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22 November 2015 at 20:10 #47546
@pedant: Thank you, as I said, I know nothing of Waterloo Station. 🙂
@mudlark: Agreed that the history of Waterloo Station aligns with the possibility of a forgotten street.
@lisa: Agreed some sort of future scene with Jenna Coleman as some sort of Clara is inevitable. If nothing else, the way TV series are filmed, the order in which scenes are filmed does not reflect the order in which they will be shown. Even if Jenna Coleman had to leave as soon as possible for her next role as young Queen Victoria, it would be wasteful to not think of something for her to do to be in the final two episodes or perhaps even the Christmas episode. Look at how Moffat was able to efficiently use the time the show had with Maisie Williams.
22 November 2015 at 17:17 #47525@mudlark: I thought Ashildr said in the episode the reference to Waterloo was not Waterloo the battle but Waterloo Station. Now I know nothing about Waterloo Station, but a brief web search indicates that it and its surroundings are infamous for a long convoluted history and thus confusing layout, a parallel to the hidden street.
22 November 2015 at 09:20 #47491Because it is the Time Lords that helped cause Clara’s death, the ones the Doctor is really going to punish and get his revenge on are his own people, the Time Lords. I speculate the Doctor is going to use the hybrid to erase them from history and make them only legends and myths.
To return to my bonkers theory, I speculate the reason Gallifrey is lost is because the Doctor needed both the inputs of the Doctors and the inputs of the Dalek positions at the moment he phased out Gallifrey to calculate the dimension he sent Gallifrey to. The hybrid will have dominion over the time lines of both Time Lords and Daleks.
22 November 2015 at 08:52 #47490@lisa: I am thinking the Doctor wants to see Clara in that diner because close by there is another equivalent of a time lock due to the events of The Impossible Astronaut through to The Wedding of River Song. He knows Clara will be at that diner because she is there at every crucial moment of the earlier Doctors in order to stop The Great Intelligence. Thus he will not be able to change history, so he is free to do something like maybe substitute a song in the jukebox for one he wrote to express his feelings for Clara.
22 November 2015 at 08:27 #47487@bluesqueakpip: I don’t think Clara died because she ought not to have imitated the Doctor; she died because she misinterpreted the Doctor. Because a major part of the Doctor is finding the truth and acting on it. Clara thought she could out-clever Ashildr and the Doctor by withholding information and thus not dispelling her ignorance, and thus she died.
I am reminded of some stories of Percival’s quest for the Holy Grail where he endures quite a few more trials because at a certain point he asks no questions about why a certain procession is happening.
And I do agree for modern companions the show has made sure to have a revisit of their departures to make them somewhat happier.
22 November 2015 at 07:24 #47485@bluesqueakpip: I’m thinking more Clara and the Doctor are like Enkidu and Gilgamesh.
22 November 2015 at 07:06 #47484@countscarlioni: Every single companion departure in the new series has happened in two parts, one sad, the second a little happier. So there is hope for Clara.
22 November 2015 at 06:41 #47482I am so happy, well, not at the death of the character of Clara Oswald, but because some measure of justice has been dealt out to the Doctor for his actions in The Zygon Inversion.
Because in the end what killed Clara Oswald were the wrong lessons he taught her. The Doctor should not in my opinion use manipulation as the first resort, but it should be the last resort. That is why he and the companions should go into adventures assuming the best of people and not the worse even if they know they are going to be disappointed. Clara Oswald lost her life because she wrongly thought she should imitate the Doctor, which she should not, as she should have known when she said one of them should be the good cop and the other the bad cop. Clara turned to manipulation and hiding of information for her first resort, and for once a character who did that, even if one of the good guys, paid for that evil.
It is fascinating that here is another society of refugees, just like the Zygons the Doctor deliberately forced on humans, but now in anger the Doctor was willing to destroy them all before Clara called him off?  And see how the Doctor eventually failed stopping Ashildr from obtaining knowledge of extraterrestrial civilizations or to attain their powers. He may have sealed off the Black Archive from the foolish British UNIT whose real crime was hoarding their knowledge instead of spreading it to all of humankind, but there is no such thing as stealing tech from another species, because such acts are of patriotism. How much better had there been honesty, openness, and nurturing of Ashildr from the beginning so that maybe she would have told the Doctor who told her about his life, the probable identity of her eventual blackmailers.
Ripples that turn into tidal waves.
