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2 December 2015 at 10:28 #48511
I have an alternate theory for the confession dial. A lot of Time Lord technology is very old and they have often almost forgotten how it works.
To me the confession dial used to function as some sort of security blanket / device of last resort for Time Lords venturing out into the universe. They would wear a bracelet that if they got in trouble would teleport them into their confession dial. (Time Lords like bracelets as a means to return home. See the Fourth Doctor serial Genesis of the Daleks.) They would answer the questions only they (and the other Time Lords) would know, Gallifrey would monitor their answers, and then they’d be back home safe and sound.
But just like the Eye of Harmony that was concealed on Gallifrey that by the time of The Deadly Assassin had been forgotten, over time the regular Time Lords forgot what were all of the capacities of the confession dial. Even the Doctor might not have been informed. Only someone from the very dawn of Time Lord civilization, perhaps Rassilon himself, might have known.
Now why would this capacity of the confession dial have been so important to the early Time Lords? Because their very first, Omega, was lost seemingly forever without an easy means to return to Gallifrey when he used the Hand of Omega to create the Eye of Harmony.
2 December 2015 at 09:19 #48502@carrieanne: Not only that but for just this one episode, that the Doctor’s pockets are bigger on the inside than the outside seems to have been completely forgotten. In The Witch’s Familiar for heavens sake the Doctor apparently even is able to carry with him the ability to serve himself a cup of tea.
2 December 2015 at 02:53 #48480It is somewhat amusing to me to think about maybe the opposite of bonkerizing, to be able to predict certain elements of this epic mythical story without knowing a thing about the story. How is it possible? It can be done by reading Joseph Campbell’s The Hero of a Thousand Faces from 1949, Joseph Campbell a friend and mentor to George Lucas.
We can predict the hero will know he is different at a young age, that he has some sort of destiny. The hero will eventually be forced to separate from his family or people and go on an adventure. This adventure may have themes such as a descent to the underworld and a battle with a hideous monster, the hero having to overcome his fears. This is the part everyone who has heard of Joseph Campbell knows.
What I believe may not be as well known is that Campbell goes on to predict any great myth will have an element where the hero as a result of his adventure achieves an understanding of the unity of what was previously thought to be a duality, such as young and old, male and female, human and nature, etc. The hero must return to his family or people and tell them of his new understanding, which they may choose to either accept or reject.
So by reading a book from 1949, it would have been apparently possible for anyone to have predicted there would be some sort of hybrid in the current Doctor Who storyline, and not only that, but to predict in the future that the Doctor will bring to his people the Gallifreyans some revelation of unity between dualities that define the hybrid.
1 December 2015 at 05:48 #48393In the classic series Fifth Doctor serial The Arc of Infinity, it is shown that the Gallifreyan Matrix contains a copy of the Doctor’s “biodata extract” of sufficient detail to have enabled Omega to have transferred back to this universe in a body duplicate of the Doctor’s had the process been allowed to properly complete. Wouldn’t the Time Lords or in particular Omega have noticed a half-human half-Time Lord DNA hybrid in this biodata extract?
1 December 2015 at 04:40 #48389Irreverent thought of the day: If the Doctor only had his classic sonic screwdriver with him, he might have been able to tune a frequency to more easily break through the crystal wall. Or he could have at least used the screwdriver as the tip of the beak on a bird and chipped away using that.
1 December 2015 at 03:30 #48381@pedant: There’s still my theory if the hybrid does impose a peace between Time Lords and Daleks that it would go back to a point in time when Daleks were in one location. Now one possibility might be a little bit after the events of Victory of the Daleks. If Moffat cared to return to Asylum of the Daleks, have a version of Clara hack the Dalek internet at that point in time.
1 December 2015 at 03:24 #48380@puroandson: In my opinion, the confession dial follows a strategy of Steven Moffat to deliberately rewrite parts of the classic series, a precedent so that his successors can also make each run as showrunner their own.
Thus the confession dial is a rewrite of the classic series message box shown in the Second Doctor final serial The War Games. That message box could find its way back to Gallifrey. That to me is a hidden property of the confession dial: It is a mini-tardis with the ability to find its way back to Gallifrey even through different dimensions. The confession dial is bigger on the inside than outside.
Because it is a mini-tardis with the teleporting room as its entrance, there has to be safeguards. That safeguard is to ask the person entering the confession dial to repeat what the answers were that the confession dial was programmed with. In addition, the tortures inside the confession dial are customized to the person recording on the confession dial. Thus if one is the one who made the recording, eventually it will sink in at least what to do to stay alive to give the answers. And as another safeguard from Gallifrey’s perspective, if one is about to use the confession day to escape back to Gallifrey, they can monitor the answers inside.
So in my opinion the Veil in another Time Lord’s confession dial might take a totally different form.
