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11 February 2015 at 11:17 #37936
@scaryb The Librarian would be offended; he is an orang-utan which, when you think about it, is a form far better adapted for clambering around the library stacks 🙂
10 January 2015 at 10:37 #37190Yes, it’s jennylve1 again. Another ‘message’ has just arrived in my inbox, also.
9 January 2015 at 18:25 #37141@ichabod Just realised that I should have acknowledged you as well as ScaryB when making reference to the Doctor/baby analogy. My apologies.
9 January 2015 at 11:54 #37133@purofilion
I got an impression PC dives into the role straightaway.
That is how I saw it too; and the ‘see me’ moment was the point at which I felt he had nailed it.
What we saw in the following eleven episodes did not strike me as a continuation of the post-regeneration crisis, but as a process of self (re)discovery. In Time of the Doctor he had come to terms with the fact that he was approaching the end of his allotted spans: there would be no more lives. Then suddenly, shockingly, he is granted a new set of regenerations and he is, in a sense, reborn; starting again from the beginning, whatever his outward appearance suggests. @scaryb ‘s observation that he seemed at first to be establishing his sense of self from first principles, as a baby would, hits the mark exactly IMO.
The initial post-regeneration fugue, though deeper than usual, is, I think, pretty much over by the end of Deep Breath, but the exceptional and unexpected regeneration has left him profoundly unsure of himself. Much as an adolescent might, he examines and explores and tests his identity from ‘Am I a good man?’ until he reaches the point where he feels he can state, ‘Yes, this is me, this is who I really am’ or, in his case ‘ I’m an idiot, in a box…’
I read somewhere that Peter Capaldi said that he wasn’t approaching the part with any fixed idea about how he was going to play it, but wanted to work his way into it. If so his attitude locked perfectly into the twelve episode arc.
Good grief — so now that I’m 75 all of a sudden I like *younger* men?
You too, huh? And what is also disconcerting is that the ‘younger man’ has grey hair and I, by some freak of heredity, don’t.
5 January 2015 at 11:29 #36971@janetteb I second (or is it third?) the recommendation of Prachett’s Discworld novels. They are wonderfully imaginative, gloriously, laugh-out-loud funny, and with an underlying stratum of solid insight and wisdom. And if your boys are of an age to read them, then I would judge that so are you 🙂
The character of the successive novels changes considerably and so they are, in my opinion, best read in order of publication. The earliest are very different in character from the later ones – ‘The Colour of Magic’ and ‘The Light Fantastic’ in particular; in those first two a good deal of the fun is playing ‘Spot the Parodies’, though they are enjoyable, light hearted romps even if you are not familiar with the works and authors being sent up.
4 January 2015 at 19:54 #36936@ichabod @pedant Yes, ‘Timescape’ is good on so many levels, the themes still relevant, and the time travel premise, if questionable according to modern theory, was entirely plausible when it was first published (but then it was written by a physicist). It is more than 30 years since I read it – my copy is a paperback edition of 1982 – but it is a novel which has stuck in my mind and your mention of it has prompted me to get it down from the shelf again, to read as soon as I have finished re-reading Terry Pratchett’s ‘Hogfather’ in honour of the season.
3 January 2015 at 22:22 #36897@arbutus The Master as Wile E Coyote – absolutely spot on! Brilliant 🙂
@elbalk-kev There is not much I can add to what has already been said in response to your post; I pretty much endorse the views expressed by @JimThe Fish, @arbutus and @pedant. The only authority I can bring to bear on the subject is that of someone who was (at least technically) an adult in November 1963 and who has watched Doctor Who on and off from the beginning. As such, I can vouch for the fact that the programme was never, from the first, seen as purely a children’s programme, even if it was shown in the Children’s Hour slot, and that, insofar as it had an educational purpose, it was the presentation of history via the imaginative medium of time travel, as @pedant pointed out (I suspect that the ‘educational’ aspect was primarily a way of selling the concept to the stuffier echelons of the BBC).
Long before Doctor Who first aired I was interested in science and an avid reader of science fiction. The radio serial ‘Journey into Space’ which I used to listen to in the early to mid 1950s, was science fiction, in that it aimed to be consistent with scientific and technical knowledge at the time, though now quaintly outdated. Doctor Who was not serious science fiction in that sense and I never saw it as such; it was and is, as @jimthefish says, fantasy with some of the trappings of science fiction, and tends to be at its weakest when it attempts a veneer of scientific credibility. Its strengths, and the reasons for its longevity lie elsewhere, and if I regarded it as science fiction I would not still be watching it.
As for your strictures on Moffat as a writer and show-runner; I can only say that, while I give all credit for RTD for reviving Doctor Who, I regard Moffat as the better writer and, while not uncritical, regard the imaginative directions in which he has taken the show as being as interesting and engaging as anything in its 51 year history.
2 January 2015 at 19:51 #36845@purofilion You certainly did not offend me in any way, and I’m very sorry if I gave that impression in my response. It looks like a classic case of crossed wires; easy enough on an internet forum – even one as polite and forgiving as this one 🙂
When I used the term ‘epic’ I was thinking in particular of the Christmas Specials and finales produced by RTD, which tended to go OTT as far as I was concerned – the kind of episode where the cast of (CGI) thousands and the overblown scale of the action threaten to overwhelm the real drama at the heart of the story. TDotD was epic in the right way (IMO), but it all comes down in the end to how you define the terms.
