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@janetteb   Hmm; if any of the companions *had* known beforehand where and how they would be post-Doc (as it were), they could have asked him to return them to their pre-Doc pasts, couldn’t they?  Even just knowing that their time with the Doctor was coming to an end, they could have at least asked about going back and choosing not to go with him, to spare themselves sad retrospection on their Doctor-days from some duller, more difficult future?

Of course, he’d have had to say no — his own life with them would be changed, too, and all those adventures abolished or rewritten, and besides, there is that basic insecurity about and reluctance to mess about in the past unless you have no choice, isn’t there?  They’ve set up the “fixed nodes” to keep the prospect of time travel from causing total chaos and unrecognizable history for a reason — part of it being, I suppose, to prevent most characters from being able to “go back” and mend errors or make some planned change in the course of history.

As for life being pretty good these days — I hear myself saying sometimes in conversation, “I’ve been very lucky” (I have — not Rowling lucky by any means, but yeah, lucky) and also “I’ve probably got about 5-10 good years left, good years defined as not spent mainly in the waiting rooms of doctors’ offices or fishing through dumpsters for a meal”.  Both are true.  From this vantage point, why in the heck would I want to go back and give some event a twist toward what looks like a more positive outcome when that could end up with me dead 15 years ago after a nasty clutch of unlucky years?

At any rate, who with a spark of spirit and intelligence would choose to un-live a period of travel with the Doctor?  Sheesh!  People made of play-dough, maybe?  Turnip-people?  There I go, slandering turnips again . . . !

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@JeanetteB  Re changing your past — Well, there is that little crux of the matter, which is, how much do you like your current self?  If you like her fine, then why would you go back and make major changes that would result in a different you now (and chances are, even smallish changes could bring significantly large results)?

Mind you, I have “regrets”, as most (all, if they’re honest?) people do.  Funny, though, how the further I age from those regrettable moments, the less I a) think about them at all, and b) would consider, if I had the chance, time traveling to go fix them (assuming a major shift in my future self would *not* be a collateral effect, because I do pretty much like me these days — except for the besetting sin of impatience, which I’ve never been able to get much of a handle on, and a few other things).  The weird thing is, when I *do* look back, I often find that whatever I thought I’d learned from “failing” somehow in a currently regrettable moment, looking at it now I see other lessons.  And I wouldn’t want to give up the whole range of learning, over the entire lifetime, from one pudding-brained mistake, for the (imagined) lessons of having taken a different (presumably better) course at that past moment.

Thing is, I guess I just don’t believe that a “smoother life” (with the pudding moments reversed or finessed in some way) is or would be necessarily *better* than the one I got/made.  I don’t think we (as souls) come here (into bodies) to coast on some friction-less course from birth to death.  For one thing, it would make an awful, boring, insignificant story . . . I mean, imagine if that were the Doctor’s life story!  Would we still be watching, after 50 yrs?

DW is still going strong; Star Trek, which was designed as an illustration of how a more mature and advanced human society might get along by trying to minimize conflict and violence, is gone some time now, apart from re-runs and the occasional movie.  As a friend of mine told me once, “Nobody gets out of here unscathed; we *come* here to be scathed!”

Damn it; Craig, this surely doesn’t belong here on “companions”?  If it belongs anywhere on this forum site (I know I’ve gone off the deep end again), can you shift it there please?

 

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I dunno — is this “News”, exactly?  It certainly was news to me.  So — the Horse Guards are fans?  What about their horses?

Hell, it’s gotta go *somewhere*, dontcha think?!

 

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@scaryb  Um, I clearly didn’t make myself clear about Danny.  I *did* like him, and I was happily waiting for the writers to give him some depth to grow into, but they didn’t.  I know there are always time constraints, naturally, but I would gladly have foregone another discussion of wells etc. for a sort scene of Danny on his own, maybe, calling up an old army mate to get together for a drink, because he’s feeling alone and disconnected from his civilian life (and Clara is off with the Doctor) . . . Just a couple of hints of a life for him outside of school while away from Clara would have been enough to give him some independent reality for me.  And that was what I wanted, so I’d get the sense of a real, multi-dimensional life with more to than just Clara that was ended with his death.  The Doctor’s mirror was way too narrow a definition for him, and the failure (of the writers, not the actor — he did the best he could) to endow him with a bit more dimension, took away in the end from his sacrifice and death as CyberDan.

 

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@purofilion  WAIT now — that important thing is what she was gonna tell *me*!  The two-timing slice of pork-trimmings mash-up!

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@purofilion  Don’t worry about it, it’s all just theory.  But yeah, I’ve done enough reading and poking around and consulting with this and that to have a notion about this, and to me it makes sense, but, eh . . . ?  So what?  Every single one of us will eventually find out the truth(s), won’t we?  Nobody drops out of this school.  Wish I could, frankly — but attaining and then somehow hanging onto enlightenment looks to be just too damn much *work*, with no guarantee of getting there by that means anyway.

