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@winston    It might have been slightly more accurate to say ‘leaping about like a slightly geriatric mountain goat’ , but I am determined to return to a state where I can leap, in however creaky a fashion  🙂

@puroandson  What a lovely idea!  It would be delightful to be read to whilst I recovered.  The procedure itself and the immediate aftermath shouldn’t be too bad an ordeal, judging by past experience, although the following weeks of restricted activity may prove tedious.

The weather was foul today, raining and blowing a gale from early morning onwards, with the wind roaring around the building and wuthering in the chimney, and although the skies cleared later in the afternoon it was another day lost as far as gardening was concerned.  Very frustrating, as there is a lot to do before spring really gets going, and in my present state I can only manage a little at a time.  Fortunately the forecast is better for the rest of the week.

As for your story of the guy with the anal piercings and tattoos, I can only say that I am thankful that I did not read it before eating 😮

 

 

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@whisht  @arbutus  @bluesqueakpip    Thanks!   Fingers crossed and touching wood, but if the op this time is as successful as when I had the other hip done ten years ago I should, by late summer, be leaping about like a mountain goat  🙂

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@puroandson

Thank you! And warm Easter wishes to you both in return, though I suppose Easter day is almost over where you are.

There is, indeed, a large chocolate egg for me to nibble on, and a chicken in the fridge waiting to be roasted with tarragon, butter and garlic.  There are also some fairly urgent tasks to attend to in the garden, but showers are forecast and, since the clocks went forward to BST last night, my body clock is discombobulated, so I will probably spend much of the day in self indulgent laziness.

I now have a date for the hip op – May 4th, assuming all goes to plan, which gives me plenty of time to clean my flat thoroughly and cook enough to fill the freezer in anticipation of six weeks on crutches.  I’m saving my rewatch of series 9 for that period of convalescence.

All the best,

Mudlark

 

 

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@ichabod    I should have re-read your post #51198 before pressing *submit*, as I had failed to register that you were enquiring about the ordinary DVD boxed set, not the blu ray.   The release date is the same, though, and I think that all the extras are included in both.

 

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@ichabod    Delighted that you are back and that all is going well with your eye; eyesight is so precious. So add my <hug> to the rest.

The S9 full series blu ray boxed set is due for release tomorrow (Monday) in the UK and April 5th in the US and Canada.  I don’t usually buy boxed sets of TV shows, but I am making an exception in this case, and possibly in a few others.  I’m seeing the orthopaedic surgeon on the 16th to discuss a hip replacement and if, as seems probable,  I’m going to be largely housebound for an extended part of the late spring/early summer I will need plenty of entertainment and distraction. What better companion than the Doctor in my enforced idleness 🙂

In anticipation I have just bought a smart LED TV and a blu ray player to replace my relatively elderly LCD set and DVD player. It’s absurd: the two together cost less than a quarter of the price I paid for the old, non HD, not-in-the-least smart 22 inch set 12 years ago.  Such is technological progress!

 

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@puroandson  @jimthefish

Related fact of very little importance.  Yaffle is an old name for the  Green Woodpecker, the bird on which Professor Yaffle was based.  The favourite food of the bird is ants, and the name comes from it’s ‘laughing’ call.

 

 

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@kbranagh  @puroandson

I don’t think that the Doctor who threw the screwdriver to the child Davros was an earlier incarnation. It is the same incarnation operating in a temporal loop.  The sequence as I read it is as follows:

The Doctor, looking for a bookshop, accidentally ends up in a battlefield in the war on Skaro. Or maybe the Tardis, who does not distinguish clearly between past and future, thought it necessary to bring him there.  He throws the screwdriver to the child in the handmine field but then, on learning that the child is Davros, reacts instinctively, runs back to the Tardis and travels back to the future, minus screwdriver (hence the sonic shades).

Shortly after this he learns that the now ancient Davros is looking for him. By now he has had time to reflect on his actions and to feel guilt and shame at having abandoned the child, and so he thinks that he has a moral duty to go and face his old enemy.  But to give himself time to prepare, or perhaps simply to procrastinate, he seeks refuge on Karn. When he arrives there the conversation with Ohila which we saw in the prologue takes place, and in that exchange there is an oblique reference to what happened on Skaro.

‘Did something happen?‘ asks Ohila,  and then ‘Was it recent?’ and the Doctor reluctantly admits it because, from his point of view, it was in his immediate past.

Davros probably kept the screwdriver initially because it was useful, and perhaps as a memento of the person who rescued him; he wouldn’t have realised who that person was until he met him much later in Genesis of the Daleks. When he did realise, he kept it still as a constant reminder that the Doctor had initially abandoned him, and as something which might come in useful as a weapon against the Doctor, though as such it would only work against the incarnation who had given it to him.  Earlier incarnations would have had no memory of the encounter, because for them it hadn’t happened yet, so for them the screwdriver would have had no significance and there would have been no reason for them to answer his summons.

The opportunity came when he, Davros, was centuries older and the Doctor had finally regenerated into the version whom he had met in the minefield.  He could now arrange to have him intercepted at a time when, for the Doctor, the encounter was still very recent, and play on the sense of guilt he could assume the Doctor was feeling, in order to lure him into a face to face meeting.

When, after this encounter, the Doctor goes back to rescue the child Davros, he does not take back the screwdriver, because to do so would alter the future in which Davros still had it in his possession

Hope that makes sense 😉

 

 

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@puroandson

are you a detective?

