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1 July 2013 at 13:40 #13058
@Shazzbot – the St John’s insignia is missing.
1 July 2013 at 13:11 #13056@wolfweed – That could simply be a case of ‘Drat! Wrong CGI TARDIS!’
That happened in Time of Angels, I believe.
Alternatively, it could mean that Smith’s Doctor is no longer The-Doctor-in-the-TARDIS. His TARDIS is now dying on Trenzalore.
30 June 2013 at 23:59 #13048@Shazzbot – ah yes. But, a small problem.
… and other people get pushed into a past where they live for ever yearning for a person they know they can never have (because she’s decades yet to be born) and they make the best of it, whilst living in the shadow of the knowledge that they won’t meet their True Love until they’re dying.
You’re describing Rory in Angels in Manhattan.
I’m sure Billy fancied Sally like mad, and she obviously fancied him, what with the Freudian slip about her name. But they never even got as far as a first date. It’s like saying that you will always know that the bloke you met in the lounge for ten minutes at Heathrow (when he was off to Russia and you were off to Crete) was your One True Love.
Now in Angels in Manhattan we get the true nightmare version: Rory, who spent two thousand years waiting for Amy, trapped in that tiny hotel room, knowing that he’s not going to see Amy again until he’s dying. Brrr. That version really does make me shudder.
30 June 2013 at 23:06 #13046Once you have the perfect monster
Ah, there you have the crux of it for me – and the reason I prefer the later Angels episodes. The angels in Blink are not my perfect monster. They’re just creatures who want you for lunch. To get that lunch, they send you back in time.
And while that would definitely rate as an ‘oh, bugger!’ moment for me, it’s not something I find especially scary. It’s entirely comprehensible. There are lots of things in the world that want you for lunch, and part of your job in life is to make sure they don’t get it – or at least, that if they do, you’re not the one on the menu. 🙂
But if you are on the Angel’s menu, you’re not even dead! What kind of monster is this? I mean, seriously, its idea of killing you is to let you get married and have kids and grandkids before you actually die and it’s supposed to be scary?
Whereas once you get to the later episodes, the Angels develop motivations beyond ‘lunch!’ Not nice motivations, either. A race that tortures Amy for fun and later imprisons people so they can keep feeding off them is scary. And they can get into your head (was the granite dust ever real, or only in Amy’s mind? We’ll have to discuss that when we get there).
So I prefer the later episodes. I enjoy Blink hugely, but not because I think the Angels are a perfect monster – it’s the timey wimey wibbly wobbliness of its paradoxes, the way none of the people involved let the monsters defeat them, the clever scripting and the great performances of its two leads. Lovely episode, but sorry – I just don’t find statues scary. 😀
30 June 2013 at 20:54 #13036They were an alien that were just not designed for a return.
@jimthefish – not entirely sure about that. I think in Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone they were very creepy indeed – and I say that as someone who didn’t really find the original Angels that scary. Their malevolence, especially, was coming along in leaps and bounds.
In Blink humans were just lunch. By ToA/F&S we found that the Angels, given the opportunity, like to play with their food. By Angels in Manhattan they were battery-farming us. I think Angels in Manhattan was a very good episode, but of the three ‘Angels’ stories, I like the middle one the best. Certainly better than I like ‘Blink’.
Anyway, having watched the Confidential so kindly put up by @phaseshift, I note that we’ve missed out a favourite Moffat theme – taking childhood games and fears and turning them into Who monsters. That monster under your bed? Real. That game you play where you can’t move if someone’s looking at you? It’s not a game. Bad marks at school? Your teacher will send you to be eaten by a monster. That crack in your wall? It will eat your parents.
Sweet dreams, kiddies.
30 June 2013 at 16:49 #13034Bonkers Theory One: Eleven is keeping a back up copy of himself in that fob watch he’s been (presumably) wearing since The Snowmen. He regenerates in the 50th – but the back-up copy plays a role in the Christmas Special in the same way River’s copy was an important character in The Name otD.
30 June 2013 at 16:43 #13033@Shazzbot – I suspect the reporter is simply going off Matt Smith’s frequent statements that he’s booked until the Christmas Special, and presuming that this means he’s regenerating in the said Christmas Special.
Whereas I’m sure that, if we put our minds to it, we could come up with Ten Bonkers Theories about how Eleven could regenerate in the 50th but still be in the Christmas Special…
30 June 2013 at 08:43 #13025@phaseshift – no, that looks right. There should be twenty two weeks worth, leaving us one week spare in case ‘An Adventure in Time and Space’ is shown before the Anniversary Special.
If it’s shown afterwards, between the 50th Special and the Christmas Special, we can pop in Pond Life.
29 June 2013 at 23:47 #13022@phaseshift – it does depend on what everyone wants, but looking ahead at the double-parters, I’d suggest Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone as the one to watch over one weekend. While it’s a double-parter, there’s no real time gap – it’s one long story.
Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead, otoh, is so important to the future Moffat story-arc that I think it rates discussion over two weekends.
@chickenelly – yes, they just managed to get Carey Mulligan, didn’t they? At the point where she was a leading actress, able to carry a Doctorless episode, but just before she became a leading film actress and much too expensive to afford. 😀 She does a great job of carrying the episode; if she hadn’t then gone on to Hollywood, I suspect Sparrow and Nightingale would have made future appearances.
