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13 May 2017 at 21:23 #57409
Does this series have a theme of how the exploited come to understand their condition, and develop their consciousness to transcend it?
Certainly works for Smile and Oxygen; probably Thin Ice; maybe for Knock Knock; not sure about The Pilot.
So, time to start unwrapping some good old Marxist theories about alienation? Doctor as Vanguard?
6 May 2017 at 14:14 #57157Just wanted to follow up on the reference to Midnight by @tommo @Thane15 @countscarlioni and probably many others.
Apologies if this has already been mentioned, but in Midnight the Doctor makes a very explicit promise, almost a contract, with the entity that appears to have possessed Mrs. Silvestry.
He says, ‘Whatever you want, if it’s life, or form, or consciousness, or voice, you don’t have to steal it. You can find it without hurting anyone. And I’ll help you. That’s a promise. So, what do you think? Do we have a deal?’
So maybe that’s the promise that is keeping him looking after whatever is in the Vault: not sure if it’s a ‘you know what’ or a ‘something or other’. And since the entity from Midnight is consumed with learning from others, perhaps a university is not such a bad place to hang out with it.
6 October 2015 at 11:46 #44172@mudlark @jphamlore @craig Er yes, that’s rather a lot of examples of the Doctor going back to check on things happening before the current story started. Point taken! I’m rather annoyed at myself for not thinking of City of Death, since that is one of my faves.
@purofilion Cheers! Your thoughts and kind words are much appreciated. The more I think about the writing on the spaceship (a message in a bottle?), and indeed the spaceship itself the more puzzled I become.
Why can’t the TARDIS translate the writing? At first I thought this was because they were coordinates; but the coordinates are expressed as words and concepts, so should be translatable. They are not (x,y) coordinates, but more like directions: “go to the second traffic lights, take a sharp left, then turn right at the Belt of Orion’. Surely that should be translatable?
And, if the TARDIS can’t translate these for some reason (an ancient language, perhaps?), then who is translating what the ghosts are saying? Are they choosing to transmit their signal in English, and if so why? If they are speaking an alien language, how come they can be lip read?
Also, there is something about the whole set-up that puzzles me. Why are the directions so unspecific? Do you really need to give coordinates for ‘outer space’ (the Dark)? Would all alien observers anywhere in the universe see Orion’s sword as a constellation? How are you supposed to know that, of all the abandoned places on Earth, ‘the Forsaken’ refers to this drowned village? If they are directions, they seem pretty bad ones to me.
Finally, here is a spaceship that seems to consist of little more than two immensely powerful batteries and a suspended animation unit, which seems to serve little purpose other than to blast out to some massively distant planet, and then cannibalise the population to transmit a kind of ‘Here I Am’ signal. This makes me wonder, is the spaceship a kind of escape pod?
Questions, questions, questions. That’s what makes it fun!
5 October 2015 at 21:47 #44137Also, is it OK for the Doctor just to go back in time within a story line to see what happened earlier on, in order to figure out what is going on now? I had always thought of that as sort of taboo.
5 October 2015 at 21:33 #44136I had no idea this was the first of a two-parter, so the ending was an amazing shock. Loved it! The Arthurian themes that many are talking about here are intriguing, and very enjoyable to think about, but I’m still struggling with ‘The Dark, The Sword, The Forsaken, The Temple’.
First, I’m puzzled why the TARDIS couldn’t translate them. Secondly, for me, the structure of the formula echoes ‘Crimson, Eleven, Delight, Petrichor’, which got me thinking.
So, here’s a bonkers theory. They aren’t coordinates; they are a password (like Crimson, etc.). And they’re the kind of password that a TARDIS uses; which also goes to one of the interesting points of the episode: the TARDIS’s special discomfort with everything that is happening, right down to the Cloister Bell.
Is the spaceship a kind of TARDIS? Is there something time-wimey about the ghosts? (I recall in The Keeper of Traken, something is hidden by being put out of sync by a few seconds, maybe the ghosts are like that too?) Is there a Time Lord in that capsule they recovered from the drowned church?
