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12 August 2013 at 14:07 #15947
But maybe I have just misunderstood something there?
@HTPDET – I think so. The difference between Amy and River is that Amy still exists because her parents were swallowed by the crack after she was born. In fact, since she’s in the house on her own, it’s entirely possible that her parents were swallowed by the crack just before she started praying to Santa – and that’s why she’s so scared. She doesn’t remember why, but she knows the crack is terrifying.
Rory, otoh, is killed before he can conceive River with Amy. Their wedding is tomorrow throughout Series Five; the universe only comes right again after they’re married.
Amy was born, then her parents vanished. Amy still exists; it’s just that she doesn’t have any parents. In the same way, the photo of Rory and the engagement ring still exist, even though Rory was never there. Echoes survive when people fall into the cracks. Amy and the engagement ring are just such echoes.
River, however, has just become a living Grandfather paradox. In this case, it’s a double Grandfather paradox. BOTH parents have died…
Intervention of an unknown force: fine – but what did the unknown force introduce into the TARDIS to make it blow up? If it’s River, then that’s why she can’t get out. The unknown force is using River to make the TARDIS explode.
Too close to the Crack? Didn’t we have a picture of the Crack on the screen in The Eleventh Hour? And a Crack in the TARDIS itself when the Doctor’s time-line is rewinding?
12 August 2013 at 13:32 #15944If she was conceived by a chameleon-arched parent would she really be 100% human or be a timelord with some kind of biological chameleon arch?
That really is up to the writer – because all we’ve seen so far is that a chameleon-arched parent can have children with a human. Since you can’t tell a chameleon-arched Time Lord from a human being, presumably the children will also be human. Definitely human. Couldn’t be more human.
But they may have something hidden in their genetics that allows them to become Time Lords again. Human Time Lords, like River.
I dunno. I keep going back to that empty cradle in the TARDIS; the one we first saw in A Good Man Goes To War. And Clara’s a Nanny; her job is to look after other people’s children. Both times we’ve seen her working as a Nanny, she’s been looking after kids who have lost their mother. But not their father.
So who would be the ‘father’ if the Time Lords are lost, but their children are perhaps … not? The Doctor.
If the Time Lords were guilty, if the Time Lords deserved to be shut behind a Time Lock forever, their children did not. That’s certainly something that would not be done ‘In The Name of The Doctor’; imprison children forever.
An abandoned child (Amy). A stolen baby (River). An empty cradle (belonging to both the Doctor and his wife). Now there’s a Nanny, someone whose job is to look after the children. And the Doctor, consistently, keeps trying and failing to look after children. He wants to, but he can’t. Amelia, Melody, the Maitland kids, even that little boy in Cold Blood. They all trust in the Doctor, and they are all lost. What then happens is that they’re found again.
Those Clerics in Time of Angels, the ones who are happy to work with the Doctor – they wear what I keep insisting is an ‘Alpha and Omega’ symbol on their uniform. Not just Omega (the end) but an Alpha, almost hidden inside. The End is also the Beginning. So The Last of the Time Lords might also be … ?
12 August 2013 at 12:01 #15938My only issue with Clara being related to the Doctor is that she doesn’t regenerate when she dies
@thommck – well of course she doesn’t. She’s human.
She’s incredibly human. She’s extremely human. We’ve seen her grow up human. We’ve seen one of her Claricles die proclaiming she’s human (rather than a dalek). She reads on a mediscanner as human. An empath has insisted that she’s ordinary (and human). She reacts to the Slug Venom of the Red Death in the way that a human does.
She is extraordinarily human. I don’t think we’ve ever had a Companion who’s had their humanness mentioned in over half the episodes they’ve been in. She’s human, okay?
That it is mentioned so often suggests that it’s important. It only needed to be in one episode to establish it; not this every-other episode insistence that Clara is an extremely intelligent but otherwise ordinary human.
It doesn’t stop her, for example, being the Doctor’s great granddaughter. We know from Human Nature/Family of Blood that ‘John Smith’ could have had human children. If his granddaughter Susan had been chameleon arched, Clara could be her entirely human daughter. If she’s the Doctor’s daughter, she was chameleon arched as a baby.
