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@purofilion

So, there you go @mudlark. No water needed

Fair enough, though the type of metal receptacle which I know as a charlotte mould -and which appears to be what is described in @kharis ‘s cook book – would not be a particularly suitable container for cooking a soufflé in the oven, and not a very elegant way in which to serve one, whether hot or cold, so why not use a soufflé dish?  (The mixture for the type of soufflé which is basically a set mousse is cooked over a low heat before being poured into the chilled mould).

And I still maintain that, in this part of the world at least, a charlotte is the dessert made in the mould, and not the mould itself – and I did check in Larousse Gastronomique, various cookery books and the Concise Oxford Dictionary in case I was mistaken in my understanding.

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@kharis  @lisa

I hesitate to pour cold water on an intriguing and suitably bonkers theory, but I was somewhat startled to read

A charlotte is the dish you make a soufflé in

A charlotte is a sweet dish made in a metal mould with slightly tapering sides.  For a classic Charlotte Russe the mould is lined with sponge fingers and filled with a Bavaroise cream and, when chilled and set, the charlotte is turned out from the mould.  A soufflé is usually a hot dish made in a cylindrical ceramic dish with ribbed sides, and it is served in the dish, straight from the oven. Somewhere at the back of a cupboard in my kitchen I have both a soufflé dish and a charlotte mould, though it is many years since I made either.

@kharis  I guess from the quote at the end of your post that the recipe in your cookery book is for the cold dish sometimes referred to as soufflé, which is basically just a mousse with extra gelling agent to make it set firm, and such a cold dish could indeed be made in a charlotte mould, though I have never heard the mould itself referred to as a charlotte. For that matter, a charlotte could be made in a soufflé dish, although the ribbed sides of the dish might make it difficult to turn out for serving

But don’t mind me; I’m just nit-picking as usual  😈

 

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@Purofilion   I must have expressed my thoughts very poorly if I gave the impression that I was confused.  When I wrote the original post on the subject, my understanding of events, and of who knew what and why, was exactly as @miapatrick and you have subsequently outlined them.  Those who made the agreement intended or assumed at the time that the boxes would be functional.  It was the Doctor’s decision subsequently, probably in collusion with the Osgoods, that they should be a bluff; but even if the Osgoods weren’t party to this at the outset, as custodians of the boxes and the embodiment of the peace they would have to have been made aware of the truth.  That reading was implicit in what I said about Bonnie probably being allowed to retain her memory in anticipation of her taking on the persona and role of the second Osgood.  For the bluff to work, however, it was essential that everyone else who was party to the treaty and involved in maintaining it continued to believe that the threat was real.

What did confuse me was Miapatrick starting her response with the word ‘but’, as if she were presenting a counterargument or pointing out an omission.

Anyway, it’s a minor point to get hung up on, and perhaps I should have left the matter there and refrained from responding, but I had had a tiring day, my back was hurting, and I was perhaps in a somewhat snappish mood.  I apologise to you and Miapatrick for any offense I have given.

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Musing idly on the title of the next episode,and the advance information on it, I suddenly thought of the Goya etching, ‘The Sleep of Reason Brings Forth Monsters’.  Prolonged lack of sleep , since it results in derangement, also produces monsters, if only in the mind.

The full epigraph for the etching reads (in translation) ‘Fantasy abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with her she is the mother of the arts and the origin of their marvels’  which seems apt, if only tangentially.

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@miapatrick

but the Osgoods knew that there was nothing in the boxes

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

Whether the idea that they should become the living embodiment of the peace was their own or was suggested initially by the Doctor, the fact that they had been aware which of them was which during the negotiations and had chosen to remain silent was almost certainly the reason he determined that they could be entrusted with the truth about the boxes, whereas Kate and other senior members of UNIT, having a somewhat military mindset, could not.

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@miapatrick

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

plus the others present at the time.

In The Day of the Doctor it is clear that this was what the Doctor intended, and presumably what happened.  I think, though, that in the agreement they came to the boxes were intended to be functional, and that Kate and all the others involved continued to believe that they were.  It was left to the Doctor, however, to create and supply them (for one thing, he was the only one who had access to the gas which was lethal to Zygons), and it was his decision, therefore, that the mutual threat they represented should be a bluff.

In the stand-off, the Doctor’s words implied that the resolution which we saw was the fifteenth iteration, and in each of the previous fourteen Kate and/or Bonnie had attempted to use their box and discovered the bluff. Their memory of this then was wiped so that they continued to believe in the reality of the mutual threat and, from their point of view, everything reverted to the starting point.  When Kate finally decided on an alternative course of action, closed her box and stepped back, Bonnie hit upon the truth again, this time intuitively.  Kate then pointed out that the knowledge that they were an elaborate bluff meant that the boxes could no longer function as a deterrent to anyone wishing to break the peace, and so her memory of the fact, was wiped for the fifteenth time, as was that of the two Zygons who had brought Clara to the Black Archive.  Bonnie’s memory was not,  because the Doctor foresaw her role as replacement for the Osgood who died.

