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6 December 2015 at 23:25 #48879
so much to say, so little time
I was in the underwhelmed camp until the type 40 got stolen, and thereafter it was pure love…
memories become stories – in a series that has foregrounded stories so much this opens up so much possibility – that everything we watch is the half forgotten echo of what really happened – all those loose ends and weird moments we seize on – who really wrote on the chalk boards in listen – a now forgotten clara? etc etc – this is moffs hybrid get out of jail / middle finger up to the literalists…
i thought the point of the hybrid was that it was the dr himself who started the prophesy when he broke into the matrix – he was talking to the wraiths but the wraiths don’t talk – was he talking to clara – did she help him escape – or a claricle – and if she was there and the hybrid is the doc/clara then the prophesy is predestined to become true
cloister bells ringing – many on here have claimed to hear cloister bells on the soundtrack – will the bells stop
not sure why some think orson pink resolved – it has opened up the possibility of resolution i suppose but…
oh and the real hybrid is of course the MoffCap. I have a theory that post 50th moff feels totally liberated and with cap on board has really pushed the boundaries – what a series this has been – proper grown up sci fi (appreciate some don’t like the sci fi tag, but i quote back someone (forget who) who said genre fiction is too good to be wasted on genre writers)
28 November 2015 at 23:39 #48103o m good golly miss molly
so help me through the confession dial paradox – at the end of face the raven Me is holding it, at the end of Heaven Sent the Dr is holding it – are they one and the same? Is the Dr and therefore Gallifey still inside the confession dial that Me is holding?
dr who / the prisoner / monument valley mash up oh yes
any advances on the theory that this ep was the dr trapped in castle scenario missy talked about in ep 2
can i also be the first (and maybe last) to throw Nietzsche;s theory of Eternal Recurrence into the bonkers bucket of ill considered trifles
24 November 2015 at 23:53 #47764@blenkinsopthebrave the sofa sounds tempting, but not as tempting as my bed – i have a sandman to make…but i will post more about them when i have had a slightly less crappy day at work than i had today (if u remember from a few years back, my boss is missy!!)…but one quick thought on the topic – they take over disused buildings and the audience wander about inside, experiencing whatever action they happen to come across – so there is no linear narrative, you make your own narrative depending on the order you come across things, which fits neatly with my its all out of order theory for this series
24 November 2015 at 23:06 #47761@blenkinsopthebrave – it is indeed about a year, in human terms, but for a time traveller it might have been yesterday or tomorrow. Seriously though I am an avid reader of the site, but a terribly lazy poster. I tend to wait until i’m just bursting to get something out there.
loving the development of the out of sync theory and totally agree that there are clues in capdoc’s hair and clothes. I’m sure Moff has previous for going back and filling in the gaps and reordering things though I can’t quite place my finger on when…though blink and the pandorica eps had an element of it.
there’s also a punchdrunk influence going on this series – punchdrunk are a remarkable ‘immersive’ theatre company for those who don’t know. They did a dr who themed theatre collaboration with the bbc a few years ago. they have a huge hit which has been running in new york called sleep no more, and their last uk show was called the drowned man …they did a pre show event which began with a tarot reading…oh I could go on…
23 November 2015 at 22:36 #47672I can’t help feeling that that which is hidden in plain sight is the Dr’s confession dial. Something about the role of the dial in the first ep bothered me, a feeling that whatever it was prepared for wasn’t the trip to see Davros. So my bonkers theory is that the events of Face the Raven take place before the Magician’s Apprentice and that we will find the dial making its way from Me to Missy. Which of course leaves a Claradox.