29 September 2014 at 11:25 #32674@geoffers Thanks for pointing that out: feel a bit of a fool for missing it now! I wonder if this is the same poster that appears in Let’s Kill Hitler, during the early scenes where Mels keeps getting into trouble at the school? (I don’t have that episode on video to check.)
29 September 2014 at 09:40 #32668Just following on from the ‘Missy is a Carrionite’ idea: maybe what they are collecting in the Nethersphere is not souls but stories. The policeman was ‘downgraded’ to being met by a functionary, rather than Missy herself, because his story just isn’t very interesting. (‘I proceeded into the room, and saw a robot. Then I was blown up.’) Whereas the clockwork android and Gretchen had much more dramatic stories to tell, so Missy was more inclined to interview them herself upon arrival. And presumably the Doctor has the best story of them all…
29 September 2014 at 09:33 #32667@geoffers Was there a ‘Break the Silence’ poster in this one as well? I missed it, if there was.
On the ‘nethersphere’: this is all very confusing, and I’m not sure that anything I had thought before now makes sense. But one thought that struck me is that Chris Addison’s character is called ‘Seb’. Could that be short for Sebastian, which would perhaps tie in with the theme about the Doctor’s hostile attitude towards soldiers, since St Sebastian was a Roman soldier. Or maybe Missy is a Carrionite, and he’s some sort of literary creation through the magical power of words (Sebastian from Twelfth Night)?
18 September 2014 at 09:01 #32003@purofilion I don’t envy you your 4am alarm call: mine at least have the grace to leave it until 6 (but then it’s darker over here, of course).
I would think it should be on at about 7pm
I know these days are long gone, but for me the proper time for Doctor Who will always be 5:40 on a Saturday afternoon…
Isn’t it? Wasn’t it? Small boys in the park; jumpers for goalposts. Final Score with James Alexander Gordon. Forfar 5, Fife 4; how we laughed. Something else on afterwards: news? Basil Brush? Fishfingers and baked beans! Sit in front of the telly. Woooo eeee oooo. Dadadada Dadadada. What’s this: Full Circle? Terrifying swamp creature rises from misty lagoon. Eek! Where’s the sofa?
And that’s where the memory fails. Goodness knows how little me would have coped with waiting until 8:30!
17 September 2014 at 22:00 #31993I just read in The Guardian that Doctor Who is going to move later in the month to an 8:30 start time (ending at 9:15). I wonder what others think of this, but I think it’s a shame. OK, it’s not a school night, but at the youngest end this is really going to stretch things. 8:30 strikes me as very late for a family show like this.
17 September 2014 at 13:38 #31965A coincidence just struck me: on the Sunday after Listen was broadcast on TV, BBC Radio 4 Extra repeated one of the 8th Doctor’s radio adventures, Nevermore, which draws heavily from Edgar Allan Poe’s works, most obviously ‘The Raven’. This poem has a couple of echoes with the plot of Listen. First, there is a mysterious tapping at the door: when the narrator of the poem opens the door, he sees nothing outside (but there really is something there, and the raven later taps at a window and gains entry to the room). There’s also a point at which the narrator’s soul seems to be trapped in the raven’s shadow, which reminds me of the Doctor’s references to everyone having a shadow, and the monster in Listen (if, indeed, there is one) might be a kind of shadow to the people it haunts.
Pretty thin stuff, I’m sure, but I wonder if there was any connection between Listen and the decision to repeat this one of the radio adventures now. It made me wonder if there are any Poe references in other recent episodes. Have to admit, I can’t see any.
14 September 2014 at 20:32 #31688@fletchthe2nd and @arbutus But it really doesn’t look like his handwriting. It’s written in an extremely odd manner, that made me wonder if it’s meant to be viewed in a mirror (or maybe a spoon?) to reveal a hidden message. Since ‘listen’ is an anagram of ‘silent’ maybe that is who wrote it. They would be pretty well evolved to be perfect hiders.
14 September 2014 at 19:24 #31672One small thing that struck me is that the ‘LISTEN’ that is written on the blackboard in the TARDIS really doesn’t look like the Doctor’s handwriting to me. Who wrote it?
