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18 October 2015 at 05:02 #44993
Here’s my bonkerizing re “The Girl Who Died”, what with those resurrection chips and all: I’m suspecting that things work out so badly, in terms of the Doctor’s new bravado about saving people regardless of the effects of those actions on the future, that he will cave at the end and under extreme duress try do some clever, desperate things that involve — “Each man kills the thing he loves” — like that. But Ashildr (who can “see me again whenever she likes” he says here) returns, and uses the second chip to make Clara an immortal hybrid too. They both leave the Doctor (you refuse any more losses? We’ll give you losses, boy-o!) on his own and go off to do their own heroic things.
No, never happen, I know. Just dreaming.
So, if it becomes clear in S9 that Clara *must* be subtracted somehow to preserve the bleble of Rassilon or whatever, the Doctor can, perhaps, go back to the end of DiH (to right after the coffee shop farewell), and after the goodbyes are over, lock himself into the stasis bed (conveniently stowed in the Tardis) for not 62 years but 162, so that when he does wake up, Clara has in fact been left to have her normal life and die of old age without him coming back for her at Xmas. The rest of her life, as she described it to him in Last Xmas, takes place while he’s sleeping, and it’s all ancient history when he wakes up. No Xmas do-overs (Last Xmas is now a dream), no second chance after all.
S9 then goes up in smoke, and Clara with it; but hell, he did say that he never gets second chances. I’m just filling the prescription here, written in the Doctor’s own hand . . .
18 October 2015 at 04:47 #44992@bluesqueakpip Who else gave a drunken cheer at “reverse the polarity of the neutron flow”?
Me! I absolutely whooped with delight . . . I loved this, thought it was a wonderful rush of energy and ideas. The playfulness here worked beautifully with/against the on-going problem of Clara and the Doctor’s absolutely necessary loss of her and v.v. in future. I have some thoughts about that, but they go on Spoilers, right? Meantime, I loved the completely unrealistic baby language (what, do babies participate in the human collective unconscious until they start to talk, maybe? Where the hell else would “fire in the water” come from?). And of course truth to tell, the baby saved the day!
I thought the nod to Pompeii/face was exactly right — not a huge deal, but provided a working context for “I’m the Doctor — I save people!” line. “Choosing” his face is interesting, since he also doesn’t know where they come from or why, he said in Deep Breath, I think. But we do have this multi-dimensional Doctor, the personality running about the universe in a particular guise with variable limits on what he does and doesn’t know about the future; and, apparently, a core-Doctor self that stores away his knowledge and throws out useful hints now and then, and that’s the “I” in “It’s like I’m trying to tell myself something.” He doesn’t just see the universe in multi-dimensions, he’s multi-dimensional himself, as a sapient being.
And that finish — well, it looks to me as if the Doctor has in fact *become* a “rebel TL” (x2, as an old Punk Rocker,) in the form I was maundering on about yesterday — he’s declared his rebellion now against not only the TLs’ non-interfering monitoring (?) of time’s ever rolling stream, but against time itself: against Entropy.
And that way, madness lies; and, sooner or later, deadly destruction (returning to the future to find it irrevocably changed, and yourself possibly not having existed since you messed about with somebody’s death).
As to Miss Restored to Life, well, I suspect that — spoilers for next time, I’ll go there. I do have an odd feeling about the resurrection of Ashildr, though; the Doctor speaks as if he knows exactly what he did to and for her with this gift, and understands quite well that she’s not going to be happy with immortality because, well, nobody ever really is in DW, I think, and certainly the Doctor’s own experience has been bumpy. Did he just read about the Mire’s resurrection trick in that book he was referencing, is trying out their chip-trick, and waiting to see how it works for Ashildr before considering doing the same for Clara? Waiting to hear from Ashildr about how it went, later on, to try to be sure there’s no hidden trap in it for humans? Has he got another chip hidden away to use with Clara, if it goes well — but probably, given her, um, temper and touchiness, not without asking her first if she *wants* it (which he couldn’t do with Ashildr)? Does he want to see whether Entropy (“anybody listening”) strikes back at him for screwing with death (not as the Fisher King did, but still, this is clearly a transgression on his part and he means it to be)? Or worse, strikes in some way at Ashildr instead, making the gift a poison pill?
I thought the episode was a wonderfully entertaining, engaging, moodily promising episode, much better than I’d expected. And *full* of stuff to chat about, as observed above. Basically — loved it. Will see how it holds up on re-watch.
17 October 2015 at 21:37 #44949@bluesqueakpip But in the 5063 revival, they’ll have a *real* alien playing the Doctor.
17 October 2015 at 17:47 #44936@purofilion I still think (when I get a little depressed about some eps in S8) that there’s a reason we had interesting little biopics into Sherwood Forest, the Moon (with its odd lego-like spiders) and bizarro London -it all meant something. Something huge. But possibly, it didn’t: “it is what it is.” And yet….Orson, the thing under the blanket, Clara in some loop
Those tasty hints and oddities — they’re like Schroedinger’s Cat, in a way: they *might* mean something meta, singly or strung (partly or wholly) together, or not; but we don’t know for sure until Steven Moffat (or some later show runner) suddenly reaches back and makes them signify in some larger way. Or, conversely, that never happens, and when DW flies off forever in, say, 5050 or so, those oddities are still undisturbed in the past of the show, never made more of, never developed. And how can we tell which bits were deliberately placed for later use and which get picked up (or continued) because they became cool/useful/potentially awesome in hindsight? I’ve read that the sunglasses were a serendipitous addition, to start with; and Moffat said the “I don’t think I’m a hugging person now” line in Deep Breath was a sort of throw-away, but Capaldi seized on it and made it “a thing” that the writers grabbed and used on into the start of S9 as a base note of his Doctor’s character.
17 October 2015 at 06:58 #44908@purofilion Boy Ilion has his ‘big trial’ for the national leagues on Monday: about 30 show up on Day 1 and 15 are chucked in the first stage.
Best luck and celebrations, I hope!
17 October 2015 at 06:55 #44907@jphamlore, re Clara + I wonder if there has been a decision to not go down the direction of an incredibly convoluted history or to not give what are in effect superpowers to the next companion.
I sure hope so. Clara has just about exhausted that path for now, I think, as a kind of capstone to the super-companion build-up that I associate most with Rose. That’s why I keep thinking, Rigsy, please — a kid with a “normal” human past (so far as we know) and a normal human life ahead of him, except for these speed-bumps coming of for a while with the Doctor. That would be refreshing, and would allow the Doctor to be fully focus on his own problems — notably, I expect, the problems of Gallifrey and MixMaster.
What puzzles me is I’m not seeing any new candidates in recent episodes.
Yeah, none left standing, anyway. Maybe Kate? I’d go for that in a hearbeat: mature, knowledgeable, capable, brave in a family tradition of courage and loyalty, the broader perspective of UNIT, and so on. They changed a flirty young Doctor for an older one with a more somber tone to him, so why not change a mystical, fresh young companion with romance at least a bit on her mind for a mature, solidly centered woman dedicated to the protection of our world and species? Worth a try, I agree.
17 October 2015 at 06:39 #44906@lisa Well, he flouts TL rules, or bends them, or challenges them openly, like trying to use the Tardis to take him to the future he mustn’t return to yet in BtF, but he’s forced to find another way (presumably the “right” way) back. And at other times, “I can’t do that.” “I know when I can, I know when I can’t,” pretty much depending on the needs of the story. In his efforts to keep Clara safe in BtF, he speakd rather wildly about to hell with the rules and the consequences of breaking those rules, but the Tardis keeps him in line.