I also had a bit of a Pan’s Labyrnth feeling about Sleep No More (that at least part of the ep were the false memories of the dying Rassmussan) so now I’m thinking that one possible solution to my Claradox is that this whole wild and wonderful and very unreliably narrated season is somehow a manifestation of Clara’s consciousness…
28 October 2014 at 23:07 #34252@purofilion nice to be back, finally got to wrestle the mac away from the mrs… i’m not a theologian, more a picker upper of unconsidered trifles… for some reason the jonah story is one that stuck in my mind from an early age, i think cos my dad used to sing “it aint necessarily so”, years later i became interested in whale and dolphin conservation which led to reading books about dolphin behaviour and real life stories of dolphins rescuing people, which led me back to reading jonah… anyway it all came back to me after watching the episode…
28 October 2014 at 21:08 #34245maybe because i was tired, hungover, and had just read my little boy “the giving tree” but i thought the episode was wonderful, and strangely emotional. in fact i am loving the series, especially the wheels within wheels-iness of it and the thematic resonances between episodes. particularly interesting this time was:
(1) danny’s wanting to die comment, echoing the ‘banksy’ character last week’s attempt to kill himself on the train, and the missy / afterlife theme – maybe wanting to die is how you avoid being swept up into the nether sphere … cf the doctor’s self hatred…
(2) some good bonkerising here on the fairy tale / myth themes, but again I am picking up some religious vibes – the “we were here before you and will be here long after you” speech from the earth spirit thingies struck me as classic old testament God is eternal, and that was before i thought about the book of jonah, where a gourd springs up overnight to protect jonah from the sun (!!) and then i got to thinking about how jonah is sent to save the people of nineveh but is troubled about it – its never made clear whether he is worried because they won’t repent and be saved or because they will and they don’t deserve to be, or because if they repent they won’t believe him that they were about to be destroyed – anyway you get the point…
(3) is it all in clara’s head – well i think this was planted in our minds by moffy because of the is it all in mauve’s head thing and the call back to Fear Her
(4) the stories we tell ourselves and the way they become real – cf Listen, fairytales, religious stories, the afterlife … is it all about belief – do those who make it to the nether sphere have to believe there is an afterlife
(5) subversion of the moonraker trope, whereby danny and clara and the kids do not go off to some new colony to repopulate the human race
(6) what surprised missy? that the doctor didn’t destroy the forest thereby condemning the earth to destruction, or clara’s speech which wittingly or unwittingly forced back into the tardis when he had his moment of revelation
(7) how come missy bears an uncanny resemblance to my boss? which really is a thing
(8) no possible justification for this, but i have felt all along that the nether sphere is in a tardis, tho whether it is the doctor’s, the master’s or a n other time lord’s i know not, but if i had to choose i would say a n other ‘s tardis inside the doctor’s tardis and disguised as the bookcase, cos there is something very odd about that bookcase…
(9) oh and i’m back 🙂
18 May 2013 at 22:56 #9658wow.
to me, it seems that the John Hurt Doctor can’t be one of the existing 11, specifically the time wars doctor, because “our” doctor freely admits to his part in the time war, “i’ve killed them all” so it couldn’t be his deepest darkest secret – 11 talks about future as well as past events existing in his timestream so that leads me to think Hurt is a future doctor, and given the specific mention of the valeyard that could well be where its heading…
but i guess we wont know for sure until moff opens up the hurt locker for us…
5 May 2013 at 23:49 #7938mind you, i’d quite like to see clara go bad, she’s a bit too goody goody, maybe too good to be true?
5 May 2013 at 23:41 #7937@timeloop following the great red v blue debate elsewhere on here, maybe she is a redprint! i’m not sure it follows that shes river inversed or that she is programmed to do anything other than be herself.
going back to basics, there are 3 claras in different timezones. either that has happened as a consequence of something, eg river being in the exploding tardis, or a virus transmitted from cal to the tardis or whatever, or it has happened deliberately. if the latter, someone or thing has done it but we dont know if it is for fair or foul reasons, all we can say for certain, i think, is that her role seems to be to save the dr.
5 May 2013 at 23:24 #7934@htpbdet i’m not sure how vigorously i should defend my speculation as i’m not sure i ever got to grips with river in series 6, but i think there are differences, most noticably that claras role is to save the doctor, not to kill him. maybe the big bad manipulaing clara is an enemy of the silence so the key is to get the dr to trenzalore so the silence will fall.
but my preferred area of speculation is the link between clara, the tardis, paradoxes and cal from the library.
lets face it, we dont have much to go on so far!
5 May 2013 at 22:11 #7929@haveyoufedthefish but if she isn’t innocent its hard to see how see how she could stay as a companion beyond the big reveal of the final episode
5 May 2013 at 22:09 #7927@Shazzbot i know what u mean about it being too close to river, but its my best guess at the moment 😉 i wouldn’t bet my house on it tho!