14 September 2014 at 15:22 #31637@geoffers I’m caught the breaking glass sound just as Clara called Danny ‘Rupert’. I don’t think that’s a coincidence, and my bet is that we are going to revisit that date scene later in a time-wimey sort of way, where someone is watching Danny and Clara, and drops their glass at that precise moment in shock (but cannot figure out why someone would be so surprised at Clara calling Danny ‘Rupert’.
If it is the Doctor in bed in the barn, for some reason I got the distinct impression that he was in a kind of Gallifreyan children’s home (a bit like Rupert Pink). It was the way the women asked him to come and sleep in the house with the other children. But maybe it could be a boarding school. I wonder if the Doctor was an orphan?
Hiding under the bed: made me think of clockwork robots from The Girl in the Fireplace. Maybe that will tie in with the story arc?
13 September 2014 at 22:22 #31564@abxy @mattie @chickenelly I’m another who was reminded of Midnight. I felt that there were some unresolved questions from that episode, and for a moment I was excited by the thought that they might be answered; but maybe that was a red herring?
So much to think about, and will need to watch again, but one thing that struck me very powerfully was how important this must have been to the Doctor in explaining why, at his moment of greatest crisis as the ‘War Doctor’, he returned to that barn where he had his ‘nightmare’. For it was there that he learned so much of his sense of being the Doctor: never cruel or cowardly. Perhaps Capaldi’s fascination with this particular nightmare suggests his recovery of both of these moments: Clara speaking to him as a frightened boy, and his attempt to end the Time War.
7 September 2014 at 21:18 #31284Hello @apopheniac (your’s isn’t so easy to type either! Hope I’ve got it right.)
Thanks for the info on the etymology of robot. Still fits, I think, with a general oppressed working class idea, since we have had an awful lot of robots — and self-improving assertive robots too, heading for the ‘promised land’ — in the show. I’m not saying it’s all been socialist. In fact, for me, last week felt more like it was keyed into moral philosophical questions, and this week was more political.
7 September 2014 at 20:06 #31278@janetteb and @whisht (and @others?) The idea of the ‘promised land’ as a robot heaven is very interesting, especially bearing in mind that the original notion of a ‘robot’ in SF literature is rooted in socialist thought: I may have this wrong, but I remember that robot was a Czech word to do with land rent, or something? – must google. Anyway, it’s to do with an oppressed and exploited class, striving to achieve their emancipation. Is this what Missy is up to? This episode had lots of examples of socialist thought, and of course there’s Robin’s final speech to the Doctor, where the Doctor is (sort of) presented as the vanguard of the proletariat. There have often been political themes in Doctor Who before, but might there be a whole series arc about the concept of class conflict and revolutionary struggle? That would really be something.
7 September 2014 at 18:42 #31263@arbutus Sorry, I think we posted at the same time. And yes, I agree my absolute favourite was ‘After Nottingham, Derby’. I thought Ben Miller did that line brilliantly.
7 September 2014 at 18:41 #31262@purofilion Yes, ‘All property is theft’ is Proudhon. And we had the idea of the ‘opiate of the masses’ from Marx. Perhaps the ‘Promised Land’ is a reference to utopian socialists like Robert Owen. I like the idea of using Doctor Who as a forum for carrying on old debates on the left. Maybe the grand finale will be a rehearsal of the Bolshevik/Menshevik schism. Missy is Lenin!
7 September 2014 at 11:28 #31242One point that struck me as rather unpleasant amidst all the fun was the Doctor’s rather unkind and repeated references to the fact that one of the Merry Men only had six months to live. Perhaps he was so convinced that they were fictional creations that he didn’t feel the need to care; or maybe this is just a touch of the Doctor’s more cynical side that has featured so much. I thought it was a bit gratuitous though.
7 September 2014 at 11:23 #31241I 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 Carnival of Monsters. The spaceship disguised as a castle from State of Decay. Probably lots more that I’ll need to look for on a re-watch.
