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@whohar

I agree that there are hints of something a bit odd about Belinda, as if she knows things that, on the face of it, she shouldn’t. The answer, though, may lie in a crucial incident in The Robot Revolution. When the two time-separated instances of the document registering the naming of Belinda’s star touch, Alan regresses to conception and is swept up by the polisher bot, but Belinda and the the Doctor experience a scrambled review of her life past and (potentially) future. This, on top of the time fracture (schwup effect) could well explain why she sometimes ‘remembers’ things prior to experiencing them.

Incidentally, it seems to me clear that the time fracture, which the Doctor thought he had resolved but which clearly he hasn’t, has shunted them into an alternative time stream in which the earth has been destroyed , which is why they can’t get back.

 

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A bit late on the scene, but I may as well add my pennyworth.

As it was a very long time since I last watched Midnight I decided to watch that again before tackling this episode so that I could compare the two directly. It seemed doubtful that a return to the theme of an isolated group of people facing the unseen and inexplicable could match up to the original, but in the event I think the approach was sufficiently different to ensure an equally shocking impact, and for my money it was the best episode of the three so far this season. Rose Ayling-Ellis was particularly impressive in her portrayal of panicky desperation and terror.

The idea of possession by an unknown and presumably malign entity, as in Midnight, is always creepy, but equally so is the sensation of something following you, sensed but not seen, as with the traveller on a dark and lonely road who  ‘ …. turns no more his head, Because he knows a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread’  *  And like the Balrog in Moria when the dwarves dug too deep, this monster rose out of the pit the miners dug to reach the diamond layer.

Here, as in Midnight, someone sacrifices herself in an attempt to get rid of the monster, but where in the former case all ended well for those who survived, here we are left with no such assurance.

* Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,  also quoted in the MR James story The Casting of the Runes 

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After watching The Robot Revolution this occurred to me as appropriate

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@juniperfish

I was also struck by the similarity between Bel’s yellow 1950s dress and the pink 1950s dress worn by Rose in The Idiot’s Lantern, which was set in London in 1953 (and this episode is set in 1952 in the US).

Also I was struck by the similarity between the red-bodied robots in the first episode of this season, The Robot Revolution, and the cyborg King Hydroflax in The Husbands of River Song. Incidentally, the robots of The Robot Revolution were designed, according to the production notes in the Wikipedia entry for the episode, with a “retrofuturistic” look influenced by the 1950s:

Ditto, ditto ditto.

In The Robot Revolution my immediate thought on seeing the robots was the similarities in the design to Hydroflax, and the design of their rocket ship was straight out of 1950s SciFi comics. That the 1950s vibe was deliberate was of course confirmed when I subsequently watched Doctor Who Unleashed. Cool in it’s way, although I couldn’t help wondering how a cute little rocket ship of such design could possibly be supposed capable of navigating interstellar distances. But where the Whoniverse is concerned that kind of reasoning leads to madness; best not to pursue it.

As for the design of Bel’s dress in Lux with its full skirt and multiplicity of petticoats, and Rose’s outfit before that, they are more 1959 than 1952, but as with the similar anachronism in the 1960s outfits in The Devil’s Chord, I suppose anything which recalls the decade seems appropriate.*

RTD was born in 1963, the year that Doctor Who came into being, so never experienced the 1950s, but it does seem as if he has a fascination with the decade. Perhaps for him it has an air of the exotic.

 

*I wonder if it ever occurs to the designers that there may be people watching who are old enough to have worn such clothes.

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Hello everyone, and apologies for having been so long AWOL.

As things turned out I’ve only just caught up by binge watching Joy to the World, The Robot Revolution and Lux end-to-end which I enjoyed, though with an slightly uneasy feeling that some elements of the plots didn’t quite add up. I have also caught up with the discussions, but if I’m to add anything of substance I will need to watch the episodes again at more leisure to register the details.

The reason I hadn’t watched the Christmas special before now was that, for me, Christmas didn’t really happen. I woke up on the morning of Christmas Eve with a bad headache and acute nausea and the next few days are a bit of a blur. Far worse was the discovery on Sunday 29th that my downstairs neighbour, two months short of her ninetieth birthday had fallen, broken her arm and been lying on her living room floor since Christmas Day. I have copies of her door keys, and if I had been up and about as normal I would almost certainly have realised something was wrong and gone down to investigate, but in the event it wasn’t until a friend of hers became worried and called on me that we found her and were able to call an ambulance. Fortunately she is a very tough lady and after a couple of weeks in hospital and two more months convalescing in a nursing home she is is now back living in her flat, albeit with support from carers.

After that I didn’t feel much like watching the Christmas special and my only Who activity in the following weeks  was an attempt, still not fully achieved, to watch all the Tom Baker episodes in sequence. Over Easter and covering the first two weekends of the current season  my youngest brother and wife were over from France and we were occupied with various activities, including larger family unions, so it is only now that things are fully back to normal.

 

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@dwnerdfrommars

Wow, this got political (that’s okay)

Although The Winchester (pub) rather than The Sofa seems recently to have become a place for discussing general Who related topics, the description on the front page of the Forum, where it is listed under Topics, is

The latest pub on our pub crawl. A break from the sofa and Doctor Who. Somewhere for chat about news, politics, sport etc. Avoid if it’s not for you.

So political is indeed OK  🙂

Project 2025, set out in a 900 page document, is the dream of a group who want essentially to establish a white nationalist, evangelical theocracy in place of the Constitution. Think of it as a backward-looking evangelical Christian version of the Taliban or the more extreme of the Iranian Ayatollahs. It has nothing to do with Trump himself, who just wants to have the freedom of an absolute monarch to grift and otherwise do as he pleases without consequences, and to take revenge on anyone who isn’t sufficiently loyal and worshipful of his person. The Project 2025 gang, on the other hand, probably think that he, if he is elected, will be easily manipulated into carrying out their agenda.

 

 

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@dentarthurdent

Yes, the first-past-the-post system here is grossly unrepresentative and urgently needs to be reformed.  Happy though I am with the result this time round, it is absurd that a party with little more than a third of the vote should gain a landslide victory. In fact the only party whose share of the vote this time has been at all accurately reflected in the number of MPs elected (71) are the Lib Dems, and that may be due in part to the way in which they have focussed accurately on the seats they targeted  to win. In their lamentable coalition with the Tories in 2010 one of the Lib Dem’s conditions was that there should be a referendum on Proportional Representation, but the system chosen to put to the electorate (AV) was probably the least effective of all the options, and the campaign was half-hearted at best, so it was rejected.

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I’ve also been following events in the USA fairly closely and am appalled by the fact that Trump has a realistic chance of being elected. The prospect of another Trump presidency is frankly terrifying, especially now that the Supreme Court has granted him, at least as he sees it, carte blanche to do whatever he wants without any legal repercussions. Moreover it’s not just his would-be fascistic dictatorship that is so worrying, it’s the people who want to use him to establish a white nationalist, fundamentalist theocracy, namely those behind Project 2025. It would be horrifying enough if  the repercussions were confined within the USA, but they are not.

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Beige is fine as far as I’m concerned; Attlee was hardly a charismatic figure, and look what his government achieved! For the moment I’m just relieved that the grown-ups are now in charge, and I certainly don’t expect miracles, given the disaster area that Starmer’s government have inherited. What worries me for the future is the extent to which Labour’s landslide depended on Reform splitting the right wing vote.

