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4 June 2013 at 19:59 #11853
Even if the TARDIS doesn’t switch mental genders with a female Doctor, there’s one type of close female relationship which open up oodles of frustration for the companion. Namely, a girl and her Mum.
They’ve already hinted, in fact, that the Doctor’s relationship with the TARDIS sometimes drifts over into her acting like his mother. 🙂
4 June 2013 at 11:23 #11830Girls can aspire to being “assistants” (then leave to fulfil their “proper” function and get married).
@scaryb – Amy’s pretty much a commentary on that kind of attitude. She meets the Doctor at an impressionable age, and spends the rest of her childhood only wanting to be the ‘assistant’ to an extraordinary man. She flits from job to job (and we’re shown that she’s very successful at some of her jobs) – almost certainly because of the ‘what’s the use, dear, you’re only going to get married/run off with the Doctor’ mantra that she’s been conditioned to believe.
And then she gets kidnapped by people who see her only of value as a baby factory.
And yet Amy is clearly written as a strong, confident woman who’s obviously achieved in more than one area (a classic children’s story that’s still being read by kids fifty years after it was written, successful model). There’s quite an implication that meeting the Doctor ruined her life. For one thing, it got her stuck in the past…
It got her stuck in the past.
4 June 2013 at 00:10 #11808Smith was ‘my’ Doctor.
@ardaraith – yes, that’s always painful. Sylvester McCoy was ‘my’ Doctor, in his last two series (I was unusual in that ‘my’ Doctor was the fifth Doctor I’d seen – but for me, McCoy completely matched the notion in my head of what the Doctor should be like). I not only lost my Doctor, I lost the entire bloody series.
But it came back. And that’s what I’ll always remember. It came back, with new Doctors; and even though none of them will ever be ‘my’ Doctor again, the show itself came back better than ever. 🙂
In the meantime, have some tea, try a jammy dodger, and make sure you’ve got the DVD’s to hand.
3 June 2013 at 23:47 #11803the Doctor will be a child ( has anyone suggested this yet?)
@ardaraith :waves hand in the air frantically: Me! Me! Me! (and possibly @phaseshift as well).
Or at least I suggested he’ll regenerate as a baby (possibly a baby girl). A rebirth for the 50th.
3 June 2013 at 23:44 #11800@ardaraith – yes, they don’t seem to stay as long as when I was a kid … oh, wait, that would be Tom Baker. I was primary school aged when he arrived, and applying for universities when he left. : -)
Regeneration is the core of the series – that and the TARDIS. There are always new beginnings in Doctor Who.
3 June 2013 at 21:17 #11788I think they were pretty confident about Tennant; so yes, he may have started off with a three year contract. Already played leading telly roles, worked with RTD before – and mad keen on Doctor Who. 🙂
3 June 2013 at 20:57 #11784For those who don’t know, we’re using Before Gap (BG) and After Gap (AG)
@craig – or in my case, Pre Gap/Post Gap, Before Gap/Post Gap, Pre Gap/After Gap, err, err, I know there’s a Gap in there somewhere…
I’ll get it right eventually. 😀
3 June 2013 at 20:53 #11781@phaseshift – one thing I have noticed about PostGap Who is the way they have an ‘exit strategy’ planned in for a Doctor that doesn’t work out – a finale at the end of the first year that can easily be rewritten to be somewhat fatal. 🙂
Christopher Ecclestone they used it, David Tennant and Matt Smith they didn’t need to. This ‘termination option’ is probably due to the embarrassing ‘tripped over a brick’ regeneration of Six into Seven.
And if it is a policy, it does mean the showrunner can take risks. I noticed upstream that people were suggesting that they might book a ‘risky’ Doctor for one year only. They’ve already done that – Series 5 was written so that it could have been Eleven’s complete arc. Smith was too young, didn’t have enough experience, they took a risk – and he was great, so he was (I’m pretty sure) then contracted to play the Doctor until the 50th.