And for those who don’t know ‘The Listeners’, it’s available here.
29 June 2013 at 23:31 #13021@Shazzbot. Yes, it’s the difference between then and now. Back then, the UK audience had three choices. BBC1, BBC2 and ITV. Or you could go out to the pub, or play cricket, or – uh, well you get my point. VHS video recorders were just coming out in Japan, but they were very, very expensive.
So drama then was a bit more like theatre is now. You can rely on the theatre audience to sit through a slow start; they’ve paid for their ticket and they’re darn well going to watch for the next couple of hours. They’ll be patient. Likewise, the television audience would know that they generally enjoyed a bit of Doctor Who and that they didn’t fancy the other two programmes on the telly at the same time. They’d be patient.
In Girl in the Fireplace, Steven Moffat talked a bit about the need to keep that member of the audience who’s thinking about turning over to the hundred other options available, or going to the pub – and you’ve got about three minutes to do it, and then you need to keep them there. Because nowadays, turning over is easy. You don’t even have to get up off the sofa; just press the button. So the writer needs to keep giving that undecided viewer a reason to keep watching. Ooh, look – there’s a horse! On a spaceship! Why is there a horse on a spaceship? Well, I’ll just watch a couple more minutes to find out…
29 June 2013 at 23:18 #13020@Shazzbot – ‘Cartmel Masterplan’ is a fan nickname. Andrew Cartmel had a new idea for the Doctor’s backstory – that the Doctor wasn’t ‘John Smith from Gallifrey’ but a reincarnation of a mysterious and important figure from Gallifrey’s past. The writers he commissioned used it; but the next Script Editor to come in would probably have developed and changed it.
Thing was, there wasn’t a next Script Editor. Instead the writers he commissioned went on to write many of the New Adventures, and many of them followed Cartmel’s backstory ideas. The ‘Cartmel Masterplan’ therefore became much more important than it would otherwise have become – it became the story arc that the New Adventures novelists were following.
The modern ‘Showrunner’ is an import from the US; where the old BBC style was to have a main Producer and a Script Editor as the Second-in-Command, from Russell T Davies onwards you have a situation where the old Script Editor is now called Head Writer, has a producer’s credit – and is in charge, with the more administrative producer as the slightly more junior member of the team. The producer is now in charge of producing the Head Writer’s vision; the Head Writer sets the direction for the show during their tenure.
29 June 2013 at 23:01 #13017Gosh, that was the stupidest place to hide from a mysterious gunman. Against a flat wall, neatly spotlighted by a ‘street lamp’. And, oh yes, the rat. It doesn’t help that the rat they’ve got doing the acting looks like a rather sweet little pet … and the puppet stunt double bears more than a passing resemblance to Roland the Rat.
“Shared it with the Venerable Bede” – in a presumably unrecorded visit of the monk to London? The monastery visited in Bells of St John is in Cumbria, not Northumbria and some five hundred years later; but the Doctor appears to be friendly with quite a few monks.
I agree that Chang suddenly starts to become more sympathetic; from appearing to be the main villain he’s suddenly revealed as the man obeying orders he doesn’t entirely like.
On the whole, I’d say this is a typical middle episode of the period; twenty four minutes is spent with everyone not doing very much at all. You can imagine the After Gap series cutting straight from the Doctor and Companion fighting off Mr Sin to Leela leaping on the back of the cab to the Doctor in the sewers (with a few explanatory lines about the Fleet leading straight underneath the Palace). The fight between Leela and Weng Chiang would take about ten seconds (and would be a lot better blocked).
But they’d probably still only have the one cab. 🙂
29 June 2013 at 22:12 #13013Sylvester McCoy. An odd one for me, because, five Doctors in – I suddenly found myself with ‘my’ Doctor. Not in his dreadful first series, but in his last two.
When Colin Baker’s initial performance wasn’t working, he didn’t change it. He didn’t even seem to realise that there was anything wrong with his initial ideas. When Sylvester McCoy realised his initial ideas weren’t working, he changed them. His Doctor became less comic, more visibly dangerous. Alien, manipulative, unpredictable; someone who could send innocents to their death and could keep secrets. The roots of the AG Doctors are here, in his performance. And in Ace, we see the roots of the AG Companions. The Companion with a mystery, a story arc of her own.
His major problem was the scriptwriting; his first series contained some terrible scriptwriting – and wasn’t even written for him. His last two series had some good stories produced by very new writers – compare that with the AG series, where the story told by a new or newish writer is usually the weakest of the bunch and the current Head Writer says that Who is no place for a new scriptwriter. So it’s probably not a surprise that even the good stories wobble a bit.
I think the ‘Cartmel Masterplan’ had its points – and as @jimthefish says, elements might not be entirely dead in the water. If there is a reset, for example, we might get hints that this isn’t the first one…
But once McCoy was able to direct his Doctor more in the direction he wanted, he was brilliant. If he’d been luckier in his period, he might be remembered as one of the best of the actors playing the Doctor. Instead he seems doomed to be near the bottom of the list – purely because most fans haven’t seen any of his best stories.
29 June 2013 at 21:31 #13011The Doctor was adamant that no-one could read ahead in Melody Malone’s book – … really? As a Time Lord?
@Shazzbot – Yes, really.
He reads ahead in Melody Malone’s book. He decides to change what happens in the book.