1 December 2015 at 01:17 #48368@hillforest: In my opinion, one reason the Doctor never broke and even started dissembling as soon as he was free of the confession dial is the confession dial is a mini-Tardis with a link between Earth and Gallifrey is the only physical link Gallifrey has left to this universe. If the Doctor gave up all his answers, the Time Lords would be able to use the confession dial to get back to this universe. And that I believe the Doctor is willing to do anything to prevent. Some secrets must never be revealed.
I suspect that the Doctor will revisit the events of The Day of the Doctor when he reappeared with the other 12 Doctors and add his input to their calculations. Only he is going to randomize his input and throw it away so that Gallifrey can never be found. Gallifrey falls no more.
1 December 2015 at 01:10 #48367@pedant: I wonder if the Doctor has been trying to compose a song to say what he thinks about his relationship with Clara for who knows how many years.
Of course in my dream world he then says heck with that and starts riffing on Merry XMas Everybody. 🙂
30 November 2015 at 22:22 #48341A clue right in front our noses might be seen from the end of Heaven Sent. The Gallifreyan citadel city is surrounded by what appears to be a barren desert. That is not right. It should be a green belt. This is known now, on Earth, 21st century. It gets even worse if as seems likely there will be shown plenty of people trying to scratch out a living in this desert.
That is why this tower, this social order, must fall. The Time Lords are literally sucking the life out of their own planet.
30 November 2015 at 21:45 #48340The Tarot card for next week’s Hell Bent, and also for the beginning of the season for the Daleks, is The Tower, the card for the collapse of social order:
http://www.tarotlore.com/tarot-cards/the-tower/
The Doctor upended the Dalek social order when he regenerated the Daleks that had been left in their sewers. I expect he will upend the Time Lord social order and thus break the billion hearts of those in the ruling class and the establishment that supports their rule. I suspect it will be having failed to procure a suitable energy source from other species, the Time Lords have had to resort to preying on their own kind, the lower class Gallifreyans, for regeneration energy.
I have to wonder if there will be a distinction between feeding off the mass of people, similar to what Davros was doing with the Daleks, or picking some victims and sucking them dry until they are dead.
30 November 2015 at 16:42 #48321We have to keep in mind the part of the show left for moving events is less than 65 minutes long. There’s only so much time for doing things on Gallifrey, especially with the other rumored scenes.
How exactly is the Doctor going to punish the Time Lords for Clara’s death? He most likely is not going to be shooting lighting bolts out his fingertips.
No I think once again it will be the Doctor forcing some horrible truth to the surface and thus toppling the Gallifreyan social order, just like he used to do say during the Fourth Doctor serials. (This is why I continue to object to the entire premise of The Zygon Inversion, because when it comes to the social order, the Doctor has always been about truth not lies.) The most likely candidate I think is that cut off from the Sisterhood of Karn’s Elixir of Life, the Time Lords are now some sort of vampires. They might even be feeding off the Gallifreyan lower class. This ties into this season’s theme of the evil of unnaturally prolonging life and not having a means for a good death.
The Doctor usually does not directly kill people, only monsters. For people, he lets them make their own choices to kill themselves.
30 November 2015 at 01:41 #48275@pedant: Yes, events may have been started for the Doctor before the Time Wars or even back to the Cloister Wars that Missy mentioned. But there might not be enough time left in the season to show why the Doctor came to believe he was destined to conquer Gallifrey and stand in its ruins. 🙁 Something has to be left for Moffat’s next season …
30 November 2015 at 01:35 #48272I think the crystal wall did not regenerate because it was an interface between Gallifrey and the castle, not strictly part of the castle. Observe skulls that fell into the water were also not magically disappeared, they just accumulated.
The random boy I think is a reference to the very first scene of this season, where the Doctor encounters another boy in another place, young Davros on Skaro. But this time the Doctor will remember 2.47 billion children on Gallifrey the day he almost destroyed them all using the Moment, so at least for them, he will show mercy.
Backup copies as part of teleporting has been debated forever in science fiction, such as Star Trek. The Doctor appears to be asserting with enough energy one could pump out dozens or who knows how many perfect copies of the Doctor.
30 November 2015 at 01:20 #48268@lisa: Fantastic insight about the new twist on “run you clever boy and remember me.” Thanks!
And while Clara is dead, the story of Clara is kept alive in the Doctor’s heart and memories. And we have been hearing from the Doctor for a while that what makes the being is the story.
30 November 2015 at 00:44 #48262And here is my most conservative theory given the next episode has barely over an hour to wrap things up this season for major changes. There is only so much one can do.
The Doctor is a hybrid Time Lord / human not by DNA and not even by souls per se but simply because all of the time and shared experiences he had with Clara Oswald. As shown in Heaven Sent, Clara is almost literally in the Doctor’s head, first appearing only in writing on the chalkboard in his internal mind Tardis, then with her back to him, and finally a full fledged speaking to him from the front. The memory of Clara Oswald and what she was as a person now make the Doctor a hybrid of Time Lord and human.
