@tegan   Ok so the doctor has now forgotten Clara completely right? Including all of their adventures etc. But then how does he know anything about himself? He met her as the 11th and regenerated while with her, she has been his companion since the start so how does he know anything about himself

Do you mean how can he remember his own past, t…[Read more]

@juniperfish  Very nice.  Clever old Doctor, what a caper!  I just don’t know when he would have time to work all that out while running his maze repeatedly inside the Dial.  Except, of course, in his Mind-Tardis time-outs.

Only Clara was in there.  He couldn’t plot this devious ploy out with her avatar looking over his shoulder, could he?  Exc…[Read more]

@tegan  each time he regenerates he basically has to learn about himself from scratch, he would have done this while with Clara so wouldn’t he forget those memories completely? Or am I completely wrong here?

He tells Clara in the diner that he *does* remember their adventures together — he’s just told her the whole story.  Except that there was…[Read more]

@puroandson   Puro Solo — There’s also his failure to realise that some things which are sad and even truly terrible can also be beautiful – which is one of his faults -he doesn’t recognise that and he must learn to.

I think that’s right; he’s got as far, at the end of Hell Bent, as saying of *his* end of the story here, anyway — the memory…[Read more]

@pedant  Thanks for that link to the HB script — interesting, that they omitted the bit at the end where the Doctor *does* recognize Clara’s face, in Rigsy’s painting on the Tardis, and touch it to indicate that *now* he puts two and two together and knows who he was talking to just now.  I bet there were some some discussions about that!

Glad t…[Read more]

@lisa  I’ve been wondering about whether the Clara ‘thing’ will bleed into season 10? In fact, to my mind it might continue to be an influence until this Doctor regenerates.

My question, too.  I think probably yes, but only in a harkening back to CapDoc as he was in S8 — he might well revert to being more prickly, more guarded, more aloof, as…[Read more]

@bluesqueakpip  Oh!  Thanks!  See, the ins and outs of these things can *only* be understood via Library Science.

Damn — the CD player of Rassilon, wasn’t it, playing that stressful modernistic piece, “Torture the Doctor, He Needs it”.

@puroandson  I remember (Son speaking) in Deep Breath when Clara said “I never saw you as a boyfriend, it was never like that” and he said (and this hit me like a wallop) “I never said it was your mistake”.

@morpho   we’ve…[Read more]

@jphamlore  Wow, you have an amazing imagination — wonderful bonkerizing, rich and strange!

if this is their standard of collective decision-making on issues that potentially affect the fate of the universe, this does seem to be another fairly rash one, so maybe it is better they go their separate ways.

Yes.  They don’t even know for certain w…[Read more]

@jphamlore  Is it possible that Moffat has throughout the season been portraying the Doctor as a victim of PTSD

Interesting; it would be no surprise if the Doctor *were* subject to PTSD for a long succession of highly traumatic events, but some core elements seem not to apply (suicidal thoughts and impulses?  Flashbacks?  Uncontrollable ou…[Read more]

@mudlark  That all makes good sense, thanks.  The query aptly symbolizes my usual state of mind, so it’s fine.

@mudlark   I think that the experience within the confession dial is that of a mind within a completely immersive virtual environment . . .  the wall of azbantium, rather than being the real, physical barrier it appeared to be, was a metaphor for an obstacle which could only be overcome by innumerable repeated attacks on it over several billion y…[Read more]

@miapatrick   I meant he didn’t seem surprised when Missy and Clara turned up at his going out party.

Oh, right — for some reason I thought you meant that Missy and Clara turned up in the Confession Dial (well, Clara did . . . sort of).

he wasn’t expecting to be taken by force, was he?

Maybe not, but he *should* have been (I mean, Davros!  Eve…[Read more]

@jphamlore  if you put on a soldier’s uniform, with the possible exception of someone who is a Gallifreyan foot soldier, the Doctor is almost going to go out of his way to make sure you die for your country for your sin. 

Oh, hardly; he didn’t blow up the plane or insist on a military patrol to go to the church.  But he seems to feel that if you…[Read more]

@jphamlore  Wow, that’s a great hunk of background — if I ever knew it, I’ve forgotten it completely, and that’s *without* a neural blocker, mind!  Well, what you’re describing seems to be the War Doctor.  CapDoc, in our time, has shown great distaste for soldiering and soldiers (despite having hung in there for quite a bit of it on Wh…[Read more]

@puroandson  Dear Puro Solo, thanks for that, funny as hell — it is to laugh, or else to cry.  I guess we’ve all gotta eat, or at least cope with, the darker and more rotten fruit of the bright and empathic education reforms that grew out of the sixties (I’m thinking of the ideas of people like Jonathan Kozol (I think) here in the US, actually h…[Read more]

@notime  I still can’t help but think the Doctor realized that Clara failed to reverse the polarity and in fact rendered the neural block useless so he decided to fake his memory wipe. It just seemed that way to me when I re-watched the episode. His mannerisms seem to show that he was working though the remaining moves in a game of chess and fo…[Read more]

@puroandson  Dear Son of Puro — thank you!  I’m just glad it made sense — I was still a bit jet-lagged at the time from a trip last weekend.  The best way I know of to get a good vocabulary and a good command of ways to use them for different purposes is, first — to read.  Lots.  And I don’t mean, read what passes for words on Twitter et al.…[Read more]

@notime  I presume Clara must have been very moved to see the tribute left on the outside of the tardis. She no doubt would have known exactly who did it. I wonder if Ashildr looked on with envy since she would never know what it feels like to be memorialized.

Seeing the proof of Rigsy’s admiration for Clara could be very inspiring to Ashildr as…[Read more]

@puroandson  What was great?  Do you mean the quote (which I forgot to put quotation marks around) in #49171, from another discussion board?  If so, thanks very much — I put that on that board myself, in response to an unhappy post by someone there that set off some explosions in my brain, which is I guess “where I got it from” in the first pl…[Read more]