@lisa    Half-faced man was dressed in late nineteenth century style, it’s true, but then Deep Breath was set sometime in the 1880s, judging by the style of the women’s dresses, so it was in keeping – certainly not as anachronistic and out of place as the costume appropriate to an undertaker of that period would be on for a newly arrived alien…[Read more]

@Juniperfish   Yes, sorry! I was nit-picking and should have made it clear that, apart from that quibble, I agreed with your point.  I am still puzzled by the decision to call the alien the Fisher King though, given that the name has such resonance.  I kept looking for something definite that might tie it in to the grail legend, but failed.  If y…[Read more]

Yet another excellent episode and a beautifully intricate bootstrap loop.  My immediate feeling after the first viewing was that the ending seemed a bit rushed, with too much left to the Doctor’s explanation in the final minutes, but I realise after a second watch this morning that this was because I hadn’t been concentrating sufficiently to spot…[Read more]

@lisa  Clara’s leaf looked like a sycamore or maple leaf, so you are right; nothing like a rowan (also known as mountain ash) leaf.  The rowan was sometimes planted by the doors of houses to guard against witches and other evils. I’m a bit doubtful about the druid connection, though.  Almost all of what is known for certain about the druids of an…[Read more]

@lisa  No, I have never met Rohan, despite the Edinburgh connection.  I came across his books originally while browsing in bookshops, as is my habit, but it is clear from his writing alone that he has eclectic interests and a thorough understanding of the essentials of archaeology, cultural anthropology and mythology.  I tend to be highly cr…[Read more]

@bendubz11   I stand corrected 😳

I hadn’t come across the term in that context, and it doesn’t appear in any of my books on ornithology, though admittedly the latter are chiefly reference books for identification.

@purofilion   I wasn’t disparaging the bonkers theorising.  I just prefer the notion that the big bad in this case is somethi…[Read more]

@jphamlore

The more I think about it, the undersea base the Drum does not make sense.

Unless my memory is at fault, I don’t think anyone in the episode was claiming that it had been built originally for the purpose of exploiting oil or other mineral resources.  It is adjacent to or within what had been a military base prior to the dam b…[Read more]

@bendubz11

Clara’s mother’s maiden name = Ravenwood
Ravens = SONG birds
Wood –> “the only water in the forest is RIVER”

An intriguing argument but, while your first and third points can be taken as valid evidence, ravens cannot, by any stretch of the imagination be described as song birds.  The sounds they make are harsh quarking noises and a…[Read more]

@lisa   Good call re Raven.  All the discussion of raven references had reminded me, also, of the Tlingit myth (although I wasn’t sufficiently well informed to know that it was specifically Tinglit; only that belonged to peoples of the north west coast of  North America).

Have you ever come across the Winter of the World novels by Michael Scot…[Read more]

@jphamlore

The Doctor has encountered plenty of phenomena that looked like they might be ghosts but from what I recall never blurted out they might be ghosts. What does that actually mean?

I suspect that this is a deliberate piece of misdirection on the part of the Doctor.  The things have the stock characteristics of ghosts as many people c…[Read more]

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@PaperMoon

One thing I noticed was that the Doctor refers to Orion being viewed from the other side

The Doctor presumes that the message contained in the glyphs on the wall of the space ship and being relayed by the ‘ghosts’ consists of coordinates to guide someone to the site.  The problem with this, as I noted in an earlier post, is tw…[Read more]

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@FiveFaces   What is generally forbidden, because it could lead to significant paradoxes and the possibility of a major temporal disruption, is for the Doctor to double back on his own time line.  In other circumstances there is no reason why he cannot go back to observe and investigate the origins of a situation in which he finds himself; it wo…[Read more]

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