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31 July 2013 at 17:37 #14672
why use an average one?
Somebody who gets series regular on Doctor Who, series regular on Law and Order UK, series regular on a children’s TV series and series regular on a US TV series is not an ‘average’ actor. Actresses, even the pretty ones, just don’t get that amount of work by being ‘average’. They might manage one show (and stay there comfortably for years), but they don’t keep repeatedly convincing different production teams that they’re the one to fill those intensely competitive top slots.
I accept that you didn’t like her performance. But the scriptwriting meant Martha had to do more to ‘earn her place’ than any AG companion before or since.
31 July 2013 at 16:29 #14665I must be the only one who doesn’t really see the problem with Martha as a problem with the actress, but I do see it that way.
Well, you do have a tendency to demand rather high standards of the actors. 🙂
I’d agree that there were moments when Freema Agyeman didn’t make the most of her opportunities. Generally, my take on her throughout her time on Who was that she was a very talented – but relatively inexperienced – actress. You could see that quite clearly when she played against Catherine Tate – who was hugely more experienced, and it showed.
The Who production team seemed very happy with her; the only reason she wasn’t in Torchwood’s Children of Earth was her filming commitments for Law and Order UK clashed.
Yes, she gets the phone and the TARDIS key. How many episodes in does she get them? Yes, she has a successful arc, in which she works out that this passion for the Doctor is going to be forever unrequited – and goes.
Now compare that with any other AG Companion (the main ones, not the ‘invited because Rose/Amy want them along’). Rose, Donna, Amy, Clara – they all get the ‘invite’ at the end of their first episode. Donna turns it down, Victorian Clara does the traditional Christmas companion thing of dying at the end of the story 🙂 But they all know their status by episode 2.Except Martha, who spends much of the first part of her series being told how Rose would’ve done this better.
Yeah, rebound girl. Instead of the actress being allowed to establish herself as the new Companion, she has to tackle a script which constantly reminds the audience of her predecessor, and then not-so-subtly implies throughout the first few episodes that she’s not a real Companion. She’s only along for one trip. And one other trip. Oh, okay, you can have the key…. Her best performance comes in Human Nature/Family of Blood, because in those episodes she’s out from under the shadow of ‘not really a Companion’ and has to play the only person who knows what’s really going on.
30 July 2013 at 19:54 #14632@Shazzbot – I’d point out that the preferred method of execution in Doctor Who is the firing squad. Or the death ray. Hanging is talked about, but never normally seen. 😈
Getting back on topic, I’m currently happily reading my way through David Weber’s ‘Safehold’ series. It’s a weird-but-fun combination of science-fiction and Age of Sail style naval battles. Though if you do happen to have an allergy to discussions about the correct type of rigging for sailing through a hurricane, it might be best avoided. 🙂
30 July 2013 at 19:29 #14628@Shazzbot – she did seem to be wearing ‘L’ plates for quite a few episodes; if I’m remembering her career correctly, she went to the University of Middlesex rather than drama school – and then got lots of smallish telly parts rather than longish theatre gigs – which would mean she’d basically been working a day here and a day there. Since leaving Doctor Who she’s barely stopped working – currently she’s a series regular in The Carrie Diaries in the US.
But I suspect a lot of it was the plotline; which seemed to consist of endless episodes in which Martha wasn’t yet officially on board the TARDIS.
I seem to recall David Tennant in one of the commentaries joking that one episode had consisted entirely of Martha having to take a Companion’s Theory Test. But then they’d decided that really was too boring…
30 July 2013 at 18:54 #1461230 July 2013 at 10:01 #14599Actually, the Sixth Doctor might have worked if he’d regenerated as a cat! 👿
27 July 2013 at 23:59 #14538Another theme that turns up in The Beast Below which keeps turning up in Moffat’s work: the loop. The eternal circle that people can’t get out of. Liz 10, especially, who keeps reliving the same ten years over and over and over.
