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6 December 2015 at 17:25 #48833
And then there’s Gallifrey, which is, somehow, back in our universe. Frozen in time, but then not, by the machinations of the people frozen in time?!
The subject of how it returned was raised, but skated over by the Doctor. I would have to check his actual words, but I got the impression that though the Time Lords thought that they had found a way to do it themselves, that might not have been what had happened.
I don’t think that there is necessarily any inconsistency here. What the 13 Doctors were hoping to do in Day of the Doctor was to use the stasis cubes both to isolate Gallifrey in time, as in the scenes in the pictures in the undergallery, and to remove it spacially, temporally or both. What they actually achieved may have been different, and if it was simply shifted into a pocket universe, then the Time Lords would not have been in stasis, and therefore could well have devised a way of getting back. Assuming that all went according to plan, however, there could well have been a time limit on the imposed stasis, as with the pictures containing the Zygons, and it seems probable that the Doctors would have tried to set such a limit, since the intention was that Gallifrey should at some point return to the universe. A time limit on the period of stasis would also explain why Gallifrey ended up four and a half billion years in the future, but with Rassilon and the General from the Time War still in charge.
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6 December 2015 at 16:48 #48831I’m a bit bemused by the fact that some here seem to have taken it that the Doctor has completely forgotten Clara, but his situation is not an exact parallel with that of Donna, who truly did remember nothing. I think it was @spider who was the first to point out that on some level he has clearly not forgotten, as is evident in the fact that it is he who is narrating the story we see. It is just that the memory of her is now externalised, as if she were in a tale he had read or been told, rather than personal to him. When he starts to tell the story to Clara in the diner he may not have recognised her, but he would have to have been pretty dense not to have realised who she was by the end; as I said in my post above, she did all she could to make sure that he would. In a way the scene in the diner was a reprise of the scene in the scene in the café at the end of Death in Heaven, where each failed to correct the other’s assumptions, but here I got the impression that, while nothing was said, they parted with a tacit understanding and mutual awareness. He hasn’t forgotten the facts, but he is distanced from them and the emotional tie is broken, leaving him to go forward.
6 December 2015 at 15:33 #48820This episode may not quite have reached the heights of Heaven Sent, but it wasn’t far behind, and very neatly packaged as a story, book-ended by the scenes in the diner where the Doctor tells it.
The events of Face the Raven remain unchanged, and for her family, friends and the pupils at Coal Hill School Clara is and remains dead. But she, suspended indefinitely between life and death, between one heartbeat and the next, will have four and a half billion years to travel the universe with the immortal Me, returning the long way round to her final moment on Gallifrey. She has lost the Doctor, except in memory, but she no longer needs his presence, since she can continue, Doctor-like, to experience the adventures which had come to be her chief reason for being. To me that seems a fitting way to round off her tale, and not the anti-climax that a literal resurrection would have been.
Unlike Donna and the amnesia which wiped all recollection of the Doctor from her mind, the Doctor’s memory of Clara is not completely obliterated – he is a Time Lord whose memory does not work in the same way as that of a human, and presumably he had configured the neural block for a human brain; and how could he forget her entirely, when her myriad lives have been entangled in all of his? So, although she may no longer be always and immediately in his mind, she lingers like a song or a story narrated by someone else and remembered, evoking a deep emotional resonance, but as something experienced at one remove; joy and sorrow recalled in tranquillity. It is an elegiac conclusion.
When he enters the diner he does not recognise her; does not *see* her, but by the end he cannot fail to have realised who she was, even if he did not acknowledge the fact. In her conversation with him she gave him enough prompts and clues for him to work it out and, if that were not enough, he could hardly fail to realise the significance of the diner dematerialising around him. This was her last gift to him. After that there was his Tardis with her image painted on it, and who else but she could have brought it from London to the desert?* But when he leaves in the Tardis, the last we see of it is Rigsy’s painted memorial with the portrait of Clara flaking away, and the fragments scattered to the winds.
As for the story itself, the Doctor goes to the barn, to the scene where, unknown to him, his had his very first encounter with Clara and where a woman still keeps a bed in the hayloft as a refuge for boys should they need it; returning, as Ohila says, to the beginning. And in what follows, all that is wrong with Gallifrey is revealed with great economy. Despite his changed face he is recognised and welcomed by the ordinary people, because it was for them he saved the planet, and they know it. The Time Lords acknowledge him as the one who ended the Time War, but for the General and the soldiers he is the war hero who fought, even though he fought unarmed. Even the half-crazed Rassilon has a moment of insight when he says of him, ‘Words are his weapons, when did they stop being ours?’ But for Rassilon he is the enemy of the established social order who must be destroyed, and he shows the values of his idea of social order in his contempt for those who are not Time Lords when he says ‘… here in the dry lands, where there’s nobody who matters: no witnesses’.
The Doctor emerges from the barn looking very like Gary Cooper as the Marshal in High Noon, grim faced and implacable, to face the necessary show-down, one to one, with his enemy, and the enemy is forced in the end to come at his bidding. The Western film references are unmistakeable, seen also in the line in the sand (the legend of the Alamo?) and in the music. And when all is over he leaves the Time Lords with a chance of something like a fresh start, with Rassilon banished and the General regenerated, now at one remove from the Time War and less scarred by it, and with at least the possibility that lessons have been learned. If so he will have achieved more than his primary purposes of personal revenge and the saving of Clara; and though in seeking those ends he may, as Ohila says, have broken every rule he lived by, the means may have at least in part been justified by the result.
It is to be hoped that the Time Lords are content to remain in the far future and to refrain from meddling in the affairs of the rest of the universe. On the other hand, while an exiled Rassilon without a Tardis would be rendered fairly harmless, a vengeful Rassilon with a Tardis provides great potential for future stories. He might even team up with Missy, if she were ever to see a way of using him for her own ends.
*Well, Missy, I suppose, but it is hardly her style.
5 December 2015 at 12:57 #48683@puroandson (both)
As far as I am aware the Cloister Wraiths have never been mentioned before. although my memory of BG Who is patchy, to say the least, since there are a great many episodes, even of those surviving, which I haven’t watched since they were first shown. All I have written is of course still speculation, arrived at by been adding two and two, and for all I know making the answer five 🙂 Only seven hours to go now before we find out here in the UK, and I’m feeling quite excited. The episode will be hard put to equal, let alone top last week’s episode, but the omens look promising.
As for the cloister thing, I supposed most people would think first of its meaning as the private, inner part of a monastery or nunnery, so I just wanted to show how the word might be applicable in a wider context, and in this context in particular.
Son of Puro. I sympathise with your not being able to get into old Who. I used to watch it at the time because it was entertaining and imaginative and sometimes provided food for thought. The often crude effects and relatively slow pacing of a lot of it didn’t bother me at the time, because that was fairly typical of the BBC, which didn’t have big budgets to play with. When I watch episodes now, though, I tend to get impatient with the slower pace and the amount of ‘padding’, even though some of the stories are very good in themselves. People expect much higher production values these days, and young people in particular have, I think, become a lot more sophisticated about these things.
