[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

Given that the title of the finale is now all over the Internet – including the Radio Times and the BBC – I’d say it’s now ‘news’ rather than ‘spoilers’. So – The Name of The Doctor. Reminiscent of ‘The Name of the Rose’.

Which ties in nicely to his former companion.

But the meaning of ‘The Name of the Rose’, which Eco actually picked as a fairly neutral title, is that – broadly- the only thing we can keep from the glories of the past is their names.

Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus

Or loosely – and from somebody else’s translation:

The ancient rose remains by its name. Naked names are all that we have.

The only thing remaining of the ancient Doctor is his name.

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@ardaraith – yes. The red and blue could easily signify two things simultaneously – just as we saw two Doctors simultaneously in the forest.

So red could be past/heart – the Doctor’s heart is in the past. Blue could be ice/future. The Doctor’s future is that of an unfeeling monster, one who sees the people around him as ‘past lives’. Ghosts. They’re all dead, really, dead and buried.

Time, as Moffat says, can be rewritten. Perhaps Clara is part of a desperate attempt to rewrite time. To rewrite the story of The Doctor, so it becomes the story of Doctor Who. 😉

 

 

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@ardaraith – no, Clara’s already died the same number of times as the show. The show’s died twice – the Classic Series was cancelled and the US TV Movie We Do Not Mention failed to get picked up. Clara’s now died twice.

She very clearly represents ‘the future’, not the Glorious Past. She kills the vampire by giving up all the unrealised might-have-beens of the past, and earlier on she says ‘I hated history’. The Doctor is being pretty clearly connected to ‘the past’. He has no descendants, he lets down the ‘blue shift’ universe (the real universe) and keeps the ‘red shift’ (pocket) universe which – in time travel – also represents the past. And now he’s losing that past – and in his view, the past is all he is. It’s his soul. He is nothing but a story, a set of memories.

A reputation that he’s now deleted. A memory he’s steadily losing.

For Clara the past is something that doesn’t own her. It’s an item in her clothing, an umbrella to keep the rain off.

Since they’re picking up stories, they might be referring to Tolkien at some point:

Tell me, who are you, alone, yourself and nameless?

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

If you carry this on and see Clara as benign; a governess trying to teach rather than some mad Dalek instructor – you can see that the stories we/the Doctor are being told are trying to reconnect the Doctor with his emotions; melt the sliver of ice in his heart.

Lesson one: Rings of Akhaten. It’s not what you’ve done that can defeat the memory vampire – it’s the thought of all the things you never got to do with the person you love.

Reconnection to the Doctor’s earlier self: he does that himself – he remembers being in Akhaten with his granddaughter. He also remembers that:

I’d forgotten how much I liked it here.

Lesson two: Cold War.  It’s not appeals to your personal fame that will stop the massacre – it’s seeing the people you’re about to kill as people like you. People who are exactly like your dead daughter, for example. It’s empathy.

Reconnection to the Doctor’s earlier self: Professor Grisenko, who is curious, eccentric, and ultimately kindly. He treats Clara like a granddaughter. When the Doctor fails to look after her, he’s the one who does the job.

Lesson three: Hide. The monster may not be a monster at all – your own fear might be creating the monster.

Reconnection to the Doctor’s earlier self: Professor Palmer, the multi-talented scientist. War hero, remorseful killer (in a good cause), spy, scientist, investigator of the weird. He loves his assistant – and unlike the Doctor, who seems utterly unable to say the words ‘I love you’ even when he does, he finally manages to blurt out the truth. Professor Palmer gets over his past and manages to come back to life. Oh, and he ends up with a great to the Nth granddaughter.

Are all these stories real? Good question. They may be memories – the Doctor trying to piece together his memories and learn where he went so horribly wrong. Or it might be a combination of Clara-the-governess and the TARDIS knowing where the Doctor needs to go.

This idea fits with just about every possible bonkers theory about a benign Clara, btw. She could be an incredibly powerful storyteller, a personification of the Doctor’s universe (she is the programme), the future Doctor doing some essential timey-wimey rewriting of the Doctor’s story to stop him/herself from becoming a monster, or his loving granddaughter (great-grandaughter doing the same thing).

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

Hi, @badwolf99

One thing I do like about your theory is that it would fit very well with all that numerology that fits Clara with ‘Doctor Who – the programme’. Because if Clara is writing history to suit herself (even unconsciously), then that puts her in the same position as the writers and producers – she’s the person who’s telling this story.