If she’s his ‘Nanny’ she doesn’t know it; she was certainly deliberately steered into becoming a Companion. But she thought she was contacting a computer help line.
12 August 2013 at 11:32 #15937Corden as the Baker. I can’t see that.
@htpbdet – because of the character’s dramatic range, I take it? Probably why Corden wants to do it – if he can pull it off, it’s going to widen his casting quite a lot.
12 August 2013 at 11:22 #15934@htpbdet –
The Universe in that timeline ends because the River Paradox, caused by Amy’s death, is too big?
The Universe can cope with it. The TARDIS can’t. The Universe can’t cope with an exploding TARDIS – only the Time Lords know how to stop that, and they’ve just locked the Last of the Time Lords up. The entire sequence is a perfect storm.
- Without Amy’s death, River is still possible (presumably there was some way to get Rory back).
- Without River being trapped inside the TARDIS (the topic of ‘who trapped her inside’ is still a loose end) the TARDIS wouldn’t blow up – I’d guess River would just vanish like all the other erased people.
- Without the Doctor being locked inside the Pandorica, River wouldn’t be trapped inside an exploding TARDIS – he would either know how to get her out, or tell her what to do to stop the explosion destroying the whole of space and time.
If you take away any of the three things, the explosion doesn’t happen. As long as Amy’s alive, River’s possible. As long as River’s outside the TARDIS, it doesn’t blow up. As long as either Amy or River are alive and unexploded, they can rescue the Doctor. If the Doctor hadn’t been locked inside the Pandorica he could probably have either saved Amy or stopped the TARDIS exploding…
Which other things did you think?
12 August 2013 at 11:04 #15932Do you think Hurt is Doctor Zero?
I meant Prisoner Zero = Doctor Zero in a metaphorical sense, not in a literal in-story way.
As to Hurt being ‘Doctor Zero’ that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s the Doctor before Hartnell. Just that – unless Capaldi turns out to be the Thirteenth Doctor, and Matt Smith has in fact been playing the Twelfth, Hurt has to be ‘not in the count’. He’s the Doctor With No Number, Doctor Zero.
Or is there a further, key point – that the Doctor, the one person the TARDIS knows can confound paradoxes, is placed in confinement and so is incapable of dismantling the paradox.
Could be. I do feel another blog post coming on….
The TARDIS, being reasonably intelligent, seems to be able to cope with repairable paradoxes. But looking at The Pandorica Opens artistically, the order of shots is that the Doctor is placed in confinement, River can’t get out, and Amy dies. And the stars go out.
So yes, you can certainly say that because the Doctor is placed in confinement the TARDIS explosion and Amy’s death can’t be prevented. But the stars go out when Amy dies.
12 August 2013 at 10:43 #15928No idea whether this is anything to do with young Amelia Pond, but –
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23663337
Amelia was the most popular name for English/Welsh baby girls, for the second year running.
11 August 2013 at 23:22 #15915has killed the sound
Do you have a filter on your computer? Or does your ISP filter stuff? The sound played fine on mine.
11 August 2013 at 16:20 #15907@phaseshift and @jimthefish – well, if Prisoner Zero represents Doctor Zero, then yes.
Regarding booking John Hurt; I remember working with the late Nigel Stock and finding out that he was so very busy that you basically had to grab him a minimum of two years in advance. It wouldn’t surprise me, given that John Hurt is at least as busy as Nigel Stock was, to find that they’d booked him for the 50th Anniversary back in 2010.
11 August 2013 at 14:59 #15901@miapatrick – right-handed for most things, but yes – ambi-sinister. Dinners with place settings are a bit of a nightmare because I eat and drink left-handed. (yes, I’m sorry, I did just steal your glass. Would you like the one on my right side? I’m not using it…) And for some reason I automatically use my left hand for the London Transport Oyster Card – which is difficult, because they place all the card readers on the right.
I would assume that the problem with Flesh!Amy was that the body-signals coming through were pregnant, but the Flesh either couldn’t simulate a pregnancy – or was having its ‘programming’ overridden so that ‘Amy’ didn’t know she was pregnant. Either the TARDIS scan was reading the real Amy’s signals simultaneously with the Flesh signals, or the Flesh kept trying to simulate pregnancy – and then either failing or having the pregnancy simulation shut down.