4 December 2015 at 21:37 #486454 December 2015 at 17:37 #48636Wraiths would be to TL’s what the gooey remains in the Dalek sewers are?
Probably not, since the sentient goo in the sewers on Skaro was composed of the decayed but still living physical remains of Daleks.
If I have understood the Matrix correctly, it is supposed to be something like an immensely powerful computer into which the minds of dead Time Lords are uploaded, so it doesn’t entail the preservation of living remains. Within the Matrix these minds may retain their individual identity, perhaps experiencing a kind of afterlife in a realistically simulated virtual world. I was speculating that these stored minds might be capable of manifesting themselves in the real world, using some method of projection.
If the wraiths have any physical solidity it would probably be as hard light holograms or equivalent, but the fact that they are referred to as wraiths suggests that they are insubstantial.
4 December 2015 at 17:17 #48635@todeledo I can think of several possible answers to your question.
Bone does not last all that long in the sea unless it is buried in the sand or silt of the sea floor, and if the passage of time was objectively two billion years, rather than being a simulation within the Confession Dial and so something experienced only subjectively by the Doctor, even mountains do not survive that long. The older skulls would have been decaying or being eroded by sea currents and sand movements at a fairly constant rate, even as more skulls were added.
Assuming, again, that the sea and the castle were physically real in a bigger-on-the-inside Confession Dial, and the skulls were piling up around the base of the castle, the heap would, as you say, eventually rise above the surface of the water; but in the underwater scene they seemed to be spread fairly evenly over the sea floor, as if they had been shifted about by sea currents. The sea around the castle cannot have been very large, and if the skulls were spread fairly evenly, their mass would have displaced an equal volume of water and so the surface level of the sea would gradually have risen above them, and the depth of water remained more or less constant.
If, however, the castle and the sea were a virtual environment generated by the hardware of the Confession Dial, as I have been suggesting, then what we saw need not be taken too literally. All that would be necessary to convince the Doctor of the passage of time would be the changing pattern of the stars and a sea floor covered in skulls, but realism would not need to extend to the finer details.
4 December 2015 at 10:32 #48625So, do we think that there could be versions of Doctors 1-11 + War “sliding” about as wraiths?
I very much doubt it. The minds stored in the Matrix are, if my memory is correct, supposed to be those of dead Time Lords – i.e, those who had run out of their allotted number of regenerations and were no longer incarnate – not earlier incarnations of those who had regenerated but were still living.
@starla @puroandson
The most likely explanation for the wraiths seems to be that they are ghostly manifestations of the dead Time Lords, visible as moving shadows or silhouettes or as more solid-seeming apparitions such as the one Starla pointed out. There need not be anything supernatural about them, since they could be images and holograms of some kind projected by the Matrix. It suggests that the Matrix is not just a passive resource to be consulted at need, and that the minds within it can act independently to draw the Time Lords’ attention to some particular threat or danger. The appearance of the wraiths perhaps indicates indicate a level of threat even greater than that signalled by the ringing of the Cloister bells.
I have been thinking this morning about the seeming connection between the Matrix and the Cloister. The word cloister derives from the Latin claustrum, meaning inclosure, custody, confinement, a boundary, which in turn is linked to the verb claudo, to dam, shut up or enclose, to render inaccessible.
It would seem that the wraiths are dangerous in some way, since the soldier was warned not to approach them, so it would make sense that measures have been taken to pen them up or inhibit them within the larger context of the Matrix, and my guess is that this is what the Cloister represents here. At the very least one can understand why living Time Lords might not welcome constant intervention and meddling by stroppy deceased ancestors.
3 December 2015 at 23:49 #48599@puroandson I got the impression that the Cloister in this case has some connection with the Matrix. The soldier is sent down into the Matrix to find out why the cloister bell(s) are ringing and reports that the ‘sliders’ – um, sorry, wraiths are active, and we see what look like the moving shadow of a Time Lord in full regalia. Subsequently they are referred to as ‘Cloister wraiths’, apparently dangerous and not to be approached.
My guess is that the wraiths have some connection with the minds/personalities of dead Time Lords which are stored in the Matrix along with their accumulated knowledge (Ref. Trial of a Time Lord, I think).
Perhaps the Cloister in the Tardis represents some kind of remote extension of the Matrix ???
3 December 2015 at 11:08 #48568The person in the dial chooses their own hell/torture/purgatory
Ooh, I like that idea! It ties in very well with the concept of the Dials as full records of a Time Lords inner life. So it could be that, over his or her successive lifetimes, each Time Lord’s purgatory is created within their personal Dial out of the record of their accumulated experiences, mistakes, memories, regrets and fears. No tampering need have been involved in the creation of the Doctor’s ordeal, and the only external intervention was to push him into it prematurely.
It occurs to me that Confession Dials, and the hard and software within them, might have a connection with the Matrix – the mega-computer which is said to store the personalities of Time Lords and all their knowledge after their deaths – and be the means by which they were uploaded to the Matrix. If so, the purgatorial process might have been designed as a kind of audit and purification before the record entered the Matrix; which ties in with @puroandson ‘s analogy of the confessional.
In this case the Doctor was not dying when he entered his Dial, and his mental passage through it and physical emergence from it could be seen as a kind of rebirth, more fundamental than any regeneration.
2 December 2015 at 18:39 #48531@Morpho
an unphysical interpretation leads to a lot of physical metaphors for unphysical things (the stars, clockwork, erosion, gravity, combustion, etc.) that are so vital for the plot.
True, but then it is highly likely that a technology so advanced that it could create a space/time vehicle which is bigger on the inside – seemingly almost infinite, in fact – would be capable of creating the technology to generate a completely realistic, internally consistent and fully immersive virtual reality, right down to the shifting star patterns and everything else.
As for the clockwork images, it is those as much as anything which make me think that some of what we were seeing was pure metaphor or symbol. Things are not always what they seem in the whoniverse 😉
As you say, though, there is a strong possibility that what is actually happening is different, and possibly even more bonkers, than the most bonkers of theories any of us has come with so far 🙂
2 December 2015 at 16:21 #48525@puroandson Son of Puro Re the hybrid.
Interesting question. As you probably know, a hybrid, in the sense we normally use the term is indeed a cross between two different species, plant or animal. In theory either or both parents could themselves by hybrids but, since hybrids tend to be infertile, this is unlikely unless genetic engineering is involved.
We can probably take it for granted that what is meant here is a lot more complicated than that, especially if it involves Time Lord technology, and it may not entail any kind of cross-breeding at all. If Me is the hybrid, she would be the result of Mire technology inserted into a Viking girl. Both could be described as warrior races, and since the result is functionally immortal, Me has had time to develop into something very formidable indeed.
I don’t think she is the hybrid, though. The information we have been given so far indicates that the Doctor left Gallifrey because he knew who or what the hybrid was or would be and was scared of divulging that information to the Time Lords – or anyone else for that matter. But if that was the case, how could he have known that twelve generations down the line he was going to create that hybrid; and if he had known in advance, why would he have done it? It’s a paradox.