Well, google has its uses – which is not to say that there are not some points of resemblance between archaeological research and police detective work.  It is a bit early in the day here for gargleblasters, but I might help myself to a lunchtime beer. Not ‘warm’ though; cask conditioned ale should be served at cellar temperature, i.e. cool but not refrigerated, since further chilling kills the taste.  Mind you, there are some beverages sold as beer where killing the taste is a good idea, assuming you choose to drink them in the first place 🙂

Yes, I was following the discussion of the precise meanings of re-boot and DEM, but it didn’t seem as if there was any need for me to add my ha’p’orth.  Others provided cogent arguments for why re-boot is a perfectly apt way of referring to the restarting of Doctor Who, and if @bluesqueakpip ‘s  comprehensive definition of what does and does not constitute a DEM does not serve to change the minds of those who believe that a DEM is any plot resolution which they don’t happen to like, or one which they didn’t see coming because they weren’t paying attention, they are clearly impervious to reasoned argument and are best ignored.

@janetteb  and PuroSolo   The War and Peace adaptation suffered somewhat from being compressed into 6 hours 20 minutes, as opposed to the 20 hours of the 1972 version, but it had the advantage over the latter of being filmed largely on location in Russia and Lithuania, and visually it was very impressive.  Inevitably they did not have the resources to do justice to the battle scenes, though the ten minutes or so allocated to Borodino were used effectively.  All in all I thought that, within its limitations, it was well done.  Paul Dano was excellent as Pierre, to the point where one could overlook the fact that he is neither large nor fat, and Jessie Buckley was equally good as Marya.   Others were miscast though: Lily James was unconvincing as Natasha, and Tuppence Middleton isn’t nearly voluptuous enough for Helene and didn’t, to my mind, seem to have grasped the essence of Helene’s character.

I would be interested to see the costuming blog, Janette. The men’s costumes looked OK on the whole, to my eye, at least, though I gather that there were some inaccuracies.  The women’s costumes on the other hand were all over the place, as you say – often more 1912 than 1812, and some could have come straight off a Hollywood red carpet.  Were the costume designers incapable of doing the necessary research? or did theythink that accuracy was unimportant?

As for the hip, I will know more by next week, when I have an appointment with the radiology department at the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, which conveniently enough is only four miles from where I live.  The right hip was done nearly ten years ago and the worst part of that was being on crutches for six weeks afterwards, and then having to limit activity for a further six months until the prosthesis was firmly embedded and muscle tone was restored.  It was worth it, though.

 

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@puroandson

I’ve moved the discussion of the George Gently review to the pub, since it seems a more appropriate venue.

As you may have gathered, I was intrigued by your description of the ‘review’, so I have been doing a bit of digging. I couldn’t find any such review of the episode ‘The Lost Child’ in the British press, and it certainly wasn’t in the Daily Wail, whose review was favourable.  The only thing which did correspond in pretty much every detail was by an American blogger and, to be honest, I found it so absurd it was funny.  I’m not even sure that the writer realised that the Gently stories are set in the 1960s.

I quote: ‘…propaganda from the Left’   ‘dishonest homilies from the leftist media’  ‘ethically challenged entertainment’   ‘Leftists can’t help but take any small opportunity to take a jab at anything which is government run’.  Does this sound familiar?  If this was what you saw,  at least it lets us Brits off the hook!  – which isn’t to say that there are not plenty of people here who think like this, even if they don’t express it in the same way; I just doubt that they would take this particular show as a pretext for their ranting.

Thanks for the ‘welcome back’.  I have been looking in on a fairly regular basis and reading with interest, even though I haven’t been finding much to say for myself lately.  I’ve been in my usual state of post-Christmas/New Year hibernation and, prompted by the BBC dramatisation of War and Peace which has just finished, am re-reading the novel to remind myself of all that the book is, which the dramatisation (good though it was in its way) is not.  This in itself is time consuming.

Left hip is acting up, so I am currently lurching around like some monster from a Hammer horror film and probably looking at a hip replacement op in the not-too-distant future, which is a bore; otherwise life is good.

 

 

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@puroandson

Where was this review?  I ask because the terminology  ‘liberals and therefore Communists’  sounds more like the US than the UK, where ‘liberal’ has a rather different meaning.  On the other hand, it is the Right Wing in the US who ‘sneer at all things government’.  As @pendant says,  the people who spout this kind of thing are rather more noisy than they are numerous, in the UK at least, though I fear the numbers are growing, thanks to a barrage of misinformation and propaganda from our current government and the RW press.  Sadly, I have come to the conclusion that there is a large section of the population who simply do not ‘think’.

If I thought such views represented the majority I would become profoundly depressed, so I try to maintain the hope that the climate of opinion will shift again, and before it is too late.  In the meantime, I do what little I can to kick against the pricks  – and you can take ‘pricks’ any way you wish 😈

 

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This is the first time that I have watched 42 since it originally aired. Beforehand, the fact that I could recall very little about the episode and had never previously bothered to re-watch it seemed ominous, but in the event I was pleasantly surprised – which I suppose is the right order of things ;  ‘Blessed are they who expect nothing’  and so forth 🙂

There is little subtlety at any level, but if you don’t examine or analyse it too closely, and ignore a few highly implausible elements, it is a pretty taut piece of story-telling, pacey and exciting enough to have kept me engrossed and on the edge of my seat, at any rate.  It is also visually impressive and conveyed very vividly to me the heat and the grungy, sweaty interior of that inter-stellar equivalent of an ageing and run-down container ship.

If this is indicative of what is to come we will probably be well entertained, but I fear that we may not find so much meat for dissection and discussion on these boards.  We’ll see, and perhaps C C will surprise us by taking the show forward rather than back to old ground.

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Good wishes to everyone for the new year.  And since I happen to have a glass in my hand, a toast to the forum and all who post here.

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@pedant   Or, as someone I knew once observed, ‘Security is the feeling of knowing that one’s trowel is tucked firmly into the back pocket of one’s jeans’.

Even more comforting than knowing where one’s towel is.

