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  • #34534
    MTGradwell @replies

    @brandeberger

    Wow, is this the first ever instance of timelord regeneration gender-hop? I’m not sure.

    It’s actually long-established canon that Time Lords can change gender on regeneration. Look up e.g. “The Corsair”.

    #33547
    MTGradwell @replies

    @bluesqueakpip

    I am, for example, completely certain that there were no Daleks in World War Two. Rose hanging off a barrage balloon is just about possible, but Daleks in the War Rooms – and Spitfires able to cope with vacuum? Nope.
    Similarly, Reg in The Doctor, Widow, Wardrobe is flying a model of Lancaster bomber which hadn’t yet been built.

    And Danny doesn’t watch Doctor Who every week to see what his girlfriend is getting up to, and Clara doesn’t scour the internet for spoilers that might tell her what monsters she’ll be facing next week and how she might deal with them. And we never had a Prime Minister called Harriet Jones.

    I know the universe of Doctor Who is not our universe, but once upon a time it did have rules of its own that it usually (but not always) adhered to. And the rules included a physics that was similar to the physics we knew, except when highly advanced aliens made use of principles we haven’t discovered yet. The history was the same as our history, because the Time Lords and the Doctor in particular went to great lengths to keep it on track. The show was meant to be educational, so whenever possible it dealt with real history and real science, rather than handwavey nonsense. There was technobabble (‘reverse the polarity of the neutron flow’) but it was so rare that whenever it did occur it made its way into the show’s lore, like jelly babies, and it didn’t get in the way of the real science. There weren’t 100 instances of technobabble per episode. It wasn’t Star Trek.

    If we don’t remember any of the other monsters that regularly plagued London back in the Sixties until the Doctor dispatched them, that is probably because these things happened in transient timelines. It is established canon that time travellers CAN meddle with history, causing previously established events to no longer have occurred. Because this is such a dangerous thing – one wrong step, and humanity isn’t just gone, it never even existed – the Time Lords took a VERY hands-off approach, only interfering when they absolutely had to, and then only in the smallest way possible. And when some larger intervention was required, rather than get their own hands dirty they would rely on a renegade such as the Doctor to put things right.

    Now I realise that all this has gone by the board recently. There aren’t any Time Lords, or rather they are not in a position to intervene, not even slightly. The Doctor has carte blanche to do what he wants, apparently without the slightest need to clean up after himself. But I can’t help thinking that it was better the old way. New Who is supposed to be a continuation of Old Who, not a complete reboot with completely different rules and backstory. Some stories still pay lip service to that notion, and I tend to prefer them to the ones which don’t.

    I also realise that there was plenty of pure fantasy in Old Who. I enjoyed episodes like those with the Celestial Toymaker, who could apparently remake reality on a whim. But I enjoyed those because we weren’t given pseudosciency “explanations”, so we could make up our own minds. Was the toymaker a being with godlike powers, like Star Trek’s Q? Or was the “reality” he was manipulating something akin to Star Trek’s holodeck? Or was it something else entirely? You decide. In any case this all took place on the far fringes of the universe, or even in a different universe entirely, so it didn’t have to shake our belief in real physics in the here and now. Now I know some argue that the current arc is taking place in a universe where real physics just doesn’t apply at all, ever, like a giant version of the Celestial Toymaker’s world, but that’s not how it’s being presented. We’re still getting lip service being paid to real science, in the form of the Doctor using a yoyo to test gravity, or him referring to spider-like creatures on the moon as “bacteria”, as if it’s obvious that such a vast creature would carry vaster-than-usual bacteria. But a yoyo should still work in 1/6g, and the “bacteria” don’t look like bacteria, they look like spiders. And they’re having no trouble doing spidery things in a hard vacuum. Etc. Etc. Etc. There’s still science in Who, it’s just that occasionally it is extremely bad science, where every bit of it absolutely contradicts everything we have ever known or are ever likely to know.

    #33542
    MTGradwell @replies

    @wordmuse

    On another note: Doctor Who is not hard scifi. The facts of the real world are no more than props and devices. For example, in the real world, the moon actually masses in at something over 50 TRILLION tons, meaning that a space critter coming in at a few billion isn’t going to change gravity a wit’s worth of notice. But that’s OK with me.

    It would be OK with me too. a space critter weighing billions of tons would be quite an extrapolation from what we know, but that’s what good SF is about. But that NOT how the moon-dragon was presented. Unless I’m seriously misunderstanding, it was presented as occupying most of the interior of the moon. Basically it WAS the moon, apart from a thin outer shell. So it weighed something like 50 TRILLION tons. Except, at the time of the episode the moon’s gravity had become similar to earth’s meaning that its mass had increased approximately six-fold. To something like 300 TRILLION tons. Without any apparent gain in size, unless the moon’s surface is made of something very stretchy.

    In our universe this would mean that the Dragon was made of something six times as dense as the moon it hatched out of. The moon acquired this extra weight and density in a very short space of time, cosmically speaking, but that was nothing compared to the shortness of the time it took for the dragon to lay a new moon-sized egg, immediately after hatching. And then it very conveniently disappears, from the sky and from the entire Doctor Who universe, leaving everything exactly the same as if it had never been there at all. That is why the Doctor didn’t know the outcome in advance – whether the dragon was destroyed or not would make absolutely no difference to any of his past or future adventures, or to anything else for that matter, except for the presence or absence of a feeling of guilt in those tasked with making a decision about it. The destruction of the moon was so inconsequential that it never made it into any of the history books, and nobody ever felt inclined to mention it afterwards.

    Now you can try to explain this in terms of the physics of the Doctor Who universe – the embryo dragon phase-shifted into the moon from elsewhere, just like the mummy this week phased in and out of visibility and tangibility, only on a slightly larger scale. But even if you can accept the possibility of a 300 TRILLION ton creature phasing in and out, think of the enormity of the COINCIDENCE, of the egg that it lays being practically indistinguishable from the one it just hatched out of. Consider the COINCIDENCE of such a unique creature, the only one of its kind (or so we’re told), hatching out of OUR moon when there are a trillion others it might have hatched out of. And how can anyone know that it is unique? Shouldn’t the people of Earth be concerned about the possibility of an Earth-dragon emerging from their Earth-egg? Or the Solar dragon emerging from its Sun-egg? But I may be pre-empting the plots of future episodes there.