Yes, the copies were so faithful that they also reproduced medical problems.
11 August 2013 at 13:59 #15898Vowels are tricky for me.
Yes, they will be if you’ve got verbal dyspraxia, because so many English words use the neutral vowel (pronounced ‘uh’) when saying words aloud. I’ve got a level of dyspraxia, as well; I never did manage joined up writing.
Anyway, back onto topic – I seem to recall that the Doctor first scans Amy after she tells him she’s no longer pregnant. Which would be a reasonable thing to do: if Amy’s either had a false pregnancy or a miscarriage, a scan is a very good idea; the facilities on the TARDIS are likely to be far in advance of our/Amy’s time.
11 August 2013 at 09:32 #15886@Shazzbot and @miapatrick – it’s the dyslexia. If I’m a Spelling Dalek (which I am), I’m the one facing River Song and going ‘Mercy! MER-CY!’
Basically, to interpret what I read, I go by what a word looks like. Then I go by context. Matching by sound is the last thing my little dyslexic brain tries. And it’s not terribly good at it, because when I try to translate a visual image to a sound, my brain mixes the sounds up. If I can’t match the mangled pronunciation to a word I know, I’m in trouble.
‘Cannon’ doesn’t look like ‘canon’. It’s got six letters, not five. Its context isn’t the same as ‘canon’. One means a piece of artillery, the other an agreed selection of texts. To me, it just plain isn’t the same word. And every time someone’s spellchecker replaces ‘canon’ with ‘cannon’, I have to go through the entire process of ‘word does not compute. Context does not compute. Match word with sound. Can-non. Can-non. Intended word was Can-on.’
Too much of this and I feel like I’m being slapped round the head. Apologies, @miapatrick, if you’re also dyslexic, but for those who aren’t, it’s difficult to explain how a misspelled word will drag my entire reading process to a screeching halt. There really is a distinct pause.
Which tends to make me the Spelling Dalek, because I’ll stare at an entire screen full of text and go ‘you’ve spelt their, thier.’ Or ‘you didn’t mean ‘conformation’.
(I’m guessing it was confirmation, and yes, I know it was a joke – but I had to think about it overnight to figure out what you did mean).
Yours
The Spelling Dalek
10 August 2013 at 23:12 #15881did we have conformation, before The Eleventh Hour, that McGann’s doctor was cannon?
@miapatrick – I don’t think he was fired out of a piece of artillery, no- though I wouldn’t put it past the McCoy Doctor. 😀 But the McGann Doctor was canon (note the one ‘n’) because we saw ‘John Smith’s’ sketch of him in Human Nature, and also his face was one of the Doctors displayed in the Cybermen’s infostamp data.
So he’s firmly down as someone who can claim ‘The Name of The Doctor’. 🙂
10 August 2013 at 13:18 #15859I have to put on my Continuity Nazi hat and wonder, how the heck did River get changed from her Cleopatra garb into her Indiana Jones costume?
What, seriously? You think she didn’t have time to change into riding gear while the Legion was finding and saddling three horses?
Mind you, given the amount of costume changes River has plus the seeming lack of any bag to hold said costumes – I reckon the Doctor has, at some point, given her ‘bigger on the inside’ pockets as a birthday or anniversary present. 🙂
10 August 2013 at 13:04 #15858We picked Ghostlight, I think, because it’s the story where you can really see how AG Who genuinely derives from BG Who.
It’s all there. The Companion’s story taking centre-stage. The Doctor didn’t arrive here by accident; he arrived here because the evil in this house caused a pivotal moment in Ace’s life. It’s a classic ‘children know there are monsters; the Doctor teaches you that you can destroy the monster’ story. Here, he’s teaching Ace. More, he’s teaching her that her decision to burn down the house was right – no matter what the probation officer said. She was the one who saw the evil clearly.
Then there’s the incredibly convoluted plot and its ‘take no prisoners’ approach to the general intelligence of the audience. Audience, you are smart people with video recorders (nowadays, i-player). If you weren’t paying attention damn well rewind! A lot of the plot depends on having at least some familiarity with the Darwinian theory of Evolution and the knowledge that the Anglican establishment initially opposed the theory. That’s the belief that the typical Who audience isn’t stupid and that kids can follow some pretty complicated stuff right there.