Additional support for your theory: since the Rings of Akhaten, Clara has become the real hero of the story. Bells of St John is about the Doctor finding and saving Clara – but even there, it’s Clara who discovers the monster’s Evil Lair ™, allowing the Doctor to save her. In every other story Clara’s in, she’s the one who saves the day. She rescues them from the Asylum, she brings the Doctor back into the fight and melts the snow, she gives Grandfather the indigestible leaf of infinite might-have-beens, she reminds the Ice Warrior of his long-dead daughter, she persuades the TARDIS to go rescue the Doctor.

The Doctor, in the last three stories, has failed. He’s still the protagonist, the one who makes things happen – but the hero is Clara.

Which would fit with her telling these stories. We’re all the hero of our own stories.

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@haveyoufedthefish

The real value of announcing now that there’s a Zygon on board the 50th Anniversary episode is that it completely negates the value of any snatched ‘spoiler’ photos. We haven’t a clue whether any picture is Ten, Ten Point Five, Zygon-Ten, Dark Doppleganger-Eleven, you name it.

So, yeah, total misdirection. That said, they’re probably in there somewhere – I don’t think they’d pay for a Zygon costume unless it’s used at some point.

 

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

My tendency is to think that there are indeed two Doctors running about in there.

@jimthefish

Perhaps he’s a Zygon. 🙂

Well, we know they’re back. And the teaser for next week’s episode hints at a prisoner in the TARDIS, and Zygons have to keep the original alive to shape-change. And there was that very long gap where the Doctor vanishes in Rings of Akhaten, followed by Clara arriving back to find the TARDIS now locked.

And then in the very next episode, the ‘Doctor’ says ‘I’m breaking her in,’ as if he’s only just got the TARDIS.

Okay, so, bonkers theory number whatever: the ‘real’ Doctor was kidnapped in Rings of Akhaten and is now held prisoner in the depths of the TARDIS. 🙂

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

Do we have a ‘general S7 discussion’ thread since we shut down the speculation thread?

Anyway: The Doctor as psychopath.

River called the Doctor a psychopath (“only one psychopath per TARDIS”). I know ‘sociopath’ is the more popular term right now, but if you look at the Doctor, currently:

Lack of empathy – growing. Check.

Criminality. Check. He’s a thief; it’s even referenced in The Eleventh Hour – where Amy points out that he didn’t just borrow those clothes temporarily, he kept them. A guy who basically has a magic wardrobe stole those clothes. Ten used to point his Sonic at the cashpoints and nick money. The TARDIS thinks of him as ‘her thief’.

Anti-social behaviour. Three was the most conventional; most other regenerations have had a fine collection of anti-social tendencies. Mostly a Check.

Egocentricity. Oh, dear lord. Definitely Check.

Superficial Charm. In spades. Who doesn’t love the Doctor (apart from Who himself). Check.

Manipulativeness. Couldn’t possibly be more Checked. Rule One, anyone?

Irresponsibility. This is a man who’s travelling the universe in a stolen TARDIS and his last regular job was seven regenerations back. Plus he has a habit of wandering off and coming back two years later. Or ten years later. Or not at all. Even when the person concerned is seemingly his only living relative. And long term plans? Definitely not. Check.

Impulsivity. Eleven is practically the poster child for this trait. Check.

The only thing currently between the Doctor and full blown psychopathy is remorse and whatever empathy he’s got left. He’s losing the empathy; what happens when he finally decides ‘sod the remorse’?

 

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

I think the ‘companions used to be ordinary’ lament is actually saying something about the Doctor. His companions used to be ordinary people who had the potential to be extraordinary (only an extraordinary person could survive the Doctor).

And his rule of thumb for companions used to be pretty much ‘oh, so you wandered into the TARDIS and survived? Welcome to the crew. ‘

But post Rose he’s been increasingly wary of taking on new Companions. As he says in Let’s Kill Hitler ‘guilt’. And then:

There must be someone left in the universe I haven’t screwed up yet.

And now, since his regeneration, he’s been refusing to take on anyone unless they’re a mystery. Even little Amelia was a mystery – all alone in that big house. Rory was the ‘ordinary’ companion, and that’s because he came along as Amy’s boyfriend.

And died. Repeatedly. 🙂

 

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@mephistopheles (and I saw that production! Great, wasn’t it?) – there could well be a Susan/Clara link. Currently I’m zipping back and forth between ‘great to the nth granddaughter’ and ‘Nth Doctor’.