    It was the improbability of the coincidences that floored me just as much as the improbable science, but it didn’t help that the improbable science came thick and fast throughout that episode, without even the slightest let-up. You’d think there’d have been at least some scrap of known real science to mollify the technophiles, but no; though I think they did try with the yo-yo bit, they didn’t quite succeed even with that.

    #33496
    MTGradwell @replies

    @wordmuse

    Some of it is downright squirm-worthy. Especially, when Clara – who’s supposed to be a strong woman (and was in the Matt Smith episodes) lies to Danny. My wife and I were so relieved when she finally fessed up and made things honest between she, Danny and the Doctor. We loved the relationship bits in the Moon episode.
    But now we’re back to her lying to Danny and to the Doctor in order to carry on her double life – which had been resolved favorably in the earlier episode.

    But does she lie to Danny? Danny asks “is it done?” and she replies “yep, mission accomplished”, but what precisely is the “it”, the mission that has been accomplished? I think it is the completion of the “last hurrah”, the final trip on the Orient Express (in space!!!), and indeed that is accomplished. Clara is no longer on the Orient Express (in space!!!). It no longer exists, having been blown up. All through the episode Cjara has been explaining to the Doctor about why this is her last trip, so there isn’t anything more that needs to be said. All that remains is for her to get a lift home, a mere formality at this point.

    I think it’s only a couple of seconds after the ending of that call that Clara realises that she really doesn’t want the adventures to stop, and they don’t have to. It’s that belated realisation which causes a big smile to spread across her face. In the words of the song, she’s having a good time, she’s having a ball. And as Danny told her earlier, she does basically get on with the Doctor. And Danny is cool with that. So why should it stop now? Of course Clara has been lying throughout the episode, occasionally to the Doctor but mainly to herself, but I don’t think she deliberately lied to Danny.

    #33492
    MTGradwell @replies

    @janetteb

    What Danny is grappling to understand is that her relationship with the Doctor is not romantic.

    I agree with the rest of your analysis, and I too don’t dislike Danny, but I can’t see that. On the contrary, he seems to understand better than Clara herself does that her relationship with the Doctor is not romantic.
    “Well, one, you can’t dump him because he’s not your boyfriend. And two, dumping him sounds a little scorched earth, you still basically get on. I think you should just enjoy your space train. At least it’s not dangerous.” – He was doing really, really well until that last sentence.

    #33482
    MTGradwell @replies

    @scaryb

    Don’t really see why people generally find it easier to suspend disbelief for a teleporting mummy on the Orient Express (IN SPACE!!) than for the moon’s an egg scenario, but happy people are generally on board for this epi 🙂

    Given the way human nature works, an “Orient Express (IN SPACE!!)” is not just plausible but practically inevitable, given only that our tech continues to advance in the future and that as a species we retain our interest in stories, especially stories which combine opulence and mystery. And teleportation is a staple of SF, and mummies are a staple of the horror genre. Mechanically animated mummies are something that we could make even today and even with limited resources, though I admit they probably wouldn’t last for millions of years and teleportation would be out of the question.

    Compare that with the moon as an egg.

    @craig

    There was a bit of a problem with it being closer to home because of “known” science – which nobody can actually claim to know.

    That was a tenable position a couple of centuries ago. It’s still a tenable position with regard to much of our science, especially our cosmological speculations about the origins and the distant reaches of the universe; however, the moon is our neighbour. Men have landed there, and brought back samples, which have been analysed and which are not noted for their resemblance to eggshell. The pattern of craters on the surface has been examined, and used to infer how old that surface is, and it’s very old indeed. Maybe a billion years old. There’s no air there, no food, nothing that might support life, and no sign of life. It being an egg would contradict EVERYTHING we know about physics, chemistry, biology, and just about any other science you can think of. What does a moon dragon live on? Where does it come from? How can it gestate for maybe a billion years, and then lay a new egg immediately upon hatching? How is it able to extend its wings against the pull of its own gravity? What is the use of those wings, in space? What does it breathe? How does it avoid freezing on one side, and boiling on the other?

    Now we might try to come up with pseudo-scientific answers to some of these questions, e.g. the wings are solar sails, the dragon doesn’t need to eat because it’s some sort of robot, or whatever. But any such answers would only raise more and bigger questions, because there’s nothing in our body of scientific knowledge which could even begin to accommodate a moon-dragon. If it was real then all of our science would be bunk, from beginning to end. ALL of it.

    That’s the difference.

    But moon-as-egg does work very well in terms of story. I’ve no doubt there’s plenty of myths about the moon as an egg, explaining its phases as a hatching out that happens every month. The story could have worked if set in a place where story takes precedence over science, e.g. in a virtual reality like the Library. There’s plenty of precedent for the Doctor turning up in such a virtual universe, where real world physics does not apply. The moon-as-egg episode would have worked better if there was some evidence (other than the bad science) that it was set in such a universe.

    #33480
    MTGradwell @replies

    @jimbomcmaster

    I find the conversation at the end about addiction strange, because they both seem to have forgotten about the fact that the Doctor did give up traveling for ages and ages –

    But the conversation wasn’t really about the Doctor. Clara tried to make it look like she was talking about him when she brought the subject up, but actually the reason she brought it up was that she had spent the entire episode fighting her own addiction, and was looking for a way to explain that she was still addicted. The “last hurrah” was like the “one last cigarette” that smoking addicts tell themselves that they need to have before they finally give up smoking forever.

    The Doctor realised this, and turned Clara’s question back to her: “well you can’t really tell if something’s an addiction until you try and give it up” – implying he had noticed that Clara was finding it difficult to give up, unlike his earlier self. “Let me know how it goes” – that should have been Clara’s line if the conversation was really about the Doctor.

    The reason Clara was so happy after her phone call with Danny was that she realised that the call gave her an excuse. Rather than admitting she had failed to defeat the addiction, something which she had been planning but dreading to say, she could instead pretend that Danny was the reason she’d been intending to walk away, and now he had come around so there wasn’t any problem.