What else? You can see a lot of McCoy in Smith’s performance – and probably a lot of Troughton in McCoy. As Steven Moffat says – these actors are all playing the same man.
Fenric is probably a better adventure story – but it doesn’t give you that clear sense that – in BG and AG Who – we’re watching the same series. Just one that now has more budget, can use better special effects and has a much higher profile.
10 August 2013 at 12:48 #15857When I consider this story, I find it easy to see it mounted with the production values and haunted house feeling of something like “Hide”. Wouldn’t that be astonishing? It’s so full of good ideas that the budget and schedule could not accommodate.
Very much so.
What was Peter Davison’s joke (or possibly the scriptwriters joke) about BG Who versus AG Who? The Championship versus the Premier League. Even at the original four episodes length, Ghostlight would only be a two-parter in the 42 minute format. And if it had the modern budget it could have been a really incredible story.
That’s actually one of the things that mildly annoys me. Stage plays are routinely re-produced. They have to be; they’re live productions. Films are re-made with scripts that are close to the original. But so far, you don’t re-make a TV programme unless you’re moving countries.
And yet I keep thinking how much fun it would be, say, if we had Talons or Ghostlight re-made with modern production values. There must be a way to do it: the adventures of an alternate-universe Doctor, for example?
10 August 2013 at 00:30 #15841@Shazzbot – Curse of Fenric is probably the best; Remembrance of the Daleks is my personal favourite.
Remembrance includes this scene with Ace:
9 August 2013 at 23:51 #15837The associated Confidential can only be found in parts. So:
and
and finally
9 August 2013 at 23:42 #15835@Shazzbot – good question. That’s what I asked in my second post – the real ‘loose end’ is the question of whether something else is controlling the TARDIS.
Though if, by the time River gets the doors open, the TARDIS is already beyond hope of saving herself – she’d probably do a very similar thing to what she does. Namely, seal River inside a time-loop to keep her safe. And she can’t do that if River then exits; River would be just outside an exploding TARDIS – which is probably not the best place to be…
9 August 2013 at 23:38 #15834@wolfweed – and it showed.
But – three weeks from concept to half-hour live show? It’s amazing that they managed to get anything remotely coherent in place.
9 August 2013 at 23:33 #15832@SteveTheWhistle
WATCH THE EPISODE
WATCH THE EPISODE.
NO, REALLY, WATCH THE EPISODE.
This is the episode where you really can see that they had to cram four episodes worth of script into three episodes shot. Subplots are flying around all over the place. I think the ‘cuckoo’ is Josiah, who comes into the happy family nest of the Pritchard family, and – in an inversion of the cuckoo – shoves the parents out of the nest and keeps the chick.
I don’t like the idea of having evolution (or should it be devolution in this case) work on terrestrial individuals,
You mean adult individuals, surely? Because the successful mutations that lead to evolutionary change always do operate at an individual level. My biology is ‘Open University Science Foundation Course’ 🙂 but going by Horizon documentaries and stuff, Marc Platt may be closer to our modern understanding of genetics than he was to eighties genetics. The latest research suggests that you can switch genes on and off in an adult individual – so presumably a much more advanced science would be able to, say, switch off the more human genes and switch on the more ape-like ones. Possibly with some high speed mutation and/or gene therapy.
I think the poor night staff may have been the Pritchard’s original staff (also hypnotised) – but it never was made clear.
9 August 2013 at 23:20 #15829@SteveTheWhistle
it doesn’t make sense for them to abduct her (i.e. the Ganger) again from Astro-Melody’s room at the orphanage. What would be the point?
Amy had just spotted the photo of herself with a baby. She was, therefore, getting perilously close to discovering her real situation.
9 August 2013 at 22:18 #15819@MadScientist72 – he wouldn’t have noticed his wife going missing if – say – the real Amy nipped out to the shops and the Ganger Amy came back with the washing tablets.
Or she went out to work and the Ganger Amy came back.
Or Rory was on a night shift and they nabbed her while she was asleep.
Or, or…
9 August 2013 at 22:15 #15817Yes, I know, I know. We’re supposed to be watching this tomorrow.
To me, the real loose end in this episode isn’t ‘Why does the TARDIS blow up’. It’s ‘Is someone controlling the TARDIS?’ That’s what River says; that’s what stops her getting out and so causes the TARDIS to explode from the endless paradoxes involved.