Hmm… I think I’ve bonkers-ly theorised before that possibly the reason we only see Eleven Doctors plus Hurt Doctor in the Doctor’s time stream is that he never gets past Eleven; that he’s in a loop.
27 July 2013 at 23:56 #14535@phaseshift – oh, Rory’s attraction for Amy has always been something completely obvious to me. He’s her anchor; the person whose sheer stability and ordinariness means that she can bound off in her crazy life without it becoming so insane she can never get back.
And Amy’s attraction to Rory is that she keeps pushing him out of his comfort zone and stops him being exactly like his Dad. 🙂 They may look as though they have nothing in common; in fact, they complement each other.
27 July 2013 at 23:45 #14534I find it interesting that for such a physical performer that by the time we get to Fenric and Ghost Light that McCoy’s physical comedy is all but gone and here certainly all the lighter moments seem to be linguistic ones.
It’s one of the reasons I like McCoy so much. It wasn’t that he’d never done serious drama; it was that someone who’d been hired for his comedy skills was so willing to take the Doctor that dark – and that alien.
27 July 2013 at 22:09 #14526Re-reading #14532, I didn’t intend to imply that Martha didn’t give a damn – just that I don’t think ‘having your family kidnapped by a psycho because you’re the Doctor’s current Companion’ counts as ‘unscathed’. 🙂
Her family was destroyed – or at least severely damaged – because she was Companion to the Doctor.
27 July 2013 at 22:07 #14524@craig and @Shazzbot – it certainly was a ‘there’s got to be something positive we can say about the Sixth Doctor’, wasn’t it?
I particularly enjoyed Marcus Wilson’s ‘very bold decision.’ Bold – but stupid. 🙂
I did wonder what on earth they were going to show for the Sixth Doctor’s story; the Moff wisely chose Vengeance on Varos, which at least has the advantage that you can talk about the writing and the idea behind the story. And Nabil Shaban, who gives a great performance.
27 July 2013 at 21:48 #14523OK, I’ll take that gauntlet and answer, Martha.
Hmm… well, if your definition of unscathed is ‘not giving a damn about my Mum, Dad and little sister being the slaves of a bonkers psycho for an entire year’, then yes. 😈
Martha found she was strong enough to look after her family. But I wouldn’t define her as ‘unscathed’; rather, she was someone who was also strong enough to survive the Doctor. And strong enough to walk away.
27 July 2013 at 21:23 #14521It took two viewings to place the character names and understand what is being set up in this part.
Yes. We’re into the era of widely available video recorders – and now we’re starting to see the assumption that the audience doesn’t have to get everything the first time round. They can rewind.
You can also see this Doctor’s very alien nature; the way he manipulates even someone he likes, the different reactions to physical phenomena, his immediate recognition of other ‘aliens’.
The physical comedy bit – Sylvester McCoy was primarily known as a physical comedy actor when he became the Doctor. His first series was a bit of a disaster; one of the big differences between McCoy and Colin Baker was that McCoy (and Andrew Cartmel, the script editor) recognised that they had to make drastic changes. But you do still see these very stylised physical comedy moments throughout the Seventh Doctor’s period, here and there.
27 July 2013 at 20:33 #14519Yes, the composer here was Mark Ayres – who I think isn’t as good as Dudley Simpson (the composer for Talons). Murray Gold I rate quite highly – I’ll listen to his music quite a lot.
This is sensibly set to budget. Interiors, costumes available from store, props available from store. That meant they could spend the money on getting a decent bunch of actors; which they needed, because this isn’t a straightforward story. Ace is our viewpoint character – and she really doesn’t know what the hell is going on. Neither does the audience. 🙂
It’s established very quickly that there are no normal inhabitants of this house, and the people who just work there want nothing more than to get the heck out before dark. It is considerably more stylised – if you compare this ‘haunted house’ with the ‘haunted house’ of Hide, you can see the difference in stylistic approach. Victorian Gothic versus Kitchen Sink (and Hide does have a kitchen sink, as well as some whisky glasses, mugs of tea and a bottle of milk).