On election night I stayed up until 4 am and could have stayed up longer, but decided in the end that it was probably better if I got at least a few hours sleep. As a result I missed seeing the downfall of Liz Truss as it happened, but the schadenfreude was delicious even on seeing the news a few hours later.

In my home city of Norwich things went as expected; Norwich South re-elected Clive Lewis with a handsome majority and Norwich North returned to the Labour fold. I said that it would be interesting to see what happened in the rural hinterlands of East Anglia and it certainly was. Apart from Norwich there are seven more constituencies which for the most part have always voted Conservative. North Norfolk voted Tory in 2019, but in the previous decade or more had voted Lib Dem and has now reverted to them. Of the rest, three remained Tory but with vastly reduced majorities, two voted Labour, one (S W Norfolk) being the constituency of the aforementioned Liz Truss, and the coastal constituency of Great Yarmouth, sad to say, elected the Reform candidate.

In the neighbouring county of Suffolk, which is also predominantly rural, the results were equally interesting. In 2019 the entire county was a solid Tory blue. This time round the county town of Ipswich opted for Labour, as did three of the normally Tory rural constituencies. Waveney, the constituency bordering Norfolk, went Green. The remaining three constituencies remained Tory, but again with much reduced majorities.

What’s notable is that here the traditionally Tory voters went for Labour, in contrast to the similarly traditional Tory voters in Southern England and the Midlands who opted for the Lib Dems.

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Many thanks  @whohar  @winston  @blenkinsopthebrave  @janetteb  for the good wishes.  The polling station for my area is only 15 minutes walk from where I live and is on my route into the city centre, so I voted on my way to do my weekly food shopping, Voting seemed pretty brisk for mid afternoon, with a steady stream of people coming in, but everything very well organised and no significant waiting to be checked and pick up ballot papers. According to what I have just read, there are signs elsewhere of a generally high turn-out, which is encouraging.

Little doubt as to the result in my constituency, Norwich South. It has been a persistent and valiant island of red in a sea of Tory blue for decades and it would take a seismic upheaval to unseat the incumbent, Clive Lewis. Norwich North, which has been Tory in recent years, will almost certainly revert to Labour, but what happens in the normally True Blue Tory rural hinterlands of Norfolk should be interesting.

I hope I manage to stay up long enough to witness at least a few ‘Portillo Moments’ even if I lack the stamina for an all-nighter watching the results come in, but I’ve bought a bottle of wine and a few nibbles for sustenance.

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@ps1l0v3y0u  @juniperfish

To be a warning about Sutekh it would need to be DAFTJACKAL

Or even more to the point, MAD JACK 😉

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@thane16

It took me a while to compose the above, and in the meantime you and others have been continuing the discussion and to some extent overtaken me. I will  read and catch up and give everything due consideration, but it is late here and I’m not sure my constitution can stand up to many more late nights.

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@thane16

I do think that there won’t necessarily be a return to R’s mum. Pretty sure Rus would say it’s all tied up -theme over slavish addiction to plot.

I didn’t mean to imply that there would be a return to the subject of Ruby’s birth mother. That plot line has indeed been brought to an appropriate and satisfactory conclusion If Louise Miller appears at all in any episodes next season it will be simply as a member of Ruby’s extended family. On the other hand, as  @whohar  said, we have been left with a number of questions to which in my opinion we have not yet been given satisfactory answers. If all we have been shown in this last episode of the season is supposed to be all that there is to know on the mystery of Ruby Sunday, then I’m inclined to see that as a failure on the part of RTD. He has set us puzzles and raised expectations and then not fully delivered, or what he has delivered contains lacunae and is not entirely coherent.

Let’s start with The Devil’s Chord: Maestro saw a hidden song (Carol of the Bells) deep inside Ruby’s soul then said, ‘How can a song have such power? And power like Him’. The Doctor asked ‘Who?’  to which Maestro replied, ‘The Oldest One, on the night of her birth. He can’t have been there’.

Sutekh was The One Who Waits; if he was also the Oldest One, that’s a very grand promotion for someone who started out as a psychopathic Osiran, extremely powerful and extremely long lived but ultimately mortal, even if subsequently he managed to acquire immortality and accumulate even greater power while hitching a ride on the Tardis. If Sutekh, simply by having been lurking nearby in the Tardis, had become entangled with the song and somehow imprinted in the soul of the baby lying at the church door, that means Ruby could be said to have carried a seed of death within her, but then so, in a sense, do all living things. It’s a consequence of being born.  So why did Maestro tell the Doctor, ‘This creature (Ruby) is very wrong’ ? And if the power of the Oldest One is indeed somehow contained in the song in her soul and was enough to worry Maestro, doesn’t that mean that there is something extraordinary about Ruby, despite her ordinary origins?

Then there are are the discrepancies shown in the Time Window, which have already been extensively discussed.  It could perhaps be argued that the hooded woman, whether or not Ruby’s mother, had originally stopped and pointed before the Doctor arrived on the scene, and that the sequence of events was being jumbled up and mashed together, causing the Doctor to say that his ‘memory kept changing, time kept changing’, but that doesn’t explain the air of mystery surrounding the woman. Ruby asked why they couldn’t see her properly, even when she was close, and the Doctor thought it was more than just a glitch in the image, it was as if she was shadowed. With hindsight we might conclude that it was Sutekh doing the shadowing, but if so he would seem to have been obstructing and frustrating his own purpose.

I simply suggested a hypothetical scenario such as might be a basis for further development next season and provide satisfactory answers to all the threads seemingly left hanging.

 

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@blenkinsopthebrave

This does in fact have BBC approval. It was shown last Saturday at the end of Doctor Who Unleashed, the behind-the-scenes supplement which airs on BBC 3 after each episode.

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@whohar

I think it’s a shame that the Death of any of the main characters is avoided as it tends to diminish the stakes.

Yes. After what RTD was saying in the build up to the episode I was fully convinced that someone we, the audience cared about was going to die – and I had the box of tissues to hand. When absolutely everyone and everything was dusted off so early on in the proceedings my heart sank, because it was so obvious that such a state of affairs was going to be reversed. In any case, whereas the death of one person hits home and stirs the emotions, even if that person is fictional, the death of billions is too overwhelming to register at the same gut level. If death is to feature in a drama it should mean something, and that applies even if it is a science/fantasy centred on a death-bringing god. Anything else is a refusal to confront a fundamental reality.

Typing that I was suddenly reminded of a long ago incident when my mother asked my six year old little brother what he had done that day at school. My brother replied that they had been playing cowboys and Indians. Q. ‘Were you a cowboy or an Indian’?  A. ‘I was Jesus’. Q. Why? A. ‘Because when people were killed Jesus had to make them alive again’.

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@thane16

I think it was @bunface who suggested the possibility that the woman in the hooded cloak might not have been Ruby’s mother, and that chimes with the direction of my thinking over the past 24 hours or more. It’s a question of assumptions, led in our case by the way the observed facts were presented.