1 January 2015 at 16:21 #36794@barbaralefty Glad it wasn’t just me!
Which does get us back to, that house ain’t real…
Well, it struck me from the first as a bit unreal, particularly as we had last seen Clara in a flat in a multi-storey block; and once it became clear that this was a dream scenario the matter was settled as far as I was concerned: it was part of the dream, though it may well have incorporated elements of houses she had known. It reminded me of a recurrent dream I used to have (and variants of which I still have from time to time). In the dream I would find myself in a house which I identified with one my family had lived in when I was in my teens. The real house was late Georgian in date, modestly elegant and spacious, but in the dream it was much larger, grander and more richly furnished and, in walking around it, I kept finding rooms and treasures that I had previously been unaware of.
@purofilion Russian matryoshka dolls (and I assume that the Czech dolls you refer to are similar) was indeed another image that came to mind, but it seemed to me too straightforward. The one which occurred to me first of all was that of one of those virtuoso carvings of filigree balls, freely revolving one inside the other, fashioned from a single piece of turned ivory or boxwood. I settled for Chinese boxes as a more widely recognized simile.
Strange that you should refer to the people caught up in the dream as ‘expendable; disposable almost’. They were ordinary people, certainly, albeit in extraordinary circumstances, but I did not see them as expendable; certainly not ‘red shirts’, to use the Star Trek analogy. The real difference here – which I alluded to – was the scale of the drama which, though tense, was domestic, not epic. The Doctor was not a super-hero, not the ‘oncoming storm’, flying in to save the world and terrify the monsters at the very utterance of his name; he was the ‘idiot in a box, passing through, helping out’ – as in the past he most often has been (and as, on the whole, I prefer him to be).
You mentioned Shona in particular, and she was certainly the most fully realised personality of the four individuals at the polar base: the girl who, in the end, was most anxious for everyone to keep in touch and who, as we discovered, was facing a Christmas alone and lonely (and there is a big difference there) in her messy flat, with nothing but a rather depressing ‘to-do’ list to help her through. The fact that her list consisted largely of watching horror sf movies and fantasy does suggest, though, that she might have been a major element in driving the dream . It would not surprise me if she made another appearance.
The ‘scientists’ did not, of course, convince as real scientists. Their behaviour and their setting looked to me more like the imaginative construct of people whose knowledge was based on film and television scenarios, and perhaps the occasional popular documentary. If they were reluctant to accept the irrationality of the intrusion of Santa Claus and of a ‘skeleton man and a girl in a nightie’ who had arrived in a police telephone box , it was not so much that they were rational scientists, as that they were dreamers trying to assert the logic of their communal dream.
As for Clara, lingering on the sleigh with Santa as they flew above London – who has not tried to cling on to a particularly seductive fading dream as they awaken? And Santa was, in this instance, the Doctor’s alter ego.
31 December 2014 at 19:49 #36745I suspect that it is distinctly bad form to bring your own drink to the pub, but I seem to have this glass of champagne already in my hand, so I will raise it to drink a toast to The Doctor Who Forum and to wish everybody here
A VERY HAPPY NEW YEAR
Mudlark
30 December 2014 at 16:47 #36665Postscript: Did anyone else spot, among the throw away lines and little jokes, that Santa, having just entered the polar base, turned towards Rudolf, visible and fidgeting in the open doorway, to quiet him. He pointed, there was a beep and Rudolf’s nosed flashed and went dark. The logic of a dream!
And on the subject of dreamscapes, was my imagination working overtime, or did the exterior of the polar base bear a certain resemblance to the layout of the rooftop where Clara first encountered Santa? That, too, would be consistent with the logic of a dream.
30 December 2014 at 16:25 #36664At last, five days later and very late to the party, I find myself with time to sit down and analyse, or try to analyse, why I found Last Christmas so very enjoyable and all-round satisfying. Although I have read through all the comments to date, it has been at snatched intervals and at speed. I jotted down a few notes, but I apologise in advance for any failure on my part to recognise or acknowledge points already made and discussed.
It was pretty much all I could have wished for in a Christmas offering: seasonal without schmaltz, and with a hint of acerbity to cut the genuine emotional content; nicely gruesome monsters, and the drama of an insidious threat to all life on earth which was played out and resolved on a compact, almost intimate scale, in contrast to the extravagance and pyrotechnics which, to my mind, have marred so many of the Christmas Specials. The narrative was as neat as a set of intricately fashioned, nesting Chinese boxes, ornamented with delightful little details, surprises and jokes.
The themes of dreams versus waking life, illusion and fantasy versus reality, stories, legends and myths were explored in a thought-provoking way which cast some of the more debateable aspects of Series 8 in a new light, and this was signposted early on.
Santa Claus: …believer until the age of nine. Why did you stop?
Clara: Because you’re a fairy tale; I grew out of fairy tales.
Santa Claus: Did you, Clara? Did you really?
…. cue sound of Tardis materialising.