In this respect, and his quickness to intervene as you say, he remains in a constant state of rebellion — as he says himself (11 I think), “Don’t tell me the rules!” So he is still a rogue TL, bashing his way over, under, around, and through those rules (sometimes); in fact the TLs have tacitly *agreed* that he can and should do this, by breaking their own rules at Clara’s request and giving this rebel who’s run out of his own lives a whole new set of incarnations in which to go on shoving their precious rules around. So — the rules were never that important to them, which seems unlikely; or in their exile the TLs have learned to tolerate or even desire some small degree of (literal) unruliness via the Doctor; or Clara in her meta aspect (Impossible Girl) has special pull with them or actual command over them to get them to break their own rules this way. Or?
Have they gained a conscience, and willingness to have the Doctor continue to act as their get-out clause? “Yeah, we don’t interfere (except for the odd mumble-crazy-universe-destroying-war-mumble), but we’ve got this free agent out there doing good and saving lives!” Do they just need 11 to regenerate so that 12 can get them out of the pocket universe they’re stowed in *without* resuming a disastrous war?
But I think the point of challenging the TL non-intervention rules was not that those rules had bad consequences, but that those rules too often prohibited even making an effort to bend consequences toward away from the bad and toward the good. Which means that what he’s really rebelling against is the nature of the universe: the way its internal logic minus, apparently, any moral dimension but our tiny little fists of protest, leads to consequences that are so often cruel, unfair, and wildly destructive. That’s what he intervenes to try to moderate, change, or avert.
The Doctor is in rebellion against Entropy. He really is a wonderful idiot.
17 October 2015 at 03:56 #44903@purofilion Cruise, a dark haired, dark eyed, fairly short man is playing the 6 foot 5″ Jack Reacher- Scandinavian in looks, by the books – is an odd choice.
Money choice. Like Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut, but nothing since. It’s all the blowhard macho crap that a) drives me nuts and b), when I’m tired of being nuts, puts me to sleep. He seems so desperate to be tall . . . a really poor choice of things to be desperate about.
17 October 2015 at 03:39 #44902@pedant [Clara] could be a single entity living in four dimensional space, but human reasoning skills are not really designed to see the universe that way . . . She doesn’t travel through time – she is temporal (back to the tesseract idea) It has been suggested many times, however, that this is exactly how TLs see the universe.
Which sounds to me like one more enormous difference between TL experience and human experience, necessarily dividing them from each other except for very limited and transitory connection points (adult alien + puppy, but now let’s have some play time — then puppy keels over in a needed nap, alien gets on with their multi-dimensional life that makes no sense to puppy even when awake). Or: when a TL interacts with puppy in a time-linear fashion (that puppy can participate in), TL is choosing linear action/perception in order to be able to include puppy, for a bit anyway. It would be like — willed blindness: I *see* that x and y happen like this, but I’ll pretend I don’t so that I can maintain the illusion of free agency that lets me have an adventure that I don’t already know the outcome of.
The other aspect I see of TLs seeing the universe in multi-dimensions is that if they routinely perceive all of time and space as one multi-dimensional system, no wonder they’d have a hands off policy: what’s the point of acting at all, if everything is fully perceptible including the outcomes of all actions in the already and always extant chain of causality? You end up with a version of fate or predestination: I can travel in time, but time itself goes in one direction and it leads to X by this route that mustn’t be messed with. Probably the only action seen as necessary would be curatorial action — correcting variations to protect the main development = Time Lord policy?
Is *that* what the Doctor is “rebelling” against — TL non-interference (except in defense of status quo) that makes sense from the TL point of view (and is boring, well, yes, if you’re full of energy and eager for action)? So would the Doctor’s attraction to “lesser” species like us be that we anchor his own perceptions in the here and now (at least some of the time) where action and choice appear to be effective options *because* we humans can’t see all of time and space at once? Our limited perceptual grid makes risk and adventure possible, even for a TL who can (including seeing Clara in different dimensions at once) — if he shuts out his greater knowledge and immerses himself in our linear view of time and limited spatial dimensions, where changing events appears possible . . . ?
I feel that I’ve painted myself into something, but can’t see enough dimensions to know whether it’s a corner or not.
17 October 2015 at 00:27 #44883@drben Wow! What a handsome line-up of tarot and S9! That’s a teensy work of art all by itself. Now let’s see what happens — S9 is delightful so far, IMO.
@jphamlore Kate Stewart could be the victim of office politics at some point. That would give her time to have an adventure or two as the Doctor’s temporary companion.
I would so like to see that — !
@serahni If I am way off the mark, please let me know. Heck, we hardly ever know what the mark *is*, let alone who’s on it or way off! I tend to go for the simplest theories, myself, only because I can’t keep the complicated theories straight in my head long enough to figure out how I feel about them. My own feeling is that Clara is an emergent phenomenon, and on top of that (if it’s possible) a bootstrap paradox, possible called forth not by any particular person’s will, be they TL or anything else, but by a literally universal need that the Doctor not be allowed to get all killed and stuff because “we” (everybody) need a madman in a box ping-ponging wildly around the place to keep some creative/destructive spontaneity working the mix of events.
From a writer’s p.o.v., I can attest to the excellent effects of this sort of thing on stories. I had a straightforward story going once that stopped going because I couldn’t figure out what the characters would do next. A new character appeared — almost literally “The Fool” only more toward the shamanic end of the wild card spectrum — and away we went, just on the energy derived from total surprise and the necessity of giving up the wheel to this new creature for a while. But I don’t really expect anything like that for Clara — Moffat seems to prefer anchoring his mysteries somewhere out of sight for a later surprise-reveal.
16 October 2015 at 18:21 #44874@bluesqueakpip I think the post-Time War Doctor has been so traumatised by the destruction (at his hand!) of Gallifrey and its possible rescue that he won’t really recover until he can walk on its soil and talk to its surviving people. As Clara bluntly points out, he’s got survivor’s guilt.
Okay, that makes sense to me . . . and perhaps also, as the person who pulled the plug on Gallifrey once and then shoved it out of sight (even his own) next time that chance came round, I can see that he might need the reassurance that it is, indeed, still there (wherever there is).
16 October 2015 at 18:05 #44872@rorysmith it is possible that Clara may do as she begged the Doctor last series and try to save Danny by taking the Tardis on her own. I can see her rushing to save him by driving a car she borrowed. You can imagine the rest.
!!! Yes — as handsome a bootstrap thingie as ever was!
16 October 2015 at 08:53 #44855@arbutus As to knowing why he left, I’d actually rather not. Hints have been dropped here and there, but it’s such a big mystery, so much at the core of the Doctor’s mythology, that it’s hard to imagine any showrunner really wanting to take it on. For one thing, the answer would never in a million years make everyone happy.
Well, *that’s* for damn sure! Maybe just leaving it a mystery is the best approach after all. As for “home”, well, how many other TLs has he run into while wandering the universe? MixMaster, of course, which right there makes him *not* the last TL, but one of the last at most. Could he be missing just the normal folk on Gallifrey, the ones he burned/didn’t burn? Doesn’t show any signs of it, and how are they different from normal Earth people, us pudding brains? You have to be trained to earn TL status, and then you’re one of these rather unpleasant people with powers they don’t know what to do with so they do damned little except fight a war — the Fisher King had it about right, I thought. I thought all that was what the Doctor was rebelling *against*.
So is he eager now to go back and *not* be a rebel? This old punk rocker who’s just found his guitar and his tweaky shades? That’d be a let-down. Might as well turn stock-broker on Earth. Feh.
Oohh. Too much wine, at a late and windy hour (in more ways than one). Bed calls.
16 October 2015 at 04:34 #44853@purofilion Oh, oh, that’s four minutes I owe you — forgot that we’re trying to spell titles out more! Apologies.
there was that woman who married a tree recently? Was it in your neck of the words (oh my, I’m on form today!) or was this in England?
Married a tree? England. That must have been England; it’s so English, isn’t it? The English are so into their flowers and their green stuff and their shrubberies . . . on “Midsomer Murders”, anyway (a guilty pleasure of mine).