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You were right, @puroandson , there is something that I needed throughout my professional life without ever realising the lack. Forget my trusty WHS forged steel 4″ trowels;* so much labour could have been saved with a trowel that was sonic 🙂  I’m not sure about the design of River’s trowel, though – far too baroque.  What was with the blunt, wavy edge, for a start – unless the curves were supposed to somehow modulate the sonic pulses?  I’d have gone for something more streamlined.

As for the rest, I am re-joining the thread far to late in the day to do much more than echo what others have said days ago, and for any failure to acknowledge those people, I apologise in advance.

The trailer left me with a slightly apprehensive feeling, but my worries were unfounded. For the whole hour on Christmas evening there was a silly grin plastered over my face and, for the last 20 minutes or so, perhaps just the teeniest lump in the throat.  It was a gloriously mad whirlwind of an episode, fizzing and sparking with jokes and one-liners, and the combination of Capaldi and Kingston was everything I hoped for and more.  River was in fine, amoral bad-girl form, and the Doctor, after his initial bemusement at her failure to recognise him, in wry mood, deciding (as @ichabod noted ) to milk all the fun he could out of the situation, right up to that pivotal moment of stillness when River, having finished her impassioned declaration, finally became aware of the steady gaze of the person next to her and turned to face it – a moment perfectly realised by both actors.

One of the delights of second and third viewings was being able to focus on the subtle changes of expression on Capaldi’s face.

I agree with all those who have said that River’s failure to recognise the Doctor was in large part due to the fact that she knew of only twelve faces, but I think that there was more to it than that.  If she had not been wholly preoccupied with her schemes she might have picked up a good deal earlier on what he was trying to tell her. Even his initial, delighted grin on seeing her should have been enough to cause her to give him a second look, if she had been paying attention.

I think it was @blenkinsopthebrave who observed that the first part of the episode had more of an RTD ‘feel’, while the second part was pure Moffat, and I can see the point, although I think that even the first part was slicker and funnier than anything I can recall of what RTD wrote for the show, and the segue from one part to the other was very deftly managed, so that nothing jarred.

*Trowels, plural.  With use they tend to wear down to a nub and become useless except as a status symbol.

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Maybe it was the liberal infusion of Christmas spirit*, but I thoroughly enjoyed that, and will no doubt appreciate the nuances all the more when I view it again tomorrow, sober.

I’m an archaeologist from the future. I dug you up’.

In my dreams …..

* Well, a decidedly palatable Saint-Emilion.

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Just dropping in to wish you all a Very Happy and Peaceful Christmas, with much good cheer and an entertaining and enjoyable Christmas Who.

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For those of us in the UK who fancy some post-Christmas Tom Baker, The Face of Evil is on BBC4, two episodes at a time on, December 28th and 29th at 7 pm.

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@ichabod

So if he remembers the events of that period but not the attachment to Clara, the person, how will what he remembers make sense to him? If he thinks of *her* as an empty outline of an unknown person, inscrutable as to feelings or motives, he would have to see *himself* (in his past) the same way — like a game piece, with no understandable motives of its own, just being moved randomly about by the story.

That would indeed be intolerable, and I think unsustainable, but I think the text, however one reads it, is enough in itself to establish that this isn’t the case.

When Clara-on-Gallifrey first asks the Doctor about the neural block the scene cuts immediately to the diner and Clara asking ‘So what was it, the thing that you took? ‘ And the Doctor replies ‘There was only one way to keep Clara safe. I had to wipe some of her memory’.  Clara then asks ‘Of what?’ and he replies, ‘Of me’. 

So he clearly retains not only a detailed memory of what happened, he can remember his motives for acting in relation to her, and from that he has been able to deduce her importance to him, even though he is now emotionally distanced from what he felt at the time. It is as if, when he tries to focus his mind’s eye on the memory of Clara herself and anything personal that she said to him, there is a blind spot, although everything else is clear. The effect of the neural block is evidently very selective indeed.

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Back briefly

@Morpho

Is this the only time one of the Master’s ridiculously overcomplicated plans ever actually worked?!?

Certainly a thought worth pondering 🙂

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@puroandson  (son)

This is straying a little bit off topic, but I find it interesting that you associated the scenes with the Doctor at the barn with  Shane, whereas the Western film connection I first thought of was High Noon.  Both are films which made a big impression on me when I was around your age. We didn’t see all that many films, because we lived out of town, and when we did go to the cinema it was as a family treat. My parents didn’t approve much of the usual run of shoot-’em-up Westerns, but they did take us to see these two, and I think it was because, in both of them, the moral issues which arise when law has to be enforced by the gun, and the cost to the gun fighter, are examined with at least some degree of subtlety.

If this has any relevance it is because it perhaps brings us back to the Doctor, who faces the soldiers and the Time Lords, including Rassilon, unarmed,* but finally crosses the boundary when he takes the General’s weapon and shoots him.

*not even with a spoon 🙂

Puro solo

The fact Clara died prematurely indicates that the Hybrid as a prophecy remains unfulfilled due to Clara’s untimely demise on Trap Street?

As I see it, not necessarily.  The Doctor said that once Clara was in someone’s mind, she never leaves. So the Doctor, facing down Rassilon and the High Council standing in the ruins of Gallifrey with Clara-in-the-mind, could be the hybrid, without her being physically present at the time.

And now I should be going back to writing my Christmas letters, or perhaps going to bed, since it is nearly midnight here.

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@juniperfish

Watching the lovely acting tics of Capaldi, such as the slow way he raises his eyes to Clara’s face in the diner – it all leaves room for still waters running deep and yet deeper

Agreed. The directions in the script which @pedant linked to leave little room for doubt about what the writer intended, but I still maintain that the bare script itself, and the actors’ interpretation, allow for both readings. In any case, once a work of fiction has left an author’s hands, whether in print or as a TV production, the author is no longer in total control, and what the reader or viewer makes of it may be than was originally intended, but a valid interpretation, nonetheless. What an author puts into a work may be more than they are conscious of at the time of writing. I wouldn’t go so far as to say the Doctor had it all figured out, but I think it’s possible that he had a dual awareness.  As far as Jenna’s performance was concerned, I didn’t see devastation and grief; I saw an elegiac sadness, regret for what had been and could never be again and, finally, acceptance. Then she entered the Tardis console room, braced herself, and launched energetically into whatever she could experience between the penultimate heartbeat and the last.

