@devilishrobby I agree. I think I need to rewatch this season now, from the beginning, and work out my thoughts about this. @juniperfish mentioned a “kitchen sink” vibe, and that’s exactly how I felt. Everything was tied together, but it felt rushed and a little unsatisfying. Yet parts of it were wonderful. I loved the Doctor finally showing us a…[Read more]

@juniperfish

I agree that I quite liked the Doctor as ‘John Smith from Gallifrey’. But one thing I did manage to mention before they shut the Graun thread; Chibbers is making the Doctor’s origin story that of an abused child. A very abused child.

Which is terrific, fairytale or not, because being an abused child is too often the villain’s…[Read more]

@blenkinsopthebrave

I genuinely don’t know. Given how easy it would have been to call that episode ‘The Timeless Child’, I’m pretty sure the plural has some significance. Right the way back in Chibnall’s second episode, The Ghost Monument, the Doctor herself is the Timeless Child, singular.

One of the things I did pick up this episode is that…[Read more]

Great posts, everyone… and YAY! to bonkers theorising being back.

@Juniperfish (big furry wave to you) – totally agree with your take on Tecteun (interesting to get her side of it which pretty much corroborates what the Master described to the Doctor, only “justified”), and like @Mudlark I wondered about her adopted child seeming to have so…[Read more]

Once again we are jumping back and forth between multiple narrative threads – six in this case, but now that we have a firmer idea of what is going on and where everyone fits in it isn’t so much of a problem and I enjoyed this episode, even if it wasn’t up to the standard of last week. And visually it was gorgeous.

Of the various threads, that of…[Read more]

@juniperfish and now I’m thinking of the Never-ending story, with the serpent on the book cover and the endless progress of destruction and re-creation. You’re right, it makes the serpent some lovely imagery.

@jimthefish re: going forward, it would be possible to spin this in a positive way for the Doctor, I suppose. The Doctor now knows who she…[Read more]

@juniperfish, That is an awesome interpretation. It makes total sense, and, along with the serpent motifs, it also feels like a mobius strip, where the universe, the Doctor, and Doctor Who the show meet themselves in a never ending way.

@miapatrick, Also love the idea that Chibnall might also be attempting to fold the 8th Doctor into this…[Read more]

@juniperfish and @miapatrick

So are witnessing the death and rebirth of the universe and the death and birth (rebirth) of the Doctor simultaneosly?

Ooh, I do like this idea quite a lot. I do wonder if the Doc and Vinder wouldn’t have felt some kind of bond when they met though — although I guess not, given we’re talking many, many regenerations…[Read more]

Thanks @Jimthefish for remembering me back into existance!

RL has been having a massive impact on my online DW life; ironically for life in a pandemic with lockdown etc I got really busy, and mostly been having to watch on catch up (sometimes several at a time). Also, with less scope for bonkers theorising in the last 2 seasons maybe some of the…[Read more]

@juniperfish

The last paragraph of your post was the most inspirational thing I have read for ages. It just so perfectly captures why we are all here.

@craig

I’ll just add my voice to the eloquent appeals above. I felt much the same way as you a year ago. I thought, I’ve finally gone past this (it only took 40-odd years) and that I was done. I was struggling to get through more than 10 minutes of a Chibs episode without my attention wandering. But this year, while it’s still far from perfect…[Read more]

Or ‘Stramash of the Tumshie-Heids’, as my old pa would have said.

Well, I have to say that I really enjoyed that quite a bit. I’d say that was easily Chibs’s best episode of Who ever and, what’s more, I’d say he’s produced the best Sontaran story since The Time Warrior. I’m gradually getting used to the new Sontaran design and it was nice to see…[Read more]

Hi all – hope you’re all well.
You’ve said much of what I was thinking, but said it far more cogently.
You’ve also said things that I didn’t think but which gives me a lot to consider!

I’m guessing that someone has already mentioned a feeling of Doctor Who: Endgame from this.
Something about people disintegrating into dust in a seemingly…[Read more]

@Scot-C

Welcome to the forum.

It occurred to me, also, that it was a little strange that the Lupari, at least as represented by Karvanista, weren’t particularly enthusiastic or consistent in their attitude to humanity, given their assigned role as protectors. Karvanista doesn’t seem to like even his assigned human very much. On the other hand,…[Read more]

@juniperfish

As @bluesqueakpip says , Williamson’s tunnels do exist, date from the 1820s, and are nothing to do with mining.

Williamson, who was a wealthy businessman in Liverpool, bought an area of undeveloped land in the Edge Hill area of Liverpool and proceeded to build houses there of very eccentric design, and to excavate an extensive…[Read more]

@juniperfish

Yes, time can be rewritten but, so far as we have been told, only in very narrowly defined circumstances – that is, if the change is not perceptible to the universe as a whole; otherwise the results of any attempt are catastrophic. The rewriting of events in ‘Day of the Doctor’ were possible because, as far as all observers in the…[Read more]

@Juniperfish
Yes, there was a lot going on.

A clear link made to Victorian industrial revolution Britain, and the poor being worked to the bone in the mines (digging for what, if not coal?).

Ah, that’s the interesting thing. Williamson was clearly harking back to previous villains like the Great Intelligence, but he and his tunnels are part of…[Read more]

Viewed in the cold light of morning  it seems obvious Jo Martin’s Doctor cannot be a regenerated Jenny,  so scrub that hypothesis of mine. In the first place, Jenny would surely not have forgotten the existence of her parent, even if she believed that parent had not survived beyond the end of his twelfth regeneration and she decided to take on h…[Read more]

@juniperfish – yes, it would have been difficult to imagine 13 and Jack getting on, possibly even less so than 12 and Jack. (In fact, for someone so chirpy, I can’t help but feel that 13 is the Doc least likely to get on with a whole range of people. She seems to use that fam like a security blanket in a way. And as that is stripped away, as in…[Read more]

Maybe it was the input of Vinay Patel as co-writer, but this episode seemed to display a surer touch than almost any since Chibnall took over, and for me at least conveyed more of the essential  Doctor and her universe; and for the first time I had the feeling of Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor as a fully realised incarnation of her predecessors, with…[Read more]