You can see the Seventh Doctor’s manipulative nature here very clearly: he’s listened to Ace’s story, he’s obviously decided there’s more to that house than she’s realised, and he’s taking her to the point where it all started. But without doing anything so straightforward as telling her ‘we need to investigate’. If he did that, she might say she didn’t want to go.
Is it my imagination, or is McCoy trying to conceal that wretched pullover as much as he can?
27 July 2013 at 20:04 #14516Yeah, this is the episode that I think got rushed because he was working so hard on writing the Eleventh Hour. It just doesn’t quite work.
In the days when Steven Moffat was on Twitter, he quoted one of his little boy’s comments. “Dad, what happens when you can’t think of an ending? Is that what happened with The Beast Below?”
So the Moffat household is also clearly of the opinion that this one didn’t quite work. 🙂
But that said, this is an interesting one from the bonkers theorising point of view, especially now we nearly are at the denouement. Amy directly links ‘the beast below’, the Star Whale, to the Doctor. She’s referring to the Star Whale being very old, the last of its kind, loves children and is naturally kind – even when terrified people torture and enslave it.
But in the light of the ‘hidden John Hurt Doctor’, you can see that there might be other comparisons with the Star Whale. Firstly, the Star Whale is hidden. When we first see Starship UK, we don’t see that it’s there. Whenever we see all the faces of the Doctor, the John Hurt Doctor is hidden.
The Starwhale, while hidden, permeates Starship UK. Its tentacles are everywhere. And it is the most terrible secret, kept from all the children until they’re old enough to understand (and forget). Likewise, the John Hurt Doctor is the Smith Doctor’s ‘secret’. The Star Whale is treated as a ‘monster’ and is in constant pain. And the Smith Doctor clearly sees himself as a monster; refuses the title of ‘The Doctor’ to the Hurt incarnation and seems to be in constant pain from all that self-loathing.
The Starwhale, it’s implied, eats the protesters, the ones who want to change their world. Rather like the way the post Time War Doctor has ‘eaten’ his companions. Name me a post Time War Companion who’s managed to walk away from the Doctor unscathed.
Finally – like the Doctor, the Star Whale manages to save the whole of the UK. It probably turned up on a Saturday, around tea time. 😀 When it’s free of the burden of all that pain – things are actually a whole lot better. Now it can really concentrate on its self-imposed job, rather on all that artificially imposed agony.
Anyway, the initial rhyme – also rather interesting if you see the hidden ‘Beast’ as the John Hurt Doctor.
A horse and a man, above, below,
One has a plan, but both must go.
Mile after mile, above Beneath,
One has a smile, and one has teeth.
Though the man above might say “hello,”
Expect no love from the Beast Below!And the second one:
In bed above we’re deep asleep
While greater love lies further deep
This dream must end, this world must know
We all depend on the beast below.27 July 2013 at 10:12 #14493@craig – this week’s Moffat episode is ‘The Beast Below’. Next week’s will be a double parter: Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone.
Thanks!
25 July 2013 at 23:12 #1440325 July 2013 at 01:12 #14365@nick –
Was this ever a fixed point in time in the first place ?
Since time completely stopped when it was changed, I think the answer has to be a categorical ‘yes’.
Although we don’t exactly how a Timelord can die and not regenerate, the Doctor will have a pretty good idea.
Yeah, we have a pretty good idea as well, because it’s been seen several times in the BG Who and once in the AG Who (Last of the Time Lords). If Time Lords receive a fatal injury and don’t regenerate, they die. Fatal shooting + no regeneration = dead. They may live forever barring accidents, but the accidents do happen.
24 July 2013 at 23:47 #14361@miapatrick and @wolfweed – Greatest Show in the Galaxy is also a bit of a legend. They discovered asbestos in some of the BBC TV Centre studios, so shut them down.
