BBC APPROVED SPOILERS...

@Miapatrick

but the Osgoods knew that there was nothing in the boxes

Yes, I know.  Where did I say or imply anything to the contrary?

Whether the idea that they should become the living embodiment of the peace was their own or was suggested initially by the Doctor, the fact that they had been aware which of them was which during the negotiations…[Read more]

@Miapatrick

the point about the peace is that it isn’t dictated by the doctor. It was negotiated between Kate and the Zygon leader

plus the others present at the time.

In The Day of the Doctor it is clear that this was what the Doctor intended, and presumably what happened.  I think, though, that in the agreement they came to the boxes were in…[Read more]

@jphamlore

Sadly I must totally disagree that this episode had anything to say about war, especially its status today.

I’m not sure that anyone is arguing that this episode and the preceding one were about war as such, still less that they were about the kind of double-think and obfuscatory language manifest increasingly in the justification and…[Read more]

@Arbutus

A Zygon took Kate’s form at the original treaty negotiation, but we don’t know that the Zygon kept that form afterward. Since no mention was ever made, I’m inclined to think it didn’t.

The possibility that the Zygon who copied Kate in The Day of the Doctor had survived in that form had not occurred to me, although the existence of two Kat…[Read more]

@Bluesqueakpip and @Miapatrick   Either reading could make sense, because the link established between them would have imbued human Osgood with the Zygon’s greater maturity and confidence, and the Zygon Osgood with her human counterpart’s knowledge of the Doctor.  I prefer to see them as having become two halves of one person as, it seems, they wi…[Read more]

@Arbutus   Yes, that exchange between Osgood and the Doctor, as they walked up from the beach where they landed after their bailout, was very revealing.  It was she who realised immediately the possible significance of the fact that Bonnie/Clara had contacted him before firing the missile, and that the first missile had misfired, and she who un…[Read more]

A trivial afterthought:  The Doctor, when challenged to give his first name, decided to call himself Basil; a trifle hubristic, perhaps, since it derives from the Greek for king 😕

and  erratum, post#46594, last paragraph, penultimate sentence should read:   … the Zygon whom *Bonnie* forces into reverting to his original form.

Maybe I shou…[Read more]

@nerys

which version of Kate are we seeing?

You posted that while I was writing mine above.  Maybe the ambiguity was deliberate.

I took the disagreement as to the amount of time that had passed to the fact that Clara had spent most of it in a quasi-dream state and, as in dreams, here time sense was distorted.  What we were seeing was a highly t…[Read more]

Some further thoughts, in no particular order.

Bonnie, the commander of the rebel Zygon faction chooses to replicate Clara for obvious reasons, but clearly without realising initially that the link works both ways, and without fully understanding what Clara is or has become. So with something of Clara inside her head she has rendered…[Read more]

This, on first viewing yesterday evening, left me feeling more than a little breathless, and having to resist the urge to watch it again immediately.  Better to let it sink in overnight and leave it to the morning.

We could scarcely have hoped for a better sequel to last week, ratcheting up to the culminating scene and a speech delivered wi…[Read more]

BBC APPROVED SPOILERS...

@soundworld   Yes, I too thought that scene was very well done, not least in the way it illustrated that certain truth.  Killing at a distance, however it is done, tends to be dehumanising because it divorces the bomber crew, those who launch the missiles or the drone operator from the end result, and the human cost can then be obscured behin…[Read more]

@winston

Is it the layout of the store or the shoppers or the employees? Maybe the lighting or the music?

In the case of Tesco and branches of certain other supermarket chains I have ventured into, probably a combination of all of these things.  I do sometimes patronise Sainsbury’s, a branch of which is situated only 20 minutes walk from where I…[Read more]

@Starla   @Lisa   Re the UNIT soldiers being fooled into entering the church:  since the Zygons were able to lift information from the soldiers’ minds and use that information to replicate members of their families, perhaps they were able also to manipulate the soldiers’ minds into believing and trusting what they saw, despite the briefing that…[Read more]

@Mersey   To add to what @Bluesqueakpip has just said, I lived in Belfast, in Northern Ireland, for nearly three years in the early 1970s, when terrorist bomb explosions were a daily occurrence, some of which I witnessed at close range.  I was fortunate in that neither I nor any of my close friends was harmed, but it was always a pos…[Read more]

@pedant

Art is informed by the real world (and, when things are working properly, vice versa). And it must always be fearless, or it fails.

Seconded, with emphasis.

@Mersey  Please, I beg you, do not assume that because we disagree to some extent on what is or is not an appropriate subject to be referenced in a show such as Doctor Who, that we…[Read more]

@Kharis

War is neither glamorous nor attractive. It is monstrous.

As a pacifist and the daughter of pacifists I concur wholeheartedly. I find it hard to understand how even in these days, when the immediacy of television reporting and the internet make it difficult to ignore the reality, war can still be glamorised and the soldiers who are…[Read more]

@Phaseshift  I should have put my approval of your righteous rant on record before now, but let it be known, belatedly, that I punched the air when I read it.  Was it a Koestler coincidence, or are you telepathic?

The only review of the episode which I have read, other than the Guardian, was in the Independent, and that was enthusiastically a…[Read more]

@janetteB   After our discussion of the carvings on the pillars of the hall in The Girl Who Died I decided to go back and take another look.  As a result I realise that I was almost certainly wrong in identifying it as having affinities with the Urnes style.  In fact it looks more like the Oseberg style (after the ship burial found there), whi…[Read more]