“they ALL went nuts” -and the ritual was the turning point perhaps)? Wait — little nervous now. This is a society that took its best and brightest and deliberately drove them crazy? Or, seeing how crazy they all went, toddled right along making more loonies? Also I’m getting a weird, weird vibe here, an echo of that old Sci Fi trope, “There are some things man was not meant to know!” Surely Steven Moffat isn’t banging *that* drum? It’s completely anti-Doctor, who’s all “get out there and ask questions til you get answers!”
16 October 2015 at 02:11 #44848@lisa makes me think he always felt an outcast his entire lives. That’s the mystery that most intrigues me. Maybe the scene in Listen of him sleeping in the barn was a tiny window into that?
Yeah, I get that too — and the talk of his doing badly at the academy . . . and hanging out with that kid who spectacularly flunked and who now talks of himself as “The Master” . . . something a little dodgy about this guy . . . He could have happy memories + quite poisonous ones of his early years, as most people do. Certainly the scene in the barn in Listen is an image of isolation, of being sequestered away from others (even if by your own choice) . . .
But as an adult, he seems to be pretty confident, take charge type, open to new experience in ways that I wouldn’t expect from someone who’d been bullied or picked on or marginalized as a child. He’s got a swagger to him that doesn’t read as “I’m doing this to look cool, though I’m really nervous about these new people dismissing me” to me; it looks firmly rooted in his character. Though of course that could happen over such a long life: the rebuilding of the ego that’s taken a battering in childhood through more positive experience as a person of power . . . Dunno. Still thinking.
16 October 2015 at 00:53 #44845Everybody on the TLs — I’ve never liked them, found them repellent actually, partly because I never had a doubt that our rogue TL had excellent reasons to get the hell out of Dodge in the first place — even though at first he could be unpleasantly arrogant and dismissive just like a TL because he is a TL and wherever you go there you are, etc. If they never are seen again, I wouldn’t mind — I like my space wanderer as just that, rather than an annoyingly delayed Odysseus just trying to get home (as per Voyager, Lost in Space, etc.).
We, as human individuals, mostly do not grow up to throw ourselves into trying to get back to where we were born and raised, except for maybe a visit now and then (and if we really are grown up, we know that the Peoria we find isn’t going to be the Peoria we left anyway). I see the Doctor, particularly this Doctor, as a grown-up, a traveling man whose curiosity and restlessness (and dislike of politics in general) would drive him crazy if he actually went home and stayed there. I did know, briefly, a person like that — an Englishman I used to run into at a local coffee/bookshop where he hung out whenever he swung through town. People asked him where he came from and called home, and he’d give evasive answers, so one night in conversation with him I said something like, I bet you have little hang-outs like this in cities all over the place, don’t you, and you move around from one to another rather than going someplace you call home. He smiled and said I was pretty clever for a small town girl (which I’m not, but never mind).
Then there’s another question, of course, if we decide to take it as a real question: did something specific besides boredom and disgust actually *drive* him into leaving Gallifrey? If that’s so, then the situation changes: he has something from his past to resolve, this time not by running away but by doing something else. For that, I’d have no problem with a return to Gallifrey. But in that case, I’d like to see some indication that he does want to “go home” but is conflicted about it because it’s a matter informed by some inherent conflict; if that’s happened, I’ve missed it.
16 October 2015 at 00:39 #44844@juniperfish hated Eleven’s comment about Clara being an enigma wrapped in a mystery wrapped in a skirt that’s a little bit too tight – ewww
Me too. That’s the kind of crap that turned me off 11, and also is fodder for the STFUmoffat haters who think our show runner is an irredeemable misogynist. Just gets in the way in every direction. Personally, I *like* the puppy comparison instead because given comparative life-spans and brain capacities of TLs (supposedly) and humans, it’s a good metaphorical statement, a hard truth but a true truth; and while we love our pets, sometimes to distraction, there are generally accepted limits to how far that love should go, even if you’re a TL. Flirting can be fun in general, but actually falling in sexual love with your schnauzer? Not so much.
We sort of did get a tiny bit of Tucker-edge in DiH, when they made the madman President of the world, though, attitudinally, although without the, er, specialized vocabulary of TToI. But just as limits (from “family” audience concerns) on blood, violence, and sexual behavior keep DW on its toes in terms of finding other, better ways of keeping us entertained, the Doctor *not* being a Swear Lord flavored heavily with vitriolic frustration forces both writers and leading man into finding more to the character than most TV comedy characters get. Tucker was a comic character after all, delightfully fire-worky but not exactly deep with backstory or life outside the office — which is why fanfic writers have enthusiastically taken off with other aspects of Tucker, so much to fill in!
15 October 2015 at 19:18 #44840Oh, boy, goodies — getcher goodies here! Found this this morning, Moffat on writing TWF of Davros/Doctor scenes:
https://www.reddit.com/r/gallifrey/comments/3ov4gz/production_notes_steven_moffat_qa_for_doctor_who/?
I have to admit, the conflicting viewpoints part sailed *completely* over my head. Yam an idiot.
15 October 2015 at 05:34 #44824@lisa on Caecilius — mmm, tasty! Thanks! Though I don’t see a way back to Pompeii in what we’ve been shown so far of the next 2-parter — ? Unless Maisie W. is playing a character who escaped Vesuvius back then — Caecilius’s daughter, perhaps, who’s somehow become a time traveler herself who doesn’t age?
15 October 2015 at 05:21 #44821@janetteb I have been visiting a costume site recently where the tendency to depict ancient peoples with wild tangled hair is a constant niggle. The Maisie Williams’s character’s hair appears to be very nicely done.
No kidding — if you look at informal photos taken of tribal peoples by 20th c anthropologists and photographers, there are lots of examples of folks sitting on the ground together to comb and braid each other’s hair, paint or tattoo skin, etc. Hunter-gatherers in particular had, we now think, lots of spare time. They seem to have spent a lot of it on personal adornment (look at pics from New Guinea, or, for more settled farmers and flock keepers, the embroidery and other decorative details of regional costume in pre-industrial Europe — wearable personal adornment). Stuff got beat-up with daily use, of course, but that doesn’t mean that people neglected their own appearance. I think that came later, with beggary induced by agrarianism, urbanization, and industrialization.
@mirime Though in terms of tarot cards I’m getting a Tower feeling.
Ah, yes — that old Tower feeling . . . this whole series *looks* like just what they promised us — lively adventures, romps in time and space. But it *feels* like a tower frozen beneath slow-branching lightning descending toward a catastrophic strike. How crazy are we, to eagerly follow one set of linked adventure stories about solving problems and overcoming adversaries, as it plays out against a single, longer, and broader background story of what certainly feels like oncoming disaster? At least, for those of us tuned in to both surface narrative and submerged story vectors (a fancy way of saying “character arcs” I think), what the Hell do we think we’re doing?
This is a project of and for mad people. Sometimes it feels like an addiction — mild, but formidable, and also somehow nourishing. Very, very, very odd. Was just watching a show about how the brain constructs individual internal models of the world out of sensory signals from the environment, rather than directly perceiving that environment as it “really” is (whatever that would mean), so thoughts are untethered.
14 October 2015 at 23:17 #44799@gamergirlavatar That’s when I learned that Eccleston was a great Doctor and I wish he didn’t need to leave so soon.
Yes, I thought he had a refreshing and welcome grittiness about him and great potential in general — probably one reason I never took to Tennant. I’d wanted more of Eccleston, and felt cheated out of that and so resentful of the new guy
14 October 2015 at 23:12 #44798@arbutus Thank you! I think in fact I lost interest, to some degree, with 10 and 11 *because* I was turned off by the heavier emphasis on those Doctors’ emotional investment in humans. Yes, there were moment of Doctor-ly stand-offishness and even harshness, but the undertone of what us kids called “mushy-ness” in movies that had too much “romance” for our action-hungry little minds really put me off.