But a Susan/Clara link would work – one reading of ‘An Unearthly Child’ is that Susan saved the Doctor. She made Ian and Barbara curious enough to follow her home and that was the turning point that began the Doctor’s journey to ‘hero’ instead of ‘villain’.

So if blood is calling to blood out of time, perhaps all these ‘love saves the day’ ‘love is the one thing that never ends’ clues are hinting that Susan’s love for her Grandfather is strong enough to find a way to save him a second time. Even after her own death.

 

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

Possible dialogue for the 50th:

Tenth Doctor: What’s the last thing you remember?

The Doctor: I was in a junkyard on Earth, it was November 23rd 1963 and I was waiting for my granddaughter to come home.

Tenth Doctor: Yes, well. Quite a lot’s happened since then.

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@morbius – I’d think all the stuff from the TARDIS (we saw lots of wires leading from the TARDIS to the equipment) was to synchronise the two universes to at least some degree. Otherwise 100,000 years would have passed in the ‘real’ universe before he took a single step in the pocket universe.

Given that they were in there a lot longer than three minutes, I don’t think it was synchronised exactly. 🙂

@thedoctordude – I thought the lightning flash was an indication that time had passed between the Doctor and the Professor looking at the map and the Doctor tapping Clara on the head.

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

If we’re doing redshift/blueshift, he lets down the universe which contains his future. Which would mean Clara – who generally has something red in her costume/personal props – is something from his past.

Gosh, at the moment I could do with a metaphor for different versions of me – I keep swinging between ‘she’s the bloody Doctor!’, ‘no, she’s a descendent’ and it’s still possible to go for ‘she’s like the Doctor because she’s storing his memories as a retrieval program’. 😀

Good old Moffat. He’ll probably come up with an entirely different option.

But I am beginning to like Clara very much; Moffat’s gone for a keynote of ’empathy’ and it’s showing. She always cuts to the ‘heart’ of things. She’s shocked by death when the Doctor analyses it intellectually, she calls him out on not being affected by having seen the birth and death of an entire world. Very powerful mind (the black hole appears when Clara arrives, not before) and yet extremely young and her reactions are probably closer to the way the average viewer would really feel, faced with all this.

Perhaps the red is because she’s the ‘heart’ that the Doctor has lost.

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

Welcome, @branfish. So, do we now have a shoal? 🙂

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@scaryb
Repeating my post from t’other place, because I’m not sure who’s reading where:
The only things I can think of at the moment are:
They would have started on November 22nd 1974, exactly eleven years after the assassination of President Kennedy.
November 25th 1974 is eleven years (and two days) after the first broadcast of Doctor Who.
They are on day four – this is the fourth episode since Clara officially became a companion. The time is also 11 (for the Doctor) and 04 (for Clara’s fourth trip in the TARDIS).
Caliburn may be a reference to Caliban, or it may be a reference to Arthur’s sword Caledfwlch, which Geoffrey of Monmouth anglicised as Caliburn. 

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

If you want to play with alternate universes, @juniperfish, how about:

0:33 Doctor takes off his bow tie to tie the door shut.

0:34 Doctor picks his bow tie off the forest floor, the house having dissolved.

0:38 We see the Doctor with the monster right behind him – and the Doctor is wearing his bow tie. He turns round, he’s tieless, he turns round again, the bow tie is back. And then it’s gone again, and doesn’t return until he’s back in his proper universe.

I would be very surprised if this was a continuity error – they’re very careful in showing us that the Doctor’s taken his tie off, to the extent of not just having him take it off, but having him pick it up later.

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

The ‘sliver of ice in his heart’ is a reference to The Snow Queen – which is an opera, but is more famous in the original; it’s a fairy story by Hans Christian Andersen.

I suspect it’s rather important, because all those glass shards in the posters? That’s the main component of the Snow Queen. Kay is a little boy who has a sliver of glass from a magic mirror fall into his heart; it makes him cold and cruel and everything in the world seems squalid and ugly – except snow. Then he gets kidnapped by the Snow Queen and everyone think’s he’s dead. Except his friend, Gerda, who goes to the Snow Queen’s palace to find him. She weeps tears of love on seeing him – which melts the ice in his heart.

On their return home they find they’re now both adults – and it’s summertime.

So we’re back with: something is making the Doctor cold and cruel. He’s either going to die or people will think him dead. The power of love will save him. Not his love – the people who love him.