The Doctor, who was the only external witness to events at the church on Christmas eve 2005, arrived when baby Ruby was already lying in front of the church door and the goblins were about to snatch her. He saw a woman in a hooded cape in the distance, walking away, and assumed that a) she was the person who had just abandoned Ruby and b) she was Ruby’s mother. In the introductory scene in The Church on Ruby Road we see a woman in a hooded cape walking towards the church with a baby in her arms, with a voice over by the Doctor telling the story, but what we are seeing is what he assumed had happened, not necessarily a precise record of what did happen.

When the events are seen again in the Time Window, the Doctor is the only one present who was there at any stage of the original proceedings, and he is therefore the only one aware that what they are seeing does not correspond to what he saw originally; this time the woman stops, turns and points, as if she was aware of these spectators from the future. Despite these discrepancies, he still seems to assume that it is Ruby’s mother whose image they are watching

Next consider Sutekh and his preoccupation with the identity of the hooded woman who, following Ruby herself and everyone else, he also assumes is Ruby’s mother. @miapatrick  said this was because he couldn’t see her and I agree, but that it was in more than the literal sense of ‘seeing’. It wasn’t just that the woman’s face was hidden by the darkness and the hood. Maestro could see deep into Ruby, into her soul if you think in those terms, and perceived something very troubling. Sutekh, who was of the same order of being and more powerful, may have looked into Ruby in similar fashion and seen whatever Maestro saw, but I conjecture that when he tried to do the same with the hooded woman he encountered a blank wall. He couldn’t see into her inner self at all.

The hooded woman could have been Ruby’s mother and all the anomalies in what we saw in the Time Window the result of somebody or something messing with memory and/or the VHS  tape, but that leaves a lot of questions unanswered. Consider another scenario. A frightened 15 year old scurries up to the church, leaves her baby and runs off again, hoping that she hasn’t been observed but knowing that the Christmas Eve midnight service is in progress and her baby will soon be found. Between then and the baby being taken into the church, but before any intervention by goblins or the Doctor, something else happened, probably involving the hooded woman who, depending on who is observing/remembering, can seemingly be in two places at once. What that something was, and what exactly it is about Ruby that had Maestro and Sutekh so concerned will be for next year’s  season to resolve – or so I hope. That Ruby will be back is no secret now, though what part she will take in proceedings remains to be seen.

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@blenkinsopthebrave

As  @ps1l0v3y0u  says, there is no answer; in fact nothing adds up in terms of the explanation offered. Who attaches a road sign to a lamp post on the premises of a pub, anyway? (For the record, I checked all the scenes in the Time Window where the lamp post is visible and, although the images aren’t exactly crystal clear, there is nowhere the slightest indication of anything attached to it. For what my opinion is worth, I still think that she was pointing at the Doctor or the Tardis. Perhaps the VHS recording had changed again to tease and mislead.

If what we saw in The Church on Ruby Road was an accurate depiction of what happened on that Christmas Eve 2005, then there was no indication that the woman in the caped hood saw the Doctor at any point, or even that she noticed the kerfuffle with the goblins. She was already far along the road and past the church by the time he arrived on the scene. Nor  was there evidence of anyone else around, either then or in the Time Window, so it looked as if  the alternative version of the woman, the one in the Time Window who stopped and pointed, whether at the Doctor, the Tardis or the Road sign, was aware of the Doctor and Ruby and other witnesses from the future. otherwise why point?

The discrepancies in the sequence of events shown in the Time Window must be deliberate and significant, in fact the Doctor noted and was puzzled by them.   Maybe someone or something was tampering with the memories and thus with the past, but until it is all accounted for, Ruby’s story is not done.

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@miapatrick

… it was Ruby’s mother who he couldn’t see

Yes, now that you point it out. I suppose my mind was wandering down another path and interpreting ‘see’ in a much wider sense. But why, among all the other mothers who have abandoned their babies or given them up for adoption and whose children have since tried and failed to find them, was her identity so important to Sutekh? The answer, or so we were told, was because it was important to Ruby, which implies that the identity of Ruby herself was an unresolved enigma and therefore an obstacle to him, as it was for Maestro also.

@juniperfish

Your alternative scenario with Ruby manifesting as the eye of Horus would indeed have been wonderful and much more satisfying.  I agree that the more mundane and low key story of Ruby finding and being reunited with her birth parents was touching in itself, but as a kind of afterword to all that thunder and spectacle it lacked the impact that it might have had in another context.

@wolvesarerunning

What young mother names her child by turning dramatically and pointing to a road sign?

To make it even more unlikely and confusing, she did so only in the ‘remembered’ scenes in the Time Window, and in that case, who or what was doing the remembering and who did she think was there to see? The Doctor said that he didn’t think she was aware of him or Ruby watching her.   In the original sequence of events as shown in The Church on Ruby Road there is no evidence that she witnessed the arrival of the Doctor or anything of the events which followed immediately after, because by that time she was already well past that point, walking away in the distance.

Now for a little nit picking if you will indulge me.  The setting is presumably supposed to be urban, and in the context of a heavily built up district or suburb a street with a relatively modern name such as Ruby Road is not unlikely, and nor is a Victorian or modern church on such a road. However, for all that they attempted to create the impression of such a setting – and the fact that they were shooting the scenes at night helped – they couldn’t entirely disguise the fact that the church and pub were surrounded by trees and bushes and fields. The church was/is medieval with perhaps some Victorian restoration work on the tower ( I had a good look at the stonework and so can vouch for this), and where there is a medieval church in existence, even if it has been engulfed by later buildings, the road on which it stands will almost invariably be called Church Road or Church Lane, or else named after the saint to whom the church is dedicated.

My apologies. I will now go away and do penance for my pedantry, but I’m sensitive to this kind of topographical detail.

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Mrs Flood’s Snow Queen get up at the end suggests that she may play a bigger part in events in the Christmas episode, and given Moffat’s record in basing Christmas specials on what could loosely be termed fairy stories, maybe we should expect a Hans Andersen theme.

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@miapatrick @cathannabel

He couldn’t see her, therefore he feared her, as a potential ‘rogue’ element that could sabotage his plan.

True, but in the population of Earth, let alone in the universe as a whole, how many people are mysteries to themselves and others, so why was it Ruby alone whom Sutekh couldn’t see?  Was it the additional fact that she was travelling with the Doctor which imbued her mystery with unique significance in his eyes?

@juniperfish

RTD’s very wonderful recurring message for Doctor Who about how every ordinary person is valuable and meaningful.

That, I think, was certainly the message that he wanted us to take away from the episode. The problem, for me at least, was that after all the previous build up which misled us into thinking Ruby must be special in an extraordinary, possibly timey or extra-terrestrial way, and overpowered by the apocalyptic events earlier in the episode, it fell rather flat.

 

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@blenkinsopthebrave

Well, here are a couple of reflections. I think we should change the subtitle of our forum to:

“Theories even more dramatically satisfying than what’s actually happening.”

Perhaps they should employ the members of this forum collectively as a kind of think tank to come up with scenarios for future Doctor Who episodes 😉

Further thoughts arising on the subject of unresolved questions. Given that the legions which the Toymaker said were coming never showed up, are they still to come? Maestro and Sutekh plus a couple of people temporarily possessed by Sutekh, don’t really match up to the definition of ‘legions’.

If Ruby was, as it turned out, just an ordinary human being, how come she could, just by the power of memory, cause it to snow any time, anywhere?