So, what do we learn about the Doctor in this episode? That he’s the most dangerous man in the universe. The most feared being in the Cosmos. He rides a black horse (River and Amy both ride greys). And that he doesn’t know ‘who’ he is.
Who is the Doctor? The question in the title was largely ignored until Moffat’s era: to the extent that when he yelled “Who da man?” in Eleventh Hour, nit-picking fans pointed out that the Doctor was never really called Doctor Who. And missed (as did I) that this is something underlying the Smith/Moffat era; it’s one of Moffat’s running themes.
Doctor Who? Who is the Doctor? In The Lodger, he doesn’t use the ‘John Smith’ name. Instead he remarks that he doesn’t really remember why he called himself The Doctor. In The Beast Below he talks of changing his name. In The Name of The Doctor we discover that ‘The Doctor’ represents something. But what?
Doctor: A nameless terrible thing, soaked in the blood of a million galaxies, the most feared being in all the cosmos. And nothing could stop it, or hold it, or reason with it. One day it would just drop out of the sky and tear down your world.
Who is The Doctor? Is he doomed to become solely that ‘nameless, terrible thing’? Or is it something he’s already been? The older this regeneration gets, the more the Doctor seems to apply the word ‘monster’ to himself. He’s a monster. A lonely one, one that can be kind, but essentially – a monster. He needs his companions; they keep the monster under control. Fairy tales again, another constant Moffat theme. The fairy tale that seems to be in the Doctor’s head is ‘Beauty and the Beast’.
His Companions and his wife have a much clearer view.
River: I hate good wizards in fairy tales. They always turn out to be him.
The Doctor’s personal history is another theme, referenced once or twice in series 5 and also in 6 and 7. He’s been a parent; he hates seeing children crying uncomforted. He’s the last of his kind (he thinks). He keeps an empty cradle in his TARDIS. His entire race only exists in his memory; they fell out of the universe. No wonder he only wants to remember the Time Lords and Gallifrey in the good times; perhaps, somehow, the good Time Lords might be brought back. If he remembers them.
He has nothing to live for. He has nothing to lose. All that’s left is hope; that if he travels hopefully, someday he’ll arrive.
And in the meantime, he’s the Doctor. Why did he choose that name? He doesn’t remember. But he knows what it doesn’t stand for. If he’d lobotomised the Star Whale, he would have changed his name; the Doctor would never do that, and if he had done that – he’d no longer be the Doctor. Whatever the Hurt Doctor did, this Doctor believes that it was something ‘The Doctor’ would never do. Should never have done.
By the end of the episode things can’t possibly get any worse. Companions: dead. Universe: over. Doctor: in a prison he can’t get out of. Resources? Well, he’s a Time Lord, always at their most dangerous when they’re desperate. Because that’s when they say: ‘screw the rules’.
And he has reason to be desperate. The stars explode. And at the moment all the stars have died, the background music stops, mid-beat.
The rest, is silence.
9 August 2013 at 21:32 #15802@MadScientist72 – it’s in A Good Man Goes To War – I looked it up on Planet Claire.
Doctor: They must have taken you quite awhile back. Just before America.
9 August 2013 at 17:06 #15782Is it ‘so bad it’s good’ or just so bad the TV dies in sympathy for the production teams’ careers?
@Shazzbot. ‘The Twin Dilemma’ is … unforgettable. Though in many ways, I’d quite like to forget it. The only good thing in it is Maurice Denham, who must have been wondering what the hell he was doing in that pile of sheep’s entrails.
Otherwise: dreadful script, some dreadful acting, rotten music, costumes that make the eyes bleed and a plot that is more convoluted than Ghostlight – and doesn’t have the clever ideas behind it that Ghostlight has.
9 August 2013 at 13:29 #15758@Shazzbot – no, that one was definitely for the shorter members of the audience. And the robots really didn’t work.
But if you like, you can decide that Clara had done something interesting to the Silurian computer – we do see Amy and the Doctor from its point of view.
(I remember suggesting that theory when the episode first came out).