That means that what happened in the book never happens – which means:
The book is never written in the first place, because it was based on events which have now never happened – and so:
The Doctor doesn’t know he has to change events. Which means he’s probably going to make the choices he made in Melody’s book. Which means the book gets written and:
He reads ahead…
Shorthand version: he can’t change his own future, once he knows for certain what it is. Not without creating a paradoxical time loop – a time stream that perpetually flips back and forth between the two realities. So a book like Melody Malone’s, which details his exact future, is very dangerous to him. It’s probably also why he didn’t enquire about Trenzalore, or ask for exact details on these mysterious dark hints about a future more terrifying than his past.
Given the hints from Waters of Mars, I suspect that changing a ‘fixed point’ feels, to people like River and the Doctor, something like wading through a mudslide or fighting against a gale force wind. They can feel the direction time wants them to go in.
29 June 2013 at 19:54 #13001In the commentary Murray Gold and Steven Moffat describe this episode as a ‘Chinese puzzle’. I think that’s why it feels as if it has less ‘heart’ than Girl in the Fireplace. That’s a ‘star-crossed lovers’ story; this is a detective story. GitF is about saving the girl from the monsters; ‘Blink’ is about finding the murderers. It’s a noir, complete with spooky house and pouring rain.
But we’ve still got some popular Moffat themes. One of the big ones is that the people in this episode may be killed by the monsters, but they’re not defeated. Kathy and Billy both live good lives – despite the Angels stealing the ones they were going to have. Death, in Moffat stories, may be inevitable, but how you fight the monsters is up to you.
Another theme that’s played out later: if the Doctor knows his future, he can’t change it. He can’t nip back and rescue Billy Shipton – because Billy always had to take the slow route, hiding the Easter eggs and giving Sally the Doctor’s message. He can’t rescue Kathy – because he now knows he didn’t. And in S7, he can’t rescue Rory (and Amy). Because he didn’t.
Time travel implies a Predestination Paradox. Every action is fixed. Do we have free will? Only as long as we don’t know our future; only as long as we can freely choose to take the action that we always did take.
Moving away from head-bursting time paradoxes, Blink feels much less ‘Doctor lite’ than Love and Monsters. I think this is because Moffat used the available filming time for David Tennant and Freema Agyeman very cleverly. They’ve got the two ‘live’ scenes – but the third scene, the long Easter Egg scene, becomes available to be seen again and again. It’s the Chinese puzzle, parts of which are seen several times before its secret is revealed. It makes the Doctor feel much more ‘present’ than he is: part of the detective story for the audience is asking ‘why isn’t he there?’
28 June 2013 at 23:27 #12967I suspect it was because the show was showing glimmers of recovery under Sylvester, Aaranovitch and Platt et al that it survived.
@jimthefish – Agreed. If we haven’t had the Seventh Doctor, we’d have never have seen the Ninth. That team must have felt for years as if they’d failed in their efforts to save Doctor Who: but they didn’t – they made it clear that what was needed was a reboot.
I remember watching Remembrance of the Daleks, and knowing that they’d done it: they’d produced something as good as the best days of Who. By then the BBC was determined to cancel – but it was episodes like Remembrance that meant the fans remembered Who as something worth saving.
28 June 2013 at 22:14 #12953I actually read the Starburst interview when it came out and agreed with much of it. Doesn’t make me like Eric more, but I question if he was in a fit state of mind to do that interview.
@phaseshift – I doubt that he was: in my first version of that post I described the interview as a ‘professional suicide note’. Possibly if he was working for the BBC today they’d have given him sick leave – and, as you say, a bit more support. And, if he’d still been employed by the BBC, he’d very likely never have given that interview. It’s understood when you work on a show that part of your job is promoting the show – that includes not slagging off the producer to the press, even if it’s true. Especially if it’s true.
Reading between the lines, it sounds very like Jonathan Powell was giving Saward an opportunity to make an official complaint about JNT – but he didn’t take it.
If people are curious about the interview, there’s a copy here.
28 June 2013 at 12:38 #12932@Jecoll – and while we’re not going to write your assignment for you – if you also take a look at the SIDRAT section of the blog, you’ll find a number of blog posts about first meetings with the Doctor.
Between those three sections you should find enough material to speak for hours. 🙂
27 June 2013 at 12:42 #12899@shazzbot – it would be unbelievably, incomparably rude for Nicola Bryant to say ‘Colin was awful in the role’. She was his co-star; her job was to work with him, try and develop some chemistry with him, and help him produce an entertaining performance in his scenes with her. Acting’s about teamwork – plus, actors don’t generally give bad performances for the fun of it.
The only time you can tell someone they were crap is a) if they admit it themselves (in which case you’d probably say something like ‘no, it wasn’t your best performance ever’) or b) you hate their guts and never want to work with them ever again. 😈
And Colin Baker – as an actor – definitely isn’t a bad actor. He’s a very good actor, cast in the wrong part for his range.
That Eric Saward was prepared to say in public that Colin Baker was miscast and Saward thought Baker was terrible was a sign of how horribly wrong things were going behind the scenes; giving that interview to Starburst (I think it was) was professional suicide. As far as I know, he hasn’t worked in television since, beyond interview appearances. If he’s working as a writer, he’s using a different pen name.
