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13 October 2015 at 19:35 #44717
There used to be two lakes, Lower Loch and Upper Loch, and Lower Loch was drained to make room for a fake Soviet town (because there is obviously no cheaper way to do it when the military is involved) and the breaking of the dam merely restored the status quo ante
OK, I’ll buy that explanation. I can just about believe that the military would be capable of such a cack-handed way of doing things. It reminds me of an occasion when I was in charge of excavating a large site where we had a bowser to supply water. At the end of the digging season, when it was time to collect the bowser, I was away on leave. I returned to find the bowser gone and two great hephalump traps in the site compound. It turned out that they had been dug for the back wheels of the land rover in order to lower the tow bar. Seemingly it had not occurred to anyone to use the jack to raise the tow bar link of the bowser!
13 October 2015 at 19:01 #44709@purofilion
Strictly speaking the term Vikings should apply only to those who went a-viking – i.e. adventuring and raiding abroad – but I will go along here with the general usage.
The idea that the Vikings were all shaggy and unkempt is indeed down to TV and film representations, where the producers and costume designers haven’t bothered to do any research. They were in fact highly accomplished craftsmen and sophisticated metalworkers, who traded as far abroad as Constantinople, and while villagers would have worn clothes of homespun fabric, probably dyed with vegetable dyes as @janetteb says, those of high status might well have worn imported fabrics, including silk. Since surviving fabrics reveal knowledge of quite elaborate weaves, even the homespun need not have been particularly crude.
Men would generally have worn a tunic over fairly close-fitting trousers, with perhaps a cloak when outdoors. For fighting they would have worn a bowl-shaped or conical helmet, perhaps with a nose guard. Some of them might have had mail shirts, though those would have been expensive. Typical women’s dress would have been a long-sleeved, ankle length tunic dress, over which might have been worn an open-sided garment like a tabard, fastened at the shoulder with long pins or, for the wealthy, a matching pair of elaborate and often large and heavy bronze or gilt bronze brooches. Dress pins are fairly common finds on Viking era sites.
13 October 2015 at 18:22 #44701@bluesqueakpip I understand your point, and clearly that was how the Doctor viewed the matter, but I have difficulty, nevertheless, in seeing how anything which might be termed the soul was involved, since the ghosts did not appear in any profound sense to represent the person-hood of the dead they resembled.
I was never quite sure how auton-Rory worked, but the River who was saved to the library was the complete and essential ‘her’ in digitised form (or equivalent depending on how the computer memory functioned). The nethersphere also stored the complete minds of the people uploaded. In both cases the people continued to live in a disembodied fashion.
What puzzled me about referring to the ghosts in terms of souls is that they were copies only in a very incomplete and superficial sense. The Fisher King – or the programme he had initiated – took from them only what was needed for his purpose; energy, a structural form and the bit of mental wiring imprinted with and primed to relay his message. What did was bad enough, depriving them of life and all its potential, and it was cruel also because of the impact it had on the people who had known the dead, but the essential being of the dead and whatever of it, if anything, continued beyond their deaths, was beyond his reach
13 October 2015 at 17:03 #44695Blowing up the dam would very likely sweep the village away, but it would not leave it under water for 150 years. There would be some rubble and a river, and no need for an underwater mining facility.
*cough* May I politely draw your attention to post #44497?
13 October 2015 at 12:15 #44686@janetteb Indeed the Vikings had combs – not only necessary for tidy hair, but for controlling head lice and nits. I don’t know if you have seen any examples. Most of the ones which survive are carved from horn or antler, although others may have been made from some suitably dense wood. They are often quite elaborately decorated, and some have a neat little case to protect the teeth.
Judging by those photographs there appears to be something odd going on with the costumes; more specifically with the arms and armour. Some at least among the group of men shown confronting the metal-clad monsters are wearing what look like authentic style helmets of the period (and for the rest; I have already had my say on inauthentic horned helmets). But where the Maisie Williams character is shown with two men, they are all wearing scraps of wildly anachronistic plate armour. Their helmets are also anachronistic; one looks to be of the 14th century, and the other two – the tin hats with a brim – resemble those worn by men at arms in the 15th. They also appear to be carrying long bows which would have been equally out of place.
Odd, and I trust that it will prove significant and not just the result of the costume designers failing to do their homework.
Sadly I will probably have to wait until the 27th to find out, as I will have visitors staying with me and, out of courtesy, I would not want them to feel obliged to watch something in which they probably have no interest.
13 October 2015 at 11:48 #44685The Doctor throws the term “soul” about in a fairly casual way.
That is something that has been bothering me, also. Other than their outward appearance, the ‘ghosts’ don’t manifest any characteristics of the people the Fisher King has co-opted – certainly nothing of the essential personality of the individual which might be termed a soul. In fact for his purpose the only thing necessary is an analogue of the bit of mental wiring which has been altered in order to relay the message, plus the electro-magnetic simulation of a body capable of wielding metal objects as weapons. And that appears to be all that the ‘ghosts’ are.
Perplexing.
12 October 2015 at 21:18 #44633The Doctor, of course, should be as broad as possible in his interests.
Indeed he should! If someone is able to live so long, with multiple lifespans, they had damn well better make good use of the time in return for the privilege. Come to think of it, a lifetime of more than two millennia (estimated) would become pretty tedious without multiple interests and insatiable curiosity 🙂
12 October 2015 at 21:09 #44631(this is in response to your post on the Before the Flood thread, though you were responding to @blenkinsopthebrave above)
Who doesn’t wish Clara an ending in which everything works out
Only up to a point as far as I am concerned, because I am not too keen on the taste of saccharine. I would more happily settle for a bitter-sweet-but-satisfying resolution. In real life things seldom if ever work out entirely in a happy-ever-after way but, with a bit of luck, they can lead to something which is ultimately fuller, richer and more rewarding.