9 August 2013 at 12:59 #15753@Shazzbot – Angels Take Manhattan is being repeated in a week or two – BBC Three are doing a Friday night repeat of S7. As far as I can work out, the schedule suggests that ‘An Adventure in Time and Space’ will be broadcast the Saturday before the Anniversary Special.
I’m rather glad of that, because my original recording of ATM got a bit wibbly-wobbly during some vital bits of dialogue. But I do seem to recall that River tells the Doctor to shut up, when he’s telling Amy he doesn’t know if the Angel will send her to the place and time where Rory is. She clearly knows that it does/did.
9 August 2013 at 12:49 #15749@Shazzbot – re loose ends – have replied to you in The Pandorica Opens. Don’t want to set our Topic Nazi off when she’s only just got back. 😉
9 August 2013 at 12:48 #15748@Shazzbot – we’re down to watch this tomorrow, I know, but one of your loose ends is very specific to this episode.
I’ve never really seen the TARDIS exploding as a ‘loose end’. It hung in the air for a bit, yes, but it’s now been tied up; once you find out that Amy and Rory are River’s parents, there’s a fairly clear explanation for the explosion.
River’s piloting the TARDIS. And River, at the moment the TARDIS explodes, has just become a living example of the Grandfather Paradox. Not only is her father plastic, but her mother’s just been killed. Before River was conceived.
So she’s impossible, and she’s piloting the TARDIS. Oops. Cue explosion.
Later on, in The Girl Who Waited, the Doctor refuses to let Older Amy in the TARDIS for a similar reason; the TARDIS couldn’t cope with such a huge time paradox.
9 August 2013 at 12:39 #15744@craignixon and @Shazzbot – yes, there’s definitely a line in there somewhere which states that Amy was kidnapped before Series 6 started. Either that, or Moffat said when after All Was Revealed.
River’s reaction to the Silence could be – a reaction to the Silence. If it’s morning sickness, she’d need to use her time bracelet to nip away from 1960’s U.S., have the baby (either in 1980’s Lancashire or 1949 U.S., you pick) and then nip back to her 1960’s role of finding Silents. What she can’t do is stay in the U.S. for several months hunting Silents without the pregnancy showing.
Personally, I’d place any pregnancy during the Angels Take Manhattan. Not because there’s any morning sickness – but because River is a) really keen for Amy to go back in time to be with Rory and b) refuses to travel long-term with the Doctor.
Looking at her refusal to travel long-term with the Doctor; it’s a bit odd that his own wife doesn’t want to live with him. But it makes perfect sense if she can’t possibly tell him (because of the G.I.) that she’s pregnant. Any long term stint in the TARDIS is going to make the evidence of pregnancy more than a bit obvious, especially when the Doctor’s got a medi-scan on his control panel.
The implication when she tells Amy to let the Angel send her back in time is that she knows – has known for a long time – where her parents ended up; and also knows it’s somewhere that the Doctor can’t visit. Amy and Rory are, therefore, safe from the GI. So is any child of theirs. And an adopted child will also be safe from the Silents; they’re only interested in a child who has a ‘time head’.
This could simply mean that River knows her parents will be safe and happy if they stay in New York. Or it could mean they’ve just become a ‘safe house’ to hide a child in.
9 August 2013 at 12:14 #15741@Shazzbot – Hi! Welcome back. 🙂
9 August 2013 at 11:07 #15733there appears to be something rather Timey/wimey about the mother
Definitely the mother; there’s that ‘Oh, my stars’ exclamation – which is a genuine exclamation, just rather more common in the 16th Century than it is now. She also stops dead for a second when she first sees the Smith Doctor. And finally, the Victorian version seems to be played by the same actress (somebody else spotted that one).
And, of course, there’s the ‘don’t talk to strange men’ injunction. Which is both entirely sensible, and something which might apply particularly to the Doctor. He’s a very strange man indeed. 😀
All this could be a red herring, of course. Who carries enough red herrings to open a smoked fish stall on the market. 😉
8 August 2013 at 21:33 #15708Regarding the Capaldi Doctor and Clara:
She could be his daughter (by River). She could also be his great-granddaughter, by Susan. Either choice would take us ‘back to the beginning’ – the Capaldi Doctor travelling with a member of his family.