20 November 2015 at 07:49 #47323Whereas I continue to argue Ashildr in The Woman Who Lived represents Justice:
http://www.tarotlore.com/tarot-cards/justice/
The figure in Justice is seated between two pillars that go back in art to a representation of the two trees in the Garden of Eden, the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life. Ashildr has eaten of the Tree of Life and now wants the Tree of Knowledge which the Doctor denies to her. The figure has a sword, Ashildr’s first desired weapon when she was shown practicing stabbing the Odin-Mire as a kid, and the figure wears red, the color of the dress Ashildr is shown wearing. And at the end of the episode Ashildr is judging the Doctor himself, reflecting the scales, and wishes to achieve some sort of justice for those whom the Doctor leaves behind.
18 November 2015 at 07:12 #47233@purofilion: Considering how Missy was taunting the Doctor in Death in Heaven about how a phone call from Clara would force him to run to her, that he’d go to hell and back for her, and that Missy could make the Doctor heel because of this, it would appear Missy has personally constructed Clara’s life so that it would be unbearable for the Doctor to see Clara’s end. Perhaps that is the point, what Missy and Ashildr have in common, this goal of making Clara’s end as a companion so painful the Doctor will have to reassess whether he can bear to have another human one.
It will be interesting to see if Moffat tries to get yet another relatively young actress as the next companion or whether he will go in a different direction.
17 November 2015 at 20:06 #47205This week’s tarot card reading seems almost like shooting fish in a barrel:Â Sleep No More refers to the taro card The Moon:
http://www.tarotlore.com/tarot-cards/the-moon/
The action occurs on an artificial moon of Neptune, a space station, and the rescue mission comes from Triton, a moon of Neptune.  On the tarot card we see two man-made towers of protection, which may also refer to the union of Japan and India. This union believes itself to be prosperous and apparently in union of mind, body, and spirit, as shown by the universal greeting, “May the gods be with you.” Also one may expect a union of Japan and India to achieve such a balance. However all is not in balance: This union has reduced mind in its grunts. And we find out that far worse, it has devised a means to reduce the time of sleep to near nothing.
Sleep helps achieve a “life of the imagination apart from life of the spirit,” not just rest, but also integration of memory and thought. It is blessed. The attempt to eliminate sleep, upsetting the balance, arouses monsters from the deep, as symbolized by the crayfish coming out of the water. This new species of Sandmen wants to fall upon human civilization like wolves devouring it. Ironically, we learn one man’s mind, the scientist Rasmussen, has become incorporated into the collective thought of the Sandmen, in effect becoming a domesticated dog unto their wolf.
17 November 2015 at 18:02 #47200@jammiedodger: Well, my personal theory is the hybrid is some sort of adjudicator between the Time Lords and the Daleks. And it does not exactly sound like the Doctor’s reunion with the Time Lords would be a happy one … That’s why I have been arguing for a while that eventually the Time Lords must be restrained in some fashion from returning to this universe. The worst of them will be fallen angels, perhaps almost literally as Weeping Angels.
17 November 2015 at 17:43 #47197@jammiedodger: I think what will be brought back are Gallifreyans, but not in the expected manner. Just look at this season.  Most of the extraterrestrials are on Earth, and the Zygons and apparently whoever are in Face the Raven are hiding out in contemporary times.
If nothing else for the show’s convenience and perhaps to reduce costs, it would be better if all the extraterrestrials were Earth-bound and accessible in contemporary times. Including the Gallifreyans.
17 November 2015 at 17:23 #47193jammiedodger: I welcome all speculation so go right ahead.
Quite a lot has been teased by now. The Christmas episode is supposed to have the return of River Song who will not even recognize the Twelfth Doctor:
It seems like a light-hearted enough concept, but I wonder if it will show off a new order of things where the Time Lords are not believed to have existed but are at most legends or myths. Is it possible that River Song no longer even knows the Doctor can regenerate?
17 November 2015 at 08:00 #47180I’m curious if Face the Raven could be equally titled Ashildr’s Revenge.
Those snake like tattoos on her. Perhaps they are an offer from the Daleks for a peace treaty with the Time Lords that will break the Doctor’s heart. Ashildr specifically mentioned she remembered Clara as a possible future weapon versus the Doctor.
So perhaps it is the Daleks who offer a peace with an adjudicator, Clara, trapped in a chronolock for all eternity to enforce the peace, past and present. It turns out that Clara has been in training throughout her life to handle this role. Clara can for example go back in time and exactly arrange the Daleks during their assault on Gallifrey so that the location of Gallifrey will now be known by the Doctor. Clara will also be responsible for erasing the Time Lords from history so they are only myth and legend. The mysterious street in London that no one knew about is a demonstration to the Time Lords of how they can hang out on Earth without being detected. The Judoon are there because the Shadow Proclamation sensed something odd going on.