As for the ‘denial stage of grief’ crack (I’m looking at you, @pedant ) I’ve known enough real grief in my life to know that the theoretical stages of grief don’t necessarily apply. As far as I am concerned, you face it, roll with it, and get on with living the rest of your life as best you can. If I did misread the scenes in the diner, it was more likely because I was being  being over analytical and over-rational than because I was identifying too closely.

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@jphamlore

the Matrix …  It needs an agent to go out there and explore. It needs a Doctor

Interesting idea. The Doctor did tell Clara that the Sliders talked to him when he went into it as Matrix in his youth, though he was referring to himself in the third person when he did so, and spoke as if it was a matter of hearsay.

@bluesqueakpip

the Time Lords seem to have ‘resurrection’ technology … down pat, providing they have enough information to reconstruct the mind and body.

It’s far from a new idea in science fiction, and certainly what I assumed when ‘resurrection’ was mentioned.

The sliders didn’t seem too happy with their situation, judging by the screaming face we glimpsed, so if Rassilon had been in there for centuries or millennia, that might explain the crazy megalomania when he re-emerged  😉

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@soundworld

I presume (uh-oh!) they’ve been exiled without access t0 time-machines (since they’re safely stored on Gallifrey, right?

There is always the possibility that Rassilon has an ally or two still on Gallifrey – people who managed to keep their heads down and avoid notice, so that they escaped being evicted.  Such an ally might be able to obtain a Tardis and follow him, and it wouldn’t be too difficult to locate him among the few star systems still surviving.

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@pedant

As it happens I had to go into the city to get some more paper for my printer, so I took the opportunity to pop into one of the local bookshops and do a bit of browsing.

The legends include aliens and some travellers in time and space (not Time Lords) who have rather peculiar ideas about what constitutes an entertaining reality show, but unless I blinked and missed her, Missy did not make herself known in any of them, nor was there anything to explain the anachronisms in The Woman Who Lived. The latest of the stories appears to be set at the beginning of the 17th century, though, so there is still time  🙂

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@Morpho

where are we on who the hybrid is?

Moffat is on record as saying that what he writes is a lot simpler and more straightforward than some people choose to see it (people like us, for instance), and what he wrote here certainly pointed to it being the Doctor+Clara, even though he trailed other possibilities and he has been known to lie or mislead.  At the very least the terms of the prediction are technically fulfilled and, since Gallifrey is now positioned towards the end of universe, it doesn’t leave much room for an alternative to arise – unless, of course, the Time Lords are capable of moving the whole planet back in time again.

That being the case, it would appear that the hybrid was not a hybrid in the normal sense, but the synergistic convergence of two beings of similar temperament and complementary character, one Time Lord, one human

 

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@puroandson

a control freak race

What a wonderfully apt description of the Time Lords!  It is no wonder that the thought of a maverick like the Doctor roaming loose around the universe so worries and exasperates them, even without their suspicion that he is withholding vital information.

And yes, the experience may have pushed him into a kind of temporary madness, causing him to abandon the code he has tried to live by, but it was in the end cathartic, and he has emerged from it healed.

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@tardigrade

The truth about the hybrid was, I think, far less important than the fact that the prophecy had seriously worried the Time Lords. Their fear would have been compounded by the knowledge that whatever the Doctor had learned when he ventured into the Cloister as a young man had scared him so badly that he ran. We were told that the predictions of the Matrix were accurate, but clearly they were not necessarily complete, and like the utterances of the Oracle at Delphi, could be sufficiently ambiguous to be open to different readings. In this instance everyone had opted for the worst possible interpretation.

As it turned out, if the hybrid was truly the Doctor+Clara, then the conditions could be said to have been fulfilled, since the Doctor did conquer Gallifrey, at least to the extent of ousting its rulers, and he and Clara did stand in its ruins, not while it was still populated, but during the last moments of the universe

Whether or not the Doctor had really forgotten what he had learned, or even if he knew that the truth was far less dreadful than people feared, he realised that so long as he refused to answer the question he held the advantage. As he said ‘The first rule of being interrogated is that you are the only irreplaceable person in the torture chamber. The room is yours, so work it.’  What fuelled his determination to hold out against the interrogation, even to the extent of enduring repeated torment over billions of subjective years, was above all his hatred of and rage against the Time Lords, or at least Rassilon and the others of the High Council.  They could at least have tried asking him nicely first, but instead they decided to lay a trap which resulted in Clara’s death and then to try and torture the truth out of him. Add that to the fact that he laid the blame for horrors of the Time War at their door, not to mention the fact that they had planned to save their own skins at the expense of the rest of the universe, and it isn’t really surprising that, as @puroandson said, he was absolutely resolved to escape on his own terms or not at all. That inhuman stubbornness in the face of his perceived enemies is one of the characteristics that make him the Doctor;  ‘Never give up, never give in.’

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@ichabod    I’m not sure where that query before your tag came from, but things were shifting about rather oddly when I was doing the formatting.

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?@ichabod

there is one real thing in there with him: when the Veil steps outside after him, it collapses into empty cloth and cog-wheels.

I’ll have to watch that again to be sure, but I think that it then faded and disappeared, just as the shimmering outline of the wall persisted for a few moments and then shrank to nothing.  I took this to be the lingering after effects of his mental submersion.

where was he, his physical self, while all this was going on inside the Dial + his consciousness

My theory, as outlined in comments in the Heaven Sent thread, was that his physical self might have remained  in potentia in the hard drive of the transporter, the ‘transporter’ in the dial being an analogue of the real thing.  His release or, as it turned out, his escape from the virtual reality of the confession dial was the trigger for his physical re-materialisation.  I accept that this may not be at all what SM envisaged, but it makes a lot more sense to me than his being physically present in a real clockwork castle.