26 June 2013 at 21:35 #12884@Shazzbot – yes, it is possible to find people who liked Colin Baker’s Doctor. It’s just that none of them seem to post on this forum.
So if any Colin Baker fans happen to be lurking out there, do post. We won’t bite.
[Well, PhaseShift may become … sarcastic, and I might do my killer koala impersonation and try to claw your face off. But we won’t actually bite.] 🙂
25 June 2013 at 09:45 #12872Another death – this one from the world of popular archaeology. Professor Mick Aston, lead archaeological consultant on Time Team for most of its run, has died.
24 June 2013 at 23:27 #12870Well, I love those mysterious SF illnesses in which someone is in danger of imminent death: but can still climb forty foot ladders and swing gymnastically across the stage.
Barring the theatre chase scene – definitely padding – that episode really zipped along, very gripping. And nice characterisation – yes, we see the other side to Litefoot when he doesn’t correct Leela’s table manners, but instead simply imitates them. One wonders how much of his casual racism is ‘acceptable conversation for the Victorian gentleman’.
And the After Gap Who picked up the idea of Time Agents and ran with it.
So far, this story is so good that it could really benefit from being remastered and having the effects re-done. You miss the good writing because you’re distracted by the terrible giant rat, the iffy glowing eyes, and I swear they’d simply thrown a straw covered tarpaulin over a modern car in one of those street scenes (the one with Chang and Weng-Chiang in the cab). ‘No money’ is being replaced by a well-written script and solid repertory-style acting.
And yes, definitely riffing off Phantom of the Opera as well as Sherlock Holmes. Oh, well – at least Weng-Chiang is just creating giant spiders instead of playing his giant organ. 😈
23 June 2013 at 23:45 #12863@Shazzbot – unfortunately I can’t remember the sentence, either….
23 June 2013 at 23:28 #12861@HTBDET –
Don’t blame me – those aren’t all my theories. I don’t like namechecking people in the spoilers forum as I can never remember who avoids it like the plague.
1. That one is, I think, mine. With other people adding bits. Basically, having entered his own time-stream the Doctor can now only exit it within his own past. He’s stuck between Gallifrey and Trenzalore. So he might revisit a regeneration for some reason – and if we see bits that weren’t previously filmed, then of course Tennant and Smith will have to put the old costumes back on.
Supporting evidence. The ‘extra’ raggedy Doctor in The Eleventh Hour. The dark figure flitting through little Amelia’s kitchen who was identified by eagle-eyed fans as Matt Smith in the raggedy doctor costume. This never has fit the official explanation of ‘it was a bit planned for “The Big Bang” that we ended up not using’ because Smith is wearing the wrong costume for ‘The Big Bang’.
If that ‘extra’ raggedy Doctor does end up being used, all I can say is that it was indeed a very long game being played.
2. An alternate history doesn’t necessarily mean Ten doesn’t look like Ten. We’ve already had an alternate history where Ten still looks like Ten – Turn Left, where he dies. Perhaps he crashes the TARDIS or something. 🙂
3. Can’t help that – it’s been suggested… 😈
23 June 2013 at 22:59 #12857@htpbdet –
Well, if they’re wearing those costumes in the 50th, and it’s not just for the DWM cover story (which is, after all, on regeneration) then we’ve already had several theories which would fit.
One: the Eleventh Doctor is trapped in his own timestream and can no longer visit any event except the ones in his own life. (he revisits the regenerations).
Two: there’s an alternate history from when Nine regenerates into Ten.
Three: the reboot involves reversing every regeneration – from Eleven back to Hartnell/Troughton.
I will now return to the light, having been called over to visit the ‘dark side’ of the Spoilers forum. 🙂
23 June 2013 at 21:53 #12851@htpbdet – don’t get too excited – those are both the ‘post-regeneration’ costumes they first wore before they adopted their own official costumes.
David Tennant is wearing Nine’s costume and Matt Smith is wearing the ‘raggedy Doctor’ costume.
23 June 2013 at 21:47 #12850@Shazzbot – oh, yes, it’s all very neatly tied together. I don’t think Moffat picked his historical period by accident – Mme de Pompadour knew Voltaire pretty well.
23 June 2013 at 20:35 #12846@brynwe – I think @pedant makes the point very well. But it is also picked up subtly within the script, when Reinette talks about ‘reason’ a couple of times.
‘Reason’ versus common sense. The clockwork droids have ‘reason’. They need parts. Parts are available. They use those available parts. They need a brain for SS Mme de Pompadour. There is a ‘Mme de Pompadour’ brain available – in Eighteenth Century France. They go to Eighteenth Century France.
Two seconds of applying common sense would tell you that all this is stupid. Unfortunately, the droids don’t have any common sense to apply. They only have reason.
As an engineer once said (Charles F. Kettering)
Logic is an organised way of going wrong with confidence.
🙂
23 June 2013 at 00:14 #12789Hide’s well worth a re-watch – I think it’s slowly becoming my favourite episode of 7.2, despite my not liking Jessica Raine’s performance very much.
The Doctor only seems to recognise Professor Palmer’s feelings – and that because they’re clearly a reflection of his own. Otherwise, he cheerfully talks about how terribly lonely empaths are – in front of Emma -doesn’t get that the monster’s not a monster but another lost traveller and doesn’t get that Clara might not be too keen on exploring a haunted house.
