@serahni   I can’t shake this feeling that the Doctor’s promise to “guard this body for 1000 years” was somehow a reference to himself. I did wonder if he managed to use the device to kill Missy to somehow transfer something of himself to her, since she had just asked him to teach her to be good. Is this remorse a reaction to a foreign empathy…[Read more]

I saw a translation of the Pope’s outburst that went something like this: “Where are we?  What are these girls doing here?  I thought we were back at the Vatican — Doctor, why have you brought us here?”  This last as he darts back through the doorway to where the Pope’s retinue are waiting.

@fatmaninabox  Hey, glad you got out alive!  Welcome back.

@wolfweed  Thanks for that very sad news about this terribly hard stress Moffat was under (and still is and will be for a long time, I imagine).  I think Capaldi’s mother died unexpectedly just before they began filming Season 8.  Such a hard, heavy kick in the heart that is . . .

@countscarlioni    the Doctor requesting a coordinated mili…[Read more]

@missrori  Hell Bent:  everybody including Clara regarded him as a selfish monster for his actions, for risking everyone else’s safety just to save one person no matter how important they were. No one but Clara cared how he felt and had suffered; everybody else was more important than him. Why couldn’t he have just contented himself with soup…[Read more]

@pedant  I wonder if there is a sim within a sim going on.

Yes!  I think so.  I think the monks ran their sim Doctor to the point where they defeated him — only first he got the word out to RealDoc, so “Damn!  Run the simulation on, let’s see what in informed sim Doc will do when we do the invasion part of this simulation, and figure out how to…[Read more]

@pedant  My first thought on seeing the monk, walking towards the Doctor bak-lit by the portal was “Buddhist” and they have monks too.

Me, too.  It was the one bare arm extended out to the side when we saw him in silhouette.   Many of the Buddhist monks I saw in Thailand kept one arm bared, for doing stuff with, while the other was hidden by the…[Read more]

@pedant  Right; everybody in SF knows that moment where suddenly the scientific underpinnings of your story collapse under the weight of new theories and discoveries; you just hope that your story is good enough that nobody (who notices) will care.  “Timescape” is that good a story.

The notion I dislike the most is the parallel universe one, w…[Read more]

mudlark  Ha!  How nice.  I’ve certainly never forgotten the opening chapter (I think?) in which a scientist is flying somewhere, over the ocean, and notices the red bloom in the water of the mutant(?) algae that are slowly but surely on their way to suffocating the seas and, eventually, choking off our species.  A beautifully thought out piece of…[Read more]

@morpho   net result of *all* of that is that the (real) Doctor is alerted to an imminent alien invasion, i.e. pure exposition.

What’s the “net result” of Don Quixote, or Alice in Wonderland, or “Midnight”, for that matter?  DW isn’t a novel; it’s a long picaresque tale of tales that goes in circles (Doctor wakes, goes on adventures, “dies”, re…[Read more]

@missrori    . . . “Without hope, without virtue, without reward”…if that is to be the Doctor’s fate in “The Doctor Falls” for doing what’s right, well, no wonder there are so few heroes in this world!

I think there are many, many heroes in this world — and a lot of them go unrecognized til after they’re gone, if then.  The nature of our li…[Read more]

@thane15  Puro — this universe is patterned. The repetition of tropes, if done successfully, mimics the very thing from which we cannot escape: 

Isn’t that fractals?  Perhaps the universe blossoms through time like a paisley design.  Sheesh, I’m high on Time stuff — and real time.  It’s 4:20 a.m. here, and this is getting ridic…[Read more]

@steffstaff  Welcome, and thanks for this: I can only think of one possibility for Earth victory here… And that’s if one of the shadow-doctors during the multiple test-invasions works out he’s in a simulation and chooses to deliberately let the invasion succeed, 

Excellent!

@mudlark  . . . maybe the Doctor’s blindness is not just a challenge fo…[Read more]

@pedant  It is, evidently, set soon after River’s death and one of the canonical symptoms of depression is for people to not take care of themselves.

Yes — you couldn’t miss the shabbiness of the jacket, compared to the swashbuckling dark red velvet one . . . or even the Regency black.  A nice, telling detail.

@thane15  wherever I look on the…[Read more]

@gamergirlavatar  (Good that) the Doctor is blind because this can be developed over the course of the season and won’t be played like a fun adventure we’ll never return to. I can’t wait to see how The Doctor and the other characters adapted to this.

Interesting to see what he does with a condition that he can not talk his way out of.  It’s…[Read more]

@wolfweed  Moira means destiny/fate, btw…..

@thane15  Of course it’s Bill. Fate and me we have a thing.”

I wondered.  Now I have the jitters.  Love it.  “Oxygen” was a breath of fresh air (?); we are *not* doomed, after all, to a season or mere fun and games (and, well, people being eaten by wood lice or nano-thingies or monster fish).  Th…[Read more]

@missy  I quoth it, all right; and I too dread ye xmas special (although I think “The Doctor Falls” will be the toughest go for me, Xmas being a calmer, more gentle denouement, perhaps).

After that, all bets are off.  I suspect that the Broadchurch “chums” (wasn’t it only him and one other writer?) were simply too much of a dicey proposition a…[Read more]

@missrori   . . . the darkest the show’s been since “Dark Water”.

Oh, wow — *can’t WAIT*!  It could be that Moffat took on the earlier, lighter episodes just to lull us into a (false) sense of security, and now — one hell of an oncoming storm!  I would like that.  No, let’s be honest — I would love that.  He’s got an actor with a fine, stygia…[Read more]