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@jphamlore

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

I’m not sure that anyone is arguing that this episode and the preceding one were about war as such, still less that they were about the kind of double-think and obfuscatory language manifest increasingly in the justification and discussion of military adventures and military intervention.  Rather they were about kinds of thinking which lead to conflict:

In the first place there is the ingrained tendency in human beings to identify themselves in relation to the ‘other’; the alien –  whether the ‘others’ are the members of another tribe who may not be quite as human as ‘we’ are, the incomers to a village who are regarded with suspicion, the supporters of a rival football team, people with opposing political views, immigrants who look different or have different customs or different religious practices, or the population of another nation whose interests conflict with ours.  This is the kind of binary thinking that we saw at its simplest in the child Davros, who knew only two kinds of being – his own people and the enemy ‘other’, in a war which had been going on so long that nobody remembered how it had begun.

Secondly there is the narrowly focussed and rigid reasoning that can lead people to think that they, and they only, are in the right, and that any action, whether terrorism or full-scale war, at whatever cost, is justified as a means to achieve their end.

The scenario in The Zygon Inversion may be unrealistic in a number of ways, but the basic point is made.  Conflict only reinforces and perpetuates perceived differences, to the point of seeing the enemy as undeserving of consideration or even life. Ultimately the only satisfactory resolution is to face the ‘other’, with mutual acknowledgement and forgiveness of past wrongs, and to forge a compromise.

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@arbutus

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

The possibility that the Zygon who copied Kate in The Day of the Doctor had survived in that form had not occurred to me, although the existence of two Kates might explain the anomalies which @nerys and I both commented on, and would  have been a potential asset in monitoring the cease fire.   On the other hand, a Zygon Kate, or a human Kate linked to a Zygon counterpart, would not have been willing, on 14 successive occasions, to use the Osgood box. We can presume therefore that the Kate present at the face-off in the Black Archive was human, without any Zygon input.

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@bluesqueakpip and @miapatrick   Either reading could make sense, because the link established between them would have imbued human Osgood with the Zygon’s greater maturity and confidence, and the Zygon Osgood with her human counterpart’s knowledge of the Doctor.  I prefer to see them as having become two halves of one person as, it seems, they wished themselves to be understood.  The surviving Osgood carried forward something of her sister, and now she has a new counterpart, with an added element of Clara-ness carried over from Bonnie’s link with Clara – a very complex hybrid indeed.  What more is it necessary to know?

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@arbutus   Yes, that exchange between Osgood and the Doctor, as they walked up from the beach where they landed after their bailout, was very revealing.  It was she who realised immediately the possible significance of the fact that Bonnie/Clara had contacted him before firing the missile, and that the first missile had misfired, and she who understood the significance of the text ‘I’M AWAKE’, while he was still in a rather insecure and hopeless ‘hope phase’.  Whether or not she was originally a Zygon, the link she had had with her sister Osgood had given her an insight into the Zygon-human link which the Doctor lacked, and an intuitive and empathic understanding of the Doctor himself.

Bonnie’s ‘It’s not fair!’, which you quote,  is the cry of any adolescent who ever felt themselves misunderstood* , and of every frustrated toddler in a tantrum.  As the Doctor sees it, this is little different from the mindset of any fanatic or ideologue who thinks that the destruction of the world is justified in the cause of remaking it, and who is to say that he is wrong?

* I have always borne in mind, as a salutary reminder, my younger brother’s remark to my mother on one occasion, as I stormed out of the room, slamming the door on my way out; ‘Don’t worry; she’s just suffering from adolescence’. and my mother’s response, ‘Yes, it’s alright; I know’.

 

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

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

Maybe I should refrain from writing long posts, since I nearly always fail to spot such slips, even when editing.

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@nerys

which version of Kate are we seeing?

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

I took the disagreement as to the amount of time that had passed to the fact that Clara had spent most of it in a quasi-dream state and, as in dreams, here time sense was distorted.  What we were seeing was a highly time-compressed sequence of events which might well have taken a month in real time.  Alternatively and quite plausibly, the Doctor’s perception of time is different from ours, or else, for reasons not yet revealed, he was engaged in some time travelling back and forth as these events were playing out.

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Some further thoughts, in no particular order.

Bonnie, the commander of the rebel Zygon faction chooses to replicate Clara for obvious reasons, but clearly without realising initially that the link works both ways, and without fully understanding what Clara is or has become. So with something of Clara inside her head she has rendered herself vulnerable to rather more than the kind of manipulation which enables Clara to communicate with the Doctor.  The Doctor, once aware that she is not dead, realises this and that once ‘…in the mind of Clara Oswald, she may never find her way out.  Furthermore, now it has been established that the mental link, if maintained, is reciprocal, the question of whether either Osgood is human or Zygon may ultimately be redundant.

The call-backs to previous episodes were a nice touch.  In Under the Lake the Doctor said that he had jettisoned the memory of sign language in order to learn Morse code, and now Morse code becomes the means by which Clara- within-Bonnie is able to communicate directly with the Doctor.  Going further back, the experience of the dream crabs Last Christmas clearly helped Clara to establish the nature of her dream state within the Zygon pod so that, instead of being completely disorientated, she was able to assert her identity and fight back.

There was one thing that bothered me about Kate, though.  There is no reason why she should not have survived that encounter in Truth or Consequences in the manner which she stated, given that we had already seen that she was armed and on her guard, but if it was the original Kate who emerged from the encounter , how did she come to know so much about the Zygon plot, including how to contact the commander of the rebels, what to report to her, and the location of Clara’s pod in the Zygon cavern?  That information could not have been in the files in the Police Station which she read.  Perhaps there was more to that encounter than we were shown, and she was initially replicated by and thus obtained the information via the mental link to the Zygon before turning the tables in ‘five rounds rapid’ fashion.