22 June 2013 at 23:23 #12784@phaseshift – yes, but I think in ‘Hide’ the point is that the Doctor does know Earth. He’s lived there. He knows people from there. He’s having a nice chat with someone from there. And he’s just gone from its birth to its death and it should mean something to him. Whereas it’s very clearly played as if such a journey means nothing at all beyond a possible solution to a mystery worth solving.
That scene is, I think, riffing off Toby Whithouse’s similar scene in Vampires of Venice:
I can’t see it any more… I’m 907. After a while… you just can’t see it!…I look at a star and it’s just a big ball of burning gas and I know how it began and I know how it ends and I was probably there both times. After a while, everything is just stuff! That’s the problem.
And now, by the time of Hide (probably about 200 years later in his personal time line), he doesn’t even understand that there is a problem. It’s just stuff – and he has to have it explained to him why Clara is upset.
22 June 2013 at 22:56 #12781@htpbdet – slow and steady. Don’t overdo it.
But I only ever take the televised episodes as having anything to say on any given topic. (Sorry!)
Alas, the Great Continuity War between the GI and Clara has blown that one right out of the water. What we have seen is not always what has now happened. And the point that the novelisation and the televised episode differ now merely means that there were at least two versions of that particular reality.
But anyway: even if the televised episode is the current continuity – the Valeyard is clearly not imitating a living statue in Covent Garden, so he’s not a ‘Watcher’ like figure. Is he a Cho-Je-like projection? Because if so – then he has the appearance of one of the Doctor’s incarnations.
I agree with McLeela that there might be a natural limit to regenerations, and that the more a Time Lord regenerates, the more likely it becomes that they will have a regeneration in which everything they try to suppress decides to come out to play. And we’ve seen a projection of the Doctor’s darker side (the Dream Lord) – and he’s not nice.
I think it’s going to be a question of ‘which story is more interesting to tell?’. The one where we stick to strict continuity? Or the one where we go with the alternative continuity (which went on record in the novelisation) that one of the Doctor’s future incarnations goes dark side?
The assassination attempts are pretty specific. The one at Lake Silencio ‘kills’ the Doctor, then shoots him again in the middle of his regeneration – preventing it from completing. The poison used in Let’s Kill Hitler will specifically prevent a regeneration. In both cases the plots are rather convoluted – there must be other ways to kill Time Lords.
But if the people planning this fear a regeneration more than they fear the Doctor escaping, then you can see that both methods are chosen because they’ll specifically prevent a regeneration.
If you can be bothered to give me the time codes of when they are sighted, that would be greatly appreciated. J
McGann and Tennant are both very brief: McGann is a blur running across the screen at 00:01 in the California shot, almost immediately followed by Troughton running across the screen in the opposite direction. The only way you can spot it’s McGann is that you can just see the wing collar.
Tennant is 00:35 – he has his back to the camera. I think the shot is of the Library. but it might possibly be New Earth. Clara is centre-screen, red dress, toolbelt.
That the Doctor loves River is pretty clear – when you consider that he’s someone who’d rather die than say ‘I love you’ in public. They’re a couple whose natural relationship is one of arguing and making up. But from Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone you can see in the Doctor’s behaviour that he’s someone who knows, just knows, that he’s going to end up with this woman. And he knows damn well that for her, it’s already happened. And it’s annoying him.
As @scaryb says, from River’s point of view, she’s considerably more insecure than she makes out, because she’s figured out that the older she gets, the less the Doctor will love her – because they’re meeting in the wrong order; as she gets older she’s meeting him earlier and earlier in their relationship.
I don’t think River knew what was going to happen at Trenzalore
I think River did know what would happen at Trenzalore, because she explains very precisely to Clara what’s going to happen. And then she behaves towards the Doctor as if – well, as if this was the moment she didn’t want to happen. She wants to keep him from Trenzalore, she wants to keep him from going into the time-track. But once his decision is made, she relaxes.
Mind you, the kiss might have helped. 😀
Regarding the Daleks – from the perspective of the Daleks, they came first. When the Hartnell Doctor meets them, he doesn’t seem to know who or what these creatures are. It’s not until Invasion of the Daleks that the Doctor decides to fight them rather than just escape from them.
@scaryb – the Doctor very specifically says that people shouldn’t have expected a body in his tomb. I think we do now have a problem in that the ‘track of tears’ has just become the serpent swallowing its own tail; that’s probably why it’s collapsing in on itself. It may be that the Doctor going into it has created a paradox, or it may be that the living ‘track’ was always safely stored in the TARDIS somewhere. Once the Doctor is dead, however, there’s no one to protect it – it has to be sealed in a ‘tomb’ until the scars of his passing heal.
I think the reason we’re going to meet Rose and Ten is because the Doctor now can’t escape his own time-track. He needs a TARDIS, he also probably needs someone who might be able to help him. And if Hurt is the real Nine, he needs a post Time War Doctor who knows what happened; somebody who knows ‘the secret’ because it’s also his secret. Had Eccleston been willing, we probably would have got Nine and Ten. Hey ho.
22 June 2013 at 21:15 #12780It is a lovely episode, and introduces themes that would later be examined by other Who scriptwriters. And yes, @phaseshift, I became very aware when I watched it that Moffat’d taken the chance to explore the slow path/quick path in greater depth with Amy.