2 December 2015 at 16:01 #48523Thank you. I often feel hesitant about posts such as these, which have a tendency to stray way off topic, so it always good to know that there are people how have found them interesting.
2 December 2015 at 15:50 #48521@Morpho Hello, and a warm welcome to you.
The word HOME which appears in the wall is, I think, designed as a hint or clue to give the Doctor the incentive to persist in trying to get through it and out of the trap which the Confession Dial has become. It is ambiguous, of course, because the Doctor interprets ‘Home’ as the Tardis, whereas in fact it turns out to be his home planet.
The *how* is trickier to explain, but I think that it depends on how you see the nature of the Doctor’s experience. Having read the comments you will be aware that there are at least two schools of thought. Some think that the Doctor is physically present within a physical environment, having been teleported into a bigger-on-the-inside artefact. Others such as myself don’t find that explanation very convincing.
We are told that a Confession Dial is in some sense a Time Lord’s Last Will and Testament, which we know is not an exact analogy, but which implies that it is very personal to the individual. So an alternative interpretation is that it is an artefact attuned to the individual, with hardware containing a detailed and intimate record, not just of the things he or she has experienced, but of their innermost thoughts and feelings, including subconscious fears. The Doctor hands his Confession Dial to Me, and it is this which he presumably, in some sense, enters; but not, I think, physically.
If, as I have argued, the hardware in this artefact can, like that of the Nethersphere, generate a convincing and completely immersive virtual reality for the person to whom it is attuned, then what the Doctor experiences is all drawn from his own mind, even if someone has edited or used the record selectively to make his experiences a kind of private hell. If that is the case, there doesn’t need to be a technical explanation for the word HOME, because it is all in the Doctor’s mind, whether it appears as a result of his own deductive reasoning, or of external tampering, and the wall is not literally a wall of Azbantium, but a symbol representing a barrier he has to get through.
None of this is necessarily correct, of course, but I hope it helps 🙂
2 December 2015 at 10:35 #48512@puroandson Glad to be of service re the survival of organic materials 🙂
It occurs to me that I omitted at least two other sets of conditions in which organic materials could survive for long periods. One is when the environment is extremely dry, as in the Egyptian desert. The Egyptians probably cottoned on to the idea of mummification after observing that bodies buried in the desert sands tended to become desiccated before they had fully decayed. Such things as wood or papyrus would quickly be eroded if exposed on the surface, but protected from the elements, as in a sealed tomb or in a sealed pottery jar in a cave, could last a very long time.
Anything buried in permafrost conditions will also survive well- mammoths in the sub-arctic tundra are perhaps the most widely known examples, but there have been burials excavated in the High Altai, for example, in which the bodies were preserved almost intact, down to the tattoos on their skin , as well as their clothing and the personal possessions buried with them.
When I wrote of anaerobic conditions I didn’t explain why these were conducive to the preservation of organic materials. Maybe the reason is too obvious to require explanation, but in case you were at all puzzled, it’s because the lack of oxygen inhibits the kinds of bacteria which cause decay.
2 December 2015 at 10:01 #48508@starla @bendubz11 Yes, the pub is The Fox Inn : the place for discussion of any topic not directly related to Who.
1 December 2015 at 18:30 #48443But I wonder what would have happened to that body had he failed?
I suspect that if he had given up or otherwise failed his mind would have remained trapped forever in the Confession Dial or, to look at it another way, ceased to exist except as a record on a hard drive. His body would have remained in potentia on the threshold of the teleporter, never to be reconstituted and ultimately to be deleted from the teleporter hard drive.
if this is Missy’s doing, what is she after?
I imagine that the destruction of all the Time Lords by the Doctor, leaving the two of them as masters of the all time and space, would be an objective entirely in keeping with her past record. She is, after all, ‘bananas’ and his/her schemes never less than grandiose in their ambition, though inevitably containing an essential flaw 🙂
1 December 2015 at 15:29 #48427@nerys I sympathise with you over the memory thing. Like you, I was never much good at rote memorising: facts had to be in a context or I didn’t retain them, and even then I had far from perfect recall. Nowadays I find that names – of people and things – often slip my mind temporarily (nominal aphasia, I think it’s called), and like you I put it down to glitches in the retrieval system, because the name or word I need always surfaces eventually, especially if I don’t worry at it. On the other hand, I have vivid memories like little video clips, of my childhood and teenage years, stretching as far back as my second year of life – and can usually place them pretty accurately.
It is a tremendous pity that the first viewings of these episodes are marred for you and others by the insertion of ad breaks. It is irritating and jarring enough when a show is designed to accommodate these interruptions, but Doctor Who, being a BBC production, is not.
1 December 2015 at 14:12 #48425Nit-pick corner.
@puroandson @teddybear You were discussing the survival properties of organic materials such as wood, and my professional opinion was sought.
In the very long term, of course, on a geologically active planet with an atmosphere, nothing would survive in its original form. In the course of several billion years mountains could be upheaved, eroded down again to sand and silt, the sand and silt compacted into rock, and the rock either subducted into the mantle of the planet and recycled or upheaved again to form more mountains; and repeat, several times over.
In the short term, when it comes to the preservation of organic materials and bone, it depends very much on the physical properties of the context. Bone doesn’t survive very long at all in highly acidic soils. Nothing survived of the bodies buried at Sutton Hoo but stains in the sand. In alkaline soils on limestone or chalk they can survive several thousand years, at least; and in the right circumstances, of course, they can become fossilised. Under water it would depend on conditions. Exposed to currents and shifting sands bone would erode fairly quickly; buried, it could survive quite a long time. In real world conditions, the skulls and hypothetical remains of the chair(s) exposed on the sea bed would certainly not have lasted very long; the apparent number of the skulls could be put down to the rapid rate of accumulation rather than long term preservation.
Organic materials such as wood and leather will normally decay fairly rapidly, but in waterlogged, anaerobic conditions can be preserved for a long time in good condition, though once they are removed from those conditions, conserving them from rapid decay can be a tricky and lengthy process. Suitable conditions for preservation could be waterlogged, compacted deposits as at the Viking settlement site excavated in York, or fine silts on a lake or sea bed, in which prehistoric boats have been known to survive in good condition. In the case of the Mary Rose, Henry VIII’s flagship which sank in the Solent and ended up on its side on the sea floor, the half which was rapidly buried in silts survived in excellent condition, together with its contents; the half which was exposed had gone completely. Since the wreck was raised, though, the process of conservation of the ship’s timbers has taken decades.
The acidic, anaerobic conditions of peat bogs are also good for preserving wood and leather. In Irish bogs and the Cambridgeshire/Lincolnshire Fens, the stumps and roots, and sometimes whole trunks of prehistoric trees are fairly common finds, as well as prehistoric timber causeways and wooden artefacts. Then there are bog bodies – the remains of Bronze age and Iron Age people who often appear to have been deliberately sacrificed and deposited as offerings. The skin, hair and soft tissues are often extremely well preserved, although the bones have been completely dissolved by the acidic condition.
