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14 January 2024 at 18:13 #75298
@dentarthurdent Oh dear – well spotted! Good old Grauniad 🙂
For anyone feeling stressed by the New Year (and aren’t we all) here is an oldie but a goodie (particularly if you are not a fan of the “mindfulness” trend):
14 January 2024 at 11:50 #75296Hello All,
Lovely interview with Capaldi in The Observer today:
27 December 2023 at 23:32 #75173So, are we looking at an exploration of the Doctor’s origin prior to Tecteun and The Division, do you think?
I think there’s a lot which could be done with this theme, even without the plan being that the Doctor actively goes looking for his origins pre-adoption by Gallifrey, or finds them.
Gatwa’s Doctor has already been drawn to a fellow foundling, in Ruby, so the psychological ramifications of the Doctor’s sense of themselves as an orphan of unknown descent, are clearly on the table.
Tecteun was a very malevolent adoptive mother, so perhaps some of the Doctor’s adventures with Ruby will involve situations with cruel parents, or other abandoned or experimented on children, of whatever alien form.
If Fourteen’s mistake in invoking myth at the edge of the universe (with that salt line) has let the Toymaker back into the universe, perhaps it has had other effects as well. Are we dealing with a branch in the timeline of the universe? So the universe Gatwa’s Doctor now inhabits is one where mythological creatures and figures have become embodied in reality?
That would explain why goblins are now manifest on earth.
And it fits with the timeline altering effect of Fifteen and Donna’s encounter with Newton too (a universe where “mavity” not “gravity” now holds the heavens in place).
The Doctor’s bi-generation itself can be seen as a symbolic bifurcation of reality.
As for Mrs. Flood, your suggestion @ps1l0v3y0u about a link to the Capaldi episode Before the Flood, is interesting, because that episode was about a bootstrap paradox. And “mavity” I think will turn out to be a time-altering “butterfly effect”, so I wonder if “the flood” in Mrs. Flood’s name is an allusion to the time-alteration initiated by Fourteen at the edge of the universe, whereby myths now “flood” into reality.
25 December 2023 at 19:20 #75127Well I loved it – Gremlins meets It’s a Wonderful Life.
It’s fresh, it’s a little bit timey wimey, and the Doctor is a huge dandy who enjoys eating up the dancefloor in a kilt!
Just how many times did he change fabulous outfits in that episode?
Intrigued by all his jewellery and what meanings it might hold.
And who is the mystery lady neighbour who knows what a TARDIS is? A Time Lady?
Plus, looks like Fourteen and Donna’s butterfly effect meeting with Isaac Newton is still rippling through earth’s timeline – “mavity” is still go. What else has been altered?
Merry Christmas all.
23 December 2023 at 17:22 #75099Merry Mid-Winter Solstice to all!
Thought you might enjoy this naughty clip with Tom Baker and Mary Tamm (Romana 1)
It’s from the “for cast and crew” outtakes/ blooper 1978 White Powder Christmas
You can find out more about it here:
https://archive.org/details/WhitePowderChristmas
19 December 2023 at 16:58 #75070@oochillyo Sorry to hear you and your family are not well. Sounds like a nasty flu or Covid to me, with cough and a fever.
Get some rest. Once you feel better, I think you might enjoy Kurt Vonnegut’s writing (if you haven’t already read him).
18 December 2023 at 14:40 #75058Sneaking out of work briefly to wonder whether a 6oth Anniversary “What’s Your Favourite Who Series/ Story/ Episode from 60 years of Who” topic might be nice @craig for Yuletide? Seeing as the BBC has kindly made so much of the back catalogue available on iplayer at present…
15 December 2023 at 10:12 #75024“Eight” sounding like “Ate” and a Club looking a bit like a Brassica, my suspicions were confirmed right at the end, when Cauliflower Cheese was served up at the meal. Expect this dish to turn out to be the Big Bad of 15’s first season.
The Cheese Wheel of Time?
Planet of the Cheesey Wotsits?
14 December 2023 at 18:21 #75013@phaseshift – Oh that’s lovely background on the comic story of the Star Beast (I’ve never read it).
The new version of Doctor Who Confidential is called Doctor Who Unleashed, available on IPlayer, one episode of “behind the scenes” for each of the specials. In The Star Beast associated one, David Tennant meets Dave Gibbons and Pat Mills on set and gets them to sign his original Beep the Meep comic, which he’d kept all these year – give it a watch – happiness all round.
On class and Doctor Who, I watched a great For The Love of Sci-fi panel with Christopher Ecclestone and Billie Piper (it’s really recent – 2023) speaking about their time on the show, and Ecclestone talks a lot about being working class and entering the world of acting. They also discuss the snobbery (and frankly, hate, in some corners of Who fandom) Billie Piper encountered when it was first announced she would play Rose (Ecclestone implies some of that was class snobbery and I’m sure he’s right):
(I’ve forgotten how to embed video here, but this is the link).
RTD and Chris and Billie are all from working class backgrounds and RTD’s determination to expand Doctor Who’s class life-worlds on screen, as something fundamental to his revival, gave Nu Who an incredible fresh start. That long shot in Rose where the two of them talk as they walk through Rose’s estate, and the Doctor gives his spine-tingling speech in response to her question, “Who are you?”:
“I can feel it. The turn of the Earth. The ground beneath our feet is spinning at a thousand miles an hour, and the entire planet is hurtling round the sun at sixty seven thousand miles an hour, and I can feel it. We’re falling through space, you and me, clinging to the skin of this tiny little world, and if we let go. That’s who I am. Now, forget me, Rose Tyler. Go home.”
is iconic, and a far cry from the historic upper-middle-class-ese of the Time Lords (“my dear chap”) affected (as well as rebelled against) by the Fourth Doctor (the first to have a story set on Gallifrey – The Deadly Assassin) when in the company of his own people.
13 December 2023 at 20:54 #75006The Goblin Song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXgnqGTOXTE
Music by Murray Gold and lyrics by RTD2 – all the proceeds are going to Children in Need, which in this miserable Britain where so many children are currently going hungry, is absolutely very Doctor, and made me quite teary actually, because RTD2 is really intent on using his regenerated Dr. Who platform (and Disney’s money) with his whole chest.
@mudlark You deduction sounds solid, and as the Doctor was a foundling too (and probably still processing that) – Ruby and Fifteen are kindred spirits. Tecteun was a kind of Goblin King really, wasn’t she, gobbling up her adopted Timeless Child, for her own genetic experiments.
The name Ruby Sunday made me think of The Rolling Stones Ruby Tuesday:
“There’s no time to lose, ”
I heard her say
Catch your dreams before they slip away
Dying all the time
Lose your dreams and you will lose your mind
Ain’t life unkind?”
What does the Doctor dream of?
13 December 2023 at 18:31 #75004Really enjoyed reading your Cathode Rave article.
And yet, it would be wrong to say that the Baker era, for all its metatextual playfulness is wholly apolitical. The lack of seriousness in the Fourth Doctor is a political play in itself and, like his predecessor, there is always an edge of mocking disdain in any of the Doctor’s dealings with authority and he is far less indifferent to injustice than the First and Second Doctors appeared to be. You just have to dig a little deeper with this Doctor.
Baker’s Who often really reflected on questions of power. It was just, very often, rather more implicit than explicit about it. Take The Face of Evil, for instance (a fantastic story) where essentially the Fourth Doctor’s own arrogance and carelessness (in repairing Xoanon but forgetting to wipe his own memory print from the process, causing the computer to develop psychosis) caused enormous suffering on a planet the Doctor simply flew away from and forgot about. Generations of the descendants of the original space-ship expedition were experimented on by Xoanon as a result of the Doctor’s error. The Doctor’s intervention was intended to be kindly, but it directly caused Xoanon’s eugenics experiments, and shaped the lives of Leela’s people for generations. The story is implicitly critical of colonial arrogance, embodied in the Doctor himself.
But – I probably should be commenting on your Cathode Rave blog directly, rather than here….
@scaryb and @jimthefish – definitely love the new sonic and what a great motto. Ncuti Gatwa is going to slay (with words).