If the next Doctor is also a risk, they’ll no doubt do the same again; a first season which could be a complete story – but will be survived if the risk pays off.
3 June 2013 at 15:34 #11755@curvedspace – bonkers theorising? Combination of ‘I guessed the murderer before the end’ and ‘the author outsmarted me! Again!’ Also, I genuinely enjoy analysing scripts and performances.
I really doubt we’ve got anywhere near figuring out all of Moffat’s next move. As a writer, he’s smarter than all of us. 🙂
As above, that’s part of the fun. But bonkers theorists do need to be careful; you can fall in love with your own work, your own theory, and prefer it to whatever the showrunners have come up with. And I have seen people get very angry with authors and producers for, basically, not being the fan. For having their own story to tell, and not the fan’s story.
I’ve read so many theories about what I might see that the surprise now will be WHICH one comes true, rather than allowing my mind to be open to whatever Moffat might write.
My recommendation for that – and it’s something I’ve had to do when I’ve fallen too in love with a theory – is to tell yourself very firmly before watching the latest episode (especially if it’s the finale): “They were brilliant theories. And they’re WRONG. Brilliant – but wrong.”
Repeat as needed. 🙂
2 June 2013 at 13:59 #11657@timeloop – I made it up.
What I’d like to say would probably require a quick run through the PG-rated TARDIS translation matrix before I could post it on a family forum. 😈
2 June 2013 at 13:27 #11649“In his spare time, Mr Levine generously divulges the exact nature and number of their Christmas presents to small children. He will also give advance notice of any surprise birthday parties that might be in your immediate future.”
2 June 2013 at 13:03 #116442 June 2013 at 12:33 #11636Can they really be going for a regeneration story at Christmas?
@juniperfish – my bet would be that they’re going for a regeneration at the end of the 50th. The Christmas Special is introducing the new Doctor. Matt Smith is really playing The Ghost of Doctors Past. 😀
Oh, is that a coatstand over there?
2 June 2013 at 08:20 #11585Despite the Moff quote, I think they already know who the next Doctor is.
@pedant: I think so too. And I think it’s a woman. It seems from last night that there are rumours of castings going around – I reckon they’re calling people in for the next Companion. Male people – because they don’t want an all-female TARDIS.
This is not to say it’s definitely Coleman, despite my well known bonkers theory. 🙂 But looking at Moffat’s story-arc over the past four years:
- He’s used Amy and Rory’s relationship to see what worked and what didn’t in a duo where the female is the pro-active, adventurous partner.
- He’s used River Song to play around with a female ‘Doctor-type’ character. Again, I’d say he’s been seeing what does and doesn’t work.
- The strong implication of Name of the Doctor was that Eleven is the last of his line. He’s probably not sticking to this literally – but metaphorically, if Eleven’s the last in the unbroken line of male Doctors, that makes perfect sense.If he’s not actively casting a female Doctor, he’s certainly been thinking very seriously about it.
1 June 2013 at 23:23 #11542Well, Moffat’s team cast Matt Smith when they were looking for someone in their forties… so I’m sure they’ll pick the right person. 🙂
1 June 2013 at 23:11 #11538Yes, it’s headline news on the BBC news site. I imagine either Matt Smith has got a job which means they can no longer delay the announcement, or they knew it was about to break.
Gosh. I’d been expecting it , but in the last week I’d almost convinced myself he was staying for S8.
1 June 2013 at 18:27 #11519@juniperfish – good points. Yes, the Doctor has a ‘dark mirror’ in each episode. You missed out the Great Intelligence, by the way. He’s the Dark to Clara’s Light, in the battle for the Doctor’s ‘soul’.