5 May 2013 at 21:35 #7922@haveyoufedthefish i’m with you on that, but it doesnt mean she isnt innocent, i suspect she is has been placed around the doc by some other big bad that shes completely unaware of
5 May 2013 at 21:00 #7919@scaryb i second that re the bbc article on de la mare, not a writer i know, but have kindled myself some short stories. most relevant part of the article for me re dr who was the idea of the joy of things left unspoken, mysteries unexplained.
i think there is something within the character of 11 that is reconciled to the unsatisfactory and imperfect resolutions of the mysteries he encounters, certainly more so than some of the commentators who stress unduly about how mrs gillyflower built a rocket. thats why i like this site, because people here probe the mysteries without starting from the point its all a terrible oversight by moff.
whats interesting to me about 11 is that he is not so much of the scientist / investigator as some of the previous docs, he is more like a maigret figure who puts or finds himself at the centre of the action and lets the resolution come to him, particularly in this series via clara.
5 May 2013 at 20:27 #7917re the fall of the 11 th if its the same kind of fall as in he’ll rise higher than ever before and then fall so low then i wouldnt hold your breath for anything too significant
5 May 2013 at 19:48 #7910@Shazzbot i think the pilgrims were all in jars, and the supermodel army were her henchmen rather than pilgrims. the victorians were great collectors of things, especially specimens, and glass jars feature very much in the current fad for steampunk / retro victoriana
5 May 2013 at 18:31 #7908it was always part of mrs gillyflowers plan that the petrified people would be revived once the earth was cleansed, i think there was also a reference to an antidote when they talk about how ada got scarred, so i reckon the steam chamber thingy was a de-petrification chamber
4 May 2013 at 20:26 #7776i thought mrs gallifrey, sorry, gillyflower, reminded me of some of the naysayers on the grauniad…hell and damnation, moral turpitude, same sex inter-species relationships, disgusting, cancel the series
4 May 2013 at 19:54 #7761wonderful! the episode Gatiss was destined to write – shades of League, Oranges are not the only fruit and Carry on Screaming, great callback to Emma Peel with the catsuit, oh and a touch of Moonraker as well. Who would have thought it. And a big organ (the rocket of course).
Agree with @htpbdet about the shades of Talons and Fang Rock, two of my all time fave eps.
Loved the sepia tinged flashback and no doubt the stories within stories theories will get something out of that as well as the dark room photos (again) and the photos on the computer – wheels within wheels…
2 May 2013 at 22:02 #7638@phaseshift – i find your analysis of series 5 compelling, and what i think is exciting is that i think its as much a subconscious thing as moff setting out to deliberately run that idea through the series, it just kind of seeps out. i think that when you are in the zone creatively, some kind of magic serendipity kicks in, such as the fantastic anagrams that have popped up today…
2 May 2013 at 21:57 #7637more eps i’d like to see:
Sonic the Hedgehog
Spiders from Mars
The Winds of Uranus
The Deadly Squirrel
Planes, Trains and Tardises
A River Runs Through It
The Beast With Two Backs
2 May 2013 at 18:47 #76222 May 2013 at 18:10 #7619“physician heal thyself” springs to mind
2 May 2013 at 18:08 #7617random quote from series 5 a “i’ll be a story in your head. That’s okay. We’re all stories in the end. Just make it a good one, eh? ‘Cause it was, you know. It was the best. The daft old man who stole a magic box and ran away. Did I ever tell you that I stole it? Well I borrowed it. I was always going to take it back.”
stories and memories seem to run through the whole moff era, but going back to cal, her problem was not enough memory, the dr offered to become an additional hard drive…2 May 2013 at 13:21 #7595the only way is gallifrey
i’m a sontarian get me out of here
2 May 2013 at 13:20 #7594more episodes that need to be made…
dalliance of the daleks
a stitch in time
knowing me knowing who
fobwatch
2 May 2013 at 13:13 #7593@Shazzbot did u hear about the constipated mathematician who worked it out with a pencil and paper.
sorry everyone!