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@craig – agreed. I note that when they have showed clips of the previous Doctors, they’ve either been photos, print-outs, or video playback. And when it’s video playback they’ve ‘projected’ it on a wall (Next Doctor) or mid-air (Eleventh Hour). Previous companions were shown on a smallish TARDIS screen.

All of which suggests that the quality of the archive footage is very ropey indeed, and they’re using every trick they can think of to hide its poor quality.

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

Anyway, looking at the posters for images running through, we have:

Bells of St John. Two different posters, one with the Doctor on a motorbike, Clara behind and lots of broken glass. Another with the Doctor looking into a Spoonhead (ie a mirror), with Clara behind him.

Rings of Akhaten: there is a broken mirror behind the Doctor and Clara. The Doctor is facing SR (audience left) with screwdriver pointing downwards. Clara is SL (audience right) holding the leaf upwards. The screwdriver and the leaf form a diagonal.

Cold War: we’re looking through a porthole – which is cracked. The Doctor and Clara are behind the glass.

Hide: we can see the Doctor and Clara – but we can also see the ghostly images of some photos. Again, we might be looking at them through glass, or they may be a reflection. Clara is mirroring the Doctor – he has his sonic raised in his right hand, green light lit. She has the candelabra raised in her left hand, one candle at exactly the same height as the Doctor’s sonic. The lighting of the faces also mirrors – the Doctor’s lit from Stage Right, Clara Stage Left, and both have one side in shadow.

Journey to the Centre of the Tardis. Broken glass again. I’ve already mentioned that the number of Doctor’s and Clara’s (implying reflections) match with the Doctor representing the Fifth Doctor. If he’s playing the Fifth Doctor, Clara could be representing the two ‘future’ Classic Doctors after Davidson – or she could be representing the two assistants in Castrovalva, Adric having been captured by the Master.

Crimson Horror: I can’t see any glass, or any reflections/mirroring – except that Clara’s framed as if she’s in one of those Victorian glass bottles you kept plants in. But I can’t see that it is glass.

Nightmare in Silver: two planets/moons, mirroring. No actual glass or mirrors, but there is water.

And the uh, final poster has very definitely got glass – we’re looking through a broken window, in fact.

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

Well, we’ve already had millions of corridors in The Doctor’s Wife. The poster features millions of stairs – admittedly the posters are rather interpretive, but stuff on them generally turns up in some form.

Stairs Even money.

The Swimming Pool Also even money. It’s been mentioned too often.

The Library 100:1 because The Library might appear in the finale or at the 50th.

Another Control Room 3:1 – they have three others readily available – Ten’s (which they’re probably using for the 50th), the First’s (drama doc) and the Eleventh’s Mk 1 (I doubt they tore it down).

I think we may find that Professor River Song’s room is in fact her husband’s bedroom. Seeing as they are, in fact, married. She might have her own study.

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@ardaraith – if you could find me some ‘it’s all a dream’ clues that are as blatant as Frances Barber popping her head into the scene every now and then, I’d go with it. Or a duck pond without ducks, to hint that things are vanishing from the universe. Otherwise, you’ll have a really annoyed audience. Audiences hate ‘and then they woke up and it was all a dream’. I think they’d be okay with another ‘ganger’ gag, but again – where are the deeply unsubtle clues? Doctor Who is a family show; with such a major reveal we need clues that can be picked up by six year olds, not just the bonkers theorists. 🙂

I can go with these episodes being the retold version of real events; the reason they’re fictionalised is that they are the ‘based on a true story’ film. Or even that the Doctor’s been trapped in the Land of Fiction since his TARDIS crashed in The Eleventh Hour – we’ve probably had enough ‘fiction’ clues to go there. River’s done the equivalent of ‘we’re all stories’ a few times. 

Or that Moffat’s planning a ‘fourth wall’ finale where the Doctor discovers he’s a fictional character in a family TV show. And that his entire universe is a story. Again, that would fit with the ‘through the looking glass’/breaking glass images in so many of the posters.

And the comment that the 50th Anniversary is a love letter to the fans; if Moffat’s going for the SF idea that fictional universes may really exist, then the Doctor lives because he’s loved by the fans. By the millions of fans, over fifty years. By the fans such as RTD and Julie Gardner and David Tennant and Steven Moffat, who grew up and went into television and produced shows and wrote episodes and played him and just plain refused to let him die. By the grown up fans who – when Doctor Who came back – sat their kids on their knees and introduced them to the show they’d loved.