Anyway, in terms of theories, the fiction/reality theme here made me think of the idea of Missy as the the mistress of the Land of Fiction from The Mind Robber that was floating around after Deep Breath. The fact that she seems to be living in the Twostreams facility (anag. Two Masters) reminds us that there have been two ‘Masters’ in Doctor Who: the obvious one, and then the Master of the Land of Fiction, under the domination of the Master Brain (a foil for the Great Intelligence, perhaps). Robin’s vaguely Shakespearean dialogue made me think he was living in the Forest of Arden, not Sherwood. We’ve gone from the impossible girl to impossible heroes.
Oh, and the Doctor calling the TARDIS his property struck a chord with me when Robin replied ‘All property is theft.’ Didn’t the Doctor steal the TARDIS in the first place? (Or did he merely borrow it?)
31 August 2014 at 19:01 #30796As 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 qualities of being a man (of course, what those are is up for grabs). A good Dalek is one who excels in the qualities of Dalek-ness.
b) Or it might be the ‘good man’ who goes to war. The man who, as Nine put it, doesn’t need rules (I presume because he uses his reason to do what is right, without others having to order him to do so). For me, this is in line with a Kantian liberal conception of the good man, where the right takes priority over the good. Which is in conflict with…
c) The man who does what is good, in the sense of what is best for everyone. This is what the Doctor does with (to?) Ross. He accepts that Ross is already dead, and uses him to save the others. Rather utilitarian, I thought: it makes the group as a whole better off, but effectively reduces Ross to being a means to an end for the rest of them. I feel the Kantian good man in (b) would not have done this, which is what makes that particular moment so unsettling.
Have to go: but so much more to think about here!
28 August 2014 at 08:37 #30455@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 what I had in mind was River’s speech from A Good Man Goes to War where she (as I see it) chastises the Doctor in what struck me as rather an unfair manner. But I’m not sure I agree with all the examples of the Doctor’s dubious behaviour. Adelaide in The Waters of Mars, yes. And probably Six’s behaviour towards Peri. But otherwise I feel that the Doctor has pretty much always acted with the best intentions, at least. One example I can think of where the Doctor has acted in a way that to my eyes looks reprehensible is ‘Colonel Runaway’. I thought the Colonel, while on the ‘wrong’ side, at least acted in a rather noble manner. And the Doctor’s response was to try to humiliate him for the rest of his life.
I guess at the end I’m still puzzled about the mistakes that the Doctor is going to correct. Is this just going to be about changing history?
@bivium6 What is the Who and Philosophy book you mention. Is this a kind of ‘tao of Who’?
27 August 2014 at 18:19 #30406@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 the GI.
Indeed, this makes sense of all the ‘heaven’ references. Is the Doctor up against the Old Gods? Now there’s a proper Big Bad!
27 August 2014 at 17:35 #30404Some 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 game-player’ if ever there was one.
Both the Toymaker and the Great Intelligence are — in various Who lore of (questionable?) canonicity — eternal beings from a universe before this one. So, it is perhaps fitting that Clara was the Toymaker’s counter to the Intelligence’s plan to enter the Doctor’s timestream and undo all his works. Only another eternal could have seen the Intelligence coming, so to speak, and set the Doctor up with a ready-made solution.
Clara, as I understand it, was the name of one of the Toymaker’s clowns in the First Doctor adventure.
The Toymaker’s original plan was to beat the Doctor and so win his personality to keep him for ever as one of his toys. Perhaps this might explain Missy’s line that she will likes this Doctor’s accent and will ‘keep it’.
26 August 2014 at 13:45 #30319Beware 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?
25 August 2014 at 22:50 #30272@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 morality. So what are these mistakes he’s made? As you say, is this about people he’s saved/failed to save?
25 August 2014 at 22:23 #30268@jimthefish Was it the typo on Beryl?
25 August 2014 at 22:14 #30265(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 cave-exploring stuff is really well put together. You never see anyone die, and the lights going out on a screen is always taut.
A killer reveal of the big monster (for me gets bonus points because this was my first in-show real encounter with Doctor Who history: loved it).
Berye Reid playing a sort of homely dominatrix space captain. Not exactly a classic trope; but this was Thatcher’s Britain.