It’s weird, really — it took the jangling abrasiveness of CapDoc to make the emotional bond between the Doctor and Clara work for me. The mismatch of this pair’s terms of entanglement — she looks like a short, pretty girl, he looks like a gaunt older man with the weight of a dozen lifetimes on his shoulders; she’s a passionate and willful human trying to choose the right future *for herself* in keeping with a short human lifespan, but he’s solidly fixed on her in a deep, almost structural way that makes her absolutely necessary to him while he rebuilds his psychological self; she already has a function in our world that she’s ultimately going to decide to commit to, while he’s spinning slowly in space without a tether to anything but her, wondering what he is and what he’s for. For me, there was lurching, crooked, but ultimately perfect balance between centrifugal forces dragging them away from each other and centripetal forces grappling them together in ways deeper than the traditional tropes of “romance” — until that tension resolved/dissolved in Last Xmas, acknowledged attraction won, and that particular struggle ended in harmony, however transitory.
But during it, there was plenty of room for her to exhibit her intense focus on her own needs and goals, and him his tendency to flicker in and out of that “detachment” mode where where his “coldness” took over, dismaying her (and, sometimes, him too — “Am I a good man?”). I guess the centripetal attraction holding them — mostly — together didn’t work for me without a corresponding outward force made of her normal, human self-absorption and his alien (and therefore legitimate) detachment. Those things didn’t work for me with Victorian Clara and SmithDoc; it didn’t gell properly (for my tastes, anyway) so the “mushiness” was too sweet, too human, girlfriend/boyfriend for me.
And yes, the whole regeneration thing — to actually see that happen to someone you’d been dealing with as human (but with extras like a time machine and a piano sized brain) would be not just scary but horrifying. That’s forcefully intrusive and unarguably Big Universe stuff, when your own default setting has been the human-scale Little World stuff, even with trimmings of exotic adventure in the company of a protector. (I’m avoiding the Impossible Girl question because I don’t see much continuity between that and S8 Clara.)
14 October 2015 at 22:04 #44795@mudlark Yes, it’s funny how people’s attention gets snagged, in a “but, realism!” mode, on this or that, in the midst of a parade of adventure stories about a regenerating alien and his time machine. Thanks for the thoughts on what a rush of lots of water does. In fact, I remember being surprised, seeing photography of tsunami flooding that looked more like a rapid oozing of increasing depths of water rather than a meters-tall invasion of water, once initial contact was made with the beach in phuket, I think it was, or thereabouts. At any rate, I’m happy to accept the underwater arrangements in UtL too, to keep the gates open to the flow of The Story.
14 October 2015 at 17:55 #44784@mudlark The foundations and parts of the walls of the buildings would have survived – enough for some of the outlines to be visible – which would have made it easy for the crew of Drum Base to locate the church, especially if they had plans of the base dating from before it was flooded.
You know, for some reason I don’t recall seeing the village in UtL, and the church’s remains looked like normal collapse after 140 yrs — with the stasis bed not covered in mud, silt etc. The base itself was shown in that overhead through-the-water shot that didn’t (as I remember) include any wreckage around it. Maybe a mental comparison was going on in my head to all those news photos of the wakes of tsunamis, with so much just mashed to a sort of pancake of splinters, so finding the stasis bed just sitting there with a few boards over it didn’t say “flood” to me as in the coming wall of water we saw in BtF. My iTunes stuff is in a bit of flux/crisis so I can’t actually re-watch til I get that resolved, though, so my comments are provisional.
@purofilion Ichabod may have meant that as it was a mock-up of a village during the Cold War, there were no other people
Well, better if I had meant that!
Thinking about how the FK might not have died but not actually drowned in the flood since it’s a bit like a tornado, I think, in that a lot of the damage (to people and buildings) is done by the wreckage the water carries banging along with it. You can get slammed into a wall and die of that before you have time to drown. Either way, I don’t give much for the FK’s chances of having survived the breaking of the dam in order to show up again later in the series; which is too bad — I wanted to see more of him, too.
14 October 2015 at 10:11 #44764@mirime His conversation with Clara at the end showed it wasn’t a complete lack of caring.
Oh, I agree — he did care, but he closed that off and ran on his colder, more analytical, alien track — that callousness (see also, “She cares so I don’t have to”) that was the only way he could get to a solution and stop the dying. It’s part of him, and he uses it or falls back into it from time to time. By the time he’s talking to Clara on the beach, he’s off that track, the problem is solved, so he can open up from and speak from his more human side, the side that does care and did care — a lot. But that had to wait, while the alien detachment fixed the problem. Maybe “detachment” is a better word than “callousness” for what we’re both talking about? It’s a shift in perspective, rather than a hardening of the heart(s) . . . ?
14 October 2015 at 03:00 #44748@blenkinsopthebrave Good god, *more* activity? It’s 8 pm here, and I still haven’t had my dinner! Too busy catching up and noodling about . . .
14 October 2015 at 02:54 #44747@cumquat I know this will be tough for you to take, but as a troll of course you *completely* deserve it — lovely to have you aboard, oh Mother of Bassets!
@mirime I absolutely love Capaldi as the Doctor . . . I never felt that he was cold, callous, uncaring etc. or un-Doctorlike . . . I think he might really be the Doctor
Somebody over at — doctorwhotv, maybe — posted (more or less) this about Capaldi a little while ago: “Somehow they got confused, looking for their new lead actor, so by mistake they hired the actual Doctor to play the Doctor.” That about expresses it, for me — I think this part is a perfect fit for Capaldi’s acting style, and I dread the day he gives in to the wreckage of his tortured knees and hands over the Tardis key to some other cripple-in-waiting. I especially like the Tom Baker vibe I get from his Doctor, since that was my Doctor (until S8, that is).
I do think, though, that sometimes CapDoc *is* a bit callous because Capaldi brings out the alien nature of the Doctor, which sometimes pulls him out of his learned human perspective and into a colder detachment — especially since he *needs* detachment at critical moments (as in Mummy), so he has to keep his access to it open. When he’s in human mode, mostly connected through Clara, he’s very tender-hearted, what with a double serving of heart to start with and a natural gift (curse?) of (usually concealed) sympathy that allows him to approach beings alien to him with warmth and curiosity (until they try to kill him, and sometimes even after that — per part of the conversation with Davros in TWF).
Looking at that wonderful shot of the FK having the Doctor standing there looming over the cornered Doctor reminds me that DW *is* a family viewing show (among other things), so it’s not full of physical fighting and bloodshed, and this confers on the character of the Doctor a special sort of authority. You know he’s not going to whip out a gun and shoot the FK, so he must by inference be a person of enormous personal presence and courage to be able to essentially talk and maneuver his way to victory over a creature like this, pretty much bare-handed. How many times have we seen the Doctor face down an enemy mainly by shouting, “You don’t get to kill anybody here!” — and then doing/saying clever things to save the others.
We know what the Doctor is by his choice of weapons: none, for the most part, except his nerve and his intelligence — and his Time Lord aura. Whoever plays the Doctor puts on that mantle of Time Lord stature, even if when you first meet him he’s wearing a Victorian nightgown and slippers. It’s kind of amazing — a super-hero with No Special Powers (apart from, well, a time machine, erm . . . ), just the force of his brain and his personality.
So part of the message is that everyone is capable of effective heroic action — though it sure helps to be a Time Lord?
14 October 2015 at 01:54 #44740@mudlark I don’t think that this Fisher King could have been a water creature in any true sense. According to my recollection, he told the Doctor that his people, when they arrived, would have drained the world – presumably of water, implying either that they didn’t need it or had a use for it elsewhere.
He’s not meant to be a water creature; or, if he is, the water of his home world is long gone. In one of the “extras”, a costume guy explained that they wanted the FK to look like a creature from a very *dry* place, so they tried to make his exoskeleton/armor look desiccated, and succeeded — he looks chalky. So when he says they want to drain our oceans, I think that translates as “take your world’s water for ourselves” (and, by the way, enslave you).