The memory of Clara Oswald is so strong it was able to keep the Doctor going over 2 billion years. I can’t think better proof of true bonding for a mental hybrid.
29 November 2015 at 18:05 #48221I argue that the confession dial may at this point in time be the only physical link between this universe and Gallifrey that can transport people. So how is Ohila the leader of the Sisterhood of the Karn being shown in the trailer?
I now think Ohila is being shown in a flashback, perhaps during the Time War where the Time Lords and Daleks were tearing apart the universe, or maybe even as far back as the Cloister Wars mentioned by Missy in The Sorceror’s Apprentice. I conjecture she is telling the Time Lords that due to the Time Lord actions during one of these wars, the Sisterhood will no longer supply the Elixir of Life.
The blue tubes in the promo images therefore refer to the Time Lords conducting war crime experiments on re-creating this Elixir of Life, more reason for the Doctor to punish them. We have seen a theme this season of species living too long, not knowing how to die a good death, like the discarded Daleks in the sewers on Skaro.
29 November 2015 at 07:52 #48174I still think the Time Lords did not per se mean to torture the Doctor.
The confession dial is a mini-Tardis, bigger on the inside than the outside. Look at its gears, an earlier version of Time Lord tech.
I think the Veil is simply the confession dial’s self-defense system, keyed to the confession dial’s contents. If a hacker beamed in, the hacker is tested, just like the Doctor was. The more the hacker accurately reveals, the more is shown until finally the diamond wall in Room 12.
29 November 2015 at 07:31 #48171Here’s something I find interesting: The Doctor mentions the prophecy the hybrid will do something to a billion Gallifreyans. But there were 2.47 billion children alone on Gallifrey in The Day of the Doctor.
I think it is still in play, 1 billion adult Time Lord souls to be transplanted into Daleks, the Doctor’s revenge that ends the way. Perhaps some number of Gallifreyan children souls to be reborn in either new humans or humans who died prematurely. Many others can stay on Gallifrey and live out their lives apart from the rest of the universe.
Think Ron Moore’s Battlestar Galactica. Humanoid appearing Daleks with Time Lord souls. Other Daleks their enemies created by Davros. It’s a perfect solution.
29 November 2015 at 06:42 #48168I am sure Moffat did not intend this, but with the extreme suffering depicted that the Doctor underwent for billions of years, for me, the Doctor has paid in full for his actions in The Zygon Inversion. Thank you, Steven Moffat.
29 November 2015 at 06:39 #48167I have a theory that Moffat is deliberately re-writing various parts of the classic Doctor Who canon to allow his successors to do the same and keep the show alive for every era.
To me the Confession Dial is Moffat’s rewriting the self-assembling message box the Second Doctor used in The War Games to contact the Time Lords. This box has the ability to return to Gallifrey. So perhaps does the Confession Dial. If one looks at the inner workings of the Confession Dial, it appears to me that it is actually a form of Tardis in of itself. Thus the bracelet the Doctor has to teleport teleports him inside the Confession Dial.
It may be as a defense mechanism to hacking, the Confession Dial is programmed to destroy any invader that does not correctly answer what its contents are. It is possible the Time Lords did not intend to torture the Doctor, or even to learn the nature of the hybrid, things just worked out that way.
Now in Face the Raven I believe that just before the Doctor teleports, there is the sound of Ashildr activating some button. This I assume both activated the Confession Dial and the teleport. So the question is, how did Ashildr learn of the Time Lords? I’m going to guess the Time Lords were able to send a brooch, a pendant, what Ashildr wears around her neck, similar to the Eye of Hades, that is small enough to go between dimensions. This may have been enabled by Missy.
Now with the Gallifreyan child first contacting the Doctor, this is an indication the Doctor will in the end decide not to kill one billion Gallifreyans. Thus my theory still stands the Doctor’s sentence will be to put Time Lord souls into the Daleks. It’s the one thing the Daleks can’t fight, because the soul might not be DNA-based, and it is DNA purity the Daleks enforce.
The universe had aged billions of years, but the Time Lords in The Day of the Doctor were said to be frozen in a moment of time. They are a small bit of the way towards the very end of the universe.
28 November 2015 at 13:46 #48016I don’t know why this didn’t occur to me sooner, but what if the Doctor’s intervention in Clara’s life set off a ripples that turn into waves reaction that led to a death of Danny Pink that should not have happened, thus creating a time paradox with Orson Pink. Perhaps the Time Lords just needed Orson Pink to travel to the end of time to create the crack in the universe they need to send Gallifrey through. It is preventing Orson Pink in a time paradox that is the problem for the Time Lords.
I still do not think the Time Lords tried to assassinate Clara. But perhaps what they are trying to do is traumatize the Doctor so heavily with thoughts of Clara’s death that he will go back in time and prevent Danny Pink’s death by not meddling in Clara’s life.
Even darker, maybe the stuff with the toy soldier and the Doctor and Clara rescuing Orson were not supposed to happen either. What if the Time Lords wanted Orson to do something like blow up his craft in despair.