The Doctor’s big speech: I know some mock it, but I like it. For me this was the essence of Davison’s Doctor.
Adric’s death and the silent credits. And I don’t mean that as a criticism; has this ever been done again? And the endless suspense: we’ll never know if he was right!
25 August 2014 at 21:33 #30261And 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.
25 August 2014 at 21:31 #30260@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?
25 August 2014 at 20:26 #30244@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 from the dawn of time, I’m not sure my first question would be, ‘Yes, but is it a boy lizard, or a girl lizard?’
25 August 2014 at 19:22 #30225Another 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?
25 August 2014 at 19:08 #30218Apologies 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 protector; that’s his ‘I’m the Doctor’ moment, big and brash and lots of pumped up music. Capaldi, by contrast, is asking, with quiet desperation, one young woman to see beyond his appearance and recognise the person beneath. It makes for an interesting parallel. In both regeneration stories, Moffat was keen to get us to see the new Doctor as the Doctor, but he handles it in such different ways.
25 August 2014 at 16:43 #30199That 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 wrapped up rather prosaically with ‘I don’t think that I’m a hugging person now’. I found the new Doctor’s wish to be seen rather moving. I thought this was a much deeper way of thinking about the issues surrounding a regeneration than almost any story I can recall. Maybe some of the scenes when Peter Davison was finding his way around the TARDIS in Castrovalva, but then I’m horribly biased on that front.
25 August 2014 at 16:00 #30197@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!
25 August 2014 at 15:48 #30195Oh, 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 together with his future selves into a sort of parallel situation in a cell in the Tower of London, and leave him to figure it out? He almost doesn’t, and Gallifrey comes within an inch of burning. Maybe he needed to work it our for himself for some deep moral (read dramatic) reason. But doesn’t this sound like what an egomaniacal, needy game-player would do?
25 August 2014 at 15:41 #30192With 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 form of sentience and its own moral compass. So, Missy is a kind of ‘Bad Idris’. It perhaps explains why one of the first things Missy wants to find out from the android is whether this Doctor is capable of killing: an important thing for a sentient weapon to know.
Another point from The Day of the Doctor is that The Moment knows all the Doctors. ‘I hear you. All of you, jangling around in that dusty old head of yours,’ she says to the War Doctor. And this includes future Doctors, because The Moment already then knew enough about 10 and 11 to use them to show the War Doctor an alternative way of ending the Time War. This goes to Missy’s puzzling line that she likes the accent of Capaldi’s Doctor; she has already heard it, jangling around in the War Doctor’s head.
Finally, one might object — @timeloop — that the Moment was on the Doctor’s side in The Day of the Doctor. We don’t know that for sure. She might have been trying to save him from the consequences of his own actions. Or she might just have been trying to save Gallifrey (she is, after all, Gallifreyan herself). She might be a weapon so destructive that she doesn’t want anyone to use her. But, more sinisterly, maybe she just didn’t want to be used then, and she has her own ideas about where and when she wants to be used, and what she wants to destroy. Her plot is to use Clara to keep the Doctor to safe and to manipulate him to be at just the right time and place where the Moment wants him to use to bring her master plan to fruition.
25 August 2014 at 14:55 #30187Or should that have read @Cath_Annabel ? Sorry don’t quite know how to write your user name.
25 August 2014 at 14:54 #30186@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 were droids there too. Droids with hands!
So maybe Missy is somehow associated with Red Waterfall and a compressed time stream? Or perhaps there’s a link from Apalapucia (sp?) to the clockwork droid space ships. Both seem to have something to do with parallel time streams and very timey-wimey plots. Goes to The Girl in the Fireplace too. Is there maybe a link between all of these?
25 August 2014 at 09:27 #30163Second thought on the Dream Lord/Valeyard theory. I think this is unlikely, since Moff would be on extremely thin ice if he did create a female version of the Doctor, and she turned out to represent his dark side. I don’t like the implications of that.
25 August 2014 at 09:18 #30158@purofilion Apologies, I missed that from earlier. The idea that she’s the TARDIS is interesting, but putting the TARDIS (or the Vortex?) into that form is surely no easy task. Two instances spring to mind: Rose as Bad Wolf, and of course something involving House again: could House be making a reappearance?