For me, that also explains the FK’s reaction to seeing the dam break: he stands still facing the flood and spreads out his arms, welcoming a joyful death by WATER!
14 October 2015 at 00:28 #44737@purofilion for someone steeped in music, and as a visionary in his art, the idea of losing one’s hearing and livelihood would be an unbearable loss.
Reminds me of how in our own time Alzheimer’s and other dementias sometimes seem to target creative intellectuals, stealing over time the intelligence that they’ve built honored lives on . . . Terry Pratchett. Iris Murdock.
And yeah — it had actually sunk into my understanding that the Doctor went back 140 yrs to meet the FK before a flood that did no damage except to kill the bad guy, I might have lost my suspension of disbelief too. But I don’t bring that kind of realism-demand to DW. In my own work, when the background is complex, I’ve sometimes made decisions about just not pursuing a potentially dodgy element too far because there’s a danger of derailing the whole story, or clogging it up with boring explanatory gunkus. It’s that “artistic license” thing, and how you choose to use the time you have for a project. As always, choosing A means *not* choosing B, C, D, . . . using your judgment carries risks. With something as strong as DW, they’ve got a lot of leeway with most fans, much less with others. You cut the knot and hope for the best.
And anyway, @pedant came along and fixed it, so, not to worry; there’s always a bonkerism to get us around these little, um, sinkholes of logic/fact, provided we’re willing (not to say, delighted) to be steered north-by-north-bonkerly.
13 October 2015 at 19:30 #44714@pedant So what is the soul in the Whoniverse?
@bluesqueakpip . . . Because Doctor Who can’t really use a religious meaning, Moffat seems to be using ‘soul’ as shorthand for ‘copy of the individual which is so good you can’t tell it from the original’. . . .
There’s a concept of the soul in Buddhism and Daoism — a sort of discreet energy packet that moves from life to life manifesting different personalities for each life. These personalities are the “false” constructs, as I understand it, designed for engaging with life X or life Y, that must finally be seen through and let go before the energy packet can dissolve once and for all, releasing its energy freely into the energy sea that is the universe at large (the Dao, I think). Leaving aside reincarnation through successive lifetimes and personalities, maybe that concept of spontaneously emergent (rather than specifically “created”) souls works here, since it doesn’t require a God.
I think that sort of “soul” would be a combination of a discreet energy packet and the sub-development, through a physical existence, of the individual personality. At death, the released energy part carries the “personality” part into whatever sort of after-life existence (or maybe just persistence) we can imagine — the astral or spiritual or etheric etc. plane, a Heaven/Hell choice, a ghostly trace lingering in physicality until ultimate dispersal . . . ? Or this combination soul can continue (voluntarily or not) to be active on the physical plane as a ghost, or as this:
. . . that ‘soul’ can be contained in a physical body, an electronic avatar, or a dream-existence.
So the Doctor’s anger and fury might be because the Fisher King has co-opted the ‘souls’ he’s taken, has taken a person’s death – and instead of retaining the memory and essential personality, has simply converted it into a physical avatar with no option but total obedience.
In the terms above, the FK has broken out the discreet energy part of the soul for his own use, leaving the personality part to die away since it has no energy left with which to persist on any plane or in any form (should that be an option)? The FK is a vampire who drains the composite soul’s energy, which extinguishes the personality component that might otherwise have an afterlife if there is one to be had.
This . . . ties in to another of Moffat’s long running themes: ‘death’ does not equal ‘defeat’. It’s not the worst thing that can happen to you: it’s simply the last thing that will happen to you.
Well — the Doctor says there are no ghosts in the traditional sense that he’s found. That may be Moffat saying that death is the last thing that happens to you. But given the Doctor’s talk of the soul, death is *not necessarily* the last thing to happen to you in the Whoniverse, as we saw with the Nethersphere. So talking in-Whoniverse about souls and what happens to them does change what death is there, I think.
13 October 2015 at 10:16 #44679@miapatrick People [here] tend to engage on the mad theories level more than on criticism, because that’s really what this forum is about.
I think, from the comment in the private message to puro, that 109 wanted a place to pick apart the *structure* of recent S8 and 9, second-guessing and condemning decisions made by the creative team about how to keep DW DW but differentiate the new Doctor from his immediate, very popular predecessors — casting decisions, direction, “poor: production values, etc. It was an invitation to a glum and dolorous blame-game, IMO — everything was a mistake, so who made it, and why were they were so dishonest, “stale”,”lazy”, and so on, as to do so. Blah blah, we’ve all seen it on other boards.
What I see around here isn’t that. It’s lively discussions of the shape of the story on all its levels, its arcs and buried secrets to be revealed later (or never); analysis of how episodes work, and where they don’t and why; and ideas about the characters, who (and what!) they are, why they behave as they do, and where they’re going in the long run. DW gives us such a rich feast of stories and characters, and we — well, we do like to play with our food.
Does that sound right to others here? I’m a recent incomer myself, so . . . At any rate, that’s why I think that this really just wasn’t the right place for 109 (or others of like mind), troll or no troll.
13 October 2015 at 09:45 #44677@purofilion Beethoven started to lose hearing in 1796 between the ages of 25-27, possibly even earlier
Good grief — the poor fellow! How horrible. It couldn’t have been from syphilis, could it? Wasn’t there a ton of that going around at the time, or was that later on? The 19th c had so much going on in it that’s fascinating from an arts p.o.v. that it tends to telescope together in my (haha) memory.
13 October 2015 at 09:35 #44676@lisa You’re right. He won’t run. I just looked again at that phone call — “You made yourself essential — die on the one that comes after me — you *don’t* leave me — ” Clara is still wrecked by Danny’s death, and the only thing holding her back from the brink is the Doctor. He says we all have to go sometime, and she says she’s not ready to think about that yet. Does she mean thinking about her own death, too, foreseeing it as the only possible ending for herself, if the Doctor dies or if he doesn’t? That “the one who comes after me” is very ominous. It hints at clear, if firmly suppressed self-knowledge: knowing that she’s still alive and functional because the Doctor is alive; and that at some point he’ll (probably) be alive and she won’t be, and there will be another companion.
But until then, the Doctor must not and can not jaunt off on his own and not come back for her as long as she’s alive, because that would be an unacceptable betrayal of that invitation: “Please — don’t even argue!” She says it as plainly as she can, and he can’t deny it, so he says yes, he promises to come back, even though who knows. They will be thrown apart from each other again, but now he’s committed to doing his damnedest to stay with her until it’s over and time for that “next one” that he’s been trying not to think about, and hoping she doesn’t think about either (only, damn it, she *does*).
So I guess I have to give up the idea that the 62 yrs that Old Clara lived before the Doctor dropped by in Last Xmas really was a dream-crab life, because clearly the acceptance of Danny’s death (and of the Doctor’s temporary desertion) that those 62 yrs of maturing won her is gone now. Never happened. The Doctor wiped it out by going back 62 yrs and returning for her very soon after Danny’s self-immolation instead, to take her traveling with him.
Here she is in s9, still raw with Danny’s death, taking chances, trying to be as tough as the Doctor can be over this regrettable death or that one (even Danny’s — “Yep, still dead”), bouncing back ready for anything. The Doctor has successfully provided Clara with distractions, but he hasn’t healed her — or left her enough time (since the goodbye-lies in the coffee shop) to heal herself, before coming back to give her the stars and planets again, which is what he has to give.
You know, he really *isn’t* a very good doctor: Davros was right about that.
A great Doctor, though. And Clara, poor thing, is on her way to being a great Clara, I think. Whatever that turns out to be . . .
13 October 2015 at 06:43 #44670@arbutus Does anyone know why the groups of black birds might be given such interesting names (Conspiracy of Ravens, Murder of Crows)? There must be a reason, historically, presumably something to do with the negative image of those birds. But it would be interesting to know more about how it came about.