As @scaryb says, I linked up several of Clara’s dates to important dates in the history of the show. That might just be a little ‘nod’ by the production team; in the same way, John Smith in Family of Blood remembered his ‘parents’ as ‘Sydney and Verity’. Clara’s actions in The Name of The Doctor effectively make her the production team; she rewrote the show.
Clara’s mother also has ‘show dates’ – both her date of birth and her date of death. Her date of birth goes back to the pre-BBC origins of the show, with an ATV SF series produced by Sydney Newman. Her date of death is either the date Rose investigates the Doctor, or the date the episode ‘Rose’ was leaked online.
In the ‘Impossible Girl’ sequences, it appears that – unless the Victorian Mother and the Modern Mother are played by very similar actresses -Clara’s mother is somehow mother to every single ‘Claricle’. Which raises the question ‘how the bloody hell did she do that?’
Blood calls to blood, the Doctor says. Clara can always find the Doctor; okay, she’s in his time-line. Her mother can always find her – in the Doctor’s time-line. The implication is that all three of them are connected by blood; Clara, her mother and the Doctor.
8 August 2013 at 19:52 #15706@craig and Shazzbot It’s very easy to have a furious row on-line; there’s no body language or tone of voice to warn people that it’s time to cool things down. Of course, speaking from experience, people usually find this out after the stressful situation has provoked the furious row.
😕
Cup of tea? Jammie dodger?
8 August 2013 at 17:01 #15702No, I hadn’t read that particular quote. Please don’t watch the Twin Dilemma, though; since we knew that there are at least three Doctors in the fiftieth anniversary episode, a trinity or triumverate isn’t too big a guess.
And I missed the troll invasion; though that was on purpose. I kept spotting names I didn’t know in The Next Doctor thread all weekend, so stayed away from that thread as well as the Spoilers thread.
To @craig, @jimthefish, @phaseshift and @Shazzbot – sterling work, all. Sorry to hear it was all a bit fraught and rather bruising.
8 August 2013 at 14:27 #15693@wolfweed – I suspect the reason that so many fans were fooled was that – post The Movie That We Do Not Mention – a U.S. remake is now the subject of quite a lot of nightmares. 😈
8 August 2013 at 13:42 #15690It was an old rumour running around the BBC and theatre circles (particularly Donmar crowd) that Chiwitel Ejiofor was offered the part when Tennant left but turned it down. I have no idea if that is true.
That would make sense: it would certainly explain why they then had to go into full scale audition mode.
8 August 2013 at 12:42 #15686Neil Gaiman’s tale about a black actor already having been offered the role of the Doctor (but not for this regeneration) has started to do the media rounds.
I’m wondering if it was when they were setting up the reboot… ahead of Christopher Eccleston.
7 August 2013 at 16:33 #156577 August 2013 at 11:50 #15653@fatmaninabox – yes, we’ve had this discussion. I think I was the one who suggested River might be pregnant – though I’m going for Matt Smith playing the Doctor’s son, brought up by Amy and Rory in the safe zone of New York. 🙂
But I would say that River getting pregnant is an odds on bet. Why? Well, the first series the Moff did ended with a wedding followed by a baby, and the second series he did ended with a wedding. 🙂 So where’s the baby from this wedding?
There are indeed two on-screen candidates – Clara, definitely human but also very like the Doctor. And Anthony, whose scene was written but then not filmed. That may well have been for the entirely technical reason that the scene would have given too much away for Power of Three and didn’t fit thematically with The Angels Take Manhattan. Or, it could be because Anthony has an important part to play later on, and they didn’t want to cast the actor yet.
Or, it could be because the Moff knows exactly who’s going to play Anthony in the Christmas Special. Anyone else think Matt Smith’s haircut is starting to shape up as an American crew cut?
If we’re going ‘back to the beginning’, the beginning saw the Hartnell Doctor a wanderer in space and time – with a family. Susan was his granddaughter. We know the Moff is thinking along those lines: he made sure Jenny survived her story.
Looking at the Great Intelligence arc long-term; any child of The Doctor conceived and/or born during the Smith tenure would have to be hidden. However much River might want to tell him she’s pregnant, she can’t – because if the child interacts with the Doctor, the Great Intelligence will be able to detect them upon entering the Doctor’s timeline. The GI is trying to destroy the Doctor; the nastiest way to do that would be to have the Doctor watch his children die.