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

We could scarcely have hoped for a better sequel to last week, ratcheting up to the culminating scene and a speech delivered with a power and subtlety which were mesmerising.     In principle it followed the pattern of the previous two-parters this season: a first episode which features incident, action and reaction in the forefront, and a second in which there is a shift to a more reflective mood in which the moral and philosophical issues and consequences are examined, but this time without any diminution of pace or intensity.

The Doctor describes the stand-off in the Black Archive as a scale model of war, but what struck me were the parallels with the kind of reasoning behind the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction, but without the risk that an accident, misjudgement or the actions of fanatics could trigger Armageddon.  A very Doctorish solution so long as the double bluff can be maintained.

In his argument with and appeal to Bonnie the Doctor exposes and dissects the flaws in the reasoning of all fanatics, not least young fanatics such as Bonnie, who want to change the world according to their own narrow ideology and limited perspective, blind to the ultimate consequences and careless of the suffering of those who do not share or cannot be forced to adopt their views.  Revolutions, however idealistic their aims, tend to create only further problems and suffering.  The Doctor can make his passionate appeal because he has seen so much of this,  knows only too painfully where it leads and has been faced with the ultimate decision: whether or not to commit genocide ‘in the name of sanity peace’. That appeal, both rational and emotional, can work in this closed context – a microcosm of war – as, sadly, it would not in our current reality; so he can reach Kate through reason, albeit after 14 iterations, and he can reach Bonnie, eventually, because in replicating Clara physically and maintaining the mental link she has incorporated something of Clara within her – the friend inside an enemy.

So the balance of the cease-fire is re-established, but it is still only a delicately balanced cease-fire, in which ‘the price of peace is eternal vigilance’,  unless or until the difference between human and Zygon ceases to matter and the Zygons in their natural form cease to appear monstrous in our eyes.  But do the Zygons necessarily need or want to revert to their natural form?  Some  – a splinter group – wanted to be free to do so, even at the inevitable cost of triggering a war with their host species.  In the video which opened The Zygon Invasion, the Osgoods stated that the ability to copy other life forms was a defence mechanism, enabling them to embed themselves among other species, which suggests a form of adaptability which goes well beyond temporary expedient and could, if necessary be permanent, perhaps consolidated by the original mental link to the individual whose body print they adopted.   What the Osgoods achieved could be the norm, and this possibility is reinforced by the attitude of the Zygon whom forces into reverting to his original form.  He was content living among the host species and did not want to change back.

 

 

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@purofilion  (and everyone else worried that the next episode might not live up to expectations)

Please Harness: make it a good one.

The omens are favourable, if the preview blurb in the Radio Times (dead tree version) is to be relied on.

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@soundworld   Yes, I too thought that scene was very well done, not least in the way it illustrated that certain truth.  Killing at a distance, however it is done, tends to be dehumanising because it divorces the bomber crew, those who launch the missiles or the drone operator from the end result, and the human cost can then be obscured behind a screen of euphemisms and obfuscation.  For us to witness the drone operator seeing what appear to be her partner and child in the target frame brings home the reality in the simplest way possible.

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@winston

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

In the case of Tesco and branches of certain other supermarket chains I have ventured into, probably a combination of all of these things.  I do sometimes patronise Sainsbury’s, a branch of which is situated only 20 minutes walk from where I live, and I don’t find the atmosphere there nearly so off-putting – for one thing the staff there are generally friendly, and I don’t mean in a robotic have-a-nice-day manner.

@arbutus   Sadly, it is a long time since there has been an independent grocery store near here. Even the local convenience store, which was part of a small chain, was taken over by Tesco and is therefore to be shunned except in dire emergency.  Fortunately there are a number of specialist food outlets and delicatessens in the city, as well as a central market with some very good specialist food stalls, open six days a week, and there are also regular farmers’ markets.  I do not eat a great deal of meat, but when I am in carnivorous mood, there is a butcher nearby who stocks only meat from free-range, traditionally reared animals and poultry, mostly supplied from local farms.  Marks & Spencer’s food hall, which I also patronise on occasions, is relatively expensive, but the staff there are very friendly and chatty, and many of them have been there for years and so recognise regular customers.

Anyway, as long as I avoid places like Tesco’s, shopping for food and household goods need not be a harrowing experience.

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@starla   @lisa   Re the UNIT soldiers being fooled into entering the church:  since the Zygons were able to lift information from the soldiers’ minds and use that information to replicate members of their families, perhaps they were able also to manipulate the soldiers’ minds into believing and trusting what they saw, despite the briefing that they had received.  That is how I read the situation, anyway.  The woman who aborted the drone strike earlier because she saw what looked like her family wasn’t prepared for the sight, so her hesitation is understandable even if her mind wasn’t being manipulated.

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

And yes, children and young people need to be shown, via a suitable medium, that explosions and shootings, which may look cool in video games or in mindless action movies, have terrible and tragic consequences in real life, even at the risk of upsetting those who have witnessed or lived through such incidents.

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@pedant

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

Seconded, with emphasis.

@mersey  Please, I beg you, do not assume that because we disagree to some extent on what is or is not an appropriate subject to be referenced in a show such as Doctor Who, that we do not understand or care about such matters as the conflict in the Ukraine or the MH17 incident, or the many current critical global issues.