Ravens and crows are carrion birds, for one thing — frequenters of fields after the battle, gallows after hangings, etc. That, and the fact that they will sometimes attack young lambs and try to eat them alive, has given them a dark aura of cruelty and allegiance to death. They’re also known to be extremely smart — as could be observed when ravens mob a larger predatory bird, for instance, as it tries to hunt in the sky. So “murder” and “conspiracy” seem pretty natural.
if Clara is indeed a Bootstrap Paradox, where does that leave Dad and Grandma? Unless it is Clara’s mother who is actually the paradox? Or am I just confusing things?
I don’t think you could confuse them any more than they’re already confused. Too timey-wimey for my little brain.
@blenkinsopthebrave to have her “die” by going to the Nethersphere, and be reunited with Danny not only is in keeping with her many previous deaths as a Claricle, and not only goes back to her walking past her own grave, but keeps her “out there” somewhere, together with Danny again. I know…what an appallingly rank sentimentalist I am! But there you go.
Well, me too — I’d gladly take that ending for her, but I’m pretty dubious about it. Danny did say that the Nethersphere was dying (when he sent Clara the Afghan boy). If Missy had transported herself from the graveyard to the Nethersphere and found a way to reboot and maintain the place, wouldn’t Danny have known that it wasn’t dying after all?
13 October 2015 at 06:30 #44669@scaryb Nice portrait! LvB looks very young there . . . how old was he when the deafness set in, do we know? The death of O’Donnell is a kind of hark-back to MotOE, isn’t it — in this 2-parter, there’s a mystery to solve and no energy spared (by the Doctor) in mourning the already-lost or enormous efforts to keep the rest alive. This is pretty cold (especially since the base crew are fleshed out and appealing, except for the corporate turd and we’re soon done with him — just thing, Schwerski, only dumber, and you’ll see that Pritchard’s not a stereotype — he’s a *type*, the type that gets ahead, in the corporate world). It also highlights the Doctor’s concern for Clara, although he must know that it won’t help in the long run, as she’s riding for an inevitable fall. Also O’Donnell’s fate and the Doctor’s part in it is reassurance that the “mercy” setting often has to be turned on in this character (his default could be the alien detachment that keeps us aware that he’s not human), unless you happen to be the apple of his eye — at the moment, at least. Does a very long life require a series of short attention spans if you’re to survive it with sanity?
Anyway, the cold edge is still there. Good; I was hoping it would withstand the general relaxing of the very strung-out S8 Doctor into the cooler dude of S9.
13 October 2015 at 06:09 #44667@arbutus et al When someone new joins the Forum, they most often start out by saying something like, “Hi, new poster here. Looking forward to lots of cool DW discussion!” Sometimes they show up on the Sofa to tell us a little about themselves. They almost always mention how long they’ve been a fan. What they do not generally do is announce themselves by saying, “Hi, I just signed up to express my disappointment, but I can already see that you don’t want to hear that.”
What got me was that pouty little whine about “Here I’ve gone to all this trouble to sign up, and now I find — ” Which means that not only did 109 (by her own admission) not bother to watch any of the S9 episode to their endings, but she’d also not bothered to familiarize herself with the discussion here before signing up. She states outright that she’s just looking for a place to display her string of complaints about every aspect of the show in a bid for — sympathy? And she’s pissed off to find that this isn’t that place. She’s right; it’s not.
13 October 2015 at 00:11 #44639@supernumerary I think the rock theme more came down to “wouldn’t this be cool, guys!”, and having Capaldi’s guitar right before the theme provided a nice excuse.
Sounds good enough to me!
@jimthefish . . . despite the comprehensive embracing of the BG show in these episodes, the troll-brigade on t’other place are still baying for cancellation. Moffatt seems to be giving them exactly what they’ve been asking for and they’re still not happy. I just don’t get it. (Nice work on the drive-by troll btw.)
Oh, Standard Trolling Procedure — never change your whine, no matter what.
It took us a while to get a handle on his Doc. Is he the stern father figure. The aloof professor? No, he’s the ageing rock star. And I think it works really well.
It does — and since it’s authentic to Capaldi’s youthful years, it sits very well on him now, too. Am I nuts, or was he chewing *gum* when he made the tank entrance?
@miapatrick I like the moments when the Doctor talks to us- I liked it in Listen as well. Partly because Capaldi is so good at it. It also increases the sense of the Doctor as a kind of teacher
I liked that aspect too; and he can be a good teacher, when he’s not rushed or rattled or emotionally involved (see KtM, prime example). I like that too — sometimes he does a thing well, sometimes he does the same thing pants-ily, it’s conditional — like life.
@jphamlore The Doctor and Clara on the other hand are a temporary relationship pretending to be permanent. Neither, especially Clara, seems to be dealing with the fact that the Doctor and a companion’s relationship ends in a jarringly abrupt way
right; not a word about that, not from him — because he knows it’s coming with the anxious certainty of one who has gone through it so many times before; and not from her because if that goes (and she survives), what’s left for her? She would have to re-invent herself all over again as a human, and frankly I don’t think she has the heart for it, and I read things as, she doesn’t think so either. Powder keg a-rolling.
@bluesqueakpip to sara-jane109, beautifully laid out, and thank you. very possible that Clara’s ‘exit’ is one where she will stay somewhere permanently because they need her to be the Doctor. She’s reported dead, because she never returns to 21st Century Earth.
That, to my mind, is the optimal outcome for her, but frankly, I’m doubtful. Although maybe by the end of S9, she’ll have stabilized her mental balance enough to be able to recognize, evaluate, and choose that option if it presents itself. Maybe.
@lisa Interesting that a group of Ravens is known as a conspiracy. Oh, you just gotta watch out for that anti-raven propaganda, you know!
@arbutus I think that the part of the Doctor who put her to bed with jammie dodgers, and sat guard outside her house all night, is currently well submerged in the complexity of the Time Lord psyche.
I do too; the TL stage, which is universe-wide, has engulfed him again, starting with the Davros encounter, and Clara really isn’t part of that *as the Doctor’s inhumanly deep history*. She finds herself shut out of that, a sort of almost bit-player, trying hard to get back in. It may be that the only way to do that is to crash his (resumed, after S8’s trauma) party in a death-defying way that might defy death but not escape it.
@lisa It seems to me that when Clara says ‘you don’t leave me’ that hit a nerve in the Doctor because he nearly keeled over. Why? Because he knows he needs to be with her to help with what ever it is will be her ending.
This fits nicely with Missy’s parting taunt in TWF — that it’s not the Master who runs away, it’s always been the Doctor. So, given that parting with Clara may be exceptionally painful as he envisions it, running away might in fact be a sort of sneaky background desire that Clara’s “you don’t leave me” struck sparks from. If, when it comes to it, there’s literally nothing he can do to save her, it might be a struggle for him to stay and just be there for it, the way it is for people whose go-to answer to a problem is, okay, how do we FIX this?
@rob So the Fisher King will return and claim Clara’s soul Yup I’ve been on the quintuple espressos again
Hell, man, where do you get your coffee??!!!
@blenkinsopthebrave I’m hoping for a longer game; but you might be right.
12 October 2015 at 19:53 #44622@jphamlore In fact I think someone watching Clara who has never seen her before in her earlier appearances would have no idea how potentially good Clara can be at hacking. The transition from Clara I think will be difficult. I would have thought a year could be spent using guest companions like a revived Osgood, Kate Stewart, and even Missy. I wonder what the reaction would be if they instead tried to go with a new Tegan with no technical qualifications whatsoever.
Clara’s tech-savvy — from her scene with Kate at UNIT in TMA, I think you’d get a sense of tech familiarity (and the motorcycle riders I’ve known have all been tech enough to take their bikes apart to fix and clean them, and here’s Clara on her bike . . .