Light mirrors: given that Clara means ‘clear, bright’ and that the posters quite specifically place her as ‘mirroring’ the Doctor, Clara’s undoubtedly one of the Doctor’s light mirrors. Bells doesn’t seem to have any other ‘light mirrors’, but in Cold War we see Professor Grisenko, who plays the supportive grandfather/father to Clara’s distressed Companion. Hide has Professor Alec Palmer, finally coming out of his frozen shell after the war – and it’s Professor Palmer who manages the Doctor’s trick of encouraging Emma to become the hero she doesn’t believe she can be.
Journey – as you say, we’re the other side of the looking glass. Clara may be playing his ‘light’ mirror again. There’s also Tricky, whose supposed lack of humanity hides compassion and intelligence – and who should be the Captain of his particular ship. Crimson Horror – the Doctor’s ‘light mirror’ is the Paternoster Gang, especially Jenny. Nightmare in Silver his ‘light mirror’ is Porridge. In The Name of the Doctor, his ‘light mirror’ (apart from Clara) is, appropriately, his ‘other half’ – River Song, his wife.
1 June 2013 at 17:40 #11517I had a think about this in fictionalised form under your blog post on The Children Who Waited in SIDRAT.
@juniperfish – yes, that reply of yours really should have been a full blog post of its own. But the ‘Doctricals’ of S7 part 2 mostly aren’t ‘Dark Doctors’ – apart from Mrs Gillyflower, of course, who was as bonkers as a bath full of fishes. 🙂
1 June 2013 at 16:45 #11513So, I’m wondering: we’ve just discovered that Clara, in leaping into the Doctor’s time-stream, got scattered through time like the leaves in autumn.
All those ‘mirror-Doctors’ we’ve been seeing throughout this half of S7. Has the Doctor (or will the Doctor) somehow been scattered through time by leaping into his own time-stream? Were those mirrors Doctricals, just as Clara has her Claricles?
🙂
31 May 2013 at 10:02 #11439@danmartinuk – my list of the truly awful monsters:
The Loch Ness Monster (Skarasen). Mainly a special effects failure – but even as a kid, I was ‘is that a rubber turtle, or a toy dinosaur?’ It was rubbish! That monster completely destroyed any sense of drama the second it appeared.
Shockeye from The Two Doctors. Both Doctors must have been suffering brain damage from the Androgum transfusion to let that particular adventure go on as long as it did. And the giant red eyebrows really deserved a series of their own…
Ogrons – they were just plain dull.
From the Post Gap Series
The Scribble Monsters in Fear Her. The idea of being trapped in a painting has been done so much better (in the Five Doctors – only there it was being trapped as a wall sculpture for eternity).
Soloman’s robots in Dinosaurs on a spaceship. One of those ideas that must have looked good on the page, probably looked fine on the set, and very possibly sounded okay in the recording suite. It was just that – when you put it all together – these were the least scary killer robots Who had ever invented. Even when they were firing at the cast, the only fear I felt was that they might irritate me to death.
31 May 2013 at 08:57 #11437‘Canon’ in fan slang does derive from ‘Canon Law’. It is all material accepted as ‘official’; for example, in the universe of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, ‘canon’ is the TV episodes and those comic books later approved by Joss Whedon, Buffy’s creator. Generally, if a writer on a show deviates from (usually) previously broadcast ‘canon’, they’d better have a damn good explanation handy for the fans.
To use a Buffy example, in Season Five, Buffy suddenly acquired a never-before-mentioned sister; an event that broke the show’s previous ‘canon’. It turned out that Joss Whedon did have the said damn good explanation. 🙂
Some Whovians take this, and argue that the television episodes of Doctor Who are ‘canon’. Future Who writers should base their continuity on the broadcast TV episodes. If no Daleks escaped from the battle of Exxilon in the original story, you can’t later introduce Dalek survivors of Exxilon.
This is despite the fact that both Post Gap showrunners have explicitly said ‘there is no canon’. Who is a show about time-travel, and one of its rules is that The Doctor can change time. There is NO fixed version of past events, even if we did see it happen on the telly. There never was; even the Pre Gap writers changed stuff.