I like your paramoron investigator.  I used to read some of that stuff, but it’s so boringly pedestrian and Wal-Martish on the page, no patience for it now.  They tend to model those “demon-hunter” blah-blahs on old gangster stories, due to severe lack of imagination.  It’s much better on DW, since there’s a damn zygon right in front of you on your screen, and it will be dealt with forthwith so we can have a story about trees saving the planet next.

Quite happy with that, thanks.

 

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@lisa  Yeah, I’m gad nobody saw my pathetic attempts to stop typing and go the hell to sleep last night . . . well, this morning, and not all that early either.

It sometimes takes the form of a sort of brain-fever, doesn’t it?  Love Moffat et al, for writing tv for people with very hot brains . . . and everybody else as well.

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Thought I’d transport this post, which I came up with very late last night on another discussion site, to a spot here, as it’s an attempt to validate KtM on the basis of how its core scene — Clara’s blow up at the Doctor — is bounced off of later in Season 8.

What a beautiful set-up for the Xmas finale that quarrel-scene in KtM is! Here’s the Doctor, having made a clumsy, hurtful effort to show Clara that he thinks she can stand on her own two feet and make big decisions without him.  Her reaction: instead of trusting that her friend’s behavior was well-intended, she condemns him for it and tries to literally banish him from her life.

Then, in Dark Water, she *intentionally betrays him* by using the Tardis keys to try to blackmail him into doing what she demands. What is his response? First, he stands there and takes the hit full on; look back at the volcano scene, when she throws away the last key, and then says she’d do it again. His face tells us all we need to know about how that feels for him.  Not surprisingly, he rebukes her for “letting him down”.

But he does *not* kick her out of the Tardis, as she clearly expects him to do because she knows she well and truly deserves it. Instead, he says he’ll help after all, and when she says good grief why, he calmly delivers a breathtaking declaration of unconditional love. Then, while she’s standing there struck dumb and paralyzed by shame and desolation (seeing the enormous miss-match between his feelings for her and hers for him, plus Danny is still dead), he comes up with a way to move her on from that awful moment by brusquely yanking her forward into doing exactly what she wanted to (although he thinks rescuing Danny is a doomed endeavor, and dangerous besides).

He now understands she really needs to do this, so never mind the blows she has just dealt him and the shallowness of her regard. “Chin up, shoulders back — let’s see what we’re made of, you and I.” With that short speech, he sets the two of them on equal footing — provisionally — and gives her the chance to prove that she belongs there with him.

Well, he is a Time Lord. He has two hearts, and they are apparently big hearts with deep resources of devotion (Moffat’s word). Clara is only human; she has one heart, and on the evidence it’s an emotionally weak one, constrained by ego and riddled with inconstancy, as, let’s face it, our human hearts so often are.

So, on to Last Xmas: He returns to Old Clara (the first time). She shows new (presumably hard-won over a lifetime) emotional maturity by immediately and unstintingly forgiving him for taking 62 years to come back to her after their dream-sleigh ride (he got distracted; how unusual). He is remorseful for the delay, and is man enough to say so and apologize instead of “bantering” his error away.

And there it is: they have now moved to a new level of emotional symmetry between them — they don’t care any more who loves whom more, or who betrayed whom, issues dwarfed by long deprivation of each other’s company and the wonderful warmth of reunion at last — and on that basis they can move forward together in mutual trust and affection if they want to.  They want to, so they do.  The bookend to the KtM quarrel is matched by its mate in the finale, and the re-set for Season 9 is completed. (I think this is why I found Season 8 so satisfying overall — I was following the emotional arc, not the plitty-plotty SF hijinks that some viewers are still complaining about — and lo, I have my reward, because IMO that satisfaction was Moffat’s master plan all along.)

In my book that is brilliant and elegant story-telling, no matter what does or does not come afterward.

 

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I got one, but deleted it, don’t remember “who” it was from.

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@ryanmar15  Matt Smith for ping pong — he’d be the most fun to watch, anyway!  He’s gawky but he’s fast, and I’ll bet he’s a good dancer, so he should be great at ping pong.  Besides, he could always Time Travel back a minute in the Tardis and re-do a bad serve or return shot.

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@lisa  Matrix Missy!  Love it!  I hope we can also have a MixMaster somewhere along the line — or has that already happened in some form?

Talking about this show is a wonderful game — so glad I found you guys!

 

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@janetteb  Enjoying the memories is certainly an option, and a good one, provided you don’t, say, get obsessive about it and lose your way in your own post-Blue Box life on account of it.  The variations on response vary widely across possibilities and forward in time.  After death, maybe backward in time, too, as you (or some version of your spirit) looks over those memories in the future . . .