12 October 2015 at 20:36 #44627Does anyone know why the groups of black birds might be given such interesting names (Conspiracy of Ravens, Murder of Crows)?
I cannot say for certain that this is the reason, but I suspect that the root may be in their nature as carrion birds – haunters of battlefields which feature as such in myth and legend. The Morrigan sometimes appears in the guise of a crow, for example. Crows are also seen as symbols of discord. In addition, all corvids are highly intelligent, which people in the past must have observed and maybe found uncanny (recent studies have observed that some species of crow can solve puzzles that are beyond the capability of a five year old human). Thus we have Odin’s ravens, Hugin (thought) and Munin (memory).
12 October 2015 at 19:34 #44618I think he’s the aging rock star who reads books on philosophy and quantum physics in his spare time
So he’s Brian May with short hair?
OK, astrophysics and quantum physics are not exactly the same, but you get the idea 😀
12 October 2015 at 19:25 #44617I don’t recall seeing the Doctor quite this hysterical about companions-in-danger before. So I think that he knows Clara’s future. He thinks she dies young.
Nail –> head. That is exactly what I have been thinking. It builds on the hints last season that he knows something of her future, that it is coming relatively soon, and it is not good. Now that he is sure of Who and what he is, the turnaround from ‘She cares so that I don’t have to’ to ‘I have a duty of care’ is telling, because he, of all people, must understand bereavement and the process of grief, both hers and, in anticipation, his own.
Glimpses of the future, like oracular prophecies, can be misleading, and I hope you are right and that the Doctor has misinterpreted what he thinks he has seen. Her death would be tragic, but in a sense it would also be a cop out. The mystery of her existence needs to be resolved – and I very much like the idea that she embodies a causal loop – but her exit from the scene should not be as ordinary as death, even if the death is heroic.
12 October 2015 at 11:01 #44591@purofilion As soon as the Doctor mentioned Beethoven I thought of you and grinned 🙂
He did assure us that ‘None of this happened …’ but, unless I missed something, the analogy seemed incomplete. The time traveller copies out the scores and publishes them, but does he ‘become’ Beethoven, the documented person who wrote letters, exasperated people and conducted his own works, or are the works published without establishing a verifiable existence for the composer? And if he does ‘become’ Beethoven, how does he establish his back-story back to his birth and beyond?
It might work better if the time traveller manages to find Beethoven, but discovers that he is a young, wholly unsuccessful musician and composer with no performed or published work to his name. He gives Beethoven the manuscripts copied from the printed scores and thus launches him on a career which ensures that the music will not only exist in the future from which he came but will have an identifiable historical source
12 October 2015 at 10:36 #44590was that yet another snake I saw in the trailer?
It isn’t entirely clear in this particular trailer, but in one shown before the beginning of the season the monster in question is shown from a slightly different angle, and despite the long sinuous neck it looks much more like a dragon than a snake, with a mouthful of needle-like teeth (think T. Rex) and some kind of crest behind the head. Since it appears in a story featuring Vikings and a one-eyed individual wearing a winged helmet (characteristics of Odin), a dragon would be perfectly in keeping. Dragons certainly have some snaky qualities, but I don’t think shedding their skin is one of them. They often guard treasure and are long lived and difficult to kill. Often they are represented as intelligent, cunning and devious and, in some tales at least, have the power of speech which they may use to beguile and deceive the unwary. Some, but not all of them, can breathe fire.
On the question of the Tarot, I am like @ichabod in that my knowledge is very limited. I once possessed a pack – in fact it may still be lying around somewhere at the back of a drawer – and I did at one time read up a bit about the symbolism. My feeling ( I may be repeating the obvious here, and if not I am open to correction) is that the attributes of the four suits and the major arcana are such that they have universal applicability, however they are used. The work of any writer, and in particular one who draws extensively upon archetypes and myths may therefore be read and interpreted in that light, whether or not that writer had the Tarot consciously in mind.
On a more general note, I am delighted to see that at least some of the Vikings are wearing authentic looking helmets (i.e. pretty much like Norman helmets, without horns). Most the women’s costumes look more generic early medieval than specifically Viking era Scandinavian, but these appear to be villagers, not high status people, so I suppose anything goes as long as it looks approximately right, and I won’t quibble 🙂
11 October 2015 at 19:59 #44504@lisa Half-faced man was dressed in late nineteenth century style, it’s true, but then Deep Breath was set sometime in the 1880s, judging by the style of the women’s dresses, so it was in keeping – certainly not as anachronistic and out of place as the costume appropriate to an undertaker of that period would be on for a newly arrived alien from Tivoli on a derelict military base in the 1980s, even if the alien was an undertaker of sorts. Prentis’s outfit was specifically that of an undertaker, – the crepe sash around the top hat in particular was part of their formal get-up when officiating at funerals -whereas that of half-faced man, as far as I can recall, conformed more or less to normal city wear for a gentleman of those days.
11 October 2015 at 18:43 #44497@juniperfish Yes, sorry! I was nit-picking and should have made it clear that, apart from that quibble, I agreed with your point. I am still puzzled by the decision to call the alien the Fisher King though, given that the name has such resonance. I kept looking for something definite that might tie it in to the grail legend, but failed. If you are right, that it was simply to call attention to the parallels with the Doctor, it seems a rather clumsy way of going about it.