27 November 2015 at 19:25 #47992@ichabod: Easy solution to get both kinds of Daleks, grey and irredeemable. The grey ones are the ones the Doctor gives the Time Lord souls to, the irredeemable ones are those Davros (re)creates.
There can even be a Ron Moore Battlestar Galactica feel if some of the grey Daleks take on humanoid form and start promoting their religion they feel is superior to that of humans and others …
27 November 2015 at 03:23 #47965@ichabod: I think Moffat has said that it could have been possible that this year’s Christmas special was his last ever Doctor Who episode as showrunner. Therefore it stands to reason that he would have tried to wrap up many loose threads from his own stories the last few years in Hell Bent.
So from Asylum of the Daleks we see Moffat introducing the concept of the Pathweb linking all the Daleks that a version of Clara was able to hack into. That would be a perfect conduit for another version of Clara to hack Time Lord souls into the Daleks.
I have to wonder if this whole arc has been the culmination of years of patient negotiation that Moffat has been conducting the the estate of Terry Nation to allow some changes to the status of the Daleks. Moffat is apparently even the son-in-law of the agent who originally negotiated Terry Nation’s acquiring the rights to the Daleks in exchange for allowing Doctor Who to use the concept.
26 November 2015 at 17:30 #47933@mudlark: Well spoken, thanks.
Ripples that turn to tidal waves. It is so risky to change time knowing its effects down the line.
Unless one approaches the problem from the other direction of time. What if the Time Lords plan is to reenter the universe at the very end of time when everything but them are dead and then rewrite time moving forwards? Then they could avoid paradox easier.
26 November 2015 at 08:58 #47918Now to make the Time Lords a bit more evil, what if they did plot the end of Clara … only to give the Doctor the last temptation. What if they offer the Doctor the chance to go back in time to save the life of Danny Pink and to create an alternate timeline where Clara eventually left the Doctor to marry Danny and have the kid who eventually would become Orson Pink’s ancestor, thus saving Clara as well. This Orson Pink then goes to have the time accident that enables the creation of a crack in the universe at the end of time where the Time Lords can escape back into this universe.
26 November 2015 at 08:23 #47914I have read recently that Moffat thought the upcoming Christmas show could be his last as Doctor Who showrunner. It stands to reason Hell Bent may throw in the kitchen sink for what he did. So here’s my grand unified theory for all the leaks so far for Hell Bent.
The Doctor and the Time Lords are battling at the end of time because the Time Lords wanted a paradox, a non-existing Orson Pink to have his time travel experiment travel to the end of time causing a crack in the universe. The Doctor, enraged by the fate of Clara, prevents Gallifrey from physically returning at the end of the universe; instead sentencing the Time Lords to only have the ability to have their souls transplanted into Daleks, the Daleks claimed to be soulless by Rusty in Into the Dalek.
After the Doctor decides to put the Time Lord souls into the Daleks, he goes to the one fixed point in time and space he knows he can find a new version of Clara, the diner in Utah, a Clara that will be protecting the Doctor from the Great Intelligence. He needs some version of Clara because he needs to hack into the Daleks to upload the Time Lord souls, and Clara has been shown to have become an incredible hacker. But where can he find the Daleks to hack into them all at once?
Remember in the portrayal of Gallifrey’s vanishing and the Daleks destroying themselves in The Day of the Doctor that Moffat was careful to show one damaged ship escaping, I believe the Dalek ship that would later appear in Victory of the Daleks. That is the ship and that is where the Daleks can be hacked. That is why there is a leaked scene that appears around the time of Victory of the Daleks.
26 November 2015 at 07:50 #47912Yes, let’s think about the Time Lords not being evil but the Doctor very angry at them for the accidental fate of Clara. Now I have been wrong about Gallifrey not being able to come back to this universe because the Time War would start again. There is one place they can go where there would be no war … the end of the time as shown in the Moffat-written episode Listen.
Now suppose the event that caused Orson Pink’s time travel experiment to send him to the end of time was no accident. Suppose that his even existing is some sort of paradox since Danny Pink is dead. Suppose this was done to create a crack in the universe at the end of time where Gallifrey could re-emerge, a time at which Gallifrey would not be attacked.
I don’t know what the Time Lord plan is. They might want to somehow restart the universe from there. They might be able to set up some sort of fixed point in time and go back in time whenever they want. The key to me is the Time Lords under Moffat are no longer mustache-twirling villains.
But the Doctor is still mad at the Time Lords with insane fury, and perhaps rightly he does not want them to rule anything anymore. My theory is the Doctor forces the adult Time Lords who want to come back to have their souls merge with Daleks, which becomes the hybrid.
26 November 2015 at 06:57 #47911I can’t help thinking there has been a dramatic change in how the Time Lords are being portrayed morally between Davies and Moffat. The Time Lords are basically irredeemable villains in The End of Time. Yet by The Day of the Doctor the show runner Moffat chooses to show the pathos and humanity of Gallifreyans and Time Lords.