Ashildr gets her revenge on the Doctor because she has schemed, perhaps with Missy’s help, to get the Doctor’s companion Clara trapped for eternity in an equivalent of hell.
16 November 2015 at 17:15 #47118Here’s my theory that might take bonkers to another level. The Time War and its inevitable restart should Gallifrey reappear in the universe make it impossible for Gallifrey to reappear, because the entire universe would unite against them.
So what if Moffat is planning to have the Time Lords disappear from the universe’s history, to become the stuff of legend, at least for an experiment of a season. It would be symmetric to trying to erase memories of the Doctor’s existence.
But how would one explains events such as the destruction of the Zygon planet that forced them to relocate to places like Earth? Solar flares, that’s how.
Now imagine someone, perhaps even the Doctor notes a huge number of species-exterminating solar flares. He may remember the Time War, but suppose it becomes apparent something else is causing solar flares, including targeting Earth …
16 November 2015 at 08:10 #47072Here’s a mystery to me: Why doesn’t the Doctor know where Gallifrey is? His sonic screwdriver held the program that calculated where to put Gallifrey in the first place in The Day of the Doctor. The only way it can’t know I think is that there was an extra input that could not be calculated in advance: Where were the exact locations of the Dalek ships firing on each other? That had to be known so that the planet could disappear at exactly the right moment so that the Dalek fleet would annihilate itself. And if there is no way to know where those ships were … unless someone or something controlled those ships and put them in the right place at the right moment.
To think like the Doctor, do not ask who or what the hybrid is, think what the hybrid is supposed to do. The hybrid must be the answer that ends the Dalek – Time Lord wars and allows Gallifrey to return to the universe. The hybrid must control the Daleks including reaching back in time.
But the Daleks are infinitely adaptable, infinitely determined. They cannot be contained within time. No, eventually the hybrid controlling the Daleks must exist outside of normal time and space. The hybrid must be … chronolocked.
But the hybrid would feel inside itself time passing. The chronolocked hybrid would feel itself to be trapped in its own hell, forever.
15 November 2015 at 20:07 #47014Am I the only one who liked Robot of Sherwood? For a man of his time, I thought the Sheriff of Nottingham was portrayed as having vision as well as ambition, even some small sense of nobility, one of the best portrayals of his character I have ever seen.
15 November 2015 at 09:16 #46973This episode has almost zero chance of being followed up, but curiously I can see some really potential for the Sandmen, at least for one follow-up story. At least they seem to have some sort of intelligence.
One of the whole points of the Doctor as a character is negotiation with intelligence if that intelligence is part of a civilization and is not just that of a selfish monster. So have a follow-up episode where the Sandmen have some sort of culture, some sort of civilization, from all the dreams and images they have been absorbing. Then have the Doctor bring them to the negotiating table to find a way for them to feed without slaughtering all intelligent life in the universe.
It just seems a common sense principle to me that, although people today may enjoy eating chicken or fish, that does not give humans the right to base the entire food supply on slaughtering an intelligent chicken-person or fish-person species, if such an intelligent species is discovered on another planet, when there are plenty of alternative food sources that can be used, such as the efforts now to create various meats in a lab.
15 November 2015 at 09:06 #46971The Doctor: “… humans, stupid, filthy, greedy humans.”  The filthy part, not unlike what Missy was saying about humans to Osgood right before Missy killed her.
I’m thinking whatever happens the last three episodes will free the Doctor from his hybrid pretext for hanging around Earth and humans.  He’ll have to find another one.
15 November 2015 at 07:40 #46970Wasn’t one possible great catastrophe that could completely alter Earth’s nations already shown in a Steven Moffat-written episode no less, The Beast Below? Solar flares are going to devastate the Earth around the 29th century.
Of course back then revealing the truth to the general populace and having no more lies was considered a noble end to a story …
15 November 2015 at 06:36 #46968More riffs on Neil Stephenson’s Snow Crash. Recall from Before the Flood that all sentient life is evidently neuro-linguistic programmable by some sort of lower level assembly code, the brain’s equivalent of the BIOS hacked into by the letters inside the Tivolian ship. In Sleep No More we have the equivalent of the Asherah virus that has both a physical and an electromagnetic component. It would appear the Thirty-Eighth century, due to some unmentioned catastrophe, may resemble a time similar to that before the Tower of Babel event. I suppose that makes the Doctor the equivalent of Enki who will eventually find a counter-program to save humanity and the universe.