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After all the hype and advance publicity, with RTG telling us it would be devastating, heart rending and the most spectacular season finale ever, that was something of a disappointment to put it mildly. All the musical cues and clues led nowhere, it seems, and the mystery of Ruby and her parentage turned out to be nothing out of the ordinary, even though Sutekh thought it important enough for him to spare Ruby and the Doctor in an attempt to find the answer. All it amounted to was that Ruby’s unknown mother was of  cosmic importance because she was important to Ruby and the Doctor, but in the wider world that is hardly unique. Many if not most people at some time in their lives are of overwhelming importance to at least one other person, so why were they the only ones spared?

Before these last two instalments aired I wrote that I worried that the whole thing would end up collapsing in a heap of incoherence, and the resolution of the crisis did indeed seem incoherent, sad to say.  What does the ‘death of death is life’ even mean? Even the absence of death doesn’t necessarily mean life, and in any case Sutekh is a bringer of death, not death itself. If it comes to a personification of Death I think I’ll settle for Terry Pratchett’s version. If the Tardis, in the course of dragging Sutekh into the Time vortex, had also dragged him back through time and in so doing annulled all his works, the solution might have been plausible, but unless I missed something (which is entirely possible, since this is after watching for the first time), that didn’t seem to be what was intended.

On the plus side the episode was visually effective, but even there I had reservations. The apparition of Sutekh, realised through a mixture of puppetry and CGI, was impressive, but to me he looked like a cross between a donkey and a wolf*, which rather spoiled the effect. They would, I think, have done better to start with the image of Sutekh in Pyramids of Mars, which was suitably weird and sinister looking, and work on that (‘glow up’ is, I think, the current term).

It saddens me to be so negative, but there were things I really liked. The Tardis in the Time Window, being the memory of  the Tardis and its essence and summation over all her time with the Doctor, was a wonderful concept and wonderfully realised. In particular I liked the mini replica of the designer’s monstrosity that was the thirteenth Doctor’s console room, reduced to a hearth fire around which the Doctor and Ruby could warm themselves and so performing a function for which it was much better suited. The idea that Sutekh had been a hidden presence in the Tardis ever since the Doctor first encountered him in 1911 was genuinely chilling, though I did wonder how he had evaded detection by the Tardis herself. But she isn’t omniscient, and it’s conceivable that a parasite lurking in the crevices might escape her notice. On the other hand, a parasite who is at the same time a god of cosmic evil, steadily increasing in power,  might have some difficulty escaping notice.  The story of the discovery of Ruby’s birth family was touching,  but not enough in itself to be the whole stuff of Doctor Who, let alone a finale’. Even as a coda it was it was rather overwhelmed by the pyrotechnics

Unless there is something more about Ruby yet to be revealed, which seems unlikely, we are now left with just the enigma of Mrs Flood. She is obviously more than she seemed, but then we knew that from the end of The Church on Ruby Road onward. She wasn’t possessed by Sutekh, but it isn’t clear that she is entirely on the side of the angels either, and evidently she has her own agenda.  We leave her, looking like a cross between the Snow Queen and Mary Poppins, foretelling more trouble for the Doctor.

Please note: I didn’t read any of the comments before posting this, so if I have repeated points already made by others I apologise, but it was not intentional

 

* The wolf would have been appropriate enough as a signifier of death if we were dealing with the Norse gods and Fenris, but we weren’t

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As preparation for tomorrow I’ve just been watching the remastered and edited version of Pyramid of Mars in Tales of the Tardis on iPlayer. As a feature length film and with a few updated tweaks it has greater impact, I think, even though the effect of the cliff hangers in the original 25 min episodes is lost.  I note that Prof. Scarman’s racist comment about the Egyptian workmen (‘superstitious savages’) has been edited out.

The brief introduction and post script with the 15th Doctor telling Ruby about this previous encounter with Sutekh give a taste of how effective Gatwa can be as the Doctor in more sombre and reflective mood, and he doesn’t seem at all confident that he can prevail this time. As he puts it, the Sutekh he faced then was the size of a man; since then he has evolved and become a Titan.

I’m tempted to stay up and watch when The Empire of Death drops on iPlayer, but will probably wait until next morning after a good night’s sleep

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@miapatrick

Mrs Flood is Susan, who had been chameleon arced till the Christmas episode.

Yessss!  Wonderful suggestion – it fits perfectly with what we know, and if I were given to betting I might even stake a modest sum on the likelihood of it turning out to be true.

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@thane16

With two artificial hips and now a new knee I’m gradually turning into bionic woman. It’s exactly a year since I had the knee op, but I made what the surgeon and physio seemed to think was near miraculously rapid progress in recovering full use of the joint.  If only they could also do spine replacements.  Because of the loss of inter-vertebral tissue I’m also the Amazing Shrinking Woman (Originally 1.61 m in height, I’m now only 1.48 m 🙁  )

Getting the garden back into shape will be a huge task. Thanks to the periods of neglect owing to the knee and protracted episodes of acute back pain it’s been something of a losing battle over the past 3-4  years but I live in hope, and the fact that I can now manage 3 + hours at a time is promising. Actually, if you don’t look to closely it still looks quite good in a shaggy sort of way, but I don’t want it to progress too far along the re-wilding path.

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@thane16

Experiments on sound profiles or fluctuations of, & connections between, pitch in scales, triads & chords across an entire work are on-going but technology is developing legitimate methods of sound analysis and measurement in Time Windows (!)

And RTD has been dropping thumping great hints from The Giggle onward, in addition to the more oblique references to a fundamental connection between Ruby and music. Clever.

Many thanks for that highly illuminating discourse; it provides much to ponder and digest. Incidentally, I received notifications of both versions of the post, so I’ve read both. I’ve learned the hard way to copy (Ctrl C) any long post before pressing Submit, so that if it goes astray I can just paste it back in (Ctrl V).

@blenkinsopthebrave

If I received notification of both versions of Syzygy’s post, then presumably you equally received notification of the original version of my response to you, as well as the edited version above. You may have been puzzled or even offended by the paragraph in the original which I subsequently edited out. It was the result of my misreading your ‘how many things will I get wrong’ as ‘how many things will go wrong’.  I’m currently waiting for delivery of new reading glasses, but I was pretty tired, also. Earlier I’d spent more than three hours gardening, and not even wearing a back brace at that, such is the difference my new knee has made to my whole stance and well-being. 🙂

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@whohar

On the subject of Jemma Redgrave I’m in complete agreement. I’m in awe of any actor who can convey so much with just a tightening or twitch of the facial muscles, and I always look forward to any episode when I know she’ll be in it.

I confess I’ve never come across Rovelli’s books; I’ll look out for them. I am, however, broadly familiar with the ideas concerning time and entropy and it has always seemed to me logical that the two were aspects of the same thing. When reading on the subject I can usually grasp the concepts; my problem is that I can’t follow the mathematics, which is the only language in which the reasoning can be clearly expressed. At age 16 I managed to pass the GCE ‘O’ Level maths exam, but it was by far my weakest subject and I was in the ‘B’ stream, assigned according to ability in a three stream system. We studied mainly algebra, geometry and trigonometry, while the ‘A’ stream got to start on calculus (later I had reason to wish that we had done more on statistics and probability, which would have been useful to me, but that’s another story). Maths is taught differently now and who knows, this way might have suited me better. Anyway, in the final two years of High school, when we started to specialise, I had to give up science subjects, including physics which I loved. But this is straying way off topic, for which I apologise.