But since most of this is off topic and probably more than you wanted to know, I’ll stop there 🙂
1 December 2015 at 13:19 #48424What if Ashildr/Me had contacted the Time Lords (via Missy?) and is the one driving all of this
Oh yes! I can see how that would work very well, though I suspect that it would be Missy’s idea, with her as the driving force and Ashildr/Me acting at her instigation.
The anachronisms in The Woman Who Lived suggested that by the seventeenth century, if not before, Ashildr/Me had been in contact with someone who time travelled and perhaps even done some time-travelling her self, and if so, Missy is by far the most likely contact. Missy, poking around in the Doctor’s time line, would certainly have sniffed her out and seen a use for her.
Ashildr/Me on her own presumably knew of the existence of the Time Lords, but it is hardly likely that she knew their whereabouts or how to contact them. On the other hand Missy, if she escaped from Gallifrey via the crack in the universe at Trenzalore and not during the final days of the Time War, would know at least its location and, assuming @jphamlore is right, could have used her own Confession Dial (assuming she has one), or the Doctor’s while it was in her possession, as a means of contacting them. It might be significant that when she showed the Doctor’s Confession Dial to Clara in The Magician’s Apprentice it was partially open. She may even at this point have extracted the information which the Time Lords used to create the Doctor’s personal hell.
If this is the case, then my guess is that she conspired with Ashildr/Me, using her in effect as a catspaw so that her own involvement remained hidden. She provided Me with the necessary information, and Me made the contact, effectively offering to deliver the Doctor and his Confession Dial on a plate.
1 December 2015 at 12:40 #48422It has taken me most of the morning to refresh my memory of yesterday’s discussions and to catch up with all the posts from the night shift. So much food for thought!
He’s accepting what he feels is just punishment for Clara’s death; and it’s hardly enough, because he needs absolute *masses* of expiation if he’s to move beyond the enormity that she’s gone for good
I find @puroandson ‘s concept of the Confession Dial as confessional apt in the sense that, if I am right in my conjecture, it contains an analogue of his conscious and subconscious mind and soul, with a complete record of all he is and has been. Within it he is being forced to confront truths of his life that he might have wanted to remain unexamined.
On the other hand, maybe because of the Quaker influence on my upbringing, I am not comfortable with the idea of penance to expiate the guilt he feels for his failure to protect Clara, especially such a protracted penance. I think, rather, that he feels persistence and ultimate survival are what he owes her, who has so often prompted him to live up to his name and be his better self.
@jphamlore #4368 and #48380 I like the idea of the Confession Dial as being akin in part to the message boxes – something which can be used as a means of communication between Time Lords and Gallifrey, even across different dimensions, though clearly it is a good deal more than that.
I’m not so sure about the idea of it as a mini Tardis, bigger on the inside and able to contain the Doctor physically. @tardigrade agrees with this idea, but it seems to me to have a major flaw. As @ichabod says, if that is the case, how does the Doctor enter it? When the external dimensions of the Tardis shrank in Flatline, the Doctor couldn’t get out of it, and by the same token, nobody could get in.
As I conceive the Confession Dial, it is something like the slice of Gallifreyan ‘hard drive’ in which the uploaded minds/souls of the dead were stored, and which generated the virtual environment of the Nethersphere in which the dead had a virtual existence which felt real. The Confession Dial is on a much smaller scale; a sliver rather than a slice, big enough accommodate just one mind/soul rather than multitudes, but capable of generating a completely convincing virtual environment.
On that level, the question of whether the Doctor is being reconstituted as a copy or a clone billions of times doesn’t seem relevant. The Doctor immersed in the virtual environment of the Confession Disc is, in effect, an uploaded version of himself within his own mind, or rather a landscape constructed from parts of his subconscious mind; his ordeal, including the repeated reconstitution in the teleport chamber has no physical counterpart. This raises the question of what is happening to his physical body, and the best I have come up with so far is that he is somehow suspended in the portal of the real (as opposed to virtual) teleport chamber, and the point when his virtual self finally breaks through the wall to Gallifrey is the point at which he completes his physical journey.
30 November 2015 at 13:14 #48309@mersey When the Doctor said ‘Who’s been playing about with the stars?’ it wasn’t the first time that he had cycled through the whole experience, from his emerging from the transporter to the Veil catching up with him at the wall, he just didn’t realise it immediately As with the rooms of the castle, his experience was reset to the beginning of the sequence each time, so he remembered nothing of the previous cycle and had to work things out afresh each time, making infinitesimal progress over the course of subjective millennia.
In fact we jumped into the story when this process had already been going on for some 7000 years within his Dial generated hell – time enough for the stars to have shifted perceptibly and a considerable pile of skulls to have accumulated in the Lake. The environment may not have been objectively real, but it was designed to register realistic and internally consistent evidence of the passage of time in a way which he would notice.
30 November 2015 at 12:18 #48304@teddybear Hello and welcome to the forum.
The confession dial clearly isn’t a Last Will and Testament as we understand it, nor a straightforward confession. As far as I can make out from the clues we have been given, it is more like a complete and continuously updated record of the Doctor’s life as experienced in his conscious and unconscious mind: not like a diary or a memoir, which could be edited by the writer, but the whole of it – all the good and bad, including his fears and regrets. It would appear that all Time Lords have one, and perhaps it is in part a way of storing memories, because even a Time Lord’s brain is probably not big enough to retain all the memories of so many long, consecutive lives.
What I suggested yesterday in my post #48206 seems to be more or less confirmed by Moffat and Peter Capaldi in a clip which is now up on the BBC Approved Spoilers thread. What the Doctor is experiencing in this episode does not necessarily have any objective reality, because he is trapped inside the Confession Dial – not physically, but in a kind of virtual reality projected by the Dial and containing manifestations of his greatest fears and regrets. In a sense it is all in his mind. When he sees the Veil he says, ‘I know you, I’ve seen you before’, because for him it brings back the memory he subconsciously associates with death – the childhood memory of the body of a dead woman shrouded in veils and the flies around it. For him, subjectively, everything seems real, and all the evidence he sees indicates the passage of 4 billion years as he gradually chips and wears away the wall of Azbantium (400 times harder than diamond). Outside this virtual reality, though, in the real universe, the time which has passed could have been no more than a few hours or days.
It seems that the Time Lords were able somehow to contact Ashildr/Me and persuade her to trap the Doctor so that he could be brought, if not to Gallifrey itself, to a point where our universe touched the pocket universe to which it was transferred by the 13 Doctors in Day of the Doctor. The Time Lords then seem to have tampered selectively with the Confession Dial to create a nightmare scenario designed to try and force the Doctor to face things that he had preferred to remain buried in his subconscious.