Then there was the (lack of) explanation offered by everyone, including Clara, asked how they came to be on a scientific base at the North Pole: ‘It’s a long story‘
The idea of the dreams within dreams was used to very good effect. It also raised questions, amongst which was, how come a group of people who, with the exception of the Doctor and Clara, turned out apparently to have no connection with one another, were in the same dream(s)? (I think it was @macphisto96 who referred to ‘community dreaming’). The explanation which occurred to me was that while they were under the influence of the dream crabs, which operated through telepathy, they were linked telepathically – the dream desires of each feeding into one another, reinforced by the Santa Claus myth/archetype. But whereas all but the Doctor were initially unaware that they were dreaming, the Doctor himself was a lucid dreamer: that is, he was aware all along that he was dreaming and was, to some extent able to direct the course of the dream. Perhaps it was he who first summoned Santa Claus because, as @dimchall (SallySparrow) observed, Santa is his dream counterpart in many respects; a manipulator of space and time, travelling in a vehicle which is bigger on the inside and, in this case, the person who acts as the catalyst in resolving the problem.
It was a very clever way of incorporating Santa which allowed belief while not committing to a too-literal representation. Because Santa can be completely real within the dream and, in this case, it was essential that people accepted him as such, as underlined in the ‘Tinkerbell’ moment ‘Do you believe in Santa?’
Some of the stories are resolved and the stories (lies) which Clara and the Doctor had told one another were soon dealt with. In her dream of Christmas at home with Danny, Clara was enabled to come to terms with Danny’s death and, I think, acknowledged subconsciously her changed relationship with the Doctor. This was signalled for me when there was the knock at the door and she said it was probably her Dad – and it was, of course, the Doctor, her ‘space dad’ (I am among those who think that there is no biological relationship: the link with River is/was probably the result of Clara’s involvement with the Doctor’s time-line).
I suspect that it is one of those episodes which will repay many more viewings, because it contains so many goodies, like the silver sixpences and charms in an old-fashioned Christmas pudding, and I am sure I haven’t spotted them all.
29 December 2014 at 10:36 #36609@purofilion In the event I was permitted to watch it on Christmas Day, though I received some funny looks. Unfortunately circumstances made it difficult to concentrate, so I wasn’t able to appreciate it properly at the time. It might have been the distraction of a puppy with very large paws bouncing round the room, or the small cat curled up on my head*, but the fact that I was semi-comatose following consumption of a very large Christmas dinner and a good deal of excellent wine had rather more to do with it.
It was a couple of days before I had the opportunity to view it properly, and I still haven’t had time to read through people’s reactions here, but I hope to be able to gather my thoughts and see if there is anything I can add to the discussion later today.
In the meantime, and in brief, I thoroughly enjoyed it and, for me at least, it ranks as the best of the Christmas specials to date.
*strictly speaking, the cat was partly on my head, partly on the back of the sofa.
23 December 2014 at 17:58 #36333Just looking in to wish everybody a Happy Christmas, with or without tangerines. I have a goodly supply in readiness, having found some in Sainsbury’s, lurking among the acres of clementines and satsumas.
Now I’m off, laden with goodies, to spend Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with my brother and sister-in-law in darkest Suffolk. If we watch any television at all in our post-prandial stupor, it will not be programmes of my choosing and won’t include Doctor Who. I have set it to record, though, and will watch it as soon as I return.
To compensate there will be much good cheer, including at least one convivial session in the friendly village pub, and a new labradoodle puppy to keep us entertained.
5 December 2014 at 17:30 #36047@pedant et al. 10/10 for me too, though my knowledge of the philosophers in question is entirely superficial.
5 December 2014 at 11:31 #36037@purofilion
Commiserations on the flood and the pest of an insurance agent. Have another brandy or fortifying beverage of your choice from me.
Also, belatedly, my good wishes for Mr Ilion’s op.
23 November 2014 at 12:47 #35838@stormy72 ‘Tomorrow’s Worlds’ is a four part series on the history and significance of Science Fiction, shown on BBC 2. The first part was broadcast yesterday evening and, naturally enough, focussed chiefly on Science Fiction on film and on television rather than novels and short stories.
@fatmaninabox That ‘tears in the rain’ speech always gives me goose bumps. Blade Runner is one of the few SF films which meet my unreasonably critical standards 🙂
22 November 2014 at 17:57 #35815@scaryb If, as @craig has pointed out, cross dressing is de rigeur, then I am disqualified from representing River. And I really cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, see myself as any of the Doctors – unless you want a hypothetical future Doctor who is vertically challenged (5′ 1″ and shrinking), with longish, straight hair which, if not exactly full-on ginger, does have a slightly sandy tinge 🙂
22 November 2014 at 12:44 #35802@juniperfish Very sorry to see that you are still unwell.
Which Doctor do you fancy dressing up as for the Doctor Who Forum calendar?
I know this wasn’t addressed to me, but I have nevertheless given the matter some thought. I don’t see myself as any of the Doctors but, given my erstwhile profession I ought to appear as River. Trouble is, although kind friends assure me that I do not look my age, and I have been accused of keeping a portrait of myself in the attic, I don’t delude myself that I could pass for fiftyish or younger – except, perhaps, ‘in the dusk with the light behind me’ . Nor, alas, can I boast her… um… attributes.
Hope you will soon make a full recovery, in time for Christmas if not before.