As for the Last Will and Testament reference, I can’t remember whether it was the Doctor or Missy who said something to the effect that it wasn’t a very accurate analogy.  According to what the Doctor said in this episode, it was meant to be something that a dying Time Lord, or his/her mind, entered to undergo a form of ritual purification, ‘facing their demons’ before their mind was uploaded into the Matrix – which isn’t far off my original suggestion that the dials were a kind of life record/review with which a dying Time Lord would be confronted before entering the Matrix.

As you can probably tell, I have read a great deal of science fiction  in the course of my life  🙂

 

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@blenkinsopthebrave  @puroandson   Bex as a brand name was, as far as I am aware, unknown in the UK. but we did have the equivalent generic APC tablets in our medicine cabinet when I was young.  Nobody took it on a regular basis, but I remember one occasion in particular when I had recourse to it.  Some time previously I had broken a molar so badly that it had to be extracted. Unfortunately my teeth have very strong and curly roots and the extraction was difficult. Afterwards it turned out that the dentist had left fragments of the root in the gum, and a nasty and very painful abscess developed.  In desperation I took about twice the recommended dose over the course of one day, which certainly dulled the pain, but left me feeling very strange indeed 🙂

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@puroandson  @morpho

Simulation theory of the universe, yup.  We could be figments in a universe which is just a vast and complex computer simulation being run by … what?  😮   Fun idea, no?

Which is what I have been suggesting the castle in the confession dial was on a small scale – except that the Doctor in the dial wasn’t a figment.  He was just mentally plugged into it or, to put it another way, his consciousness was embedded within an avatar of himself in the simulation, so  the experience felt completely real in every detail.

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Further to my post above and earlier post #49230, I think that the events of Face the Raven/Heaven Sent/Hell Bent could be seen as the culmination of the very long game which Missy has been playing, starting with her ‘matchmaking’ between the Doctor and Clara; her dual object being to induce the Doctor to abandon the code by which he has always tried to live and to get her revenge on Rassilon.  Her first attempt to do this  was by presenting the Doctor with an invincible army of millions of cybermen, and when this failed she rethought her strategy, adopted a plan more in keeping with her instructions from the Time Lords.  She could hardly have planned the death of Clara in Trap Street, though she might have hoped that Clara would act as she did, and the result was certainly all she could have wished for.

Going off at a tangent, I’ve been meaning to say that I found Capaldi as the Doctor in icy, vengeful mode utterly, spine-tinglingly  compelling, and though it may be reprehensible of me, I do enjoy it when we see the dark side of the Doctor.  Not a role model, to be sure, but as others have said, he has always had that side to him, and that is what makes the character so endlessly fascinating.  As he said to Kovarian in A Good Man Goes to War, ‘Good men don’t need rules. Today is not the day to find out why I have so many.’

 

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@Morpho

As regards the relationship between Mayor Me and the Time Lords, I think that Missy, with her access to a means of time travel and her knowledge of the whereabouts of Gallifrey, was probably acting as go between in the events leading up to Trap Street.  As I said in comments on Heaven Sent, there are indications that Me may have had contact with Missy as early as the 17th century, if not before.  Even at the best of times Time Lords, with a few notable exceptions, are not known for the willingness to go roaming the universe in time and space, and they are currently protecting themselves by cowering near the end of the universe. In the circumstances Missy is well placed to be their errand girl – even if Missy might view her role rather differently.

From the point of view of the Time Lords, the wall of azbantium and the tantalising appearance of the word HOME would appear to be just another means of frustrating and tormenting the Doctor in their efforts to force him to give them the information they wanted. They fully expected that he would break under torture and according to the General, once they had that information he would have been released*. As far as they were concerned there was no need to provide even a potential, if highly improbable way for him to escape.  The fact that wall was in fact barring a way out seems to me to point to Missy and the scenario which @bluesqueakpip outlined.

Missy has known the Doctor since childhood and, as Blue said, she understands him very well, well enough at any rate to foresee how he would react to being trapped in this way and to push all the right buttons. So she ensures that there is a way out for someone very, very, very determined, stubborn and persistent, and to give him a bit of incentive she devises the barrier so that the word HOME appears briefly each time he arrives there.

As I have argued before (though I know you disagree), I think that the experience within the confession dial is that of a mind within a completely immersive virtual environment, and we already have the example of the Nethersphere in the last series to support such a theory.  It follows that the wall of azbantium, rather than being the real, physical barrier it appeared to be, was a metaphor for an obstacle which could only be overcome by innumerable repeated attacks on it over several billion years.

 

*Rassilon, knowing him, may have had other plans

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@puroandson  @morpho

Re the trajectory of the confession dial.

Let us assume, as a reasonable hypothesis, that Missy was indeed involved in the plot to entrap the Doctor. Rather than escaping from Gallifrey, she was allowed to do so by Rassilon and the High Council after Gallifrey had returned to the normal universe, the condition of her release being that she helped them to get their hands on the Doctor using any opportunity which presented itself. She agreed, but in the expectation that she would be able to find a way of doing so which served her own ends and, if possible, rebounded on Rassilon.  Presumably neither she nor they could have foreseen the events of The Magician’s Apprentice/The Witch’s Familiar, but when the Doctor sent her his confession dial she immediately saw it as a way of achieving the both the Time Lord’s ends and her own, in the way that @Bluesqueakpip has proposed above – and I very much like that theory; it fits perfectly with everything we have been shown.