The Time Lords may have had another motive, also. According to @Juniperfish ‘s suggestion, the wall represents the barrier between our universe and the pocket universe containing Gallifrey. We know that the Time Lords want to return to our universe (Time of the Doctor), so it makes sense that, having forced the Doctor to face and admit certain truths, such as his fear of death, they might be using his qualities of courage, determination and dogged persistence to break through that barrier, and what we saw was symbolic of that process.
As for the final secret, the Hybrid, we are now led to believe that the real reason the Doctor left Gallifrey in the first place was to protect that secret from his fellow Time Lords because he was terrified of the implications. Since then he has been given little reason to trust them, so it makes sense that he would endure a subjective 4 billion year hell rather than give it to them willingly – at least not while he was still trapped.
Now finally, when he has broken through onto Gallifrey, with the mental strength and clarity he has gained through his ordeal and the confrontation of his fears, perhaps he feels himself ready to present them with the truth and able to face them down. Personally I don’t think when he said ‘The Hybrid is me’, he was referring to Ashildr/Me, because as far as I can make out in his complicated time-line, she wasn’t even born when he left Gallifrey. I turned the sub-titles on to check, and it was lower case ‘me’, not ‘Me’, but that could, of course, be a bit of misdirection, or simply a mistake on the part of the writers of the sub-titles, so Who Nose?
29 November 2015 at 23:51 #48256@puroandson Puro, tremendous news regarding the student you mentored, and what a lovely story.
I think I said once last year that I am often little more than subliminally conscious of the music in Doctor Who, though that may be due partly to the balance of the sound reproduction on my somewhat elderly TV set. It is probably significant, therefore, that I was very much aware of the music throughout this episode, and it was indeed beautiful and evocative.
29 November 2015 at 23:39 #48254So far I have not deigned to comment on the Doctor’s views on gardening and gardeners. If it were anyone other than he who had uttered those remarks I would be up in arms (it’s amazing what damage you can do with a gardening fork), but in the circumstances I will overlook his lapse in judgement 😎
29 November 2015 at 23:27 #48252@ichabod Thank you very much for those appreciative comments. I can only return the compliment with regard to so many of your posts 🙂
@puroandson ditto. One of the great joys of this forum is the convergence of so many different viewpoints, observations and insights, so well articulated.
Son of puro I’m glad you liked reading what I wrote. Castles are fascinating, not just in terms of medieval warfare and sieges, but for what they can reveal about the structure of medieval society and the way that the great families and their extended households of very many retainers lived. My brothers and I were lucky in that we lived in an area where there are several castles which we used to have fun exploring, and not so long ago, as an adult, I was privileged to be able to investigate and write reports on most of them. The interior scenes for this episode were mainly if not all of them filmed in real castles in Caerphilly and Cardiff, though some of the rooms with colourful painted walls were, I think, in a nineteenth century mansion built in the grounds of Cardiff Castle rather than the medieval castle itself. The decoration is the Victorian idea of high medieval style – not entirely inaccurate, but perhaps a little exaggerated and romanticised.
29 November 2015 at 16:39 #48213The trailers raise an interesting point concerning Gallifrey. The General who appears here, played by Ken Bones, appeared also in Day of the Doctor, which indicates that nothing like two billion years has passed for him and his fellow Time Lords – it would be an impossibly long lifetime, even for them. It could be accounted for if Gallifrey and its inhabitants had, as the Doctor(s) originally speculated, remained frozen in time in a pocket universe, but if they were truly in stasis, how could they have communicated with our universe to grant the Doctor a new set of regenerations, or to contact Me in order to arrange for his entrapment?
Maybe, as I suggested in the discussion of Heaven Sent, they have not been in stasis, but time in their pocket universe has passed at a radically slower rate; or maybe, as in my preferred explanation, it is simply that the two billion years the Doctor experienced were entirely subjective within the pocket reality created by the Confession Disc, and that little or no time passed for either in our universe or that of the Time Lords on their side of the barrier.
29 November 2015 at 16:17 #48212@whisht Oh, brilliant catch re the Flammarion engraving!. The old idea of a clockwork universe of concentric spheres.
The recurrent clockwork imagery in connection with the Time Lords is intriguing. In the Day of the Doctor, what we could see of the inner workings of the Moment, as it appeared when the War Doctor originally uncovered it in the barn, resembled clockwork, and then there were the Chameleon arch watches: symbols of time to us, but clearly masking a much more complex reality.
Re-reading my post #48206, I realise that my reasons for doubting that two billion years had passed in reality, at least for Gallifrey and the Time Lords, were not very clear. One of those reasons is that the Time Lords, having engineered the entrapment of the Doctor, would have been unlikely to hang around for that length of time waiting for him to break out, and if they hadn’t intended him to get out, everything, even in their stagnant world, would probably have changed radically after the passage of that much time; the other possibly reason is more than a little spoilery, so not to be discussed here.
29 November 2015 at 14:58 #48208Obligatory Mudlark nit-pick: Time Lord skulls must be very different from human ones, since even after two billion (subjective ?) years, the lower jaws appear to have remained attached to the skulls. Once the flesh and ligaments have dissolved from a human skull, there is nothing to keep the lower jaw in place.
29 November 2015 at 14:45 #48206That was magnificent; a tour de force on the part of everyone concerned in its production, and breathtaking even on second viewing – in fact *especially* on second viewing. Count me among those who rate this among the best episodes ever.
What we saw was, of course, entirely from the Doctor’s point of view – a subjective reality within the Confession Dial, or rather in a virtual, closed-loop environment – a projection of his own mind generated by the Confession Dial and representing, in metaphor and symbol, significant elements of his life with its fears and secrets. @soundworld summed it up succinctly and well: the Doctor was, in a sense, inside his own head, and the key was, I’M IN 12, recalling Room 11 in The God Complex. Significantly, perhaps, the inscription was at the bottom of a rectangular pit resembling a grave.
The Confession Dial itself, being Gallifreyan technology, could be a sliver of a Gallifreyan hard drive, just enough to store the mind and life experience of a Time Lord, and it appears to have been the instrument by which the Time Lords were able to bring the Doctor to a point of contact with Gallifrey and there to manipulate his perceptions to create a personal hell, though a physical break-through was not possible until the Doctor himself, through inhuman persistence, had battered a way through the wall of Azbantium. I like @juniperfish ‘s image of the wall as the lock or veil between our universe and that containing Gallifrey, though the physical wall we saw must have been a metaphor of an underlying reality.
The whole episode was permeated by imagery of passing time and death. In the pre-title sequence the Doctor’s soliloquy, repeated in the text glimpsed briefly on the castle wall, speaks obliquely of these inescapable companions following us through life, never hurrying, never ceasing. Clockwork imagery is everywhere in what follows, carried through from the title sequence. The internal workings of the Confession Dial, when we see them finally, resemble clockwork, and this is reproduced in the ratcheting wheels and cogs which operate the castle, and in the structure of the castle itself, with its independently revolving sections and cog-like crenellations. The Veil, which at the end also collapses into a heap of cogwheels, represents the inexorable passage of time, but also death and the Doctor’s fear of death, symbolised for him by the childhood memory of the veiled body of a woman and the flies. When the Doctor eventually succeeds in entering Room 12, the snapping of his fingers echoes the ticking of a clock.