@blenkinsopthebrave I can see your point, and I too was a bit irritated by the preamble via the fourth wall – as if, after all the looping timey=wimeyness of the last few seasons, we would be incapable of following the moebius logic of a bootstrap paradox without a big signpost to direct us. It would also have been better if, when it came to the resolution of the story, we had been shown more of what the Doctor was doing instead of being given just one or two hints and then a comparatively lengthy exposition at the end. I can understand how Whitehouse might have wanted to keep the viewers in suspense as long as possible before revealing the twist, but I would still have preferred more showing and less telling.
That said, the puzzle was nicely intricate and, insofar as the cleverness of the mechanics was too much in the foreground, the fault was offset by the interplay of characters and the emotional undercurrents which were revealed in the process. The acting, as you said, was outstanding.
On a more general level, I am left with a fair few questions. There was no indication that Drum base was in existence in 1980, but if not, it must have been designed and built from the beginning as an underwater installation, so for what purpose? I think it was @jphamlore who pointed out that it was far bigger, more elaborate and more expensive than would have been needed just to extract oil. I will have to watch Under the Lake again to check that I am right in thinking that it had only fairly recently been handed over to Vector.
I note that the Doctor did, in fact, refer to the derelict military site as a town, although when we saw more of it, even the parts that had been done up to resemble streets of shops etc. were in fact basic military blocks behind the facades. So not a genuine town or village which had been evacuated and adapted for the purpose. Most of the buildings we saw were not even disguised. The one into which they dived to avoid the Fisher King even had a blast wall in front of the entrance, and the ‘church’ appeared to be largely an elaborate mock-up. But this is again nit-picking and I am seeing it with my archaeologists hat on. Clearly it was filmed in a real abandoned military installation, with some basic dressing for the purpose.
Another point which occurred to me was; why was Prentis dressed as a 19th century or Edwardian undertaker? Unless he felt that if he was coming to Earth he had to adopt the local dress appropriate to his profession and got it wrong by a few decades.
And finally. How come the site remained flooded for more than a century after the dam burst? As I mentioned in one of my musings on Under the Lake, Dams are normally constructed across river valleys, and if the dam breaks the water, after the initial surge and flood, resumes its flow in the river channel. Of course it is remotely possible that the dam held back water from a river which had been diverted from another course, and there was no outlet from the site.
On reflection, perhaps it is best if I do not look to have all my Ts crossed and my Is dotted. That way madness lies in the Whoniverse 😉
11 October 2015 at 13:28 #44486Yet another excellent episode and a beautifully intricate bootstrap loop. My immediate feeling after the first viewing was that the ending seemed a bit rushed, with too much left to the Doctor’s explanation in the final minutes, but I realise after a second watch this morning that this was because I hadn’t been concentrating sufficiently to spot the clues.*
The break between the Doctor saying that he must face the Fisher King and his announcing ‘Now I’m ready’, of course denotes the unspecified lapse of time in which he was able to work out what the Fisher King was probably planning, and to devise a way of thwarting that plan which was consistent with the appearance of the things he has already seen in the future using the information supplied by his own future ‘ghost’. When he finally confronts the Fisher King he is standing in front of the suspension casket which is now in active mode (the lights on the panel in front), though it isn’t entirely clear whether it is the Doctor or the Fisher King who has switched it on, and after the Fisher King has stomped off we get a brief glimpse of it behind him and can see that it is now open.
the Doctor and the Fisher King are very much paralleled in the episode – explicitly so because they both occupy the tomb.
As I read the sequence of events, I don’t think that the Fisher King did get to occupy the suspension chamber at any point. He is first seen shrouded and lying on a bier above the suspension chamber, not in it. He revives and immediately starts the process of summoning his own people by creating the first ghosts In his exchange with the Doctor he confirms that when the ghosts have proliferated and become sufficiently numerous, they will summon an ‘armada’ enough to ‘wake him from his sleep’, with the implicit understanding that the ‘sleep’ will be in the casket. But he never gets to enter the casket, because the dam bursts and he is swept away in the flood; so from that point on it always contained the the Doctor, and only the Doctor – though prior to that Prentis may have spent all or part of the journey to earth in stasis within it.
As regards the changed relationship between Clara and the Doctor as noted by @craig, I am with @ichabod in seeing it more as a shift in the balance rather than an estrangement. Her desperate pleading with the Doctor to change events in the past so as to avoid his own death echoes her attempts in Dark Water to persuade him to undo Danny’s death, and she ends by saying outright that he is essential to her because he has given her something – and she hesitates over the implied ‘to live for’ before concluding ‘to be’. She is indeed struggling with the after effects of bereavement, as several here have noted already. The choice is between collapsing into a soggy heap or carrying on, so she adopts a cheerful façade and carries on ; but the Doctor is her principal life line and the enabler of adventures which serve as a distraction from her underlying emotional state.
* Maybe because I was cross-eyed from a day spent trying to adjust and remake a complicated garment which someone else had botched, but no doubt the two large glasses of wine with my evening meal didn’t help
9 October 2015 at 22:49 #44382@lisa Clara’s leaf looked like a sycamore or maple leaf, so you are right; nothing like a rowan (also known as mountain ash) leaf. The rowan was sometimes planted by the doors of houses to guard against witches and other evils. I’m a bit doubtful about the druid connection, though. Almost all of what is known for certain about the druids of antiquity is from the writings of classical authors such as Tacitus, and that does not amount to very much. What nineteenth century and modern Romantics have built on that rather tenuous base is of doubtful authenticity.