I think an attempt to capture some of the cultural vibe of Snow Crash may explain some the earlier exchanges between the throw-away soldiers at the beginning. However I am afraid no one is willing to embrace the novel’s anarcho-capitalism, so the actual spirit of the novel is lost.
14 November 2015 at 04:08 #46899I wonder if Moffat is about to show how great a fan he is of the classic series by revisiting yet another of my favorites in a new way: The Curse of Fenric.  Instead of just trotting out the villain, why not use the story’s cool idea of a chess puzzle with seemingly no solution, until the companion tells Fenric of the solution of having the White and Black pieces work together.
The chess puzzle is the deadlock between Time Lords and Daleks. The player trapped by the puzzle is the darker impulses of the Time Lords to return back to this universe to rule it. The companion who provides the puzzle’s answer to the dark player, to the horror of the Doctor, this time is Clara, perhaps in the role of a hybrid. Will the Doctor be forced to break his companion’s faith in him to re-restrain the dark player?
13 November 2015 at 16:09 #46881Suppose that we’ve all been wrong about the word being “hybrid”: Actually, we’ve merely been hearing the pronunciation and it should have been “high-bred”. Clara is the “high-bred” from when the Doctor stole the Gallifreyan President’s wife and had a child with her.  As it turns out the President’s wife was a young Queen Victoria and Clara amazingly looks just like her mother. Later to protect his daughter the Doctor erased his memories but left enough clues to eventually recover them if there was to be an emergency. Sadly what the Doctor needs to do is send Clara with the Hand of Omega back to Gallifrey through a one-way wormhole never to see her again, because only Clara can bring peace to Gallifrey.
Oh wait, that’s the plot to the movie Men in Black II. 🙂
13 November 2015 at 07:29 #46867My explanation is a sadder one for Clara’s appearance in the diner: Suppose she was gone forever but the Doctor had to see her just one more time. He has to pick a fixed point of time where he cannot change things. So he goes back to that diner on that day because he knows she will be there, because she’s always there to try to save the previous Doctors from the Great Intelligence, based on the events of The Name of the Doctor. But that Clara won’t know he is the Twelfth Doctor because relative to that Clara he has not happened yet.
13 November 2015 at 07:04 #46866@purofilion: Wonderfully written, nothing really to add from me.
Jenna Coleman is going to play a young Queen Victoria:
12 November 2015 at 17:05 #46842I did not mean to suggest having the actual person who plays The Stig, a person who changed as the years went by on Top Gear.  But instead I wanted having the character of The Stig, helmet covering face and body in a driver’s suit, appear as a dangerous extraterrestrial. 🙂
In the words of one of the classic Doctors, “Why not?” 🙂
12 November 2015 at 05:18 #46825On a sad note for Face the Raven, how perfect it would have been for The Stig to have made a guest appearance. This is why I think the BBC should be more active getting guest stars on the show before something happens that makes it impossible.
Florence Welch of Florence and the Machine has apparently been begging to be on the show, and the BBC has been pushing Florence and the Machine hard. How awesome would that be to have the Doctor shown with What Kind of Man playing in the background.
11 November 2015 at 17:09 #46796And here are more even bigger mega spoilers:
http://www.doctorwhotv.co.uk/huge-shocks-in-series-9s-final-episodes-77904.htm
11 November 2015 at 16:56 #46794Big alleged spoilers for the final three episodes of Season 9:
http://blogtorwho.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/doctor-who-series-9-finale-angry-doctor.html
I say alleged because I simply do not know anything about this site.
11 November 2015 at 07:16 #46778@janetteb: Also for many of the previous companions there is a first apparent end that seems very sad, and later the Doctor somewhat patches it up. Martha Jones was an exception because her destiny was always to go off and be an independent career woman.
11 November 2015 at 05:47 #46773@nerys: At least for Under the Lake, the Cloister Bell would have justifiably been ringing because another version of the Doctor was inside the suspension capsule relatively nearby. It would have been warning of a possible time paradox.
11 November 2015 at 05:38 #46772These hints of what is happening the final two episodes seem very disconnected. It is as if they were in a dream …
Because maybe that’s where they are occurring, some merger of dream and reality. Hasn’t that been a theme such as Last Christmas?
Let us go back to The Time of the Doctor. There is a crack through which the Time Lords are sending their message which turns out to be asking for the Doctor to prove it is safe for them to emerge by stating his real name. Clara appeals to the Time Lords to help the dying Doctor who is going out to face the Daleks one last time. The Time Lords probably know if they return the Time War starts again, yet the crack might be their only chance to escape where they have been imprisoned since The Day of the Doctor. Yet we see the crack close, energy shoots out to give the Doctor his regenerations, and then he is able to Highlander on the Daleks destroying them.
