chairs/office and halfway down the stairs by the time something finally happened.
1 September 2013 at 18:23 #16887Ah, the early Eighties. Throughout this episode it was becoming really, really obvious that there are only two women in the cast and one of them is there to play ‘victim’ and be rescued by the hero. Leela would probably have nutted Jex by now.
What Peri should have done, of course, is to have grown and developed throughout her time with the Doctor, so that we could all say ‘ah, this is early Peri’. Unfortunately, she got the Sixth Doctor. 🙁
I agree about the kids enjoying President meets liftshaft – by and large, part of Doctor Who’s enduring appeal is the various gruesome (but strangely bloodless) deaths. Which is why Moffat has his reputation as an ‘everybody lives!’ scriptwriter; his death rate is a lot lower. Unless you’re a Companion; Moffat Companions should make sure their funeral insurance is kept up to date and that they’ve made a will.
If you’re Rory or Clara, this could be an especially expensive business. 🙂
This third episode fairly zipped along – even the traditional ‘escape, get recaptured’ padding had a nice variation with Peri and the Doctor getting recaptured in a different order and getting different fates. I agree with @phaseshift – when I watched this at the time, it was all incredibly exciting – and still has a lot of tension now, when I know the ending.
1 September 2013 at 09:36 #16876Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi were spotted having lunch yesterday…
Oh, my God. They’re getting married!
😀
1 September 2013 at 09:05 #16875Will there be a DVD or blu ray of the 50th anniversary
@austin2492 – Yes. Suggesting to BBC Worldwide that they not put out a DVD or Blu-ray is a bit like trying to convert the Pope to Buddhism. Sometimes they’re so enthusiastic, they put them out before the episode has even aired…
There are also some rumours of theatre showings. Information will probably be available nearer the time.
😀
1 September 2013 at 00:05 #16866@phaseshift – as to where the Doctor found another Paul Smith shirt, pick one of
a) he knows Paul Smith and asked him to make another shirt or
b) living in a ship that can reconfigure architecture and machinery on demand, he just said ‘another shirt like this one, but in blue’.
I’d make a similar guess about the jacket; once he’d decided he wanted a tweed jacket he kept the one from the hospital – but there was also another tweed jacket in the TARDIS wardrobe. Like all the AG Doctors (and many of the BG Doctors), Smith’s Doctor isn’t that fussed about wearing the same clothes all the time so long as he’s in the same general style.
31 August 2013 at 23:46 #16865@phaseshift – Yes, I think he definitely had Trenzalore in mind when he was writing this episode. It’ll be interesting to find out, when Mr Moffat retires from producing Who and
cashes in his pension planwrites his book on his time as producer, exactly how far in advance stuff was planned.It was certainly left open that we could see Canton again – there’s over forty years available between 1969 and 2011. The only problem with Mark Sheppard is that he’s really, really busy. If I recall correctly, he had to juggle quite a lot of stuff to be able to do this two-parter – and he juggled it because he wanted to be in Doctor Who very badly indeed.
This really is an excellent episode, though; however many times I watch it, it’s never boring, not even when you know how the Doctor gets out of his ‘death’. And I think @scaryb‘s post #2009 above is quite right – River didn’t really know where and when she was when she was in the astronaut suit, and she didn’t realise her older self had witnessed the Doctor’s ‘death’. Until the moment the astronaut comes out of the water.
31 August 2013 at 23:23 #16864All the babies are strong enough to do is transport their victims in space but not in time. That doesn’t seem like a particularly effective way of dealing with his enemies.
They get transported to Winter Quay, never to be seen again. Sounds pretty effective to me 🙂 Also, Grayle’s trying in this case to scare Melody Malone, who knows about Angels. So throwing her friend/partner/Dad to the Angels – probably more effective. And another also, it means you don’t get blood on the floor. Blood is hell to get out of floors.