    #33454
    MTGradwell @replies

    Really enjoyed this one. Makes up for the dubious handwavey technobabble of last week. As Arthur C Clarke said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, so if you want the science to appear far in advance of what we have today then it should be presented as magic. Attempting to explain the trick (midichlorians, anyone?) just spoils it. Especially when the presentation of current tech such as the Space Shuttle is just as dubious as that of the far future/mysterious alien stuff, as was the case last week. Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, great episode. The mummy was well realised, lots of subtleties in the script, gorgeous set, etc.

    @badwulf

    What did everyone think of the fact that Clara has changed her mind about travelling with the Doctor just because Danny has said it is OK?

    As the Doctor said, it’s about addiction. During the course of the episode Clara came to realised that she can’t give up the time-travelling, no matter how angry she might momentarily be with the Doctor (and she’s had an unspecified amount of time to calm down from last time). Travelling on the Orient Express. In Space! With more awesome coolness to come next week, and the week after. Who could turn that down? Certainly not Clara. When she says she changed her mind because of Danny, it’s just because she doesn’t want to admit that the Doctor was right.

    @juniperfish

    what would “reverse engineering” of the Foretold’s ability to kill actually mean? Enabling it to grant eternal life?

    “Reverse engineering” doesn’t usually mean “engineering to do the opposite”. It usually applies to when you have a device that you can’t take apart, because that would break it (e.g. a microprocessor) or because there are rules that say you can’t (e.g. when making Open Source software that resembles something proprietary). You can’t do that but you can study its external behaviour to your heart’s content. From this you can work out how it probably works internally, and build something that behaves the same way.

    #33047
    MTGradwell @replies

    @bluesqueakpip

    I was very keen on planetary science as a schoolchild. Most of what I was taught? Completely wrong.

    OK there’s no jungles on Venus, but science never said there were, only that there might be, and pulp SF ran with that. And there are no canals on Mars, but science never said there were, it was just a misunderstanding due to a mistranslation of the Italian ‘canali’ (channels). And there are channels on Mars, albeit not ones that could plausibly be observed from Earth using an ordinary optical telescope. I don’t think planetary science has changed all that much in the last half century or so. Our knowledge has expanded as a result of robotic probes being sent all over the solar system, but nothing formerly established as fact has been overturned as far as I know. And even if something was, I don’t think it would quite compare to discovering that the moon is a giant egg.

    But I was OK with the moon being a giant egg. Like I said initially, “Having the Moon be an egg was already stretching things, but having the imminent hatching of that egg causing Lunar gravity to multiply six-fold to match Earth-normal was a stretch too far.” I can accept some implausibility, but there has to be some limit to the number of stretches per episode, beyond which we have to recognize that any tenuous connection to reality has been severed and we are wholly in the realm of fantasy.

    So maybe I should loosen up, and accept both the moon being an egg and its gravity increasing sixfold or so. After all, there’s “rule of cool” and all that, and haven’t stranger things happened in Who previously? Maybe, but those two things are just the start. Once again, with emphasis: ALL of the science was garbage. ALL of it. I’ve only just begun to scratch the surface.

    The Doctor first notices that the gravity is stronger than it should be when he is aboard the shuttle which is approaching the moon; but that could be due to the shuttle’s deceleration, in much the same way that your weight seems to increase when you’re in an elevator which slows towards the end of its descent. But how IS the shuttle decelerating? Parachutes and wings don’t work in the absence of an atmosphere, and the shuttle doesn’t have forward-facing engines. To be using its engines to decelerate it should really be landing facing backwards. And doing that would require huge amounts of fuel, especially with the moon’s gravity being suddenly increased six-fold. Where was all that fuel stored? Did the Shuttle have huge fuel tanks that were discarded just before the Tardis arrived? How was the undersurface of the shuttle reinforced enough for it to land on the rough lunar surface without it being torn apart? Then the Doctor uses a yoyo to illustrate that something is wrong, and says that they should all be “bouncing around like fluffy little clouds”. But 1/6g is not the same as zero g, and a yoyo should still work in 1/6g, though it might require a change in technique. And so on. All of that is from just a few seconds near the start. I could go on and on.

    With the yoyo it does at least look like the writers are trying to inject some real science into the story, I’ll give them that, but I don’t think they quite pull it off successfully. And having the shuttle land on the moon, facing forward in much the same way that it did for an Earth landing, but without a parachute … well, it’s probably not beyond the powers of a really advanced technological civilisation, but are we really going to get that advanced in the next thirty-five years?

    By now I’m not quite as horrified by all this as I was on initial viewing, and I can see that there is some cleverness in the story. It’s clever to have the old moon disappear and be almost instantly replaced by a new one. It echoes countless myths and legends, and it explains how the Doctor can visit the far future and “the” (actually “a”) moon is still there, and nobody in the future remarks on its former disappearance because it was such a brief blink-and-you-miss-it thing. It’s clever but it’s pure myth, not science. It’s too convenient that the new moon immediately replaces the old one, and looks exactly like it.

    #33031
    MTGradwell @replies

    @bluesqueakpip

    Yup. In no particular order: Robin Hood exists, there’s a dragon in the Moon, dinosaurs were much bigger than we think they were, Daleks can become aware of their own evil, there appears to be life after death and bankers can repent of their misdeeds.
    Am I spotting a pattern here? 😉

    There’s been something implausible in every episode – it wouldn’t be Doctor Who otherwise; but that’s not the same as stretching the laws of physics beyond breaking point. Most of the examples you give don’t even involve science at all, at least as currently understood: e.g. the real physical existence of Robin Hood wouldn’t break any scientific laws that I know of, though it would sent a lot of historians back to the drawing-board; and life-after-death is something outside the realm of science, at least until it becomes a testable phenomenon with reproducible experiments. Besides, I suspect that the afterlife we’re being shown will turn out to be not “the” afterlife, but some reasonable facsimile thereof for which there will turn out to be a perfectly good explanation, though whether we will actually be given that explanation is another matter. I suspect that the explanation will be something like that of the library in “Silence in the Library”.

    And it is possible to come up with explanations for the implausibilities in the earlier episodes if you try hard enough. For instance, we don’t have the fossilised skeletons of every dinosaur that ever existed, just a small and very unrepresentative sample. It’s entirely possible that there were T-Rexes or similar dinosaurs significantly larger than any we have in a museum. And in the case of the supposedly repentant banker, she did have many clones; it’s possible that the person we saw on her deathbed was not the banker herself but rather an escaped clone who never had anything to do with banking, and who was aware of what her clone-sisters had done and wanted to atone for it in some way.