If one looks at this with the eyes of someone who has never seen Doctor Who before, isn’t it obvious where Gallifrey is now: The Time Lords somehow transferred themselves to the Doctor. Perhaps or perhaps not the Time Lords then transferred themselves to somewhere on the Tardis. The Doctor or the Tardis are the only places Gallifrey can be where the Doctor can always find it.
Capaldi is apparently going to be the only actor in Heaven Sent. Yet there will be a monster, the Veil. What other face can the monster eventually have but Capaldi’s? Where else can the action be but something inside the Doctor’s head or inside the Tardis? How else can it be that after he gets through his perils he can somehow find Gallifrey?
Missy wasn’t lying when she said Gallifrey was at its original coordinates, at least when the Doctor visited those coordinates.
11 November 2015 at 05:10 #46770To return to the topic of The Zygon Inversion, the episode got off to a sour note for me not because of the second missile hitting the airplane, but the cavalier way in which the deaths of everyone but the Doctor and Osgood were treated. The Zygon prisoner might have announced he was prepared to die, but I don’t think the pilots or the rest of the crew were. Cannon fodder, who cares. Well, for an episode that is trying to deliver a serious message, maybe someone on screen should care for the briefest of moments.
And then there’s the issue that apparently the entire human population of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, was actually killed off at the start of the first part of this story. So if this form of the peace is to hold, the government must cover this up with some cover story, say an explosion or something. (It doesn’t seem the Zygons would have bothered to copy them since living without having to be copies is what their goal was, besides, they were already Brits for their human form.) Which is apparently close to 6,500 people dead.  So now the show has created what would be one of the most infamous incidents in United States history that is caused by something. And that something will be demonized, falsely.
Peter Capaldi and Mark Gatiss have apparently mentioned that they would like to do a certain story pointing out the dangers of a certain form of energy. How convenient, I suppose the government depending on its politics can scapegoat the form of energy they don’t like and have it permanently banned in the US if not worldwide on a convenient lie. Oh and let’s not forget how inconvenient it would be if someone who was thought dead actually ran off into the desert and somehow survived. Better I suppose to kill them off so they don’t spread their false story that is actually true.
Ripples that turn into tidal waves. Where does the evil in the name of doing good ever stop once this process of building on a lie starts.
In another forum I have been pondering the question of what is Doctor Who really about. An easy answer is the Doctor is simply trying to apply the Golden Run, to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Or to state this another way, do not use tactical advantage to treat others as mere instruments for one’s own goals. To me this episode that is supposedly anti-war is glorifying war because it is justifying treating certain humans as mere instruments for some abstract goal, hiding the knowledge of Zygons from the general public, even to the point of killing these humans.
Just listen to the rhetoric: If humans found out about Zygons, humans will react badly and civilization will go up in flames. Does anyone care to see this is a hypothetical, not a scientific fact?  The killing of people for fear of an abstract hypothetical is what is the face of evil today.
What happened to the Doctor who throughout this season has been advertised as trying to save lives.
10 November 2015 at 15:07 #46714@blenkinsopthebrave: This is an idea I got from another forum. Could Veil be somehow related to the Valeyard?
There is one scenario I think where some version of the Valeyard does come into play finding Gallifrey. Where is the one place Gallifrey can be where the Doctor can always find it? What if more came through the final crack at Trenzalore than regenerations? After all, since when did regenerations give the Doctor the ability to go Highlander on the Daleks? What if the Time Lords trusted Clara more than anyone imagined? What if Missy was, perhaps inadvertently, right when she said that Gallifrey was located at its original coordinates, when the Doctor visited those coordinates?
Because what if Gallifrey is somehow located inside the Doctor.
10 November 2015 at 06:56 #46701@kharis: Yes, and after what happened to Amy and Rory, I strongly believe whatever the ending of Clara will be, it will involve something we have seen over and over and over.
With Amy and Rory, it was always some time paradox that threatened their relationship, and would Amy in the end prove her love and actually choose to be with Rory at all costs.
In The Zygon Inversion here is Clara once again in some sort of altered reality figuring out she is in an unnatural reality.  Just like Last Christmas which could have been Jenna Coleman’s final episode as Clara. But the contrast I think was in Last Christmas, Clara was being offered personal happiness, the life with Danny Pink she never could have, whereas in this ending I think they will go with having her exit the show as a teacher.