It is very interesting to see if the Time Lords will be reverted back to being irredeemable villains. I am going to guess no, that the Doctor will perceive them to be irredeemable due to Clara’s fate but will stay his hand at the last moment in honor of her memory.
26 November 2015 at 06:17 #47910I am wondering if with the crack being sealed in The Time of the Doctor, there is no longer a physical way for Gallifrey to return to the normal universe. The only way Gallifreyans might escape back is if their information, their minds, their souls are transmitted. That is, the Matrix would be transmitted.
Perhaps the Doctor has been transmuted into an intermediate Gallifreyan hard drive for testing to make sure he is the Doctor. We saw the reverse of this process when the boy who Danny Pink killed was miraculously brought back to life in Death in Heaven.
26 November 2015 at 03:27 #47897Here is my quibble of the episode, because I think on this forum there should always be room for criticism.
I am really curious how someone who is not that into Doctor Who would interpret what happened to Clara in the context of how other stories are presented in TV or movies. When I try and step back and just watch Face the Raven without prior assumptions, every single detail seems to be a portrayal of Clara Oswald’s soul being taken by something similar to the Devil for possible eternal torment in some form of hell unless she is eventually rescued.
The Doctor himself says:
The Doctor: It’s called a Quantum Shade. It’s kind of a spirit. Once it’s bound to a victim, you could flee across all of time and all of the universe, it would still find you.
“Shade” is a synonym for “spirit.” We have a being that can pursue one anywhere.
Later Ashildr says:
Ashildr: She can’t. Clara, I made a contract with the Shade when I put the chronolock on Rigsy. I promised it a soul and only I can break that contract. When you took it from him, you changed the terms. You cut me out of the deal.
With “contract” we have an explicit analog to making contracts with the Devil on pain of forfeiture of one’s soul, “soul” also being mentioned. Clara even agreed to this deal, although she did not read the fine print.
Perusing Sarah Dollard’s interview
http://www.thegallifreytimes.co.uk/2015/11/exclusive-spoiler-filled-interview-with.html
and reviews of Face the Raven, I am outraged over Clara’s end being called a “death”. What is depicted is her soul is taken away for possibly eternal torment in some sort of hell. Why can’t creators in this day and age own what they have depicted with pride so that it is easier for the next creator to expand the limits of creative freedom even further in this medium? Why do reviewers fail to make the most obvious connections just because the conclusions might be a bit uncomfortable. Very bad, long-experienced, and painful ends often happen to very good people.
And this bad faith interpretation I feel has consequences for when creators try to depict some socially useful message. Too often I see creators trying to have it both ways, claiming that what was depicted on the screen supported whatever message is politically correct at the time without that being the case. And it is wrong.
Because in the end good only triumphs when it can be done in the open with pride, as has been seen with other recent movements.
26 November 2015 at 01:52 #47886@lisa: I agree that Missy has her own agenda apart from the Time Lords. The Master was enraged by the earlier prospect that the Time Lords were all dead, yet the Master was also enraged by his being implanted with the drumming sound by the same Time Lords that drove him crazy most of his life. I find it consistently terrifying in the portrayals that the Master / Missy has been seeking technology that can control mass numbers of people. I wonder if Missy wants to bring the Time Lords back but chain their minds somehow, to put them under her thumb. “Upload the mind, upgrade the body.” I even wonder if a singular Missy now exists. What if the Master / Missy has converted to being a virtual mind that downloads itself into a master body at any point of time, but if that body is destroyed, it can instantly create another body to redownload?
I do not believe the Time Lords set out to murder Clara Oswald. They just wanted the Doctor. The murdering was Missy’s idea, to enrage the Doctor, because as Missy put it, she just wants her friend back. She therefore wants to alienate the Doctor from every other rival for his affections, from companions to fellow Time Lords. Clara was Missy’s plot to break the Doctor’s desire to have another longterm human companion. Clara was to the Doctor an earworm of a companion, designed to obsess him, and thus to break him when she died.
25 November 2015 at 19:38 #47859@janetteb: Yes, there is a possible truce, but this is why according to Davros the prophesy said the two warlike species would have to be “forced” to combine to create the hybrid.
From Into the Dalek, an episode with a co-writer credit for Moffat:
DOCTOR: I saved your life, Rusty. Now I’m going to go one better. I’m going to save your soul.
RUSTY: Daleks do not have souls.
DOCTOR: Oh, no? Imagine if you did. What then, Rusty? What would happen then?Daleks have no souls but have physical existence in this universe. The Time Lords have souls but have no physical existence in this universe.
Consistent with the themes of the Zygon episodes and The Day of the Doctor, I actually see two outcomes for Gallifreyan souls. The young souls of the children can go into some human, perhaps one who has just died prematurely, and live out one ordinary life without regeneration. Or the Time Lords who want more can have their souls transplanted into a Dalek. Life’s not fair.