The members of this forum are from many different parts of the world, with widely different experience and viewpoints to inform their contribution.  Speaking for myself, I was born in the UK during the second world war and grew up in the aftermath, aware at least to some extent of the consequences, and knowing that though life was not particularly easy for us for many years, others had suffered and were suffering infinitely more.  I do not recognise the attitudes which your attribute to us, and am saddened to think that this is the impression you have received.

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@kharis

War is neither glamorous nor attractive. It is monstrous.

As a pacifist and the daughter of pacifists I concur wholeheartedly. I find it hard to understand how even in these days, when the immediacy of television reporting and the internet make it difficult to ignore the reality, war can still be glamorised and the soldiers who are casualties of war sentimentalised – never mind that they were most of them ordinary people who enlisted for practical reasons, and that the ’cause’ they died or were maimed in may have been wholly unjustified and venal.  I forget off hand who it was who said that war was politics carried on by other means.  As far as I am concerned, war is always the mark of abject failure on the part of politicians and the diplomats whom they appoint.

Of course it isn’t just the aggressive instincts inherent in mankind and social conditioning which encourages people to view war as an acceptable way of dealing with problems; there are huge vested interests which keep the juggernaut rolling (don’t get me started on Trident), but really this is a subject for discussion in the pub.

 

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

The only review of the episode which I have read, other than the Guardian, was in the Independent, and that was enthusiastically approving. The BTL comments, though few, were also very positive;  I have too few brain cells left to risk them by venturing into Torygraph territory.  As for brain bleach, if required I would undoubtedly go for the second option you propose.  If the alternative requires venturing into Tesco I would have to forego it in any case, since I am allergic to that particular supermarket chain – almost literally.  On the occasions when I have had no option I found that I could enter their portals feeling full of good will towards all humanity, and emerge half an hour later feeling homicidal.

 

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@janetteb   After our discussion of the carvings on the pillars of the hall in The Girl Who Died I decided to go back and take another look.  As a result I realise that I was almost certainly wrong in identifying it as having affinities with the Urnes style.  In fact it looks more like the Oseberg style (after the ship burial found there), which would be pretty much correct for the date in which the story was set.  The Urnes style is dated to the 11th century and would therefore be too late for that context – not that such a trivial matter would bother many people other than archaeologists and art historians 🙂

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@purofilion   Many thanks for the good wishes and the offer of a virtual drink.  You did in fact wish me happy birthday before, in your post #45888, but twice is twice as nice. Coffee would have been inappropriate at the time you posted, which over here was 1.37 pm, as you surmised .  I was up and about until 00.30 am. but an hour later was tucked up, fast asleep under the duvet. All the champagne has been drunk, alas, but there is a bottle of a promising-looking Chablis which I can broach, and I will raise a glass to you this evening to wish you sweet dreams.

If you are still confused about the change in clock time, we reverted from British Summer Time (BST) to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) at 2.00 am on Oct 25th, so the clocks went back an hour and we had an extra hour to sleep or stay up and play.  In my case I retired at the usual time but woke at 6.00 am instead of 7.00 so gained no advantage 🙁

@arbutus and puro  Oh *that* dream  😮

Oddly enough, I cannot recall ever having it during the years I was actually taking exams, either at school or university, but nowadays it is a recurring nightmare.  I find myself back at Norwich High School* – or sometimes another, unfamiliar school in the city – faced with an exam, usually in French or History, after having skipped all the classes because these were subjects which I studied at ‘A’ level and I thought that I would remember enough to be able to wing it.  Now, on the eve or the morning of the exam I suddenly realise that the syllabus is completely different from the one I followed, the period of history studied has been different, and I haven’t read the works required for the French Literature exam.  I’m not sure what my subconscious is telling me.

As for maths, it was by far my weakest subject, and from the age of 13 I was in the B stream for that subject, with the less mathematically gifted students. I was fine with geometry and trigonometry and OK with arithmetic, though slow, but algebra was a bit iffy.  I generally understood in theory but tended to get in a muddle in practice, especially when it came to quadratic equations. Only those in the A stream got to study calculus prior to taking GCE ‘O’ Level.  I did nevertheless and against the odds manage to scrape a pass ‘O’ level (pass mark around 50% – in those days they used to adjust the pass threshold according to the average standard of those taking the exam that year.

* now an independent school with a very high academic reputation, but in those days it was what was known as a Direct Grant School, partly funded by the Local Education Authority and with an intake of 40% non fee-paying pupils in the senior school (ages 11-18).

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@ichabod

I think they hit it just right, myself.

So do I, but perhaps this wasn’t entirely clear in what I wrote  🙂

 

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@mersey

This is still tv series about funny alien.

If that were all it was, I doubt whether I would still be watching after all these years.

I understand your point of view, but I do not see why serious issues should not be addressed in a popular show which reaches a varied audience with a wide age range, because this can, if handled carefully, be a much more effective medium than either a documentary programme or high minded ‘serious’ drama with much narrower appeal.  From the beginning in 1963 Doctor Who has quite often, obliquely or directly, subtly or not so subtly, addressed moral, philosophical and political issues, and the issues addressed in this particular episode are among the most pressing and disturbing of those we currently face.  The fact that they are being addressed in a family show does not mean that they are being taken lightly or treated frivolously, even if the message is wrapped in an entertaining package of fantasy fiction.  In this guise it is much more likely to reach the most important audience; children and young people.