As to the wrist: Amy says ‘Page 43, you’re going to break something.’ Then she foretells River’s later line. Yes, technically, the Doctor could get an idea. The point is that he doesn’t. Throughout the episode he’s trapped by his training (so is River); he’s been carefully and extensively trained in the idea that once you know your own future, you’re stuck with it. We’ve just been doing the re-watch of The Impossible Astronaut; that’s the whole underlying premise in that episode as well. Amy, Rory and River can’t tell the Doctor he’s going to die – because you don’t tell people their future. Changing a known future can blow a hole in the universe.
And while Amy points out that the Doctor’s has already done just that, Rory points out that yes, he has – but the universe did blow up. 😈
Amy and Rory, on the the other hand, don’t really understand exactly how dangerous changing their own future is – so they manage to change it. The Doctor, throughout the episode, does understand exactly how dangerous this is – and doesn’t dare. The only reason he dares in The Big Bang is because the universe has already been destroyed, so how extra dangerous could changing the future and creating paradoxes be? The worst has already happened. 😉
(River, I suspect, knows where and when her parents ended up – she certainly acts as if she does in the final scene with Amy.)
Erm, yes, I’d risk it.
You’d risk it – the Angel Liberty wouldn’t. That’s not bad plotting, that’s just characterisation. 🙂 As I say, as far as she knows, Rory has already died. Therefore he now can’t escape – his future’s already happened. And he saw himself die; the only reason he’s on the roof in the first place is because he saw his own future. Dying now will create a paradox, and paradoxes need enormous power to create them. Rory doesn’t have that amount of power.
Unfortunately for the Angels, Amy does.
31 August 2013 at 17:06 #16847I think, in retrospect, I don’t like the Ninth Doctor. Not because of Chris Eccleston’s refusal to do the convention circuit or to return for even a cameo; I have a very distinct impression that his time on Doctor Who wasn’t happy. And if that’s the case, his determination not to go back or relive the experience at conventions becomes entirely understandable.
But the first series of AG Who remains the only AG series where I had some episodes recorded-but-unwatched weeks after I was physically able to watch them. I’m still not entirely sure I ever did watch The Long Game and the Parting of the Ways all the way through. I was on board until World War Three; I remember watching the first part of ‘Dalek’ – and then I had to stop watching ‘Dalek’ part way through for some reason, and I didn’t watch the rest of the episode until it was well into David Tennant’s run and I’d finally bought the Series 1 DVD.
And it was like that for the remainder of the series. If I had the time, I watched the episode. If I didn’t – I wasn’t too bothered. Yet as soon as David Tennant stepped on board, that became unthinkable. Matt Smith, likewise, has kept me gripped.
So what did Christopher Eccleston not have, that Tennant and Smith both did? Funnily enough, I think watching Caves of Androzani has been helpful, because I felt very much the same way about Peter Davison right up until Caves. Davison didn’t feel as though he was comfortable being the Doctor – until his very last on-screen story, when he suddenly seemed to pass through that barrier and ‘get’ his Doctor.
The way that came across on screen was that this incarnation of the Doctor didn’t feel comfortable about himself. Christopher Eccleston, likewise, never felt like someone who was happy about this entire Doctor Who thing – and so his Doctor never seems to be really, definitely there. This is a man who knows the steps, but can’t yet dance.
Of course, we may discover that this is going to be retconned into making perfect sense. The Ninth Doctor isn’t the Ninth Incarnation. He’s the Ninth Doctor. He’s somebody who was trying to rediscover the role; somebody coming back to ‘The Name of The Doctor’ after being deeply, profoundly lost.
Is he fantastic? Yes. I don’t think it matters that old fans like me spent a series not being entirely happy – Christopher Eccleston’s Doctor carried an entire new generation through Series 1 and into a regeneration. And he was funny (though he doesn’t have a light touch with humour) and he was goofy, and he did have charm. Without his willingness to take a risk, there would have been no David Tennant and no Matt Smith.
When we rewatched Empty Child/Doctor Dances, one of my comments was that the rewatch made me think how much better those stories would have been with David Tennant (or Matt Smith). But if you look at those episodes another way – as the story of someone who has to have, finally, a moment where ‘everybody lives!’ before he can get back to being The Doctor – then Eccleston’s perfect.