While on the subject, though, and at a slight tangent, it occurred to me that the Flanders and Swann song on the First and  Second Laws of Thermodynamics seemed appropriate Flanders & Swann – ‘First And Second Law’ (youtube.com) especially the words of the penultimate verse, All the Heat in the universe/Is gonna cool down)/’Cause it can’t increase/Then there’ll be no more work/And there’ll be perfect peace  … Yeah, That’s entropy, man.

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@blenkinsopthebrave

On the question of Mrs Flood I’ve had second thoughts, and your idea that she has been watching over Ruby is pertinent. In short, I’ve concluded that she probably hasn’t been taken over by Sutekh or any harbinger acolyte of Sutekh’s but that, for whatever reason, she is time sensitive and so was aware of his approach. After all, when she said that a storm was coming and that ‘he waits no more’ she didn’t assume the heightened, prophetic manner of Harriet, and nor did she show signs of change in her appearance.

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@blenkinsopthebrave

Thanks for the tip. It’s available from tomorrow, so I think I know what I’ll be doing tomorrow evening 🙂

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@bunface

I’m glad it was helpful. One of the great things about this forum is the many different areas of expertise and the different angles which people bring to the discussions.

Yes, I’m an archaeologist. I started out as a prehistorian, specialising in the Neolithic and early Bronze Age periods in Britain, while at the same time spending significant amounts of time taking part in excavations on major Saxon ecclesiastical and monastic sites, plus some Viking. However, in the last fourteen years before I (unwillingly) retired I was what might be termed a specialist generalist, doing research and fieldwork on sites of all periods in England, up to and including World War II and early cold war defence installations (very much not my favourite area of study, but fascinating in a horrible sort of way).  Archaeology is a funny sort of discipline, occupying an area somewhere between the sciences and the humanities and straddling the boundaries of both, which may be part of what attracted me to the subject in the first place.

For the record and to expand the context, I’m also interested in physics and cosmology, though lack the mathematical skills to explore these fields more than superficially, and  for what it’s worth, I’ve read a vast amount of science fiction and in the process have accumulated a very large collection of SF books dating from the 1960s onward (where books are concerned I’m a hoarder).

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@bunface

Did you really think it that scary?   I suppose I was treating it like an exercise in field work – visiting, say, the site of an abandoned medieval village or of a monastic precinct, observing and recording all the humps and bumps marking buried remains, identifying them in terms of ditches, walls, buildings and so forth, and trying to interpret the pattern; or doing the same as a desk exercise using air photos. It keeps me amused in my retirement, now that I’m no longer physically able to do fieldwork, and maybe it helps prevent my brain from turning to porridge 🙂

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I’ve been musing on that question of infection/possession – who was channeling a supernatural entity, at what point did that entity gain access, and to what degree were the people affected aware before the point at which the full manifestation of Sutekh himself was about to break through? The identity of these entities, other than Sutekh himself, is also in question. The list of gods which the Harriet  intoned when fully possessed  included, in addition to those which @juniperfish so helpfully posted, ‘gods of skin [or sin?] and shame and secrets’ and the children of Incensor ‘called Doubt and Dread’

In the case of the Tardis we can, I think, assume that it was some element of Sutekh himself she was carrying, and that she was aware that something was wrong – hence the groaning – although the sense of danger wasn’t enough for her to sound the cloister bell. But what of the others. Those we know of are Susan Triad herself, Harriet Arbinger, and seemingly Mrs Flood also.  In The Devil’s Chord, Henry Arbinger claimed to be the son of Maestro, so was certainly one of the minor deities, So was Harriet Arbinger of the same order? And if so, was she aware of the fact, or was her identity suppressed until the point of breakthrough?

Judging by her prophetic utterances when alone with Cherry Sunday, Mrs Flood (as in before or after the flood?) was also acting as a harbinger, so was she also of similar kind, simply posing as the kind of neighbour people might trust to granny sit, or was she infected as a result of her brief contact with the Tardis and only channeling such a minor member of the pantheon? Either is possible and would explain her belated recognition of the Tardis, and perhaps her encouraging Ruby to enter the Tardis and follow the Doctor. In which case, bang goes the theory that she had travelled in another Tardis when younger.

As for Susan Triad, clearly she wasn’t aware of being infected, although troubled by the dreams in which she was unwittingly stalking the Doctor; but when the breakthrough occurred and she changed, she seemed to become an aspect of Sutekh himself, and that seems foreshadowed by her subconscious link the Doctor and the Tardis, and by the fact that her dream self manifested in so many forms.

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@scaryb

When did the TARDIS become infected? Let’s assume it was in Wild Blue Yonder,

That seems to me very much the most likely occasion – see my earlier post in response to @markkelly. It’s just about possible the Meep brought it earlier, depending on the identity of the ‘boss’ referred to. It might be worth re-watching that episode to check if the Tardis made that groaning noise.

Your suggestion that the woman who left baby Ruby at the church was Susan Triad is plausible and might help to explain the discrepancies between events as the Doctor first witnessed her in 2005, and her behaviour when viewed through the Time Window. She wasn’t infected when she deposited the baby at the church door, but became infected when the Tardis arrived on the scene as she was walking away.  But in that case the colours on her collar might just be coincidence*, because they were there before the Tardis arrived. Susan Triad would have been in her late thirties or early forties in 2005, probably already in a position to afford childcare. As someone at UNIT HQ pointed out, women who abandon their babies are usually teenagers or in their early twenties and not in a position to handle the responsibility of a child.

* If those colours are significant it’s a very subtle hint, because I doubt if anyone who didn’t watch as closely as I did and pause the recording to check would have noticed. But the Doctor on the same occasion was wearing an orange top and blue trousers.

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@blenkinsopthebrave

.. it might imply that Sutekh is able to manifest in the Time Window. How? Well, it has already been  established that UNIT has incorporated a dynamic system courtesy of Triad Technology…

If I am right in thinking that that the Tardis had already been possessed by Sutekh – or perhaps infected is a more appropriate term – when the Doctor went back in time to save baby Ruby from the goblins, then Sutekh was already present, at least in latent form, at the original event; didn’t Maestro imply as much when they were puzzling over the mystery that was/is Ruby? Then, as I suggested in an earlier post, while the Time Window was open, the infected Tardis in UNIT HQ and its earlier self as seen in the Time Window could have connected to create a synergetic effect. This may have enabled the ‘red’ Tardis and the firelit, buzzing swarm centred on it to be projected onto the scene, mirroring the eventual scene in in UNIT HQ in which Sutekh ultimately manifested himself. And you are right; Susan Triad may not have been aware of being possessed/infected at the time, but Sutekh would have had every opportunity to sneak some very nasty viruses and traps into Triad Technology software to help things along when the time came.

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Today I found time to re-watch the Time window scenes more closely, pausing at frequent intervals, in order to compare, in detail, the differences between events as we saw them here and as we saw them in The Church on Ruby Road. What follows is probably going way too far into nit-picking detail, so just call me obsessive and ignore if you so wish. On the other hand, the differences are presumably of significance.