Thinking things over I now have a way for the Time Lords to have contacted Ashildr and Missy from another dimension. We just saw it in The Woman Who Lived. Suppose the Tharils from another dimension could take another form, I don’t know, maybe like Rump’s. Suppose the Eye of Hades could take another form, I don’t know, maybe the pendant that Ashildr prominently hangs around her neck that one can see after she removes her scarf.
Then the Time Lords would just need something like a death to charge up their inter-dimensional transfer.
But the Doctor is not going to let the Time Lords just come back. What if his solution is even more drastic, since if the Time Lords come back the Time War starts again. What if the Doctor erases the Time Lords from history so they become only the stuff of myth and legend.
Let us just think who the Time Lords are relative to these times. They are a former imperialistic empire that became decadent and the immolated itself in a war that threatened to destroy the universe. I really doubt they are going to be restored to their former status.
25 November 2015 at 03:25 #47782@bendubz11: I don’t even remember where, but I had read some speculation that the quantum shade would return somehow in Hell Bent that really seemed to make sense. Thus the use of Simon Paisley Day seemed to make sense. I had the impression Rump in Face the Raven was a bit more than he appeared. In any case he would have made a good messenger or delivery person, perhaps even using his true form as the Wolverine. 🙂
Simon Paisley Day is exactly the type of actor I have been talking about as someone who I think the show needs to find a way to do more of what they can do. Doctor Who has access to a nearly unlimited pool of Shakespearean actors. In Face the Raven the show found a way for the aliens to be in human form allowing the actors to do some acting. Now if only we can have some more continuing characters, then the Shakespearean actors can show all of their skills at speaking and depicting emotion. That has been the great thing about this season, the tremendous conversations between the Doctor, Clara, and certain returning characters.
25 November 2015 at 02:57 #47778The Veil is played by the same person as plays Colony Sarff, and the outfit is pretty similar. could it be not the time lords but in fact Davros and Missy working together to trap CapDoc?
As this season has shown, who wouldn’t welcome seeing more Missy or more Davros? I suspect starting the season so strong with those two interacting with the Doctor has led to many fans having such high regard for the product. I have been avoiding some of the more blatant spoiler pages so I may have missed something, but sadly, I see no indication that Michelle Gomez will make any further appearances this season. 🙁
And Missy did not exactly get off to a great start with her personal relationship with Davros just tweaking his eye in The Witch’s Familiar.
Curiously though in the IMDb site the names listed have changed to where the character of Rump is no longer listed. I swear Simon Paisley Day was listed as an additional actor just last night.
25 November 2015 at 02:30 #47773Unless of course, as I’ve seen people suggest, The Doctor IS the hybrid. or maybe it’s a hybrid race he created.
At this point it certainly is quite the possibility the Doctor is somehow the hybrid: He’s almost the only candidate left just looking over the names known to be in Hell Bent.
Just watching some of the big story arc episodes of the David Tennant or Matt Smith eras it is astonishing to me how toned down the show seems to have become, at least relative to the madcap feel of how at any moment anything could happen back then.
Whereas now I am running out of possibilities we have seen before for how the Doctor can even get to speak to the Time Lords. They are after all in another dimension so I do not even see how physical objects can realistically reach them. Virtual reality like the Gallifreyan Matrix? Something to do with the quantum shade? The Tardis has even been deliberately disabled as far as taking the key away and left to be painted in Rigsy’s art.
I would welcome some extreme bonkers at this point.
25 November 2015 at 00:59 #47769There is something I can’t even come up with a plausible bonkers theory to explain. As Davros stated in The Witch’s Familiar:
DAVROS: There was a prophecy, Doctor, on your own world.
DOCTOR: Please you must, you must stop this. You must stop this!
DAVROS: It spoke of a hybrid creature. Two great warrior races forced together to create a warrior greater than either. Is that what you ran from, Doctor? Your part in the coming of the hybrid? Half Dalek, half Time Lord?My question is: How did the Doctor know about the hybrid at least back when he was the Hartnell Doctor if not sooner? Is there going to be some sort of special effects enabled appearance of Hartnell’s image in Hell Bent? I know the Doctor has been shouting this season that there are no limits to what he can do, and it would appear in Hell Bent the Doctor may have been unanchored from his usual moral compass, but reaching back to his very first incarnation on Gallifrey to transmit information seems going a bit too far.
24 November 2015 at 07:49 #47698@ichabod: The Doctor does believe in at least one concept of a soul as shown in a Moffat-written episode The Bells of Saint John, an episode featuring the character of Clara Oswald:
DOCTOR: This whole world is swimming in wifi. We’re living in a wifi soup. Suppose something got inside it. Suppose there was something living in the wifi, harvesting human minds. Extracting them. Imagine that. Human souls trapped like flies in the world-wide web. Stuck forever, crying out for help.
Here is one more piece of evidence. I believe the Chronolock Guy is a Cyberman, I am guessing the same one we briefly see with his Ood wife. He is the first one shown to be taken by the raven.