A no-tech companion seems like a poor choice to me at this point; the Doctor would have to explain things all the time, lots of technobabble, or else just hand-waving and gosh-that-looks-like-magic stuff. And if the Doctor is busy explaining to a female companion, lots of complaints about the competent male having to explain tech stuff to tech-ignorant female. With frequent charges that he’s sexist laid against Steven Moffat, I don’t think he needs *that* on his plate.
I’m inclined to favor the idea of taking Rigsy on and keeping him on for a while — he could start out as basically tech-savvy in the way most western young people are these days, eager to learn to complement his art skills (such as we’ve seen them to be in “Flatline” plus whatever expansion the writers want to give him). Of course then they run the risk of being called racist, given a young black man learning from an older, much more powerful white alien . . . it’s tough navigating the wilds of modern sensitivities about long-standing imbalances.
12 October 2015 at 07:29 #44587@rorysmith They then sever ties with him being distraught at Clara while giving us the happily ever after we wanted for the Pinks. Orson is proof they do survive and that cant be ignored. So Clara dead? No, but the Dr will feel as she is to him. Again, hello.
Yes, hello, glad you decided to dive in! That is a very nicely bonkerized theory, though I’m not sure that the Doctor could ever feel that she’s dead to him, so long as she’s not actually dead dead dead, period, that’s all she wrote. The tensions holding them both together and apart throughout S8 now seem to have abated, but the bond is still strong — even though Clara plainly feels now that it’s not strong *enough* any more (“duty of care” is far, far from “Do you think I care for you so little . . . “). She went through the fires of self-discovery with him in S8, and I think she misses not just Dan but that scorching love-and-discord-closeness with the Doctor as well. A revived Danny might be enough (or seem enough) to ease her anxiety and pain sufficiently for her to leave the Tardis and go with her revenant-lover, but I’m doubtful — I don’t think Moffat would like it enough.
But, of course, we never know til we find out . . . that’s what bonkerizing is for — to get through the period of uncertainty and have some laughs!
ichi
12 October 2015 at 07:09 #44586@bluesqueakpip More seriously, I’m wondering if young Joivan Wade is being considered as a possible new companion, and then they’re going to cast a new female companion after they’ve finished filming the Christmas Special.
I think so too. Rigsy’s reappearance seems timed right for him to step in, at least temporarily. But if so, I’ll bet they’re already considering candidates for the next full-season companion, actors’ schedules being the way they are. Only they’re not going to say so now and distract from all the goodies laid out on the groaning board from here til Xmas!
@bendubz11 Re all these snakes and serpents: Rebirth? Shedding skin? That points to one thing and one thing only in the Whoniverse and that is Timelords. With Timelords you get Gallifrey, Missy is off making a plan for something, and the seed of how Gallifrey is back has already been left in “Death In Heaven” and “The Magician’s Apprentice”, you just need to read between the lines. Gallifrey is back and there is nothing anybody can do about it.
Or — The Doctor needs to shed Clara (and/or v.v.) so that he (and/or she) can embark on further growth; and one or both will need unusual flexibility to cope with whatever comes next — or with waiting for whatever comes next to arrive. Thanks for checking out the symbolism — very interesting! With the Tarot, I’ve never gone beyond the in-your-face symbolism of the suits and the Major Arcana, myself. Are there traditionally snakes in the classic decks? I use the (first) Aquarian deck, myself; the boldness and simplicity of the art work appeals to me.
12 October 2015 at 06:53 #44585@purofilion Those who have criticised the opening use of Beethoven’s 5th perhaps forget that Beethoven, next to Bach, was a most feared extemporiser and improviser of his own, and others’ motifs. That Murray Gold did the same with the Doctor Who theme in Before the Flood was an historical nod to Beethoven.
Ooh, lovely — and our Doctor is himself a wonderful hand at extemporizing. Rigid systems being evaded or bent or just outsmarted by flexible intelligence is a recurring pattern in the show largely because having (more or less) sworn off weapons, his brain is what he has for both defense and offense, putting together whatever’s found at hand (although he may have planted that “whatever” himself earlier on, when feeling loopy).
A Raging Sense of Entitlement (ARSE)-where a person believes they are entitled to this opinion due to various issues such as a) being right because they are 🙂 b) they know better than Moffat or any show runner etc….
See every time some foolish troll rolls in here trying to set off a brou-ha-ha, as per just now: perfect examples, all of ’em, and none stay long because there’s no nourishment for them here, and they just aren’t interesting enough to compete with actual discussions already ongoing.
12 October 2015 at 02:32 #44547@lisa River will be reappearing after Clara leaves. She told the Doctor in ‘Name of the Doctor” that she was connected to Clara.
But MissMaster is connected to Clara too, having “chosen” her somehow? And I thought I was confused before . . .
12 October 2015 at 02:28 #44546@purofilion I read the Dan Martin Blog which was great. In that, he had a link to Bootstrap -a 13 mins short film but it wasn’t in English, so ahem, having no attention span, I stopped it. Did anyone persist? Is it helpful to Clara and her continuing story?
I couldn’t make head nor tail of the clip, and stopped watching. But I think the point is, as others have noted that these loops seem to have no identifiable beginnings, which can get lost in the dizzying factor of events once started going round and round. Which reminds me — does a causal loop have an end? Apparently it does, since the Doctor isn’t forced to continue shuttling back and forth here, but how can just going around once end something that’s 100% momentum of some kind, with no starting place to be satisfactorily completed?
Does that question even make sense?
12 October 2015 at 02:20 #44545There’s also another possibility, and that is that Clara discovers that she is in some vital and potentially awful way Missy’s creature, manipulated and maneuvered by Missy for purposes entirely related to the Doctor. That whole “She was born to save the Doctor” thing *means* that Clara was *not* born to be a full-fledged human being, but to be operated as a purpose-built tool of some kind. If our current Clara had to see herself in that light — that’s a pretty precarious position, I’d say, for someone who’s shown herself to be smart, willful, impulsive, bold, devious, demanding, and otherwise pretty damned human.
Missy didn’t say “I bought him a puppy”, “I found a puppy for him”, or “I made a puppy for him”, but “I gave him a puppy” is enough to give me the creeps about a possibly crucial connection between Clara and Missy that, if revealed, could have devastating consequences all round.
And what if Clara, rebelling against Missy, becomes a determined enemy to Missy — the villain who is also the Doctor’s oldest friend?
12 October 2015 at 02:02 #44543@mersey I usually listen to the new episode without watching it for the second time so kudos for great dialogs and music.
That sounds like an excellent idea; must try it.
@arbutus I wonder if Clara is actually turning herself into the Doctor because, lacking Danny, she can no longer be Clara?
I’d say so; Clara-the-human (Coal Hill School, gramma, pretty girl who could have any guy she wanted if she’d noticed anyone but Danny and the Doctor) is just going through the motions now, I think, so Doctor Clara — capable adventurer, take-charge crisis manager, quick-thinking danger dodger — is her only clear path. But it’s a dead end — she can try to be the Doctor, but she can’t really be him; so no, she doesn’t have a clear view of what she wants either, so we also can’t see it.
I like the Doctor with his guitar, but as a rule I enjoy seeing new facets of an old, established character. It’s life-like. The regular people I know stay the same at the core, but develop new facets as they age (and if they’re lucky enough to have that potential + circumstances that can bring it to blossom). I like my fictional icons with that spark of life in them.
11 October 2015 at 22:22 #44515@arbutus I have been thinking lately about how much TV has changed in recent years. This is the first show that I have regularly watched that actually requires a second viewing to get everything you can out of it. I know that there are other shows out there like that, but I don’t happen to watch them. But it seems to me that Moffat’s DW is a show that is designed for the world of internet viewing. I find that rather cool.
That’s what I absolutely love about it: the invitation to explore beyond the on-the-face-of-it story of the week. But I think that’s also *exactly* what one wing of the hater-corps finds so objectionable — that DW has become more challenging, to meet the rising expectations of a pretty darn smart viewing audience. Haters tend to yap on forever about “lazy writing”, when what they should be thinking about — particularly when faced with S8 on — is lazy viewing: demanding that everything be slapped onto your plate for you to scarf up without a thought.