I was guest speaker yesterday at a class at the Honors College at UNM (a local colleague runs a course called “Meet the Authors” there every spring); and one of the questions the instructor asked me was, “How would you like to be remembered?”  In context, I assume he meant how would you like to be remembered as an author.  I said that I didn’t much care, since there are 7 billion people on this planet and counting right now, so why should I (or, by implication, almost anyone) be remembered at all, give or take 100 yrs, or 500, etc., and besides most written work is specific enough to its time that it runs out of connections for future people simply by becoming “dated” after a while.  Yes, Shakespeare, but not forever, not even him.

It occurred to me afterward that a few years ago I’d have given a different answer, or ten years go, or forty, or probably even yesterday.  I can hardly be exceptional in that, and all it implies.  We talk a lot about change, and its massive presence in our lives, but I don’t think we really examine that idea and assess how it’s impacting us very much — maybe not until you’re old.  All those choices behind you now: what did they mean?  Which ones would you undo, if you could?

If you had — a time machine, and all of space, all of time?

 

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@jimthefish  — “Artistic license” is only a good excuse *when it works*.  When people just fall about hooting with scornful laughter, I think maybe that’s a good indication that “artistic license” just isn’t going to fly this time.

On the other hand, for some viewers it clearly *did* work as artistic license.  So . . . ?  Ah, the critic’s dilemma . . . what makes *my* judgment superior to all those other peoples’ judgment?

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@nick1235  On that law — You *do* lose something in the end, no matter whether you choose to open the Blue Box or not.  Before me at every instant there lies a spread of choices, some intermingled, some starkly singular because they branch off so sharply from the main trunk of the tree of Made Choices that follows me.  What people tend not to notice is that (usually) every time you choose A over B-Z, you are also choosing *against* all the choices that are not-A.  Sometimes possibilities crop uf later on in recognizable form, sometimes not, but even so the returned chance for Z, say, isn’t the same as it would have been before you chose A.

So there’s an enormous cost right from the get-go to every choice you make: you give up massive amounts of potentiality, + and -, and then you do that again at the next fork in the stem you’re following/creating.  In this sense, you pay for *every* choice, but there’s no telling how much, or how much you gain either, not while you’re still up the tree and climbing.  This is why Clara’s “indecision” over who to spend her time with, Danny or the Doctor, is all about cost-benefit but she has to do it *blind* (as we all do most of the time) because she can’t really foresee everything to be gained/lost on the one hand or on the other (no wonder she keeps trying to put off the decision!).  But it’s very clear that life with the Doctor does not in anyway “equal” life with Danny.

As for better or worse — ????  How could you know, before, during, or after, for that matter?  Every choice brings lessons; in my view, all lessons are valuable.  The big difference appears not in the choice and its outcomes, but in how you, the chooser, deal with it, and that varies hugely too, over the course of a lifetime.  And even weighing the +- of that varies over a lifetime.

The companions always leave the Doctor, one way or another, don’t they?  Simply because he’ll outlive them if for no other reason, even if he has to regenerate into another body to do so.  If they survive to take up a sans-Blue Box life post Blue-Box life, they have to cope with a different set of choices (with memories of the Doctor, but usually without the Doctor himself any more).  They’ve gained whatever wonders (+ and -) they’ve met, and paid with everything they’ve “missed out on” (+-) by not living ordinary lives during their Blue Box time instead.  The people they’ve become aren’t the people they would have become via ordinary experience, too, so they’ve “lost” being those other people instead of these (and v.v. if their choice went the other way).

What they do with all of that experience — Danny or the Blue Box — what they do *after* — is a matter of more choices: forget? Pine away missing stuff you no longer have?  Rejoice in newfound (comparative) peacefulness and, one hopes, wisdom?  All of the above, none of the above, part of the above?  When — as soon as you step off the Tardis?  Ten years later, when you look back and see it a) differently than it looked to you at the time and b) also and inevitably distorted by memory?

Add in the possibility of time travel, and it all becomes wildly more complicated in both potentiality and in fact as you make your choices.  You pay and you gain for choosing the Doctor over Danny.  You pay and you gain for choosing Danny over the Doctor.  Me, I like to think that I’d choose the Doctor; how I’d feel about that choice afterward — impossible to predict, from one moment to the next (see: Chinese farmer + stray horse).  You pays your money, and you takes your choice.

I like to think that I’d choose the Box every time.  But that’s a wish; no accurate prediction can be made about a real opportunity, except that A, or B-Z, I’ll win some and lose some, and come out a different person than I would have been if I’d chosen B.  Or C.  etc.

I’ll have that potato now, please.

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@purofilion  With you on that — it’s the people, all of them really; the rest is icing on the cake, but usually *interesting* icing, not car-chases and beatings and vicious, bloody murder on every hand.