In folklore, another tree with magical connotations is the hawthorn, a common hedgerow plant in the British Isles. In Ireland it is also known as the Fairy Thorn, and it is supposed to be bad luck to cut it down or injure it because that would incur on the wrath of the Good People and bring bad luck . There are apocryphal tales of the planned routes of new roads, even in recent times, being diverted in order to avoid having to fell a hawthorn. One legendary hawthorn is the Glastonbury Thorn, which was supposed to have descended from one grown from the staff of Joseph of Aramathea on a visit to Britain.
9 October 2015 at 21:02 #44380@lisa No, I have never met Rohan, despite the Edinburgh connection. I came across his books originally while browsing in bookshops, as is my habit, but it is clear from his writing alone that he has eclectic interests and a thorough understanding of the essentials of archaeology, cultural anthropology and mythology. I tend to be highly critical when it comes to fantasy novels, because so many are derivative or lacking in internal consistency, but his writing really drew me in and absorbed me into his imagined worlds.
Apart from the Winter of the World novels, he has written another fantasy series in which our reality is the centre, core or hub of a spiral or wheel of possibilities, where everything ever imagined by man can be encountered – the further out from the hub the more extreme – and every place in the world has its archetypal counterpart. The spiral impinges on reality for those who are lucky enough to stumble on the interface, so that someone idly wandering one evening through a half derelict port district might suddenly see a forest of masts above the rooftops, emerge to find sailing ships of many periods of history moored at the wharf side, and eventually find themselves sailing into the sunset among cloud archipelagos to find adventure.
9 October 2015 at 12:15 #44370@bendubz11 I stand corrected 😳
I hadn’t come across the term in that context, and it doesn’t appear in any of my books on ornithology, though admittedly the latter are chiefly reference books for identification.
@purofilion I wasn’t disparaging the bonkers theorising. I just prefer the notion that the big bad in this case is something new and exotic.
9 October 2015 at 11:18 #44367The more I think about it, the undersea base the Drum does not make sense.
Unless my memory is at fault, I don’t think anyone in the episode was claiming that it had been built originally for the purpose of exploiting oil or other mineral resources. It is adjacent to or within what had been a military base prior to the dam burst which created the lake, and I got the distinct impression that it had only been leased to the oil company relatively recently. As @bluesqueakpip pointed out in her post #44102, in our universe major atomic research stations were sited on the north coast of Caithness – a suitably remote and relatively thinly populated location.
My theory, such as it is, is that it was a Top Secret installation built prior to the flood as a sealed environment, for the purpose of investigating and exploiting some kind of alien technology, possibly connected to the alien craft. Sea Devils or Zygons are always a possibility, but I would have thought unlikely in this case.
Being a sealed environment it could easily be adapted as an underwater base, probably before the flood, which I strongly suspect was the result of a deliberate breaking of the dam above the site and the building of another dam below it to contain the water and create the lake, perhaps to ‘bury’ whatever it was they found. If there were no obstruction below the burst dam, the flood would have been temporary and the water would have drained away in the usual manner, since dams are usually constructed across river valleys.
@purofilion
So the base is gigantic: the town appears small
To the best of my recollection the only reference to what had been there before the flood was to a military base, and such bases (as opposed to military barracks) are not usually sited in towns. If it was, as I surmise, a Top Secret establishment it would almost certainly have been isolated from any civilian settlement. If there had been a village on the site, it would have been taken over by the military and evacuated.
9 October 2015 at 10:34 #44366Clara’s mother’s maiden name = Ravenwood
Ravens = SONG birds
Wood –> “the only water in the forest is RIVER”An intriguing argument but, while your first and third points can be taken as valid evidence, ravens cannot, by any stretch of the imagination be described as song birds. The sounds they make are harsh quarking noises and anything but melodious!
9 October 2015 at 10:23 #44365@lisa Good call re Raven. All the discussion of raven references had reminded me, also, of the Tlingit myth (although I wasn’t sufficiently well informed to know that it was specifically Tinglit; only that belonged to peoples of the north west coast of North America).
Have you ever come across the Winter of the World novels by Michael Scott Rohan? They are fantasies set in an imaginary vanished civilisation centred on the west coast of North America during the last Ice Age. The stories feature supernatural Powers who control the Ice and whose aim is to use it to scour the whole earth and return it to a pristine lifeless state. Opposing them are other Powers who sometimes meddle in human affairs, and one of these is Raven. As in the Tlingit myth he is a trickster and his symbol is a raven with the sun in its beak, in the style of Tlingit art, but he also has many of the characteristics of Odin, appearing to humans as a cloaked wanderer with a staff, or as a warrior carrying a spear. So two for the price of one, as it were 🙂
If you haven’t read any of the books, they are well written and for the underlying mythology the author has drawn very effectively on First Nation, Norse and Finnish sources and made of them something seamlessly coherent. I would recommend in particular the trilogy The Anvil of Ice, The Forge in the Forest and The Hammer of the Sun
8 October 2015 at 10:37 #44316The Doctor has encountered plenty of phenomena that looked like they might be ghosts but from what I recall never blurted out they might be ghosts. What does that actually mean?