Ahem. Sorry, I’m in the middle of what @htpbdet calls ‘gin and tonic time’, only with me it’s ‘currently halfway through third glass of wine’.

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@craig – drat. One and a half glasses of red wine and I start forgetting which site I’m on. 🙂

Glad you don’t mind. Just stop me if I suddenly start discussing Joss Whedon. 🙂

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@craig – yes, they have – the Leveson Inquiry dealt with more than one person who’d been falsely libelled as a criminal by the traditional press.

But since I have asked previously that we avoid current events in our little corner of the Internet, could  I suggest that we don’t discuss this further?

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

And while we’re on films about our baby steps into space, may I recommend The Dish? It’s kind of a ‘based vaguely on real events’ film rather than a drama-doc, but it’s very, very funny. And Parkes Observatory does look like it’s set in the middle of a sheep-run; the logic was that by placing it in Parkes, middle of nowhere NSW (pop. slightly less than 10,000) they’d avoid a great deal of radio interference.

Parkes Observatory, by the way, is still working with NASA and also has an extremely impressive record of discovering pulsars.

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

Ah, yes, The Right Stuff. Great book and film – though I admit that, personally, I always preferred Apollo 13.

To be truthful, I think that’s because I was old enough to remember Apollo 13; especially the feeling of the world holding its breath as NASA fought to get them back alive.

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

Spoiler space, discussing spoilers, do not read, we are discussing spoilers

******************************

Honestly, I did say these were spoilers, didn’t I?

Though as I say, this is discussing something now on the BBC site.

What have we always thought impossible???

It doesn’t say we have always thought this impossible. The teaser says ‘you might have always believed to be impossible’. Could be as simple as we actually will hear the Doctor’s real name (Eustace? Algernon?), or it could be a reference to a female Doctor.

Because whenever people talk about a female Doctor, some fans always go ‘The Doctor can’t be a woman.’

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

I’m not entirely sure the finale title is a spoiler any more: it’s on the front page of the BBC’s Doctor Who page, which I’d rate as ‘officially announced’.

The teaser is ‘and stand by for something that you might always have believed to be impossible‘ which has just made me put ‘Clara is the Doctor’ in the ‘number one bonkers theory’ spot. Moffat keeps calling her ‘The Impossible Girl’.

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@haveyoufedthefish – touch? They bloody hug!

However one is an old man, and one a ten year old boy, which is why I’m thinking that Moffat has decided the explosive properties are mainly due to the same atoms existing in the same time point – the two Kazrans would have hardly any molecules or atoms in common, even though they are the same entity. The screwdriver very definitely adjusts time potential to make both sides even – it sparks.

The Angels are clearly feeding off some kind of energy of time-position, because they send people back in time – and then feed off the now available energy. And time-travellers can be spotted if you have a multimeter that can measure Artron energy. We do also see the same person at two different time-points in the room in Angels in Manhattan – but I don’t think they touch; Rory just touches Amy, and I don’t think the detective touches anyone. Except an angel.

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@phaseshift – yes, definitely a shout-out to Castrovalva. The breaking glass motif from Bells of St John also repeats.

The other thing is that there are Five Doctors (Davison was, of course the Fifth Doctor and was also in The Five Doctors) and two Claras. Which means that together, they make seven – for the seven Classic Doctors?

Anyone fancy checking for teeny tiny Doctors/Claras in case I’ve got the numerology wrong?

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

is basically Muse doing blatant theme tune rip off. 

I’d agree. I’ve been listening to Muse all night, and every time I hear ‘Uprising’ I’m looking for the blue box in the background.

Don’t panic @whisht, it’s more that I’m surrounded by people who are into classical – and since I have no particular objection to being dragged along to an opera, you tend to pick stuff up. 🙂

 

 

 

 

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

you’re the same bunch of atoms and you’re carrying the same time potential relative to your other time frame self.

@haveyoufedthefish That’s always vaguely annoyed me, and that might be why Steven Moffat seems to have quietly dumped the time potential discharge thing with living beings separated by enough time. (Christmas Carol) but shown that he’s kept it for inanimate matter (Big Bang).

Because, give it long enough, and you’re not the same bunch of atoms. Most of  your liquid-y parts will have been replaced with nice fresh water, a lot of your cells will have replicated and the originals died off … and what happens when a Time Lord regenerates?