I liked Amy and Rory quite a bit, and loved it that they got away scathed but still healthy.

I’ve come to appreciate Season 8’s Clara, and I’m worried that she’ll get messed over in Season 9 for terrible plotty, arc-y “reasons”.  Bringing somebody else on board too might provide some restraint through slowing things down a bit . . . ?  As long as it’s not Missy!

I like Clara’s impulsiveness, her strong emotions and quick thinking, plus her new confidence in herself (“What would the Doctor do?  No. What would *I* do?” in Flatline).  I hope Danny wasn’t her last chance at solid human warmth and support (which is something the Doctor can’t provide even if he wants to, certainly not consistently enough for a human’s needs).

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Um — anybody have thoughts about this news, and the UK shows people love?

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/mar/02/bbc-production-top-shows-studios-division-doctor-who?CMP=share_btn_tw

From the comments below, it seems to be seriously problematic, and another victory for the selfish and destructive economics of the Right — ?

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@purofilion @jimthefish  I generally get an odd impression off Tennant.  I think he’s just wound way too tight for my taste, feels like there’s no place to go from there but screaming meemies, just on the verge of alla time — exhausting to watch (I do love a talent for stillness and composure in an actor — that breathes *confidence* to me, and an actor’s confidence leads to my greatest of comforts as audience — the sense that I can *trust* this person to do the job and do it handily or even brilliantly, and not to let me or the story down).  And yes, Tennant was great for DW in general, and I’m glad of that, and the publicity appearances are a must these days if the bosses demand them.

So okay, it’s all good.  You like what you like (though it never hurts to take another look just in case you missed something, and if you have, why remain deprived, by your own stubbornness, of quality entertainment?).

Maybe I like stillness because I’m studying it as a quality — I want more of it for myself.  Even after all these years of (admittedly on-again, off-again) zazen, I’m still not great at composure, and I miss it: the solid base, the thoughtful pause, the patience to anchor the fireworks well.  *sigh*  Hey, maybe some day . . . though obviously I can live without it, since I’m still here!

 

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@jimthefish  Well, you gotta take the soap box for a ranty run every now and then or it’ll curl up and die, won’t it.  Rather not say more about  BC, myself, since I only saw the first season, and not all of that since I didn’t take to it.  Curious to see how the viewership is holding up for this new round.  I should also get it out there, I guess, that I’m not a Tennant fan (nothing wrong with his “Hamlet”, but nothing special either IMO), so that probably has something to do with my disaffection for BC, though frankly what put me off right away was the local cop being allowed to work on the local case involving all her neighbors.  I’ve gotten past worse “poetic license” in other shows that I liked more, though.

This one — it felt a little like that cop series “D.I. Banks”, where I just couldn’t get hooked into the affect, if there was any (seemed not, to me), so I never cared enough about the characters to stick around.  Just picky, I guess . . .

 

 

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@bluesqueakpip  Thanks — a view from close up always helps.  That having had lots of time to dwell on the opening eps/first book in the series etc. must certainly play a part, since so much energy and expectation is packed into getting the thing going in good enough form to make that necessary first impression.  The Tuesday Rule illuminates the issue, and adds to the unlikelihood of any time available to be “lazy” in.

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ScaryB  Oh, I wasn’t talking about editors encouraging writers to do what they already do well (although that does happen, sometimes, and helps to trap some authors in a pattern of work that they are desperate to get out of  — like an SF author trying to sell a non-SF detective story).  I meant that most authors and their editors really do not know precisely what it is that the author is doing that’s making *her* spy story sell at 5 times the rate of every other new spy story out there — so you don’t want an inexperienced or new editor to go through this author’s latest Mss. red-lining something the editor thinks needs tightening up, say, when it’s just that type of discursiveness that draws the majority of fans to that author’s work. Like, oh, somebody deleting Terry Pratchett’s comical footnotes, for example, and making Lord Vetinari more iron fist and less velvet glove . . .

 

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@purofilion  “Carnography” — you’re welcome.  I should add, in fairness, that “Hannibal” has a sizable following of people who find it deliciously thrilling (they say), classy in its acting and production, clever as all get out in a satirical sort of way.  I say it’s spinach, and I say the Hell with it, but that’s just me . . .

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@jimthefish  As someone who has from time to time erred in a similar fashion, let me put another name to the problem: Impatience.  The rush to get *through*, escape, move on.  Mind you, that’s *my version of this problem*; doesn’t mean it’s Chibnail’s, so “laziness” sure isn’t subject to a veto by me.*  That’s what vocabulary is for — drawing distinctions, fine or otherwise.