31 May 2013 at 08:41 #11436I think the adipose have to be a leading contender; they look like cuddly marshmallows.
@mtgradwell – the adipose were supposed to look like cuddly marshmallows. They’re baby adipose; looking cute and cuddly is a baby’s main defence mechanism.
They were a counterpoint to the Doctor and Donna’s first meeting – where he killed off all the baby Racnoss. The evil Nanny probably would have been more suited to the Sarah Jane Adventures – I remember thinking at the time that she’d wandered in after being made redundant from the alien fizzy drinks factory – but she was in Who’s long line of managerial/corporate-villains.
31 May 2013 at 08:25 #11435We Whovians do have actual lives, thank-you-very-much
Errrr…..
@whohar – for those over the age of 18, a quick test is: in which life do I have to pay the rent/gas bill/mortgage?
The other one is the real one. 🙂
31 May 2013 at 00:13 #11413@Shazzbot – yes, the timestream disappears long after we hear the Doctor’s voice, and after he’s corporeal – they’ve got a light effect on him when you first see him, as if the squiggle is illuminating that side of his body. It’s been fizzing away for a bit, and then vanishes as Clara is stumbling towards him. Which agrees with what they both said; the Doctor says the time-stream is collapsing in on itself because he’s inside it, and she tells him to get out.
He’s a Time Lord, after all – I’d imagine that even if his route in has gone, he’d know if there was some way out. He’s certainly talking to Clara as if there’s still a way out. But another signal that the time-stream is collapsing is that Eleven is talking with the Hurt Doctor – who should be several centuries away from Trenzalore.
Given that Time Lords in the previous continuity (continuity? Hah! The Great Intelligence/Clara spit on your continuity!) needed special measures to interact with their previous selves, I’d personally see the collapsing time-line, at the very least, as a great excuse for Eleven and Clara to exit at a point where they meet Ten and Rose. It would also explain any interaction with the Hurt Doctor.
30 May 2013 at 22:07 #11403@scaryb – agreed, except I’m wondering if the Doctor and Clara are trapped within his timestream – i.e. they can only travel “from Gallifrey to Trenzalore”.
A perfect topic for the 50th – the Doctor has to escape from his own history. And unless he does – there is no future. 😈
30 May 2013 at 19:55 #11385@everyone – there was a better image, but it was copyright.
Anyway, moving away from the codpiece jokes (on the grounds that talk of cod pieces might upset the fishes), I note that one of the recent waistcoats worn by the Eleventh would have been part of Colin Baker’s preferred costume – he wanted black velvet.
The fob watch itself (or a visible chain) has been used by over half the Doctor’s incarnations – the First, the Sixth, the Seventh, the Eighth, the Tenth and the Eleventh.
30 May 2013 at 19:20 #11382@scaryb – I think it’s the fez.
🙂
30 May 2013 at 19:17 #11381That costume was unbelievable, even for a race of people who are now canonical for having “terrible dress sense” (Eleventh Doctor). To be fair, Colin Baker himself didn’t want it – he’d rather have gone for something in black. I think the audio covers generally use what’s now called ‘the blue costume’.
It’s a lot easier on the eye. I have seen suggestions that if you really, really want to make a proper Sixth Doctor coat for cosplay, you should just search pet shops for the appropriate dog blankets. 😈
30 May 2013 at 13:34 #11364I think ‘charmless’ is a pretty good description of the Sixth Doctor. Colin Baker was most horribly miscast; he’s great at playing nasty characters – but the producer of the time didn’t seem to realise that his off-screen charm didn’t extend to making him likeable on-screen. And the miscasting seemed to be a symptom of things going wrong behind the scenes; Who had lost its way. Even in Davison’s era, Davison seemed most comfortable in the role when he knew he was leaving it.
The scripts didn’t help; they were terrible. And yes, I agree. Michael Jayston would have been a far better Doctor than Colin Baker.