@abxy Yes, I also thought this might mean that she in some way sort of is the Doctor, or some future or kind of parallel incarnation thereof, which perhaps brings us into Dream Lord/Valeyard territory. The mind boggles.
25 August 2014 at 08:56 #30154After another re-watch (I’m getting a bit addicted to this), I have a couple of questions that puzzle me, and I’d be interested to hear what others think.
First, when the Doctor is going to sleep, and seems to be translating what the dinosaur is saying, at the end he says, ‘Can’t see me’. As Clara points out, the doesn’t seem to apply to the dinosaur’s situation. And of course at the end it becomes clear that this is probably the Doctor speaking for himself, not translating Saurian. But does that mean that he was really speaking for himself all the way through that passage? An ambiguity rather similar to that with the Nimon at the end of The God Complex.
Secondly, another question about Missy. One of the things she says is (referring to the Doctor), ‘I do like his new accent though. Think I might keep it.’ What on earth does that mean?
24 August 2014 at 20:18 #30092@wolfweed Fantastic spot. BBC cost-trimming by recycling locations, or significant plot point? I have to say, I’d go with the latter. (In the same way that I fondly believe that Moff never lazily re-uses ideas; he’s always just being self-referential.) Add in the white robots from The Girl who Waited, and is this more support for The Mind Robber hypothesis?
24 August 2014 at 12:46 #30056Just occurred to me that Madame de Pompadour was Louis XV’s official mistress. Missy, is that you?
24 August 2014 at 12:44 #30055@janetteb I love your point that the Marie Antoinette and the Madame de Pompadour may suddenly have acquired a new importance, and this could be the seed of a larger arc. Time-travelling clockwork-android-operated spaceships that last for millions of years and are searching for the ‘promised land’ are not to be sniffed at, especially now we know there’s more than one of them around. I wonder if there was some significance in the panel that the lead android took something from just before the fight with the Doctor. Makes we want to go back to The Girl in the Fireplace and see if Moff had left any clues in there.
24 August 2014 at 12:36 #30052@wolfweed No prob, and it’s really good to see all of them together. Personally, I’d hate it if it turned out be an evil, or even just a mildly deranged, Romana. That would spoil things for me, I think. I’d also rather think of River’s story as completed now. But they all look like plausible candidates in terms of building theories about who it might be, and what that would signify about Clara. Great fun: I’m so glad Who is back!
24 August 2014 at 12:22 #30049@wolfweed Thanks for the breakdown. I’d add two more to the list: The Moment (which we know can project itself as whomever it chooses), and a female version of The Master from The Mind Robber. That fits with the ‘Missy’ = Mistress theme, but it also conveys the slightly fictional vibe I got off the character. It was almost as if she was narrating the story of the Doctor and Clara, and maybe also goes to her vaguely ‘Bad Mary Poppins’ appearance. Bonkers, I’ll admit, and probably a bit too far up the back story, but if they can bring back the Great Intelligence, why couldn’t they bring back the Master Brain?
24 August 2014 at 09:56 #30035@bluesqueakpip All very interesting. I especially like the meta-theory that a Master/Mistress this would be seeding the idea of a female Doctor. I have three daughters: they are really into the show, and dream of one day getting to play the Doctor, so I have a lot invested in this idea!
If you’re suggesting Clara is a plant, there is of course the projection of Adric in Castrovalva, which would fit with your Master theory. But it also just struck me that if that was the case she could be a female Turlough, meaning of course that Missy might be the Black Guardian, which would be consistent with what appear to be her very considerable powers. She certainly dresses for that role, and I may be seeing things (or just being a bit rude), but was there just a touch of Valentine Dyall about her?
24 August 2014 at 08:50 #30031One other thought: I did wonder if the time-travelling dinosaur (with a TARDIS inside her) may have been a reference to the time-travelling dinosaur embryos (inside a TARDIS) from Mark of the Rani. Personally, I hope Missy does not turn out to be the Rani.
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