*Part of my recoil from this word, “laziness”, is that I’ve seen it used so often as a catch-all condemnation for many kinds of failures, without (it seems to me) nearly enough consideration of what *else* might be going on, alongside of, instead of, or causally.  To take an extreme example, the kids who used to be charged with “laziness” for dozing off in class, many of whom turned out to have simply had no breakfast, for one reason or another.  That sort of thing is *very* common in the US as part of the standard Reactionary response to failures due more to class (or other) inequities than personal fault, ergo punish, don’t help.  I think that’s how the word’s been tainted for me, at any rate.

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@The Krynoid Man — oh, thanks!  Love the ANTZ music!  I nice lift to the end of the day (here, anyway).

@whisht — Now, *those* are some eyebrows!

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@IAmNotAFish: Many writers who hit it big then start a downward slide because nobody dares to edit them any more — first because publishers no long approve of editors actually editing (costs money, if the editor is worth a damn), and secondly because nobody know exactly *why* this piece of drek or that magnificent gem of a book becomes a best seller and you don’t want some underpaid youngster to edit out exactly what it is that the public is responding so wildly to, and thirdly because (sometimes) your successful author has a swelled head from all that success and gets huffy about editing suggestions, and God forbid they *leave* and go to the competition.  It’s a kind of perfect storm of go-to-hell-in-a-handcart thing: all the winds are blowing from a bad direction.

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Danny was boring because the writers wouldn’t give him any background — no friends, no (extended) family (since he was an orphan), no ex, no dog, no damn nothing: just Clara, Clara, Clara, 37 wells, and a dead Afghan boy, none of which works as the kind of background that gives a character dimension.  Given the shallowness of his material (until the finale, anyway), I thought Anderson did a bang-up job of at least making paper-thin Danny likable despite being conceived as a cardboard cut-out.  Gods, I hate the *waste* of talent and opportunity *so much*!

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@IAmNotAFish — Agree on charging writers (particularly of book or screen fiction) with “laziness”; we aren’t.  Sloppy, yeah, sometimes, in our haste to meet deadlines or get the god damned thing Off The Desk For God’s Sake It’s Been Over a Year, etc.  But unless you are a writer with independent means, or a writer heaping up one huge best-seller after another, “lazy” is not much of an option in today’s marketplace.  And even “hacks” (definitions vary) are usually too proud of their work — its effectiveness, if not its artfulness — to be “lazy” with it.  For the most part, almost all we have is our pride, when indeed we can afford to have that.

The crappy “second act” seems to be a problem in many art forms, usually arising from either sequelitis — just keep spinning any thread you can tease out of the foregoing volumes/movies until people stop paying — or padding a story’s middle to keep the end from happening when sound dramatic structure says it should.  Dullness in the (unnecessary) middle is the almost inevitable result of the latter, a tailing off of quality of the former.  Happens all the time — money talking, mostly, shoving artistic judgment (assuming some is on hand) aside.

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@purofilion  — “Carnography” is a term coined by somebody a decade or more ago, using the root “car” as flesh or meat — chile con carne — and it was used to mean something similar to “pornography”, only about flesh/blood/innards etc. spilling out all over the screen (it was used specifically about movies like “Texas Chainsaw massacre”).  Making artful arrangements of dismembered corpses (the famous “iris” from Hannibal) strikes me as a perfect example.  And I can’t see any redeeming value whatever to this kind of ick, except for viewers who like the extremely grotesque in their stories.  I have no problem with that on the printed page (I just skim, usually, because it’s basically boring to me, like extended descriptions of fights and battles), but in visual programming I hate it.  I’m not nightmare prone, but given a strong enough visual cue that sticks in my memory, I am likely to have very bad dreams — and my dreams are way too important to me to be sacrificed on the altar of cheap (or even expensive) thrills.

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Broadchurch — I saw the first series, hung in to the end.  While everybody acted their sox off very well, I just couldn’t figure out why I should give a damn about any of these incredibly dull people.  The major question about everybody seemed to be, who’s this person sleeping with instead of the person they are *suppsed* to be sleeping with?  That is probably a distortion, but it’s the impression I was left with.  Oh, the grim woman living in isolation on the beach for extremely good reasons did interest me; just not enough.  As soon as I heard that series two was going to be mostly courtroom drama, I decided against bothering with 2.  It would just be going over the same ground again, same dull bunch, with sprinkles.  It takes a *lot* more than that to lure me into a tv courtroom again.  Any tv courtroom.  I couldn’t even stick with the last couple of courtroom drama series from the UK, “Silk” and something else.

What catches my attention these days isn’t carnography no matter how fancied up (“Hannibal”, I’m looking at you),  drunken, dope-addicted, or downright crazy detectives, some dreary “immortal” who’s fixing things so he’ll be the *only* human male able to procreate (Jesus or somebody, save me, PLEASE, from more adolescent dick-fantasies — this one’s “Helix”, and “Last Man on Earth” looks more childish still), or even murder stories set in unusual places (The Bridge, The Killing, The Whatever).