Here he visits Reinette’s life from childhood to death in what – for him – is a few hours. But he doesn’t have the devastating effect on Reinette that he does on Amy; possibly because he encourages little Reinette to believe that she’s dreaming. Little Amelia, on the other hand, knew her imaginary friend wasn’t imaginary.
In Hide (writer: Neil Cross) the Doctor takes another ‘quick path’ – Earth’s birth to its death. And Clara questions what it’s doing to him. Are we ghosts to him, those of us who take the slow path? To the Doctor we both haven’t been born and have been dead for thousands of years. Can we be anything but phantoms, the not-quite real?
In Girl in the Fireplace the Doctor is visibly attracted to Reinette, visibly affected by her death. But by the time of Hide, he doesn’t understand why Clara is so upset.
Yes, the Fifty-first Century has almost been set up as the Doctor’s other ‘home’ century. And I think this was the first episode where Moffat started to hint that there’s a reason the Doctor hides his name.
22 June 2013 at 11:23 #12758@craig – ah, I see. You don’t have to post early if you’re busy – personally, I’m unlikely to be back before 5.30.
22 June 2013 at 11:00 #12753@craig – great stuff! I thoroughly enjoyed the first to fifth Doctors, so glad you found the fourth. Will watch when I’m back this evening.
As well as Talons pt 2, it’s also time for The Girl In The Fireplace. 🙂
22 June 2013 at 01:04 #12750@scaryb – oh, yes, you could. But…
We know what the Doctor did in the Time War; he created the Time Lock and he destroyed Gallifrey before the Time Lords destroyed the entire universe. So he did what he did for good reason. Classic case of ‘do you shoot the maniac who’s about to burn down the house – with people trapped inside it?’ Yes, you do.
Except…
Eleven sees himself as a monster. Like Nine and Ten, he’s got issues left over from the Time War. Whatever he did in the past makes it plausible to him that he’ll become a monster in the future. And he refers to the Hurt Doctor in the past tense. Not “he’s the one who’ll break the promise” but “he’s the one who broke the promise.”
I would guess that the Smith Doctor is supposed to be the end. We’re looking at alternate time streams here; alternate futures. The Doctor prevents the one where he becomes a monster by simply not having a future. See Journey ttCoTT, where he prevents the future in which he’s CrispyFriedDoctor by simply keeping his hand away from his face.
Okay, but in Journey there are in fact at least three possible futures: one where they all either die or become TimeZombies, one where they get through to the time-crack but the Doctor doesn’t take the Big Friendly Button through himself – and the one we see, the third option, where the Doctor goes through himself and tells himself what to do.
So I’d guess we’re heading for ‘take the third option’ – and the River in the Library (and so the River from The Name of The Doctor) is from the time stream where the Doctor took that third option. Moffat has a reset in mind which will make that ‘Valeyard’ future impossible.
That said, part of that reset might well be that everyone in the universe is convinced ‘The Doctor’ died at Trenzalore. Yes, there’s someone who inherited both the TARDIS and the title of ‘The Doctor’ – but Trenzalore is where ‘The Last of the Time Lords’ died. The ‘Eleventh’ Doctor (really the Twelfth) was the final Doctor.
There is, however, a new One. As in The Eleventh Hour, the clock reaches twelve – and then becomes One again. 🙂
22 June 2013 at 00:13 #12744@arkleseizure – yes, Jenna Coleman’s got a very ‘middle-class northern’ accent.
@phaseshift – yes, it would make sense that the producers of that period would ask an actor to alter their genuine Australian accent into what they thought an Australian accent would sound like…
21 June 2013 at 23:55 #12739@scaryb – well, frankly, it’s always a bit of a broad assumption with Wikipedia. 🙂
But it does happen a lot with actors who are actually native to the area they’re supposed to be from; most recently with Crimson Horror, when everyone was complaining about Graham Turner’s ‘terrible’ accent. He’s from Yorkshire (does the voice overs for Yorkshire Tea, in fact).
Likewise in Day of the Moon some of the crew were muttering about the accents of two of the actors playing the Secret Service men. They were, of course, the actors who were genuinely from America…
21 June 2013 at 23:23 #12736Umm… wasn’t Janet Fielding from Brisbane? And had a degree from Queensland University?
21 June 2013 at 22:03 #12731Before Gap
After Gap
and – “This is my secret. What I really did in the Time War was a complete restock of the TARDIS wardrobe.”
(The Gap)
21 June 2013 at 21:20 #1272821 June 2013 at 21:19 #12726They are “writers traps” established long ago for future writers (things that some aspects of fandom seem to expect to be accommodated)
@phaseshift – agreed. They could be quietly ignored. The Time Lords are gone (and perhaps the limit was imposed, not a natural one), the Valeyard might have been one of the infinite possibilities of the Time War.
But on the other hand, Moffat was a fan before he was ever a professional writer. He could easily have come up with an interesting idea for dealing with those particular writer’s traps. Time can be changed – one of his repeated motifs. Some things are fixed: but not everything.
Possibly it’s a repeated motif because he does intend to change the Doctor’s future. Hopefully in an interesting way.
🙂
21 June 2013 at 00:06 #12686Oh, and by the way – the Smith Doctor definitely refers to the Hurt Doctor in the past tense.
He’s the one who broke the promise. He is my secret.