19 November 2014 at 11:14 #35741@rob @badwulf To those of us born during the war, it seems even odder to think of it being taught in GCSE and ‘A’ level history courses. I have to remind myself that for someone sitting those exams today, the events are slightly more distant in time than the Boer war was for me and my contemporaries when we studied history for GCE ‘O’ and ‘A’ level 🙂
Our ‘O’ level course did cover the 19th century, though, as well as the 18th (the latter being tedious in the extreme: all those wars and baffling political manoeuvrings).
17 November 2014 at 12:35 #35717@janetteb Yes, it does seem highly improbable that a woman with a baby would have been allowed to remain in the armed forces, however essential her role; for that matter it would have been unusual for any woman in such circumstances to have continued working, whatever the type of employment. Even after conscription of women was introduced (the principal options other than the armed forces being the land army or munitions ), women with babies and young children were exempt.
As for the Russians, presumably they were allies by the time the events of this story take place – but even after Germany broke the non-aggression pact the basis of the ensuing alliance was essentially a matter of ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’. I don’t think the mutual trust extended all that far, and the idea of a clandestine operation by Russians on British shores does not seem wholly implausible.
17 November 2014 at 12:18 #35716@purofilion I agree that the acting of the two girls did leave something to be desired, but the acting in BG Who strikes me as often pretty variable and, by comparison with the acting on television now, can sometimes seem mannered or a bit exaggerated. When I watch these episodes now I tend to allow for this and it does not bother me much.
17 November 2014 at 11:09 #35712@purofilion
what’s going on with her hair?
Ace’s hairstyle is a pretty accurate reproduction of the kind of hairstyles worn by women in England during the war, as are the hairstyles of the other female characters. In Britain at that time almost everything, not just food, was either strictly rationed or in short supply, and that included materials for perming hair. So, whereas before the war most young women with straight hair permed it, from 1940 onwards they often had to improvise by rolling and pinning it into place; the roll at the front was a fairly typical fashion. Those with long hair sometimes confined it tidily in a netted bag (snood) like that Ace is wearing. Her outfit, apart from the jacket with all the badges, is pretty much correct for the period, too.
Sheer silk stockings were also hard to obtain, which is why you see one of the evacuee girls drawing a line up the back of the other’s leg, to look like the seam of a stocking. Women also used to attempt to reproduce the colour of stockings by anointing their legs with substances such as brown food colouring or diluted boot polish – sometimes with comically disastrous results. (When the American servicemen arrived their popularity was enhanced by their ability to obtain the new-fangled nylon stockings for their girl friends).
Judging by the few seventh Doctor serials I have seen, Ace carries the bag with her everywhere: it contains a variety of things which come in useful in their adventures (spoilers!)
When this was first broadcast the facts concerning the huge scale of the code breaking operation at Bletchley Park, not to mention number of people involved in the interception and transcription of German radio messages, were of course only just beginning to filter out and not widely known, so the idea of a lone cryptographer and a handful of radio operators working in isolation on a small Naval base in North East England would not have seemed so quaint!
That said, the atmosphere evoked was suitably ominous, and, as @phaseshift and @whisht have said, the underwater shots with the weed-draped prow of the Viking ship, the drowned body and the mysterious hand are particularly effective. The first thing that struck me about the two girls was that they looked a little on the mature side to be evacuees, bearing in mind that most people at that time left school and started work at fourteen. If they seem silly and out of place, that is also to some extent true to the period. Children from the city, and older children in particular, often failed to adapt very well to a rural environment and remained misfits – or else headed back to the city at the earliest opportunity.
As I have said elsewhere, by the time Sylvester McCoy took over I had long since ceased watching Doctor Who, so it is only very recently that I have been catching up and realising what I missed.
16 November 2014 at 13:51 #35679I thought Missy said that was going to kill the living humans and turn them into cybermen
You are right, and my memory was at fault. I have just watched that bit again and, although it wasn’t spelled out explicitly, the implications of her words were pretty clear – the rain would fall again and everyone on earth would die.
In either event, the reanimation of more of the dead as cybermen or the conversion of everyone living, it was necessary to destroy the clouds.
As a psychopath she quite possibly doesn’t have any real insight at all into the way the Doctor thinks or feels, or the way he sees other people. She seems to be convinced that, at bottom, he is no different from her if only he would admit it, and much of her motivation here is to force him into that admission; an admission which would, in a way, validate her own existence.
15 November 2014 at 22:55 #35630@danmartin May I join with those who have already expressed appreciation of and thanks for your blog in the Guardian. I always read it with interest, although I have never ventured to comment and, these days, seldom venture to continue BTL, for the all the reasons that others here have expressed. The way you have been able to carry on with it in the face of so much trollish negativity is wholly admirable.
15 November 2014 at 16:47 #35606You could see DW/DiH as suggesting that the Master could have reformed, that she seriously just wants to be the Doctor’s friend again and to be “understood”. (Do I believe a word of that? Not flaming likely!
Of course she doesn’t want to reform; the idea would not even occur to her! She’s a complete psychopath with a side order of nuts – fascinating but eeevil. In a sense she feels lonely and in need of an equal to appreciate her, but insofar as she wants to be the Doctor’s friend it is on her terms, after she has twisted him and brought him down to her level. She wants him not only to acknowledge his darker side but to give in to it. She will never succeed, because of the crucial difference between them: she sees other people as things – disposable pieces to be manoeuvred and discarded in a long running game, whereas he is interested in people for their own sakes, and capable of caring for them deeply.