    #32988
    MTGradwell @replies

    I’ve just lurked and haven’t spoken up about this series because I haven’t really had anything interesting or original to say about it, but I have really enjoyed it up until now. Peter Capaldi is an impressive Doctor, and such a long run of good episodes was an amazing feat, but I think it ended with this one. I can only echo BadWulf’s sentiments, especially his point 1) All of the science was garbage. All of it.

    Having the Moon be an egg was already stretching things, but having the imminent hatching of that egg causing Lunar gravity to multiply six-fold to match Earth-normal was a stretch too far. Conservation of mass/energy is one of the most consistently observed laws of the universe, and while the Tardis itself might seem to break that law, it does so on a scale small enough to be overlooked or excused. An entire moon / moon-sized egg gaining mass six-fold or so with no obvious source for that extra mass is another matter entirely. The Doctor’s technobabble “explanations” didn’t really help. I can see why they did it -the alternatives would have been to either ignore the gravitational difference between Earth and moon and just walk around normally without explanation, or to move around slowly and carefully (for indoor scenes)  and in leaps and bounds shown in slow motion (outdoors); but either of these alternatives would have been better than what they actually did. At one point they even had the Doctor perform a huge leap, which would have been plausible under 1/6G conditions but not with normal Earth gravity.

    Then, the crew enters an abandoned/derelict base, they restore the power, the lights come on and INSTANTLY it’s safe for them to remove their helmets. As if it wouldn’t take time to get the air pressure and temperature back to something tolerable. Again I can see why they did it, but…

    And it’s implied or outright stated that this moon-egg-dragon-creature is unique, the only one of its kind, as if moon-sized eggs can just pop into existence without the existence of some sort of ecosystem involving other moon-sized eggs and egg-laying dragons; even though we see the dragon instantly (and conveniently) lay another moon-sized egg immediately after hatching, implying a reproductive rate which could potentially put tribbles to shame, if it wasn’t for the unfeasibly long incubation period.

    Etc. Etc.

    On the positive side, they did do a good job of making Lanzarote look like the moon, and it was a better choice for the job than the usual abandoned Welsh quarry.

    #11923
    MTGradwell @replies

    @bluesqueakpip

    So Clara-from-Blackpool is a product of the Doctor’s future. She’s either a Claricle herself, rather than Clara-Prime (and so would cease to exist if the Doctor never reached Trenzalore) or she’s a future Doctor.

    I’d say yes she’s a Claricle. Victorian Clara was Clara-Prime.  If the Doctor hadn’t met her (and Dalek Oswin Oswald) he would never have sought out any other Claras. Even if other Claras had existed, the chance of the Doctor encountering one without actively seeking them out would have been effectively zero. So Victorian Clara had to come first. The Doctor never saw the human form of Dalek Oswin, and there could have been an iteration, before Clara was scattered across the time stream, when it was just a random mad Dalek with delusions of being human. I’d say the fact that it was in an asylum as a clue, and it wasn’t even called Clara, just Oswin Oswald.  Contemporary Clara “blew in on a leaf”. I’d say that leaf fell as a result of Clara being scattered across the timestream. But Victorian Clara was definitely real and human, and she provided the catalyst, giving rise to the course of actions which eventually led to there being other Claras.

    Could contemporary Clara be a future incarnation of the Doctor? I don’t think so. We’ve seen a back-story for her in which she is a human, with human parents.  She currently has no memory of being anything other than human from Blackpool. In particular, she has no memory of being a Time Lord, and certainly not of being the Doctor.

    However, she might become a future incarnation of the Doctor, in a sense. Because she’s scattered across the Doctor’s timeline, she might have made such an impression on it that the next time the Doctor regenerates, he regenerates with the appearance of Clara.  We could then have the confusing situation of one actress playing both the Doctor and the Doctor’s current companion. Is that bonkers enough? If not, we could have Doctor-Clara and Companion-Clara rescue Oswin Oswald from the Asylum planet just before it blows up, and together the three of them could continue to explore all of time and space, meeting other Claricles (including River Song) along the way …

    #11904
    MTGradwell @replies

    Interesting to read all the speculation here. If I’m not weighing in myself, it’s because I don’t have any personal preferences. Back in the days before the relaunch I thought they should go for a sort of prequel, with Ian Richardson standing in for William Hartnell. He had, I thought, just the right appearance, style and acting ability to do that justice. However, wiser heads than mine decided to go for a younger Doctor. I still held out hopes for him to be cast as a Hartnell stand-in in a multi-Doctor adventure, but he sadly died unexpectedly in 2007. Since then I’ve been happy just to accept the choices of the show-runners. I think they’ve done pretty well so far.

    #11487
    MTGradwell @replies

    @brynwe – River died in the very first adventure in which she appeared, the two-parter Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead. But that was way back in 2008 and with a different Doctor, so it’s understandable that you didn’t know. Also, she’s never let the fact of her death slow her down. Because she and the Doctor keep meeting in the wrong order, she has in fact been very much alive during all their subsequent encounters except this latest one, and there’s no real in-story reason why she shouldn’t turn up alive again in future episodes.

    #11421
    MTGradwell @replies

    @danmartinuk I don’t know about being easily defeated, because having seen a trailer I couldn’t be bothered to watch the actual episode, but in terms of naff ideas for DW opponents I think the adipose have to be a leading contender; they look like cuddly marshmallows. And in a similar vein from Classic Who there’s Bertie Bassett – sorry, I mean the Kandy Man. I did watch that adventure, unfortunately.

    #11417
    MTGradwell @replies

    @timeloop: Canon = officially accepted. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_(fiction) for details.

    #11351
    MTGradwell @replies

    @timeloop, @whohar, @scaryb

    Timeloop: Has anyone here metioned that the Doctor knows all of his future because he went in his Timestream (same as reading it in a book I presume)?  …
     WhoHar: If the Doc has been in his own timestream – it implies both he and Clara now know the Doc’s future. Unless he somehow didn’t look.