The passage of time within this closed environment is, however, subjective. The jump cuts, reminiscent of the final sequence in the film 2001, suggest this, but it is more directly referenced in the passages where the Doctor retreats into his mental refuge, the Tardis, to consult Clara in his mind and think of solutions to each predicament as he faces it. As he says, during his 7 second fall from the castle window to the sea below; the faster one thinks, the more slowly subjective time passes.*
Viewed like this, I don’t think it matters whether two billion years passed in reality, or it just seemed so in the Doctor’s experience. I incline to the latter interpretation, since the teleport initially brought the Doctor to a point of interface with Gallifrey, without travelling through time. The alternative would suggest that when the Doctor(s) removed Gallifrey from the Time War they shunted it forward in time, or else into an alternative universe where time passed at a different rate. By the same token I’m not sure that the question of whether or not the Doctor was repeatedly reconstituted from the Teleporter hard drive over two billion years is particularly important. In a sense it was all happening in an analogue of his mind – the repetition of mental and physical agony was subjectively real, but not necessarily actually so.
When he finally breaks through to Gallifrey he admits what he had refused to confess during his ordeal; that ‘The Hybrid is me’. For what it is worth I turned the subtitles on, and the m was lower case – though I concede that this does not necessarily resolve the ambiguity noted by several others above.
* In a minor way I can vouch for this from personal experience. I once tripped and fell headlong into an excavation trench, and in the brief time I was falling time seemed to slow, I was able to calculate my trajectory and where I would land, and to realise that there was a distinct possibility that I might break my neck ( I didn’t, obviously).
28 November 2015 at 14:16 #48018Reverting to the topic of the suitability of otherwise of Doctor Who for young viewers, but on a lighter note:
In the Radio Times issue for the week 5-11 December, there is an interview with Steven Moffat in which, referring to his younger self, he says ‘It was the only programme in the history of children’s television that was unsuitable for children. That’s why we loved it’.
28 November 2015 at 14:06 #48017I’m kicking myself.
I subscribe to Radio Times (dead tree version), and normally this arrives on a Tuesday with listings and information for the following week. For some reason the issue for 5-11 December arrived today, and I just had to peek. Definitely a spoiler too far as regards the outcome of tonight’s episode, but I have only myself to blame 🙁
26 November 2015 at 21:19 #47942Since you guys brought up the Nethersphere with Missy, how exactly was she able to be in the Nethersphere?
For what it’s worth, the way I read it was that, since the Nethersphere was a virtual reality generated by the Gallifreyan hard drive slice, Missy within it was an avatar of herself, uploaded in the same way as the minds/souls of the dead had been. Her physical self remained in the physical world, whether in the dimension of the mausoleum, or outside it in London. Presumably Missy would have had some means of remaining in contact with and controlling her avatar throughout.
26 November 2015 at 15:36 #47930@frobisher Yes, editing and revision could be seen as congruent themes, and the Doctor is not always a reliable narrator Rule 1: the Doctor lies.
From there we could stray into meta territory and contemplate the fact that, as a television show, Doctor Who in its entirety is illusion, subject to complex editing, cutting and revision 😀
26 November 2015 at 15:03 #47928@blenkinsopthebrave @puroandson Well spotted re the similarity between the structure seen in the trailer and the time machine transporter seen in The Lodger and Day of the Moon; I thought it looked familiar.
They aren’t identical: the frame of the one in the trailer is a lot chunkier than the one(s) seen in the earlier episodes, and the central cylinder is larger and lacks attached control panels, but the overall resemblance is marked, and very probably significant.
@puroandson and @lewis97 Both the sand in Planet of Death and the dust in Sleep No More consist of the residue of living things, so I agree that the sand which the Doctor examines in the trailer is intended to recall that.
I wonder, in fact, whether the whole set-up in Heaven Sent will be designed to torment him with reminders of episodes in his life, successful and unsuccessful, and that in turn it might be linked to what is contained in the confession dial? The Doctor hands the dial to Mayor Me, but was she supposed to keep it, or to hand it over to who or whatever wanted her to deliver the Doctor himself?
Perhaps the Doctor has been transmuted into an intermediate Gallifreyan hard drive
I have a strong suspicion that the events of Heaven Sent will indeed turn out to be largely illusion, and if the Time Lords are responsible, the Doctor may – knowingly or unknowingly – be experiencing a virtual reality in the Matrix, as in the Deadly Assassin, or in a Galleyfreyan hard drive data slice, as in Dark Water/Death in Heaven.
It seems to me that the concept of illusion, sleight of hand and disguise in one form or another, has been strongly present throughout this series, woven through the various episodes. When Missy and Clara where whisked from the Dalek control room by their vortex manipulator bracelets in The Magicians Apprentice we saw a realistic simulation of bodies destroyed by Dalek fire, complete with skeletal outlines; and in The Witches Familiar, Colony Sarff’s snakes hid in plain sight, disguised as cables in Davros’s life support pod. In Under the Lake/Before the Flood, the ‘ghosts’ which were central to the plot were not what they seemed and holograms were used to deceive. In The Girl Who Died the figure of Odin projected by the Mire was a hologramic illusion, as was the dragon used to drive them away. Lady Me in the Woman Who Lived was disguised on two levels – as a highwayman and in concealing her identity as a functional immortal human from the mortals among whom she lives. The Zygon episodes involved an alien race whose survival depends on their ability to mimic the form of their host species, and Sleep No More was a labyrinth of illusion in which we, the viewers, could never be certain at any point of the truth of what we were shown. In Face the Raven, we had layers of deception and illusion, from the more or less straightforward deceptions in the trap laid for the Doctor, to the illusion which hid the trap street, and the psychic field within the street which hid the form and reality of its inhabitants from strangers.
25 November 2015 at 19:22 #47858@ichabod @miapatrick @janetteb @arbutus
Doctor Who was not around when I was a child, but I am pretty sure that if I had been a child in 1963, or at any time since up to the present day, I would have relished it in all its phases, including the darker toned recent episodes. I suspect, in fact, that I would have found Face the Raven riveting. The nearest equivalent for me in childhood was the radio series Journey into Space, which could be quite spooky – the pictures conjured in the imagination by a radio drama were often a good deal more effective than the crude effects of early Who. Then, of course, there was the landmark Quatermass and the Pit, which I found disturbing, even though by that time I was in my mid teens. Both produced a frisson of mild terror, but it would not have occurred to my parents that they were unsuitable for either me or my younger brothers on that account.
Like Miapatrick I was a precocious reader, and as far as I am aware there was no bar set on my choice of reading. One of my great uncles was a journalist and at that time editor of John o’ London’s Weekly, a middle-brow literary journal. From time to time my family received boxes of review copies, and when we visited him my brothers and I were allowed unlimited access to his extensive collection of books. So we read or browsed books intended for adults, as well as those deemed ‘appropriate’ for our ages. Mia mentioned Grimm’s Fairy Tales, which is a case in point. As I have mentioned before – I think in the discussion of In The Forest of the Night – one of my favourite books was an unexpurgated edition of the complete collected stories of the Brothers Grimm, which I was given when I was six. I still have it, and its battered condition is testimony to the numerous times it was read.