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@nerys  @avaris   A minor point to note in passing also: the gravestone we saw must mark a cenotaph, not a grave with a body in it, since the Osgood zapped by Missy was reduced to a small pile of dust which would have been dispersed to the winds when the plane disintegrated.

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@janetteb    I had as close a look at the carving on the pillars as the brief glimpses allowed, pausing the recording at the appropriate moments, and can say with reasonable confidence that it was modelled on Viking era wood carving – probably Urnes style, to be more precise.  I doubt also whether the episode was filmed in a reconstructed Anglo-Saxon village.  The only one I know of is at West Stow, about 40 miles from where I live, and the setting didn’t look much like that.  West Stow doesn’t include any building as elaborate as that hall in any case.  I did wonder whether they had gone to the expense of filming at a reconstructed settlement in Scandinavia, but haven’t found any information to confirm that.

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For those interested in real Vikings, rather than those in the Whoniverse, some years ago I spent around 10 weeks supervising excavations on the site of an Anglo-Saxon monastery – a double house of nuns and monks, ruled by an Abbess.  The Viking army which was in the process of conquering much of England in the 870s had sacked it and set up their winter camp there, and there was ample evidence that, whatever their behaviour at home among family and friends, these were Not Nice People.

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@janetteb   Many thanks for the birthday wishes.

I’m not sure whether I would have had much to say about the Vikings in The Girl Who Died, even if I hadn’t had to wait more than a week to watch it, thus ensuring that I came very late to the party.  In the way they were depicted they were very much story-book or cartoon Vikings, horned helmets and all, not to mention the fact that, strictly speaking, the name Viking applied only to those who were adventuring, looting and pillaging overseas, not to those who stayed behind farming and fishing.  The set designers had gone to a great deal of trouble to get some details right, such as the carvings in the hall – though I think such elaborate decoration, perhaps with a bit of gilding or brightly coloured paint, would have been more appropriate in the hall of a wealthy chieftain than in that of the head of a small village.  The costumes, too, seem more generic early medieval than Viking age Scandinavian, though most of what we know about the dress of that period comes from the grave furnishings of people who were wealthy and of high status, so it is not a major stumbling block.

Someone with my interests is bound to notice such details, but since most people are not bothered by them, nit-picking on my part could become very irritating.

On the subject of Viking helmets, on my recent visit to Sutton Hoo I was reminded that at least one of the tinned bronze plaques decorating the helmet depicted two people, side by side, carrying spears and swords and wearing helmets with curving horns terminating in birds heads, so such images continued in the pagan north well into the post-Roman era.  Here, though, as elsewhere, the context of the images indicates mythical subjects and, assuming that counterparts existed in the real world, they would certainly have been for ceremonial or religious ritual.  As I argued in the discussion of the pre-season trailers, Horned helmets would have been highly impractical in battle.

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As a postscript:  The name of the country in which the Zygon occupied village was located, Turmezistan, suggested that a mosque rather than a church would have been more likely, but I’m pretty sure that was the whole point.  One should not make assumptions.

@purofilion   The switch was signalled by the cut following the appearance of the Zygon in the flat in its true form, and by Clara’s body language as she emerged from the flat and immediately smoothed and tied back her hair.

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I relish the more subtle and multi-layered episodes which have featured under Moffat’s aegis but, as must have been apparent from my brief post yesterday evening, I thoroughly enjoyed the change of pace and mood in this, and disbelief did not need to be suspended; it was nowhere to be seen (maybe slipped out for a pint at the local). I did wonder afterwards whether the aforesaid pace might have masked some glitches or gaps in the narrative, but on viewing again this morning in a more critical frame of mind, I could not spot anything.  It all seemed to hang together very well, even if some of the links were in the nature of ‘blink and you miss it’.

@countscarlioni

big themes for this series: hybrids and  “The friend inside the enemy, the enemy inside the friend.”

Exactly so, and very much to the fore in this episode, though without too obvious an emphasis.

Until next week we are left in a state of uncertainty with questions hovering. Even those whom we assume are not Zygon copies could be other than they seem – including the Osgood rescued by the Doctor, if it is possible for someone who is already a Human/Zygon hybrid to be copied.  The original Clara is presumably still alive in some fashion, entombed in the Zygon pod, but what of Kate?  @jphamlore suggested that it might be the original Kate who survived that encounter, but if so, how did she know that the Clara/Bonnie she contacted was a Zygon commander?  And if not, has she been reduced to a small heap of electrically sparking fibre?

The socio-political message of the episode wasn’t subtle, but it was embedded organically into the narrative and was not jarring or too obtrusive as far as I was concerned; and, as @bluesqueakpip said, it needed to be reasonably overt for a target audience of children and young people, not to mention some older people with narrow and entrenched opinions on these matters – although the latter are more likely to be simply annoyed and up in arms at what they perceive as leftie propaganda.

@winston

did the Doctor call himself Doctor Funkinstein?

He did indeed!  Presumably as a nod to his latest persona.

 

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@pedant  @phaseshift   Well, the first thought that leapt to my mind in the first 10-15 minutes was ‘Those who complain about Doctor Who having a socio-political agenda are going to be really pissed off with this one!’