    ScaryB: 2. Maybe there is no future – Clara says: “I saw all of you – 11 faces”

    Yes, I agree. There is no future, or only a very limited future, in the timestream that we saw in the last episode. Trenzalore is the site of the fall of the ELEVENTH – not the twelfth or thirteenth. ELEVENTH died, and his Tardis became his tomb. Therefore in that particular timestream there was no twelfth or thirteenth for Clara to see (unless, as I theorize, Hurt is an alternate twelfth who regenerated inside his own timestream and is permanently trapped inside it, and scattered over it in much the same way that Clara and the GI are; in which case Clara failed to spot him because the memory of him is well repressed).
    If the Doctor escapes from this predicament (and I’m guessing he will), it will result in a new timeline, a new future in which he escapes off-planet. In this new future he will have a new tomb, one probably not on Trenzalore, and the tomb which is on Trenzalore will disappear.  Still the Doctor will be careful never to return there, just in case. Best not to tempt fate. And he will hope that the new location for his tomb is a better kept secret than the old one. This new future will only Materialize after the Doctor and Clara have escaped from the timestream, so his timestream will only expand to include future Doctors then.

    #11023
    MTGradwell @replies

    I think my “bonkers theory” that I posted on the TNotD and Fan Creativity threads, actually has more internal consistency than I expected it to have as I was creating it, and would actually work. That would make HurtDr an alternate 12th. Not the Doctor that current-11th regenerates into, but the Doctor that an alternate 11th regenerates into. Alternate 11th looks like Matt Smith, but originated in a very different timeline, one in which there was only one Clara (Victorian) and no Silence.  Because there was no Silence, and River originated as  a result of the Silence’s machinations, there was no river either. Because there was only one Clara, the Doctor had no reason to seek out other Claras and would not have succeeded anyway if he had sought them out.

    When alt-11th confronted the Great Intelligence at Trenzalore, with no River to help out, he had to say his own name. With no Clara to help out, he had to dive into his own timestream, not to rescue Clara but to tackle the GI head-on himself.  After regenerating into Hurt-Dr, he scattered himself along his own timeline, so that all the other incarnations became aware of his existence. He then had to do some pretty terrible things in order to thwart the GI, such as bringing the Time War to an end. Those actions alone should provide enough material for a 50th episode, but it would be confusing without some setting out of his back-story, and unsatisfying without the resolution which would come in the next iteration when Clara gets scattered. For how that happens I’ll refer to my “bonkers theory” rather than repeating myself here.

    http://www.thedoctorwhoforum.com/forums/topic/general-thread-fan-creativity/page/2/#post-10956

    #10956
    MTGradwell @replies

    Yesterday I posted a “bonkers theory” on the TNotD thread, about possible background and future developments. Shazzbot liked it and suggested I should contact the site creators and request a blog, as an episode thread did not seem to be the best location for such speculations. However, I note that there is this place already, and it might be the best place for general theorizing, at least for now. So, for now, I’ll just repost here what I posted yesterday. I hope that’s OK.

    I’ll combine the two posts from the other thread into one here, even though that does make it rather long:

    There has to be a first iteration, one in which Clara has not been fragmented into the timeline. Some events still pan out in a way broadly similar to what we have seen, but for instance the Doctor, instead of being aided by Clara at the Asylum, is aided by a random mad Dalek. Because he hasn’t been aided by Clara, the Doctor has no reason to seek her out, so he doesn’t. When he arrives at Trenzalore, he does so with Vastra etc but without Clara and without her psychic link to River. When the Great Intelligence demands his name, he holds back at first but ultimately surrenders, and speaks his own name. The tomb opens. But the Doctor has left it too late. His companions are dead. And the Great Intelligence enters the Doctor’s timeline, intending to make every other moment in it just as bitter as that one. Without any Clara to leap in and thwart him, the Doctor has no choice. He leaps in, not to rescue Clara this time but to tackle the Great Intelligence himself.

    Inside his own timeline, he dies and regenerates into the JH Doctor. JH Doctor is still trapped inside his own timeline. He thwarts the Great Intelligence at every turn, but at immense personal cost. At each defeat the GI grows more and more furious, until it is nothing more than a tight ball of hatred, all directed exclusively at the Doctor. Then it dies, or appears to. (Actually, although it is dead, because it has insinuated itself all over the Doctors timeline prior to dying, those echoes of itself remain. They are just echoes, not the true GI itself, and they have been thwarted every turn, and they don’t even have any memory of what made them oppose the Doctor in the first place, they just know that they hate him without knowing why, but they are still dangerous. Dangerous enough to lead the Doctor to Trenzalore yet again, in the next iteration.) The Doctor, exhausted by the fighting, dies yet again, and regenerates for the twelfth and last time, still trapped inside his own timeline.

    The Tardis (the mostly non-broken one, the one with only a slight crack in its window), sensing that the Doctor is irrevocably dead, or at least irrevocably trapped, places his timeline inside its control room. It then locks its doors, and automatically relocates itself randomly to a nearby spot, as it was programmed to do in any emergency. Not to the opposite pole of the planet in this case, but to a spot about a mile away and maybe a thousand years in the past. There it begins a process of slow decay.

    End of story, seemingly, but no. The Tardis is programmed to inform River, as next of kin, about her husband’s death. River is startled by this telepathic message, as she is with him when she receives it, enjoying one of her breaks from prison. After a brief discussion with him, in which he informs her about Timelord burial customs, she persuades him of the importance of divulging his name to her ….

    River can’t tell the Doctor why she wants to know his name, because spoilers. It therefore takes quite a while for her to learn it, but eventually she does. She then visits the Doctor’s final resting place, the ruined Tardis, and uses his name to gain access to the control room. She enters his timeline, and in order to avoid creating temporal paradoxes she visits only his 13th and final incarnation. Her purpose in doing so is to say one final goodbye to him. However, she is shocked to discover that he doesn’t know her at all. He’s never heard of anyone called River, and is mystified by her presence in his timeline.

    He has heard of the Silence, in fact he created them in an attempt to derail his own timeline by bringing about his own death before he can betray his friends and betray the whole universe by leading the GI into his tomb. He created them, but he doesn’t know anything about them kidnapping babies or whatever. They’re supposed to kill him, not kidnap babies. She realizes that this Doctor originated in a different timeline, but has crossed over into hers, perhaps when the dying Tardis made its very last jump.