Rather than lose the story completely (like Shada), the production team put up a circus tent in the car park at BBC Elstree and filmed all the supposed-to-be-studio-interiors in the tent. In a tent. In a car park.
😀
24 July 2013 at 14:28 #14334I’d enjoy rewatching Ghost Light as well. Apart from anything else, it was the final Before Gap Who shot, even though Survival was the final one screened.
It’s also the first story in the ‘Ace trilogy’, so it does make a very nice bridging story between BG and AG – contrary to the ideas of many fans stuck in the Tom Baker era, AG Who is a true continuation rather than a complete re-imagining. Ghostlight is one of the stories where you can see the roots of AG Who.
If we want to tackle things more slowly (we’ve got until November, after all), Caves of Androzani? That would show the Davison era. And the people who never saw Colin Baker might get some idea from the regeneration scene of exactly why the Sixth Doctor is regarded with such loathing… 😈
24 July 2013 at 13:47 #14332observations on the Paul McGann era are likely to be limited
@phaseshift – and now, for one night only…
(I think that was RTD’s line).
I hope he does get some screen-time in the 50th.
24 July 2013 at 11:43 #14321I think the people complaining don’t get the point of Comic Con – while I don’t know if it’s in the contract, I know everyone there has something new and exciting to announce or show at their panel. The Who production team sensibly went for an exciting trailer. When the ruddy trailer gets shown in the UK is up to the BBC, not BBC Worldwide.
As to one of the RT commentators saying that every other film/show releases the trailer on the web the day after – really? Because we certainly didn’t get to see The Hobbit footage for ages after Comic Con 2012. In fact, I think I had to go and watch the film 😀
23 July 2013 at 00:00 #14285@wolfweed – awww! Look at the widdle werewolf!
Nice work. He’s even got that slightly cross ‘it’s too bright out here’ expression that newborns so often have. 🙂
Personally, I prefer to think of HRH The Baby as our newest Whovian. It does run in the family…
22 July 2013 at 11:28 #14264@blenkinsopthebrave and @scaryb – this is speculation, not spoilers. When I was checking out the convention appearances of the ‘older’ Doctors for availability during filming dates, Paul McGann wasn’t attending precisely the same conventions as Sylvester and Colin. He missed one out.
22 July 2013 at 11:17 #14263@scaryb – and BBC Worldwide are now going ‘B*gg*r! We should have booked the Excel for a week!’
😈
20 July 2013 at 22:00 #14220@SteveTheWhistle – I think the Doctor suddenly realised he’d been quoting a poem from 1911 and hurriedly named a music hall performer who did that kind of stuff.
Yes, for a warrior of the Sevvateem, Leela was a bit pants this week. Enthusiastic, but it was clearly either the fight director’s week off – or they’d run out of that part of the budget. 🙂
20 July 2013 at 19:52 #14216@Shazzbot – I agree; it was a faintly disappointing ending with rather a lot of ‘we’ve escaped – oops, no we haven’t.’ Added to a fair amount of ‘let me tell you who I am before I kill you’.
I can’t help thinking that a character called ‘Magnus Greel, the Butcher of Brisbane’ would have been even scarier than not knowing who Weng-Chiang really was. So I wonder if they were deliberately trying to hint that this ‘Weng Chiang’ might be the Master?
20 July 2013 at 16:53 #14211@Shazzbot – thanks for that.
Yes, I said a lot in that blog entry, so I’ll just make a few points here. I remember watching this for the first time, in Hi Def. The colour palette and the detail were just astonishing; it’s a quite beautiful episode. I agree with @craig; there’s a definite red/blue palette being used. Jeff’s Gran’s house has a purple/lilac palette (suitable for an old lady) – which of course is the red/blue colours, mixed to make purple. A lot of people are wearing some pink, and the hospital has a blue/green.