Personally, I bailed after Mysterious Planet, and returned when Colin Baker was replaced by Sylvester McCoy. I suppose the Sixth’s contribution to history is going to be in the idea that the Doctor can have a regeneration who isn’t ‘The Doctor’.
If Colin Baker had been given better scriptwriters – who knows? I cannot imagine either RTD or Moffat having kept Colin Baker on any longer than the contract required, but I can imagine both of them hurriedly rewriting to play to his strengths, to give him a series where we watched ‘the Doctor’ struggle with the fact that – this time – he’s not the hero everyone expects him to be. If we’d got that, maybe ‘Trial of a Time Lord’ would have been a series that meant something. Instead of a series that lumbered the current producers with the problem of the Thirteenth Doctor becoming the Valeyard.
29 May 2013 at 22:44 #11356@craig – no blowing up the planet!
😀
29 May 2013 at 22:39 #11355Yes, I think there’ll be a new timestream. There are too many clues that in the current timestream, the Doctor’s life ends in the very near future.
Possibly, in fact, the records state that it ended on Trenzalore – when he went into his own timestream after the defeat of the Great Intelligence, trying to rescue a companion. And then never returned.
Which is why there wasn’t a body in his tomb. 🙂
29 May 2013 at 13:19 #11318@Shazzbot – yes. The choice was apparently between an episode of Doctor Who (i.e. cut down to a twelve episode series), or Confidential.
29 May 2013 at 12:41 #11309Looks like the BBC’s slow climb to the 50th Anniversary has started.
29 May 2013 at 12:24 #11305I bet the contract includes several “best behaviour” clauses (what you can and can’t do “in the name of the Doctor”)
@scaryb – I think Matt Smith once said that one of the procedures with a new Doctor is to pop them into a quiet room with the BBC’s PR staff and basically go through their entire life story for anything, anything at all, that a tabloid could use. So if the Scum manages to get ahold of a piccy of MS smoking a joint while at uni, the BBC already have a ‘damage limitation’ plan in place.
On the whole, if they’re regenerating Matt Smith at the 50th – which would make sense, thematically – then unless John Hurt actually is the new Doctor, they’ve kept it extraordinarily quiet. And I agree; they could have had a female Doctor with, say, Amy and Rory. But now they’ve replaced that working duo with one female Companion – if they then replaced Matt Smith with a woman, they’ll need to balance up the Companion roster. And Clara doesn’t have a boyfriend. More, it’s strongly implied that the Doctor is filling the ‘boyfriend’ slot, and everyone can see it.
Putting the fun bonkers theorising aside for a moment, the likeliest possibility is that both Matt and Jenna are continuing in their current roles, and the strange delay in official (as opposed to unofficial) confirmation is because Steven Moffat wants to hold out the prospect of a regeneration. Which is kind of impossible if you know the current Doctor is already filming S8. 🙂
That said, I come back to the point that – if you announce a female Doctor in advance, before she’s started working on the show – she’ll need not just the skin of a rhino, she’ll need the skin of an armour-plated rhino. I wouldn’t want to walk on set after six months of people writing newspaper articles, telling the world that this is a betrayal of Doctor Who. ‘Promoted Companion’ would sound a much better way of handling it.
29 May 2013 at 11:45 #11300but Clara didn’t. Does this kibosh your Clara as Doctor theory?
@whohar – not really, because the Doctor is standing around delivering truckloads of exposition before he faints. He faints when he starts mentioning the paradox, and it’s implied he faints (while still manfully delivering the exposition) because of the developing paradox.
For the Eleventh, that time-line represents a paradox. It’s about to be changed; his future and his past. Both his and the GI’s presence are creating that paradox – he faints.
For Clara, however, that same time-line doesn’t represent a paradox. She always did go into the time-line, to change the Doctor’s past back to what it should be. There’s no paradox, no reason she should faint. And indeed, once Clara goes in and the burgeoning paradoxes are removed, the Doctor leaps to his feet (and delivers yet more exposition).