PS Sorry about the blizzard of posts. I have been busy over the past few days, so am catching up.
15 November 2014 at 16:17 #35602@lisa @scaryb you were discussing the difference between the cybermen in the mausoleum and those manufactured in the graveyards. My understanding was that the cybermen in the mausoleum were the ultra rich who had been conned into financing 3W and who had knowingly elected to have their remains preserved in the mausoleum and their minds uploaded to the nethersphere. Missy pointed out that there was one for each of the main population centres in every country, and I thought she said that once in place over the said population centres they were to explode/disintegrate into the clouds of nanomachines which would seed the graveyards – as appeared to happen over St Paul’s. No doubt their original cyber-bodies they were then reconstructed by the same nanotechnology.
The ‘newborn’ cybermen in the graveyard emerged complete, I think, and with minds downloaded, but it took a bit of time for them to link up to the hive mind, and once they did so they had to await orders before they were able to act. They were ready by the time Missy arrived to demonstrate their obedience – a perfect army. Except, of course, that two who had been soldiers in life, Danny and the Brig, had instilled in them a rather different kind of discipline and sense of duty which overrode the cyber conditioning.
When we saw the scan of the graveyard, by no means all of the graves were ‘active’. There was a reference to a second shower of rain seeded with nanomachines, but I thought that was to create more cybermen from the remains in the graveyards, not to complete the cybermen already activated.
It occurred to me that it would have been perfectly possible for the Doctor to have accepted Missy’s gift and then himself ordered them to self-destruct, but it was important that he should make his rejection of the offer as emphatic as possible, and important, also, that cyberDanny should be entrusted with the task, demonstrating the Doctor’s final acceptance of and confidence in PE, as well as underlining for Missy the flaw in her grand scheme.
It wasn’t clear if the minds in the nethersphere were downloaded in the same way that we would download data to our computers, or if the process entailed removing the originals from the matrix data slice, but since Danny and the Afghan boy were still there several weeks later, it looks as if either the minds were retained in the data slice or they returned there after the cyber-bodies were destroyed. I would have thought that, of the two alternatives, the former was more likely.
10 November 2014 at 18:42 #35272@spider My take on the heat sensor problem (other than that UNIT probably had access to gadgetry more highly advanced than the rest of humanity) was this. According to what we were told, the ‘pollen’ which rained down on the graveyards, penetrating the earth and locking on to the organic remains in the graves, consisted of nanobots. These nanobots proceeded to manufacture the cyber bodies round the nucleus of the organic remains, presumably using minerals available in the surrounding soil at a molecular level. This process would probably generate heat in the surrounding soil as a by-product and, since the backfill of the graves would tend to be of a different and slightly looser consistency than the surrounding earth*, it would disseminate the heat more readily and the difference be detectable on the surface. Couple that with some kind of geophysical ground penetrating detection and imaging system and you would have a result, though the detail in the images we saw stretched even my credulity 🙂
* That’s how infilled pits and graves are detected and excavated on archaeological sites.
10 November 2014 at 14:04 #35250@macphisto96 I agree; I don’t think Missy was lying, although I suspect that she was being a little bit economical with the truth in order to mislead the Doctor, and the Doctor, in his eagerness to learn the whereabouts of Gallifrey, failed to register what she was actually saying: that Gallifrey is in exactly the same place as it always was, but in a superimposed alternate dimension.
10 November 2014 at 12:31 #35245@arbutus I did not have time to respond to your post #3519 yesterday, but returning to the discussion of whether or not Missy’s ‘choosing’ of Clara involved a paradox loop: you said
I wonder if Missy somehow avoided ending up in the Time-Locked Gallifrey? Possibly dying and regenerating in the process?
That would certainly resolve the paradox, but I was going by this exchange between the Doctor and Missy:
Doctor: Why are you still alive?
Missy: You saved me!
Doctor: I saved Gallifrey
Missy: Yes, Gallifrey too, I suppose. There is always collateral damage with you and me. It’s our Paris.
Doctor: Gallifrey is lost in another dimension.
Missy: Yes and No
Doctor: Meaning?
Missy: Yes, it’s in another dimension. No, it’s not lost.
If Missy is not lying here, she implies that it was the Doctor’s saving of Gallifrey which incidentally saved her from destruction in the Time War and thus enabled her to escape, either at the point where he saved Gallifrey and brought about the end of the war, or from the pocket universe into which Gallifrey was saved (perhaps by exploiting the crack through which the Time Lords were able to grant the Doctor a new regeneration cycle). Naturally, from her egocentric point of view, the saving of Gallifrey is incidental to the more important fact of her survival 🙂
The reference to Paris was presumably a nod to the film Casablanca
@rob I take it that when you said
Surely the return of Gallifry when the Master saves the Doctor happens after the Timewar thus the Master was in effect never in the Gallfry pocket
you were referring to the events in The End of Time. But in that double episode the Master attempted to break the Time Lords out of the time locked Time War. The Doctor pointed out that breaking the time lock to bring back the Time Lords from a point before the deployment of the Moment would entail bringing back the Time War as well, and allowing it, and all the attendant horrors, to continue. As a result the Master changed his mind, prevented Rassilon from killing the Doctor and, when the link to pre-time lock Gallifrey was destroyed, attempted to kill Rassilon. In doing so he appeared to be drawn back with him and the other Time Lords behind the time lock and thus into the last days of the Time War. He might have escaped this fate, as @arbutus suggests, but as I said above, that is not what is indicated by Missy’s words to the Doctor.