    She asks alternate 13th about how he met his end, and learns it was at the hands of the Great Intelligence. So she asks if there is any way that the Great Intelligence might be thwarted. She learns from him that the GI was defeated once before, by a Victorian barmaid/nanny named Clara Oswin Oswald, but Clara died shortly thereafter. River resolves to seek out this Clara, and to see if she can do anything about her untimely death.

    Alt-13 meanwhile has had enough of this discussion with a perplexing stranger. He dismisses her out of the timestream, back into her physical body which lies just outside in the control room. He then leaves the timestream himself, in the only way he can. He follows it back to near its beginning, on Gallifrey. Back then, all of the timestreams of all Timelords had been kept together in one place, and the resulting thicket was known as the Matrix. There were portals to the Matrix, via which Timelords might enter and exit. Alt-13 exits the Matrix via one of these portals, becoming the Valeyard, and spends the rest of his days trying to get his younger self tried and executed for treason.

    Long story short – There then follows an iteration in which Victorian Clara is saved from Death, and it is Victorian Clara who becomes the Doctor’s traveling companion. She attempts to save him, and is scattered throughout the Timelines. In the next iteration it is modern Clara (who, along with Dalek Oswin, did not previously exist) who becomes the travelling companion, while Victorian Clara once again dies. This iteration is the one which we have all seen. This time around the Doctor and Clara succeed in escaping from the Doctor’s tomb, thus averting the Doctor’s previously-fated regenerations into Hurt-Doctor and the Valeyard. They then resume their adventures, carrying on from where we last left them. The End.

    #10847
    MTGradwell @replies

    @Shazzbot, @whohar: Thanks.

    @Shazzbot

    I haven’t contacted the Dr, Who production team – I only had this particular theory at about 7p.m. and this forum was the first to get it, receiving the first part more or less as fast as I could type. I didn’t know until it was all typed out whether it would even be any good, though now that it is up there I do get the feeling that it does work reasonably well. But it’s really just a piece of idle speculation – the real production team will have already shot the next episode, I suspect, and that is bound to be substantially at odds in some respects with what I have supposed, making any possible reconciliation difficult.

    @whohar yes the timeline has to be made inaccessible, but hopefully not until after 11 and Clara have escaped from it. Changing the password probably won’t be enough. Maybe relocating the broken Tardis to an abandoned timeline would suffice, and that’ll happen automatically if the Doctor changes the future significantly e.g. by failing to actually die on Trenzalore. He still has to die somewhere, somewhen, though, but once again the actual location will become a closely guarded secret. If Gallifrey is somehow restored then it might be kept there – and become inaccessible when Gallifrey is lost again.

    #10837
    MTGradwell @replies

    Bonkers theory part 2

    River can’t tell the Doctor why she wants to know his name, because spoilers. It therefore takes quite a while for her to learn it, but eventually she does. She then visits the Doctor’s final resting place, the ruined Tardis, and uses his name to gain access to the control room. She enters his timeline, and in order to avoid creating temporal paradoxes she visits only his 13th and final incarnation. Her purpose in doing so is to say one final goodbye to him. However, she is shocked to discover that he doesn’t know her at all. He’s never heard of anyone called River, and is mystified by her presence in his timeline. He has heard of the Silence, in fact he created them in an attempt to derail his own timeline by bringing about his own death before he can betray his friends and betray the whole universe by leading the GI into his tomb. He created them, but he doesn’t know anything about them kidnapping babies or whatever. They’re supposed to kill him, not kidnap babies. She realizes that this Doctor originated in a different timeline, but has crossed over into hers, perhaps when the dying Tardis made its very last jump.

    She asks alternate 13th about how he met his end, and learns it was at the hands of the Great Intelligence. So she asks if there is any way that the Great Intelligence might be thwarted. She learns from him that the GI was defeated once before, by a Victorian barmaid/nanny named Clara Oswin Oswald, but Clara died shortly thereafter.  River resolves to seek out this Clara, and to see if she can do anything about her untimely death.

    Alt-13 meanwhile has had enough of this discussion with a perplexing stranger. He dismisses her out of the timestream, back into her physical body which lies just outside in the control room. He then leaves the timestream himself, in the only way he can. He follows it back to near its beginning, on Gallifrey. Back then, all of the timestreams of all Timelords had been kept together in one place, and the resulting thicket was known as the Matrix. There were portals to the Matrix, via which Timelords might enter and exit. Alt-13 exits the Matrix via one of these portals, becoming the Valeyard, and spends the rest of his days trying to get his younger self tried and executed for treason.

    Long story short – There then follows an iteration in which Victorian Clara is saved from Death, and it is Victorian Clara who becomes the Doctor’s traveling companion. She attempts to save him, and is scattered throughout the Timelines. In the next iteration it is modern Clara (who, along with Dalek Oswin, did not previously exist) who becomes the travelling companion, while Victorian Clara once again dies. This iteration is the one which we have all seen. This time around the Doctor and Clara succeed in escaping from the Doctor’s tomb, thus averting the Doctor’s previously-fated regenerations into Hurt-Doctor and the Valeyard. They then resume their adventures, carrying on from where we last left them. The End.

    #10743
    MTGradwell @replies

    Is this still the place for bonkers theorizing? Because I have a bonkers theory.