I suspect that this is a deliberate piece of misdirection on the part of the Doctor. The things have the stock characteristics of ghosts as many people conceive them: they resemble dead people, they can walk through walls, they are semi-transparent and they come out at night. For some reason (mistrust?) he does not want the crew to speculate too much about what they really are, or to know what he is really thinking, therefore he calls them ghosts. If we, the pudding-brained viewers, can see the pointers to what they really are, it is hardly likely that he really thinks that they are the dead returned 🙂
As for his apparent lack of interest in the possible control panel, it could be that he does not want to investigate or to have anyone else taking too close an interest until he has gone back in time to just before the site flooded and found out more about what was going on then. To meddle before he has further information would be too risky .
7 October 2015 at 21:12 #44282it could just be that they both, coincidentally, have spikey faces.
Coincidence? I think not. That mural wasn’t just for decoration 😉
Though, as @purofilion pointed out, there are arguments against it being the spikey-faced monster in the suspension chamber/coffin.
So, monster under the lake* = (or at least represented by) sea serpent ? Very strange! On the other hand the mural might represent a dragon, since not all dragons in the early tradition had wings or even legs. One of the old English terms for a dragon was ‘worm’.
* The monster has been named in advance publicity and the name has archetypal resonance, but since it isn’t mentioned in the trailer I am playing safe here.
7 October 2015 at 11:27 #44262@janetteb Any attempt to understand Stonehenge has to take the prehistoric features of the surrounding landscape into account, and modern techniques such as ground penetrating radar are now revealing much more about that than was ever discovered in the past by fieldwork and excavation. No archaeologist seems yet to have discovered the chamber beneath the stones where the Pandorica was housed, but maybe it is masked by some kind of exotic alien cloaking device. 🙂
As for the treatment of archaeologists by writers of science fiction and horror stories, I can only say that they seem to have some very peculiar ideas about what we get up to! I have in my time been responsible for the discovery of some remarkable artefacts but, sadly, all of them had a rational explanation and none of them, so far as I am aware, was cursed or attributable to alien intervention.
7 October 2015 at 10:20 #44259@purofilion
Ah, but archaeologists are historians, no?
In the opinion of some historians I have known, archaeologists are a lower form of life – grubby peasants fossicking around in the dirt 🙂
Anyone studying the archaeology of a historical period needs to know how to use historical sources, especially primary documents, and to understand historical method. For those specialising in prehistory such skills are less useful, since by definition there are no primary historical records. Nineteenth century antiquarians were generally gentlemen educated chiefly in the classics, and they had a tendency to interpret all the prehistoric artefacts they found in the light of the accounts of barbarians written by Greek and Roman authors, but while those accounts have some limited use in relation to the peoples of Europe in the later Iron Age, they need to be used with caution.
The Archaeology department at Edinburgh where I studied was and is indeed a completely separate department, although it had originated as an offshoot of Art History; during the time I was there, and for some time after, the two were both housed in the same rather cramped late Georgian house (both departments were small, with only a handful of honours students per year).
Honours courses in the Edinburgh Faculty of Arts were to some extent more like the liberal arts courses in American universities, in that students were required to take at least two additional first year courses in other subjects. We archaeologists were lumbered with four ancillary subjects, including first year and Intermediate Honours Art History and two years of history, though for the first year course we could choose between British, European or Ancient. The second, intermediate Hons. course was tailored for us, in that combined the history and archaeology of the post-Roman period in Europe up to the 11th century.
At the time there were very few universities offering first degrees in Archaeology, and the two rated most highly were Cambridge and Edinburgh, where the departments were both headed by very eminent prehistorians. Now there are many, offering a wide range of both general and specialised courses, some separate and some jointly with such subjects as history and social anthropology.
But all this is way off topic, so I will yield the floor to the bonkers theorists.
6 October 2015 at 23:57 #44231@bluesqueakpip @purofilion I agree that the Triple Goddess as we have just defined it is largely a modern concept, although I would argue that it is anthropologists rather than archaeologists and historians who are responsible (I feel bound to stand up for my profession, after all). The idea does, however, have some slight grounding in archaeological evidence.
On the Germanic and Celtic fringes of the Roman world there was what seems to have been a cult involving a trio of female figures, known as matres or matrones who are depicted in numerous stone carvings, sometimes with votive inscriptions or prayers. The link is pretty tenuous, though.
6 October 2015 at 23:36 #44228@bluesqueakpip Naively, I assumed that The Drum referred to the circular plan of the installation, at least in the thinking of those who named it. It certainly does fit the theme of reverberations and signals, though.
6 October 2015 at 23:07 #44222@purofilion The triple goddess has three aspects: the Maiden, the Mother and the Crone (aka ‘ the other one’). In other words, the three aspects of the feminine. I would have to check, but I think that this is tied in to moon symbolism – the new, full and old moon.
The malevolent water spirit seems to be pretty universal. In Cheshire, where my mother grew up, there was one known as Ginny Green Teeth, who lurked in pools and would drag unwary children to their doom. In north eastern England I believe that there is a similar tradition of a river dwelling hag known as Peg Powler.
6 October 2015 at 20:53 #44204One thing I noticed was that the Doctor refers to Orion being viewed from the other side
The Doctor presumes that the message contained in the glyphs on the wall of the space ship and being relayed by the ‘ghosts’ consists of coordinates to guide someone to the site. The problem with this, as I noted in an earlier post, is twofold.
a) If the intended recipients of the message are extra-terrestrial, there is no reason to suppose that they would be like humans in seeing pictures in the patterns of the stars; and even if they did, the pictures would probably not be the same.
b) Unless the extra terrestrial aliens are from somewhere fairly close to us in the galaxy, the relative positions of the stars in Orion would be different. If we could go back or forward sufficiently far in time, the constellations would look different even from earth, because everything in the galaxy is in motion.