Yeah; re-watching is cool! And writing for people willing or even eager for the treasures yielded up by an in-depth approach is even cooler . . . I wonder if all this started way back with “Twin Peaks” — anybody remember that show? And some other rather devious and deliberately obscured shows that proved unstable outliers since, like that one about the traveling carnival in Depression Era America, or poor old “Lost” . . .
11 October 2015 at 22:12 #44514@denvaldron I think that the Tivoli dressing as a Victorian undertaker is a bad, weak choice.
In terms of sense, yes; in terms of the visual effect, wonderful, particularly the sly suggestion of that sort of Dickensian hypocrisy and general deceptiveness in the interests of genteel appearances. Loved it!
@blenkinsopthebrave the Doctor was willing to sacrifice O’Donnell in order to test his theory, as Bennett rightly accuses him of doing. The Doctor does not deny it. This gave him a steely resolve that had echoes of Hartnell. It was something I thought worked quite well.
Nicely spotted — I’d overlooked that. I wish the Doctor had been a bit more confrontational about it, though — but he did grapple with the issue in MotOE, so . . . okay.
@arbutus He was quite up front about his willingness to mess with the rules for Clara’s sake. I wonder if he feels a sense of guilt over the conclusion of her relationship with Danny that will ultimately become intolerable to him?
That may depend on whether Missy is implicated in some way in Danny’s death, I think. We don’t know for certain that she didn’t engineer it, in order to kick Clara into getting the Doctor to the Nethersphere.
Also, She said, I think, “If you ever loved me…” I think it was “If you ever loved me in any way — ” Very loaded, if you look at it. That she should put it in the past tense (“ever loved me”) and with such a conditional phrase — what a smack on the nose for the Clara/12 shippers, of whom there are many (they’re on tumblr, and thrive on an imagined primarily sexual relationship, whether externalized or not, between these two characters)! But also another indicator of Clara’s state of mind, and the Doctor’s distraction from her now, as opposed to S8 when she was front, center, and dominant in his awareness most of the time. Now, in s9, she seems deeply uncertain about her standing with, let alone her centrality to, the Doctor — and scared to death of disappearing from his view except as a possession he owns, is fond of, and makes use of as logistical back up and partner, but that’s it.
I think she’s right to worry; and I worry about both of them and the outcome of the inevitable crunch.
@bluesqueakpip I suspect it’s simply a case of the alien dressing appropriately but getting it slightly wrong.
Bit like the Doctor, really.Oh, perfect — !
@sara-jane109 But what I’ve found is a forum void of any dissent – all opinion is positive or pettily questioning minor points. So..since my opinions will clearly not be tolerated, can anyone tell me how I can find a forum for me to express my views?
Speaking strictly for myself, I feel a bit saddened for you. I’d say you’re right — the views you came to express are unlikely to find reenforcement here, although from what I’ve seen, “being tolerated” isn’t really an issue unless you’re actively abusive about it. Being comfortable here is something else again, and angry posters do drift through here from time to time looking for chorus-mates, and, not finding them, move on.
I suggest that you go to the Guardian comments below episode reviews, or one of the DW discussions on reddit.com (heavy negativity tends to shift between the “Gallifrey” list and the “doctorwho” list on reddit, so try both; oh, and “doctorwhocirclejerk” seems to consist of a dozen or so haters each trying to outdo the others in spitefulness, but I think that’s maybe on tumblr, which also has “STFUmoffat”, another haters list). I’m sure your own non-petty “questions” (“hate the production values, acting, casting, dramatic choices, etc.”) will find a warm welcome somewhere in there, or in adjacent pools of venom.
11 October 2015 at 21:27 #44510@denvaldron Thank you — that analysis gives lots to think about.
@arbutus I feel the same way about this casual tossing out of possible future companions — and of perfectly inoffensive DW fans! What gives, here? A weird hostility vibe, or what?
11 October 2015 at 18:32 #44494Thinking about Clara’s future, via S9: I’m thinking about what Missy said (in TWF), about how the Doctor was in miserable retreat so “I gave him a puppy” to distract him with something to care about. This leads back to being blown in on a leaf as the Impossible Girl.
Now in S9, Clara mourns the loss of Danny (and of an earth-woman life anchored in home and family) by hurling herself into Doctor-like danger as a distraction. So: she’s either going to go a hurl-to-far and smash herself to death against the wall of being merely human after all; or she’s going to hit that wall (under her own power or due to some machination by Missy) and break it open, fulfilling (and ending) the whole Impossible Girl story line by transcending her mask of “mere” humanity in a final blaze of glory.
So, tragedy — or triumphant/tragic transfiguration? Or — something else?
Looks like Moffat’s take — that the DW stories are always about the companion — will prevail: Clara’s quite enormous story, taken as a whole rather than part by part (Impossible Girl – Crucial Companion – Would-Be Doctor), will be brought to a close, one way or another, by S9.
Leaving the Doctor — where? With a new companion; or alone and needing one. And, maybe, finally, wholly focused on a return to Gallifrey for some sort of reckoning, before a launch into another direction?
11 October 2015 at 17:51 #44491@charlie-cook did you read the inscription on Prentice’s card: May the remorse be with you
Thank you! That went by to fast for me. I liked the base crew very much — beautiful detail in the relationships there, looking forward to re-watches. Loved the fourth wall business — what could be nicer than having the Doctor talk to us watchers directly from time to time? A refreshing splash of water, made me sit up straight and listen once I’d realized that there wasn’t someone else in the control room, in the camera’s position, for him to be addressing.
@jphamlore beings die, and people have to go on as best they can. That happened in this episode where Bennett has to go on as best as he can without O’Donnell, a forever unrequited love. The Time Lords live a long time but they are not immortal. Plenty of super-powerful species have been shown throughout the years but the one connection is that these species eventually came to an end,
I agree; and if not for Clara, I’d think that the arc of this series could be the Doctor having to learn and accept that yes, Gallifrey is gone forever, done and dusted, TLs gone for good (until a future show runner feels like bringing them back). Since he must lose Clara — to fail to rescue her from the deep grief (which I also see) of having had her big life choice snatched away from her through Danny’s death, to lose her as his companion on any terms at all — I think that’s pretty much all the loss that can be inflicted on him at this point without mashing him flat for a very long time (which brings us back around to 11 before Clara, and we’ve been there with Matt Smith so recently).
I’m also not invested in the TLs in general, as I’m not given to re-watching BG. To me, the Doctor was more interesting when he was away than when he was on Gallifrey, probably because Gallifrey wasn’t developed as anything more than this bunch of quarrelsome aristocrats in absurd Flash Gordon outfits (hmm — related, a bit, to why I avoided opera until “Eugene Onegon” and “Boheme” brought me some characters I could give a damn about). I think I’d better go over to spoilers, got some bonkerizing to do re S9 over all.
@mudlark The break between the Doctor saying that he must face the Fisher King and his announcing ‘Now I’m ready’, of course denotes the unspecified lapse of time in which he was able to work out what the Fisher King was probably planning, and to devise a way of thwarting that plan
That was exactly the point at which I needed a visual cue to *how* he was getting “ready” — the dam, the cell. I’ll watch again and look for some hint that he’s fully occupied deducing from what he knows about the future exactly what he must do “now” in the past to bring that future about. It was too big a jump for me, but now that you connect the dots — it’s *brilliant*, of course!
@bluesqueakpip did anyone notice the nice little joke that Clara is now so like the Doctor that she gets her very own companion-who-wanders-off?
I didn’t, but now I do, and I like it! Again, pushing the boundaries of just how much *like* the Doctor she can act without running disastrously up against her own much narrower human limitations and dying of them, in some way. Unless they take a very different direction — I should move to spoilers for exploring that, though, right? Or — Sofa? Not quite sure.
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