Apart from that … Whoof!  Edge of the seat stuff, even if I am well beyond hiding behind the sofa.   Wonderful how many threads they managed to pick up on.   Result: one very happy Mudlark  🙂

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Re life expectancy in the 17th century.  I have just done a quick check and about 12% of children in England died in their first year. The mortality rate for all children was higher than I remembered – about 60%.  For someone reaching the age of 20 or so, average life expectancy was 59/60 – and of course there were plenty of people who lived into their 70s and beyond.

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@countscarlioni

the writer was careful to get other facts correct. Ashildr/Lady me tells the Doctor, for example, that the life expectancy in England in 1651 is 35.

Another interesting and perhaps significant point;  I don’t think that anyone in 17th century England would have considered mortality in that statistical light.  Lady Me, who had seen so many generations live and die, might have had a different perspective, but in a contemporary setting would not have had the means to gather the data.

I have found that people are sometimes misled by such statistics, though.  The figure quoted is the life expectancy at birth, and it is skewed by a very high mortality among infants and young children in the general population.  Once, when I was researching family history, I totted up all the baptisms and all the burials of children recorded in all the 17th century registers for a parish in Lancashire in which some of my ancestors lived.  I do not have the exact figures to hand, but they were horrendous – if my memory is at all accurate, the number of baptisms was little more than 20% higher than the number of infant and child burials.  These figures are not valid for the country as a whole, of course, and the method statistically crude even for one parish.  I would have to check the details, but I think more sophisticated demographic studies of the population as a whole have shown that anything between 40% and 50% of children died before reaching adult years.

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@mersey  I was simply picking up on something others had discussed earlier.  My tongue was firmly in my cheek 🙂

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Just a few more random thoughts and observations before tomorrow and the next episode.

Firstly, the resemblance between the outfit worn by Ashildr/Me in the background of the selfie, and that of Clara’s mother which sharp-eyed @kharis spotted.  It probably is just the writers tweaking our tails – as @pedant said, ‘Beware the chain yank’, and the actors do not much resemble one another.  But what first sprang to mind on reading that post was Clara’s mother’s promise always to be with her, wherever she was.  And if Ashildr were Clara’s mother, we know that at least once before she had to feign death before people began to notice that she was not showing any sign of ageing.

The use of the word ‘cocktail’ in a context which suggested the modern meaning leapt out at me as an obvious anachronism, and I am with @countscarlioni on that; but I also think that it was intentional. Remember what Missy said to Clara about anachronisms?

Ingenious suggestions by @brewski and others aside, there seems to be agreement that the earliest documented use of ‘cocktail’ to mean a mixed drink is in America in the early 19th century. There is, as @django said, a possible use slightly earlier, in 1798, but it isn’t entirely clear in that instance what was being referred to.  Mixed alcoholic drinks certainly existed in the 17th century, but the word ‘cocktail’ as used then and throughout the 18th century referred to a horse with a docked tail.  Since those with docked tails were mostly hunters or carriage horses, and the tails of thoroughbreds were not docked, it came, by extension, also to mean horses of mixed or doubtful breeding   Which, come to think of it, might be the origin of cocktail as applied to drinks  😉

I prefer to think that it was a heavy hint that Ashildr/Me has been doing a bit of time travelling, perhaps with Missy, as suggested already.

Sam Swift’s joking and bravado on the scaffold has historical precedent, I think.  When people could be hanged for even quite minor crimes and hangings were public, it seems to have been a point of pride among habitual criminals to affect a show of cheerful bravery.

And finally, a couple of things which gave me goosebumps.

Me’s words to the Doctor about herself and mirroring him (as @juniperfish pointed out)

‘No one’s mother, daughter, wife. My own companion, singular, unattached, alone.’    and

The patterned view of the Doctor, playing his guitar, framed by the aperture in the Tardis  – just beautiful!

 

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The above ended up a great deal more long winded than I intended, and a lot of it is essentially riffing on points already made by others.  So apologies for length and for lack of adequate acknowledgements.

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@everybody

It is late in the day to be joining in this discussion and I don’t feel that I have much of substance to add to what has already been said by others, often very eloquently.  But for what it is worth, here is my ha’p’orth on both The Girl Who Died and The Woman Who Lived.*

On the whole I preferred the second episode.  The Girl Who Died had some lovely moments, especially the Doctor’s translation of the baby’s crying, with echoes of his translation of the dinosaur in Deep Breath as others have pointed out.  But while the plot had some of the daftness of Robot of Sherwood, it lacked the lightness of touch in the latter and so, for me, it did not entirely work. The mechanics of the resolution – give or take a couple of barrels of electric eels – pretty much hung together;  with the wiring from Clara’s spacesuit (a Chekhov’s duck?), the contents of a smithy and a source of current one could well make life uncomfortable for metal-clad monsters, with a ‘dragon’ cobbled together from bits of derelict ship and a carved figurehead and animated by holographic projection to finish them off.   Nevertheless, it struck me somehow as a bit creaky.  The moral and philosophical thread running through the whole – already commented on at length, were what justified the whole for me.