I’m waiting for “The Returned”, about French zombies — you can tell they’re French because they look stoned, stone-faced, or just stunned a huge part of the time, but who wouldn’t with dead folks coming home *without being able to tell anybody anything about death*, their own or anybody else’s — those French, such *teases*! — (Oh, and not the desperately lame US knock off, called something else); and for more of the one with a lot of people vanished — “The Leftovers”.  Anything with an ounce of mystery, unpredictability, and mental agility, really.  So, of course, the Doctor — which is probably what’s wrecked me for nearly everything else — cheesy effects, plot holes, repetitiousness, hand-waving incomprehensibility, missed opportunities, and all.

If they end up in a courtroom in Series 9, though, I’m off.

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@IAmNotAFishIAmAFreeMan  Thanks for your response — both versions.

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@bluesqueakpip — It might take even longer now, since we’ve been living in the age of official lotteries replacing decent job prospects . . . you get rich quick, or you can’t even afford to stop working *ever*, at least in the US these days.

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@fatmaninabox — yikes, that’s funny!  Thanks for the mug shots!

 

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Good Lord — a masters in Spanish?  And performances as Tevye?  And the little Thalia movie house that I (like every intellectually hungry misfit and European refugee in the neighborhood) spent a large part of my young years attending, to see outstanding foreign films that never seemed to show up anywhere else in Manhattan until years later?  I’m so glad that little gem of a space endures, and has Nimoy’s name on it!  Perfectly, perfectly fitting.  *sigh*  Thanks for the links, all.

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JeanetteB — recent interview with Dan Starkey, in which he comments (toward the end) on Capaldi being pretty damn nervous on the first day of filming, and the production crew sitting at their monitors whispering, “Yes!  Yes!” as the actor hit mark after mark, gaining confidence as he went.  That dovetails nicely with “discovering that he can be” the Doctor:

Capaldi has stressed many times how completely lost he felt as an actor in “Local Hero” and other early performances; I think maybe that goes back to having been rejected early by RADA, and not getting that formal training common to top-rung UK actors.  That must make a tougher road, but a road that perhaps leads to a much more distinctively personal style, in this case beautifully suited to Doctor #12.

 

 

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@barbaralefty  — Yes, a sudden emergence from the confusion, full of focus and purpose.  So much so, in fact, that I thought, wow, we’re gonna get a bunch of stories about going back to places and events where he *did* make mistakes and he’s going to try to change outcomes or ameliorate damage, and that should be really interesting —  but no, it was only one mistake that he has in mind: playing infatuated puppy as SmithDoc.

This is also the scene where he’s just been selecting his wardrobe as CapDoc, right?  So he’s at least dressed in character, not in SmithDoc’s clothes or a street lush’s overcoat any more, and that’s a visible declaration: Now I’m going to find out everything I can about the guy who wears this outfit (for starters, he is *not* a dashing young swain with a snogbox.  Next:).  That’s the rest of Series 8 — finding that out.

It’s a brilliant device; I was all admiration when I first saw it, and still am.

 

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A scrap more about the Doctor’s memory in gif-set form (and evidence that tumblr is not worthless after all):

http://ksica.tumblr.com/post/111301760098

She’s right, of course; the scale of human life vs. a very long chain of Time Lord lives can’t truly align but can only touch off quick sparks here and there, vanished in an instant.  Well, that’s not what *he* says, but as we know, the Doctor lies, and sometimes doesn’t even know what he remembers.  This wildly uneven, multi-format, committee-created, witty, silly, hugely popular television show about imaginary adventures roaming the universe(s) with a semi-god is, in addition to all that, an ongoing tragedy of doomed connections.  There are gory grand operas, there are dark and rolling Mahler symphonies and Sibelius tone poems lighter and brighter than this endlessly unspooling story of relentless change and loss, told by humans to humans about — who else? — ourselves.

I really shouldn’t be up this late; the cats know better, and have gone to bed.  Never mind, this is what happens when you get notes on a funeral from one batch of friends, and a message about another friend just getting home from the hospital after a stroke, in the same day’s emails . . .

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@schamster  — I do like that idea — a revisit from Capdoc’s p.o.v.!  I’m curious about memory for the Doctor (any of him, really).  As a person who thinks reincarnation is the most likely form of an “afterlife” for humans, it makes sense to me that we generally *don’t* start a our current life with access to our last lifetime, let alone the 50 or 100 some might have stacked up behind us.  I think you’re suggesting that for a regenerated Doctor, simply in terms of not being steamrollered flat and paralytic by at least 1,000 yrs of memory coming crashing in at once, a kind of narrow-aperture amnesia is required, at least for a while.  So how the heck does his memory work once that aperture starts to iris open on a broader and deeper past, prompted by — a return to the physical, sensory setting of a series of events from back then?  By some more abstract sort of mental data retrieval tree of nerves and synapses?  Can he locate his way back to a specific memory-set by equations written on a blackboard?  We know that he dreams, so that could be a starting place for a search — has that been done in an episode?  I imagine that with his “piano” sized brain, there’s massive storage space, but info retrieval is the tricky bit even with just us, isn’t it?