But Clara cannot be physically a Time Lord – the Doctor would know. He wouldn’t be calling her ‘ordinary’ if she was wearing a biodamper or biologically non-human. She also calls herself ‘human’. Each ‘Clara’ seems to be very intelligent, but otherwise apparently normal – except for that very powerful mind.

I’d agree that crossing your own time line is the equivalent of finding yourself on the wrong side of the motorway, but I think it’s because of the potential for causing a universe destroying paradox. However, if what you’re creating is the equivalent of a stable time loop (Moffat loves those), you don’t have to worry about any paradoxes. If you do accidentally create a paradox it will result in baby Clara being sent to three different times to unknowingly make the Doctor fascinated with the Impossible Girl and then cause herself to be sent to the three times. Rory and Amy can destroy the Angels’ hotel in Manhattan because – if they hadn’t – Rory would never have been sent back to New York in the 1930’s. 

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

Smooth so far – nicely done, @craig

 

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

I really have to stop reading the Spoilers, but it’s just sooooooo tempting.

Caption contest:

“Right, so – if I’m a Zygon, and you’re a Zygon, where the bloody hell is the Doctor?”

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

Anyway, an idea that occurred to me as I was waking up – RTD managed to provide a loophole for David Tennant’s Ten to return without having to cross timelines with his future self. Going forward with the idea that the Eleventh might have zipped his ‘soul’ into the Sonic he’s about to give River:

Suppose, when his memories are reloaded into his body, he leaves a ‘copy’ in the Library? It’s a computer program – you can download and keep a copy. And we already had that entire story with the Gangers where it’s shown that the copy is the Doctor.

So I wonder if, when virtual River goes downstairs after reading the kids their bedtime story, we’ll discover that Eleven is in the sitting room, wearing Amy’s glasses and reading a book. 🙂

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@haveyoufedthefish and @thedoctordude

I’d agree with ‘Clara can’t physically be the same doctor’. Which is why I’d reckon ‘Chameleon Arch’ – she’d be human then, and we know that humanised Time Lords are so different the Doctor didn’t even recognise one as a Time Lord. And to be honest, I think it’d be a bit difficult to bring a kid up for sixteen years without ever noticing that their default temperature is 20 degrees below human normal and they’ve got a double heartbeat…

And, in ‘The Next Doctor’, the Doctor seems fairly comfortable with the idea that he might have met himself. Is ‘the rule’ a physical impossibility, or is it ‘once you’ve been told your future it is fixed’? Was it something prevented by the Time Lords because of the potential for disaster? And now they’ve gone, the ‘rule’ no longer exists?

If it’s ‘once you’ve been told your future it is fixed’ then there’s no problems with Clara being the Doctor. If her memory is wiped, she doesn’t remember what the Eleventh did or what she did – and so their ‘future’ isn’t fixed. Equally, if the Doctor doesn’t know he’s meeting his future self, he can’t do anything that’s deliberately aimed at affecting that future self. 

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

What if Clara, human or not, is actually a repository for the doctor’s memories?

@thedoctordude She could be. Certainly her ambition – or immediate plan – is very much something that might come from residual ‘Doctor’ memories seeping through. She wants to travel. The thing is, to me, she seems very like the Doctor. When she first appeared in Asylum, I did think that Jenna Louise Coleman was almost playing Ten. Same motormouth, same thinking she was the greatest thing ever, same humour.

That’s now been toned down quite a lot. But there’s still a lot of ‘Doctorish’ qualities in there – except that these qualities are now contained in a very young, inexperienced person. And other qualities – when in Bells of St John the Doctor remarked “I wish I was like that”, I was kind of going ‘Uh, really? Clara has qualities you’d like? That’s – interesting.’

But she could be like the Doctor because she’s a descendent, like the Doctor because he’s designed her as a repository (and so added character traits he thought he lacked), or like the Doctor because she is the Doctor.

The two ideas that would really fit with her dates, the dates that all match up to important dates in Doctor Who are:

1. She is indeed the repository of the Doctor’s memories. She is ‘Doctor Who -the program’ (a meta pun on ‘she’s Doctor Who – the programme’).

2. She’s got all the ‘Doctor Who’ dates because she’s the Doctor; the Doctor memory-wiped, regenerated as a baby and chameleon arched (possibly by River). Then hidden as a perfectly normal human – hidden in plain sight, travelling with the Doctor as his Companion. Because, after all, the one person the Doctor couldn’t possibly be is his own companion.