12 December 2023 at 18:27 #74988Definitely need a full and thorough analysis of the potential meaning behind the cards chosen. And I’m sure we’re in the right place for that…
Oh you know that is just catnip…
The Doctor picks the Eight of Clubs. Cartomancy (fortune telling with a deck of cards) equates clubs with the Tarot suit Wands. Eight of Wands in the classic Rider Waite tarot deck means change, direction and travel – so we can see this as a foreshadowing card for the Toymaker induced regeneration, which happens later in the episode.
It is also interesting to think about the card, as @ps1l0v3y0u suggests, as a call-back to the Eighth Doctor, because the McGann Doctor, in The Night of the Doctor, in the middle of the raging Time War, took the Sisterhood of Karn’s resurrection elixir and chose to regenerate into a warrior, The War Doctor.
If we are reading this card as an Eighth Doctor call-back; in the context of the episode, the conversation Donna and the Doctor have immediately prior to this card game is all about Fourteen as exhausted and traumatised. Donna confronts him and says that he’s wearing himself out by never talking about his past companions (and by implication, all his grief). The Eighth Doctor’s choice to become the War Doctor is, in Nu Who, the origin-point of all the subsequent Doctors’ trauma.
And boy does the Toymaker’s puppet-show deliberately focus on the Doctor’s trauma, messing with him by foregrounding his guilt (about being dangerous to travel with) depicting not only the death or near-death of several companions, but of the multitudes of worlds in the universe brought on by the Flux (all intent on erasing the Doctor’s own maverick influence).
So, the eight of clubs loses against the Toymaker. Let’s suggest that means the eighth card, the way of the warrior, will absolutely not be of use to the Doctor in what’s coming next – a struggle with the Toymaker, or with whomever the “One Who Waits” “hiding at the edge” may be (whom even the Toymaker ran away from) who may, or may not, be the same as “The Boss” the Meep speaks of.
The Toymaker picks the King of Hearts and wins with it. Hearts are equated with Cups in the Tarot. The King of Cups represents mastery over the realms of emotion, creativity, and the unconscious.
So, to “win” the Doctor needs to lay down his war trauma, from the Time War, from the Flux mundicide (genocide of planets) and become…. more emotionally literate? A King of his own hearts?
Looks as if Gatwa Doc is already that, judging from the tender way he immediately comforts his previous incarnation.
10 December 2023 at 15:25 #74931@ps1l0v3y0u Red was the Rani’s signature colour; she was given to wearing red gloves as I recall, to go with the rest of her red sparkly outfit. But as @phaseshift and @mudlark point out, the red nails might be a reference to the more recent “Cult of Saxon” which recalls RTD1 era’s John Simm Master.
I rather hope we’re not getting a retro-reincarnation of the Master; Simm was not one of my favourite incarnations. If RTD1 has a fault as a Who writer, it is when his melodrama shades into the bombastic, and the Simm Master really ended up embodying that (for me, at least).
Thanks @scaryb for the H. G. Wells story link – lovely – magical and creepy at once. And definitely feels like an inspiration.
If I had a quibble with The Toymaster/ Doctor face-off this time, it was that Donna was a lot more canny about the fact the Toymaster was likely to cheat, than the Doctor was. From watching the Hartnell era Toymaster, it was clear he was a dirty rotten cheat and not at all above fixing the “games” in his favour.
We all saw the fun The Toymaker had with the puppets of the Doctor’s friends
Yes indeed. I know some folks on Twitter were complaining that Yaz wasn’t mentioned, but Yaz made it safely back to Earth, after parting ways with Thirteen at her regeneration. The Toymaker deliberately picked companions who had more difficult fates because of their travels with the Doctor; Amy, Clara, Bill (even though each of them got a work-around happily ever after – Amy with Rory, Clara with Ashildr, Bill with Heather).
The idea the Toymaker will return to play puppet-master to some of the Doctor’s companions, is definitely one to watch.
Binary, dopplegangers, bi-generation
Indeed we might add, non-binary/ bi-gendered and bisexual.
In human terms, the Doctor is explicitly bisexual (bi-romantic) now, as rather tentatively explored in Thirteen/ Yaz by Chibnall.
RTD2 having Fourteen exclaim Isaac Newton is hot in Wild Blue Yonder, is going to go somewhere, I am guessing.
Gatwa Doc has already established himself as a huge, campy flirt in The Giggle, and the combination of RTD2 and Ncuti’s Doctor (gay showrunner, gay actor) and RTD’s unabashed belief in representation as one of the moral goods of Doctor Who, and I suspect Fifteen getting involved in some male companion flirting/ romancing this incarnation around (at some point) is likely on the cards.
9 December 2023 at 21:46 #74899Martin Belam on T’Other Place suggests that the red-nailed hand picking up the Master’s gold-tooth compression-prison is the Rani.
I do wonder if it is indeed, she.
If Ncuti-Doc has tried to heal his past selves’ traumas through “bi-generation”, giving Fourteen a family to rest with, it begs the question as to whether the new Doctor has really just skipped off trauma-free.
Whit-Doc found out her adoptive mother was both the originator of the Time Lords and also a Mengele-level child torturer/ experimenter. That means the Doctor now carries the new (as it was previously mind-wiped) knowledge that they are both an orphan and an abused child.
The Rani was also a profoundly immoral eugenicist experimenter, so I’m wondering if these themes of cosmic eugenics and abusive parents will be a thread in Fifteen’s narrative.
9 December 2023 at 20:12 #74888Bi-generation? In his knickers?
Ncuti’s Doctor is as charmingly full of charisma as I knew he would be. He’s going to eat up the role.
I suppose the bifurcated regeneration is the Marvel-isation some were worried about, in that, should Tennant-Doc want to get back in his bi-generated TARDIS (and take Marvel’s money) there’s no reason why parallel adventures can’t take place. The Whoniverse expanded, in the way Disney has expanded both the Marvel and Star Wars universes on TV.
I think you’re right @craig, that RTD can’t quite ever let Tennant go. But honestly, what’s not to love about that?
In Ncuti’s world, the Master is back, in a gold tooth, and the legions of the Toymaker are still coming…
I was wondering if the Toymaker would turn out to be a member of the Doctor’s own (unknown) species. But, for now, the Toymaker’s origins remain mysterious.
Salt, the Doctor’s game with the salt line and the dopplegangers at the edge of the universe in Wild Blue Yonder, did indeed turn out to be pivotal, both allowing the Toymaker into our universe, and also being used to contain him, in his playing card box prison, inside a ring of salt, in UNIT’s vault at the end. For now…
I do love that, in these dark times, which RTD2 very much foregrounded in the madness of “everyone thinking they’re always right” and a Government which doesn’t give a bleep about us (all of which The Toymaker merely turned up the dial on) Fourteen and Donna get to eat mac n cheese with Rose and save the moles from Wilf and live happily ever after.
9 December 2023 at 17:10 #74883… there’s an entire comment of yours on this thread I should link to as I want to hug it.
Awww shucks 🙂 I’ve been enjoying having you and @scaryb back in the DJing box, and actually some of the lyrics to that Tom Waits song you posted, Who Are You, combined with @phaseshift ‘s musing on the “Celestial” element of the Celestial Toymaker got me thinking:
“Are you still jumping out of windows in expensive clothes?
Well I fell in love
With your sailor’s mouth and your wounded eyes.
You better get down on the floor
Don’t you know this is war”I just watched Tom Baker in The Deadly Assassin and the Time Lords have a CIA (which I’d completely forgotten about) – Celestial Intervention Agency – it’s called in that episode; a “secret service” specifically charged with meddling in time. I presume, in present canon,that’s equivalent to The Division.
I also just watched the only Hartnell episode of The Celestial Toymaker, as recommended by @blenkinsopthebrave and Hartnell’s Doctor refers to the Toymaker as “immortal”.
So – some wild spec just before we all settle down for The Giggle. What if The Toymaker is a member of the Doctor’s original species. The Doctor, according to post The Timeless Children canon, is essentially immortal themselves? With an indefinite number of regenerations. Perhaps The Celestial Toymaker is back to do battle with a member of his(her) own species…
8 December 2023 at 21:36 #74854Hello Sofa denizens,
I stumbled on this “A Life in the Day of Tom Baker” from the Sunday Times 1978
Utterly charming and utterly neurotic, and far too many drinks in one day.
7 December 2023 at 19:58 #74844I love both of those ideas – “the imprinting” in particular.
Body-snatcher wise, you might wonder why the Time Lords only pick humanoids to copy, with the whole of time and space and alien forms to choose from. But I guess regeneration is plastic only within core Shobogan DNA variations.
The revivification of the Timeless Child is making me think again about how this narrative founds Time Lord origins in colonialism and eugenics.
7 December 2023 at 17:12 #74840The outrage it would cause in the ARSE brigade and beyond would be delightful to witness
It really would 🙂
Yes, you’re right that Gethenian and Time Lord physiology are clearly somewhat different, but I suppose I think of Gethenians as “gender fluid” in their own way too because, as you say, at the time of kemmer, they either foreground female or foreground male for the purposes of reproduction, and any Gethenian can foreground one or the other, which is why the same individual can be both a mother and father over their life-course.
That is similar to Time Lords, although, as you say, they present female or male (or possibly sometimes intersex/ non-binary) in a fixed way, per regeneration.
In the extended Whoniverse (outside the TV show) there seems to be both the asexual reproduction Looms scenario, but also the suggestion Gallifreyan children were, at least at some point, born via pregnancy:
https://screenrant.com/doctor-who-origins-gallifrey-time-lord-children/
So, The Doctor could, in the Fugitive Doctor incarnation or another earlier one, have given birth to children. I bet some showrunner, at some point, will go there.
A whole other interesting concept we haven’t really discussed yet is the fact that, by human standards, Time Lords are also “race fluid” (bearing in mind the human concept of “race” is itself a cultural construct). We’ve now seen the Doctor with black skin (Fugitive Doctor) and the Master with brown skin (Dhawan Master) as well as a lot of white (really, more accurately, pink) Docs. And of course, Gatwa-Doc will be Black. However, we don’t know if different skin tones have different cultural histories, in Gallifreyan society, or not.
Was Gallifrey ever inflected by histories of racism, as Earth has been? Or, for Time Lords, is skin colour just (for those, like Romana, with control over the process) something they take a fancy to at regeneration (I fancy darker skin this time, or lighter skin this time) or a totally insignificant detail they don’t bother thinking about at all?
5 December 2023 at 22:16 #74816@scaryb – lovely to see you and @whisht back in the DJ box!
I’d missed the detail that it was the TARDIS that clocked Clone-Donna’s long arm at the last – clever old thing. And yes, definitely a play on AI and its current weirdnesses with the human body. AI is terrifying frankly, so a very modern form of body horror.
I had forgotten ARSE – I’m sure RTD2 would be tickled by the concept of ARSE, and recognise it deeply.
@phaseshift – another old comrade clocking on <waves> Of course I remember Image of the Fendahl, because a) it was a Leela story and I was a big Leela fan, and b) it scared the living crap out of me. Something about the engulfment by the gestalt, and the monstrous maggoty component entities… I was a regular reader of Terrance Dicks’ Target Doctor Who novelisations back in the day; still have collection and that’s one of them.
Yes and Fendahleen hated salt, of course.
Salt has a long religious and folkloric history, in many cultures, as a purifier and repeller of evil (probably because it was so central to the early technology of being able to cure meat). If you’re a Supernatural fan you’ll know that salt circles are used to repel demons in that piece of modern horror Americana. So the sacred nature of salt has travelled a long way, in human history, over several thousand years.
Drawing a line in salt at the edge of the universe, and then watching your doppleganger break through it, has got to be a psychological head-frack for the Doctor. It’s his(hers) modus operandi really, as a maverick rule-breaker, crossing lines. But The Doctor is also fundamentally an agent of kindness, rather than an agent of chaos. And yet, genocidal forces (The Time War, The Flux) have converged around him. He is haunted by himself as a result, and Wild Blue Yonder physically manifests that haunting.
@bobbyfatv2 and @jimthefish Yes, thinking about body dysmorphia and transitioning IS an interesting through-line in this episode from The Star Beast and “Binary, Binary, Non-Binary” (Rose as the trans/ non-binary child of the Doctor/Donna metacrisis) and this emerges out of the first regeneration sequences we’ve seen in which The Doctor transitions gender; from male-presenting Capaldi to female-presenting Whittaker to male-presenting Tennant 2. Of course, that’s not the first gender-transitioning seqence for The Doctor, given the female-presenting Fugitive Doctor, and who knows how many incarnations, and of what genders, prior to her.
The Doctor has often exhibited some body dysmorphia post-regeneration, in the strangeness of getting used to new face, new hair, new teeth etc. But, one would imagine, gender dysphoria isn’t a thing in Time Lord society, as gender transitioning (every now and then) is a natural part of Time Lord regenerative biology. Or, for those Time Lords who prefer one kind of gender presentation to another consistently (and why should there only be two?) that’s in their control? The Doctor never has much control over who he ends up as next, but Romana 1 was able to try on several possible bodies before selecting her form as Romana 2, in a very accomplished fashion.
RTD2 is, with relative subtlety, asking us to retro-imagine Time Lord society in light of the new canonicity of Time Lord gender fluidity. Stuffy patricians in the regalia of Rassilon by day, Rocky Horror Timewarp dancers by night? But that’s hidebound by our own gender “norms” and gender “transgressions”. My favourite Ursula Le Guin novel, The Left Hand of Darkness, probably captures it better; a society of gender-fluid people. I’ll look forward to future Who where we see that version of Gallifrey.
4 December 2023 at 17:40 #74785@thane16 Hello Puro and son!
There’s just been a really good exhibition on the Pre-Raphaelites at Tate Britain in London – notable for exploring Christina Rossetti’s work and Elizabeth Siddal’s work, and for bringing the class dynamics of the so-called “brotherhood” to the fore in a way earlier exhibitions of this kind would not have done (middle class men like Rossetti and Morris and their working-class models/ muses, whose own artistic contributions have been previously sidelined).
I can’t remember the reference to the Goblin Market from Smith-Doc’s tenure but his was definitely, as we discussed at the time, the most “fairy-tale” oriented run (and my favourite Nu Who to date).
4 December 2023 at 17:34 #74784@mudlark That is incredibly cool – just read the article on wobbly spacetime.
They haven’t done the experiment suggested yet (re tiny mass fluctuations) to prove or disprove it – so the galactic jury is still out!
@jimthefish I feel your “Controversies in Dr. Woke” article should also be posted here!
4 December 2023 at 13:55 #74774@craig That’s brilliant – times are indeed horrendous – the Doctor would be proud of you 🙂 (donated)
3 December 2023 at 20:56 #74761Nipping back to say, that seeing your doppelganger was considered an ill omen and a harbinger of your death, in Gothic literature, as in Poe’s poem Silence (1833) here:
There are some qualities—some incorporate things,
That have a double life, which thus is made
A type of that twin entity which springs
From matter and light, evinced in solid and shade.
There is a two-fold Silence—sea and shore –
Body and soul. One dwells in lonely places,
Newly with grass o’ergrown; some solemn graces,
Some human memories and tearful lore,
Render him terrorless: his name’s “No More.”
He is the corporate Silence: dread him not!
No power hath he of evil in himself;
But should some urgent fate (untimely lot!)
Bring thee to meet his shadow (nameless elf,
That haunteth the lone regions where hath trod
No foot of man,) commend thyself to God!https://poets.org/poem/silence-4
and also in Rossetti’s spooky doppelganger painting How They Met Themselves (1864) modelled on himself and his wife Elizabeth Siddal on their honeymoon (when she was also dying of consumption and laudanum addiction).
https://www.leicestergalleries.com/browse-artwork-detail/MTY5OTA=
I really did lose a breath in Wild Blue Yonder and consider that actual Donna might be left behind on the exploding space-ship with doppelganger Donna having fooled the Doctor longer term.
It’s not a spoiler to say we already know Fourteen is heading for “death” (regeneration). Whether that will tie back to the faerie lore he unleashed with that line of salt tale at the edge of the universe or not remains to be seen:
“We must not look at goblin men,
We must not buy their fruits:Who knows upon what soil they fed
Their hungry thirsty roots?”Goblin Market, Christina Rossetti (1862)
3 December 2023 at 15:48 #74759@robertcaligari Well, representation, casting and identity are certainly complicated contemporary questions, on several fronts, so, having a discussion about it is perfectly acceptable! The people I have contempt for on this question are those with no interest in thoughtful debate, who just want to scream that some cultural artefact or other is “woke” because it no longer centres people like them and/or, more cynically, because it garners them attention in the outrage economy we all, unfortunately, inhabit.
In the case of Wild Blue Yonder, I wonder whether Donna and the Doctor are in the same universe as the one they left, given that the ship the TARDIS ended up on after the coffee spilling incident “fell down a wormhole” to the edge of space. So, one intradiegetic (in-story) explanation is that Newton is mixed-race in this alternative universe.
Extra-diagetically, Netflix’s Bridgerton (not really my cup of tea, but very popular) and its bodice-ripper Regency fantasy world seems to have pioneered what is often called contemporary “blind casting” with respect to ethnicity in (loosely) historical drama. What is great about this is it allows actors from diverse ethnic backgrounds to fully participate in this kind of drama. And it should be noted that the whiteness of fantasy (see the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings films) has also been somewhat transformed as a result (see the, later, Amazon Lord of the Rings, which has some POC elves and hobbits).
What is perhaps most “fake” about Bridgerton’s kind of “historical” drama is that racism is erased. There were about 15,000 Black and brown people living in Britain in the Regency period, but they mostly worked in domestic service and their lives would have been impacted by the transatlantic slave trade and the concatenation of white supremacist “racial theory” associated with it:
https://www.linnean.org/learning/who-was-linnaeus/linnaeus-and-race
I tend to think that dramatic license is absolutely fine in entertainment (and positive. as it also means contemporary POC actors do not have to play parts constantly inflected by the trauma of racism in historical fiction) as long as we’re not erasing such history in serious historical spaces. Often, in fact, the opposite is happening, and contemporaneous history is taking a serious look at the history of race and racism. The Linnean Society would not, fifty years ago, have explored the racist implications of Linnean theory!
Casting Hugh Grant as Martin Luther King would clearly not be acceptable today, but that’s not equivalent to blind-casting Newton as someone British mixed-race in Doctor Who, because a foundational part of King’s story is his struggle, as a Black activist, against racial segregation in a US which discriminated against African Americans. “Race” (a persistent social construct, as all geneticists will tell you) is central to King’s story.
Historically, of course, “blind casting” has gone the other way. For much of the 20thC, as earlier, Othello was played by white actors in blackface; another practice that we would not find acceptable now (given the racist history of blackface).
Nathaniel Curtis was a lovely Newton, and no doubt his appearance in Doctor Who will have encouraged lots of folk to read Newton’s Wikipedia page and learn a bit more about the actual historical figure, which can’t be bad. Newton, incidentally, was probably, to use our modern categories, asexual or gay.
3 December 2023 at 11:24 #74753Back for breakfast…
@blenkinsopthebrave and @miapatrick <waves> I’m guessing “mavity” isn’t just there for fun, but it’s going to be a butterfly effect, which will come back to haunt them in the next episode?
Newton uttered the word after Donna left in the TARDIS, but although she didn’t hear it, it would have been written down as such by Newton in his <i> Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica </i>and taught subsequently down the centuries. You can see the Doctor clocking the change with a quizzical look when Donna says, “At least we’ve got light, air, and mavity” on the space-ship at the edge of the universe.
But what else will flow from that small change, in terms of ripple effects in time?
I had a look at Twitter (unfortunately, Musk’s ever descending cesspit, X, now) last night, after the episode aired, and of course a certain contingent were spluttering and screeching into their cups that Newton was depicted by Nathaniel Curtis, who has a British Indian Dad. At least there were plenty of funny replies along the lines of, oh really, an outsize gonk with the voice of Miriam Margolyes doesn’t strain your credulity but this you’re stuck on etc.
Curtis was in It’s a Sin, and I’m always a fan of writers/ directors who develop relationships with actors and recast them in their work over time. I’ve just been on a Mike Flanagan watch-a-thon and he does this, e.g. with the incredible Carla Guigno.
Of course, second on the list of the Who outrage machine, was Fourteen describing Newton as hot:
Donna: “Was it me, or was Isaac Newton hot?
Doctor: “He was so hot… Oh? Is that who I am now?”
Donna, “Well it was never that far from the surface, mate… I always thought…”
This is the second time Fourteen has asked himself who he is now. Last week he said out loud to Unit’s Shirley Bingham (with her Q’d up wheelchair) that he loved Donna, and then pulls up in surprise:
Doctor: “Well, that’s what I’m worried about. Because I’ve got this friend called Donna Noble, and she was my best friend in the whole wide universe. I absolutely love her. Oh. Mmm. Do I say things like that now?”
Shirley: “It sounds like a good thing to say.”
I think the implication, in both these cases, is not that the Doctor didn’t have such feelings before (pansexual attraction, and love for his travelling companions) but, as we know, Ten was too buttoned up to say such things out loud. After the experiences of Eleven, Twelve and Thirteen, all of whom went through a lot of love (platonic and romantic) and pain, in relation to their various travelling companions, it seems Fourteen has aquired a greater degree of spoken out-loud emotional literacy than the previous incarnation with the same face.
I really like this differentiation between Ten and Fourteen.
And I’m also delighted that, from RTD1 through Moffat and Chibnall to RTD2, we’re arrived at a Doctor Who fit for the twenty-first century, where the Doctor can regenerate as any gender, any ethnicity, and love anyone.
And each showrunner has built this in incrementally over the arc of Nu Who to date, from Gaiman’s The Doctor’s Wife (6×4) when we first hear about Time Lords regenerating in a gender-fluid manner, via discussion of The Corsair, to the appearance of Jo Martin’s fabulous (and first Black) Doctor, The Fugitive Doctor, in Fugitive of The Judoon (12×05).
2 December 2023 at 20:10 #74742Dopplegangers are unfailing scary, as gothic fiction knows, and these double-walkers from the universe’s edge with their too long arms, were certainly that.
And why not, when you’ve got two great actors, with great chemistry, and only three episodes, stick them in the black emptiness at the edge of everything and watch them spark together.
I enjoyed the episode a lot for the pure fizzing chemistry; the Doctor and Donna picking up the threads of their friendship and deepening it in extremis. Superb work from Tate and Tennant.
I was also very intrigued by the fairy-tale counting salt and the vampires and the Doctor’s cryptic remark worrying about the mythology he’d unleashed in the plastic space of the universe’s edge. Did anyone else think about E-space from Tom Baker’s day, and the Great Vampires?
Loved the idea of slow bomb too and the clever equine-skeletoned captain and her last clever act.
29 November 2023 at 23:02 #74708@craig – I know absolutely nothing about back-end web design, but please let us know if we can help e.g. a crowdfunder if funds are needed? Sounds like a good idea to do it in the fallow period between the specials and before the start of Ncuti’s run proper.
I suppose I’d say – keep the archived threads of old, if possible, and keep the tag line “theories even more insane than what’s actually happening…”
Thankyou 🙂
29 November 2023 at 20:20 #74705Den of Geek has a nice article identifying as many as possible of the Who aliens fashioned in Rose 2’s Toys:
Which Doctor Who Monsters Were Hidden Among Rose’s Toys and Childhood Drawings?
I think they missed one though – top left in the dark corner, The Face of Boe, right?
https://images.app.goo.gl/mKd8kgWupvp6TMm2A
@craig I couldn’t get the image to insert.
I’m wondering why, in universe, Fourteen has returned with the Face of Ten.
What did Ten leave unfinished?
Perhaps answer enough is that he’s undone the great wrong perpetrated against Donna originally, now the reverse mind-wipe has restored her memories.
His other misdeed, which also, interestingly, involved denying free choice/ free will to a companion, is sealing Rose 1 into the parallel universe (with Ten 2) without really giving her a choice in the matter.
@jimthefish Yes, I would expect Rose 1 to appear perhaps on the TARDIS scanner or, briefly, in a rift between the universes or something – enough for an emotional exchange.
27 November 2023 at 18:47 #74672It’s great to see the band getting back together , old and new, to our delightfully over-analysing space!
@scaryb <waves>
I enjoyed Pat Mills’ review of The Star Beast – many thanks for that.
@jimthefish <likewise waves>
RTD2 is indeed a perfect moniker, and all power to the hive-mind of the interwebs for creating it. I am interested to see how much RTD2 differs from RTD1. I adored It’s a Sin, which I thought vastly superior to the earlier Tofu, Cucumber and Banana. What I’m hoping for is a bit of mystery as well as the big emotion we know RTD knows how to bring, and we’re off to a nice start on the mystery front.
@mudlark and others re The Boss – Mystery Number One – I see we’re discussing The Celestial Toymaker, which I hope doesn’t count as a spoiler, as it’s already been in the specials’ trailer and the Beeb publicity that Neil Patrick Harris will play him. The Celestial Toymaker’s previous incarnation was rather like a cross between Star Trek’s Q and Squid Game, so whether he and The Boss are one and the same or not, let the games begin (and may the odds be ever in our favour).
My other note of speculation is the Chekhov’s Gun of Donna’s daughter’s name. I mean, sure, RTD2 used the name congruence between Billie Piper and Yasmin Finney’s characters to drive interest in the 60th specials (and troll the toys-out-of-pram, “They’re-turning-Rose-trans” brigade) but, is RTD2 really not going to follow through on this massive neon flashing sign? We all saw the way the script had Tennant Doc react to the name “Rose” in The Star Beast.
So, I wonder, are we going to see Billie Piper’s Rose 1 again, before Tennant Doc becomes Gatwa Doc? Can RTD2 really resist the great love story of his RTD1 tenure getting a final outing?
26 November 2023 at 15:41 #74649The password the Doctor created to Donna’s mind-wipe:
Westerly, Pelican, Dreams, Tornado, Clifftops, Andante, Grief, Fingerprint, Susurration, Sparrow, Dance, Mexico, Binary, Binary, Binary,
I suspect, knowing RTD’s mischevious side, that he can’t wait to watch its hyper-analysis by fandom, trying to “crack” said code, when it’s probably the Doctor’s equivalent of a Google-generated “unguessable” password.
Because RTD, unlike Moffat, was never a Who writer much given to “puzzle-Who” (apart from the premonitory “Bad Wolf”).
However, it does seem somewhat more of a poem, rather than either a more literal, or a randomly-generated, code; a kind of mood-map of the way the Doctor felt about Donna?
What sort of mood?
Westerly – well I did think about Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind (as well as thinking about the R4 Shipping Forecast, and the Wizard of Oz and the Wicked Witch of the West):
“O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing”
which isn’t just a nature-poem, but is imbued with Shelley’s desire for revolutionary change and his role as a poet in igniting it:
“…make me thy lyre…
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like wither’d leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,Scatter, as from an unextinguish’d hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawaken’d earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”
Which certainly fits with RTD’s evident zeal to continue the progressive representational work which his original Nu-Who was proud of, broadening the Whoniverse to include British working-class companions (in Rose and Donna), the first Black companion (in Martha) and the first LGBT characters, from Captain Jack to the cat-people wives, Alice and May, in Gridlock and on.
Donna is a bit of a pelican, a gobby kind of bird, and also no doubt (as all humans must seem to Time Lords) a bit of a sparrow too, flying fast and short-lived.
Pelicans and sparrows both have a long history of symbolic meaning in literature. Pelicans in Ancient Egypt were associated with death and rebirth, and Shakespeare mentions pelicans’ symbolic meaning in Hamlet, commonly understood in his time as a Christ-symbol (supposedly sacrificing her blood for her young):
Laertes: “To his good friends thus wide I’ll ope my arms, And, like the kind life-rend’ring pelican,
Repast them with my blood”.Sparrows have a long history in mythology. They were one of the birds associated with Aphrodite, the Greek Goddess of love, and they appear in the Bible as illustrative of God’s care for even the smallest of creatures: Matthew 10:29-31 – “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care”.
There’s something musical in “andante” and “dance”, something whirlwind in “tornado” and “clifftop” and something tinged with loss and the fleeting nature of connection in “fingerprint”, “grief” and “susurration”; all of which, we may agree, speak to the Doctor’s feelings about his time with Donna in the TARDIS.
Besides the words, the fact a code exists at all, adds a nice undercurrent of darkness to an otherwise upbeat revivial, which undoes the horror of Donna’s original fate of forgetting her Time and Relative Dimensions in Space. Tennant-Doc used a reversible code when he wiped Donna’s mind, as if squirrelling away the contingency to revive the Doctor-Donna in just such an emergency as presented itself thanks to Beep the Meep’s genocidal tear in London, even knowing such a revival would kill her. I am always pleased to see a little darkness in the Doctor.
25 November 2023 at 21:56 #74635Hello Everyone <waves, wearing a big scarf>
Ooh I’ll have a jelly baby @craig. It’s been a minute, but here we are – sixty years – what a wonderful Whovian life.
I’ve just watched the new behind-the-scenes show Doctor Who Unleashed on I-Player and it was lovely to see RTD back in the saddle and supporting Yasmin Finney, talking about trans representation and her role as Rose.
I didn’t realise, until I watched Unleashed, that the Meep story was based on a Doctor Who comic.
David Tennant and Katharine Tate’s enthusiasm was just enormously infectious, and I loved the new TARDIS console as a tribute to the original Hartnell one.
Overall, my anxieties about Disneyfication have been allayed, so far, as the show remains happily true to its British roots, apart from the fact that surely the TARDIS should be serving tea, not coffee.
Cue, nonetheless, lots of screaming headlines about “Doctor Woke” in The Daily Fail etc. next week, which you just know RTD will chuckle delightedly over in his slippers.
It’s been wonderful diving into the Whoniverse archive the BBC have put on I-Player for the 60th. I’m currently tickled by the Hartnell era, particularly the far-shots of various space ships and Dalek saucer craft clearly made of washing-up liquid bottles and silver gaffer tape, wobbling on string in the galactic sky. I’ll forever love the homespun low-fi origins of Who, but excited for the next chapter.
29 October 2022 at 12:19 #73634@bluesqueakpip <waves>
But I agree that, when we look back, we will see this as a great ‘opening up’ era
Yes, and I am really grateful for it. The seeds were sown in The Doctor’s Wife, with the off-screen appearance of the Time Lord, the Corsair, described as sometimes regenerating male-embodied and sometimes female-embodied. And Missy and Whit-Doc and Martin-Doc have fully realised the concept of a female Master and female Doctors on screen.
I also think you’re right that Chibnall found writing a female doctor harder than he thought it would be.
Michelle Gomez’s Missy, in the Capaldi era, was absolutely excellent, inhabiting the Master’s capricious cruelty, villany, and obsessive Doctor-focussed mania with the strong continuity needed for the gender-swap to “take”. However, the fact that Moffat wrote The Master-as-Missy, i.e. the Master in a female incarnation, as the most redeemable version of the Master we’ve met, so that eventually, in World and Time Enough, she takes the Doctor’s side against her previous incarnation, falls, regrettably I think at least, into a gender stereotyping trap (no doubt unconscious) that women are “softer”.
As far as Whit-Doc goes, both the Doctor’s delightful, and oftentimes bombastic, arrogance, together with the Nu-Who era Doctor’s flirtatiousness, were excised from this female Doctor incarnation, again to her detriment (IMHO). Now, that partly reveals the mechanisms of the patriarchy. Whilst society is conditioned to accept that male arrogance can be endearing, and to accept that a hundreds-of-years older man romancing a teen girl can be sympathetic e.g. the entire vampire Twilight series (and here, Ecclestone and Tennant Doctors + Rose), we all know that female arrogance is socially punished (even if warranted) and that if the same romantic dynamic in the TARDIS had been an older woman Doctor and a teen boy or a teen girl, there would have been BIGLY complaints.
In the end, the writers’ room went with an unspoken (to one another) more age appropriate (to human eyes) Yaz-WhitDoc romantic attachment, inspired by the “Thasmin” fandom of this pairing. And I appreciated it, even as it gave the strong impression that, because this was a queer (in human terms) romantic undercurrent, the kiss afforded Nine-Rose, Ten-Rose and Eleven-River was bottled.
Jo Martin’s Doctor was truly ground-breaking as the first black female Doctor, and I really regret that she was only afforded a bit part, when she inhabited the role so commandingly. I would have loved to follow her own adventures further.
But I am all in on Ncuti Gatwa and can’t wait to see what happens next.
23 October 2022 at 22:37 #73578Hello Everyone!
I got absolutely soaked in a really wild thunderstorm on my way to the pub at tea time, so had to come home and try to dry the chill off my bones in time to settle in for The Power of the Doctor.
I was watching the incredible special effects and thinking, you know, I really wish we had lower production values and more frequent episodes – the gaps in between are sooooo long.
That said, this was a really super special, and a fitting goodbye for Whit-Doc.
Really delighted we got another outing for Jo Martin’s Doctor – she’s got such a sardonic and fabulous presence.
Favourite moment was definitely the “WTF” look shared by one of the Daleks and one of the Cyber-Masters as the Master got down to Boney-M’s “Ra ra Rasputin”. Sacha Dhawan was absolutely great – the vulnerability and the psychopathy so finely balanced. Lots of psychoanalytic things to say about the fact the Master wished to regenerate into the Doctor in a kind of Time Lord body-merge. He claimed that he intended to then thoroughly traduce the Doctor’s reputation for all time, by doing dastardly deeds in the “name of the Doctor”, but obviously, this course of action also revealed his desperate desire to both utterly possess the Doctor and to destroy himself.
It was touching to see Ace and Teagan again and I’m a huge fan of Nu Who’s revisiting of once-young-now-older companions, and the poignancy with which it throws into relief the Doctor’s experience of space/time, compared to that of his shorter lived earthly companions. The “Doctors’ Anonymous” support group for ex companions at the end was <chef’s kiss>.
Whit-Doc’s era was quite uneven, and took a long time to find its feet (in my view at least) but it has done brilliantly at opening up the being-ness of the Doctor going forward, so that in the future s(he) can be played by an actor of any gender and any ethnicity.
I’m gutted to see Whit-Doc go now, just when I feel she’s fully inhabiting The Doctor, but such is the nature of time and Doctor Who. I felt the same about Capaldi. Being heartbroken by a regeneration and filled with anticipation for the next incarnation is fundamentally what it means to be a Whovian!
Pretty sure the last sunrise the Doc witnessed was on the top of Durdle Door. A symbolic doorway, Durdle is apparently, according to Wikipedia, derived from the Old English “thirl”, meaning to pierce) and this time, it seems time is running backwards into Tennant Doc. Whit Doc’s expressed (to Yaz) intense desire for more time as herself (a similar sentiment to that expressed by Tennant at his own regeneration) may have been what has summoned this old incarnation back for unfinished business?
Pretty sure RTD is going to engineer a reunion with Rose at some point, just to make that section of the fanbase go wild.
Aren’t we lucky to be living through this new Who golden age?
2 January 2022 at 19:16 #72747Hope you’re feeling better @scaryb , and @winston that the rest of your family stay Covid free. It’s everywhere right now – bloomin’ Covid Christmas, as Raymond Briggs would say. I’ve been indoors for the last ten days with my sis, as she tested + on Christmas eve. So far I’ve escaped – lots of open windows! We are out of Covid-gaol tomorrow.
Proper Victorian convalesence warranted though.
1 January 2022 at 23:15 #72740HNY everyone.
I was delighted that Yaz’s romantic feelings for the Doc were acknowledged in text.
It’s really, deeply meaningful for gender non-conforming and LGBTQ+ fans to have watched the Doctor become gender-fluid by way of regenerations and now, in the Doc’s awkward fashion, perhaps romantically, fond of certain humans regardless of gender.
My child-self would have been absolutely astonished and amazed that such wonders could ever have happened on page and on-screen in the official narrative.
That aside, I’m glad the Doctor’s genocidal actions with the Flux are coming back to haunt her. She has really stirred a Dalek hornets’ nest now.
Like @cathannabel I love a time loop, and was there a Covid pandemic response metaphor in there? Humans doing the same thing over and over again, and getting killed, but over time, learning to trust one another and work together to finally escape the death trap (deadly virus/ time-loop of crap government response).
9 December 2021 at 13:09 #72660@ichabod – your characterisation and frustration did make me smile 🙂
I do appreciate feeling slightly crazed (as above) by the kitchen-sinkyness of it all. Some of the mystery I liked, however, because the universe is mysterious, after all.
I mean yes, totally, what was The Grand Serpent’s motivation? He seems to have been a dictator on Vinder’s home planet and he infiltrated/ contributed to the founding of UNIT on Earth and was working with the Sontaarans because??? He wanted to be Grand Serpent of the universe?
I think he was meant to be a representation of every petty megalomaniac tyrant to ever have cursed the ordinary folk – a snakey space Trump.
He works metaphorically in a way he doesn’t work logically. If we see him as a manifestation of Ouroboros, the eternal birth, death and rebirth of the universe, aligned with the forces of destruction, then he has been exiled to contemplate his incomplete ruination on a space rock, because, even from the ashes of destruction wrought by a megalomaniac power-tripping dictator, life rises again. What do binary demi-species eat though? Space dust?
Azure and Swarm, who claim to represent Time, whose people were destroyed (according to them) by the Doctor and Division, and their mysterious skull-like passenger-forms (which seemed very like Time-Lord techy) were very intriguing.
Tecteun used them (by “injecting them like poison”) to try and destroy the universe she was done with. It seems as if they were natural agents of entropy (destruction) and of “free time” before the Time-Lords wrested control of time itself, using the Doctor’s “Timeless Child” DNA.
The figure of Time in Doctor form, who dissolved Azure and Swarm at the end of The Vanquishers – was she a member of their species? A mythic embodiment of Time Herself?
The title of the episode, “The Vanquishers”, made me think about war poetry, which frequently speaks of “the vanquished”. Like Laurence Binyon’s famous WW1 poem, “For the Fallen”, which speaks of the dead as immortal, as timeless now:
………….. (this isn’t the full poem)
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.At the going down of the sun and in the morning.
We will remember them.
They mingle not with their laughing comrades again;
They sit no more at familiar tables of home;
They have no lot in our labour of the day-time;
They sleep beyond England’s foam.But where our desires are and our hopes profound,
Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,
To the innermost heart of their own land they are known
As the stars are known to the Night;As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain;
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end, they remain.https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57322/for-the-fallen
Nietzsche said (in Human, All Too Human 1878-80) “Against war it may be said that it makes the victor stupid and the vanquished revengeful. In favour of war, it may be said that it barbarises in both its above-named results, and thereby makes more natural; it is the sleep or the winter period of culture; man emerges from it with greater strength for good and for evil”.
So, there is a sense in which the partial destruction of the universe has created powerful motivation for revenge, e.g. in Karvanista as the sole survivor of his species, in any of the Sontaarans, Daleks and Cybermen who may remain (none of whom are going to be best pleased with the Doctor, right?). And also, out of the ruins and the ashes, new possibilities.
It seems the Timeless Child must join with the Time Watch which contains the multitudes of her past selves. Who will she become, in the process?
7 December 2021 at 10:34 #72646Hi Everyone,
I only managed to watch yesterday and did get a vertiginous sense of kitchen sink. I’m still digesting.
There are elements I’ve appreciated very much about this “mini-series”. I feel Whittaker now fully inhabits the role of the Doctor. Her relationship with Yaz has developed an emotional meaning which anchors relations on board the Tardis. The larger themes have been enticing.
@miapatrick I was shocked by the Doctor’s genocidal decision not to warn the Dalek and the Cybermen fleets about the Sontaran trap.
But I wondered whether that was a signal that the Doctor’s past lives in the Time Watch are closing in on her. Who knows what atrocities she may have committed whilst working for Division. Karvanista’s revelation that he’d been a companion of hers once, who would have done “anything” for her before she summarily left him ,was intriguing. He was clearly a companion to one of her “hidden” selves.
And why did one of these “hidden” Doctors (presumably with Division) destroy Swarm and Azure’s people? Is that also a metaphor, for the Time Lord’s wresting of control of Time from the natural forces of the universe?
I think the Doctor discovering she’s been controlled and used by her Wicked Step-Mother and Division, and more so, steeped in blood whilst doing so, is a brilliant new darkness to add to Time Lord mythology.
It has the possibility to add so much to the Doctor Who narrative, going forward. Stories could take place with past reincarnations of the Doctor (once they’ve been “unveiled” from the watch) as well as with future ones.
For now, no wonder Whit-Doc doesn’t want to know, and entrusts her past to the bowels of the Tardis.
She’s promised a more emotionally open relationship with Yaz – a bit of a huge psychological step for the Doctor! And one that’s clearly doomed. Evidently, she thinks Yaz may not feel the same way about her anymore, once she integrates with her past selves. Certainly that integration will transform her, one way or another.
@miapatrick Yes I’d like it if the Doctor’s parentage thread had evolved. Possibly Bel’s pregnancy was simply there as another metaphor for the birth and death of the universe and the birth and death of Whit-Doc, in the same way that the, rather deliciously saturnine, Grand Serpent was.
The Master, is still in the mix, as the Doctor was warned about him by her swarmy clone.
In a sense, the Master is the Doctor’s child, given that she is the genetic progenitor of Time Lord regenerative abilities.
29 November 2021 at 17:46 #72576@miapatrick “I think we have seen the Doctor’s parents, and they’re human”
Yes, I’ve seen the spec elsewhere on the interwebs that Bel and Vinder are the Doctor’s parents.
I mean certainly, the fact that Bel is pregnant, does seem pregnant with meaning.
In terms of timey-wimeyness, there would be a time paradox going on though?
Bel and Vinder are alive contemporaneously with the events of Tecteun’s plan to destroy the universe using the Flux and therefore Baby-Doctor, if she is in Bel’s belly, is not-yet-born and has not yet been found by Tecteun and used to give birth to the Time Lords, at the same time as Whit-Doc (some umpteen reincarnations leter) is the indirect cause of Tecteun’s universe-destroying hissy-fit.
What is very cool about this, however, is it makes sense of all the serpent symbolism (the Grand Serpent and his tattooed minions). I mentioned the Ouroboros, the serpent which swallows its own tail – which is an alchemical symbol of death and rebirth.
So are witnessing the death and rebirth of the universe and the death and birth (rebirth) of the Doctor simultaneosly?
28 November 2021 at 20:57 #72567Hi Everyone,
Like you, @oochillyo , I enjoyed this episode.
The Doctor’s new origin story is a bit galactic fairytale isn’t it?
A foundling, she confronts the Evil Step-Mother who experimented on her as a child. A mother who stole her genetics to create her (adoptive) species, recruited her to meddle in and control Time, and mind-wiped her when she rebelled. A mother now orchestrating the genocide of a whole universe, in a last ditch attempt to control her “timeless child” again.
It’s not easy to find out your Mum is Space Mengele.
That sounds too flippant, I know, but that’s also the reality of who Tecteun is – a scientist who is a genocidal child-experimenter.
It must be beyond horrifying for the Doctor.
I do agree with those on the previous thread who grumbled about the Special One -ification of the Doctor, which this storyline under Chibs has pulled off. I too preferred her/him as an ordinary(ish) maverick.
On the other hand, the grand multi-verse scope and the mystery of the Doctor’s original origin-species is intriguing.
It strikes me Tecteun is a very Aztec god sounding name. Human sacrifice, particularly of the heart, was very significant in Aztec culture.
This was very grand in horizon(s), and absolutely gorgeous, yet again, to look at. The production values are incredible; Tecteun’s cherry blossom tree Tardis interior, for one. I do rather miss dusty old corridors and sticky-back plastic outfits from the days of old though.
The Grand Serpent is a Goa’uld from Stargate (snakey beings which possessed human bodies, with a penchant for Egyptology) isn’t he? Not quite sure where he fits in (except as an Ouroboros embodiment) but loving the acting.
Swarm and Azure seem to be the avatars of the forces of dark matter or dissolution in the universe.
Really enjoyed reading the thread on the previous episode, Village of the Angels, btw, with some great theorising from @mudlark and @jimthefish and @scaryb and others. Scary, you’re back – yay! I had a hectic work week and missed commenting as a result.
18 November 2021 at 19:09 #72459@craig I’ll join with @cathannabel and @blenkinsopthebrave and @mudlark and @winston in thanking you so much for everything you’ve done for us in keeping this forum going.
I know it’s taken plenty of your time and energy (and some money too). It’s your gift, so if you’re weary, you should look after yourself first. We appreciate you.
But, I remember when @htpbdet was with us, and he just could not get on with Matt Smith’s Doctor. He knew however, that change would come.
And when @bluesqueakpip found that Capaldi Doc just did not do it for her? She too, knew that change would come.
As other wise folk on here have said before, the Doctor regenerates (and so do the showrunners). Soon enough we will be in a new RTD era, with a new Doctor, and it will all feel different again.
The Whit-Doc era has not been everything I hoped it would be, albeit the Tom Baker mash-up with Tilda Swinton’s Orlando, in lace and thigh boots, was always the stuff of my own peculiar fantasy.
What a bonkers, British institution Doctor Who is.
I hope, with my whole heart, that in another 50 years, it’s still going. Someone not-yet-born will fall truly, madly, deeply in love with it, and revive it (after a hiatus in the 2040s and 50s). The Tardis interior will be green, vegetative, ancient tree-like. The Doctor will be gendered in a way we don’t have a name for yet. A historical episode set in 2021 will encounter a young Greta Thunberg, and the kids of tomorrow will be as delighted and as awed, as we are to encounter Rosa Parks.
14 November 2021 at 20:40 #72390Blimey, well that was a bit of a head-spinner.
This episode One, Upon Time perhaps takes us back, by allusion, to the episode in which Capaldi regenerated into Whit-Doc – as that episode was titled Twice Upon a Time.
As we are meeting Jo Martin’s “Fugitive Doctor” again, it seems confirmed she’s a previous incarnation whose existence has been wiped from our Doc’s memory. Do the episode title parallels suggest she’s between Capaldi-Doc and Whit-Doc, or are we still thinking much further back (pre-Hartnell)?
The Passenger seems Time-Lordy to me – bigger on the inside. Similar to the Genesis Ark which imprisoned millions of daleks during the Time War.
The Mouri and the Doctor seem natural allies, as controllers of time.
Of course, in Greek mythology the Moirai were agents of fate. Atropos cuts the thread of each mortal’s life, when the time comes – such a reference pressages Whit-Doc’s demise (regeneration).
So Swarm and Azure are “poison” introduced into the universe by whom? Was the old(er) woman giving the “poison” speech a Time Lord agent? She certainly seems to view this poison as a cleansing kind of cure.
Bel (the girl with the Irish accent and Tamagotchi pet) is searching for her loved one, Vinder, through broken time. Dan is now doing the same, as the Passenger has captured his date. Both sets of parted lovers narratively mirror the Doctor and Yaz. Why are Weeping Angels hunting Yaz in particular?
Visually this was stunning – from gold daleks to the exquisite crystalline faces of Swarm and Azure and the golden livery of The Grand Serpent.
Perhaps The Grand Serpent is a reference to an ouroboros – the universe with its tail in its mouth, ending and beginning? It seems we are chasing the Doctor’s origin story, which is also the Time Lords; origin story.
1 November 2021 at 23:33 #72276@bluesqueakpip – I love the idea that Dan is the Master (maybe chamelion-arched?).
@whereami62 – the credits described blue crystal-face dude as “Swarm”.
But there’s a lot we don’t know. Swarm the blue entity seems to consume life-force in a similar way to the space-cloud called the Flux. So, are they they same entity, say, at different stages in a life-cycle?
@mudlark – Ah but time can be re-written, so the end of the world witnessed by Rose and Ecclestone-Doc is one future, but that’s not to say, surely, that the Flux couldn’t end our blue planet sooner, changing earth’s time-line?
I do appreciate a science realism check though, on the age of the universe. Probably just arts graduate fuzzyness on Chibnall’s part. Or, (to add some bonkers speculating) could it be clue this story will involve multiverses?
1 November 2021 at 18:49 #72272Merry meet everyone!
Thanks to @craig for keeping the Forum going.
I’m excited for a serial story, as I much prefer a contiguous narrative thread to pull on, Minotaur style.
There WAS a lot going on and I feel I need a re-watch – bit of a Halloween smorgasbord of aliens, with Sontarans, dog-aliens, whoever blue-crystal-face (Swarm) is, Weeping Angels, and a new companion in Dan.
I loved the food-bank setting, Dan’s empty cupboards all too real, sadly, for many. 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?).
The Flux (space diarrhea?) disintegrates matter, dust to dust.
The Weeping Angels are a huge clue to think about time out of order (as @bluesqueakpip says) as they send people back in time to consume their would-have-been futures. Perhaps the Time Lords used Weeping Angels on the Doctor to conceal her true origin story from her?
Hunger, disintegration, vampirism (which is what Weeping Angels do too, in a timey-wimey sort of way) – the Flux as a metaphor for voracious power/ capitalism consuming people and planet.
The Sontarrans and the drum-beat of endless war.
Swarm (blue crystal-face) consumes others to rejuvenate himself. Just like the Time Lords.
The Doctor always knew her people were not good people (controlling, patrician); that’s why she ran away.
But now? Eugenicists who canibalised another species to engineer themselves?
I feel JW has hit her stride as the Doctor now, which makes it a big tragic that she’ll soon be gone.
But grief and loss and still going on? These are the persistent themes of Nu Who.
Waves at everyone x.
27 July 2020 at 09:06 #70858Hey everyone <waves> Came here too when I saw the news on Twitter this morning.
Absolutely gutted about Dan. Without his Doctor Who exhuberance and the extensive space provided back then below the line of his recaps on The Graun, we wouldn’t have this lovely place. I’ll always think fondly of the Moffat/ Guardian “golden years” on his blog.
LGBT Doctor Who fandom has lost a prominent member.
May his spirit wander with the TARDIS now.
27 January 2020 at 01:22 #69396@jimthefish He’s there for the benefit of a bit of fan service rather than being narratively necessary.
Except, Jack is only one of a handful of the Doctor’s previous companions who can time-travel independently. And we do seem to be getting gratifyingly timey-wimey. Maybe the Jack who the “Fam” just met came from further up the present time-stream, in order to bring his cyberman warning?
I saw a great theory elsewhere on the interwebs, which I can’t claim credit for, that perhaps the Jo Martin character isn’t, in fact, the Doctor, but is an AU River Song. Their supporting points were quite convincing. River can fly the TARDIS. The parents’ graves recall Amy and Rory. The Jo Martin character was certainly quite happy using weapons, but said impatiently to Whit Doc, “I know!” when WhitDoc said, “The Doctor doesn’t use weapons.”
I’d put that weapons-usage inconsistency down to a Mirror-verse effect, but, I do like this as a bonkers theory.
@mudlark The fact that the Ruth Doctor had no knowledge of Gallifrey’s destruction would be consistent with this, but it would mean working out a way in which alternative – as opposed to parallel or bubble universes – could intersect.
Yes, that lack of knowledge of Gallifrey’s destruction for Jo Martin’s Doc is what, combined with the Orphan 55 signpost that multiple time-lines for Earth are out there, which the TARDIS can visit, is what led me to the alternative time-line theory.
The Doctor’s speech to the “Fam” in Orphan 55, that the future of Earth they’d seen there wasn’t inevitable, it depended on humans actively working to avoid that apocalyptic future, makes me think the Doctor is going to have to figure out, back in time, what the Time Lords could do, in order to avoid the Master’s (apparent) destruction of Gallifrey.
I’m quite excited about a Time Lord fascist empire, which, although in Jo Martin’s Doc’s imperial time-line Gallifrey seems to have avoided destruction, also clearly can’t be good.
Perhaps the Doctor is going to have to navigate between the Scylla of Gallifrey’s destruction in her own time-line and the Charybdis of Jo Martin Doc’s time-line, where Gallifrey isn’t destroyed, but the Time Lords are full-on imperial fascists.
Or perhaps, as we’ve speculated already, the Time Lords were fascistic in every time-line, in their use of genetic experimentation, and that is what has led to both outcomes we’ve seen thus far – imperial Gallifrey and destroyed Gallifrey. And the Doc must find another way.
26 January 2020 at 22:51 #69392@jimthefish Oh I’m pretty confident the “cyberman” clue will pay off in a future story.
The Captain isn’t for everyone, I know that. But I personally love his swashbuckling, piratical, big bisexual energy 🙂
In a way, it was a smart writers’ move not to have Jack and WhitDoc meet, because I kind of think this version of the Doctor might get on less well with the Captain than the previous versions he’s travelled with. She might find him a tad too bombastic, given her own down-to-earth demeanour.
<div class=”vmod”></div>26 January 2020 at 20:45 #69385@miapatrick Yes, in terms of the distance WhitDoc has been keeping from her companions, from a character point of view, we can argue it make makes sense, particularly after all the trauma of the Time War and its aftermath and losing River and then Clara and Bill, all in upsetting ways.
Although, that’s also, perhaps, a little generous to the S11 writing, because that “strategy” has made for a rather flat series of Doctor-companion relationships on the TARDIS up to this point. It looks to me as if there’s been a significant re-think in the writers’ room for S12, based on reactions to S11.
Although, it remains to be seen if the high of Vinay Patel’s excellent episode (and to be fair he shares the writing credit with Chibnall) will be continued.
I should also say I loved Ritu Arya’s Gat, the Time Lord hunting down Jo Martin’s version of the Doctor. The relationship between them was intriguing (possibly old lovers?) so I’m sorry she’s (apparently) dead.
Agreed, it’s not much of a stretch to imagine a Time Lord imperial dictatorship. And that’s an excellent theme to be exploring now, in the context of what the Chibnall era has done best, in my view, up to now – depicting the Doctor as resolutely anti-fascist. Because what do you do when you find out your own people are the fascists this time?
26 January 2020 at 20:16 #69378Wow, well Vinay Patel is officially my favourite writer on Chibnall’s team.
That was the first time I’ve felt really gripped with the excitement that is Doctor Who at its best since the start of the Chibnall era.
Loved seeing Captain Jack again – always a fave Nu Who character for me, and he came bearing a cyberman mystery too. And (and this is good writing) – excellent dramatic tension, because Jack and the Doctor didn’t get to meet again (and of course we want them to). Hah, Graham’s head must be spinning, wondering about the Doc and Jack’s past after that hearty kiss :-).
Jo Martin made an excellent, slightly scary, alternative time-stream Doctor, and the tension between her and WhitDoc was perfect – just the sort of mutual, appalled fascination and contempt I remember with fondness from previous multiple Doctor stories.
It looks as if we’re meeting the Doctor from another time-stream (now it’s been established in Orphan 55 that other time-streams are a thing) – kind of a Star Trek style Mirrorverse, in which the Time Lords are running an imperial dictatorship of some kind?
WhitDoc telling her companions that she’s lived for thousands of years and they don’t really know her, was a great moment. I really felt the alien shine out of Whittaker, as if she’s been putting on a persona for “the Fam” up to this point. Looking forward to more of this.
Overall, I want to thoroughly celebrate the episode, and can only hope this calibre of story is going to continue.
We certainly have a lot of threads to follow now – Captain Jack, the last cyberman, the Doctor’s other self, an Imperial Gallifrey, the Master, possible Gallifreyan genetic experiments… I’m delighted.
21 January 2020 at 23:15 #69315@mudlark I like your idea that the Scythra (I know it’s officially Skithra, but I like my spelling better) are a hive species.
@bluesqueakpip Yes, I can buy your distinction in terms of the Spyfall mind-wipe for tech-whizz Lovelace (as she’d seen the future) vs the lack of mind-wipe for tech-whizz Tesla. But, as you and @jimthefish and @mudlark say – it’s still a morally problematic act. And I hope it is indeed revisted as part of the Time Lord arc.
@blenkinsopthebrave That is a good bonkers theory about some kind of timey-wimey filching of time-tech by the Time Lords, despite @mudlark ‘s lack of archeological evidence 🙂 Which exchange makes me miss River, time-travelling archaeologist extraordinaire, herself.
On the question of the Time Lords and potential genetic experimentation in order to “create” themselves, I had a flash-back to Genesis of the Daleks, and Davros’ experimentation on the Kaleds to mutate them into Daleks.
How much would Davros crow if it turned out the Doctor’s own people were guilty of similar genetic “enhancement”.
And wow that would put a new spin on the Time War.
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