Fantastic.
31 August 2013 at 14:29 #16826@fatmaninabox– yes, you could hold a gun to their head. But while that’s scary, it’s an understood sort of scary.
What Grayle wants is ‘Melody Malone’ s knowledge of Angels. River is being a hard boiled woman detective in 1930’s New York; Grayle will probably have guessed that a successful female P.I. in that place and time is unlikely to be scared by the mere threat of instant death.
Other things I can think of – he’s got Mummy Angel upstairs, and he’s been torturing her. It’s possible that he thinks the babies are sufficiently scared of him to stay downstairs in the cellar – especially when lunch is provided on a regular basis.
The outcome is in a state of flux until River says ‘are you going to break her wrist or mine’ (or words to that effect) – and the Doctor then knows exactly what she’s going to say next.
If he changes things so that she doesn’t say it, he creates the zig zag paradox – she can’t then write it in her book, he can’t read it, so how does he know she said it? As to why he’s so angry with her; that’s marriage for you. What he’s really angry with is himself, for not daring to change time to prevent his wife getting hurt; he can’t yell at the Laws of Time, so he yells at his wife instead.
Yes, the Angels are incredibly fast. Which would you rather do? Risk your own death and everyone else’s by relying on your speed – or keep still and rely on the time-stream reasserting itself? As the Doctor pointed out earlier; creating a paradox needs an immense amount of power. Angel Liberty quite possibly has that amount of power; Angel Liberty would need to be careful not to do anything that might create a paradox.
But what Rory has is Amy – Amy, who had a crack in time pouring through her growing brain. Amy, who reset the universe. Amy, who then brought the Doctor back. We’ve seen it a few times; Amy is powerful enough to change time itself.
Unfortunately, the Angel Liberty doesn’t know that. What it sees are two powerless humans, fighting against their inevitable destiny. And for someone who’s supposedly going to jump, Rory’s really not terribly enthusiastic about it – until Amy goes with him.
31 August 2013 at 13:50 #16825@thegeneral – it’s a very good idea; that the Time Lock is precisely that – time has been ‘locked’ in a single moment. It’s the perfect way to imprison the Time Lords, because they’re immediately deprived of their greatest power; the ability to control time.
Now I come to think of it, in The Wedding of River Song (which we should be watching next month) the Doctor is largely helpless. He starts the story in prison and is reacting to other people’s plans throughout.
When there is no time, the Lord of Time has lost his power.
Another interesting point which matches up with your idea: the Doctor continually sees himself as the person who killed the Time Lords. “Fear me, I killed them all.” In Wedding, time is frozen at the exact moment the Doctor (supposedly) died. And he can only unlock it by ‘dying’.
Is that what he’s done? Locked the Time Lords at the moment of Gallifrey’s destruction? So they can only ‘escape’ by killing themselves?
31 August 2013 at 12:48 #16821The idea (that the Time Lock is like The Wedding of River Song) is excellent, but as a teacher would say, it’s badly let down by the presentation.
This site uses colloquial English, but if you check out other posts you’ll find that posters generally keep to formal English grammar and punctuation. Just think of it as a chance to practice those skills. 😉
Anyway – yes, the Time Lock could be an ‘everything happening at the same moment’ mechanism. Time’s stopped; there’s a ‘this happens first’ and ‘this happens second’, but no ‘yesterday’ or ‘tomorrow’.
31 August 2013 at 11:41 #16818@whisht – if time within the Lock still rolls on in its normal way, that would indeed be the case – the Time Lock is set until the end of the universe (and there’s probably some kind of associated physical lock that means people can’t escape from the planet).
On the other hand, if the Time Lock is something like ‘Groundhog Day’ – a lock where Gallifrey is eternally stuck repeating one day (its final day) – then you can’t get out of it. You can’t get beyond it. At the end of the day, however far you’ve travelled, you’re returned to Gallifrey to begin the same day again.
Hopefully, given that Steven Moffat is considerably fonder of time paradoxes than Russell T Davies was, we’re going to find out more at the 50th.