So for the Hurt Doctor to be a future Doctor, the current Doctor must already know what his future self is going to do. Furthermore, everyone and his decapitated head is giving the Doctor ominous hints about the awful, terrifying nature of his future self.
Which means that, frankly, the Doctor’s not doing too well on keeping this highly important secret. 🙂
Nope, ‘the secret’ is in the Doctor’s personal past. The reason the Time War seems obvious is because that’s where we’re going.
20 June 2013 at 23:57 #12685Do you seriously think Moffat cares about the 12 regeneration rule? I don’t.
Care? No. Have a good script idea about it? Quite possibly. The 12 regeneration rule is a script opportunity. He may have already quietly shoved it several regenerations into the future with Let’s Kill Hitler (when River gives the Doctor her regenerations).
The Valeyard is an amalgamation of the darker sides of your nature
In the TV version. The novelisation describes him as the penultimate reincarnation, the one between regenerations twelve and thirteen. The AG Moffat-helmed series has consistently had a succession of people absolutely terrified of the Doctor.
There was a goblin, or a… trickster. Or a warrior. A nameless, terrible thing, soaked in the blood of a billion 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.
So before the Time War, the Valeyard is a figure like the Watcher. After the Time War? Smith’s Doctor is dangerous; Smith’s Doctor is scary, Smith’s Doctor is a bloomin’ psychopath. But he’s not half as genocidal as Ten was.
What do both Madame Kovarian and the Silence try to do? They try to kill the Eleventh Doctor. Kill him in a way that will stop him regenerating. They’re not fighting a war against the Doctor’s present. They’re fighting a war against the Doctor’s future. The GI wants revenge; he, too tries to justify himself by referring to that blood-soaked, terrifying future. And he names it: the Beast, the Storm, the Valeyard.
Actually, when you get inside the track of tears do you see McGann or Tennant? There is a very brief Eccleston, but I do not remember seeing Tennant.
What do you mean by ‘inside the track of tears’? Clara enters that track – and she certainly sees Tennant and McGann. And McCoy and Pertwee and Troughton. However, she sees them ‘in action’ – when her scattered self tries to repair the damage that the GI has done. Once she’s arrived in the desert, then she sees the Doctors played by Hartnell (again), Baker, Davison, C. Baker, and Eccleston.
So the tomb must be the tomb of a later Doctor or Smith later in his time.
Only if we presume that the Doctor never repairs that crack in the window of the TARDIS. The one he got when he forced the TARDIS to fall onto Trenzalore. The one he’s only just created, in fact.
That crack can be clearly seen in the giant TARDIS. Is it Emergency Protocol One where the TARDIS returns the companions (the Paternoster Gang, in this case) to their place of residence and then shuts itself down? Did she return to Trenzalore before finally shutting down? In the forlorn hope that maybe, just maybe, the Doctor and Clara had managed to escape the time-track?
I agree that being vapourised must be somewhat tricky to regenerate from; River taking Ten’s place makes perfect sense in that context. I took the GI’s explanation of ‘minor skirmish’ to mean ‘the Doctor shouldn’t have died’. Certainly in all the cases you mention, they might have died. But the salient point is that they didn’t.
Initials, dates and similar titles. 😉 It’s the one with the Angels, and it’s set in New York. It does show the Doctor cares for his wife; it can be argued that she alone is healed by his regeneration energy because she alone is the one person in the entire history of Doctor Who that he’s loved enough to marry.
But in that case, why on earth is River so angry? I admit she’s Amy’s daughter – but she’s angry enough to slap him. What does it mean to her that he’s just wasted his regeneration energy on a broken wrist?
And, speaking of River, when she meets Tennant she makes it clear she has seen more than one other regeneration and the implication is that they are AG Doctors – so, Doctors beyond Smith.
Yes, River knows what will happen. She knows, for example, that Clara isn’t dead. She quite possibly knows that the Eleventh Doctor is going to regenerate. She also knows that she can’t say anything, beyond the occasional hint.
The fact that she has seen more than Tennant and Smith in the AG Doctors doesn’t necessarily mean they were all ‘the Doctor’. And she may also know that the fact that she’s seen later Doctors doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll happen. She knew Ten could die – if she didn’t take his place. Eleven is supposed to regenerate – that doesn’t mean he will.
Sorry – but I don’t see the 12 regeneration rule as being any impediment to Moffat and whatever story he wants to tell.
Suppose the story he wants to tell is how the Doctor got round the 12 regeneration rule? Suppose the story he wants to tell is how the Doctor didn’t become the Valeyard?
Personally, that sounds a far more interesting story to tell than ‘oh, let’s just ignore it. Look, Zygons!’ 😀
20 June 2013 at 15:11 #12670in the same way that Clara’s memories from the closed loop in JTTCOTT were leaking back
Clara’s memories included stuff we never saw on screen.
My only problem with Ten dying when he shouldn’t is that they’ve already done that – Turn Left.
20 June 2013 at 12:22 #12663I’m still wondering if they’ll pull a sneaky and Hurt really IS the next Dr, even just for series 8.
@scaryb – now for that, I’d even push forward my cherished dream of a woman Doctor to the next regeneration 😀
Alas, whatever the Hurt Doctor did that wasn’t in The Name of the Doctor (title drop), I doubt it was anything as noble as dying to stop yourself becoming a true monster.