And the TARDIS is keeping an eye on young Clara (she’s got to look out for her thief; ‘he’ always gets into so much trouble). So Clara is telepathically connected to the TARDIS (she almost immediately feels that Sexy is a ‘person’ who might not like her). But it’s also slightly disturbing to Sexy, bit of a time paradox.  She might easily react by pulling Clara’s leg a bit. South Pole, anyone?

And the memories that are going to survive are the ones we’ve been watching for the last 50 years (@scaryb, I think that was your suggestion).

 

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

btw, is it important that (I think) that “Clara’s” role in AotD wasn’t Clara originally?

Quite possibly not: I know from experience that you can pencil a one-off character in, have them in several scenes, and then realise in editing that they’re not a one-off character at all, they’re that character you intended to introduce several chapters later.

Your subconscious has been at work; you just didn’t realise it had decided to bring them in earlier than planned.

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@htpbdet – I do think option 1 has the advantage that it fits in with ‘the first episode of the series sets up the mystery which will be resolved in the finale’.

The two themes in Asylum were Memory and Dalekisation. oh, and memory. Did I mention memory? It’s a huge theme through the episode; Clara saves herself from total Dalekisation by remembering her humanity, the Doctor wants to be remembered – implied in what he says to Amy – and the last line of the episode is ‘Remember Me’.

The only mechanism that sets up a future problem is that the Doctor takes off his wristband to save Amy, assuming that Dalekisation won’t work on a non-human. Given that Time Lords might well have attacked the Asylum, this is something of an unwarranted assumption.

And the clue that Clara’s world is a fugue state is given early on: “Where did you get the milk?” And the Doctor keeps repeating that. I certainly didn’t spot that it was a big clue, but by the end of the episode you realise that Moffat played fair; the clue was given.  And I did realise it was something more than a joke question.

So I would say that what has happened in these stories has happened; there are no appearing heads, no ‘where did you get the milk?’, no inability to pick up objects or people ignoring the Doctor. Clara isn’t stuck inside the TARDIS and other people are very much interacting with her. She might have some relationship with the TARDIS, but she’s a physical body. Possibly one created from a computer program, but she is physical.

I think the big thing hidden in plain sight in her life story is that we don’t see her mother pregnant, and we don’t see any hints of a birth scene. We also had it carefully dropped into a previous Moffat story that Time Lords can regenerate as very young children – Mels talks about ‘last time I was a toddler’.

So Clara could easily be a regenerated Susan. Or she might be a regenerated, memory-wiped Doctor. In both cases, the childhood we and the Doctor saw was real. 

Incidentally, we could still have the memory wiped Doctor and Clara-as-Susan; I’d think the Doctor might be willing to trust his own granddaughter with his life. But the triple-Clara is a benign trap; it’s designed to interest the Doctor, make him take Clara on board, have her with him when stuff hits the fan – because he must not know what her real purpose is.

Fields of Trenzalore. He cannot speak falsely or fail to answer. But if you don’t yet know… or in Clara’s case, don’t remember…

 

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

Interesting. Whatever Murray Gold has going on in the musical foreground – which can involve a full scale orchestra, choral accompaniment and sound effects – running underneath is always the old:

‘Dumba-de-dum,  dumba-de-dum,  dumba-de-dum,  diddley-dum, 

Dumba-de-dum,  dumba-de-dum,  dumba-de-dum,  diddley-dum, 

Dumba-de-dum,  dumba-de-dum,  dumba-de-dum,  diddley-dum, 

Dumba-de-dum,  dumba-de-dum,  dumba-de-dum, 

Wah -waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh!‘

 

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

Anyway, while everyone’s putting up vids in the music section, a little thought occurred to me.

It makes sense that the passkey (if there is a passkey) for Oswin’s memory, or for the You Clever Boy program would be musical. If the Doctor is being Dalekised, at some point he will lose his passion for music.

And we know he has a passion to music – we’ve seen him listening to Muse, and he keeps making jokes about being on various recordings. But to Daleks, music is ‘noise’. So a fully Dalekised Doctor wouldn’t be able to use the passkey.

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

Oh, by the way, the other Russian composer reference was the sailor called Onegin, (Eugene Onegin, a novel, ballet and most famously an opera by Tchaikovsky) who got horribly dismembered. This may simply be what Mark Gatiss would like to do to the opera: short version

a selfish hero who lives to regret his blasé rejection of a young woman’s love and his careless incitement of a fatal duel with his best friend.

