@phamlore  Wow, great saga there!  I like it very much!

About Vastra — does she time-travel?  I think she started out a while back in some — caves on another planet?  And then fighting the Sontarans — she wouldn’t have a Tardis, but she sure did get around, and now seems anchored in Victorian London.

@purofilion @janetteb  Thanks for the run down on the basement full of trolls at the Guardian — sounds about right to me!  Naw, the haters don’t love the show, never did.  They actually hate it.  IMO, they are pudding brains, poor dears, the real thing on display.  No wonder you came away wanting a shower!  All that pudding splashing wildly about . . .

@bluesqueakpip  Of course Boy Davros ended up believing that compassion was wrong. The Soldier shows compassion and gets killed, helping Boy Davros not one jot.
The Doctor chucks him his screwdriver, lectures him on being the ‘one’ instead of the ‘thousand’ and (seemingly) leaves him to get on with it. If Boy Davros did then escape the handmine…[Read more]

@serahni  Thank you — and I like your point about the tense chosen, “When do I not see you?”  Checking out the words Moffat chooses is always a good idea — sometimes those choices unpack in such interesting ways.  This is why it drives me to distraction when whiners moan on about “lazy writing”.  They have no clue to the high quality of what the…[Read more]

@scaryb  It’s not in the DNA of the show to put the central character on that much of a psychological journey (Look at the problems they ended up with, with the last of the TimeLords thing). The companions change so the Doctor doesn’t have to.

Brilliant!  Yes . . . he is not and can never be a child-murderer, except in a horror show about a good…[Read more]

Damn.  “Confession *dial*”.  There.  I’m behind on so much that I’ve got calendars on the brain.

@stellaluce33  I like your thought, there; that would make a truly ghastly series arc, wouldn’t it?  Boy Davros has to survive to become Monster Davros or the universe collapses, so — Sorry, Clara.  Oy.  Surely not!  Um.  It is rather rather splendid bonkerising, though . . .

@lisa  Oooh, the CC  personifying itself as the Moment did?  Well, if it’s the Doctor’s story, the *whole* story, then couldn’t the CC manifest as any one of the past Doctors whenever somebody triggered the right “bookmark”?

@scaryb  Whatever, that last scene of the Doctor shouting “Exterminate!” is as chilling as the boy saying his name at the beginning.

Yeah, beautiful bookending there — call, as it were, and response . . . separated by the rest of the episode.  That missing piece is a whopper too — getting back without the Tardis (how?!), but with a gun stick…[Read more]

@mudlark   * In passing it has occurred to me to wonder whether this ‘will’ was a document comparable to what we mean by a Last Will and Testament, or whether it was something compiled and updated as an ongoing document of a Timelors’s lifetime.

Oh, I like that!  And I think the “Will” would indeed have to be different from our “what to do with…[Read more]

@serahni  ALL of his incarnations are invited to the party, and yet most of their previous contact with the Claricles has involved them not seeing her at all!

Yes — but S8 was all about mutually seeing, finally, and for Clara, CapDoc at his own multiple party, his celebration of the great wide universal canvas that’s his home, it’s his…[Read more]

@arbutus  @mudlark   One of the ways in which Capaldi is, for me, absolutely the Doctor, is the way in which he is able so subtly to convey glimpses of those earlier selves. I completely agree with this. And I too loved the “all of me are invited” line!

YES!  So yes.  And “it’s my party” — he can be as flamboyant and changeable as he wants to…[Read more]

@doctordoctorwho  Michelle Gomez spoke about the Nethersphere making a possible return.
Perhaps that’s where Missy and Clara have ended up?

Maybe; but in Danny’s last conversation with Clara (when he sent the Afghan boy home instead of coming back himself), he said of the Nethersperhe, “This place is dying.”  So — ?  Depends.

Hmm, a thou…[Read more]

@bluesqueakpip  The Daleks as children with their choice taken away from them; children with no choice but to be evil. Clara with her Space Dad and Wicked Stepmother. Boy Davros as a child, abandoned by the Doctor.
It’s still about the children of the Time War.

Yes; it’s not just “Protect and save the children — ”  It’s also, “protect and sav…[Read more]

Jude@Fjackets  I wish I knew.  Damn, what a loss.  Do you have tech companies nearby who specialize in recovering data from damaged discs?  Or you might find some recommended ones online.

@mudlark   Leaving him, as the Doctor in hindsight quickly realised, was the ‘biggest mistake’ – the decision which probably scarred Davros’s psyche and contributed to the formation of the adult who came to believe that ‘compassion is wrong’.

If an adult walks away instead of protecting you, what can you think?  That the adult is normal, for ad…[Read more]

@purofilion  There was a feel that the Doctor’s fully cooked and confident but totally alien.

It’s the dimension of time that’s been added, IMO, time on a TL scale instead of a human one.  Vastra spelled this out to Clara in her own way in Deep Breath, but seeing the Doctor actually returning to old relationships rooted in his inhumanly lon…[Read more]

@denvaldron   On ratings — I’d be curious to see how much of the drop (from Ep 1 S8 to Ep 1 S9) was in US viewership, because S8 came to us without adverts, but S9 ep 1 was chopped to bits so ads could be added — 21 minutes of ads, to be exact, vs. 45 minutes of show.  This idiocy made a very complex and grandly expansive episode very d…[Read more]

@spider   For me the great change in tone was the kind of dumbing down of Clara here. Don’t get me wrong, I too loved her being the stand in for the Doctor with UNIT, that was fab! But with Missy I think it was a much needed slap to the chops of us the audience. We have got so used to seeing the Doctor though human eyes, through the companion and…[Read more]

@miapatrick  Yep, old punk; and he looked so happy that it almost made me wish I was one too.  In reality, though, I was never punk in any way, shape, or form.  So I guess I’m just old.  *sigh*