@pedant  we know, from the text, that at the very least a regeneration crisis messed with his memory (see Deep Breath). It has never been stated how persistent this messing is, or can be (for perfectly sound story telling reasons related to Chekov’s Ducks).

You’re right; the post-regeneration period is a good spot for establishing some fo…[Read more]

@pedant  (One of the reasons I don’t especially like “cis”, while having some sympathy with the case for it, it is exactly the sort of alienating neologism that po-mo fosters)

It alienates me because I can never $%^&*() remember what it’s supposed to mean; “cis” doesn’t connect with any meaningful linguistic root for me.  Which is not to say tha…[Read more]

@arbutus  see the Hybrid as the Doctor become Clara-obsessed, Clara-addicted. She gets in your mind and stays there. This allows the Hybrid arc to tie in with the Clara’s death arc

Interesting, that this had to be spelled out.  I think many fans had no trouble seeing Clara as unhealthily egotistical, especially in S8 (that’s what Moffat gets for…[Read more]

@puroandson  Puro solo — Well, if you’re going to worry about your mental health — !!  That’s another matter . . . I wouldn’t want to *have* to listen to it when I really didn’t caret to, mind.  But parts of it are great to walk a couple of fast and energetic miles to.

@puroandson  Son of Puro:  He already broke all his hearts and that’s not natural. We are not islands but we can’t all be sea either.

No; not while we’re still inhabiting bodies, anyway.  Nicely put; have you come across the concept of the “oceanic feeling” that deep meditation is supposed to (sometimes) produce?  I’ve touched it from time to…[Read more]

@bluesqueakpip  There is going to come some point, Moffat is saying, where even the Sisterhood, and Clara, and the Doctor, and all the other immortals of the Whoniverse – will decide that it’s time to be gone.

Yeah, you don’t get to unfix a fixed point, do you — not even by taking the long way round.  For me, this is why the whole DW serie…[Read more]

@whisht  @puroandson  Enjoyed the Glass — too late at night to play it loud, though.  Tomorrow!

Do either of you know Glass’s score for “Mishima”, the film about the poet and novelist who went sort of Japanese-Fascist crazy (?) and committed ritual suicide in public with his followers in attendance?  Fabulous suite of music, and that one wor…[Read more]

SPOILER, SPOILER, SPOILER...

SPOILER, SPOILER, SPOILER...

@janetteb  @nerys  I like The Doctor playing the guitar

Me, too — really like it.  It’s a form of meditation for him, I think — better than sitting on his TARDIS in a sort of yoga posture, more like this Doctor than a violin.  CapDoc may be an aristocrat by birth, and he has some of the attitudes and habits of command of an aristocrat, but he’…[Read more]

@tardigrade  When it’s clear that Clara’s pulse isn’t returning, the Doctor is agitated in a way that we’ve rarely seen. He certainly seems to be doubting himself at that point, so I have difficulty in seeing him putting in place a plan at that moment.

Let alone a plan that he has developed in anticipation of this no-pulse-return developm…[Read more]

@puroandson  Damn, I am not deniable, that’s for sure!  I must admit, though, that I have some colleagues who insist on telling their readers, “My characters take over, they tell the story and I just run after them, writing it all down.”  Which kind of puts legs under that nonsense which it does not deserve.  It can feel like that sometimes, but…[Read more]

@juniperfish  What we can see, for ourselves, as the BBC have released the Hell Bent script, is that the journey from script to screen has added greater narrative ambiguity than a literal interpretation of the script would have delivered. .  . . I think narrative ambiguity is part of the creative design of the show under his [Moffat’s] tenure. .…[Read more]

So — his memory gets wiped instead of hers and drop him off — in London?  That’s where his TARDIS is, but on the other hand, so is Rigsy and others who might remind him, literally, of what he’s forgotten.  Or they don’t worry about that, trust the neural block, and drop him off in London so he can find his blue box.

Only he doesn’t (why n…[Read more]

@lisa  “his duty of care” to Clara could continue with out end

because now she’s immortal as TLs are (long-lived but not invulnerable to accidents, extreme events, etc., so ending in death one way or another but probably a long way off)?  Well, that would be a rather daunting prospect for him, I agree.  It can work.

But I’ll stick with the ti…[Read more]

@morpho  @jphamlore  … it really seems to me that losing Clara personally isn’t what bothers him so much as I read it, it’s his failure in his duty of care – so if he knew she was safe, he’d be OK without her. It’s not say Rose we’re talking, where his loss was much more personal.  [I 100% agree with this.]

Well, he was *trying* to set it up thi…[Read more]

@puroandson   I don’t get this closure thing people talk about. Why? We don’t have closure in life. bad things happen and we think “I wish I’d said this to a person before they died and I never did”.

Son of Puro: No, we often don’t get “closure” for traumatic events in our lives; but we know that if you don’t at some point disengage from the e…[Read more]

@jphamore  Moffat in Hell Bent is consciously laying the foundations for what he knows will be the last classic series story, the one that brings together all of the threads of the Doctor’s youth, Rassilon, the Matrix, etc. . . . when it is done, Moffat will leave all possibilities open for the next showrunner to create his or her own version of…[Read more]

@pedant  All those moronic comments about Moffat being lazy, when redshirts really are the gold standard of lazy writing.

It never ceases to amaze me, how ignorant people are of what it takes to do not just creative work, but *good* creative work.  The theme of the “lazy” writer is constantly coming up, and it is nonsense — for writers who are a…[Read more]

@soundworld  Rassilon and the High Council have been exiled, near the end of time, where there’s ‘only one or two star systems left’. In these ‘end times’ where is there left to actually exile them to?

“They’re on the shuttle,” he says, of the High Council.  Shuttles usually go back and forth between commuter stops or some such, but if there’s…[Read more]