Imagine peasants/servants/guests bursting into song at the slightest excuse and you’ve got the rest of the opera.

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@whisht – errr, no? I’m not walking like an Egyptian.

I’ve gone all Russian. Stravinsky.

 

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

The Doctor and Clara – an image I think may have more significance by the end of S7

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

Clara not gaining access to the TARDIS in Ahkaten as simply due to her not having a key.

I think the real mystery is that the TARDIS doors are now closed. In fact, they’re locked. The Doctor definitely leaves the TARDIS door open as he takes Clara to the market.

That’s why Clara’s so puzzled; the door was left open. Has she even seen the TARDIS locked at that point?

 

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@PhineasF – the Doctor whistles ‘Silent Night’.

I’d say it’s a fairly safe bet that the constant problems with flickering electric light mean that the Silence are hanging around somewhere. Possibly in a Soviet sub because the Soviets wouldn’t have watched anything as capitalist as the Americans beating them to the moon?

 

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

Next you’ll be saying that the Doctor’s put his soul into the sonic screwdriver just before he hands it to River!

Nice thought, @whisht!

Yes, unwrapping this, he could have put the Whoniverse equivalent of a zipped program into the screwdriver, then hands it to River. His younger self, trying to save River, unwittingly also downloads his own older soul into the safe location of the Library. Safe because it’s now guarded by the Vashta Nerada – no one else can live on that planet (quite possibly not even the Silence are safe there now )

And his soul sleeps, to be woken up when You Clever Boy is run.

That would be very nice, because it bridges how the Doctor currently is – calculating, willing to use even his wife and deceive his friends to save himself – with the way he used to be. Ten’s frantic run isn’t calculating at all; it’s simply the Doctor trying desperately to save someone else’s life. It’s the Doctor at his best.

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@craig – I’ve been at the searching for victims ::cough:: sorry, research subjects stage myself, so I’d be happy to volunteer. Like Whisht, I trust she’s giving her subjects anonymity? (if she isn’t, she needs to re-read her ethics chapter 🙂 )

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

Sorry, struggling with the link to the folk tale: <a href=”http://www.artrusse.ca/fairytales/firebird.htm“>

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@juniperfish – I think we may have got caught up in The Firebird as a phoenix, and forgotten that it’s also an ballet by Stravinsky. Musical pass key, anyone?

Anyway, the short version of the plot. The Hero, Prince Ivan (Russian for ‘John’, John Smith?), enters the magical realm of Kaschei the immortal (that rather suggests the Master’s non-canonical nickname) and while he’s there, manages to catch the Firebird. He also falls in love with a princess, has a row with Kaschei about it, Kaschei sends his monsters at him and the Firebird drives them off (with lots of dancing). And then manages to send Kaschei to sleep.

While he’s asleep, the Firebird tells Ivan the secret of Kaschei’s immortality – his soul is kept inside a magical egg. Ivan destroys the egg, killing Kaschei, all the monsters vanish, the real people inside this magical world wake up, Ivan gets  the princess, and all dance.

I wouldn’t say that we’re following this plot exactly, but what strikes me is:

The tiny clues are to a ‘land of fiction’ (the twine), a ‘magical land’  – which @phileasf has picked up on. I’d point out that in both cases there are real people in this fictional land.

We get a repeat of a theme that’s being hammered home in the last few episodes. Soul (whatever the metaphysics of it are) and body are not the same thing. In Bells of St John, people’s ‘souls’ were uploaded and could be downloaded. In Rings of Akhaten, souls could be eaten. In Cold War, the big reveal was that an Ice Warrior isn’t the same thing as his armour.

Equally, in Bells of St John you have the Doctor interacting via a remote robot, in Cold War Skaldak makes his armour move like a robot. Could be the Doctor thinking a Dalek shell isn’t the same thing as the ‘soul’ inside, could be the idea that the soul can be transferred into another body (the egg) for safekeeping.

The folk tale the ballet was loosely based on (there’s a version here: http://www.artrusse.ca/fairytales/firebird.htm also has other interesting motifs; a helpful wolf, Prince Ivan is an incurable thief and he gets killed and brought back to life.

Oh, and when he’s brought back to life, he thinks he’s just been asleep.

[Bluesqueakpip @replies]

@ardaraith – the clue could be in the story title that the twine was found in: The Mind Robbers.

I think the Sindy doll is just a meta-joke; Sindy was also ‘born’ in 1963.

[Author]

Posts