Matt Smith ‘sold’ his Doctor the moment he popped his head out of the crashed TARDIS in little Amelia’s garden. No running in period; he just was the Doctor.
Prisoner Zero, it can now be seen, is a metaphor for our ‘hidden’ Doctor. The one you can only see out of the corner of your eye, the one cut out of the succession, so that he has no number. He lives exactly where the Doctor never wants to look.
And a very nice, tiny touch that shows the detail they were using on the Eleventh Doctor’s establishing story: in the final scene where Amy and the Doctor stand outside the TARDIS you can see the breath of both Amy and the Doctor misting with the night chill. But it’s far more visible for Amy than for the Doctor. Gallifreyans have a lower body temperature. 🙂
20 July 2013 at 14:35 #14202@timeloop – it’s part of a hotel and is open for hire to private parties only – that’s why they were able to use it for shooting.
20 July 2013 at 02:03 #14185But there is a whole SM season devoted to the Eleventh Doctor altering his own future to avoid a fixed point in time where he dies…
No, he doesn’t. He doesn’t alter it. He believes what everybody told him – because they believed it too (except for River, very probably, and she’s almost as good a liar as the Doctor). Everybody told him he dies at Lake Silencio. And he follows the Time Lord rules; once you know your own future you can’t change it. It’s not until the very last moment that he realises that there is a way of making everyone think that he died there; and then realises what the fixed point really is.
The fixed point is that everyone believes that the Doctor dies at Lake Silencio.
Was this always the case? Well, Rory obstinately won’t die – because his death is a fixed point. Had the Doctor ever died in truth at Lake Silencio, Rory wouldn’t have been able to travel to the place and time of his death. If the fixed point at Lake Silencio had been the Doctor’s true death, the two fixed points of the Doctor’s death and Rory’s death would contradict each other.
I can’t understand why his saying nothing necessitates a continuity change?
Um, because you don’t normally look at something that’s been vapourised by a sun going nova and say ‘look at the state of it’? Mind you, it could have been the Time War rather than the GI.
20 July 2013 at 01:36 #14183@craig – I’ve put them all into media, and used them in a blog post. But yes, once they’re uploaded into media, using copy image url does work for inserting into posts.
19 July 2013 at 17:02 #14112@doctor4 – keep working at it. You’ll get the hang of this forum. 🙂
Now, to help you out – do you think there’s something different about the ‘new’ and the ‘old’ regenerations? What? Any theories on why the ‘new’ regenerations might be different from the old? Why do you think that the showrunners might have kept the ‘new’ regeneration?
Regarding what made the TARDIS crash: can you think of any other occasion when a regeneration was used as a weapon?
19 July 2013 at 15:53 #14101@jimthefish – I doubt it – the legend is that he worked out the Daleks on the back of napkins while they were all at lunch in the BBC canteen.
Which means the unwanted designs probably got used to wipe off the tomato ketchup.
19 July 2013 at 12:27 #14076@Shazzbot – I understand perfectly. And I don’t think the Doctor went back to Skaro before he blew it up at all. 🙂
However, it would be possible for a later Doctor to go to a point before a planet’s death – just as he can go back in time before a person’s death – providing he doesn’t do something that would affect his own earlier actions. So I suspect he’d now try to avoid Skaro; the point that he doesn’t mention it’s going to be destroyed by him or make any comment whatsoever that implies it will be destroyed is the continuity change. He seems completely unaware that he’s destroyed the place.
Basically my attitude is ‘the Doctor cannot alter his own timeline’. That’s why he’s so careful about spoilers; once he knew he didn’t rescue Amy and Rory, he can’t.
I would say, what with wibbley-wobbly, that there’s one possible time where the Doctor could alter his own time-line. And that’s if the Doctor knows that they did.