To set the scene, since I can’t post my map: the church, aligned west-east as usual, has a short, aisleless nave with three windows in the north wall (and presumably the same on the other side). There is a small chancel at the east end and the porch, with the tower and spire above it and a door on the east side, is situated at the east end of the nave, projecting from the north wall. The boundary of the churchyard is rectilinear on the south, west and north sides, but on the east side it and the road which continues alongside it, head of south eastwards at an angle of approximately 45 degrees from the vertical. The entry to the churchyard is from a road on the north side, opposite a large building – the pub. The Tardis parked itself on the road slightly to the east of that entry and toward the eastern end of the pub, where the Doctor had a good view along the road in both directions, westward and south eastward. In The Church on Ruby Road, the camera angles and set dressing created, to some extent, the illusion of an urban environment but, if you look carefully, it’s possible to make out that the actual location of the shoot was rural.

In The Church on Ruby Road, events are as described in my earlier post above. The Doctor arrives, looks towards the mystery woman walking away south eastward, already well along the road towards a row of buildings facing the end. When he returns from saving baby Ruby and looks again she is still walking away, but to all appearances still no further down the road, as if she had paused while he wasn’t there to see, or had jumped back in time a few minutes. He watches for a few seconds, then turns, re-enters the Tardis and leaves.

In the Time Window, the scene stabilises at a point before the arrival of the Tardis. After a minute or two exclaiming at the success of the project, the Doctor and Ruby turn to look towards the entry to the churchyard, and at the same moment the image of the woman flickers into being on the road on the near side of the entry. She walks towards where they are standing, and as she reaches them the image jumps, glitches and briefly disappears. Once beyond them the image, still somewhat unstable, rounds the north east corner of the churchyard and then pauses. Ruby’s adoptive mother thinks she is crying, which may or may not be projection* on her part. At this point the Tardis arrives, while the woman is still standing there and not, as in the Church on Ruby Road, walking away. The Doctor and Ruby turn to watch as the Doctor emerges, pauses and then runs to the church, and as they turn it seems as if the image of the woman disappears. When they turn back the image of the woman flicks back into existence and then she turns and points North-westward.  Chidozie goes to see if there is anything other than the Doctor in the direction she is pointing and reports that there is nothing, while overlooking the large object which actually is there: the Tardis. When the Doctor turns back to look at the woman she is walking away and, as they watch, the image seems to vanish. Meanwhile we see the Doctor in 2005 returning, pausing to watch the woman and  going back into the Tardis, and then we hear the sound of the Tardis departing. And while the Doctor is trying to comfort Ruby, the menacing phenomenon manifests.

What I particularly noticed, other than the obvious discrepancies in the sequence of events – which the Doctor registered but couldn’t, on the spur of the moment, process – was the intermittent instability of the image of the woman as seen in the Time Window, as if she was both there and not there at the same time.

Finally, a wardrobe note which may or may not be significant. In the past as seen in the Time Window, everything is monochrome except for the Tardis and, to some extent, the clothes of the Doctor and the woman. in which some rather washed-out colour can be seen.  From what out I could make out of from the close up image of the woman as she approached the Doctor and Ruby’s viewpoint, she was wearing, not a hooded cape, but a cape over a hooded coat, and the cape had a narrow collar. Everything appeared grey except the collar, which was banded in orange and pale blue.  In Pyramids of Mars, which I’ve also been watching, it struck me that Sutekh’s robes also had bands of orange on the sleeves and collar, with a girdle of orange and, I think, pale blue, and his eyes were outlined in orange. Make of that coincidence what you will 😉

*In the psychological sense

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I join @blenkinsopthebrave  and @scaryb in thanking you, @craig  for opening this thread. It has prompted me to go to iPlayer and start a re-watch – so far just the first two episodes. It must be more than a decade since I last saw it, on some obscure TV channel, and it’s good to be reminded of the details.

If I was being judgemental I would say that Scarman’s fate was the penalty for poor professional conduct on an excavation – but I’ll make allowances for the generally lax standards in 1911.

Egyptology of the earlier decades of the 20th century has a certain nostalgic appeal to me. My paternal grandfather was a forensic chemist who worked for the Medico-Legal branch of the Police Department in Cairo in the 1920s and 30s, and he knew most of the archaeologists working there at the time. In fact his boss did a lot of the preliminary conservation work on the finds from Carter’s excavation of Tutankhamen’s tomb. Not really relevant, I know, except that it may explain why I’m a sucker for this kind of hokum. Maybe it even influenced my choice of career; who knows/nose.

 

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@scaryb

Ruby and Carla have already scanned that VHS tape VERY closely – but they never saw a police box materialise and the Dr come out, or the woman turn and point etc…

Maybe I’m mistaken, but I thought that the raw CCTV footage didn’t show the Tardis because the camera was facing in the wrong direction. What they did was to use the the VCR recording to establish baseline data and reference points. By using Time Window technology to analyse the positions of individual snowflakes and the evidence they revealed of wind direction influenced by the known position of buildings, they were then able to pinpoint and focus on the exact time and viewpoint they wanted. Then, because the tape and the Time Window were linked, what they saw fed back into and altered the tape.

@bunface

And the TARDIS there is an illusion?

Yes, in a sense, albeit a pretty solid one. If my interpretation above has any validity, the possessed-by-Sutekh Tardis on the bridge at UNIT HQ is manipulating the Time Window to insert itself on the scene, so it’s the same Tardis but time shifted back to the night of Ruby’s birth – assuming that was the night of her birth and the baby and her presumed birth mother were not themselves time shifted.

And the hooded woman is a puppet, one with no face to see?

Perhaps, if she herself is possessed and acting under compulsion, but if you look very carefully at the scene in the intro to The Church on Ruby Road where she is carrying the baby toward the church, there is a brief glimpse of her chin, and it looks human enough.

@markkelly

In ‘Deep Blue Yonder’ the Tardis is making a groaning noise

Good point! The most likely time for the spirit of Sutekh* to have entered the Tardis was when it was stationed at the boundary of the universe, where much nastier things than shape shifting doppelgangers may have been lurking, waiting for an opportunity to get in..

* I first typed Sunakh instead of Sutekh. How’s that for a Freudian slip 😮

 

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@thane16

The head of the astronaut in Wild Blue Yonder looked somewhat equine to me, and I’ve seen enough excavated horse skeletons to know. So I don’t think we can pursue a hawk/Horus connection that far. But, just to confuse matters, in some Egyptian depictions of Set/Seth/Sutekh, the muzzle of the jackal has a distinctly raptor-beak like look.

@juniperfish ‘s duplicate red/blue Tardises (red/blue again, huh? 🙂 ) is intriguing, but I’m not entirely convinced. I’ve been thinking more along the lines of a time shift and time overlay, based on my sketch map of the church, churchyard and surroundings as seem in the Church on Ruby Road, and my plotting of where the Tardis, the Doctor and the woman appeared to be at different times on that scene, as compared with the same as seen in the Time Window. In the original scenes where the Doctor rescued baby Ruby, the position of the woman appeared to shift between that when he saw her after first exiting the Tardis, heading south eastward away from him on the road alongside the east/north eastern boundary of the churchyard, and that when saw her after having run to the church, rescued the baby and then run back. It was as if she had walked no further during the interim, or she had somehow made a short time jump backwards. That may have just been a result of foreshortening in the camera view or a glitch in continuity, but in the Time Window she did appear to do exactly that: She walked away from the Doctor and Ruby and then suddenly reappeared walking towards them, seemingly just after leaving the gate to the church yard.