Now, when we see Hurt Doctor, Clara doesn’t know who he is – and faints on being told ‘he’s the one who broke the promise’. If we’re going for a bonkers ‘Clara is the Doctor’ theory, she faints for exactly the same reason the Doctor fainted: she’s just been presented with a paradox in her own time-line. The Eleventh is fine; this isn’t a paradox. This is his past. Clara hits the deck – the implication is that this is a big paradox for her past.
Conclusion: she comes from a future where ‘the Doctor’ never ‘broke the promise’. All @juniperfish‘s bonkers theories about two time-streams are right. 😀
Either that or she’s a big fan of John Hurt, and went over all funny at the thought of acting with him. 😈
29 May 2013 at 00:20 #11266@blenkinsopthebrave – it is rather different, but I think the difference may be timey-wimey. It changed its own timeline when it went into the Doctor’s timeline. You can see the moment in The Snowmen when it changes itself – the Doctor removes Simeon’s memories, the GI starts dying – and then revives, with the words ‘now the dream outlives the dreamer’.
So, yes, significant. But significant because it shows that you can change your own time-line.
As to whether it’s long term significant, that’ll depend on whether Richard E. Grant has been secretly booked for either the 50th or Series 8 😀
29 May 2013 at 00:08 #11264@Shazzbot – there’s good old Emergency Program One. I don’t think the Doctor would mention exactly what that means until the Paternoster Gang are in the TARDIS – because if they knew, they’d dive in after him.
28 May 2013 at 23:59 #11261@Shazzbot – yes, but is the TARDIS smart enough to figure out that this particular ‘return’ is to the Companions’ native time-stream? Old Sexy is pretty smart when she wants to be. 🙂
28 May 2013 at 23:49 #11258@blenkinsopthebrave – suppose the plan is not to release the Hurt Doctor from the time-stream, but to draw the current Doctor in?
That is, the plan is to cause the current Doctor (or Doctors) to change the events that led to the Hurt Doctor being ‘cut out’ of the continuity?
Oh, and another thought – is the reason we’re going to get David Tennant and Billie Piper in the Special not because the Eleventh contacts them deliberately, but because he and Clara are now lost in his own timestream? That glowy-light-thingy looked awfully like his time-stream closing. And they were terribly careful to specify that the Paternoster Gang had a route home.
(In which case, my jokey pre-finale scenario got one point right. The Paternoster Gang will have to either get a lift from the TARDIS or walk home) 😀
28 May 2013 at 23:16 #11255@elouise – they could, but Steven Moffat already has enough flak in his life from his supposed inability to write strong women characters. So if he did bring in a female Doctor, I really doubt he’d then start having a male companion playing the Doctor’s ‘save the day’ role.
If they did, it’d definitely be played for comedy. The companion would be hopeless – and the new female Doctor would probably try out some of the old Venusian Akido skills.
Traditionally, companions from Sarah Jane onwards have given the ‘you can’t do that, you’re a woman!’ thing rather short shrift – or in the case of Leela, a short dagger 🙂 . Romana particularly (both Romana I & II had a nice line in icy glares).
28 May 2013 at 22:15 #11253If the next doctor is a woman, there will be other problems as well, say, traveling back to a time where women didn’t have anything to say?
@elouise – I suspect they’ll deal with it exactly the same way they dealt with Martha being black – sometimes it was a problem within the story, sometimes they used the ‘act as if you own the place’ method to basically ignore it. Sometimes they used it to point out that our conception of an all-white past was a load of rubbish. 🙂
It would be similar for a female Doctor; if they want to use it as part of the story, they will. Otherwise – act as if she owns the place and everyone will promptly assume the Doctor’s from the aristocracy. Male or female, messing with an aristocrat was generally a bad plan – there was always the question of ‘exactly how powerful are her relatives?’