10 November 2015 at 04:24 #46699The Second Doctor as shown in The War Games carries this self-assembling box that can carry messages to the Time Lords. Similar message cubes appeared in the Neil Gaiman written episode The Doctor’s Wife.
Now just suppose … that when a Time Lord dies a message cube forms that carries something of his or her essence back to the Time Lords on Gallifrey. And just suppose that to the Doctor’s shock and amazement, when Clara dies, some sort of message cube forms and flies away.
That is why the Doctor is willing to risk all to try and follow Clara’s cube, because it is the best chance for him to both rescue Clara and find Gallifrey.
And the betrayal occurs when the Doctor discover the Time Lords have been using him to return and intend to enslave Clara in a virtual dream reality to train themselves to go back the other direction and invade Earth.
The solution the Doctor brokers is for only the Time Lord children, trained by now a willing Clara, are allowed to go back the other direction, to be reborn as mere mortal humans, perhaps taking the bodies of humans who have just died and have a miraculous revival.
10 November 2015 at 03:21 #46698Here’s my speculation for Clara’s final fate. I believe it ties in everything Moffat has been writing about Clara from the very beginning.
The only reason to bring something back from Gallifrey in my opinion is the innocent children, as emphasized by the Moment in Day of the Doctor where the Moment told the Doctor to count the number of children he was going to murder.
So I am starting to wonder if Clara’s fate is to be a teacher of the Gallifreyan children who are planning to reenter this universe. I speculate the children must make a choice: Come to this universe to live one life as an ordinary human mortal or stay in Gallifrey forever, alive, but not having fully lived life.
So we may have a fascinating symmetry: The Doctor is the bodhisattva who purposely stays behind in this universe to help others attain enlightenment, while Clara is the gatekeeper allowing some of the child angels to leave a form of heaven to be (re)born to experience the pain of this universe.
We have now see Clara multiple times in some sort of virtual or dream reality where she is made to realize she is in some sort of unreal environment.
So suppose the Time Lords try to take her mind by force. The usual pattern of companions leaving these days seems to be some apparent sad ending and then a later fix brokered by the Doctor to let them live happier lives. So for the first apparent end of Clara, I speculate she will be teaching a class that she thinks is composed of ordinary human children when she starts detecting little oddities that make her realize she is in some sort of fake reality. She starts trying to explore how to escape … only to get rebooted back to teaching her class.
The fix I think will be the Doctor discovers her fate and that she cannot be brought back to existence as a normal human being, similar to Asylum of the Daleks. So the Doctor does the best he can: he breaks into Clara’s virtual reality and at least offers her the chance to die. But this time Clara, to the shock of the Time Lords, offers to freely give of herself to teach the Gallifreyan children, if she is allowed to teach them the lessons she learned while traveling with the Doctor.
10 November 2015 at 03:00 #46697I think Clara’s fate is something that is likely to have been hammered as a possibility over and over again. I think it will involve teaching children, and after seeing The Zygon Inversion, I now think she will be trapped teaching children in some sort of virtual or dream reality where she keeps detecting there is something wrong and is caught trying to wake from this false reality over and over again.
But as has happened before to other companions, after this apparently horrible fate, I think there will be a revisit where the Doctor breaks Clara free and she can choose to at least die. But then this time she chooses to willingly be a teacher to the children in this virtual or dream reality and thus finds a form of eternal peace.
Now for who I think she will be teaching, take a look at the BBC approved spoilers forum for the link to the BBC synopsis for Heaven Sent.
9 November 2015 at 22:34 #46687Here is a BBC synopsis for Heaven Sent:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/proginfo/2015/48/doctor-who
The accompanying picture would appear similar to a scene from Skaro from The Magician’s Apprentice or The Witch’s Familiar.
9 November 2015 at 07:15 #46646Sadly I must totally disagree that this episode had anything to say about war, especially its status today.
For one thing, if one examines the statements of all major powers in the world today, everyone decries war and claims their actions are done to prevent war. This is what happens when language is degraded to mean whatever is convenient at the moment instead of being used to actually communicate. It is quite possible for everyone to agree with the Doctor that war is wrong, and yet have as much war if not more continue to be started and to rage on in the name of being opposed to war.
The major problem I have is that one side, the humans, are being deliberately kept in the dark about the existence of extraterrestrials (something I find hard to believe after the events of Death in Heaven), so that are in effect not being consulted other than Kate Stewart and Osgood. Since Kate Stewart has apparently had her memories wiped 15 times, it would appear she has been asked the question only until she finally gets the right answer.