In The Woman Who lived the ostensible plot, leonine monster and all, was almost incidental to the dialogue between the Doctor and Me, with its depths and layers of meaning, but even so I found the balance between the two better judged and more satisfying.  That dialogue recalled for me the discussion we had last year about how someone extremely long lived or even functionally immortal might deal with the accumulation of memory.  The Doctor copes somehow, though all we have been told is that he can edit or jettison memories he regards as inessential.  He also experiences serial lives rather than one long, continuous life, which might make a difference.  And of course he is a Time Lord, shaped for long, if not infinitely protracted life.

Ashildr/Me, being human, is not so shaped, and most certainly not designed for indefinite longevity, although the alien mechanism which constantly repairs the ravages of time and keeps her in the form of a girl presumably prevents deterioration of her brain also.  @pufferfish and @ichabod have already discussed the capacity of the human brain, which we can assume falls far short of that in a Time Lord. Even so, memory seems to work differently in different people and some people are able to retain a remarkable amount. I once knew someone with an eidetic memory, seemingly able to recall not only every fact she had assimilated, but where she had come across it, chapter and verse, whereas my memory is far less efficient and the data retrieval system seems to work by context and association. But I agree that even in a brain maintained at peak efficiency, 800 years of memories would almost certainly exceed capacity.  On the other hand, Me’s memory still seemed to be in full working order as regards the more recent past, and I got the impression that a good deal of the forgetting had been deliberate erasure, perhaps facilitated by the alien technology she carried within her.

Whatever the capacity of her brain, there was nothing wrong with her muscle memory: motor skills, honed to perfection, were maintained.

What struck me more forcibly was the proposition that the passage of time and repeated loss had eroded or numbed her capacity to feel any emotion other than the adrenaline rush of risk taking.  The Doctor’s action in restoring her to life had ultimately taken that away from her.  In this second encounter and its consequences he was the indirect means of her discovering once again the capacity to feel and to find a purpose in her continued life.  Rather as, on a smaller scale, Clara told the Doctor that he had given her …’a reason to …. be.’  Quite a weight of responsibility, whether he wants it or not.

 

*It has just occurred to me that the capitalisation of Who in both titles could be seen as having a certain resonance beyond its mundane grammatical role.  Who nose  😈

 

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@arbutus  @purofilion.   Many thanks for your good wishes  🙂

Arbutus  My knowledge of Early English is just about good enough for me to have been able to understand Raedwald’s greeting and self-introduction, but no more than that, so I was relieved when he switched to the modern version of the language.

I’m not so sure about ‘Forever Young’.  I don’t look particularly decrepit, but my body has begun reminding me with increasing insistence, that nothing lasts for ever.  On the other hand, the inner me persists in thinking of herself as no more than about thirty, and has to be reminded sharply from time to time that some behaviours – in public, at least – might be seen as inappropriate for someone of my years.  En famille is another matter.

I have now watched The Woman who Lived and skimmed through all the comments.  If I can marshal my thoughts into some sort of coherence, I will join the discussion shortly.

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@purofilion

I’m flattered to think that anyone missed me on these boards!  In fact I didn’t have time to watch The Girl Who Died until yesterday, and haven’t yet finished reading through the comments.  When I have done so I will see if there is anything I can add to the discussion, though I rather doubt it.

Yes, we had a delightful time.  As a gesture towards honouring middle brother’s landmark 70th birthday I had organised dinner at a very good local restaurant, and since youngest brother and wife had to come over from France to take part it was a good pretext for them to make a longer stay with me.  The birthday was in fact in July but, since middle brother was undergoing a rather drastic course of medical treatment at the time, we postponed the celebration until it was over and he was feeling better.  The choice of date was left to him and by coincidence – because I’m pretty sure that he had forgotten until I mentioned it – he suggested the 22nd, which happened to be my 73rd birthday. The meal was excellent, the ambience congenial, and the wines, for the record were a very pleasant Prosecco, a bottle of Two Rivers ‘Altitude’ Pinot Noir (NZ), and an Argentinian Malbec.

Little bro had brought over a case of cheap and cheerful, but very drinkable Cotes du Rhone which he had picked up in a two-for-one offer at a local Foire des Vins, as well as a selection of other wines, so meals at home were well supplied, and there was a bottle of Champagne for my birthday lunch.  The weather was most definitely autumnal; alternating days of hazy sunshine and dull overcast, but the autumn colours were still glorious, not least in my garden.

We spent a good deal of the time on expeditions to local places of interest, including a couple of days out along the Suffolk coast, revisiting places where we had spent family holidays when we were children, eating lunch at local pubs and indulging in the local beer (Adnam’s – which is worth the expense).  The ultimate destination of the second of the two Suffolk trips was Sutton Hoo, since little bro had no recollection of ever having visited the site, and certainly not since the visitor centre and exhibition have been open.  Lots of (mostly replica) spectacular Anglo-Saxon bling and a reconstruction of the burial chamber with all its contents – at least a century before the Vikings, but some of the metalwork has definite Scandinavian affinities, so vaguely relevant to the first episode of the latest two-parter.

Before we toured the exhibition we walked out to see the burial mounds and were surprised to see a figure loping towards us across the site.  He introduced himself (in old English) as Raedwald, king of the East Angles, of the people of Wuffa, and he was, indeed, dressed in the style of the deceased king, with replicas of the weapons and harness, the great gold belt buckle and the helmet.  We got into conversation with him, discussing such matters as the precise meaning of bretwalda  and the effectiveness of the thrusting spear – the Anglo-Saxon weapon of choice – as opposed to the sword which, being very expensive, conferred status.  We were allowed to handle the sword, which was also a replica of the one found in the burial, with a real pattern welded blade.  Fascinating stuff, even though none of it was exactly new to me.