9 November 2014 at 21:17 #35188@scaryb Re the temporal loop. The time factor is not, in itself, necessarily a problem since, as you say, Missy clearly has a Tardis or some other method of getting around in time. It was the paradoxical nature of the loop which bothered me. Missy could not have escaped from the time locked time war without events requiring the intervention of Clara, but Clara could not have been present to intervene and influence the decision of the three Doctors if Missy had not already escaped and ensured that Clara met the Doctor and so would be present at the events of the Day of the Doctor which enabled Missy to escape … and so ad infinitum. It is the same problem which made it impossible for the Doctor to intervene at Clara’s request and ‘undo’ Danny’s death, as he explained to her in Dark Water.
9 November 2014 at 20:59 #35185I had the impression that Clara was about to tell that Doctor that she couldn’t travel anymore because she had adopted the boy
That thought crossed my mind, also. After all, the chances of her being able to locate the boy’s parents, even if they were still living, would be fairly slim. But I have a feeling that there is more to it, and that what she was trying to tell Danny when he was killed, and what she was trying to tell the Doctor, may still remain to be disclosed.
9 November 2014 at 20:37 #35177When I watched yesterday evening I was completely engrossed in the story, disbelief not so much suspended as tied up and gagged in another room, so the annoying little inner critic who sometimes interrupts to point out the implausible or illogical was silent (the anaesthetic effect of a generous infusion of Cotes-du-Rhone probably helped also to keep it quiet)*. Today I have been mulling over the implications of Missy’s claim confirming that she was the WitS. If she was telling the truth, as she appeared to be, it creates what appears to be a temporal paradox.
Her previous incarnation was last seen firing energy bolts at Rassilon and disappearing with him as Gallifrey was returned to beyond the time lock. Missy implies that she subsequently escaped again from the time war during the events portrayed in The Day of the Doctor – events in which Clara played a crucial part, having already met the Doctor as a result of the escaped Missy’s intervention and been travelling with him for some time. In other words, when Missy set up Clara’s first meeting with the Doctor, she was only able to do so because Clara, as the Doctor’s companion had already helped to set up the conditions which enabled her escape in order to set up the meeting. That looks to me like an impossible recursive loop with no alternative time line option.
I won’t hammer on about the question of how many of the dead and buried would be available for upgrading to cybermen -not just for the reasons I referred to in my comments on Dark Water, but because even skeletal remains do not survive indefinitely in most soil conditions – but if Missy had, as the Doctor surmised, been busily uploading the minds of the dying since human beings first conceived the idea of an afterlife, there would be an awful lot of minds with no body to download to!
One further thought, picking up on my earlier comment on the question of whether or not the Nethersphere survived, and what might be the implications if it did; Danny, in his last communication with Clara, said that ‘this place is dying’, but that might just mean that it was powering down. The data stored on a hard drive is not lost or deleted when you put the computer into sleep mode, or when you switch it off.
And finally, an easter egg which I only spotted on third viewing (well, it was raining and I had nothing urgent to be getting on with) Clara’s birthday was stated as 23rd November, 1986 (i.e. 23 years to the day since the first broadcast). Maybe this has been mentioned before, but if so it escaped my notice.
* Not @scaryb ‘s Tardis Red, alas, but it occurred to me that one of the benefits of time travel is that you have ready access to all the very best vintages.
9 November 2014 at 13:11 #35139@matthias You ask if the Nethersphere is still active. All the indications are that the answer is yes, as I noted in my post #35134 above. If Missy had a duplicate bracelet or other means of escaping being pulverised by the cyber Brigadier (and like many others here, I think she did escape), she might have sneaked back there and, if so, she could in theory use it to continue uploading the minds of the dying. But what would be the purpose? Her plan to install ‘saved’ minds in cyber-bodies has been foiled, and now that UNIT know what she has been up to, it is unlikely that she could get away with attempting the same thing again.
As for your other questions: Danny is clearly dead; he said so. On the other hand the copy of his mind remains stored in the Nethersphere, and if he did not immolate himself when ordering the self-destruct of the other cybermen he had some kind of body to return the mind to. The body of the Afghan boy he killed would not have survived in usable form, since the death occurred years earlier, but must have been reconstructed, probably during the process of the cyber-upgrade. Danny was presumably able to find him in his cyber form through their mutual connection in the hive mind of the cybersphere, and so rescued him. The Nethersphere is a scam; a pseudo-heaven. The question of whether or not there is any kind of afterlife other than a technological transfer of conscious minds is very deliberately not addressed by Moffat.
9 November 2014 at 12:18 #35134Such a lot to unpack in this episode that I scarcely feel up to commenting, even after a second viewing this morning. I was slightly worried that it might end up a bit OTT, in the manner of an R T D finale, but no, in my judgement it wasn’t. The balance between the personal – individuals forced by moral dilemmas to examine themselves and interacting accordingly – and the action and pyrotechnics seemed perfectly judged, and it packed a big emotional punch without lapsing into treacly sentimentality.