I think I would have been more convinced by Smithdoc’s manic ADD if I’d had a sense of him struggling to deal with all that memory — which is a more foregrounded matter now that a whole new set of regens has begun!  If humans lived 150 yrs or more, I could see a business downloading and storing half-centuries worth of an individual’s accumulated memories externally, to make room for another round after age 100.

 

 

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Ah, that’s lovely, Craig; thank you.  One of the places I made a point of visiting (once I finally got out of New York and overseas for the first time, teaching with the Peace Corps in Nigeria) was the west coast of Scotland.  Went bombing around everywhere by train by myself, very happily.  My husband and I went about 20 yrs later; I’m hoping to visit once more, on my own again, and this time I’d like to go by the red phone box, provided I don’t have to drive — I don’t trust myself as a driver on the “wrong” side of the road.

The movie feels like a kind of last hurrah before the devouring monstrosity of Globalization set in for keeps, by way of gutting the planet once and for all, looks like.  It’s good to see a place like this that doesn’t have a g.d. casino on the cliff top . . . or is that a US blight that hasn’t hit the UK yet, and maybe not forever?

Damn.  And here I thought I was in a *good* mood . . .

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@bluesqueakpip — okay, thanks, I think I’ve got it now — so everything the lying is all straightened out because they both remember the shared dream bit where they admitted that to each other.  I like the idea of a mutual dream being an “alternate state reality”.  Just am very relieved that nobody has to go back and do over dream-things since the dream interactions have a “real” weight in memory as reality prime interactions, at least for Clara and CapDoc.

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@scaryb —  Yes, that’s how it *should* be — the lying issue resolved and and put to bed in “Xmas”.  But Moffat said (interview, someplace noted by a bunch of different people), and I quote (well, I *think* I quote): “Everything (of the Xmas ep) but the very last scene is a dream.”

Which (assuming the dream-sequence began either with Santa on the roof, or with CapDoc dozing in the Tardis after the Lying Cafe) means that no, the two of them have *not* actually resolved their mutual deception, because that only happened in a dream.  And in fact maybe all or part of the “Old Clara” scene is also part of the dream sequence (that scene has several sections, remember, including the Doctor waking up — at the volcano?  which was itself an hallucination caused by a dream patch? — not once but twice — and the “very last” bit is the two of them boarding the Tardis under the Clara’s bedroom window).

Okay, so did everything in the Xmas dream as-good-as-really-happen because they both remember it when they wake up (whenever that is), as a shared dream experience?

This is the thing about “dream sequences” — and why writers normally use them with caution.  Dreams in a story can be a ton of trouble, in terms of complications for the writer to sort out later, and reader-viewer bafflement and confusion in the meantime, and maybe beyond.

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@lisa  *Can’t* think about it much because brain-melt.  I’m still stuck wondering where that damned Xmas dream-state began and where it ended (if it ended), and how much has really been resolved at the end of Series 8 vs. how much was only *dream* resolved (and so remains to be tackled all over again — like the cafe of mutual lies, for example.

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@purofilion — Horrors!  And sympathies.  My family household was the opposite; awful conversation started with Joe Stalin suddenly becoming an out and out villain, and some people tying themselves in knots trying to justify him while others wandered around with cocktails in their hands looking stunned and betrayed . . .

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@schamster — Thanks!  I somehow forgot that bit of the dialog between Matt Smith and Tom Bakker in front of the painting.  Did Baker say *why* Gallifrey has to be found — I mean, apart from the discomfort of being frozen in time until that happens (although if the people of Gallifrey are *really* frozen in time, doesn’t that mean that their minds and thoughts are also fixed on a single instant, so no suffering or even awareness on their part is implied, so — ?)?

Is E-space an alternate universe, then?  Or just a type of alternative space (or phase of time?), literally, sort of scattered around in the Whoniverse prime?

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re Marinaaa — I really am at a loss to understand why people keep dropping in here, on a site clearly used for comment and analysis by people who like Doctor Who as a concept and a show, in order to say they hate Peter Capaldi’s Doctor or Jenna Coleman’s Clara or Moffat as a writer.  And they keep saying something like, “I only came here to say THIS: I like DW but mostly *hate hate hate*!!”  Then we ignore them, or a calm, well thought out salvo is fired by one of us over their bows, and they slink off sulking.  It’s WEIRD.

