I thought this was great: favourite bit was Ben Miller’s plan for world domination that @Craig mentioned at the beginning, ‘After Lincoln, the world.’ Great stuff.

@wolfweed mentions the link to The Time Warrior. Maybe I’m seeing things, but I felt that there was an unusual number of possible references to old Who. We also got the miniscope from…[Read more]

As others, e.g. @Bluesqueakpip and @Serahni have said, that line ‘you would make a good Dalek’ contains so much scope for debate. I think there are (at least) three ways of taking it:

a) As has been noted with the Aristotle reference, this might mean good as in an excellent example of the type. So, a ‘good man’ is the man who excels in the proper…[Read more]

@JimTheFish @IAmNotAFishIAmAFreeMan Sorry to have taken a while to get back on this, but it’s been a busy couple of days. I think, on reflection, that both your points are fair, and my earlier comment on the Doctor’s morality was a half-baked idea rather poorly expressed. Both ‘bad Doctor’ and ‘impeccable morality’ are certainly overstated. Mainly…[Read more]

@bivium6 I’m totally on board with The Mind Robber. And brilliant thought on the Gods of Ragnarok: I had completely forgotten about them. The key here is that whoever put Clara into the Doctor’s life was trying to stop the GI (in the first instance, but presumably with a larger plan), and that suggests someone with the same kind of background as…[Read more]

Some fantastic food for thought here, and I admit I’m having a hard time keeping up. But I wanted to add one more theory about Missy’s identity to the mix, with apologies if this has already been suggested.

Assuming that Missy is who has brought Clara and the Doctor together, perhaps she is the Celestial Toymaker, an ‘egomaniacal, needy…[Read more]

@wolfweed

Beware of any future character called ‘Stream’

Maybe the Twostreams facility from The Girl Who Waited (which seems to have some kind of link to Missy) = Two Masters?

@JimTheFish Fair enough. I think one of the big themes of this series might be that the Doctor is out to correct what he (now) regards as his mistakes from the past. I never really agreed with the whole ‘the Doctor is basically a bad person’ idea that M0ffat seems to have been pushing; as far as I can tell, he’s always acted with impeccable…[Read more]

@JimTheFish Was it the typo on Beryl?

(Am I off topic here? Should I put this on a different forum?)

Anyway, I take your point @Arkleseizure I too have worried about the fact that the Cybermen leave an army on a ship that’s basically a flying missile. I suppose it comes down to how much plot holes matter, compared with other things that make you love a story. For example:

The early…[Read more]

And unfinished business in Pompeii. Maybe one of the Doctor’s past mistakes that he wants to correct was saving someone he shouldn’t have? That would indeed be dark.

@Arkleseizure I think Cessair of Diplos sounds like a pretty damn good theory. Why? Er… not sure either. But I like it!

On the other hand, why do you say Earthshock gets worse on repeat viewings? It stands up for me. Who doesn’t like a well-prepared meal?

@Develishrobby and many others, on the kiss: One thing I liked was (if I recall correctly) Jenny pointing out that the significant thing here is not that she’s married to a woman, but that she’s married to a lizard. Now, some of my best friends are reptiles, but I have to say that if one of my daughters ever told me she wanted to marry a lizard…[Read more]

Another possible source for theorising: what are the past mistakes that the new Doctor is intending to do something about? One guess, perhaps to fit a ‘darker’ Doctor is the ‘Have I that right?’ moment from Genesis of the Daleks. Are there any big mistakes that we’ve already seen in the show that the Doctor is going to revisit?

Apologies if this point has been made already, but something struck me as a parallel between Deep Breath and The Eleventh Hour: in both cases, a key point comes when someone is asked to see the Doctor for who he really is. In The Eleventh Hour he’s literally standing right in front of a giant eyeball, asking the Atraxi to recognise him as Earth’s…[Read more]

@Craig

That final scene in Glasgow almost became a scene from a Richard Curtis movie.

I so agree. When I heard the Doctor say, ‘I’m standing in front of you’, my mind immediately went to Notting Hill: ‘I’m just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her.’ Glad they didn’t go there, by the way, and personally I liked the way it…[Read more]

@cathannabel Oh my, what links those location ‘coincidences’ suggest! I could certainly see vague lines of something that weaves a connection between the virtual reality of Forest of the Dead, the parallel time stream stories of Girl in the Fireplace and Girl Who Waited, and the closing scene from Deep Breath. Now this is what I call a long game!

Oh, and another thing: if The Moment knew how the Doctor could save Gallifrey, why didn’t she just tell him: ‘Look, just go back in time and instruct all your past and future selves to run for centuries the software routine that will put Gallifrey safely into a pocket universe’? Why does she go through this rather twisted process of putting him…[Read more]

With apologies for — as @Whisht brilliantly puts it — ‘bonking out load’, I’d like to develop the theory that Missy is the Moment.

I think The Moment is a kind of ‘TARDIS of mass destruction’. We know it was of Gallifreyan origin (‘the final act of the ancients of Gallifrey’), and, like the TARDIS, it is a kind of object that has gained its own…[Read more]

Or should that have read @Cath_Annabel ? Sorry don’t quite know how to write your user name.

@Cath Annabel Looking back through here just noticed that you had already noted the similarities with the Nimon scene when the Doctor is translating for the Dinosaur (or is he)? Apologies for not spotting that before. And I too am intrigued by the similarities between Missy’s paradise and the garden from The Girl Who Waited. And, as you say, there…[Read more]