Missy proved an excellent foil for the Doctor; in a sense the reverse side of the same coin although she, as she herself admitted (twice), is completely bananas rather than just a mad(wo)man in a box.. And what she wants most of all is not world domination, still less galactic domination, but for the Doctor to admit and demonstrate their kinship.
The Doctor, the reluctant warrior, is subjected twice to the temptation of power, although the first time, when co-opted as Commander in Chief of Earth, he is given no choice in the matter. Missy’s Faustian offer presents him with a dilemma: if he rejects it the cybermen will control the earth, and if he accepts it his integrity is irredeemably compromised. Ultimately the resolution is brought about by the fundamental flaw in her plan: deletion of emotions has not necessarily removed the ties between the people resurrected as cybermen and those whom they loved in life. So cyber Danny can be trusted to command the self-destruction of the cyber army and the nano-pollen clouds, and Kate is saved by the intervention of the Brigadier ex machina (sorry, pedants, I couldn’t resist).
Osgood, on the other hand, dies, which is genuinely saddening. – or does she? Is it possible that those zapped by Missy were in fact uploaded to the Matrix data slice, which presumably still exists in its own separate dimension. And the minds stored in could well remain there, since downloading to the cyber-bodies would not necessarily entail their deletion from the ‘hard drive’. In fact the reverse is implied, as @hudsey pointed out, since Danny was able to contact Clara and send the Afghan boy back from there two weeks later .
This leaves me wondering, like @lisa , what exactly happened to the Nethersphere. I got the impression from the way that the Doctor referred to one dimension folded inside another but not to a Tardis specifically, that that it might be the Matrix which was generating the mausoleum dimension within St Paul’s (which might also get rid of the recursion problem). I presume that once the mausoleum space had served its purpose it could be retracted, leaving the Tardis behind in St Paul’s to be retrieved by UNIT. The Matrix data slice, within a much reduced space, would remain in its own separate dimension. Otherwise it might have been retrieved by UNIT for storage in the Black Museum.
8 November 2014 at 09:44 #34985Apologies if my response to your ideas yesterday seemed disproportionate. I did rather bring out the heavy artillery, didn’t I ? I just enjoy debate and I suppose the old academic reflexes kicked in 🙂
And I did and do appreciate the fact that you concede the strength of my arguments.
Anyway, it is not long now before we get some answers (and/or, knowing Moffat, a load of new puzzles to occupy our minds).
7 November 2014 at 21:40 #34959Slightly off topic, but continuing from my previous post: final words from ‘The Stones of Blood’.
Professor Rumford (archaeologist), having just seen the Tardis dematerialise: ‘I do have my academic reputation to consider’.
Is there something I should be picking up on here? 🙂
7 November 2014 at 20:04 #34951Apropos of superimposed dimensions, and with an element of serendipity, I have just watched episode 3 of Stones of Blood, shown earlier today on the Horror channel and recorded. It involves a ship in hyperspace superimposed on a prehistoric stone circle in normal space in England. Koestler coincidence, or what?
The story also involves silicone based life forms which feed on blood; a concept which I find rather more difficult to swallow.
7 November 2014 at 18:03 #34941@abxy Re ‘Danny Boy’. When I lived in Northern Ireland I was informed by my friends there that the words are meant to be those of a father to his son who is going off to war, not a woman, and since the song originated in Ireland I assumed that they knew what they were talking about. In practically any pub at the weekend there would be someone belting it out before the evening was over, and it was almost always sung by a man.
7 November 2014 at 17:52 #34939@badwulf Good point! I was forgetting the recursion problem. Ah well, I’ll have to fall back on the alternative dimension solution. The one idea I balk at is the idea that St Paul’s has somehow been replaced: people would have noticed 🙂
7 November 2014 at 17:14 #34933The masters Tardis does not need to be superimposed, it just needs to be inside the door (or indeed disguised as the door, since his chameleon circuit works.
This is pretty much my preferred explanation also, since it is the simplest and neatest, although perhaps I did not make it entirely clear. The Nethersphere is inside the mausoleum which is inside Missy’s Tardis which is disguised as something inconspicuous inside St Paul’s.
The alternative which I proposed – that the mausoleum and the Nethersphere it contains are located in a sideways or overlying dimension connected by a portal to ours via St Paul’s – is offered as a possible, though less likely alternative in case, as I think was argued earlier, Missy does not have a Tardis and has been time-hopping by some other means.
7 November 2014 at 13:56 #34927you can’t make a call on what’s happening unless you see the whole picture
…but that should on no account be allowed to inhibit bonkers theorising 🙂 .
7 November 2014 at 13:05 #34922You argue that the Heaven/afterlife in which HFM, Gretchen, the PC and Danny find themselves might be real because
We have seen Missy, Seb and PCSO all in the same place at the same time
But that argument is easily countered. Missy is an avatar projected into the virtual world, Seb is either another such avatar or a virtual construct, and the others are present as uploaded conscious minds tricked into thinking that they have bodies in a virtual environment which is possibly tailored to suit their own preconceptions.