The Victorian Claricle managed to move very smoothly between working-class barmaid and middle-class governess simply by adopting either the behaviour of a middle-class Victorian lady or the behaviour of the perfect barmaid.
28 May 2013 at 21:59 #11252how demanding do you think Helen Mirren’s day was in ‘Prime Suspect’?
@Shazzbot – firstly, Helen Mirren was in her forties when she first started playing DCI Tennison (exactly the age I suggested). Secondly, Prime Suspect wasn’t a thirteen episode series (running time 546 minutes per year). It was 200 odd minutes per year.
So you’re talking the difference between a gruelling five months each year for three years and a gruelling ten months each year for three years. 🙂
28 May 2013 at 20:40 #11246@Shazzbot – I mean, actually in their forties. Early fifties if they were in top physical shape. It’s a very demanding role.
28 May 2013 at 19:09 #11235I would champion Clara being the next Doctor if only the age range weren’t being pushed down piercingly of late
@Shazzbot Another reason I’d go for a rebirth which actually was a rebirth – i.e. going back to a baby. You just can’t get any younger – after that, the only way to be different is to go older. 😈
But strategically, if you’re going to sneak in a female Doctor by playing her as ‘the latest Companion’, you have to pick an actress who could play the typical Companion. Catherine Tate, at 40, was one of the older ones in recent years. Billie Piper was 23, Freema Agyeman was 27, Karen Gillan was 22, Jenna-Louise Coleman is 27.
It’s not just the running and running. It’s the hours. Doctor Who is one of those shows where the lead actor is in almost every scene, delivering a vast number of lines. They’re working sixteen hour days in ten day blocks, three days off, holidays Christmas and Easter – for ten months at a time. It’s a killer – if you watch David Tennant at the beginning of his run, and then at the end, he looks ten years older, not three. Matt Smith is more naturally baby-faced, but even he looks a lot more than three years older than in The Eleventh Hour (mind you, he did look about nine!).
I think, realistically, forties is going to be about as old as you can go for a Doctor. Except for someone playing the Doctor in only one or two episodes.
28 May 2013 at 16:30 #11227@scaryb – he looked as miserable as all hell. Uh, yeah, ‘remorseful’ is probably the better phrase.
I go for ‘past’, simply because of the way the Eleventh frequently mentions that he hates himself. And between Eight and Nine is the period when we not only don’t see the regeneration – there’s a huge personality change. Nine is traumatised. Ten’s egomania sometimes wobbles into meglomania. And Eleven hates himself.
Anyone think the GI might have attacked now because the Doctor was deleting himself from the databases? The GI is information – and the Doctor was attacking his very mode of being.
28 May 2013 at 15:50 #11219It’s a matter of much debate: which is why I think one of the things Moffat’s going to do is end the debate.
If the twelve regenerations limit was set by the Time Lords, has it already been set for the Doctor? The Master wasn’t exactly noted for abiding by Time Lord rules, but he had to go ask the Time Lords for another set of regenerations. It sounded like getting another set was a relatively easy process – but he couldn’t do it by himself.
So the Doctor could be in the opposite predicament to the one you suggest; it was a Time Lord rule – but without Time Lords, there’s no one to lift the already-imposed limit.
HTPBDET (who I hope is getting well soon) would be better able to brief you on the contradictions regarding the regenerations limit. On the one hand, a limit is implied by later stories, on the other, the Second Doctor sees his people as ‘living forever’. The explanation could simply be that the Doctor lives an extraordinarily dangerous life – and his people normally live a few millennia between each regeneration.
In The Eleventh Hour, the Doctor does say ‘multi-forms’ live for millennia. He is himself, of course, a multi-form. 🙂
28 May 2013 at 15:23 #11213It was ‘woman in the shop’. It could be a throwaway reference, you know. ‘Clara’ is named after Elisabeth Clara Sladen; the ‘woman in the shop’ could be an oblique indication that Sara Jane Smith didn’t die with the actress who played her.