2 May 2013 at 13:11 #7591hi all, i think there is a connection between clara and cal (the computer from silence in the library.forest of the dead) so the idea of rycbar as a password of some sort is very appealing.
also Bosj and sitl both have similar ideas of souls being up and downloaded, anf if we speculater river has somwhow escaped the library…maybe via the library in the tardis?…creating some kind of paradox which causes the tardis to explode…3 times, one for each clara, maybe she is caused by each explosion…
1 May 2013 at 20:24 #7478i was ruminating (beat that you cogitators) on jenny being constructed from the doctor’s dna, when it occured to me that perhaps the 3 Claras are clones, built from identical dna, which would explain 3 identical humans, with slight personality differences due to nurture rather than nature. 3 identical claras, each entirely human with no recollection of the other clones, would certainly seem impossible if you didn’t know they were clones.
if this is so, then the question becomes more about who made the clones and placed them around time, and why. maybe its another fixed point in time issue, that clara and the doctor must go to trenzalore. the claras are there to make sure the doctor cannot escape his destiny. not necessarily an evil plot. maybe it is a benign plot, that he needs to face whatever happens there to come out the other side.
jlc says the doctor has met clara before, but maybe he met the original person who’s dna was used for the clones (eg if the moff is ripping “never let me go”) and the ‘mother’ is unrecognizable eg if a lot older.
oh and what if they were cloned from the similarly three worded sarah jane smith?! smiths key hidden in plain sight 🙂 ok pure gibberishy speculation but makes a change from amy/river/tardis. ok maybe ignore this last paragraph.
29 April 2013 at 15:07 #7156Just going back to the point at the end of the ep where the picture of the brothers is altered etc…
at 32.40 ish when Tricky attacks Gregor, the Doctor tells Tricky that Gregor couldn’t cut him up because he still had a scrap of decency, and then says to Gregor “don’t ever forget this”
at 42.29 in the reset world, the other brother is bossing Tricky and Gregor defends him, the other brother says what happened to you? and Gregor says “maybe I’ve just got a little tiny scrap of decency”
so what we see is a kind of backward remembering, that events in a possible future can be remembered in the altered past
i suspect this timey wimey point could prove quite significant in eps to come, especially re run you clever boy and remember
it also seems to resonate with the notorious maple leaf containing all possible futures
I suspect the fact that JLC at the end seems to have come back from the swimming pool is a deliberate teaser with no evidence either way as to whether she has remembered anything that happened in the now erased future…
PS scrap of decency mirrors sliver of ice?
29 April 2013 at 13:36 #7149re the tardis infinity issue, time loops, and how the eye of harmony fits into the tardis, can do no better than refer to William Blake’s Auguries of Innocence:
To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.
26 April 2013 at 21:47 #6769yes, he’s a jammy dodger
26 April 2013 at 19:54 #6750i was enjoying @haveyoufedthefish ‘s summary when i made a fateful misreading, i thought he was talking about JLS, not JLC. suddenly it all made sense.
JLS split up and have their memories wiped and are spread across the Whoniverse disguised as Claras to make sure they can never reform. Current Clara is subject to a cleansing dose of 80s Nu (Who) Romantics (ultravox, Duran Duran) just to be sure. Their mission is to destroy the Master (currently incarnated as Simon Cowell) and to ensure the genocide of One Direction cannot be reversed, however fast and loose the Moff plays with the laws of physics.
We have met 3 of the 4 JLS Claras. no 4 is hiding out with JS Bach in Leipzig armed only with the 2 nd Doctor’s recorder.
Music really is the key to this series.
24 April 2013 at 10:19 #6573Claranet – he he – very good 🙂
24 April 2013 at 09:22 #6568this site is no good for an obsessive compulsive like myself…
luckily my kids took it in turns to keep daddy up all night last night which gave me plenty of time for fevered theorising, and what i came up with was the bleeding obvious i’d been too awake too notice, namely silence versus music
silence in the library – silence will fall (big bang) – the Silence – silence will fall when the question is asked etc etc
vs
music / Melody / Song
[insert joke about John Cage’s 4’33 here]
24 April 2013 at 09:01 #6566re Clara’s clothes, has anyone done a little red riding hood vs big bad wolf theory yet?
23 April 2013 at 22:25 #6519“The Doctor, his Friend, her Daughter, his Wife (Hello Peter Greenaway)”
Superb!! And what a thought, Greenaway does Who. At least the music would be better!