And, for the record, I do not feel any older.

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@mirime   Offhand I can’t think of any thematic link between the Fisher King and Odin.  The Fisher King’s wound rendered him impotent to rule his kingdom or father a successor, and the kingdom suffered in consequence, according to the ancient belief that the well being and prosperity of the land was tied symbolically to the health and strength of its ruler.

Odin lacked an eye, but he had surrendered that willingly as a pledge, in return for one cup of water from the spring of Mimir which was the source of wisdom and understanding.  So the wound he suffered was, indirectly, the means of his gaining additional power.

There was no obvious connection that I could see between the Fisher King of the Grail legend and the monster in Before the Flood.  How Odin is presented and to what extent he conforms to the myth remains to be seen, though we can take it for granted that he won’t be a cuddly character  😉

 

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@ichabod    It seems a bit strange to be debating the credibility of such details in an episode of Doctor Who, when most of us managed to a greater or lesser degree to swallow so much that was counterfactual in the last series. On the other hand, when it is a question of what does or does not allow suspension of disbelief, why not  🙂

You were thinking in terms of a tsunami, but a tsunami has the whole power of an ocean driving it inland; the surge from a burst dam can be very destructive, as the aftermath of the dambuster’s raid demonstrated, but the force of the body of water behind it is less to begin with and, unless the dam is at the head of a narrow valley or gorge, it will to some extent be dissipated fairly rapidly as the water spreads out across the valley floor.  In this case the buildings below this dam were of brick construction, and although they would have been largely destroyed in the initial surge, I doubt very much that the foundations would have been completely scoured out and obliterated.  In the following 140 years things could easily have eroded and shifted about a bit, assuming that there was still a river feeding the lake and causing underwater currents, so that it is not beyond the bounds of possibility for things that had been buried to re-emerge.  I will have to watch Under the Lake again to refresh my memory, but I am willing to accept that, even if an unlikely amount of detail is shown in the underwater view, this is allowable in the interests of clarity in the narrative.

Anyway, as @purofilion and @bluesqueakpip have pointed out, there are other ways of thinking about the damage caused or averted.

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@ichabod

a flood that did no damage except to kill the bad guy

I’ve just remembered that I meant to comment on this point (I’m in a somewhat distracted mood this morning)

What made you think that the flood did no damage?  I certainly gained the impression from information given in Under the Lake that the buildings had been reduced to ruins and the alien craft had been buried under the rubble until a shift in the currents exposed it again.  The foundations and parts of the walls of the buildings would have survived – enough for some of the outlines to be visible – which would have made it easy for the crew of Drum Base to locate the church, especially if they had plans of the base dating from before it was flooded.

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@mirime  Although your query was addressed to @bendubz11, I hope that it will not seem rude of me to butt in and answer it while I am here.

In A Song of Ice and Fire and in the Television adaptation, Bran is a young boy, rendered paraplegic by a fall, who has visions of a three eyed crow or raven who promises that, though he will never walk again, he will fly.  The visions are, as it turns out, highly significant.

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@django   The indications are, as you rightly say, that the Fisher King’s people had a particular need for water, and probably prized and revered it because of its scarcity on their home planet.  My point was that there was no sign that they were a water-dwelling species.  The creature looked like something that had evolved in or adapted to very arid conditions, and the information in the ‘extras’ feature which @ichabod saw confirms that this was intended by the costume designers.

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@lisa  I have responded to your query concerning the publicity photos on the Spoilers thread, since the subject matter could be seen as verging on spoiler territory for those particularly sensitive in such matters.

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@lisa   I have had another close look at the photos, and what appeared to you as he roundish object hanging from Maisie Williams’s belt is in fact the rounded flap of a leather purse suspended from the belt by loops.  Such belt purses were common throughout the medieval period, though I can’t say whether this particular example is copied from a genuine example of the Viking period.

The Maisie character is, of course, wearing male dress, though I’m a bit doubtful about the knee-high boots.  Ankle boots or shoes were more the Viking style, judging by examples which have survived.

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@lisa   I don’t think that this Fisher King could have been a water creature in any true sense. According to my recollection, he told the Doctor that  his people, when they arrived, would have drained the world – presumably of water, implying either that they didn’t need it or had a use for it elsewhere.

The name reminded @purofilion of Slavic tales of water spirits, but here it is associated with the legend of the Holy Grail, which probably had its roots in ancient Welsh or Irish lore and eventually became incorporated into the Arthurian cycle. In that context, far as I am aware, it  has no particular association with water.  What Whitehouse or Moffat had in mind is another matter; I for one, was looking for signs an Arthurian connection and could see none.

As for Cthulthu, I always envisaged him/it as a monstrously multi-tentacled being, rather like a hugely inflated Dalek (the organic being inside the machine, that is).

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@purofilion

that which made them distinct, eccentric and altogether different and non-uniform in their humanity, is perhaps residing somewhere else

Exactly!  A sculptural model or a hologram of a person is a copy which may be informed by an external observation of that person, but it is not *the* person in essence.  In turn, the image of a deceased person may or may not convey something of that person to the observer, but it is not the wholeness of that person, whether surviving only in the collective memories of those who have known them living, or on some plane after death.

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