Missy wants revenge on Rassilon, and she wants a Doctor who has been pushed beyond his self-imposed rules and who might be brought to see the universe as she sees it.  What she couldn’t have foreseen is Ohila, present at the show-down to act as a stern moral arbiter, shocking him back into a recollection of his better self.

As for the confession dial, my reading of the sequence of events is this:

The Doctor encounters the child Davros and abandons him in the hand-mine field.  Zipping forward again in time he learns that the now ancient Davros is said to be dying and his agents are looking for him.  He realises that this is almost certainly a trap but feels, in the light of his recent experience, that he has a moral duty to respond. In order to buy a little time he seeks temporary sanctuary with the Sisters of Karn, and his arrival is closely followed by that of Colony Sarff.  Ohila sends Sarff packing and then turns to address the Doctor, who emerges from the shadow of the nearby rock where he has been concealed.  It is at this point, I think, that the conversation in the prologue takes place. Ohila questions the Doctor, who looks uncomfortable and prevaricates.  ‘Did something happen?’ she asks, and then, ‘Was it recent?’  The Doctor admits it, and it seems fairly obvious that he is referring to his encounter with child. Knowing that he may be going to his death, he then hands over the confession dial, to be given to Missy as the only fellow Time Lord he knows to be accessible (Missy’s claim that it was given to her because she was his best friend was probably coloured by a good deal of wishful thinking on her part), and Missy tampers with it in the manner proposed by @bluesqueakpip.

At some point subsequently the Doctor regains possession of it and has it with him in Trap Street when Mayor Me demands that he hands it over. She passes it on to the Time Lords, who trap him in it, and he reacts as Missy intended.  I think that it was made fairly clear in this episode that the estimated four and a half billion years which he took to break out was subjective within the virtual environment of the dial, and bore no relation to the passage of time in the universe outside it.

The simpler alternative is, of course, that all the tampering was done by the Time Lords, but that would not explain the ‘back door’ represented by the diamond wall.

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@puroandson

Do I have any Christmas-viewing shows which I routinely pull out?

The short answer to that is, no.  In the run-up to Christmas I usually have to much to do to have time for more than an hour or so TV watching in the evening, if that; and if there isn’t anything on that evening which appeals, then I catch up on programmes which I recorded earlier.

Over Christmas itself, it depends whether or not I am spending it away from home.  If away, then the choice of viewing, if any, will rarely be mine; if at home, I follow a tradition begun in early childhood and listen to the Nine Lessons and Carols from King’s College, broadcast on radio on Christmas Eve afternoon, usually while I am in the kitchen making the stuffing* for the chicken (always a capon or large chicken of 4 or 5 kilos rather than a turkey), making stock from the chicken giblets, or peeling spuds and preparing veggies; or else while I am finishing decorating the living room, which I never do more than a day or two in advance.  You might expect that the Carols from Kings shown on TV would be the same, filmed, but it isn’t.

Over the Christmas holiday I generally plan to watch some of the as yet unwatched films and TV shows which I have on DVD, but it rarely works out that way, and I probably spend more time reading than viewing.  My problem with DVDs is that, having bought them, I reason that I can watch them any time and never get round to it – rather like having a first rate museum or other cultural attraction on ones doorstep, but never getting round to it until, or unless you are showing visitors around.  The DVDs of Edge of Darkness (the 1980s TV show, not the film), for example, remain unwatched since I bought them, but who knows, maybe this year ….

*note, home-made to an old family recipe, *not* that horrid stuff from a packet.

 

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@arbutus

So Raiders of the Lost Ark supplies cred for archaeologists 😯

Well, if I had taken Indiana Jones or River for role models*, my career would certainly have taken a very different course 🙂

* I would have needed a Tardis or a vortex manipulator to do so, or else uncanny foresight, but that is a minor detail.

 

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@puroandson  (Son)

When you realise he’s known clara for years -all those hundreds of years of trenzalore she really has been in his life for longer than anyone

And more important to him and more thoroughly embedded in the Doctor’s mind and hearts than any previous companion. So I agree that the story of their parting needed to be equally extraordinary – and it was certainly that. For Clara herself it was bitter-sweet. From the viewers point of view it was tragic for the Doctor; less so for him since what he is left with at the end is probably little more than the wistful, nagging sense of something missing, something he can’t quite pin down – a bit like like someone waking and knowing that they have been dreaming, but unable to recall the dream itself.  Maybe he will continue worrying at the problem for a while, trying to fill that Clara-shaped hole in his memory; or maybe he will give up on it and shut it away in a compartment of his mind where it will no longer bother him.

You are right, too, about the whole of this series building up to Clara’s leaving, and quite a lot of people here noticed that the Doctor seemed to have some kind of premonition of her death, or an ending of some sort, though clearly he didn’t foresee how or when.

Like you, I’m looking forward very much to seeing River and the Doctor together and I hope that the Christmas episode does them justice.  I rather like River as a character – well, she’s an archaeologist, so I’m bound to identify with her, right?  (I hasten to add that I bear little resemblance to her in any other respect, though).

I wouldn’t mind some of your mother’s drugs – just a very, very small dose. It might reduce my  pangs of conscience about the mountain of Christmas correspondence which I have yet to start on  🙂

Oh, and if you haven’t yet looked it up, grovelling means crawling or behaving in an excessively humble way in asking forgiveness or for a favour from someone.

Mudlark

 

 

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@puroandson

eerm excuse me I say: I mentioned the perception filter first didn’t we boy?

😳  grovelling apologies. I must have missed the post in which you did so.

*sigh*  So many posts, so little time to read them all – and I’m not a fast reader.

So it’s a case of two minds, and all that.  The idea came to me independently of you or @whisht when I was watching the episode for the third time, but credit should be given where it’s due.

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@arbutus @ichabod    .

Did anyone notice that the Doctor, on being ordered to “lay down your weapons”, dropped his spoon to the table?

