BBC APPROVED SPOILERS...

Ashildr will have to eventually make her way into space to keep trace of Mel and Peri?

In theory there is at least one other Time Lord other than Missy that Ashildr could have encountered, the Monk, but due to the emphasis on Missy and the Doctor being the last of the Time Lords, the Monk I am afraid has been erased from recognition.

How fortunate for the Doctor that Ashildr did not decide to accelerate the rate of human progress to get off this rock.  All she would have had to do was hang around certain scientists even of the 1600s, 1700s, and 1800s in England and France and coordinate their efforts.  She’s smart.  Because in the late 1700s this was the device that created th…[Read more]

@countscarlioni: Great catch on the line “Time will tell,” from the Seventh Doctor serial Remembrance of the Daleks.

One of my pet theories for this season is that the Hand of Omega or some renamed equivalent makes an appearance to create a new black hole out of the relatively nearby-to-Earth red giant Betelgeuse, so I am hoping this reference is…[Read more]

Humans have been known to be a warlike threat to the entire galaxy since the Second Doctor serial The War Games.

But there is going to be a need for a lot more bodies than one hybrid.   Because the Time Lords are never going to make it back into this universe in their old bodies.  They’re going to have to try to “upload the mind, upgrade the body.”

@arbutus: Yes but who knew instinctively to ask the Doctor to translate the baby’s sounds?  Wasn’t it Clara?

It is odd to me Doctor Who went out of its way to show the Shadow Proclamation in the first episode only to depict the galaxy as basically being lawless the next couple of arcs.  I wonder if whoever used the “suicide moons” was able to cripple what is supposed to be an interstellar police force.

@missy: A very good point about the Tardis possibly rejecting the Master as a long-term companion.  After all, it is the Tardis that most of the time is calling the shots as to where the Doctor goes.

The Doctor is a shepherd-like bodhisattva.  A quote the Dalai Lama likes from the works of Shantideva:

For as long as space endures
And for as long as sentient beings remain,
Until then may I too abide
To dispel the misery of the world.

Many of the Doctor’s fellow Time Lords lost their way advocating the Ultimate Sanction in The End of Time.  T…[Read more]

@purofilion: I interpret Missy’s killing the UNIT agents as being part of her training of Clara so that Clara would still be able to think fast and to control her emotions.  Thus the very next arc when Clara tells Lunn to go after the phone, which ironically I believe does not play a part in the rest of the action, she is asked whether traveling…[Read more]

@phaseshift: For the first few hundred years of her life, I think Ashildr’s problem won’t be that she’s immortal.  Her problem will be, to quote another franchise, that

Everywhere in the world, they hurt little girls.

@purofilion: As for Orson Pink, my bonkers theory still stands that Clara’s ultimate fate is to go into the Nethersphere to be reunited with Danny where they can teach the Nethersphere’s children.  That would leave her story to be open depending on what Jenna Coleman decides to do for future appearances.

Pre-The End of Time, the Master was being…[Read more]

@missy: I think it has been pretty much established ever since The Doctor’s Wife that the Tardis does indeed control the Doctor at least in the sense of taking him not where he necessary wants to go but where he needs to go.

Now we see how scientific, how rational, the Master / Missy’s campaign has been to try and convince the Doctor to stop…[Read more]

Given that the Doctor has already voiced a worst-case scenario at the end of this episode, there is no way in my opinion that that his decision to save Ashildr will be shown to ultimately be the wrong one.  He is going to redeem her if she has fallen.  That’s what the Doctor does, he saves people.

It’s great to see Maisie Williams in the s…[Read more]

This idea of an ordinary human who unexpectedly discovers they have immortality, but then has to experience the loneliness of over-and-over again outliving everyone they know, is exactly from the original Star Trek episode Requiem for Methusaleh, and is no doubt far older than that.

However in contrast to Star Trek’s character of Flint, who…[Read more]

Here is my third candidate for the subsequent life of Ashildr: Madame de Stael, French, 1766 – 1816.  Her works helped to lay to foundations of Romanticism.  She is surprisingly often quoted to this day, such as:

One must choose in life between boredom and suffering.

Here is another candidate for a subsequent life of Ashildr: Emelie du Chatelet, French, supposedly 1706 – 1749.

One of Aphra Behn’s translations was of a French popularization of astronomy, A Discovery of New Worlds.  As Emelie du Chatelet, Ashildr would have had the opportunity to converse with many of the leading French minds of that time…[Read more]

@denvaldron: Condolences, you are always welcome here among us.

Here is something for this forum, especially those who have been talking about tarot.

Aphra Behn wrote often under the pseudonym “Astrea,” that is a reference to the Greek goddess Astraea (“star maiden”) who was very popular in literature around that time.  According to the Wikipedia entry on her,

In the Tarot, the 8th card, Justice, with a…

[Read more]