That is, if a future Doctor can’t exist without alteration in the Doctor’s time line as it currently flows, their very existence implies that they must change the time line. If you’re – say – a future Doctor and you discover that the Eleventh Doctor dies at Trenzalore – you know that didn’t happen. So you would be able to change things to the events that happened in your past. You’d be able to stop the Eleventh Doctor dying at Trenzalore, even though – from the Eleventh Doctor’s point of view – that is a part of the Doctor’s timeline and so the Eleventh can’t change it.
Equally, as well as a future Doctor, a Companion would – in theory – be able to change the Doctor’s timeline. It’s not their own timeline. But the implication has always been that it takes the power of a Time Lord to change time. River might be able to do it.
@craig – is there any way we can import self created images? Trying to work out what’s going on in Moffat’s convoluted brain would be so much easier with the equivalent of a whiteboard and some pens 🙂
18 July 2013 at 22:00 #14031I see nothing to suggest that anything has happened to alter the Doctor’s past as we have seen it
@htpbdet – Motto of the Moffat era: Time can be changed.
The continuity changes are generally subtle (except for Skaro), but they’re consistently there throughout both Asylum and the second half of Series 7. And while most of them could be explained away individually, the cumulative effect is difficult to explain without saying ‘the Doctor’s continuity has changed’.
Yes, he could have visited Skaro at a point before he destroyed it. Yes, there might have been another battle of Exillon. Yes, the missing wonder of the universe could have been destroyed in an off-screen event. Yes, he could have forgotten how to pronounce ‘Metebelis’.
But all of them?
18 July 2013 at 14:29 #1400718 July 2013 at 13:20 #14001What I mean is, the version we have seen over the years is has to be the final version post Clara intervention as this is was the version his personal time line was written to. For us then, nothing changed.
@nick – ah, but you can only say that because you’re a casual viewer. The non casual viewers over at the Guardian blog have been pointing out inconsistencies and retcons over previous continuity ever since Clara first appeared on screen in Asylum.
They’ve been subtle – but there are sufficient discontinuities between the events as recalled/referred to in S7 and the events as we watched them to be able to say that the on-screen continuity of Doctor Who has been blown into teeny tiny pieces. 😈
The politer version would be to say that future producers are no longer trapped by fifty years of continuity – they can use it or ignore it as they please.
Addendum: mind you, Skaro getting un-destroyed wasn’t that subtle. 🙂
18 July 2013 at 10:10 #13991@nick – why is this TARDIS special? Two reasons. One, when the Doctor nicked her, she was in the repair shop – for repairs to her faulty navigation circuits.
What was the fault? Well, if the ‘fault’ was that she was controlling where she was going rather than the pilot … that would certainly be something any self-respecting Time Lord would think called for repair.
Secondly, as @scaryb says, by now she’s done more time travel than any other TARDIS in the known history of Gallifrey; plus she’s had to do most of it with one pilot instead of six. That one pilot probably needed to set a heck of a lot of operations on auto-pilot.
Traditionally in SF, an extended period of unusually independent operation for any sufficiently advanced machine is likely to lead to the growth of a self-aware personality. Or in the case of the TARDIS, possibly a more self-aware personality.
The problem with timetravel and paradoxes is that once this happened, it became there from the start.
Nope. Sometimes it’s not there from the start. Sometimes, in Doctor Who, you get a ‘loop universe’ (rather like the bubble universe) where events go along one course, loop back, are changed and then go along the ‘main’ track There are two versions of events, depending on whether you’re travelling inside the ‘loop’ or on the ‘main’ track.
Sadly, I don’t think we can insert media (rather than links to images) otherwise I’d do the Doctor’s ‘whiteboard and some pens’ thing.
17 July 2013 at 15:04 #13958@nick – yeah, sorry, I was using ‘common fan theory’ as shorthand for ‘there was always that suspicion, but it was never official’.