Children are as varied as any other group of people, and I feel it would be a mistake to be too prescriptive about what kind of fiction is or is not suitable for them to read or view. As both Mia and janetteB observed, the tendency to try to cocoon and protect children in this respect has increased in recent decades, and markedly so in my lifetime, and it could be counterproductive if carried too far. The tales collected by the brothers Grimm and the stories in Doctor Who can address fundamental anxieties such as abandonment, cruelty, death and loss, as well as bravery, fortitude and resourcefulness in adversity in a form in which they can, I think, be assimilated at a young age, where the reality at first hand would be traumatic.
When Doctor Who first aired the intended audience was, I believe, the average 12 year old with an interest in history and science, and it was shown in the late afternoon/early evening children’s slot; but it was never written ‘down’ to children, and from the first it was watched not only by much younger viewers but also by adults, not all of whom had the excuse that they were watching with their children 🙂 Those who were sensitive or very young could watch with a reassuring adult and, if necessary, from behind the sofa, and in that respect I don’t think much has changed, even as the show has become more deeply and densely layered and more subtle in its story telling. If I have a criticism of recent episodes it is that the balance between light and dark, comic and serious, has been a little too far skewed towards the dark, and that some young viewers may have found the more serious tone ‘boring’. Maybe, as @arbutus suggested, the programme should sometimes come with a warning for the benefit of parents of very young or sensitive children, but I do not believe that becausea show aimed at a family audience tacklesthe implications of the death of a principal character in the way that Face the Raven did, it was wholly inappropriate for children. Far better this approach, in my view, than the affectless killing in some action movies.
25 November 2015 at 11:28 #47818@puroandson Like everyone else here I’m delighted, with added sugar, to see you back with us, puro. Son/Ilion greetings and welcome to this haven of bonkersdom and all things Who, and all good wishes for your forthcoming birthday.
Keep laughing as and whenever you can. I find it a good way of getting through life, whatever it throws at you.
24 November 2015 at 18:11 #47754@lisa @ichabod Re the subject of the tattoo-like markings around Ashildr/Mayor Me’s neck:
Most people who have commented on the markings seem to have seen them as snake-like, but when I saw them in the trailer and subsequently in this episode they reminded me of plant tendrils – the tendrils of vines and clematis which wind around the stems of other plants, or trelliswork or wires and bind the climbing plant to the support, and I wonder if this might be more apt in the context.
When the chronolock has almost completed the countdown, the markings dissolve into smoke which wreathes away to summon the Raven, so presumably they represent an aspect or element of the Quantum Shade. When the Doctor tries to explain the Quantum Shade to Clara and Rigsy he says of it ‘ … once it is bound to a victim you could flee across all of time, all of the universe, it would still find you. ‘ So the analogy of tendrils which bind to something else might seem appropriate.
Changing the subject, there was a detail which I noticed on watching the episode for a second time today: in the room with the stasis machine and the trap laid for the Doctor, there was a honeycomb pattern of hexagons on the panelling of the staircase, not dissimilar to the honeycomb pattern on the walls of the control room in the Tardis. Probably just a bit of fun on the part of the set designers rather than significant, but perhaps worth bearing in mind in what comes next (?)
22 November 2015 at 23:26 #47561@lisa The whole question of the timelock and the continuing inaccessibility of Gallifrey is confusing, to say the least, and it does raise some interesting questions.
Insofar as I understand the situation – and I could be completely wrong – the time lock on Gallifrey and the Time War ceased to exist when the course of history was changed by the events recounted in Day of the Doctor: the moment was never used, the time lock was never put in place. The rest of the universe was unaware of this because as far as it was concerned, nothing appeared to have changed, and Gallifrey remained inaccessible in the present and future because it had been removed. Exactly how it was removed was never explained very clearly: the analogy was with a Gallifreyan form of art which looked like a 3D painting but was actually a frozen moment in time, or, on a more mundane level, with something latent which could be reconstituted, like a cup-a-soup; but since the Time Lords were able to communicate with the rest of the universe (Time of the Doctor), they are clearly not in stasis, so perhaps they are in a bubble universe, or in a dimension one step removed from ours. Even the Doctor seems unsure of the how and he certainly does not know the where.
The fact that the time lock no longer exists, at least in relation to the universe after the Day of the Doctor, means that the Tardis could take Clara back to Gallifrey-in-the past to encounter the Doctor as a child, and so presumably anything up to and including the time war is theoretically accessible. One might suppose, therefore, that any Time Lord with a Tardis from any time up to the events of the Time War could also, in theory, venture into their future and our present, so why is there no evidence of their having done so? I can think of only two possible reasons: a) the Time Lords are inhibited by the limitations which they placed on themselves with regard to meddling with past or future or b) that from the perspective of anyone from Gallifrey-in-the-past, as for the War Doctor, the ninth Doctor and Tennant Doctor afterwards, it was as if the events which changed history in Day of the Doctor never happened, the course of history was not diverted into a new channel, and so for them the time lock was/is still in place.
I’m not sure that this makes sense entirely, but if there is any logic to it, Bluesqueakpip might be able to work it out with a diagram.
22 November 2015 at 17:34 #47531@jphamlore. You are correct and my memory was at fault. I was making the same mistake as the Doctor and forgetting that she had corrected him.
The character of the hidden enclave would, however, still be constant with the date of construction of the original station in 1848, assuming that was what Ashildr meant. At that time of rapid expansion and redevelopment there were, I think, still quite extensive pockets of an older London surviving, and one can imagine how, in the midst of all that development, a street might easily slip off the record and out of knowledge
22 November 2015 at 17:18 #47526Dearest puro,
The messages to you from Arbutus and the others here convey my feelings exactly, and I can add little more than to say that the Forum will be very much the poorer without your active presence. My thoughts are with you and your family always.
With love and gratitude for your warmth and friendship, Mudlark
22 November 2015 at 17:01 #47524How far is the Doctor responsible for Ashildr? I think – very – especially as she was a child when he gave her the immortality chip.
I agree, and I pretty sure that he is very much conscious of that fact.
As Lady Me in the 17th century she told him that she was going to protect the universe from him, or words to that effect – a retaliation of sorts, and the latest way she has found of doing so is to create, or at least preside over a haven for some of the alien species who have, over time, faced the Doctor as enemies. Why they should choose to shelter on earth is another matter, but I suspect it all ties in with the developing theme of the good, or at least redeemable, which may be found in even the most implacably hostile foes.
Digressing a little, I’m a sucker for the idea of alternate places or realities hidden within the everyday world, such as one might stumble upon accidentally when turning a corner or venturing down a suddenly revealed alleyway. The ‘Dickensian’, old-world character of this particular hidden place might seem a bit corny, but it ties in with it having been created around the time of Waterloo, when the Doctor lost sight of Ashildr.