The Doctor: At least give him a merciful death.
Ashildr: Do you think a Cyberman fears a merciful death?
The raven attacking and finishing off the Cyberman was not a death at all. It was capturing his soul for potentially eternal damnation, just like it did Clara’s. That is why he was running.
24 November 2015 at 07:28 #47696IMDb’s page on Hell Bent has some interesting claims. I do not know how carefully they are verified. Here are some actors who will appear:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4701544/
Note one of them is from Face the Raven. As it turns out, this actor seems quite accomplished both theater and elsewhere, also has worked previously on Moffat’s Sherlock.
The last claim on this page under “Spoilers” is very big, but confirms what seems to have been obvious from other released pictures. I speculate this character may be acting as a messenger or a delivery person.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4701544/trivia?ref_=tt_trv_trv
24 November 2015 at 02:04 #47679Let us just watch the episode with fresh eyes. What are we seeing with how the quantum shade / chronolock are being presented?
When the Chronolock Guy was taken by the Raven, the Doctor said:
The Doctor: It’s called a Quantum Shade. It’s kind of a spirit. Once it’s bound to a victim, you could flee across all of time and all of the universe, it would still find you.
The Doctor flat-out says it is a kind of spirit. Now this is what Clara says when she is trying to get the chronolock from Rigsy:
Clara: Well, I was kind of hoping that would be it. I say I want it, you say, “You can have it” – done deal. Hey, turn around, let me see.
“Done deal.” More like … contract. Supernatural-like setting with a spirit raven that kills. A time of counting down until the end. And more when Ashildr realizes what Clara has done:
Ashildr: She can’t. Clara, I made a contract with the Shade when I put the chronolock on Rigsy. I promised it a soul and only I can break that contract. When you took it from him, you changed the terms. You cut me out of the deal.
These are not the tropes of a standard execution, no, it’s much worse. These are the tropes of signing a contract with the Devil and risking the loss of one’s soul.
Clara Oswald is far from dead, far worse. Clara Oswald’s soul in in some form of hell.
23 November 2015 at 20:37 #47664@pedant: I think Face the Raven bluntly states the character Clara Oswald is worse than dead; instead, she’s in a form of hell.
Just looking at the episode, the special effects show the quantum shade going into the victim, then leaving the mouth as black smoke that goes back to being the raven in the cage. It is explicitly said the quantum shade seeks souls. And we know something of what Moffat thinks of souls in the Doctor Who universe from the episode he wrote The Bells of Saint John, an episode that features the character Clara Oswald. In particular, souls can be captured and imprisoned.
No wonder the Doctor is so angry, and will continue to be so.
23 November 2015 at 19:49 #47660@ichabod: Here’s an analogy that Clara as a teacher might have been aware of. And this relates to the Arthurian legends of the Fisher King that we didn’t quite get this season.
In Chretien de Troyes sadly unfinished Perceval, the Story of the Grail, there are multiple depictions of how young Perceval causes disaster by robotically following the advice of a mentor instead of being himself. What Perceval did not understand is that what made him a candidate to one day be one of the very greatest of knights was what was innate within him, not what was taught to him.
So here is an example of apparently completely disproportionate punishment for failing. Perceval sees a procession and, trying to follow a mentor’s advice, asks no questions about it. He misses his one chance to find the Holy Grail and all of the terrible things he and those he cares for must endure afterwards result from this. To top it off, the story itself is unfinished so, at least for this work, he never finds it.
23 November 2015 at 17:27 #47635The more I think about the death of Clara, the better I like it. Clara has tremendous emotional understanding of the Doctor. But her intellectual understanding of what he is trying to communicate is near zero, as shown by her anger at him in Kill the Moon.
The Doctor was never telling her to lie all the time for tactical advantage. That instead was what Missy tried to train Clara to do. Clara confused what the Doctor was saying to what Missy was saying.
Because the one person the Doctor does not want to travel with is a clone of himself or anything close. It is hard to believe Clara missed this one most important aspect of what the Doctor wants in life.
23 November 2015 at 17:10 #47631Rigsy: The Doctor would never let you do this.
Clara: Doctor 102 – never tell anyone your actual plan. He’ll have a tantrum when he finds out. And then, when we confront Ashildr, she’ll want to take the chronolock off just to shut him up.
Clara died for her ignorance and stupidity. After all this time, she cannot honestly communicate with the Doctor when it is a life-and-death situation. She learned the wrong lesson. She is not the Doctor, but a companion. A companion is supposed to speak the truth and be herself / himself, not be a bad imitation of the Doctor lying for tactical purposes. That’s the Doctor’s job because he knows what he’s doing, while she doesn’t.
Now I know what I am hoping for for the next companion. I am hoping for someone who does not want to be the Doctor’s Mini-Me. I am hoping for someone who retains their identity. I am hoping for someone who will freely speak their mind to the Doctor. That is I think someone the Doctor should be wanting as well.