By the time we were getting into the fifteenth year of the Doctor landing on some seemingly random planet/spaceship/space station and walking straight into its biggest crisis ever, the idea that this might be purely coincidental was wearing a little thin. 🙂
Which is why several of the Tom Baker series did have him doing little jobs for the Time Lords or the White Guardian. In the long term, the idea that the TARDIS has her own agenda – to take the Doctor to places where his interfering will bring about a better outcome – is more sustainable for the show.
17 July 2013 at 12:42 #13943@nick – I don’t think making it official that the TARDIS is (sometimes) directing the Doctor’s journeys changes the direction of the show; throughout Before Gap Who that was a fairly common fan theory.
And the Time Lords did have the power of gods; some cultures worshipped them as gods and in After Gap Who, one of the Doctor’s titles is The Lonely God. The thing with the Time Lords is that they’d decided not to use their power. But they did have it.
River also describes the Doctor as a ‘god’ – and Colonel Runaway has to point out that the Doctor isn’t a god.
I also don’t think it was a throwaway line; in After Gap Who the TARDIS is definitely alive – even the console room changes to have a more ‘grown’ feel about it. The TARDIS, like the Time Lords who brought her to life, has the power of a god. The difference between this TARDIS and the Time Lords is that she tries to use it to do good.
Which suggests that she and the Doctor are indeed a very close fit. He stole her (after Clara pointed him back to the right TARDIS), but she let him. She takes him to critical events; but he’s the one who has to make the right decisions once he’s there.
Moffat’s the writer who’s often described the Doctor as being in/not in the TARDIS. They’re a team.
16 July 2013 at 15:01 #13911@scaryb – I also loved the way they actually managed to make the shadows go ‘Oh, SH*T!’ when they looked up The Doctor.
😀
16 July 2013 at 12:01 #13909@Shazzbot – I’ve organised two Harry Potter conventions. I think it was about a 50/50 gender balance and certainly nobody reported any problems to me. Well, not sexual harrassment problems. Rooms (needing/not needing/wrong floor), beds, why haven’t you accepted my paper – all those. 🙂
15 July 2013 at 17:26 #13899Which makes my teeth grind slightly the more I think of it, because does SM really believe that all women, when placed into a fantasy virtual reality environment, really only desire to be a Mum?
@Shazzbot – and this is where people start muttering ‘mysogyny’ – without taking a good hard look at his male characters. His male characters, by and large, have a strong desire to be a Dad. It’s one of the major plot points in his rather weird ‘Jekyll’ – both sides of Robert Jackman, the ‘Jekyll’ and the ‘Hyde’, want and love his children.
I always joke that when Moffat took over Who, he saw a strong, independent, single person – and said ‘this man needs to get married.’ 😀
The correct answer to the problem is to ask – what would happen if it had been the Doctor who’d gotten uploaded into the Virtual Reality Environment, and found that it was going to take possibly forever to get himself out again? What would he have done about CAL – a little girl whose only ‘parent’ was a computer program? And those two little ‘children’ who are only real with a parent? And who know that they’re not really real?
We know the answer, because we’ve seen him do it. He took Susan with him, he rescued Victoria, he took Ace with him and tried to heal her (in a manipulative sort of way, but it worked). If you replace ‘River’ with ‘the Doctor’, that last scene would have almost certainly been – the Doctor tucking the kids into bed after telling them one of his adventures as a bed-time story.
15 July 2013 at 11:58 #13891@jimthefish – I think the ‘foiled escape’ worked because it subverted the ridiculous escapes found in that kind of literature. In the Fu Manchu/Bulldog Drummond type of story, the ‘escape via dumb waiter’ would have worked. Despite the point that no villain with two brain cells would lock anyone in a room with an obvious escape route to the outside.
Here, the reason they’ve been locked in a room with a dumb waiter is that the dumb waiter only goes between the room they’re in and the main temple. They can’t use it to escape. 😉
15 July 2013 at 11:43 #13890Oh, and another minor point that I noticed. River describes the Doctor as “That Impossible Man.”