In the Time Window the position of the Tardis corresponded with it’s position as we first saw it in The Church on Ruby Road on the original Christmas Eve, and they watched the Doctor re-enter it, but then things got muddled. We never saw the Tardis with the Doctor dematerialise, but when the location of the Tardis was next established, shrouded by the cloud of (sand ?) particles, it was 20 m. to the west (Kate L-S said north, but that would have placed it in a field behind the pub)*  So yes, the latter manifestation could have been an evil twin of the Tardis, but I’m still inclined to think that it had been possessed by the spirit of Sutekh, already present on the scene in that original visit – didn’t Maestro imply as much? When they decided to review the scene through the Time Window, the possessed Tardis was also in UNIT HQ, and so was able to reconnect with its earlier self on that scene, and since this coincided with the latent Sutekh in the also possessed Susan Triad, the synergy enabled his embodied re-emergence. I suspect that the woman in the Time Window wasn’t pointing at the Doctor but at the Tardis behind him, and that it was a warning.

As regards the idea that the Tardis was already possessed before the events in this episode, that seemed to be indicated by the groaning noises it kept making. It certainly happened in Rogue, but does anyone recall if it happened before that? For that matter, why the groaning and not the cloister bell?

Just another suggestion to the mix.

 

* When you are plotting a map without any proper surveying equipment or a compass it is always helpful to have a church to provide orientation, at least in western Europe, because the church will always be aligned roughly W-E with the chancel to the East.

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@juniperfish

Thank you for having registered the list of the deities listed in the pantheon – and forgive me if I’m harking back to earlier points of discussion, but after staying up last night long past my bedtime I’ve spent all day playing catch up.

In ancient Egyptian art Sutekh is depicted as a man with the head of a jackal – the head of a scavenger and follower in the train of apex predators, which says a lot about his nature; and what struck me about his offspring as listed was how ultimately petty they all were.

The God of games: a potential source of amusement, enjoyment and friendly competition, but here he is a master of manipulation and humiliation

The trickster: a master of deception and exploiter of the gullible.

The god of music: potentially a liberating force, life enhancing, a source of joy and inspiration, but Maestro is greedy and acquisitive and wants it all for themself.

Reprobate, god of spite: resentful and revengeful in small ways.

Mara, god of beasts: manifesting the debased and destructive qualities with which humans  sometimes and perversely invest animals.

Malice/mischief/misery: exploiters of the weak and desperate.

Insensa, god of disaster: bad, but never insuperable.

So, sorry Sutekh, I’ll back the Doctor and the better nature of humanity against you any day.

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@blenkinsopthebrave

The figure in the orange cloak: forget the colour and just look at the outline. Isn’t it the woman who deposited Ruby at the church? Or am I deluded?  I fear that we may be in for a more than usually complicated timey-wimey tangle here.

Incidentally, since I compiled the not-to-scale sketch map of the church and surroundings I’ve found an aerial view of the scene as they were preparing for filming, and I’m pleased to report that my effort was accurate in essentials and has been quite helpful.

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@miapatrick  @thane16  @bunface

Early in the comments you were discussing the newly and overtly empathic and emotional face of the Doctor. For what its’s worth, I’ve been seeing this as a result of the bi-generation.  What was left of the accumulated trauma and guilt carried over from the Time War and other events and losses, together with all the resulting inhibitions, were left for the 14th Doctor to sort out in his retirement, free to attend to his own needs. The 15th Doctor is equally liberated, uninhibited and free to show his real feelings.

The vanity of the Doctor was also mentioned. I’m not sure that there is any vanity, in fact, but there certainly are occasional flashes of Time Lord arrogance. He knows he is fallible – he’s been faced with his own fallibility often enough – but he also cannot help being conscious of his intellectual superiority and greater store of knowledge. The 12th Doctor called us earthlings ‘pudding brains’, after all. That arrogance, to his credit, it is generally supressed, but it tends to surface when things get to a critical stage and he has to take command. I’m reminded of the scenes in Midnight where everyone is panicking At one point someone challenges him, saying , ‘Oh, so like you’re so special’, to which the Doctor replies, ‘As it happens, yes, I am’. Then, later, when someone else asks, ‘But how did you know what to do?’ he snaps back, ‘Because I’m clever’.

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That was certainly satisfactorily gripping as a build up to the final episode of the series, and with more than one twist well before the end. I watched the episode this morning on I-player, on the large screen monitor linked to my computer, and I’d intended to watch again this evening when broadcast on TV – but ‘events’, as Harold Macmillan once said, ‘events’. So these are my first, partially processed reactions to that first viewing.

It started out as the story of an investigation into Ruby’s mysterious origins and, as a side issue, an attempt to discover more about the woman whose face has kept cropping up in events seen and unseen by us, and this would have been satisfying enough, but then it turns gradually into a story about possession, both psychic and physical. Firstly the well meaning if slightly nosey neighbour Mrs Flood, called in to look after Cherry Sunday while her daughter is away, turns all sinister and prophetic – and maybe her eventual recognition of a Tardis was after all just the inner possessor breaking through. Then came the reveal that there was more to certain staff of UNIT than was at first apparent; and finally there was  Susan Triad herself, who turned out, after all our speculating, to be a pleasant woman with entirely philanthropic intentions – except that, encysted within that benign caterpillar was, as Kate L-S feared, the germ of a very nasty butterfly.

In a way, I was just a little bit disappointed that it turned out to be Sutekh after all. Set/Sutekh*, as depicted in Egyptian mythology, certainly didn’t have much to recommend him. Originally he seems to have been the younger brother of Horus, later of Osiris, but either way a jealous and spiteful younger brother who tried, in various nasty ways, to get rid of his sibling in order to usurp their power. He wasn’t always regarded in an entirely negative light, but eventually he came  to be seen as the personification of destructive evil and of the arid desert. His problem was that the other gods of the pantheon were always more powerful than he and they prevailed – just as the fertile Nile valley prevails against the surrounding desert, so I find myself not entirely convinced when he is touted as the Lord of Death and the Ultimate enemy. That’s the problem with Ultimate Enemies; they tend never to be as terrible or invincible as they wish to present themselves.

* According to my reference book on mythologies, Sutekh was originally a god of the Hyksos pharaohs – incomers to Egypt, possibly of Canaanite origin – but became identified with the Egyptian god Set, so presumably the two had much in common.

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Oh, @scaryb , did you really have to remind me?!  That earworm plagued me for more than a week after the episode aired, and it was driving me up the wall.

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@scaryb

Can you share??

Now you ask, I wish I could, but at present it exists as a series of sketches on scrap paper. By the time I made a clean, clear copy it would probably be too late to be helpful. As it is, my eyelids are drooping and, much as I would like to, I’m not going to be able to wait up until the episode drops on i-player. There was a time when I could remain awake and lively until all hours, but those days are finally gone, alas!

As for Mrs Flood, I think her experience of a Tardis or Tardises* goes back a lot further than the events in The Church on Ruby Road. So when she first failed to recognise the police box as a Tardis it wasn’t because  she hadn’t encountered one before, but that she hadn’t seen one in that particular disguise. Until she saw it dematerialise, all she saw was an old police box such as she had seen on the streets of London when she was young.  Perhaps at some point there has been  another Time Lord with his/her own Tardis, meddling with the affairs of Earth and taking earthlings such as her on trips in his/her Tardis. It could, of course, have been Clara and Me in their American diner Tardis. Not the Master, I hope, for her sake if nothing else.