You can even do a retcon with the Jenny story; Jenny dies because the Great Intelligence arranges things that way (turning a victory into a personal defeat). She regenerates because the Claricle somehow readjusts the time-line; she does it after the Doctor’s left because that way Jenny’s regeneration isn’t part of the Doctor’s time-line – and so can’t be seen by the GI.
6 August 2013 at 23:41 #15612“Tucktor” sprang to mind and seemed too good to pass up.
No. Just, no. It sounds like Matt Smith is about to regenerate into a duck or something. Probably a Ruddy Duck.
🙂
6 August 2013 at 23:35 #15611Yes, I hope it wasn’t anything anyone said.
6 August 2013 at 23:34 #15610I’d agree that the direction was terrible – it’s pedestrian and not well lit. If you handed this script to someone like Adam Smith, you’d get something shadowy and mysterious – and probably with a lot of lens flare 🙂
But this is rather like a filmed stage play; much of the mystery is coming from the actors. You do get the strong impression that the McCoy Doctor has a fairly good idea of what’s going on – but also that he knows that, as he says, he’s lit the blue touch paper and doesn’t have anywhere to run to.
My memory of watching this the first time is that I had absolutely no idea what was going on, but was confident that I’d eventually find out. In the meantime, I was along for the ride. Bit like Steven Moffat, really. 😀
Yes, Josiah is evolving and leaving his ‘husks’ behind – but his ‘husks’ seem to have some level of consciousness (or possibly they’re still connected to him in some way). And I remember the shock when we discovered that Gwendoline was also controlled by Josiah; she too is now frightened of the light.
I agree that having to cut down to three episodes from the four written didn’t exactly help; the feeling we’re left with in this episode is that the writer threw everything into the story but the kitchen sink (which is offscreen). That said, the ideas are quite dense. Evolution, devolution, a Neanderthal who’s thinking his way through the problem and a human who’s relying on dogma. Josiah thinks he’s in charge; the Doctor thinks he’s in charge. But are they both fooling themselves?
Tune in next week.
6 August 2013 at 23:14 #15609what narrative logic will she serve for the 12th Doctor now that she has successfully saved the Doctor?
Currently no idea, though I’m sure I’ll come up with another bonkers theory for Clara quite soon – now that my previous one has been destroyed by Mr Capaldi. 🙂
But I will say that in the Geek panel,when asked what she was doing after Who (a question she clearly didn’t expect) she was so surprised she let slip that her arc hadn’t finished. Fortunately she wasn’t shocked enough to explain what it was (except that she’s still The Impossible Girl).
6 August 2013 at 14:08 #15577@nick –
You remember way way too much Who history for my good !
You should try me on Shakespeare. 😉
Seriously, I’m an actor; remembering plotlines/stories/characters from things I’ve seen is ‘trained-in’.
6 August 2013 at 13:46 #15570@jimthefish – agreed. In fact, I have a bonkers theory that the Doctor’s clear tendency to go all asexual in some regenerations and not others is a kind of ‘Time Lord population control’.
Otherwise the universe would be knee deep in Time Lords 🙂
6 August 2013 at 13:42 #15566@wolfweed – your #15562 hasn’t come through for me. It’s doing a ‘file not found’.
6 August 2013 at 13:12 #15556Whilst I don’t conceptually discount any close relationships between Humans and sentient non-Humans, the creation of viable cross specie hybrids would probably be impossibly difficult outside a laboratory.
You’re making the assumption that the alien genetic structure isn’t, for example, tuned to a reproductive strategy of hybridising rather than a reproductive strategy of species isolation. Or that a technology which is quite capable of turning an adult individual of one species into an adult individual of another species (see Human Nature) isn’t also capable of turning an individual into someone capable of interbreeding with another species outside the laboratory (Delta and the Bannermen).
In real life, hybridisation is quite common in plants, and viable cross species hybrids in animals are more common than we used to think.
For another possible example, that the TARDIS might be entirely capable of having turned Amy and Rory’s baby girl into someone who can have kids with a Time Lord. 🙂
6 August 2013 at 12:05 #15545It’s like saying you could fall in romantic love with a Dolphin
I can see you’ve led a sheltered life…
😈
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