    There has to be a first iteration, one in which Clara has not been fragmented into the timeline. Some events still pan out in a way broadly similar to what we have seen, but for instance the Doctor, instead of being aided by Clara at the Asylum, is aided by a random mad Dalek. Because he hasn’t been aided by Clara, the Doctor has no reason to seek her out, so he doesn’t.  When he arrives at Trenzalore, he does so with Vastra etc but without Clara and without her psychic link to River. When the Great Intelligence demands his name, he holds back at first but ultimately surrenders, and speaks his own name. The tomb opens. But the Doctor has left it too late. His companions are dead. And the Great Intelligence enters the Doctor’s timeline, intending to make every other moment in it just as bitter as that one. Without any Clara to leap in and thwart him, the Doctor has no choice. He leaps in, not to rescue Clara this time but to tackle the Great Intelligence himself. Inside his own timeline, he dies and regenerates into the JH Doctor. JH Doctor is still trapped inside his own timeline. He thwarts the Great Intelligence at every turn, but at immense personal cost. At each defeat the GI grows more and more furious, until it is nothing more than a tight ball of hatred, all directed exclusively at the Doctor. Then it dies, or appears to. (Actually, although it is dead, because it has insinuated itself all over the Doctors timeline prior to dying, those echoes of itself remain. They are just echoes, not the true GI itself, and they have been thwarted every turn, and they don’t even have any memory of what made them oppose the Doctor in the first place, they just know that they hate him without knowing why, but they are still dangerous. Dangerous enough to lead the Doctor to Trenzalore yet again, in the next iteration.) The Doctor, exhausted by the fighting, dies yet again, and regenerates for the twelfth and last time, still trapped inside his own timeline. The Tardis (the mostly non-broken one, the one with only a slight crack in its window), sensing that the Doctor is irrevocably dead, or at least irrevocably trapped, places his timeline inside its control room. It then locks its doors, and automatically relocates itself randomly to a nearby spot, as it was programmed to do in any emergency. Not to the opposite pole of the planet in this case, but to a spot about a mile away and maybe a thousand years in the past. There it begins a process of slow decay. End of story, seemingly, but no. The Tardis is programmed to inform River, as next of kin, about her husband’s death. River is startled by this telepathic message, as she is with him when she receives it, enjoying one of her breaks from prison. After a brief discussion with him, in which he informs her about Timelord burial customs, she persuades him of the importance of divulging his name to her ….

    I’ll leave it at that point because I’ve got other things to do now. Any good so far?

    #10343
    MTGradwell @replies

    @Shazzbot

    OK, so, the Silence were supposed to kill the Doctor so he could never get to Trenzalore … why? I like your theory that they were guarding the Hurt Doctor (/keeping him from getting ‘out’), but … why?

    And seeing how Trenzalore is essentially the Doctor’s grave, he was a) always going to end up there (albeit being dead, he probably couldn’t do much), and b) the Doctor couldn’t cross his own timeline without massive consquences (most of which couldn’t be foreseen by the Silence), so why would they think he would do it prior to his own death?

    The Silence knew about the damage that the GI would cause if he ever gained access to the Doctor’s tomb on trenzalore. they knew that “silence would fall” (and stars would go out). They didn’t know that Clara would intervene to redress the balance. Why? They were in possession of a prophecy, or book of prophecies, which detailed just how terrible the effects of the GI’s intervention would be. This prophecy/book of prophecies presumably originated somewhere in the dying universe created by the GI, the universe which we briefly glimped between the GI’s intervention and Clara’s.

    #10335
    MTGradwell @replies

    @phileasf

    It looks like Clara has the same mother in all her lives. If every Clara gets a whole past and future, just like any other real person… then how much of the human population of spacetime exists because she does? It would mean the same people recur throughout space and time, so Clara can always descend from them..

    I don’t think every Clara has a full backstory. They are, after all, just echoes, and not the “real” Clara. they’re just real enoough to save the Doctor.  Some of them will flicker into existence for just jong enough to do the job, and then disappear again. For instance, I’m inclining to the opinion that the Clara in the Tardis repair yard was not a Gallifreyan Timelord version of Clara, it was just a projection by the Tardis.

    #10333
    MTGradwell @replies

    @brotherjohn

    I think (correct me if I’m wrong) the doctor explicitly CALLS her “souffle girl” to her face. It may be when he confronts her on the cliff edge outside the TARDIS control room, in JttCotT, but she has “remembered” events from theat deleted day when she says it.

    I stand corrected. I hadn’t read brotherjohn’s reply to @Shazzbot when I wrote mine just a short while ago, and I didn’t remember the Doctor referring to souffle girl in JttCotT.

    #10329
    MTGradwell @replies

    @Shazzbot

    Also – it’s bothering me that just before stepping into the Doctor’s timestream in TNotD, Clara says ‘well whaddaya know, I’m Souffle Girl after all.’ She hasn’t been fragmented yet – how does she know she calls herself that in AotD?

    Clara had just walked through parts of the ruined Tardis, where she was given memories of the other Clara, the one whose timeline ended in Journey to the Centre of the Tardis. So she knows about being the “impossible girl” who died at least twice before. There was no specific mention of souffle girl in that episode, but there’s no reason why the tardis couldn’t have telepathically given her memories of that as well.

    #10326
    MTGradwell @replies

    @Shazzbot

    Hurt … as in John Hurt?

    Yes. I don’t have any special insight into the course of future episodes, I was just making the same pun that must have been made already by many others, and trying to be subtle about it by using a lower case H.

    #10239
    MTGradwell @replies

    Bluesqueakpip

    Or maybe it was a continuity error.

    @mtgradwell – or maybe the Eleventh is the Final Doctor. :-D

     

    I think you’ve got something there. The Eleventh is the final doctor, at least as things Currently stand. His Tardis is even already parked conveniently close to its final resting place,  something which is unlikely to ever happen again. The final nature of the Eleventh will only change when the Doctor fixes up someone who is hurt.

    #10146
    MTGradwell @replies

    @Shazzbot:

    (translation: What the heck page was your conversation on? in terms of 50 ‘conversations’ per page, please, and assuming no CifFIx.)

    This particular conversation was on page 6.

    I was advised very persuasively that the past had indeed been changed, not once, but twice!  (fragmented GI and fragmented Clara) 

    Forget twice, think two billion, or trillion. GI changes things. Clara changes them back. Things are almost as they were, but not quite. In this subtly changed universe, the subtly changed Doctor and companions progress towards Trenzalore, meeting Claras (e.g. Dalek Oswin Oswald) along the way. They reach Trenzalore. GI changes things. Clara changes them back. Rinse and repeat. And repeat. And repeat. Until the iterations are so similar to one another that there is practically no appreciable difference. A stable time loop.

    There presumably was an earlier iteration in which the Doctor survived the Asylum planet despite not being helped by Clara. Perhaps in that iteration a Dalek helped the Doctor, but it was just a mad Dalek that thought it was human, not Clara at all. The point is, we are never shown that iteration. The Dalek we are shown is definitely Clara. Too many coincidences for us to suppose otherwise (souffle girl, run you clever boy …) quite apart from the self-image and voice. And my contention is that it is the same throughout the entire series, going back to 1963. We are never shown an episode which was not shaped in some way by Clara’s (and the GI’s) intervention. She was intervening in the Doctor’s choice of Tardis, if not before. We can only speculate about what iteration zero (when she didn’t intervene)  was like, because we have never been shown it, or anything like it. We have only been shown the stable time loop that eventually arose after many iterations.