20 June 2013 at 11:27 #12661@htpbdet – if Hurt isn’t a ‘hidden’ past Doctor, how can he be the Thirteenth? Firstly, we’ve not yet had Twelve – so it’s going to confuse the heck out of the audience. We’re trying to avert the Thirteenth incarnation, but we’re not at the thirteenth incarnation, the thirteenth incarnation won’t be a problem until the next Doctor regenerates – unless Twelve has a major part in the 50th Anniversary Special.
Plus, we may well have already seen Thirteen’s appearance, and John Hurt isn’t Michael Jayston. Michael Jayston, in fact, was probably available.
Having Hurt as a hidden Doctor allows Moffat to bump Eleven up to Twelve, and deal with the tricky problem that we may have already seen the Thirteenth Doctor. If he doesn’t deal with it, he’s leaving it as a big problem for the next producer; firstly that the regenerations are known to go up to twelve or thirteen only, secondly that the Thirteenth incarnation of the Doctor is some kind of weird amalgam of all his dark tendencies – or all his dark tendencies come into reality or something. I’m not quite sure – frankly I’d given up on Colin Baker by then. 🙂
So in answer to your ‘should he resist the chance’, I’d say ‘No. He shouldn’t’. If he does, he’s leaving the next producer a giant albatross. Whatever ideas that producer may have, first of all they’ll have to clear the decks for the regeneration, secondly they’ll need to tackle the Thirteen problem. Only then will they be able to do the stories they want to do.
But make Hurt a ‘hidden’ Doctor, the real Ninth – and then you’ve got a story arc about averting the future. Matt Smith’s Doctor (now Twelve) has two choices. Become this terrifying Doctor, the person so terrible that wars have been fought against him – or change his time-stream by refusing to regenerate.
We have two big clues from Trenzalore that his decision has already been made. Firstly, the Doctor’s time-track is firmly described as his past and his future. Yet, when we get inside it, the only people we see are his eleven known incarnations, John Hurt’s Doctor, and Clara. Even if John Hurt is a future Doctor, we’re not up to Thirteen. Unless Clara is a Doctor, we’ve got twelve Doctors inside that time-track. There are no others. Most importantly, there’s no Michael Jayston-Doctor.
Secondly, the battle at Trenzalore is ‘a minor skirmish’. Doctors don’t die from minor skirmishes. They regenerate. Except this time, the Doctor seems to have chosen to die. He doesn’t want to die; the Smith Doctor has tried every trick in the book to avoid dying – but it seems he’d rather die than regenerate.
Oh, and another little clue, this one from Time of Angels. The Doctor uses some of his regeneration energy to heal River’s wrist – and she yells at him for wasting it. But if he’s already decided he’s not going to regenerate – then of course he can use that energy for a minor injury. He’s not going to need it. And of course River yells at him – she knows what it means that he is willing to ‘waste’ it.
20 June 2013 at 01:04 #12656The Eleventh makes a lot of ‘eleven’ jokes.
One planet has an eleven hour day, later he’s eleven hundred and three, he uses an eleventh dimensional matrix, he visits eleventh century Coventry, he rewires Apollo Eleven. There’s probably others.
And ‘eleven’ is referenced a lot in the scripts. Didn’t Rory enter the Cyber Space Station on level Eleven? And in Hide the time the episode starts is 11:04.
The Doctor doesn’t specifically refer to himself as Eleven (except through the jokes), but the visual recaps of regenerations only ever include the ‘official’ ones. He’s the Eleventh Doctor; the various jokes and references to ‘eleven’ have kept that number quite firmly in the consciousness of the audience. Which is one of the things that would make me suspect that this incarnation isn’t really ‘the Eleventh Doctor’ (and Hurt is probably the real Ninth) – there is no other incarnation in which the incarnation-number has been so frequently referenced. Eleven’s number is important.
Of course, if the [insert ominous sounding name here] incarnation of the Doctor is number Thirteen, it’s very important. Because if the Eleventh Doctor is really the twelfth body of the Person Generally Called The Doctor, Incarnation Number Thirteen has just become the next Doctor. The one after Matt Smith.
19 June 2013 at 15:29 #12582@tennantmarsters2013 – theorising, of course.:)
He does exist, though; he’s the adopted son of Amy and Rory.
But given that it was carefully established that River’s time-bracelet can go where the TARDIS can’t, and that the Ponds adopted several years after you’d expect there to be a lot of abandoned war-babies, I can’t quite work out whether he’s simply a round-off to the Pond’s story (they did have their family, after all) or a plot-point.
19 June 2013 at 15:08 #12576@everyone – uh, if I’m suggesting Matt Smith is playing Anthony Brian Williams, he’d be an adult. I know Mr Smith looks about nine, but I don’t think he could actually play it.
No babies on the TARDIS, please. If the Doctor regenerates as a baby, expect her/him to be rapidly fostered out in another time-stream and return as an entirely grown-up actor. Working time restrictions mean it would be almost impossible to have a baby/child actor playing a main part.
(Did you notice how the two kids in Nightmare in Silver had lots of quickly-doable shots of standing still and saying nothing?)
19 June 2013 at 14:22 #12559And apparently, Fear Her was aimed at the kids – so comes into the ‘Dinosaurs on a Spaceship’ category.
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