Me too 🙂  that was a detail which leapt out at me on first viewing, and I grinned. Even Robot of Sherwood has its resonances.

Before that, I also enjoyed the double meaning of his response to Clara in the diner, when she asked if he had been travelling, and he answered, ‘Yes, from time to time’.

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@bluesqueakpip

I’m not sure that our interpretations are all that far apart, and maybe I didn’t express my ideas very well.  I do think, though, that it is unlikely that all trace of Clara, who was threaded through his whole timeline since he first left Gallifrey, and had been a hugely important part of two of his lives, could be completely removed from his mind unless all memory of everything which had happened since The Bells of St John were also wiped.

Certainly I got the impression that when he walked into the diner he had a subliminal sense of some trace or echo, but I concede that I may be reading to much into the way he started playing Clara’s theme, and the fact that he needed very little prompting to launch into his story.

According to my reading of the scenes in the diner, therefore, the observant, logical, analytical part of his mind was able to work out the identity of the person he was talking to, just from the ‘tells’ in her responses to his story, let alone the dematerialising diner, his reappearing Tardis and the message on the chalkboard, but at the same time there was a complete cognitive disconnect, and it was this disconnection which I thought he was trying to communicate.  @whisht likened it to the partial bypassing of a perception filter, and the same analogy had occurred to me.   I  agree, though, that it is unlikely that he would retain any clear recollection of the encounter subsequently.

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@countscarlioni

Once the Doctor, assuming he truly did not remember Clara in the diner scene, got back into his own Tardis, would he not immediately search the Tardis’s data banks for “Clara” and recover at least some of the lost memories? For him, it’s surely only a temporary loss of some memories. Have I missed something? Is there something extra clever about the neural block?

By the time the Doctor enters his Tardis he has already received enough information to have worked out who the woman in the diner was, and he could, as you say, consult the Tardis records; that is if the latter are still accessible, because Me/Clara could have tampered with those records as @tardigrade pointed out , or the Tardis herself could have done some editing, to protect him.  But whatever he can piece together about her makes little essential difference, because what has been erased is far more than just the facts.

When Donna’s memory was wiped by the Doctor it was as if the whole section of her life involving him had been snipped out, and the cut edges joined seamlessly. On that occasion he used telepathy, but now he uses the neural block, which he says is a better way, and this seems to be because it can be programmed to be highly selective.  The result amounts to a permanent disjunction in his memories, so that he can recall the adventures he had with Clara, even if the memories are a bit fuzzy – he mentions the ice warriors and the mummy on the Orient Express,  he knows that he had a companion in these adventures  and has worked out that her name was Clara, but even face to face with her and, as I still think, aware of who she must be, he cannot use that information to fill the hole where she was.  The inner eye of memory is no longer capable of *seeing* her there, nor can he recall how it felt to be in her company; and crucially as @arbutus and @tardigrade observed, the emotional connection which bound them together so tightly has gone.  This, it seemed to me, was what the Doctor is telling Clara in that last conversation in the diner. In its it own way it is as sad a resolution as if he had failed to recognise her completely, except that enough remains for the echoes of what was to be captured in a song or a story.

 

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@pedant   Fair enough.  The strength of the text and of the actors’ interpretation is that they accommodate different interpretations 😎

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@lisa  @ichabod

The Doctor lies. Again.

Exactly!  Or, if not lying outright, he has been a bit economical with the truth.  If he intended the neural block for himself all along, it probably wasn’t programmed for a full erasure.  He said that once Clara was in your head she never left, and perhaps it was only this Clara-in-the-head he meant to remove.  When he first woke in the desert no doubt his brain was more than a little scrambled, but by the time he reached the diner the memories had started to reassemble – enough at the very least for him to spot the Clara-shaped hole and put a name to it.

It may be that he really did not recognise Clara at first and the gradual or sudden realisation of who it was he was talking to was in the manner I suggested in my response to @ozitenor ,  but I was watching Capaldi’s subtle changes of expression, and I can’t shake the feeling that from the first he was aware of rather more than he was letting on.  By the end, as I have said in earlier posts, all the oblique and coded references in their conversation and their body language left me with a strong feeling, if not certainty, that the Doctor and Clara had reached a mutual, if unspoken understanding. When they parted he knew perfectly well who she was, even though she was no longer ‘in his mind’ and his memories of her in his past were more like a story told, and she knew that he knew; and they were content in that knowledge.  So he reads her last message to him on the chalk board, picks up his ‘doctorish’ coat, and is ready to embark on the next phase of his life.

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@ozitenor

For what it’s worth, my take on the issues raised in your post #48938 points 3 and 4. is as follows.  I read the initial sequence of events as you did: when the Doctor regained consciousness he was in a very confused state – waking up in the desert with no idea how he got there would be enough to ensure that, even without the after effects of the neural block – but it probably would not be long before he recalled the Tardis, and since his last memory of it was in London, he probably made his way back there to look for it.  The alternative suggested by @tardigrade is also very plausible, but I think if that had been the case, and he could sense it nearby in the desert, it is more likely that he would have headed straight for it instead of wandering around long enough to pick up a new guitar.

When he fails to find it in London he reasons that it must be somewhere in the desert, near to where he woke, so he heads back to Nevada and goes looking, having hitched a lift in the pick-up truck in which see him arriving at the diner.  How he paid for all this is anybody’s guess, though Clara and Me might have ensured that he had enough money on him for contingencies – or perhaps he earned it by busking.  The amount of time which passed while all this was happening is probably not important.  It would not have been difficult for Me and Clara to keep tabs on him – Me had been doing that for several centuries, after all, and without the benefit of a Tardis at her disposal as far as we know.