The only way I can see to resolve this logically is to assume that ghosts are mouthing is a human equivalent to the actual alien message or else, as I suggested in that earlier post, that the intended recipients are human.
Or else no one involved in the writing and production is bothered by such nit-picking details 😉
6 October 2015 at 10:43 #44171@purofilion I know that churches with onion domes and cupolas are by no means confined to Russia, but it has always been my understanding that those distinctive crosses, with the diagonal bar across the upright are specifically Russian Orthodox.
The building itself has the aisled basilica plan more typical of Western Christianity, in contrast to the centrally focussed lay-out usual for Eastern Orthodoxy, and the cupolas and crosses look very much out of place and as if they have been added on at a later date. Which suggests that if it really was a church to begin with, it was adapted at a later stage
All the other buildings and incidental features look very much as one would expect on an abandoned military base,* and as a whole it doesn’t look anything like the kind of specially constructed village or street used in military training. On the other hand, about 30 miles from where I live, there is a very large training area which was requisitioned by the M.O.D in World War II; the people living within it were evacuated, and the deserted villages are, I believe, still used for battle training. In various shots I spotted target boards with stencilled images of charging soldiers, and drums labelled ‘toxic waste’.
The design of the alien space ship, if that is what it is, bears a distinct resemblance to a stealth bomber minus the wings. I had a sudden thought that it perhaps it might be the product of a secret project, using information carried in signals from an interstellar source, in the manner of ‘A For Andromeda’, but would the suspension ‘coffin’ and its occupant fit that scenario? Or was the coffins occupant already here, and he provided the instructions as the first stage in getting him/itself off-planet. But neither theory explains the presence of a ghostly native of Tivoli, so perhaps I had better stick to straightforward observation.
Talking of coffins, there is a shot of the ‘mole man’, and the costume he is wearing is definitely that of an old fashioned undertaker, right down to the black sash wound round the hat and hanging down the back. He is standing inside the ship, with the (?) control panel in the background, and he is carrying an open book. The title on the cover, as far as I could make out, is Celestial Almanac .
* I know whereof I write. At a late stage in my career, much to my disgruntlement, I was required to investigate derelict World War II installations, now regarded as archaeological sites.
5 October 2015 at 22:02 #44139@fivefaces What is generally forbidden, because it could lead to significant paradoxes and the possibility of a major temporal disruption, is for the Doctor to double back on his own time line. In other circumstances there is no reason why he cannot go back to observe and investigate the origins of a situation in which he finds himself; it would be no different in principle from any other trip back in in time.
5 October 2015 at 21:52 #44138Yes, I was forgetting that they said it had been a military base. A simulated Cold War era village would definitely be in keeping with that background.
I hadn’t picked up any Fenric references – the Fisher King is from a different mythological tradition as I understand it, though a mash-up wouldn’t be beyond the bounds of possibility in the universe of Doctor Who. Clara as a pawn, on the other hand? Hmmm.
5 October 2015 at 20:55 #44133Ravens are also associated with the Norse god Odin, who had two ravens, Hugin (thought) and Munin (memory), which he sent out over the worlds as his messengers, to observe and bring back news.
I am happier in the world of Scandinavian and Germanic mythology, but the universe of Doctor Who is, after all, a melting pot of cross-cultural and archetypal references.
5 October 2015 at 20:37 #44131Well spotted! I hadn’t paid much attention to the trailer, but have now had another and closer look and yes, it is definitely a Russian Orthodox church, as is obvious from the style of the crosses as well as the onion cupolas – and furthermore not something you would expect to see in juxtaposition with the Soviet era type poster
If this is really Caithness, are we looking at an alternative timeline – drastically alternative, even for the Whoniverse, or is this supposed to be the result of some major geopolitical upheavals within the next century?
5 October 2015 at 19:09 #44123These “ghosts” aren’t holograms — not if they can take an axe or harpoon gun down from the wall and chase you with it — but I don’t think they can be “ghosts” (in our usual meaning of the word) either.
I agree that they cannot be simply holograms, although the hologram of Clara could be seen as an analogy and a pointer to what they really are. ‘Organised energy’ is probably as good a description as any. The fact that they resemble the people they have killed seems to point to the energy being drawn from the life-energy of the living people they duplicate, plus the energy of the mind/brain which has been imprinted by and is relaying the message. The fact that they appear to heft objects and wield them as weapons could be accounted for, as I suggested earlier, by a linked and coordinated telekinetic energy, generated from the same source. Clearly the insubstantial images could not, in themselves, lift anything.
That they are threatening and potentially homicidal, despite one of them being an alien from Tivoli – the ultimate pacifist culture – is enough on its own to suggest that they are not manifestations of the souls of the dead they resemble. I don’t think that the Doctor was thinking very clearly here.
5 October 2015 at 13:03 #44105@donnydhuum @purofilion
Now, why would a Tivoli, a race who wants to be conquered want to leave their planet, and what could he possibly be hauling? I mean, the craft was small, and since he was the only ghost, it only makes sense that he was the only crew member.
