@juniperfish

This time, Ruby sees Old Witchy Ruby before the circle break and therefore knows (without knowing why) to stop the Doctor breaking the fairy circle, and this time the Doctor knows to tell Ruby not to read the circle’s messages out loud.

Yes, I think that the merging of the two timelines brought about a kind of recursion and that, on t…[Read more]

@juniperfish

Yes I think we may revisit Mad Jack aka ‘big-stick crazy-hat’. My personal candidate for Emperor of Death.

RTD’s big challenge this season would seem to be making all the mad stuff add up. Watch out for red buttons, Artron energy and American Diners

@whohar  @juniperfish

I agree that the fact that they didn’t use ageing make up or prosthetics to age Ruby is probably deliberate and significant.  I have always looked a good deal younger than my age, or so I’ve repeatedly been and am still told,* but  I certainly looked somewhat older than that by the time I turned forty.

* It was highly an…[Read more]

@juniperfish

I too wear a plain gold band on the third finger of my right hand, but for different reasons again. It is in fact made from the gold of three wedding rings; those of my mother, my maternal grandmother and my grandmother’s mother who was born in 1841 and married in 1862, so it is a link across four generations of my family. The long…[Read more]

@juniperfish @whohar

Marti… yes I should know better. If you ask a lazy question, then immediately lazily qualify it, you maybe shouldn’t ask the dumb question.

The relatively mild criticism of that part of the story (not from me) was levelled, I believe, in context of the TERF wars. Marti and her trauma was considered ‘sprayed on’ to the sto…[Read more]

@juniperfish

Yeah the timing of the corrected timeline is an interesting point and not one I’ve managed to reconcile yet. Similarly with the 73 yards thing. Why not 74 or 72 it some other number? RTD made a big deal about this in a pre ep interview (talking about having to pace it out on a pier to ensure the ep worked) but I am not seeing any…[Read more]

@juniperfish

This is a screengrab from the end. No wedding ring, as it is on the right hand. But, as someone who wears his wedding ring on his right hand ever since his wife died, it could still be one.

@juniperfish

I’m teasing now. 🙂

As it says in the help…

To insert a picture, it must already be available on the web. If you have a personal picture, there are many free hosting sites you can start an account with and upload any pictures you wish.

Then you can link to it.

Unless you’re a mod then you can post your own pics.

Hope that helps.

@juniperfish

I’m a bit haunted by the messages from the fairy circle which Ruby reads out. They are: “I miss you” and “Rest in peace, Mad Jack”. Surely no one misses fascist Prime Minister Roger Ap Gwillam.

Except that when Ruby reads out that message Roger ap Gwilliam is some twenty years in the future. In retrospect I interpreted this as ‘Remai…[Read more]

@juniperfish

Super thoughts! 👏

Yes to the Doctor/Mad Jack-Ap Gwilym swap, very perceptive. All the doubling and binaries now to think of, perhaps even more than appears? A kind of Upside Down, then, a Mirroring, as you say. Or perhaps things overlaid, swapped out. Mirroring retains both images, whereas this is replacement?

Also yes to Mad Jack…[Read more]

@mudlark @juniperfish

apparently the name of the pub translates as ‘the dead wood.’ The actual pub also featured in Torchwood!

The full Big Bang 73 numerological analysis was outstanding, juniperfish.

I shall now rewatch to check out the name of the village

I’m curious what ‘Old Ruby’ said to all those characters to have that effect on them.

@juniperfish

Secondly, this is the third time we’ve seen alternate timelines so far in Series 14

Two of which involved stepping on something plus ‘Boom’ hinging on that as a plot point. Anyway, we have Roger ap Gwilliam (son of Gwilliam?) and Henry Arbinger. C…[Read more]

@juniperfish

Great analysis.

 a time-line which leads to the bi-generation of the Fourteenth Doctor in The Giggle (a metaphor for divergence in time) 

Love that.

Also love the fairy speculation re Ruby. So maybe it’s not that her mother rejected her (that would be a human assumption) but that her mother is fey, and took a human baby in exc…[Read more]

hmmm your avatar has recalled Stooky Sue from The Giggle for me, in relation to all three of your speculations about the return of the Doctor’s granddaughter.

@juniperfish

Coincidence?

Actually it’s Stooky Peg, from Night Terrors. But let’s face it, dolls are all cut from the same creepy bit of wood (and therefore sonic proof and likely to cro…[Read more]

@mudlark

You’re quite right. My apologies @juniperfish. Surprisingly fast moving thread this one…. and thanks for the Sargent info. It’s almost certain that the 2000ad artists of that period would know the works you refer to and would be more than eager to reference them in their work, I reckon….

@jimthefish

The moon and the president’s wife. As @juniperfish noted above, this references something that Missy said in The Magicians Apprentice, when she was telling Clara how long she had known the Doctor, ‘… since he stole the moon and the President’s wife …’  I seem to remember that the Doctor later disputed this, saying that he didn’t…[Read more]

@scaryb @juniperfish

Is there another race… that can regenerate?

What exactly do Mire ‘genetic sticking plasters’ do? When does healing become regeneration? What did it do when combined with the human dna of genius.

I don’t think ‘Splice’, as a name, can possibly be any kind of accident.

Has anyone come any closer to ‘the moon and the Presi…[Read more]

@juniperfish

It’s interesting, isn’t it, that those great foes in The Time War, the Daleks and the Time Lords, now turn out to be species which have both have been genetically engineered by Mengele-type immoral scientists (Davros and Tecteun respectively).

Absolutely! (And both with aspirations to rule/control the universe).

I’m just hoping RTD…[Read more]

Haha @juniperfish

Great to back to proper bonkerising again!

How about Mrs Flood? Where does she fit in? I get the feeling we’re being distracted from her. (Flood, unfrozen snow, Pond, River… )

@blenkinsopthebrave

But why Larkin?

Well it COULD just be the poem, but the Doctor does make reference to the sad little man who wrote it… Course he…[Read more]

@juniperfish It goes without saying that I love your over-heated bonkerising!

Re: the reflection on Larkin above, why does the Doctor quote Larkin? Apart from his free and easy attitude to women, his views on race were problematic to say the least. So why Larkin? What is Moffat and/or RTD2 asking us to think about?

I can understand your…[Read more]