31 August 2013 at 11:24 #16815Okay, I’ll have a go.
1. I suspect the henchmen normally go down to the basement in pairs – either with the next victim, or a fellow henchperson. Note that the henchman taking Rory down stays on the stairs. As to why he keeps unchained baby angels down in his basement – any self respecting crime lord needs the equivalent of a shark pool. He keeps them down there to scare people.
2. The Doctor couldn’t get a chisel because he knew (from the book) that he didn’t get a chisel. I did a blog post about this and other time problems:
http://www.thedoctorwhoforum.com/sidrat/wibbley-wobbly-timey-wimey/#14172
basically, it’s the zig-zag diagram where the Doctor goes to Blackpool and breaks an arm. He couldn’t change the future without creating an unstable paradox. Later, Amy and Rory DO create an unstable paradox – and blow enough of a hole in the time-stream that it kills all the angels. However, at this point, the Doctor doesn’t realise that a paradox is desirable.
3. Yes, I wondered about the Statue of Liberty being able to move. I suspect it’s really a case of ‘Rule of Cool’ 🙂
That said, the problem that Rory and Amy aren’t looking at the Statue once he’s got on the ledge and announced his plan is explained by the very nature of where he is and what his plan is. Namely, wobbling on a ledge and about to fall off – at which point he’ll die before his death in the hotel room, creating a paradox. If he falls off, he creates the paradox; dying is winning.
However fast she moves, she has to touch him to send him back in time. Will she be able to touch him gently enough to stop him falling? Suppose he doesn’t give her quite enough time with his blink, will the shock of seeing her move make him jump – and, err, jump?
Amy isn’t so important from the Statue’s point of view – but they do have an entire conversation where they forget about looking at the Angel – and it’s an entire conversation where she’s climbing up on a ledge with Arthur Darvill doing a lot of ‘barely keeping my balance’ acting. It’s not the blinking that is keeping her still – it’s that she doesn’t know how to get to Rory without his jumping.
The Angel in the graveyard gets Rory because Amy’s looking at Rory – I seem to recall that the Tennant Doctor’s advice included don’t take your eyes off it. She took her eyes off it (mainly because she didn’t realise it was an Angel). It got Rory in that split-second.
30 August 2013 at 15:50 #16790Bit odd that they’ve missed out The Snowmen though.
@fatmaninabox – Too Christmassy, perhaps? Or 60 minutes doesn’t fit into the schedule?
Whatever – the point that they’ve decided to do a catch-up episode tomorrow rather suggests that ‘stuff’ is due to start happening from one month before the actual anniversary; they need to play catch-up for any cancellations, because they need to finish repeating the series by mid-October.
29 August 2013 at 20:47 #16783@queenlouie – since the Doctor’s making his age up, anyway, it doesn’t really matter. 😉
That said, I seem to recall the Master saying he was eight when he looked into the Untempered Schism, and the child actor playing him looked about eight – so we can probably presume that there’s some kind of ‘translation’ into Earth years and equivalent human age.
29 August 2013 at 10:09 #16775PC’s Doctor arriving as a slightly more irritable Doctor sounds dangerously close to Colin Baker territory?
@blenkinsopthebrave – emigration? Permanent or temporary?
Yes, it does tend to raise PTST type flashbacks to Colin Baker, but I suspect the thought in the minds of SM and PC is ‘William Hartnell’. He definitely had his ‘irritable’ moments – and it will fit with this ‘eternal circle’/’back to the beginning’ theme that’s sort of coalescing around the 50th.
27 August 2013 at 23:01 #16755@jimthefish – well, you could incorporate the Hurt Doctor as sort of the Joker in the pack – he’s definitely being presented as ‘The Doctor’. The only question is, which Doctor?
26 August 2013 at 15:13 #16725A reminder that the Doctor Who Proms will be on BBC 1 in 50 minutes (4pm BST)
26 August 2013 at 12:55 #16722@craig – That must have been one of the ones where they said he looked absolutely miserable wearing it.
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