My assumption in the absence of further information was that the ‘mole man’, as a timid and pacific alien, had been killed and transformed into a homicidal ghost just as the crew members of Drum Base were, probably by the pilot using some property of the ship itself. This could have happened before the ship arrived on earth, though in the circumstances it seems more likely that he arrived as a live passenger and was ‘ghostified’ as a channel to relay the coordinates after the ship became stranded under the lake. I have been assuming also that the inscription was written by the pilot before he put himself back into suspension to await the coming of whoever was the intended recipient of the signal.
5 October 2015 at 12:42 #44103her own Doctor-y ability to keep herself safe, now that she’s more like him than ever.
But is she really? Some mystery still attaches to her origins, and she entered the Doctor’s time line in order to undo the damage caused by the Great Intelligence, but clearly she has little or no conscious memory of this. She has in the past described herself as a ‘control freak’, which suggests to me that her self confidence is somewhat fragile and depends on her ability to feel in charge. On occasions, but not always, she has demonstrated an ability to talk her way out of a tight corner, and in Flatline she had to act on her own initiative to get everyone, including the Doctor, out of trouble, which led her to compare herself to him. All of which, reinforced by his encouragement, has helped her to sustain her self belief. Clearly, also, she has come to think that she knows and understands him very well. But since then, in The Witch’s Familiar, she has had a sharp lesson from Missy on how much older in experience, more knowledgeable and powerful Time Lords are in fact compared to her.
The recklessness she displays at the beginning of this episode may some kind of over-reaction to that shock – a way of reasserting and re-validating herself, but I doubt if, in reality, she really thinks now that she has it in her to *be* the Doctor.
5 October 2015 at 12:07 #44101@purofilion
I recall you and others analysing parts of The Ring cycle and Gotterdammerung from which emerged interesting themes
Strictly speaking, we were discussing Norse myths, although the discussion began with a mention of the Ring cycle.
Wagner drew on several different sources – The Eddas, the Volsung Saga and the saga of the Nibelungs, but he used them somewhat freely, and the plot which he wove out of them, though firmly rooted in Norse and Germanic myth and legend is something different again.
Your comments on the name Lunn prompted a new thought about its possible relevance to the plot of this episode. The surname Lunn derives from a Scandinavian or Germanic root meaning a grove, whereas Lunn as an Irish forename means something like warrior (rather like Hild if we are going down the Norse route). But there is another possibility, because the word for lake in Welsh is llyn, the pronunciation of which is similar to Lunn if you discount the lateral fricative ll. Just a thought in passing to add to the mix 🙂
4 October 2015 at 18:41 #44051I have just been reading through all the comments again and see that the majority opinion is that that the ‘sword’ coordinate is a sword-in-the-lake reference and, by extension points to an Arthurian theme. I confess that I have had difficulty seeing it that way and am in favour of taking the Doctor’s interpretation at face value. But of course the Doctor could be wrong, and so could I, so I will go away and muse upon Arthurian themes.
In the meantime, pondering things that could be found lurking in lakes, I came up with Grendel and his gruesome Ma, but maybe there isn’t space for them in this episode 😈
4 October 2015 at 13:37 #44038One question- if the ghosts ‘don’t come out during day’, how are they messing with the computers to bring day?
At a guess, it is only the ability to project as ghosts and the associated telekinetic ability to manipulate material objects that is inhibited when the Base is in day mode, and that whatever is behind the projections retains the means to interfere with the electronics.
4 October 2015 at 13:25 #44036@purofilion Yes, as @bluesqueakpip observed, the mural on the wall of the Base canteen appears to be an illustration of the scene in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader where a sea serpent coils round the ship and attempts to crush it, though I don’t recall it as one of the originals by Pauline Baynes (I no longer possess a copy, so can’t check). The three figures in the ship would therefore be the three children, Lucy, Edmund and their obnoxious cousin Eustace. I don’t think you are necessarily bonkers, though, in suggesting that the subject of the mural could be more than an incidental feature of the décor in the crew’s living area, and may have significance in relation to the plot. Perhaps not a Star Trek reference though, despite the opening voice-over 🙂
4 October 2015 at 12:05 #44025One afterthought on the eyes as mirrors/windows of the soul. It is surely significant that the ghosts are eyeless, with black pits where the eyes should be.
4 October 2015 at 11:45 #44021Yet another episode to savour, and I enjoyed the shift in style and pacing. In some respects it was like a more highly polished and streamlined version of a really good BG episode, although I am sure that the ARSE brigade will find something to complain about (I cannot bring myself to read BTL on Dan Martin’s blog).
What grabbed me initially, following the Star Trek like opening shot with the Captain’s journal voice over, were the echoes of Quatermass and the Pit in the introductory sequence, as noted by @phaseshift. and I found myself all of a sudden channelling my 16 year old self in December 1958, watching episode 2 or 3 and being so unsettled that afterwards I needed someone to come with me when I went down into the cellar to fetch the coke for the kitchen range and boiler. It wasn’t just the obvious parallels – the mysterious vehicle, the Breen-like scepticism of Moran, the markings on the hull and the spooky occurrences after the crew of Drum Base started to investigate; there was the same steady build-up of tension and growing sense of menace. The story quickly began to diverge, of course, and the Doctor is nothing like Professor Quatermass, but the tension was sustained and the cliff-hanger was very effective indeed, beginning with Clara’s horrified reaction and our dawning realisation of what it was she was seeing.