22 November 2015 at 16:42 #47519@lewis97 That is a very interesting observation, and you could well be right about its significance. All the signs seem to point to there something being more to Clara’s exit from the story than we saw. It seemed odd to me that, unless I missed something, the Doctor, having witnessed her death, went straight back inside to face Ashildr/Me.
I have not yet had time to watch the episode a second time, but in the interval until I can do so I have been mulling over the various possibilities. @countscarlioni and I separately both noted the fact that Clara went forward to face the Raven, unlike others who, we were told, normally ran, and wondered if this might be significant.
As regards the death and whether or not there might be a resurrection of some kind, I have mixed feelings. Moffat has a history of apparently killing characters off, only for them to reappear, and for this to be just another instance of the same would be an anti-climax and disappointing. On the other hand we know of at least two occasions when Claricles died after helping the Doctor, and it was implied that it had happened many more times. If, as several people have suggested and discussed, the Clara we have seen over the past three years was not Clara Prime but another Claricle in a loop with no beginning and no end, what might this mean in the convoluted time line of the Doctor?
21 November 2015 at 22:18 #47453That was stunning, almost literally, because I am in no shape as yet to comment very coherently and will need to watch it again asap. Capaldi’s face can express more than a page-full of dialogue, and I don’t think Jenna as Clara has ever been better.
Perhaps Clara is truly dead, and if so it was a worthy and fitting end, but I did notice one thing which might be significant. The first person to face the Raven ran when his time was up, and someone said ‘Why do they always run?’ Clara took the quantum shade upon herself knowingly and willingly, and when she realised that she had misjudged and there was no way out, did not run but went forward to meet the Raven. Maybe such a sacrificial death need not be the end.
With all the alien technology and influences she has absorbed, who knows what is possible.
17 November 2015 at 11:30 #4718916 November 2015 at 21:43 #47136The flag is a ‘hug’ for the people of France. All the tolerant people of France
Agreed and seconded. Flags can be used for nationalistic purposes by governments and ideologues, but they also stand for the myriad people of the nations they symbolically represent. Over the past couple of days my thoughts have not been with governments, politicians and national leaders, but with the members of my family who are French by adoption or by citizenship, and with the people and the culture I have come to know more deeply through them. They are what I think of when I see the tricolor or the Eiffel tower peace symbol.
Governments come and go, and when it comes to international affairs, most – in the UK, France, the USA and elsewhere – seem to have achieved little but to compound the mistakes of earlier generations of statesmen. Where the UK is concerned, I can’t think of anything since the Suez debacle ( which is around the point where I began to take anything like an informed interest) which I could say has been done ‘in my name’. I stand, instead, with the human race, in all its complexity and confusion.
16 November 2015 at 16:10 #47113@phaseshift I meant to say before now that yesterday, for once, I ventured BTL on the Guardian blog and so saw, read (and applauded) your splendid post there. It well deserved that OOOOOOH! from @danmartinuk . Let us hope it has the desired effect and lures a few more interested and interesting contributors to join us.
15 November 2015 at 12:08 #46986One incident in particular which struck me, among the many clues in the trail that the Doctor followed, was when he commented that the station had the appearance of having been dead for a long while, before blowing the dust from an adjacent surface and then staring intently, directly into the viewpoint of the dust which was recording him, as if he could sense, if not see, what was there. The dust on the station may have been composed largely of human detritus, as he discovered, but unless I misheard or am misremembering what I heard, he went on to say or imply that this was true of all dust, which I found almost as jarring a detail as the eukaryotic prokaryotes in Kill the Moon. It seems to be a widespread belief, but any inspection of house dust under a microscope will demonstrate that it isn’t true.
Well, I had to find at least one nit to pick 😈
15 November 2015 at 11:47 #46985‘The Sleep of Reason Brings Forth Monsters’; and what could be more unreasonable than to interfere with the sleep function? As the Doctor says concerning the importance of sleep ‘…we wake up, rub the sleep from our eyes, and that keeps us safe – safe from the monsters inside’. Prolonged lack of sleep makes people first disorientated, eventually psychotic and ultimately dead, so it does not take much foresight to realise that reprogramming the brain to do without it might not be a good idea. If the episode is analysed critically, the idea that those who used the Morpheus pods might eventually become or be consumed by ‘sleep dust’ might seem a bit too literal, but to work as it did it needed literal monsters which, if not necessarily frightening in themselves, were certainly disturbing and very well realised. And if we choose to see them as a metaphor, they also work very well.
Gatiss is very good at writing unsettling material, and this quality was reinforced for me by the rapid cutting between the monochrome viewpoint of the dust and the red-lit views of the Morpheus affected humans, especially on first viewing, when I was hard put to follow all the convolutions leading up to the final twist. A second watch was certainly needed.
I was expecting the ‘found footage’ format to be off-putting because, like @phaseshift, I’m not particularly keen on it normally, but it worked for me here.
As for Clara, things are looking increasingly ominous. The inclusion of her name in the coding at the beginning, among that of the others in the rescue team, and the fact that her viewpoint is included in the footage, clearly signals that the Morpheus reprogramming has at least begun*, and unlike @frobisher I doubt whether the Dalek nano-tech will undo the damage; more likely it will compound it. And who knows what her contact with a Zygon may have added to the mix. She sought reassurance from the Doctor that he could fix it, but I didn’t find his response particularly convincing.
@miapatrick The invocation of the gods at the beginning of each attempt at radio contact was, I think, a nod to the fact that the rescue team belonged to a society which was a fusion of Indian and Japanese, hence incorporating polytheistic elements of Hinduism and the animism of Shinto.
* The inclusion of Doctor Who in the coding, which @doctordoctorwho spotted, made up vertically from letters in the names of the others and highlighted was, I suspect, just an Easter egg type joke – but then again, Who nose?
14 November 2015 at 19:20 #46926@kharis Ah, the perils and pitfalls of our common language 🙂
For the record, what we on this side of the pond would call a soufflé dish pretty much resembles a ramekin writ large ( have both in my kitchen). Moreover, it wouldn’t be referred to as a ‘pan’ in standard usage or any British dialect that I am aware of, since that word normally denotes a container made of metal, usually of the kind used in stove-top cooking.
Once, when I was visiting the US, a friend produced an American/British English dictionary and challenged me to give the American equivalents of a series of British words. I got all but one right, but I don’t think the vocabulary list included culinary implements and utensils.
I’m not surprised, though, that Jammy Dodgers and fish fingers are unknown in California. I don’t much care for either, myself, or for custard – if by ‘custard’ is meant the concoction made with flavoured cornflour (as opposed to the ‘proper’ kind, made with egg yolks, cream and sugar). Come to think of it, jelly babies aren’t exactly my favourite confection, either, so clearly I lack the credentials of a true Doctor Who fan and must slink away to contemplate my failings 😉
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