23 April 2013 at 21:26 #650523 April 2013 at 21:08 #6501I’ve just seen that in the trailer for the June Dr Who Magazine, Moff says “There’s often an element of throwing in some lovely names, and then figuring it out later, but I’ve always had a sort of plan for the Doctor and Trenzalore. Things will be resolved. Things I’ve left hanging in plain sight – and sometimes not in plain sight – will be tied up…”
Which I think at this stage means all and any crackpot theories are fair game!
Oh and the June edition comes out 2nd May, have these people no idea of the order in which time runs?
23 April 2013 at 20:57 #6498as a little bit of a diversion, here’s quite a good article on the japanese well based ghost story I was referring to…wont answer any of our riddles though…
http://seeksghosts.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/traditional-japanese-ghost-story-okiku.html
23 April 2013 at 20:39 #6494well well, the Professor did say that, or if I remember correctly he said something like it didn’t show on any of the old maps, and no one could find it, but I am speculating that the well was where the chalk circle was drawn, and that it was a metaphysical well, a portal of some sort…
As for River escaping, anything is possible in Moff’s nu-whoniverse but i think he’d have a hell of a job sorting out the narrative time-lines! my brain bubbles just trying to think about it…
23 April 2013 at 20:09 #6482oh i hope so!
at the risk of pushing my metaphors beyond any semblance of credibility, perhaps the water in the well came from an underground River!
23 April 2013 at 16:25 #6458sorry about lack of spacing, cant work out how to fix it
23 April 2013 at 16:15 #6457Hi all, this is my interpretation of the episode.
We are told the Dr has a slither of ice in his heart. When he goes to the heart of the house, the temperature drops, and in particular he finds a cold spot which he draws a circle around.
When he did this, I presumed he had found the location of the well, much talked about up to that point, the ghost of the well etc. There is a long association of ghosts and wells, particularly in Japanese folk stories, so much so that wells in Japanese culture are now shorthand for portals to the supernatural / other dimensions (eg Murakami’s Wind-up Bird Chronicles). So the circle suggests some sort of portal, as well as possibly referencing 70s horror movies where Satanists draw chalk pentagrams to summon up the devil.
When the Dr travels to the forest, something about it reminded me of the scenes in the Matrix in the Deadly Assassin (and this was without knowing that the Eye of Harmony came from that episode). I am convinced that the forest represents some sort of mental space for the Dr.
In the forest the Dr finds a lost time traveller, who many people have seen as referencing River Song, although maybe there is something of the lost time traveller himself about the Dr, and a monster that the Dr is afraid of, a monster that is actually just seeking its lost love.
Something about those monsters put me in mind of plato’s theory that humans once had 2 heads, 4 arms, 4 legs etc and were then split in two, leaving us yearning for our lost other half…
Anyway where I am going with this is that Caliburn House represents the Dr’s physical body, with ice in his heart, and the forest represents his mental / psychic state, fearing the monster within. To connect mind and body requires an empath to serve as a lantern (an odd word to use if she was needed just to connect two physical universes). The blue balloon is his physical body, the red balloon his mental condition which survives deflation (regeneration).
Why “Hide” – hide AND SEEK – the Dr must search within himself, learn that love is not a monster to be feared. He needs an empath to make the connection and that empathy is actually Clara, who steps through the chalk circle portal and via the Tardis into the Dr’s mental world to save him.
Thanks for reading if you made it this far!
PS Emma Grayling – link to Professor AC Grayling?
21 April 2013 at 23:04 #6331Hi all, fab site, I’m totally hooked.
I’m really rather freaked by the on/0ff bow tie business so went to have a closer look, and on re watching, found the scenes in the forest to be very strangely edited indeed. It may just be directorial trickery, with lots of jump cuts, but it left me with a strong feeling that there are two versions of the doctor in the forest, it just doesn’t flow right. One second he’s still, next second he’s mid twirl, and at 37.15 there’s a really odd flash of the back of his head that seems disconnected, and all that before the bow tie reappears. Probably haven’t explained it very well but have a look and see if I am making sense.
ps the official bbc site quotes “slither of ice” not “sliver”, just to throw that in.
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