As for the other characters; I agree with @serahni that Cass’s deafness probably has more relevance to the plot than the obvious fact that a lip reader was needed, and Sophie Stone wonderfully conveyed her air of authority after Moran’s death left her in command. Pritchard, the oil company rep. was meanwhile reminiscent of Beryl Reed’s captain in Earthshock, in his overriding preoccupation with his bonus and the company’s assets. As for Clara, she may have become an adrenalin junkie, eager for new adventure, but I’m not sure that I care for her in this increasingly over-confident and rash mood, and evidently the Doctor doesn’t, either. Now that she has realised, prompted by Missy in The Witch’s Familiar, that the Doctor has survived so many perils because, whatever his predicament, he always starts with the assumption that there is a way out, she has perhaps become too reliant on his ability to keep her safe. Which makes her shocked dismay at the end of the episode all the more telling.
The ghosts are intriguing. I am inclined to agree with @feanor that they are some kind of projection emanating either from the hull of the alien spaceship or from the pilot’s suspension ‘coffin’ – rather like the ‘ghosts’ in Quatermass. The hologram projection of Clara which lures them into the Faraday cage is perhaps a pointer to that. They are semi-transparent and can pass through walls, but can only appear when the Base is in night mode, so maybe there is something in the day-time lighting which inhibits the projections. I suspect that the individuals in whom the ear worm has been implanted were also reciprocally ‘read’ via the markings on the hull. At least, that is what the reflections in the eyes suggested to me: the eyes simultaneously mirrors of the soul, as @phaseshift said, and windows into it.
The ghosts are insubstantial, but they can also pick up material objects and wield them as weapons. They cannot, however, carry material objects through walls, which indicates that a separate telekinetic power is being used in conjunction with the projections.
One final, random thought. I was struck by the significance of the sword of Orion as a coordinate. It suggests that whoever or whatever is initiating the signal and whoever or whatever is the intended recipient, a) it/they are from somewhere in the galaxy where the constellation appears much as it does on earth and b) they somehow have the same quirk as human beings in seeing images in the patterns of the stars in the night sky, and have come up with a similar image. Which leads me to think that they may not be aliens from another part of the galaxy, but earthlings from another time.
3 October 2015 at 10:16 #43961@lisa @ichabod I agree that the terms ‘voting’ and ‘democracy’ which Colony Sarff used were probably a somewhat inaccurate approximation to what was actually going on. As Lisa realised, I was thinking in terms of a collective entity analogous to a hive of bees, but whereas bees only form a single physical identity when they swarm in the process of hiving off, Colony Sarff is evidently able to combine and shape itself into humanoid form at will and as required. Perhaps it can also assume other forms if need be(?). What I suspect was actually going on was an internal consultation – finding the ‘feeling of the meeting’; but Moffat as writer might have thought that too tricky a concept to convey without a more lengthy explanation or paraphrase.
I doubt if such a collective would be hierarchical in the sense that a pack or herd is hierarchical, although component members might have specialised functions determined, not by a pecking order but by the way they developed in embryo, perhaps in response to chemical signals or pheromones emitted by the coordinating member (the big snake).
2 October 2015 at 11:23 #43938“Colony Rat” (what’s Welsh for “bat”?)
I meant to look up the answer to this, and having now consulted a dictionary I am able to inform you that bat in Welsh is ystlum, and rat is llygoden fawr 😉
2 October 2015 at 10:30 #43937Also, the Doctor riding in on a tank is a nice reference to the Daleks.
Exactly what I thought, especially when the Doctor referred to the Dalek ‘travel machines’ as tanks. That tank wasn’t there solely for the purpose of making an anachronistic splash which would resonate through time, or to provide the Doctor with an opportunity to make corny jokes – jokes which, incidentally, served to focus further attention on it. Moffat was also hitting us over the head with a socking great metaphor!
2 October 2015 at 10:17 #43936Colony Sarf is just Colony Sarf, not “Colony Sarf #1” or “Colony Sarf pal of Davros”, which suggests that maybe CS is in fact unique in its sarf-ness
Perhaps, but there could be other snake-colony entities who call themselves by other names. How many words meaning snake must there be throughout the universe 🙂
I have been trying to imagine a Colony Bat or Colony Rat feeling kinship or affinity with a Colony Snake, and so far I’m failing!
I suppose it all comes down to whether Colony Sarff was an artificially created entity, in which case it/they might well have been unique, or a naturally evolved composite life form originating on some exotic planet or other. If the latter, then it follows that there would almost certainly be some method of reproduction, and at some point the colony would probably become overcrowded and a new leader would emerge among the little Sarffs, to hive off with some of the surplus population and found a new colony under a new name.
1 October 2015 at 22:15 #43903I wonder maybe if Mr. Sarff just had some innovative notions in regards
to his personal life choices?Why not? I guess it would have depended on how they voted – they are a democracy, after all. I have a feeling, though, that they might have been a wee bit offended by your implied assumption in referring to them as ‘Mr’ 🙂
@jphamlore The mind boggles!
1 October 2015 at 20:18 #43899There’s a Mrs. Sarff that has democratically voted to hunt Missy down to avenge her late SO.
I love the image that you conjure up, but since Sarff entity is/was a colony , I suspect that this kind of thing would remain strictly within the community. Think in terms of a hive of bees or an ant or termite colony, but one in which the sum of the constituent members is fully sentient, with the sentience channelled through a prime member corresponding to the queen in a beehive – in this case presumably the big snake.* Other colonies would be rivals and not welcome so, sadly, I doubt whether any other of its/their kind will be coming to avenge the demise of Colony Sarff.
* If I am correct in my interpretation, then Colony Sarff must have incorporated both male and female constituent members and, since it/they were an alien life form, possibly other genders also.
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