The aftermath of this supposed solution is the exact opposite of the only answer we have today: If mass punishment is not to be imposed, at least have a full investigation for the public record to at least understand what happened, using truth and reconciliation commissions. That is the only hope to actually advance as a species, to learn from past mistakes. But in this episode there can only be an ever escalating series of cover-ups, such as the apparent massacre of all of the human inhabitants of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. What in the world is going to be done about this, say for people who had relatives in that town, maybe very close ones, who are now at best replaced by Zygons.
Absolutely no one from the human side this episode actually learned anything with Kate Stewart’s memory being erased again. With the massacre of much of UNIT, far fewer are left who were even witnesses to the original agreement and aftermath.
The question has to be asked exactly why are humans incapable of understanding the existence among them of extraterrestrials in the Doctor Who universe? The only answer in the show may be due to the Doctor’s having witnessed events in the future, a premature revelation may create a time paradox. Thus it is the existence of the Doctor himself that apparently keeps humans in a childlike condition relative to the rest of the cosmos.
This matters because in the end, the question of how to prevent the triumph of evil to be of any worth has to have some element of appealing to education and enlightenment. But the current setup of having the Doctor in effect dictate a peace that requires almost all humans to be ignorant of the very existence of the Zygons with whom they are supposed to cohabitate destroys all plausible conditions for virtue. Apparently if one follows the logic of this episode it is better to have all power invested in at most 2 or 3 individuals. I’m sorry, but this is simply shockingly retrograde thinking that has been refuted by simple phrases such as “who watches the watchers?”
I find it incredibly ironic that an episode that purports to oppose war in the end advocates that one side simply assert that they are right, they are the enlightened ones, and that therefore they have the right and the duty to unilaterally impose their solutions on their less enlightened brethren, by any means necessary. No need to acquire assent, no need to show mercy, it’s all okay as long as one has a temporary tactical advantage. In other words, an argument against war has incredibly become an argument for war that glorifies war.
9 November 2015 at 06:56 #46645I think in both the classic and new Doctor Who, immortality is an abomination against nature, and the Doctor would think twice about granting it to another companion, even Clara. He felt very uncomfortable about Captain Jack having it.
I like the theory, that I think I have by now read in multiple places, that the episodes at some point will not be in an order linear in time to when events occurred. Thus I think it is quite possible that Clara has died in the future but that the Doctor has gone back in time to when Clara was alive to enjoy some final moments with her.
8 November 2015 at 07:41 #46577The Doctor put a lot of emotion into his speech against war, a lot of his own personal history. He was quite believable. Then again, so was Davros in The Witch’s Familiar.
This will be interesting if Moffat decides to show this Capaldi version of the Doctor as more calculating, more alien, more dangerous than we can imagine.
The prophesy I suspect says the hybrid will be a threat to devastate the universe. This is a danger on the order of what the Time Lords did to the universe in the Time War. All else must be subsumed to stopping the worst of this prophesy. All else. And the Doctor knows, he has known since the First Doctor, that humans are one half of the equation of this hybrid. The Master has known as well. That’s why both the Doctor and the Master spend so much time on Earth.  Look at the exchange between the Doctor and Osgood in The Zygon Inversion. The truth is the Doctor, and Missy, hate much of Earth and humans.
I speculate the Doctor’s concern for preserving the Zygons as hidden among humans is a pretext. What he really wants is to embed another species among humans to if possible spoil the possible use of humans as part of this hybrid scheme. Because somewhere deep down he knows the truth: The hybrid is humans as hosts for Time Lord souls, vessels from which the Time Lords can once again rule space and time.
8 November 2015 at 06:33 #46575Fantastic finish.  And it was logical: The first episode stated there had to be two Osgoods so a second one had to be found.
The Doctor apparently already achieved his objective of seizing control of the Black Archive.
On a darker note, it is clear the Doctor is actively trying to kill off as many soldiers as he can each episode. I guess he figures if they’re willing to die for their country, he’ll give them their wish. It does not seem for example that he bothered to get anyone else from the plane into a parachute other than Osgood.
The Doctor I argue is still tarot card of The Devil.
http://www.tarotlore.com/tarot-cards/the-devil/
Two figures chained to the box, Adam and Eve, with tails signifying their part animal nature but with human faces, a higher possibility for the future.
From the preview for the next episode, this is another example of how I think the show is trying to say dreams can do all sorts of things, from time and space travel to apparently creating monsters. That is because I believe the Time Lords fate is to be in another dimension where they can only be accessed through something like dreams or hallucinations or visions. They are going to be the gods of the ancient astronauts, similar to the theories of Graham Hancock.