Clara could have left the Tardis near him and in plain sight when she dumped him unconscious in the desert, but she didn’t because, as I read it, she was doing all she could to ensure that the Doctor did not forget her entirely. So she set up the alternative scenario with the diner.  Maybe the choice of that form for her Tardis was random, a copy of the original chosen simply as an anomaly in the wilderness which would be likely to attract his attention, or maybe during their travels together the Doctor had told her about some of his adventures with Amy and Rory and mentioned it, so she chose that form as particularly likely to attract his attention.  On the other hand, since she and Me apparently did not know how to operate the chameleon circuit, the most likely possibility to my mind is that it was the choice of the Tardis itself – probably the Doctor’s Tardis if it was, as it seems to have been, stashed inside the diner-Tardis, but conceivably the diner-Tardis, since the Doctor had been inside the latter briefly, and it might have become slightly attuned to him in the process.

By the time he walked into the diner he has, as you say, had time to piece together his fragmentary memories and noticed the hole left by Clara, just as a Doctor shaped hole had been left in the universe after the Claricle in The Dalek Asylum had hacked into the records of him and erased them.  He even remembers the name Clara and says, significantly I think, that he would know her face anywhere, though there is no sign that he does when he says it.

By the time he had told his story and their conversation in the diner ended, he would, as I have said before, have to have been extraordinarily slow on the up-take not to have realised who it was he had been talking to, after the breadcrumb trail left by Clara, and all the hints and clues she had dropped.  I imagine it was like bumping into some stranger and starting a conversation, only to realise after you had been talking to them for some time, that this was someone you had heard or read a good deal about but not recognised from their description.

I got the impression that even when he first walked into the place he had some subliminal awareness of its significance, else why did he start picking out Clara’s theme and launch into his narrative?  And then, at the end, he played the theme in full, which again I think is significant.  And then he sees the diner dematerialise around him, and the portrait of Clara on his Tardis.  What could be plainer?

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@puroandson

if the pulse isn’t working then her heart’s not working then how does anything happen.

The answer to that seems to be that she is existing in a kind of personal time-bubble, and the time within it is a single instant of her life, indefinitely sustained.  Since she can interact with people and things in normal time and space, she could be thought of as living in a state of active stasis – which is a contradiction in terms, I know, and doesn’t make scientific sense within the frame of anything we currently understand about the nature of the universe. But we are talking Time Lord technology here, and who knows more about the relationship between space and time then the Time Lords?  Besides, as I think you commented earlier, Doctor Who isn’t really science fiction – at least not in the sense of the kind of science fiction which confines itself to what is plausible according to our current scientific knowledge, or extrapolations therefrom.

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@arbutus   Pan galactic gargle blasters it is (hic!), and I’m perfectly happy to drink mine here rather than trek over to the pub.  It will do very nicely as a nightcap 🙂   Funnily enough, after reading through the posts as of this morning, my coffee, like your tea, was cold. In fact I think at some point I had re-heated it in the microwave, but it was still cold when I got round to drinking it.

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@arbutus  Thank you for those appreciative words.   I’m afraid I tend to get carried away, and my initial posts can be over-long as a result. I imagine that there are more than a few here who take one look at those great wodges of text, roll their eyes and skip to the next, and who can blame them  🙂

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Would it be boasting immoderately to point out that my theorising about the nature of the Cloister Wraiths/Sliders on the Spoilers thread was pretty accurate?  And I wasn’t all that far wrong about the intended purpose of the Confession Dial, either.  The Doctor’s explanation in the this episode chimed very much with my ideas on the subject, whether or not I expressed them very clearly  😉

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@doctordalek17   Interesting point.  Even if the Time Lords had been in stasis, it is clear that they no longer were so by the time of the events in Time of the Doctor, since they were communicating through the crack in the universe. That doesn’t mean that either of my suggested scenarios is necessarily wrong – they could have been trying to get back from a bubble universe outside our own or, as now seems more likely, from the far future, after having been released from a time limited stasis. The key to their return was, supposedly, the Doctor saying his name, but he refused to do so. Instead, Clara negotiated with them, pointing out that the only name he really needed was the one he had adopted, the Doctor, but if there was any indication that this served to bring them back, I’m afraid I missed it.  Maybe, as you say, the crack in the universe closed because they had returned, but realised that the universe, as it stood, was not a healthy place for them, and so fled, but that wasn’t the impression I got from what little was said on the subject in this episode; and would even the Time Lords been able to shift a whole planet forward in time by several billion years?

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@puroandson  (son)

I don’t like it when tv patronises me all the time. I can think for myself and I like to. So, maybe that is what the writer was suggesting? That we need to conclude for ourselves and also to listen really carefully

Very well said!  A good writer does not condescend or ‘write down’ to his/her readership, whatever their age, and Moffat is, in my opinion, a very good writer. He has to address a potential viewing audience spanning all ages, and he does so, not by spelling things out but by providing layered and complex narratives with something for everyone, especially if they are prepared to pay close attention to the detail and tease out the potential meanings, as most people on this forum do.  Some people prefer to be entertained by a straightforward narrative with a relatively simple plot, lots of action and all the loose ends tied up in a neat little bow by the finish, and that can be fun if it’s done well and provided it isn’t the only thing on offer.  There are some very competent writers who seem content to provide such fare, but in the end it doesn’t do much to enrich the life of any reader or viewer.

I thought also that the TLs were seen as the ineffectual people they had become. They would send an army of people to kill the Doctor: they were now frightened of him. They would put some distance between him and themselves -always send the soldiers: that’s a metaphor for the whole of the Time War isn’t it?

Exactly so, and I wish that I had referenced that comment in my first post on this thread, as a particular illustration of all that was wrong with Gallifrey.   I read all the preceding posts before I started to write mine, but once my essential impressions and thoughts on the episode started to come together and gel I was in a rush to get them down while they were still fresh in my mind, so didn’t take time to check whether there were points where I needed to make acknowledgements.  Easy to do, I’m afraid, when there is such a lot to keep track of  😳

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