😀
15 July 2013 at 11:23 #13889Apologies for having such a difficult screen name – it was the Guardian’s fault; I did want something simpler, but someone else had grabbed it.
there are 3 in River’s care at the end.
They are CAL and the two ‘virtual’ children. So CAL, who’s a real little girl, now has a real parent rather than a computer program. The two virtual children both need a parent to exist and are self-aware enough to know when they don’t exist. They knew they just ‘stopped’ when Donna wasn’t there.
While the last scene isn’t consistent with the character as she portrays herself, it is consistent with two things. Firstly, Amy’s comment about Rory – that he’d always wanted kids, even when he was a kid. Secondly, that she’s married to a man she cannot have children with.
As to that last, I don’t mean necessarily in the biological sense. But the attack of the GI on the Doctor’s timeline means that – if River did have the Doctor’s child – she couldn’t possibly let him know that. (I’m still deeply suspicious about that little boy that Amy and Rory adopted.) She couldn’t let the Doctor have any contact with the child whatsoever until he’s past the point in his timeline where the GI has access.
That is, past Trenzalore.
But again, the point that Amy and Rory adopted a child may simply be a reflection of what happens at the end of this story; finally in a position where she can adopt and bring up children, that’s what River does.
14 July 2013 at 23:36 #13884@jimthefish – because all the best 51st Century Mad Scientists know that Mad Science is always best practised in a cellar/underground sewer/storm drain. That way, when the inevitable happens and the Doctor turns up, the only things he can blow up are the underground hovel, your henchman, and a few giant rats.
See Song, R (Prof. Univ. Luna), Tomb Raider: An archaeological study of the headquarters of former enemies of The Doctor.
14 July 2013 at 23:06 #13882Catching up – I had to do the equivalent of watching this on DVR 🙂
It seems so much the opposite of what she’d wish for herself;
Well, we now know whose daughter she is. Rory’s. Rory, who waited over 2000 years for Amy to come out of the Pandorica. And she’s also done something else; given that she was stolen from her parents, she’s making sure that the children in this virtual universe (even the virtual ones) have a real parent to look after them. And yes, family is a terribly important theme for Moffat.
Couple of things I noticed: we’ve seen (in one of the DVD extras – Last Night) the Doctor take River to the Towers of Delirium. But here, she says that the Doctor had “a new haircut”. In the DVD extra, he doesn’t.
And now – they’ve given Matt Smith permission to have a very drastically obvious new haircut. Which kind of ties in with something I’ve always felt; that the River we see here is subtly different from the River we see from the Wreck of the Byzantium onwards. Is her insistence that the Doctor doesn’t change time slightly ironic – because she already knows that his timeline will change?
The other noticeable point is that she seems to be dropping spoilers all over the bloomin’ place. Especially what’s just happened before she came to the Library; it’s practically a set of instructions. Take me to the Towers of Delirium. Give me your screwdriver. Possibly it may translate as ‘I have no idea what your plan is, but I know you well enough to guess you have one.’ 🙂
14 July 2013 at 16:17 #13877@phaseshift – I’m not sure that particular reviewer has a ‘non-sneering’ mode – even when he likes stuff.
Though I imagine having one’s parents think ‘John’ is a good name to go with the surname ‘Lewis’ is one of those unfortunate starts in life. Leading to early and extensive practice of the art of the sarcastic retort.
14 July 2013 at 14:01 #13848I saw nothing that said to me that the Amy/Rory stories played out over as much as 5 years of their lives
@nick – yes, the big trouble with Moffat’s era for the more casual viewer is his deadly habit of putting important bits of information in one, repeat one, line.
In fairness, the technique was set up in the Eleventh Hour. But you do also get that one line: it’s in The Power of Three. Amy mentions that they’re growing older faster than their friends (because of time spent travelling with the Doctor) and hazards a guess that it’s been ‘ten years’ for them.
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