The nature of the Nethersphere (which you will note is indeed spherical 🙂 ) was (to me) made abundantly clear in the dialogue between Missy and the Doctor.
Missy: ‘The Nethersphere ….. the people who live inside there think they’ve gone to heaven’.
Doctor: ‘…a Matrix data slice; a Gallifreyan hard drive; Time Lord technology’.
Missy: ‘Imagine you could upload dying minds to that; edit them, rearrange them, get rid of all those boring emotions, ready to be downloaded. Meanwhile you upgrade the body. … Cybermen in cyberspace’.
What is being discussed here is the equivalent of a computer, though one with vastly greater potential than anything yet devised by human ingenuity since it is capable of storing and processing the information in millions (?) of human minds. The Doctor uses the term ‘hard drive, though presumably that is for the benefit of us pudding brains and the analogy is not exact (we can speculate on the nature of the technology – manipulation of quantum states? some very advanced form of cloud computing?)
This being the case, the idea that everybody who finds themselves in the Nethersphere has simply been miniaturised and inserted into it, as discussed by you and @apopheniac , doesn’t really hold water. After all, even if it were possible to miniaturise someone to the extent that they could be inserted into a computer hard drive, all they would be able to perceive would be the hardware; they would not be able to read or make use of the information stored on it. The miniature people exploring the interior of the Dalek were in the Dalek hardware, not in its organic or cybernetic mind.
What it boils down to is that I don’t see how anybody or anything could be physically present in a computer generated environment which essentially consists of pure information without tangible substance. I don’t think that the Mind Robber scenario is directly comparable, either. As far as I can recall, the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe were trapped in a null dimension outside normal space-time, not in cyberspace. Insofar as there is any similarity it is that their living minds and those of the disembodied minds in the Nethersphere were both being manipulated.
The Nethersphere/Matrix data slice is within, or at least visible within the mausoleum where the cybermen await activation following the downloading of the edited minds from the Matrix into the upgraded bodies. Missy says nothing to imply that the bodies being upgraded and the completed but dormant cybermen are not present in the physical form in which we see them, and the mausoleum has enough of the characteristics of a physical environment to support the presence of the Doctor and Clara. The cybermen. the Doctor and Missy, when they emerge from St Paul’s, are full size and fully corporeal. For me, the only question is how the physical space of the mausoleum relates to the physical space of St Paul’s. Is it contained within a Tardis as someone suggested (sorry, I forget who), or is it in a separate, superimposed or linked dimension or space?
6 November 2014 at 10:50 #34859I was just trying to think of what would happen if the baby was born in the Nethersphere.
I think the Doctor and Clara are real and alive since they arrived in the Nethersphere using the TARDIS. So if Clara is alive with her real body, then the baby should be real with a real body too.
My understanding, as outlined in post #34524, is that the Nethersphere where the dead arrive and the mausoleum to which the Tardis brings the Doctor and Clara are two distinct and very different environments. The Nethersphere is, as Missy implied, a virtual environment within a section of Timelord matrix. The minds and personalities of the dead have been digitised, uploaded and stored within it ready to be downloaded again into physical cyber bodies once their emotions have been deleted. The mausoleum where the bodies of the cybermen are stored is a physical place, apparently within St Paul’s but possibly (I suggest) in another dimension superimposed on the cathedral or connected to it by some kind of portal. Electronic communication between the mausoleum and the Nethersphere is possible (hence Seb’s references to Wi-Fi ), but not the transfer of physical bodies, and when we see Missy greeting arrivals in the Nethersphere she is presumably present there as an avatar.
If you look at the scene which Danny sees out of the window and from the balcony, it appears as a city covering the inside of a sphere, presumably reflecting the globular form of the matrix as seen in the mausoleum, but any setting, such as the garden where HFM arrived, could be simulated in realistic detail.
4 November 2014 at 12:19 #34728as if she were passing him a code to remember, perhaps? – providing another reason for his refusal to say anything else on the phone to her from the Nethersphere.
This possibility dawned on me earlier this morning, but you beat me to it. The implications are deliciously timey-wimey 🙂
3 November 2014 at 22:20 #34685@arbutus It’s not so much that bits end up in museums (these days, in the UK at least, any human remains excavated have to be re-interred with suitable ceremony once they have been studied for pathology and demographic information); but when a graveyard was in constant use for many centuries every bit of it will have been dug over by the sextons many times, with graves cutting into earlier graves back to the nth generation, so things tended to get a bit muddled after a while 🙂
3 November 2014 at 13:46 #34637Does that include sneaking around Egyptian tombs, wearing a gas mask and asking “Are you my mummy?”
So that’s why I am addicted to Doctor Who! I always wondered.
3 November 2014 at 12:41 #34634@badwulf 😆
Well, with all the names of other authorities being bandied about, why not Shakespeare as well? (and for that matter it is perfectly possible that he did know, at least in a general sense, that his hunchbacked arch villain had been buried in Grey Friar’s church in Leicester, since it was a matter of public record).
The reference to the gravedigger scene was in fact a somewhat oblique allusion to the fact that the graves in old churchyards, from medieval times until relatively recently, seldom remained for very long undisturbed to await the Last Trump, owing to the high mortality rate and the limited space available for new burials. