[Juniperfish @replies]

After seeing episode 2 I’m getting Shape of Water vibes. Tovey is going to boink the gender-fluid fish lady in the Mariana Trench, isn’t he.

[Juniperfish @replies]

Hello All, I’ve only watched one episode of The War Between the Land and the Sea so far, but it’s quite good.

Jemma Redgrave’s Kate Lethbridge Stewart continues to be very believable. You just know she comes from a family with an aga and the smell of wet dog in the kitchen in the morning.

The least believable bit is having a sane and functioning US administration (at least so far). Can you imagine the garbage Trump and his cronies would spout about “so monstrous, these fishy fish invaders” etc., but maybe that’s coming…

I’m not sorry the Disney partnership has ended however, despite the beautifully rendered Sea Devil outfits, as I would rather have extended storytelling and lower budget effects than incredible effects but hardly any time with the Doctor and companions, which is how Gatwa Doc’s run was, sadly, hobbled.

Got to do some work before I’m allowed to watch the next episode!

[Juniperfish @replies]

@scaryb – dammit! I now have the song, and the expression “What a load of dugga-doo” stuck in my head 🙂

On yours and @whohar ‘s mention of “hasty rewrites” – yes, when you think about the first Gatwa series and how much it focussed on the Doctor and Ruby both being abandoned and adopted children, I wonder if Poppy was planned out, at the beginning, to be the Doctor and Ruby’s (presumed) child and Millie Gibson’s departure as the main companion also required rewrites that derailed a more coherent arc about changelings. The Gatwa era, like the Ecclestone era, does feel as if it had a bumpy road behind the scenes.

I like all the theories about who Billie Piper could be, if not the next incarnation of the Doctor, from @whohar @scaryb and @jimthefish .

I’m with  @ps1l0v3y0u that she will be the next Doctor. I do hope she is, because I’d love to see what she does with the part. She was excellent as Rose, but since then Piper has grown into her craft (she was incredible in the adaptation of Lorca’s Yerma) and I’d like to see her given the freedom to use the full range of her abilities as our Time Lord, rather than playing some kind of interim placeholder character as Rose/Badwolf/Moment/Tardis-incarnation on a mission to save the Doctor.

Just to throw another theory into the mix though for fun though… what if she is the Valeyard?

With Tenant2-Doc still knocking about in London, thanks to the bi-generation, if Piper-Doc was the Valeyard that could make for a terrific series where the Doctor has to thwart a rogue version of himself, but one who, for shits and giggles, is wearing the face of the woman he loved.

A couple of articles related to Gatwa’s tenure caught my eye, as it’s Pride Month:

This one in Pink News in which Gatwa talks about his relationship with Who fans and dealing with racist and homophobic abuse from some quarters:

https://www.thepinknews.com/2024/11/14/ncuti-gatwa-doctor-who-racism-homophobia/

And this rather lovely one on the BBC about LGBT fans of Doctor Who:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c04edqyzlv2o

[Juniperfish @replies]

Returning, in a marking break, to chew over a couple of things regarding some of Ncuti’s Doctor’s characteristics.

I liked this more emotional Doctor, but I wanted his weeping to be addressed as having some meaning, seeing as he cried in almost every episode, beyond – eh, this incarnation is just more emotional.

On the other hand, I have not enjoyed Ncuti-Doc’s turn to violence. His torture of Kid, the Hellia terrorist, in The Intergalactic Song Contest, really shocked me. The Doctor has been cold and punishing before. I’m thinking of the fate of The Family of Blood – but, actual physical torture?

I know this was addressed by Bel and the Doctor, in a conversation afterwards, and the Doc admitted he was triggered by Kid’s genocidal intent, as it reminded him of the genocide of his own people. For long-time viewers, we could therefore read Ncuti-Doc’s burst of torture of Kid as a projection of self-hatred, given that (at one point in the timeline) the Doctor himself WAS the genocider of his own people.

But then came the besting of Bone God Omega by simply blasting him in the gob with the Vindicator-as-laser-weapon. I really don’t want the Doctor to become a Marvel-style superhero. The Doctor’s use of his mind to solve problems and confront violence has always been one of his/her marvellous defining features.

On the other hand, I quite liked the way RTD wrote Ncuti-Doc as still somewhat insensitive towards his human companions. The final scene with Ruby and Bel in the TARDIS was a real ouch moment for that, where poor Ruby not only had to go up against the Doc’s insistence her memory of Poppy was false, but she also had to watch Ncuti-Doc all bouncy with Bel over the joy of travelling with a new companion, and seemingly oblivious to Ruby’s pain at being replaced (even though she chose to leave the TARDIS).

I wouldn’t be surprised @pufferfish and @devilishrobby if Ncuti doesn’t show up in a Marvel movie before too long.

I’m glad that he’s also building his theatre career at the same time. Because, let’s face it, Marvel movies pay spectactular money, but they’re honestly drek as truly creatively enriching acting opportunities.

[Juniperfish @replies]

Hello Everyone,

Your cinema experience sounds fab @scaryb .

That was a true emotional rollercoaster, and RTD totally pulled off the surprise, for me at least!!!

I spent the first part of the episode thinking – jeez this is a LOT of exposition, but hey, I’m in love with Archie Panjabi’s Rani.

I wasn’t a fan of Mad God Omega or the Bone Beasts – a case of the Disney’s CGI budget overwhelming the story. Omega in The Three Doctors was much more frightening in his lo-fi gold mask and silver lame frock.

I got emotional about Gatwa-Doc and how much he wanted Poppy to be the first of the new Time Lords.

Then I thought – you cannot be serious that your priority isn’t getting Rogue out of that Hell dimenson, Doctor!

I thought bringing back Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor was a lovely touch, especially Ncuti’s more emotional Doctor helping her understand she loved Yaz. The Doctor is firmly queer-encompassing now, something I feel deeply touched by as an LGBT fan, knowing I would have been indescribably happy if I’d been able to experience that as a child viewer myself.

I was sure that when Gatwa-Doc landed in the Poppy-verse, he was going to be landing in the orchard at the moment when Newton misheard Donna and Tenant 2’s “gravity” as “mavity”, and he’d correct Newton, and then the mavity universe would be resolved. But, it seems that thread has been left hanging. As has the intriguing question as to why Ruby was the only one who could remember Poppy. Ruby is obviously going to join the UNIT team, so we’ll hopefully get to explore that later on.

Gutted to see Gatwa-Doc go, as he was magnificent in the part, but the fact Billy Piper is the new Doctor is THE BEST THING IN THE WORLD. It’s a beautiful Full Circle, for the show, for RTD and for Billie. They were there at the marvellous beginning of Nu Who (along with Ecclestone’s Doctor, whom I adored) and here they are for an amazing regeneration. I may have screeched a little with delight.

I’m a huge fan of Billie’s, I thinks she’s one of the best actors of her generation (I Hate Suzie is glorious) and only her magnificent arrival could have eclipsed Gatwa’s departure.

I’ve found Disney Who frustrating because of the truncated nature of the story-telling, but I’m completely psyched for Billie Piper’s Doctor Who. She’s going to be epic.

 

[Juniperfish @replies]

Wow, I’m very late to the party and have clearly missed some excellent bonkerising!

@mudlark I love the catch about the Rani turning the 7th son of a 7th son of a 7th son’s Mum into flowers and his Dad into an owl, a la Blodeuwedd. That’s another duality (like the bigeneration) as Blodeuwedd has the dual form of owls/ flowers. Hers is also a very powerful story (if we read it that way) about being trapped in a social system (patriarchy) as she was; a woman created by male magicians to be a bride for a King she didn’t love, and all she wanted was to be free to love someone of her own choice. yet she was punished for it.

Conrad’s world is not just Stepford Wives World, keeping women trapped in domestic chains (like Blodeuwedd), but it’s also Compulsory Heterosexuality World, keeping Gatwa-Doc’s very gay self in illusiory Straightsville. But his gayness is one of his doorways to doubt, and it keeps breaking through, so much so that we see the lovely Rogue again (albeit in a Hell dimension).

The Rani’s bone-house is no doubt a reference to another fairy tale – she is Baba Yaga as well as the Wicked Witch of the West. The bone-house also resembled the Racnoss space-ship from Tenant-Doc’s The Runaway Bride. It’s yet another instance of recycled elements from the Doctor’s past in the mavity world. Last week’s Delta Wave recalled Ecclestone Doctor’s episode The Parting of the Ways. It’s as though the Doctor is trapped in a through-the-looking glass Time Lord Matrix.

I really loved this episode, as it was quite bonkers itself – a bigenerated Rani (love them both) in search of…. Omega!

Poppy is a very adorable, and yes, as you say @whisht ,  her name, particularly in conjunction with last week’s substance “poppy honey”,  which The Corporation genocided the Hellions for, must be significant. She seems to be a sort of reverse-opium in this case, a child who sees through illusion. All of which, reminded me of the Lotus-eaters in the Odyssey, sunk in drugged illusory torpor, and Tennyson’s poem about the same:

“Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind,
In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclined
On the hills like Gods together, careless of mankind.
For they lie beside their nectar, and the bolts are hurl’d
Far below them in the valleys, and the clouds are lightly curl’d
Round their golden houses, girdled with the gleaming world:
Where they smile in secret, looking over wasted lands.”

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45364/the-lotos-eaters

[Juniperfish @replies]

Sheesh, first Belinda’s coercively-controlling boyfriend Alan, now Ruby’s deceptive fake-romancing boyfriend Conrad.

Both are young men filled with deep feelings of inadequacy who use AI and social media respectively to try and make themselves look and seem important – RTD is truly savaging the Silicon Valley tech-bros this season. I wonder if UNIT should be relying on the Vlinx quite so much…

I was genuinely upset for Ruby – that’s a real gut punch, finding out someone you thought you were falling for isn’t who they pretended to be at all and they were using you all along. Millie Gibson really shone in the episode – depicting Ruby’s vulnerability and toughness at once.

It still feels weird the way Ruby’s story has been handled. If the Doctor had mentioned her and how he was missing her, just once, in the first episodes of this series it would have helped. The fact Ruby is suffering from PTSD after her adventures with the Doctor is very convincing however, although she rather gave the impression the Doctor had left her, when in fact she chose to leave him. And why would Gatwa-Doc keep enough of an eye on Ruby to zap Conrad out of prison and give him a piece of his mind, but not pop in to give Ruby a hug, especially given this version of the Doctor is much less emotionally constipated than his predecessors?

None of the above helps the rumours about a behind-the-scenes falling out of some kind. We know how the tabloid press are, so that may all be complete b******* but Ruby’s story does feel a bit narratively awkward.

I find Millie Gibson a very charismatic performer, and the fact she’s hanging out with UNIT this episode makes me wonder if RTD’s plan has always been to hive her off into a UNIT spin-off. Of course, that may, sadly, given rumours about the end of the Disney partnership and even a hiatus for Who, not come to pass.

Something is timey-wimily off, as the version of the Doctor who zaps Conrad has not yet met Belinda, and yet Conrad knows who she is.

Just as Lux involved a world of make-believe (a cartoon) bleeding into reality, this episode involves two competing versions of reality; one where aliens are fake and the deep state is manufacturing them in order to control the population (Conrad’s version) and one where aliens are real and UNIT is keeping the public safe (let’s call that Kate Lethbridge-Stewart’s version). In this episode, given Conrad saw the TARDIS dematerialise when he was younger, and given Kate’s rather scary over-reach in releasing the Shreek onto Conrad on livestream, allowing him to get bitten, perhaps neither version is entirely accurate.

The microcosm no doubt hints at the macrocosm, so our collective theories that the Doctor may be in a Pantheon of Discord AU (the “mavity universe” across the salt line etc.) gathers pace. And maybe the fact neither Conrad’s version or Kate’s version of reality are the whole picture, perhaps also hints that the Doctor’s bi-generation is a symptom (or an additional cause) of the bifurcation of reality itself,

Mrs. Flood is definitely a wrong-un if she’s breaking the loathsome Conrad out of gaol.

This is the first episode I’ve felt the need to rewatch to see what clues I might have missed. So i’ll go and do that!

[Juniperfish @replies]

@mudlark and @whohar – I also  realised that the yellow and blue of the Doctor and Bel’s outfits in this episode look like Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (1991):

https://people.com/movies/disneys-1991-beauty-and-the-beast-fun-facts/

Could the fact Belinda Chandra is called “Bel” for short, and Belle is the name of the heroine in Beauty and the Beast, suggest the Doctor is “the beast”? So perhaps we will find out that he is a (lost) member of the Pantheon of Discord? Maybe he knows that (bodily) and that’s why he’s always crying?

There’s also Donne’s famous line from his poem For Whom the Bell Tolls; “Send not to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee”. So perhaps Bel(inda) Chandra is (like Ruby Sunday) an illusion or a trap? “Chandra” means “moon” in Hindi, so that’s also interesting given we’ve just met a character, Mr. Ring A Ding, made of moonlight.

[Juniperfish @replies]

@scaryb

I loved it, but my brain is completely tied in knots with all the meta bits! 😛 (In a good way).

The Doctor and Mr Ring A Ding have lots of visual (and other) parallels – bow ties anyone? Blue suit? Picking up a (simpering, Betty Boop-alike) female companion (in a yellow dress!) as he starts an adventure…

I think I need @juniperfish to sort my thoughts out 😉

Hello @scaryb old friend, and all <waves> . I’m a bit late to the party on this episode – only watched it yesterday.

Yes, excellent call about the similarities between Mr Ring A Ding and Miss Sunshine and the Doctor and Bel. I think we can read that as a meta-commentary clue about the nature of reality being squiffy in Gatwa-Doc’s universe, as well as a meta-commentary on the darker side of the Doctor – a fantastical being like Mr Ring A Ding forever seducing/ kidnapping innocent young things like Miss Sunshine to take them away in his time machine! Mr Ring A Ding is magnetic (literally full of light and magic, as he’s made of moonshine) and sinister, just like the Doctor who has, after all, effectively kidnapped Bel and is currently unable to return her to her parents, despite her desperate wish that he do so. Gatwa Doc has compared himself to Willy Wonka (he sings some lines from “Pure Imagination” when he welcomes Rogue to the Tardis in 14×06 Rogue) and we’ve previously compared him to Peter Pan. The goblins in 14×01 The Church on Ruby Road who kidnap babies to eat them are a bit of a dark mirror for the Doctor, who “kidnaps” orphan Ruby (I mean c’mon he is back on his bullshit of going for human companions who are, in their early 20s, only a few years out of childhood). Both Wonka and Pan are fantastical and deeply attractive characters with dark sides who entrance children away to magical realms (Wonka’s “golden ticket” factory and Pan’s Neverland). I really like this subtextual element of RTD 2.0 – the Doctor as a Pied Piper figure.

I was also struck by the similarity between Bel’s yellow 1950s dress and the pink 1950s dress worn by Rose in The Idiot’s Lantern, which was set in London in 1953 (and this episode is set in 1952 in the US).

Also I was struck by the similarity between the red-bodied robots in the first episode of this season, The Robot Revolution, and the cyborg King Hydroflax in The Husbands of River Song. Incidentally, the robots of The Robot Revolution were designed, according to the production notes in the Wikipedia entry for the episode, with a “retrofuturistic” look influenced by the 1950s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Robot_Revolution

Possibly that desire for a ’50s look is part of RTD’s underlying critical theme in the Gatwa era, tackled explicitly through the Al-as-coercive-incel character in that episode, and the Jim Crow segregation in ’50s Florida in this one, about how our contemporary moment (with its retrogressive “anti-wokeness”) is insisting on time-travelling back to the 1950s.

However, the broader theme we’re discussing here is whether the cartoons-become-real in Lux hints that call-backs to previous Who in the Gatwa era are part of a meta-narrative, whereby the Pantheon have trapped Gatwa Doc in an Alternative salt-line-has-been-crossed “mavity” Universe or, as in @ps1l0v3y0u ‘s great theory of it being The Mind Robber’s pocket universe.

Essentially, that would mean the similarities we’ve been noticing to past episodes and characters in Gatwa’s run are the result of the Pantheon remixing the Doctor’s past. So bubbly blonde Ruby Sunday is a bit of a Rose Tyler echo (for example) and Sutekh of course is a Baker’s Doctor’s old god villain redux. We’ve previousl remarked, here on The Doctor Who Forum regarding similarities to previous Doctor Who in Gatwa’s run. In particular, we talked at the time about the way in which Rogue seems like a perfect mash-up between River Song and Captain Jack Harkness – catnip or bait, for the Doc, you might say.

The name “Lux” is familiar from Doctor Who audio stories Escape from New New York and others, where the Lux are a species who attempt to take over the planet by creating cybernetic servants, the Lumen:

https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/The_Lux

There is also John Lumic (another light reference) who was the creator of Cybus Industries on the parallel Earth in 2×05 Rise of the Cybermen.  And one of the Doctor Who fans in Lux (who think they’re fictional constructs but bend “reality” by remaining at the end) is wearing a cyberman T-Shirt with the word “Telos” written on it. That is the planet Troughton Doctor visits in Tomb of the Cybermen.

We could read the cyborg references (the robots of MissBelindaChandra and the cybermen reference in this episode) as other clues to the artificial, created, nature of the universe Gatwa Doc is currently travelling in.

And we’ve speculated before that perhaps the reason Gatwa-Doc cries in every episode is that on some level, his Time Lord bi-generated body already knows that he’s inside a gigantic trap. And perhaps the solution is that the bi-generation has to re-merge, Gatwa-Doc and Tenant 2.0 Doc coming back together, ending Gatwa’s run?

 

[Juniperfish @replies]

I want to love this era, I do, but I really dislike the Disney 8 episodes per series formula.

In fact, I really dislike the death of the long-form television show, where you could fall in love with characters over 5, 6 or 7 years.

I’d barely begun to know and love Millie Gibson/ Ruby Sunday before she was gone.

Gatwa continues to be an accomplished, nay incandescent actor, but RTD2 seems to have forgotten his own wisdom – we need the companion(s) to anchor the heart(s) of the show. And with only 8 episodes per series, unless there is some kind of consistency and longevity beyond one series, the emotional through-line is broken too soon to have meaning, and then it doesn’t matter how cool the VFX is.

Gatwa-Doc can call a bevy of maiden besties “babes” on his adventures, but if the affection doesn’t have time develop in the story-world, what, really, is the point of a show about time?!

He may have cared for Anita (Steph de Whalley) in Joy to the World, but we hardly knew her.  And now the pattern repeats with Sasha 55 (Evelyn Miller).

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods – but that’s just not interesting, unless we care about the love (of whatever kind) between the latest fly and this particular god.

I did enjoy Robot AI Alan as a send-up of Marvel’s Ultron. And I would like to believe that “every 9th word is hidden” has a larger meaning in the series (but don’t hold out much hope). For example, 9 is sacred in Hinduism as the completion of a cycle. and in Norse mythology there are 9 worlds and Odin hung on the world tree, Yggdrassil, for 9 days.

 

 

[Juniperfish @replies]

I just realised (and apologies if someone has already pointed it out) that when Rose looks into the heart of the TARDIS in The Parting of the Ways and scatters the warning “BAD WOLF” all over the universe… we can now read that as a warning about Sutekh, which the Doctor completely failed to spot for several regenerations!

RTD must have been so delighted with himself for this piece of retroactive continuity – I’m certainly tickled by it.

[Juniperfish @replies]

@whohar – yes, sorry – I’m not sure how Douglas is Cancelled is being distributed outside the UK.

Eeek – I know there’s a new season of The Boys out – I could barely deal with the gross factor previously (and struggle with its “ironic” sexism) and I hear this one is even more revolting – will wait for a strong-stomach day. Anthony Starr is excellent as Homelander though, so I will probably buckle up and do it.

I’ve heard so much about The Bear and Slow Horses I’m going to have to give them a go at some point.

I’m looking forward to Interview with the Vampire Season 2 at present.

[Juniperfish @replies]

I’ve just watched Moffat’s new drama (available on the ITVX app UK) Douglas is Cancelled – Karen Gillan, Alex Kingston, Hugh Bonneville and Ben Palmer were  all absolutely superb.

I won’t post anything too spoilery about it, because it’s really worth watching pre-spoilers.

But episode 3 in particular was heart-in-mouth gripping. Karen Gillan was outstanding.

Moffat has been subject to criticism for the way he writes women, and yes, his women in this are recognisably archetypes (shrewish wife and femme fatale). But Gillan and Kingston bring the fire and the panic to make them real.

And Moffat observes the ways people are cruel to one another, whether thoughtlessly or deliverately, with a biting sharpness.

I loved it.

[Juniperfish @replies]

@blenkinsopthebrave

 I suspect that many of us feel that to some extent, we have been “played” and are left clutching at straws (or the one remaining straw–Mrs Flood)… Am I being too harsh?

In one sense, that’s fair – and interestingly, the final season of Moffat and Gatiss’ BBC Sherlock did the same thing. Created a puzzle it did not cash, which not only disappointed a lot of fans, but also (and far worse) made them feel they were being sneered at.

Engaged fans love a puzzle and a bunch of clues along the way, but I think the above writers’ mistake is to think it’s a game of chess played against sleuthing fans, and the writer “wins” if the speculating audience is fooled/ wrong-footed. Instead, I think speculating fans want a collaborative game with, where the clues should make sense and it should be possible to figure out (at least some of) it along the way. Some misdirection is absolute fun and fair game but no one wants to look at the fallen chips and think – that was pure gobbledygook.

However, to be fair to RTD2 – Sue Tech = Sutekh – some of the sleuthing audience did guess the Osiran was making a return ahead of time, because the clues ran true, such as Ruby being shown a desolate future-London by Gatwa’s Doctor – the world if Maestro won (in The Devil’s Chord) being a clue-mirroring of Sarah-Jane being shown a desolate 1980s UK, by the Fourth Doctor, if Sutekh won, in The Pyramids of Mars. And indeed, the pyramid shaped trap Rogue puts the Doctor into and the bird-headed Chuldur as echoes of Egyptian zoomorphic deities.

Also to be fair to RTD2, there are plenty of unsolved mysteries which we may well be returning to later:

a) The Master trapped in the gold tooth, and the red-finger-nailed hand which picked him up

b) The Carol of the Bells inside Ruby and the Ruby-induced snow. Both really do seem designed for a Christmas episode, and as everyone has already started speculating (love “Alien Life-Form” Garnett) just because Ruby’s birth Mum is wonderfully ordinary doesn’t mean we know everything about Ruby yet

c) The 73 yards perception filter  – something is just out of sight – it feels like it, doesn’t it?

d)  Mrs. Flood, indeed

e) The butterfly effect of “mavity” and the salt-line at the end of the universe

f) A universe in which memory can manifest materially – Ruby’s snow, the Memory TARDIS – that is new for the Whoniverse

g) Couple that with Kate Lethbridge-Stewart in 73 Yards saying “We’re the Unified Intelligence Taskforce, created to investigate the extraterrestrial and, more and more, the supernatural. Things seem to be turning that way these days…. We have telepathic dampeners, mesmeric shielding and necklaces of silver and salt in case of witchcraft.” That’s new – since when did UNIT exist in a world investigating witchcraft and the supernatural?

So, I feel inclined to trust in RTD2 that we’re not being sneered at, and there are wonders yet to come.

[Juniperfish @replies]

Just skiving work briefly to say that TV line also reported on this:

https://tvline.com/features/doctor-who-star-wars-the-last-jedi-ruby-mother-reveal-season-2-companions-1235270336/

[Juniperfish @replies]

@mudlark

The problem, for me at least, was that after all the previous build up which misled us into thinking Ruby must be special in an extraordinary, possibly timey or extra-terrestrial way, and overpowered by the apocalyptic events earlier in the episode, it fell rather flat.

Yes, I did think it would have been awesome if Ruby’s eyes had turned into glowing eyes of Horus and her skin had blushed gold and she’d taken the Doctor by the hand and said, “I’ve been shadow-possessing this child in preparation for a long time. The Osirans have come to sort out your monumental screw-up – what the hell have you been doing carting my evil brother-uncle Sutekh about the universe in your space/time machine, allowing him to spread his sands of death, you idiot!”

However, I’m touched by Ruby’s (apparent) ordinaryness (I’m still suspicious about a twist at the end regarding her identity) and I think this is because RTD2 and Moffat have a bit of a rivalry over their visions of Nu Who.

RTD1’s companions – Rose, Martha, Donna, have been ordinary people, from clearly marked working-class/ modest backgrounds, particularly Rose (shop-girl) and Donna (temp). Martha is a bit more ambiguous as she’s at Medical School, a place of social mobility.

Moffat’s have been – mystery women – The Girl Who Waited (Amy), The Mysterious Woman (River), The Impossible Girl (Clara) and have not been depicted as coming from the British working-classes in the same way.

With Ruby, RTD is returning to his kitchen-sink drama roots, which is part of his political vision for Dr. Who – to make sure that what makes the Doctor a wonderful kind of hero, in his era, is that he isn’t snobby or classist (although he comes from Patrician class on Gallifrey) but that he champions ordinary people, seeing the imaginative potential in everyone, whereever they are in the hierarchy of their society.

[Juniperfish @replies]

Also – “there’s always a twist at the end” and Moffat has written the Christmas special…

So my guess is – yes, it’s true that Ruby is an ordinary person with ordinary parents which fits with RTD’s very wonderful recurring message for Doctor Who about how every ordinary person is valuable and meaningful.

However, it’s also going to be the case that there’s a “twist” to come…

 

[Juniperfish @replies]

@ps1l0v3y0u

The arc is VR. The VR is created by someone who knows The Doctor as well as they know themself…

Why does Ruby snow? The VR snows…

I really like this theory – which might lead to the Great Intelligence, as others have previously theorised, given the snow connection. Or alternatively to a Time Lord using a grand-scale version of The Matrix, as you say.

I also like our other hive-mind theory that in the “mavity” universe, fantasy and reality have been bleeding together, which is why goblins and the Snow Queen are showing up in Doctor Who, why the Doctor is Willy Wonka crossed with Peter Pan, and why Ruby can manifest snow and a “Memory TARDIS” in reality just by wishing hard enough.

I haven’t given up @thane16 on our conviction that the Doctor’s tears mean something, other than just that this incarnation is less emotionally constipated than earlier ones.

In the Grimm fairy tale, The Goose Girl at the Well, a youngest daughter is cast out by her father the King because he demands that each of his daughters tell him how much they love him and she says she loves him as much as salt (which he miscontrues, because salt is ordinary, but of course it’s also essential for life). She is exiled to the forest and cries tears which become pearls (and which help her become independently wealthy, ergo free of her father’s control later) and she is helped by a witch:

https://www.grimmstories.com/en/grimm_fairy-tales/the_goose_girl_at_the_well

The Doctor has been (as far as he knows) abandoned by his birth parents and treated horribly by his wicked adoptive mother Tecteun, so he’s very much a lost child in a fairytale at the moment…

Mrs. Flood is definitely rather witchy…

[Juniperfish @replies]

@blenkinsopthebrave – I’ve had The Tempest in mind as an inspiration for this season because of the magic entering the universe since Wild Blue Yonder.

The Tempest has been ripe for modern discussion in the context of colonialism – Prospero seems like a cool magician aristocrat but he sets about enslaving the spirits of the island he and his daughter *colonise*.

I know RTD prefers to wear his popular culture references on his sleeve, not his Shakespeare, but I also know what a political animal he is at heart, and Ncuti Gatwa being a child Rwandan refugee originally, at a time the UK Government has been trying to implement its hostile Rwanda deportation policy is just too good for him not to use in some way, metaphorically. I noticed Gatwa’s Doctor pointed out to Ruby in Empire of Death that the looting of Egyptian artefacts back to Britain in The Pyramids of Mars was “cultural appropriation”.

Space Babies was a refugee story, and it opened this season. I expect the theme of refugees to return.

I noticed that we got a shot of one of the symbols this incarnation of the Doctor has on his fingernails in Empire of Death and it looked like a psychick cross:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thee_Temple_ov_Psychick_Youth#/media/File:Psychick_cross.png

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thee_Temple_ov_Psychick_Youth

I don’t think it’s meant to be a direct reference to TOPY!

But it IS meant to suggest a magical/ occult/ Time Lordy symbol of some kind.

Perhaps the Meep’s Boss is a Master (or Mistress) Sorcerer – maybe it’s Mrs. Flood!

 

[Juniperfish @replies]

@cathannabel @devilishrobby  I did indeed think about Thanos’ big Snap from Avengers. 

Thanos vs Sutekh – Sutekh would presumably win, as Thanos *only* wanted to depopulate the universe by half, not slaughter everyone.

It also made me think about Torchwood: Miracle Day when Jack Harkness’ blood is used to abolish death on earth (with predictably awful consequences).

I wondered whether the Doctor bringing “death to death” by killing Sutekh might lead to a similar scenario next season, where the dead have been resurrected across the universe by the Doctor’s murder of the God of Death.

Perhaps reversing the effects of the Flux? Perhaps revivifying the genocide of Gallifrey by the Master’s Death Particle?

[Juniperfish @replies]

@classicsrule1 – The TARDIS still beats Sutekh, as she only got infected by him during the Fourth Doctor’s era, so she was whirling through the episodes with just the Doc before that!

https://x.com/aljeensane/status/1804499553254850592

[Juniperfish @replies]

Narrator voice <Ruby was not, in fact, Horus, God of Rejuvenation>

I’m tickled my suggestion that Sutekh had been travelling in shadow-form with the TARDIS ever since The Pyramids of Mars panned out though, at least. I do really, really appreciate having, in RTD2, a fan of the classic series.

Like others, I was also disappointed in The Empire of Death on first watch. I think, having re-watched The Pyramids of Mars, I just miss the longer story format of old.

The Red TARDIS possessed by Sutekh, the Doctor travelling to speak with the remnants of people, on planets become barren desert worlds in the path of the death-wave, looking for material/ pieces of the puzzle needed to defeat Sutekh… had these ideas had narrative room to breath, over several episodes, they could have been amazing.

I LOVE the Red TARDIS, and I wanted the Doctor to have time to have a conversation with her, to tell her how sorry he was he didn’t realise Sutekh was growing in strength inside of her, like an Osiran parasite, all this time.

The sequence with the woman and the dusty cradle in the tent on an unknown world; the woman who’d forgotten her baby had already died, and who gave the Doctor her precious metal spoon, was excellent. No big special effects, just great acting.

I think the spoon is a reference to the Fourth Doctor’s quote from The Creature from the Pit:

“Well, to be fair I did have a couple of gadgets which he probably didn’t, like a teaspoon and an open mind.”

And honestly, if you haven’t seen the Creature, do yourself a silly favour – the Beeb’s props department would not get away with that monster now:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eD2NT8fd4Kk

By contrast, the scene when the Unit “Fam” were firing all kinds of weapons and bullets at the Red TARDIS was just cringe. Of course, human weaponry wasn’t going to be able to touch a Time Lord’s time machine, let alone one being possessed by a God of Death! And Kate Lethbridge-Stewart should have known that. I just hate a bunch of guns for no reason, and so (at least historically) does the Doctor.

I understand there will be a UNIT spin-off for Disney, hence the Unit “Fam” set-up…

On a second watch, I think many of the mysteries we’ve been pursuing remain unresolved and continue to point to a universe where fantasy and reality have been bleeding into one another.

Why could Ruby physically make it snow through the power of memory?

Why were her memories able to physically manifest a “Memory TARDIS” (with the help of the Time Window and then the Memory TARDIS’s own memories of herself)? It was a bit of a “death trap” as the Doctor said, sure, but it could actually fly?

Why is The Carol of the Bells physcially embedded in Ruby and plays when the scary fascist DNA database is searching for her mother?

I know the answers are supposed to be – because of the power of Ruby’s wish to find her mother again. But that means we are now in a universe where wishes can materially manifest.

In the universe-before-mavity that wouldn’t have happened. Fantasy made manifest is definitely abroad in this universe, and that’s new.

The Doctor at the end was so very like Peter Pan, trying to persuade Ruby not to go into the cafe and speak to her birth mother, because he knew if she did, she’d grow up a little more and leave him.

And Ruby’s wish physically manifesting is also straight out of Peter Pan, when Tinkerbell was dying and she was saved by Peter calling on all the children of the world to say out loud – “I believe in fairies”…

And why was Mrs. Flood/ the Snow Queen hiding out as Ruby’s neighbour in particular all this time?

I don’t think the Legend of Ruby Sunday is done just yet and I’m sure we’ll see her again.

[Juniperfish @replies]

Wow – the Forum has been on fire with some super musings! (I’ve been immured in Exam Boards).

@thane16

If the Tardis was infected when the Doctor saved baby Ruby from the goblin dinner then do we account for his tears, at other times, because part of him, perhaps due to his connection with the Tardis, is aware that something is deeply wrong?

Yes, I think that seems very likely – the tears every episode can’t just be a more emotional incarnation of the Doctor (as much as I am totally down with that). “The body keeps the score”, as Van der Kolk says.

I tend to agree with @scaryb that the TARDIS was probably infected by Sutekh in Wild Blue Yonder.  Although I wonder if he’s been lurking, in a sort of impotent dormant shadow-form trace, in the TARDIS ever since The Pyramids of Mars  (although his full power was trapped in the Fourth Doctor’s time tunnel). The Doctor’s salt-line blending of imagination and reality at the edge of the universe is what allowed Sutekh to connect with that trace he left behind and start manifesting himself through the TARDIS.

And regarding your music post – Gatwa’s Doctor’s TARDIS does have that juke box at the centre of it – the music of the spheres… And if we’re rolling with Egyptology, music manifests the universe:

“The goddess Hathor, who also imbued the world with joy, was associated most closely with music, but initially, it was another deity named Merit (also given as Meret). In some versions of the creation story, Merit is present with Ra or Atum along with Heka (god of magic) at the beginning of creation and helps establish order through music. Egyptologist Richard H. Wilkinson notes how she did this “by means of her music, song, and the gestures associated with musical direction” (152). Merit, then was the writer, musician, singer, and conductor of the symphony of creation establishing music as a central value in Egyptian culture.”

https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1075/music–dance-in-ancient-egypt/

@mudlark

I’m loving you putting your keen archaeologist’s site-mapping skills to work as a Whovian detective! The flashes of orange and blue on Ruby’s mysterious mother’s clothing under the cloak are interesting. In the Tales of the TARDIS: The Pyramids of Mars (just released for UK viewers on BBC iplayer) which is a cut-down version of the original Pyramids of Mars, bookended by Ncuti’s Doctor telling Ruby about his previous incarnation’s encounter with Sutekh, the colours the Doctor and Ruby are wearing are very striking: she’s in emerald green/blue and orange and he’s in his now trademark orange:

https://www.tumblr.com/ngatwa/753864017580359680/tales-of-the-tardis-pyramids-of-mars

The colour palette of Ancient Egypt was very ochre/green/blue/black:

“Colors had profound meanings; the language had four basic color terms. Blue, representing the Nile’s life-giving waters, symbolized fertility and birth. It, along with green, stood for rejuvenation and vegetation. Osiris, associated with rebirth, was depicted with green skin, and coffins were sometimes colored green to aid in the afterlife. Turquoise and faience were popular in funerary objects due to their color symbolism. Black represented Egypt’s fertile soil, tied to fertility and rebirth, often seen in depictions of Osiris and funerary deities like Anubis. Gold symbolized divinity as the blood of the gods and goddess, its rarity linking it to precious materials. It was even referred to as “The Flesh of the God”. Silver, termed “White Gold” was likened to “The Bones of the Gods”. Red, orange, and yellow had dual meanings. They symbolized the sun, seen in royal statues and jewelry. Red ink denoted the importance of papyrus. Additionally, they were tied to the desert and associated with Set. These colors held complex significances, embodying both positive and ambiguous attributes in ancient Egyptian art”

https://www.egypttoursportal.com/en-gb/blog/egyptian-civilization/ancient-egyptian-art/

Ruby-as-Horus theory is definitely go!

@scaryb

And in the meantime, (possibly unaware that she too is now infected, and being manipulated (everyone says how nice she is)) having left baby Ruby hopefully in safe hands, she goes on to develop a career as a software developer (maybe with Sutekh’s influence) which as you pointed out is now widely used, including being embedded in all UNIT’s systems, with who knows what viruses, sub programmes (infections) included, which could trigger the additional abilities of the Time Window to facilitate Sutekh’s full manifestation. All down to the TARDIS’s unique capabilities and the Doctor going back to rescue Ruby. (So S Triad (anagram) and Sue-tech (tekh) pun could be a huge amount more than the apparently throwaway jokes we were trolled to believe!)

Brilliant!

And the Red TARDIS (Sutekh-possessed TARDIS) is such a scary concept.

Re-watching the Pyramids of Mars,  Sutekh is fixated on the TARDIS as soon as he realises it’s a time machine and he tries to steal in then. The Fourth Doctor tells him TARDISes have “isomorphic controls” i.e. can only be flown by the Time Lord they are ‘keyed’ to, but of course Sutekh’s possession abilities mean no paws-on-controls required.

Battle of the Gods, here we come!

[Juniperfish @replies]

@bunface and @devilishrobby

Thanks yes, blank post, I was trying to include an image of the jukebox with Rose but failed in my efforts!

 

[Juniperfish @replies]

 

 

 

 

[Juniperfish @replies]

@pufferfish – thanks for the song find!

Seems like a gloating song from Lord Sutekh – he’s got control of the TARDIS (/alternative Red TARDIS – let’s see) so can presumably spread his dominion of death throughout time and space:

“Roam if you want to

Roam around the world

Roam if you want to

Without wings, without wheels”

[Juniperfish @replies]

@whisht and @scaryb as our resident musos – what is the tune Susan Twist dances to on stage? It’s bugging me as it’s really familiar…

@bunface @blenkinsopthebrave @thane16

I wonder if Gatwa Doctor’s frequent tears are because, on some deep level, he recognises that there is a Red Doctor/ Sutekh-possessed Red TARDIS out there in the crossed timelines, hurtling towards the Empire of Death.

I can’t imagine that a version of the Fourth? Doctor who said “Yes” to Sutekh did so malevolently, but rather as a desperate measure to try and buy more time to control the Osiran, which ended up being a huge mistake, as Sutekh was then able to possess both a Time Lord and a Time Machine.

@thane16 Thinking about it – the crossing of one reality into another could explain the anomaly between Ruby’s birth/ depositing at the Church on Ruby Road being a supposed “fixed point” in time AND a place where the time-line is being altered. If the Red TARDIS/ Sutekh-controlled TARDIS is entering “our” timestream from an alternative one that could be why a “fixed point” is capable of being tampered with.

 

[Juniperfish @replies]

Sutekhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh Lord of Death…

@bunface @thane16

Just rewatching… What about Kate testing DNA and saying ‘Just because Susan Triad is nice, doesn’t mean she can’t change. A chrysalis doesn’t know it’s a butterfly. A phoenix is just a bird until it burns.’

Is that a hint… As you said, baaaad Doctor?

I re-watched The Pyramids of Mars and Sutekh offers the Fourth Doctor an alliance, whilst torturing him. The Doctor says no, and manages to trap Sutekh in a time corridor.

However – my bonkers theory for the night – what if an “alternative time’ version of the Doctor said “Yes” to Sutekh’s offer of an alliance at that point? And the red TARDIS enveloped by the sand-storm of Sutek, which appears in UNIT’s time window, is that Doctor’s alternative timeline TARDIS. And “our” Doctor’s TARDIS keeps groaning because of the time-paradox of two alternative versions of herself in the same part of the space/time continuum.

The Fourth Doctor explicitly talks about “alternative time” in The Pyramids of Mars, because Sarah-Jane gets scared and asks whether they can’t just leave Sutekh to his own devices and go back to her time of 1980, as they already know Sutehk didn’t destroy the Earth in 1911. The Doctor shows her Earth in 1980 if they just scarper – and it’s a howling void. He explains to her that there are “alternative times”. This is exactly what the Doctor shows to Ruby to explain how Maestro’s rampage, if unchecked, would devastate the London of Ruby’s original time-line.

Incidentally, it’s Ruby who walks back into the room immediately after Kate’s line “A chrysalis doesn’t know it’s a butterfly. A phoenix is just a bird until it burns” and the butterfly mention ties in with our previous discussions about the importance of the butterfly effect this season.

I don’t know how far into the Ancient Egyptian Set mythos RTD2 is going, but Isis was the mother of Horus, the one who eventually defeats Set.  Red is a colour strongly associated with Isis, i.e., Ruby. So maybe Ruby’s mother (Isis) deposited Ruby (Horus) where she needed to be to keep her safe, and also positioned her to be able to defeat the Sutekh/ Alternative-Time Doctor Alliance.

I could not get my head round the idea that the Doctor knows he hasn’t had children yet, therefore Gatwa Doctor or a future Doctor must have deposited his grandchild Susan with the First Doctor – for some unknown reason choosing to deposit her backwards in his own timestream. Maybe the Doctor has a circular rather than a linear relationship to time, and at some point a future incarnation of his regenerates into the Hartnell Doctor and the cycle goes round again.

I also couldn’t get my head round the fact that the Doctor says Ruby’s birth and depositing at the Church on Ruby Road in 2004 is a “fixed point” in time, only to then declare that, because of their interactions with that fixed point (through the UNIT time window) time was being re-written (the video-tape now contains evidence of Sutekh).

These are all the Gods I caught Harriet-Arbinger naming:

The Toymaker the God of Games

Trickster the God of Traps

Maestro the God of Music

Reprobate the God of Spite

Mara the God of Beasts

The Three-Fold Deity Malice and Mischief and Misery

Insensa the God of Disaster

The Mother and Father and Other of All – Sutek

@scaryb

Just saying tho – the CCTV camera was apparently roughly 66 meters away from the church… in other words, about 73 yards!

Oooh nice spot.

[Juniperfish @replies]

@whohar exellent summary!

To your “What needs clearing up” list I’d add:

8. Who is the Meep’s boss and is that the same as Rogue’s new boss?

9. To whom did the mysterious red-finger-nailed hand belong, which picked up the gold tooth the Master is supposedly trapped in?

10. Why could Maestro sense that the oldest of the Toymaker’s Pantheon was present at Ruby’s foundling event?

11. Why does Ruby have a song, Carol of the Bells, trapped inside of her?

12. Why does the TARDIS keep making a groaning noise (she did it when Rogue came on board, for example)? Is some kind of temporal paradox event disturbing her?

and under your “Bonkers Theories” we’ve also had:

12. Addendum to your 12 – the Rani is the AN Other Timelord who will return

14. Ruby is her own mother

15. Ruby is related to River (snow = form of water)

16. Ruby is related to Rose (Ruby drinks in The Spinning Wheel pub in London and so does Jackie, Rose’s Mum)

17. Ruby is a simulation/ fantasy character

 

[Juniperfish @replies]

I feel like we haven’t talked about Rogue’s line about loss – sometimes the simplest dialogue is the best:

“We travelled together, we had fun, and then one day a day came along, and at the end of that day, I lost them.”

I love that line – it captures the shock and the banality, the unexpected finality of loss. We know death is coming, eventually, for everyone we love, but it’s still a surprise on the day.

Excellent stuff.

[Juniperfish @replies]

@janetteb

He promises to take Rogue to Gallifrey. Does that mean that Gallfirey still exists?

Yes I noticed that and I was happy, as I was not a fan of the re-genociding of Gallifrey by the Dhawan Master. It detracted IMHO from the fact that the War Doctor was responsible/ the 9th and 10th and 11th Doctors believed he was responsible for the genocide of Gallifrey (until The Day of the Doctor changes things for the 11th) in order to stop the Time War.

But Gatwa’s Doctor may have been planning to travel back in time to take Rogue to Gallifrey before the Master’s genocide. He still tells Rogue that he’s lost “everyone” so I suspect continuity with the Dhawan genocide remains for now.

I love your kids’ idea that the new “Boss” is a D&D Dungeon Master – love it! So essentially the Doctor is in a live-action role-play right now, and other “players” may be aware of the game – possibly Rogue and I keep wondering if maybe Ruby too.

Rogue’s name suggests a rogueishness, certainly, but he seems to genuinely fall for the Doctor. Perhaps Rogue’s “new boss” is the same as the Meep’s boss, and they were instructed to play a certain part in the story the Games Master/ Dungeon Master concocted for the Doctor. But, in the midst of that, they developed real feelings for the Doctor.

@miapatrick – love the suggestion the Doctor might actually be a member of the Toymaker’s species/ entity class without realising it.

@ps1l0v3y0u that ties in with our mutual love for the Doctor’s Willy Wonka moment, because the Doctor too, in that characterisation, is (like the Toymaker and his Pantheon perhaps) master of a world of “pure imagination” (as the song goes)…

[Juniperfish @replies]

I realise with a smile that RTD2 set this episode in Bath in 1813 – that’s the year Pride and Prejudice was published.

Not only that, but Austen lived in Bath for a bit, and at an address in Gay Street no less. Two of her novels were set there too, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.

Rogue is certainly about pride and prejudice, given the Doctor’s deliberately “scandalous” (for the time period) M/M turn with Rogue on the dancefloor, followed by Rogue’s even more scandalous proposal.

And of course, on a meta level too, RTD2 is telling us he wrote this episode in pride. and as a not-so-polite salute to prejudice – anticipating the polarised reactions to the Doctor’s smooch with Rogue unfurling across the interwebs with, I suspect, unmitigated glee.

On second watch, I notice there’s a very creepy big brown teddy bear in Rogue’s console room on his bird-like ship and also that the voice of the ship’s count-down to incineration sounds really very similar to a dalek.

The bear is a call-back to all of Rose Noble’s monster toys, and perhaps both are hints that the Toymaker and his legions are still lurking.

As for the daleky voice, just as with Rogue’s rather uncanny resemblances to Captain Jack and River Song – it’s all looking a lot like the hand of the “Games’ Master” (Susan Twist, the Meep’s boss – whoever it is) is remixing elements from the Doctor’s past into his current journey.

Someone on Twitter spotted that Ruby says in this episode that she and her girls drink in The Spinning Wheel pub in London, and that Jackie Tyler, Rose’s Mum, mentions meeting mates there for a pub quiz in Love and Monsters. What a great spot!

I forgot to say how charming it was when the Doctor starts singing “Pure Imagination” from Willy Wonka when he invites Rogue into the TARDIS.

If Ruby turns out to be the daughter of Rose and Metacrisis Doctor, then Peter Pan would be another fantasy element in the mix (Pan took Wendy’s daughter to Neverland, once Wendy had grown up).

[Juniperfish @replies]

@bunface

Noticed second time that Varma’s bird form entered the room to announce the wedding saying ‘wilkommen, bienvenue’ like the Emcee in Cabaret. A film all about masquerade and queerness in the face of a very dark threat.

Ooh – I missed that – more masquerade – love it… I am forever a fan of Alan Cumming’s version of Cabaret.

[Juniperfish @replies]

The bird-headed shape-shifters kept ringing a bell in my head and I’ve now twigged what they put me in mind of…

Has anyone read John Fowles’ The Magus? I read it when I was far too young, which is of course, exactly the right age (my parents had excellent inappropriate bookshelves in the hallways) and as such it was absolutely mind-blowing.

Anyhoo – it’s about a young naive Brit called Nicholas, who is teaching English on a Greek island one summer, and who gets drawn into the mysterious world of a wealthy old eccentric called Conchis. This dude Conchis stages increasingly elaborate masques (ritualistic drama) involving all sorts of be-costumed people dressed as, amongst others things, the Egyptian God Anubis (jackal-headed), a man with a crocodile head, a vampire, a goat-figure, Herene the Hunter, various grotesques, and pulls the bewildered Nicholas into his world.

It seems the masques are staged psychological dramas designed to mentally test/ torture/ break-down and “evolve” the hapless Nicholas. Conchis refers to the whole shebang as his “God Game”.  He is a sort of Shakespearean Prospero (by Fowles’ design) from The Tempest – a magician and a game-player.

Ding ding ding – so perhaps all the encounters Gatwa Doctor is having at present, on his travels with Ruby, are in some way “staged” by The Games’ Master.

To what end, I’m not sure – is the Games’ Master feeding on the Doctor’s tears?

[Juniperfish @replies]

@scaryb

“queering” of the Doctor. (Not delved into the nether regions of Twitter tho, or BTL comments). But this old school DW veteran is very happy.

Me too – I’m delighted. I may have let out an undignified squeal once Gatwa Doc starting getting his flirt on with Rogue.

@miapatrick I feel the need for a rainbow TARDIS mug with Gatwa-Doc leaning cheekily against her and the legend “Die mad about it” stat…

@bunface

Yes, games, games, games continue to abound.

Rogue from X-Men drains the life out of folk too.

The Doctor spots some dice on the console of Rogue’s ship and asks him if he got his name from Dungeons and Dragons…

Seems more and more likely that someone from the Toymaker’s Pantheon is abroad (perhaps the one whom Maestro said was present at Ruby’s birth) and is playing games with the Doctor across time and space. Let’s call him/her The Games Master for now. Are they the Susan Twist character – she is certainly “cosplaying” a different character each time they encounter her – so the cosplaying birdy shape-shifters may be a hint.

Rogue is very Captain Jack Harkness (and a bit River Song) – so much so that perhaps it’s not a coincidence. Did Rogue get space/time-tweaked in the Doctor’s direction by an unseen hand? A rake-ish adventurer with a sad backstory involving loss… Does the Games Master know what the Doctor likes?

And the Doctor’s tears… almost on cue now…

I keep thinking about Hamlet’s staging of “the Mousetrap”, the play within the play, to entrap his uncle. Is the Doctor unaware of the Games Master? Or has he caught on, and he’s already playing (but can’t let on to Ruby, in case she’s been placed with him as part of it)?

 

[Juniperfish @replies]

@ps1l0v3y0u  I actually saw a fun tongue-in-cheek theory on Twitter suggesting the Doctor got banished to the Barbie universe (presumably to eternal dance-offs with the other Kens) when he broke the faerie ring and released Mad Jack (I enjoyed Barbie incidentally, to be honest a lot more than Oppenheimer – biopics are almost always too portentous).

The Doctor actually speculates that the Dot AI “grew” the slugs/bugs, rather than letting them in from the Wild Woods. We see on-screen that the same bugs/slugs have already eaten everyone on Lindy’s homeworld, so they’re not native to the Wild Woods of Finetime’s planet.

Yes – Stooky Sue – a thread that keeps tugging at me. She had three Stooky babbies. And things do seem to be coming in threes – three old women following Ruby in time and space, three Stooky babbies…

Threes are often important in fairtales; Goldilocks and the Three Bears, the Three Billy Goats Gruff, Three Blind Mice.

 

[Juniperfish @replies]

@bunface

so maybe the fact Ruby Sunday (I mean, the name!) is so very reminiscent of Rose/Amy/Clara is because she’s full on alien, even in the world of Who. That is, she isn’t just alien, she’s a supernatural/fairy tale/Disney character.

Which makes me wonder, is she even real to the Doctor, only he doesn’t know it yet?

Yessssss – and therefore only “real” in the “mavity” universe, and so when the Doctor has to restore the timeline, and undo what he unleashed with the salt line at the edge of the universe, Ruby will have to vanish, like the changeling she is – back into faerieland…

Perhaps some part of him already knows this, and that’s why he cries in every episode – his body is trying to warn him about the loss to come

@wolvesarerunning

that spooky Ruby is a manifestation of young Ruby’s primal wound. The feeling of abandonment and rejection by the mother she never knew. And everyone who meets spooky Ruby manifests that original loss

I like that too, on the other hand, or perhaps additionally…

@cathannabel

Re the mystery of what Old Witchy Ruby says to everyone, that’s one of the elements that speaks to me of magic. There isn’t anything that I can imagine that would have that effect, in any remotely rational way, on Ruby’s adoptive Mum, or on Kate

perhaps what Old Witchy Ruby says is – “She’s a changeling”.

[Juniperfish @replies]

Hello @cathannabel

which makes me sad that Whitaker got such a raw deal with both the quality of scripts and stories, and the pandemic disrupting her run

Yes a discussion for another thread, but heartily agree (I think there were some banger one-off scripts but a timidity about the first female Doctor when there should have been a swagger – if you’re going to do it – own it!) Welcome back!

I’ve been thinking about how often Gatwa’s Doctor has shed tears this season – he had a tear or two running down his face in Boom whilst standing on the landmine, now in this episode Dot and Bubble and I’m pretty sure (but I’d have to rewatch) somewhere else?  It might just be that the Doctor cries now, as this incarnation is more emotionally open. But it’s also been niggling me, in case it has a deeper meaning.

We are in a universe now where fantasy and reality are bleeding together now; babies are being abducted by goblins in The Church on Ruby Road and the Doctor stepped on what he called a “fairy circle” in 73 Yards and my view is he was abducted by the fey when he released “Mad Jack”. I don’t know whether the fey being abroad in this universe are connected to the Toymaker and his legions or not, but orphans, abducted babies, perhaps changelings, are a theme…

And I do know Yate’s poem The Stolen Child :

https://poets.org/poem/stolen-child

“Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.”

We’ve just had a mention of the Wild Wood in Dot and Bubble (which is where fairies and fairy tales generally live) and combine that with the Doctor’s tears and it does feel as if the poem is being referenced.

[Juniperfish @replies]

@coockgroom

re mrs flood being Ruby, someone mentioned a few weeks ago, that mrs Flood didn’t recognise the Tardis when it appeared, but realised it was a type of tardis when it dematerialised.

Hmmm – perhaps in the time-line Mrs. Flood (as a version of Old Ruby) is from, the Doctor’s TARDIS never got stuck as a 1960s Earth Police Box? <unwilling to let go of my new bonkers theory just yet>

[Juniperfish @replies]

Having some more thoughts about Susan Twist…

Ruby has been followed around time and space by three old women now:

1) Mrs. Flood, posing as her next door neighbour in The Church on Ruby Road who knows what a TARDIS is, and prompts her to get on board;

2) Old Witchy Ruby in 73 Yards  who haunts her younger self in order to, eventually, prompt her to save the world from the “Mad Jack”/ ap Gwillam hybrid;

3) The Unamed Woman/ Susan Twist.

Three Weird Space Sisters? When shall we three meet again, in thunder, lightening or in rain…

Susan Twist first appeared in Wild Blue Yonder, as Isaac Newton’s housekeeper. That was when the universe got altered by Ten2 by invoking fables at the edge of the universe, and, prior to that, by Donna and Ten2 when parking the TARDIS on a certain historically significant apple tree. That happenstance caused their interaction with Newton, leading him to mis-hear the word “gravity” as “mavity” – and set off a butterfly effect in Earth’s timeline.

I imagine, eventually, the Doctor will need to correct the timeline back to our “gravity” universe, because all sorts of consequences seem to be flowing from Wild Blue Yonder  – the bleeding of fantasy into reality and the Toymaker’s legions popping up and causing havoc (so far – the Toymaker themselves, Maestro their child, and Henry Arbinger – aka the harbinger, and also, possibly to come and also related, the Meep’s “boss”?).

So my bonkers theory about the Three Weird Sisters is – what if they’re all the same person – and they’re all versions of Old Ruby? Perhaps Ruby’s birth and mysterious abandonment at the church on Ruby Road itself only takes place in the butterfly affected “mavity” universe? Which could lead to a heartbreaking goodbye eventually, if the Doctor has to correct the timeline back to the gravity universe…

There’s also the fourth mysterious woman, of course, the one who abandons Ruby at the church. Perhaps she is one of the Three Weird Sisters – Mrs. Flood or Susan Twist or Old Witchy Ruby? Which takes us back to the theory that Ruby is her own mother, which we were discussing on the end of the 73 Yards thread.

Has Ruby’s timeline branched into three – Mrs. Flood, Old Witchy Ruby and Susan Twist?

[Juniperfish @replies]

Well, that was a savage satire on our times, and I loved it.

Dot and bubble – the dot-com bubble – a metaphor for the way ‘civilisations’ fall through myopia, and the how the rich, despite their supremacist fantasy beliefs, simply cannot insulate themselves from such civilisational collapse.

It immediately put me in mind of Douglas Rushkoff’s trip to the desert to speak to tech billionaires about (as it turned out) how to stop their staff from turning on them when the climate apocalypse, which they’re currently doing nothing to avert, descends on their billionaire preppers’ bunkers:

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/sep/04/super-rich-prepper-bunkers-apocalypse-survival-richest-rushkoff

Callie Cook was excellent as Lindy Pepper-Bean – the ditzy rich kid desperate to stay “peppy” and not look beyond her vacuous filter-bubble to the massive slugs gorging themselves on the other Finetime residents.

I smelled a rat early on, seeing her all-white friend bubble – ‘Hang-on, surely RTD would never cut diverse young folk out of the picture here without a reason?’. But, that didn’t stop me being shocked by Lindy’s 1984-style betrayal of her (and everyone else’s) crush, Ricky September, and only then realising how cleverly it was set up.

It’s only obvious once Lindy murders a fellow white resident that she’s a massive wrong-un, and that Ricky September is the honourable exception in Finetime society, because he turns off his filter-bubble and spends his days <gasp> actually educating himself through old-fashioned reading. But, only obvious then to whom? On a second watch, the prejudice towards our Black Doctor is there from the beginning – Lindy blocks him immediately and she is horrified when she finds out Ruby and the Doctor are ‘together’ in physical space. She also says she “can’t wait” for him to be disciplined, even whilst allowing him to help her escape the citadel.

Gatwa is extraordinary, of course, in the final reveal. He does it so beautifully. The racism horrifies him as it dawns on him, but, as a regenerating Time Lord who has been white, Black, male, female, he’s so much more than Lindy can ever comprehend. And his willingness to save her, despite her disgusting ingrained racism, and his meltdown on realising that her smallness of mind, her society’s smallness of mind, means she won’t accept his help and he can’t – just phenomenal to watch. The Doctor’s tears – just brilliant – he’s weeping for how racism damages and dehumanises racists, as well as those whom they despise and discriminate against (just as the great James Baldwin said).

I thought Gibson was great in this scene too, because she gets it a split second before the Doctor does, and you can see that she wants to pull him away and protect him from the force of Lindy’s racism, because she’s evidently seen it before, as the adoptive white child of a Black Mum and Grandma.

The Doctor speculates that the dot technology has achieved sentience, grown to hate the Finetime society and has “designed” the giant alien slugs to eat the residents. The fact they’re chowing down on Lindy’s racist society in alphabetical order by surname suggests a particular kind of methodical genocide. Where did the dot-tech learn such systematic genocidal techniques from? It makes you wonder, with a horrible shiver, what happened to all the Black and brown people in Lindy’s original (and as it turns out already destroyed by the same slugs) home-planet society.

And “No stinky old people” in Finetime, only those 17-27 – the film it made me think of @blenkinsopthebrave was Logan’s Run (1976).

[Juniperfish @replies]

@mudlark

 …trust me, I’m an archaeologist

If I were an archeologist I would definitely have a sign/ bumper sticker somewhere with River’s immortal line from The Husbands of River Song, “I’m an archaologist from the future, I dug you up”.

As for Ruby giving birth to herself, she’d have to have boffed her own Dad to do it, and I really don’t see the paymasters at Disney going for that.

On the other hand – parthenogenesis?

I still think the time-paradox of Ruby pregant with Ruby would implode time though.

 

[Juniperfish @replies]

@pufferfish <waves at fellow fish!>

@thane16 @blenkinsopthebrave @mudlark  – loving the speculation that Ruby could be her own mother.

However, whilst I can see someone being their own father as theoretically possible (Back to the Future gone full Oedipus) wouldn’t being your own mother create an immediate temporal paradox of the kind that, in RTD’s Who, leads to reality collapse?

In Father’s Day, Rose creates a wound in time when she holds herself as a baby, only for a few seconds.

As carrying a child, and giving birth to one, is a months and hours long process in which two humans are in the closest proximity it is possible to be in, wouldn’t the fact that Ruby and baby-Ruby would be occupying the same temporal space blow up time spectacularly?

That said, there’s always a timey-wimey oojamaflip if a Who writer wants to pull one out of the cosmic hat for narrative punch!

I agree with @whohar and @janetteb and @ps1lov3you that there are also myriad ways for the “homo sapiens” read on Ruby by the TARDIS to be a smoke-screen. If Ruby is the same species (or partly so) as the Doctor/ Timeless Child and comes (or one of her parents does) from beyond the same portal where Tecteun found child-Doctor, maybe the Doctor and Ruby’s progenitors are from a parallel universe in which “homo sapiens” evolved genetic regenerative properties.

I was one of those who really hated the Timeless Child concept when Chibs floated it, because I was (and am) emotionally invested in the historical presentation of the Doctor, not as different from his/her people in some super-special (the dreaded midichorians) genetic way, but because of their renegade anarchistic attitude to stuffy Time Lord hierarchy. I’ve always loved Dr. Who because I wanted a rebel, not a superhero.

Having said that, the Timeless Child threads are providing us with a lot of tasty bonkers theorising to pull on…

[Juniperfish @replies]

@devilishrobby That must have been very scary, but I’m very glad to hear you’re being looked after in hospital – sorry about the crap wifi though!

@mudlark I love your several generations of women ring.

Your suggestion that Old Witchy Ruby is “our” timeline Ruby from the future is a good one.

But my head still hurts, because young Ruby at the end of the episode has forgotten the Mad-Jack-is-free timeline, but surely, if Old Witchy Ruby is her older self, she needs to remember, so she can, once she reaches the right  age, somehow teleport into the Mad-Jack-is-Free timeline to help her alternate self stop ap Gwilliam.

Young Ruby does say she’s been to Wales three times, instead of the two she said in the version of this scene at the start of the episode. The Doctor still mentions ap Gwilliam as, “The most dangerous Prime Minister in history” so he hasn’t been erased in this timeline, and presumably still therefore needs to be stopped in this future. Although, this time the Doctor doesn’t mention that ap Gwilliam almost started a nuclear war, or that it was in 2046.

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. In fact, looking at Gatwa Doc in this ending scene and the way he looks at Ruby at the circle, you wonder whether he knows there’s been a time-shift, but can’t tell her for timey-wimey reasons. But maybe he will tell her later so that she can become Old Witchy Ruby eventually.

If anyone else has watched the fantastic German Netflix series Dark you’ll be familiar with this type of trying-to-figure-out-timelines headache!

And it can’t be a coincidence that, at the start of the episode, the Doctor starts talking about ap Gwilliam just before he breaks the fairy circle which releases Mad Jack into ap Gwilliam. Did the TARDIS bring them to this spot knowing that this was the origin point of both the break and the fix timelines (with one requiring the other)? Or are the machinations of the Toymaker’s hordes at work here, trying to erase the Doctor from the universe (as the circle break seems to effect)?

[Juniperfish @replies]

@craig – thanks so much for posting Old Witchy Ruby’s fingers showing the ring (and noted re how to link to pictures for the future – many thanks – will attempt it).

I always get my left and right mixed up – bit dyspraxic!

I remember you posting your wife’s picture before, but just to say again how lovely she looks. Russell T Davies gave an interview in 2023 about how returning to Doctor Who has brought him comfort, because his husband was still alive when he was showrunner last time around and he values that connection:

https://www.thepinknews.com/2023/02/02/russell-t-davies-doctor-who-husband-grief-comfort/

As well as your reason for wearing your wedding ring on your right hand now, it was also a bit of a tradition for LGBT folk to wear unofficial wedding rings on their right hand before same-sex marriage was legalised (in those countries where it has been of course):

https://www.gayandlesbianweddings.com/why-some-gay-men-choose-to-wear-wedding-rings-on-the-right-hand/

I don’t know if that’s significant, or if Old Witchy Ruby’s ring is just a random ring…

 

[Juniperfish @replies]

@whohar

…the older Ruby appeared no older than younger Ruby. I assume this was deliberate, rather than lazy makeup choices.

Yes, I’ve been thinking about that – an indication of additional genetic longevity linked to Ruby’s mysterious parentage?

Something else I noticed is that Old Witchy Ruby is wearing a wedding ring in the final shot from her POV when we see her hands underneath the withered tree reaching out to Young Ruby and the TARDIS in the distance (I can’t work out how to upload a screenshot here @craig ?).

Since we know Ruby in the Mad-Jack-is-free timeline never marries, as we are shown all her relationships failing, does that suggest Old Witchy Ruby is from yet another timeline, come to help correct the Mad Jack problem?

She must be, right? Because Old Ruby in the Mad-Jack-is-free timeline never becomes Old Witchy Ruby. When Old Witchy Ruby finally appears in Old Ruby’s care home, the timeline corrects, but why then? Why not at the point ap Gwillam is spooked into abdicating power?

And why, after ab Gwillam abdicated did the snow stop falling over Ruby? Perhaps because magic/ the veil between fantasy and reality was banished from that timeline when ab Gwillam was banished?

 

 

[Juniperfish @replies]

@cookgroom

Wasn’t sure if I missed something about Marti?… why was she scared of him (and why did she stay?)

I think the implication is that ap Gwillam sexually coerced/ abused Marti Bridges. He creepily insisted she (a mere volunteer in the hierarchy – so a massive power gap between them) be invited to his celebration party (but no other “low level” staff) and she tells Ruby he’s a “monster”.  It was hinted, rather than made more explicit, because of the child audience.

As for why she was scared of him/ didn’t leave – all the domestic violence charities have pages on why e.g. see:

Why don’t women leave?

But to paraphrase for this particular situation:

a) Fear – the guy’s just become Prime Minister – he’s a fascist (they aim to exert total control over the media, the police, the military etc.). What would he do to a lowly campaign volunteer who tried to go public with a sexual abuse story, let alone in the aftermath of his victory when he’s riding high in public opinion? And even if he did nothing, how would she be treated by the press?

b) Shame – she’d supported his politics/ been part of the campaign to get him elected – probably feels horribly (of course overly) responsible for her part in getting this monster into power

[Juniperfish @replies]

@ps1l0v3y0u

Glyngatwg means “Valley of the Cat” apparently:

https://x.com/DoctorWhoPN/status/1792615329429917783

I wonder if the pub name, Y Pren Marw, which means “The Dead Wood” according to Martin Bellam on T’Other Place, together with “The Valley of the Cat” are both tributes to stories by that master of weird folk horror Algernon Blackwood. He has a short story called The Wood of the Dead and another, Ancient Sorceries, about a village of cat-people. And 73 Yards definitely has a Blackwood vibe.

On the other hand Glyngatwg also looks a bit like Valley of Gatwa.

@bunface

Continuing the changeling speculation – it’s interesting isn’t it, that the Doctor disappears after he breaks the fairy circle holding “Mad Jack”. Is that effectively a changeling situation? The fey take the Doctor, to their nether faerie realm presumably, and replace him with Mad Jack – leading to a very bad not good fascist time-line.

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. So Mad Jack is a spirit of the blood-soaked land of Wales, whose release from the circle means he wreaks bloody vengeance upon the English by inhabiting Roger, making sure he, and the country, goes full fascist Farage?

It’s the “I miss you” that gets me, because Ruby spends her life in the broken fairy circle timeline missing people – missing the Doctor, missing her Mum (once her Mum has been turned against her by Old Witchy Ruby), unable to connect (her boyfriends always dumping her for not being fully present). Perhaps she has to feel lonely and be so alone in order to be motivated (by her Old Witchy Ruby self) to end Ap Gwillam’s rise – which will in turn restore the original timeline and bring The Doctor and her Mum back to her.  Hannah Arendt in her famous Origins of Totalitarianism said that a lonely society is a society susceptible to fascism. I love that RTD is so determined to address the terrifying resurgence of fascism in our times through his drama.

@satsumajoe

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.

Yes, good point – the stepping on things is a deliberate pattern – and tells us, once again, that Fifteen is dealing with a timeline/ mirror universe altered by the butterfly effect.

 

[Juniperfish @replies]

Well that was excellent and has added to the arc in a couple of interesting ways:

Firstly, Kate Lethbridge-Stewart confirms that we are in a universe where fantasy is bleeding into reality, when she says: to Ruby; “We’re the Unified Intelligence Taskforce, created to investigate the extraterrestrial and, more and more, the supernatural. Things seem to be turning that way these days.”

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

a) When Ruby steps on a butterfly in the Jurassic in Space Babies and then becomes an Alien/Bjork hybrid creature, until the Doctor revives the butterfly and course-corrects the time-line;

b) When Maestro gobbles human music in The Devil’s Chord, turning the Beatles shit and leading to a nuclear winter, until the Doctor defeats/ banishes Maestro and course-corrects the time-line;

c) When the Doctor breaks the magic binding circle on the Welsh clifftop in this episode, leading to the rise of fascist leader Roger ap Gwillam (aka Mad Jack) until Older Ruby banishes Mad Jack and course-corrects the time-line.

All of which seems to connects to back to Wild Blue Yonder, as the origin point of the arc divergent time-line the Fifteenth Doctor is now inhabiting – a time-line which leads to the bi-generation of the Fourteenth Doctor in The Giggle (a metaphor for divergence in time) into Gatwa and Fourteen 2.

It’s in Wild Blue Yonder that we get Tennant 2 and Donna’s encounter with Isaac Newton, turning “gravity” into “mavity” and where the Doctor attempts to bind the terrifying Doctor and Donna doppleganger entities at the edge of the universe using the fairy-binding myth about salt. He tells the entities they (the fey) cannot cross a salt line without first counting each grain, and when they sneer, he insists that salt-line protection is both a superstition and real – they are then obligated to count the salt. And this is the crux – superstition and reality have been bled together.

So the fantastical has entered the Whoniverse. Goblins snatch children in The Church on Ruby Road, bringing to mind the changelings of fairy stories. and a mystical snow follows Ruby through time and space wherever she goes evoking The Snow Queen.

What is it that Old Mysterious Witchy Ruby tells everyone who talks to her about Young Ruby in 73 Yards which terrifies them so much? That Ruby is a changeling? That certainly seems to be the implication, given that her Mother then rejects her telling her, “Even your real mother didn’t want you.”

I’ve also been pondering the number 73. I did a bit of Googling and apparently Sheldon in The Big Bang Theory in the 73rd episode of the show, which is called The Alien Parasite Hypothesis says he loves the number 73 because:

“73 is the 21st prime number. Its mirror, 37, is the 12th, and its mirror, 21, is the product of multiplying seven and three … and in binary, 73 is a palindrome, 1001001, which backwards is 1001001.”

https://www.mathnasium.com/math-centers/kirkwood/news/bang-math-professors-prove-tv-show-theory-about-the-number-73

So we could say that 73 is a “mirror number” suggestive, in this series of Doctor Who, of mirror universes.

Does that also mean that Ruby is an “alien parasite”?

[Juniperfish @replies]

@bunface and @brewski and @mudlark

@bunface – 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.

Stooky Sue = Susan foreshadowing?

Stooky Sue had three Stooky babbies – so it seems the Doctor’s progeny is definitely a thread to pull on.

[Author]

Posts