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Ah — wait — um — okay, the Doctors *meant* to “freeze” Gallifrey but they did not intend to hide it some space pocket or bit of shifted time dimension, but it somehow got hidden anyway?  I thought they meant to do both things — freeze it and hide it — presumably (in my teeny head, anyway) if you just freeze it in place, that leaves it vulnerable to anybody who comes by, spots it, and feels like taking pot-shots at it?

When did Tom Baker tell which Doctor to go find the thing again?  I’m not remembering that.  I’m also in the dark about E-space.  What’s it?  Help?

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@craig — really interesting piece on Local Hero.   These guys certainly produced a little gem of a film, exactly in the tradition they were aiming for.  As for the women, well, I accepted them as fine at the time and I don’t think I even noticed “Sky and Sea” as pointers to their symbolic function in the story.  I don’t recall the details of the movie well at this distance, but I think the rest of the story was pretty much entirely male-centered, so if the two women hadn’t served that symbolic purpose, I suspect that there might not have been any women in the film with more than a line or two, if that.  Heck, if you keep track of the statistical analyses that turn up from time to time, we’re still far from representing the real-world presence of women in movies (that aren’t aimed largely at female audiences, that is).

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lisa — thanks for the TED link.  I suspect that a lot of the people who do TED talks are or have at some time been fans of DW — it can be such a stimulus to the creative imagination!  Here’s one (TED) that showed up in my email today — maybe this is what the Doctor could really use in his life(ves): a smart, compassionate, and thoughtful twin . . . Uh; Clara?

http://www.ted.com/talks/guy_winch_the_case_for_emotional_hygiene?utm_source=newsletter_weekly_2015-02-21&utm_campaign=newsletter_weekly&utm_medium=email&utm_content=talk_of_the_week_image

Rob — Hiya back!  I hope the waters have rearranged themselves, and the dimwit clients have transformed into something more pleasing.

 

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I saw in interview at some point with Capaldi in which he said he learned to swear from Burt Lancaster while filming Local Hero — which set him up brilliantly, of course, for The Thick of It and In the Loop later on.  Local Hero is a truly charming film, although what I’ve picked up about Lancaster as a person over the years isn’t.  Never mind, what you don’t know can’t depress you . . . and Capaldi seems to have survived working with Lancaster perfectly well.  He also said in that interview that he’d never done any acting before, and had absolutely no idea how to do *anything*, which is probably why he applied to be accepted at RADA.

Luckily, they turned him down — I think that would have been the ruin of him, or at least a mess he would have had to spend years working his way out of.

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@DroneX1 — Welcome!  Love your enthusiasm — I’m a fiend for NuWho myself, always happy to see someone else happy too.

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@mudlark  Yes, the re-watch factor has surely had strong effects on what people remember and how they remember it — you can go and check now, which wasn’t always true.  And maybe because of that as well as other things (like the aging out of the remaining members of the initial audience for BG DW), NuWho stories have become more complicated and more rewarding to experience over again, looking for nuggets missed on the first go-round, etc.  Re-watch has certainly brought us the wonderful gift of being able to continue discussing our favorite show series right through the gaps between (and in the case of DW, that’s a hell of a gap!), thus keeping the audience-show connection bright and lively.

And of course these pleasurable conversations are the best and most effective Time Sink I’ve come across so far — perfectly appropriate for the stories of a Time Lord!  We pay tribute with gifts of our own time, don’t we.

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@craig  — “Too technical” meaning there’s too much backstory to cope with if you haven’t been watching for decades?  Or too technical in terms of scientific underpinnings, which I’m skeptical about since the show seems to me to be almost pure science fantasy these days (but that may be because the “real science” in it isn’t comprehensible to me, so it all looks like magic)?

Issues of scouting out and letting in new blood and creativity are something else again and not really what Spacey’s talking about, I think, since DW is not a new project that needs to be “auditioned” or has yet to provide a track record to satisfy the money people.  As for branching out into other “platforms”, this show has done that in a pretty impressive way — well, *I’m* sure impressed, since I had no idea there were DW comics, DW radio dramas, DW minisodes, DW conventions, fan videos and music videos, archives full of DW fanfic, etc.  In fact, here we have vested interests to consider — not just the proprietary interests of the various creative teams that have created the show, but the vested interests of large numbers of very vocal fans who are vehement about changing/not changing this or that aspect (say, the gender of the Doctor; or Moffat as head writer) of the ongoing project.  The really creative, progressive, and in-their-own-way-crazy ones are already deep into creating what *they* want to see and giving it away for free on the internet.

Such a lovely chaos!  It’s like a firestorm you can’t outrun because it’s already tearing along out ahead of you on fronts you’re only partially aware of.  I guess I don’t have to add that I’m basically a non-control freak, either by temperament or because of its of experience of how illusory “control” really is.

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