@juniperfish, @puroandson– yes, definitely boarding school as endurance test, a kind of English take on the Spartans. I’ve always have that feeling from the boy in the barn scene. And the woman was able to recognise him, in whatever body he turns up in. Not quite as emotionally close as a former nurse, but a prep-school age housemistress,…[Read more]

@juniperfish @bluesqueakpip @mudlark @puroandson (both Puro Prime and the Puricle)

The thing with authorial intent is that it is the thing that distinguishes human writing from my cats paw prints on the kitchen floor. Even if I can deduce some events (chasing spider? obsessed with sunbeam?), she was not trying to impart anything to me. She just…[Read more]

@Mudlark and @Juniperfish

The text has ambiguity. But I’d say that if the Doctor’s planned to leave Clara with the means of adjusting the Neural Block, he’s done it subconsciously. He doesn’t leave the sonic sunglasses and the Neural Block on the TARDIS console together – he chucks the sunglasses when he’s irritated with their analysis, and then…[Read more]

@Juniperfish

Thanks for sharing your meanderings on the Graun!  Great post.   I have a question.

If we think Clara got pregnant then when ?  Because after dead would be too weird so when

did that opportunity occur? Also,  I’m one of the folks that is convinced that the Doctor

went for plan B as soon as he realized Clara had no pulse .   He…[Read more]

@Juniperfish

Watching the lovely acting tics of Capaldi, such as the slow way he raises his eyes to Clara’s face in the diner – it all leaves room for still waters running deep and yet deeper

Agreed. The directions in the script which @pedant linked to leave little room for doubt about what the writer intended, but I still maintain that the bare…[Read more]

@juniperfish  Very nice.  Clever old Doctor, what a caper!  I just don’t know when he would have time to work all that out while running his maze repeatedly inside the Dial.  Except, of course, in his Mind-Tardis time-outs.

Only Clara was in there.  He couldn’t plot this devious ploy out with her avatar looking over his shoulder, could he?  Exc…[Read more]

@pedant and @Juniperfish

But also, one thing Moffat seems to be kicking hard again is the idea of a redshirt.

‘Redshirts’ are the epitome of ‘the little people don’t matter’. David Weber, who’s a writer of military SF, calls it ‘war porn’. The type of war-based fiction where the only people who are going to die are either bad guys or nameless…[Read more]

@Juniperfish

(this is a response to a Graun post, since it’s locked and I found your posts on life and death in the Whoniverse terrific)

I’ve no doubt Moff will kill someone “stone dead” (no timey afterlife in view) before his tenure is over.

Danny Pink. Not just very nearly dead, but very really dead.

But also, one thing Moffat seems to be…[Read more]

@pedant    Right, I had forgotten that line. I should get a chance to rewatch later today and it will all become more fixed in my mind. But in any case, it’s still not complicated, which was my point in that post. People (in other places) seem to find it remarkably difficult to follow, which it has sometimes been, but I really didn’t think that m…[Read more]

We had a series of electrical brownouts last night (probably caused by storm whateverhisnameis) and so I’ve only just managed to watch the episode. If you happened to hear random swear words cursed into the night, possibly curdling milk and disturbing sleeping children then it was probably me. Even if you were in Australia.

As many know, like @jim…[Read more]

@Juniperfish

Maisie Williams

She utterly blossomed in this, freed of the Ashildr/ Me/ Night Mayor corsets.

More of her please.

@tardigrade  It occurred to me that the Doctor’s time in the confession dial could be seen as a possible fulfilment of the hybrid prophecy. He’s destroyed a billion hearts (actually more like a trillion), it’s just that instead of it being a genocide, it was suicide – he’s been knocking them off two at a time and they were all his own. And, as wi…[Read more]

@juniperfish  #48303  thanks for the link to the artist’s page on tumblr; a beautiful piece, IMO, so thanks for that too, @serahni.

@puroandson  #48296 (I’m trying to catch up here, using post numbers) Both of you — “fixity of purpose”, yes.  Perfect.

@mudlark  #38304  This is a great summary of the situation.  The Dial could be of the Doctor…[Read more]

@juniperfish  THANK YOU.  A friend sent me that painting and I’ve been searching for the artist but wasn’t sure where to start.  I absolutely agree and was at the point of asking it to be removed if I couldn’t find who created it, thanks for your help!

@puroandson   Hello!  I also didn’t cry, I was too shell-shocked for that.  I am still stagg…[Read more]

@teddybear   Hello and welcome to the forum.

The confession dial clearly isn’t a Last Will and Testament as we understand it, nor a straightforward confession. As far as I can make out from the clues we have been given, it is more like a complete and continuously updated record of the Doctor’s life as experienced in his conscious and u…[Read more]

BBC APPROVED SPOILERS...

Well, that reading took awhile!  🙂  So much to comment on and think about. First of all, some wonderfully eloquent writing about the heights and depths to which we were taken with this episode. Succinctly summed up by @PhaseShift:   I wish more TV could dare to be this different.   Yes, indeed. And yes, not only arc-heavy but mytho…[Read more]

@jphamlore  I 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.

I’m not sure what you refer to as apparently blameworthy actions by the Doctor in “Inversion”, partly…[Read more]

That was magnificent; a tour de force on the part of everyone concerned in its production, and breathtaking even on second viewing – in fact *especially* on second viewing. Count me among those who rate this among the best episodes ever.

What we saw was, of course, entirely from the Doctor’s point of view – a subjective reality within the…[Read more]

BBC APPROVED SPOILERS...