 

* If Tardis was a word of Greek origin perhaps the plural would have been Tardoi, which is a lot less clumsy-sounding than Tardises, but it’s an acronym, so … 🙁

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In truth I’m a little nervous about the two episodes to come. RTD has always had a tendency to go OTT with his Doctor Who finales, and he has been quoted several times to the effect that this will be the biggest, baddest, most spectacular and scary ever. I fear the possibilities presented by a larger budget may have gone to his head, and that the whole thing will collapse in a heap of incoherence. Fingers crossed that I’m wrong.

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@ps1l0v3y0u

The Bells of St John: The Great Intelligence. Yes! I hadn’t followed that clue far enough.   So, Susan Triad, not as the Big Bad, but an agent of the Big Bad, whoever that turns out to be.

@thane16

It’s only a sketch map, but I’ve had plenty of practice. For a field archaeologist and excavator it comes with the territory. First an excavation site has to be surveyed and a grid marked out, which in turn is tied in to the national map grid. Then all the archaeological features and layers uncovered have to be plotted on to the grid – and if it’s a multi-period site with deep stratigraphy that means lots and lots of site plans. Field archaeology also involves quite a bit of surveying on site, not to mention the preliminary mapping of features recorded in aerial photographs onto large scale O.S. maps. The accurate plotting of the latter can be a bit tricky, because the viewpoint is always to some extent oblique so parallax is involved, but it’s fun 🙂

 

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@whohar  @juniperfish et al. 

Thanks for the very helpful summary of all the questions to be answered (we hope) in the finale. I meant to comment yesterday but got side tracked. In consequence what I have to say may be irrelevant by the time it is read by those who get to watch The Legend of Ruby Sunday before those of us in the UK.

My suggestions regarding queries 3, 4 and 8 were already posted on the Spoilers forum earlier today. They are based to some extent on hints officially published in the Radio Times magazine, which are not all that spoilery in fact, unless you are extremely spoiler averse.

As for query 5: are the Doctor and Ruby in an alternate reality? Yes, I think so, although I see it more as an altered reality.  In The Wild Blue Yonder Tardis took them to the spatial boundary of our universe,* where the laws of Physics as we understand them are irrelevant/don’t necessarily apply, and where reality is ill defined and mutable.  So when the Doctor slipped up/put his metaphorical foot in it by invoking an irrational superstition it affected the nature of reality in our universe, introducing an element of irrationality from that point onward. On the other hand, that doesn’t explain the events in The Church on Ruby Road, which took place earlier. There is nothing particularly rational (in terms of hard science, at least) in goblins who navigate time and the skies in a cross between a rickety 18th century ship and a large kite, who are nourished by babies enmeshed in a net of coincidence, and who vanish, along with their ship when their king is skewered on a church spire. So perhaps it is Ruby herself who has introduced this element of uncertainty and superstition. The Doctor told her: ‘This is a brand new science for me … the language of Luck, ‘cos what is coincidence but a form of accident’, but that is stretching the definition of ‘science’ very thin

 

*  Boundary is more appropriate here than end of the universe, I think, because the Doctor has been several times to or near to the end of the universe in the temporal sense (in Listen, for example, or Hell Bent), but never before, it seems, to the limit of the universe in the spatial sense.  According to the General in Hell Bent, Gallifrey was moved in time to near the end of the temporal continuum for its protection, which is presumably where the Master found it when he took his revenge on the Time Lords

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@blenkinsopthebrave  @whohar  @ps1l0v3y0u  @thane16

I agree with Whohar that Sutekh (aka Set in the Egyptian pantheon) is probably not involved. In next weeks copy of the Radio Times magazine there is an interview with RTD in which he says that there are several past episodes which might have some bearing on this year’s finale, but none of them are from the 4th Doctor’s era.

As listed they are Spearhead from Space (3rd Doctor, Autons);  Badwolf/The Parting of the Ways (10th Doctor); The Bells of StJohn (11th Doctor); A Good Man Goes to War (11th Doctor, River, Amy’s baby); and The Church on Ruby Road. The Bells of St John might have some bearing on the mystery of Susan Triad, since it, too, features an industrial corporation with an evil boss. Perhaps Susan Triad is not just head of Triad Technology – and perhaps the Boss referred to by the Meep and/or Rogue, but a member of the pantheon of Immortals (?)  Such might explain Susan Twist’s ability to  insert herself in various guises into all the episodes so far in this Season.

As for The Church on Ruby Road, that was obviously going to figure largely in the resolution of the mystery of Ruby’s origins. In the interview RTD said that it would be helpful to viewers to re-watch the scenes at the church and take careful note of where everyone was and the directions in which they were looking. In consequence I got side tracked yesterday and wasted several hours attempting to do just that, trying to make a map of the church and churchyard and plot the paths of the cloaked and hooded woman and the Doctor.  The map was easy enough, though it took several attempts because my spatial sense isn’t all that it could be, but the relative locations of the two characters didn’t seem to add up entirely, as if there were several points of disconnection, or more than two characters.

 

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@thane16

Could Mrs Flood be involved in this or be part of Division…? 🤔

Initially she thought it was just an old police box which somebody, probably Abdul, had planted on the footpath to annoy her, and she only recognised it as a Tardis when it dematerialised in front of her. So at some time in the past she has certainly had some previous encounter with a Tardis or Tardises and so, presumably, with at least one Time Lord. *

I don’t really see her as an alien or particularly powerful, but if she is alien, she has been kicking around on Earth long enough to have seen police boxes when they were a familiar sight on the streets of Britain.

* I have a feeling someone has already made this point. If so, I apologise to whoever it was.

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@janetteb  @juniperfish

On the subject of Gallifrey, it would certainly be possible for the Doctor to go back because the planet itself was not destroyed, but whether he would want to revisit a lifeless planet, let alone take anyone else there, is another matter. That is unless, as Juniperfish suggested, he chose to travel back in time to before the genocide. It always puzzled me that this possibility was never mentioned during all the years following the time war when the Doctor believed he had destroyed his home planet – but then it is unlikely he would have wanted to  do so: it would have been too painful.

That set off another train of thought. In The Timeless Children the Master showed the Doctor the ruins of the Time Lord citadel and told her that he had killed all the Time Lords. But did he, in his massive hissy fit, also destroy the ordinary Shobogans? The Doctor must presumably have believed so, because if she had thought otherwise it would have been completely out of character for her to countenance the use of the death particle by herself or anyone else, even to get rid of the new breed of regenerating cybermen. On the other hand it is possible that such a consideration did not occur to Chibnall, and I strongly suspect that may in fact have been the case. Either way the death particle, if or when deployed, would have ensured that there were no survivors.

But were all the Time Lords destroyed by the Master in the first place, or only those on Gallifrey? What about Rassilon and the others whom Capaldi Doctor sent into exile in Hell Bent?  Maybe they returned once they thought the coast was clear again, but perhaps they are still be out there in the universe at large, with all with their arrogance and potential for trouble – and no doubt a desire for revenge.

 

 

 

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