If the Claricles have been appearing throughout the Doctor’s time-line, Sara Jane would have recognised ‘Clara’ as someone she’s seen in different time periods and therefore known that Clara was probably a future assistant.
28 May 2013 at 15:16 #11211@Shazzbot – well, that depends on whether Moffat thinks ‘Doctor Who’ is better with a limit on regenerations. If we take it that River gave him her remaining regenerations, then he’s got another 21 or 22 lives to play with. Which would be fine. It’s taken thirty three series to use up the current set of twelve; we’d be well past the 100th Anniversary before we could use up another 20. But what a limit would give is a reason that the Doctor still wouldn’t be that keen on regenerating – there is a limit.
Or, the rebirth could remove any time-lord-placed limit on regenerations. The Doctor will live forever, barring accidents. Which is exactly what Troughton’s Doctor once said.
Yes, I think the Valeyard will be put to rest in the 50th. It seems to me very much as if Moffat’s taken a good hard look at the continuity problems remaining from the Before Gap series, and has decided to tackle them head-on. I wonder if all these ‘two timestreams’ stories are because we are in a world where the Eleventh Doctor’s future is flicking back and forth between the two possibilities. In one, he turns into the Valeyard, the Beast, the Storm – or dies in this incarnation, to prevent that ever happening. In the other, time is changed and he (or she) lives on – without ever becoming that Dark Doctor.
And Clara, it’s strongly implied, is from or is reflecting that other possibility. That’s what happened in Journey ttCotT, anyway. She ends up in one control room, the Eleventh Doctor in the other – and the Eleventh had to pull her into his timestream; just as later on she stops the final destruction of the TARDIS by the almost unnoticeable act of taking his hand. Just as, when she’s in his timestream, he has to send her the leaf to bring her back to a sense of who she is.
Which might explain why Clara faints on being told ‘He’s the one who broke the promise’. We’ve already seen that Clara’s sensitive to time; the Doctor nearly faints when close to the paradox of his own time-line. So maybe Clara fainted because that breaking of the promise is, to her, a time paradox. She’s from the time-line where the Doctor never broke the promise; was never anything other than ‘The Doctor’.
28 May 2013 at 11:14 #11194Oh, and a slightly cheeky thought that occurred to me last night – if there is a theme in the 50th where Eleven refuses to regenerate because he doesn’t want to be the Valeyard – doesn’t want to be that man…
… then one way of really changing the time-stream, without dying, is to make sure he isn’t that man.
😀
28 May 2013 at 11:12 #11193@scaryb I favour the ‘being reborn’ thing myself – if only because it fits with the ‘Easter’/rebirth references that we keep getting. Have been getting, in fact, since the Eleventh Hour, when little Amelia apologises to Santa for waking him because it’s Easter. 🙂
And it fits in with that meta theme; the Doctor’s story has been following a loose structure; which itself follows the timeline of the Before Gap series; that should mean that we’re coming up to the rebirth – the New, re-imagined Doctor Who.
But I don’t think the ‘new Doctor’ will be an entirely different person to the ‘old Doctor’, because Moffat’s been very strict about keeping the ‘new universe’ as one built from the memories of the ‘old universe’ (that was Big Bang II). Moffat’s ‘new universe’ has continuity with Before Gap Who – even though there’s a physical break, we see that mentally, there’s no break. Amy was going to marry Rory in the Old Universe and the New Universe restarts on the day of her wedding.
Equally, Moffat’s Doctor is in the direct line of regeneration-descent from the Before Gap Doctors. The Hurt Doctor represents the break. The Doctor, who isn’t the Doctor. But he is.
So I would say that – rather than a new ‘Doctor’ taking on the name – we’re either going to see a new body with the old memories (transference of soul), or the old body reborn – but without the old memories (transference of body) and without the regeneration limit.
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