7 November 2015 at 02:48 #46464I now think it is possible that what causes Clara’s death will be shown in The Zygon Inversion, because it has a co-writing credit from Moffat. I do not believe that Moffat will allow another writer to write Clara’s death because of its importance. This might be a turning point for the franchise similar to when Romana left the classic series, a real turning point in how companions are portrayed.
Reading spoilers and speculation about upcoming episodes, it is not impossible for them to be after some death blow, perhaps not immediate, has been delivered to Clara. I am intrigued in particular by the episode Face the Raven where there is a character known as Chronolock Guy. What if the Doctor and others are not there because they are unexpectedly trapped by monsters, but the Doctor goes there on purpose to seek the assistance of this Chronolock Guy?
7 November 2015 at 02:40 #46462Now that I think harder about it, of course the Zygons have to be able to retain their human form away from humans. Why didn’t the Doctor realize this? After all, the Zygon residents of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, are thousands of miles away from the UK, and even if their copying can work over that distance, they can’t afford to turn back into Zygons just because their human double got hit by a bus.
@purofilion:Â Unfortunately for the Osgoods’ breathless declaration that every species has good or bad, the two previous arcs showed two new species the Fisher King’s and the Mire that appear to be pure evil in some sense.
I think what is missing, and may never be said in this serial, is that before two species can live in peace, there can’t be a compete asymmetry in power so that once side can crush the other without much of a struggle. I once saw a documentary where the ant colonies were being studied for when there would be total warfare with one colony wiped out, and it turned out the ant colonies would periodically skirmish, and only if one colony appeared much weaker would the other one go all-out to destroy it.
6 November 2015 at 20:55 #46429@pedant: However the very first moments of the episode indicate the two Osgoods were concerned that the loss of either would potentially be a fatal blow to the peace, because the two together are the peace. The two Zygon leaders stopped communicating with UNIT after the death of one. If I am to believe what has been stated by both the Osgoods and the Doctor and shown in the episode, one Osgood may not be enough.
5 November 2015 at 20:21 #46398And here is a totally bonkers explanation for what Osgood’s box is:Â In the clip shown at the beginning of the episode, we see a nuclear device about to detonate whose purpose was to destroy the Black Archive, even at the cost of the lives of everyone in London, to save the world.
As it happens, the Doctor has never approved of the existence of Black Archives or their equivalent whether it be Torchwood or UNIT who are hoarding those items.
What if the Osgood box were simply a device to neutralize every single item in the Black Archive. Then the Doctor could tell UNIT, better surrender to the Zygons because you’re defenseless.  UNIT is forced to unconditionally surrender on behalf of humans and then the older Zygons take back control as there is no longer any reason for war . That is one way to stop a war before it even begins.
So the whole two-parter is simply the Doctor achieving what he really wanted, the destruction of the Black Archive. He is after all the tarot card of The Devil. And this brings back real edge in the relationship between UNIT and the Doctor, and humans and the Doctor.
4 November 2015 at 21:20 #46357@steve-thorp: I interpret Amazing Grace as saying if one has faith in a higher moral calling, one will enter into a state of grace and obtain salvation. The Doctor is struggling with whether he is a good man and how should he stay on a high moral path.
It is appropriate when Osgood calls him that Amazing Grace plays because there was a time, Day of the Doctor, where Osgood regarded the Doctor as almost her Deity, literally praying to him repeatedly to save her.
Finally Osgood now represents the peace which is the new god humans and Zygons should have faith in and thus obtain grace and salvation.
4 November 2015 at 17:51 #46343What is in the Osgood box?
What the viewer has been shown at the beginning is the three Doctors with their sonic screwdrivers shooting a memory editing device UNIT had in the Black Archive to temporarily erase from humans and Zygons imitating humans enough memories so they did not know who was human and who was Zygon. This technology earlier helped create the conditions for the first peace; therefore, I speculate an upgraded version of it is the last sanction, the last hope.
But the box seems too small to affect the entire world. How convenient the episode also shows a Zygon control room that apparently can affect all Zygons.
And that is why an essential part of the Doctor is the role of tarot card of The Devil:
http://www.tarotlore.com/tarot-cards/the-devil/
It’s an interesting interpretation to change the altar The Devil is sitting on to be the Osgood box.
There’s always the temptation The Devil offers to eat of the Tree of Knowledge first, before the Tree of Life.  The Doctor cannot impose a solution, he must trick people to impose the solution upon themselves.
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