23 November 2015 at 08:12 #47599Let’s try and speculate on another scene of Hell Bent, the scene maybe set in the 1940s – 1950s.
In Victory of the Daleks, at the end isn’t there another crack in time / space? I speculate this may be where the Doctor has the hybrid start the negotiations as to what would be the settlement of the Dalek – Time Lord conflict.
23 November 2015 at 08:03 #47598@lisa: I am thinking the Doctor is sent into some sort of virtual reality similar to the old classic Fourth Doctor serial The Deadly Assassin set within the Matrix.
I used to think Clara would end up a teacher, maybe, but now there is another possibility. The quantum shade I believe is some sort of container of souls in a form of hell, and quantum refers to something very hard to break. But perhaps not impossible if one knows the key.
So what if the Doctor is able to rescue Clara’s soul from the quantum shade, then where to put it? He would try to end the possibility of dying with him again or be timey-wimey-ed out of existence, so he must go to a place that is somehow time-locked relative to him. And where better to go than Utah where he was apparently killed by River Song, a place where he cannot under any circumstances further change history. He knows one of the fragments of Clara will be there because of the Great Intelligence’s interference. So what if his plan is not just to play a sad song he composed for Clara, I would guess on a jukebox, what if it is to give Clara’s soul to her fragment, to make that fragment whole, a new Clara to live out her life.
23 November 2015 at 07:44 #47597@ichabod: That’s why as i have said a tarot card that applies to the Doctor is The Devil:
http://www.tarotlore.com/tarot-cards/the-devil/
The Doctor is going to give everyone what they ask for, like he always does when he truly wants to punish someone.
23 November 2015 at 07:38 #47595My bonkers speculation seems to be reinforced by what I have seen in Face the Raven. I was asked a few days ago why my theory some Gallifreyans, the children, would be reborn as ordinary humans. I now have my answer.
The Gallifreyan children are the innocents and the Doctor knows their exact number from The Day of the Doctor. The Moment made him get a count. It would be interesting if the Doctor figures out a way for them to be reborn into people who have just died a too early death, their one regeneration.
The adult Gallifreyans on the other hand, particularly the leaders, they will get a different fate. The Doctor does have someone to take his revenge on for the death of Clara, the only ones who know how to make a lock that fits his Tardis key and the only ones who know about a confession dial. He’s going to take it out on the adult Time Lords. Heaven help their souls.
Because as it stands there is another group of beings who according to one of them, Rusty, do not at the moment have souls, the Daleks. The Time Lords wanted a longer life in this universe. They should be careful what they ask for, for they may be about to get a long long life inside Daleks, and we know what happens to old Daleks.
23 November 2015 at 07:13 #47593@ichabod: The Doctor does have someone to take his revenge on, the only ones who know how to make a lock that fits his Tardis key and the only ones who know about a confession dial. He’s going to take it out on the Time Lords, but unlike the Time War, he’s going to take account of the exact number of children on Gallifrey to save.
23 November 2015 at 02:29 #47575For those who are asking for more of Clara’s story, what if it is in plain sight within Face the Raven and earlier Moffat (co)-written episodes?
Note that the quantum shade demands souls. From the visual effects associated with the exit of a black smoke to turn back into a raven, I conjecture the quantum shade extracts souls, captures souls. The ability of souls to be extracted has precedence in the Moffat-written episode The Bells of Saint John.
As I previously conjectured, Clara’s body might be dead, but her soul might be in a form of hell.
As for why it is called a quantum shade, the “shade” part at least to me is a synonym for “ghost” or “spirit”. From the Wikipedia entry on shade for example, one can read that this interpretation goes at least as far back as ancient Sumerian mythology where for most of the dead the underworld is a terrible dark place. As for “quantum,” one possibility is the use of quantum in “quantum-locking”.
Also chronolock has an established meaning which is not the same as a timed countdown device. Chronolock can also refer to a state of being outside normal time and space.
The use of a lock that fits a Tardis key and the demand for the Doctor’s confession dial indicate that the ones who made a deal with Ashildr are the Time Lords. What do the Time Lords want? Apparently they want to return to this physical universe.
Now there is another brief mention of soul in an episode with a Moffat co-writer credit from just last season, Into the Dalek.
DOCTOR: I saved your life, Rusty. Now I’m going to go one better. I’m going to save your soul.
RUSTY: Daleks do not have souls.
DOCTOR: Oh, no? Imagine if you did. What then, Rusty? What would happen then?Let us consider all the mentioning of the prophesied hybrid for this Series 9. Let us consider how angry the Doctor will be with the Time Lords if he finds out they helped contribute to the death of Clara Oswald. Let us consider that a solution has to be found for the Dalek – Time Lord conflict for the Time Lords to return.
Is the Doctor about to sentence some of the Time Lords to have their souls be combined with the Daleks? Could Clara Oswald have some future role to play with this hybrid?
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