    It’s not a ‘closed loop’.  It’s a massive change, because it includes Fragmented Clara, and assumes Sexy (who already told us that she chose her Doctor) is controlling Clara to ensure Clara entices Hartnell to the ‘correct’ Tardis.

    Which has always been the case, although we didn’t know it. Except in iteration zero, which we have never been shown and can only speculate about. Perhaps in iteration zero the Doctor chose the right Tardis by chance, or perhaps he was guided by someone other than Clara, or perhaps he chose the wrong Tardis and had much less exciting adventures, which we have not seen but it’s no great loss because we have Clara’s assurance that they would have been less fun.

    #10129
    MTGradwell @replies

    But she also says (at the end) – just after they’ve found HurtDr – “But I saw all of you… 11 faces, all of them you, you’re the eleventh Dr”

    He doesn’t disagree with her. So given that his timestream was supposed to contain his future versions as well (he says so!), where does that leave us? Continuity error…?

    Maybe Clara sensed that it would be too dangerous to look ahead, so she voluntarily confined herself to looking at 11th and preceding Doctors. She didn’t bother to mention that she had deliberately avoided looking at future Doctors, because that would go without saying. By entering the Doctor’s timestream they are already doing the most dangerous thing any time traveller could conceivably do, and looking ahead in it would only make things even worse.

    Or maybe it was a continuity error.

    #10095
    MTGradwell @replies

    @shazzbot:

    This is why I [sadly] suspect we’ve seen the last of River.  She knows that from now on, all she will have are the dreams of her Doctor, and no more adventures.

    From River’s perspective, i.e. the River in the Library, you are right. This was her goodbye to the Doctor. “From now on, all she will have are the dreams of her Doctor, and no more adventures”. Yes. And it’s good that she gets a parting kiss with a version of the Doctor who understands what that means, rather than her previous parting kiss with a Doctor who didn’t know her at all. But we are not shown her timeline. We are shown the Doctor’s. He’s seen her beginning and her ending, but there’s a lot in between that he hasn’t seen yet, or if he has then we haven’t been shown it.

    When does River get to know the Doctor’s name? When does she learn the significance of it, and how important it is to keep it secret? How does she nonetheless know that it’s OK to speak it out loud when the Doctor’s companions are being killed?

    Presumably she knows something even we don’t know for sure yet, that the Doctor will escape from Trenzalore relatively unscathed. The most natural explanation for that is that she does meet him again, earlier in her timeline but later in his. What is meant by her final “spoilers”? And will she be grandmother to the Doctor’s granddaughter? There’s so much that is still unrevealed.

    #10079
    MTGradwell @replies

    @thommck

    I thought it odd how the Tomb TARDIS looked the same on the inside. Does that mean the Doctor never changes it? That will probably be explained as all the versions of the TARDIS console where there, that’s just the one they happened to walk in to.

    I’d guess that the Tardis, while dying, was still sentient enough to recognise which Doctor incarnation was entering, and to reorganise itself according to his preferences, placing his preferred control room just inside the doors of the inner sanctum, rather than one of the other control rooms.

    The secret entrance to the catacombs confused me. Who put it there?Was it in the Doctors last will or do all timelords get a secret entrance with their wife’s name on it!?!

    I suspect it was put there by River. She sent a memo through time to her younger (i.e. still living) self: “You need to travel to Trenzalore, to these exact space-time coordinates <co-ords go here>. When you get there, You’ll see what looks like the ruins of a giant Tardis. Don’t worry, it’s just the Doctor’s grave. You must set up a fake grave of your own, again at the exact coordinates specified, which will actually be a secret entrance to the catacombs below….”

    Clara And the Doc said they were walking through the broken TARDIS but when they re-emerged they were outside the doors. What went on there?

    The dying Tardis’s outer shell is broken. Some of its rooms have “leaked out” and merged with the catacombs below ground, forming a seamless whole. However there is an inner core which is still intact and unbreached, which can only be opened by saying the Doctor’s name. This is the control room. Note that in Journey to the Centre of the Tardis we were told that the Control room is the safest part of the Tardis.

    River Song – I need a diagram to work her part out! I think it would’ve been helpful to signpost she was the Library version from the start. It leads me to wonder why they chose to do that? Why not just have the real River?

    If the real River had spoken the Doctor’s name, all those around might have heard it. It wouldn’t have been a secret any more. And it was important for it to be kept a secret. Also, the Library version of River is near the end of her timeline. She knows many things, including much that the Doctor doesn’t know. It was important for her to be knowledgeable. To know, for instance, the Doctor’s name. To know that she could say it, and the consequences wouldn’t be too terrible (and how did she know that? That has to be a revelation for another day. Spoilers. I’m guessing that she either meets the Doctor again, in his future, and gets the full story from him, or she gets it from fractured Clara.)

    How could River open the tomb doors if only the Doctor & Clara could see/hear her? Are we meant to believe the TARDIS could also see/hear her?

    Yes. She said as much: “The Tardis can still hear me. Lucky thing, since ‘im indoors is being so useless.”

    You’d think the Doctor knew the name of all the planets so why was this a mystery to him.

    The Doctor’s good, but not that good. There’s billions of planets out there. He’s lived a long time, but not long enough to learn all their names. And this planet lay in his future. Timelords try not to find out too much about their own personal future, because of the dangerous paradoxes that entails. The Doctor didn’t try hard to find out what Trenzalore was because he had his suspicions, and he didn’t want to see those suspicions confirmed.

    a) Old Who happened,
    b) The GI changed everything
    c) Clara got rid of the GI timeline virus meaning they had not changed anything

    I don’t see it that way, quite.  How did the Doctor encounter Dalek Oswin and Victorian Clara in “Old Who”? “Old Who”, from its beginning, is and always has been the timeline in which the GI and then Clara changed everything. There is no pre-intervention timeline, or if there is then it is very different from anything that has ever been televised, all the way down to the first Doctor selecting a different Tardis.

    You spotted a lot of other interesting things, and raised other questions that I don’t have answers to, but I hope that what I have written is of some use.

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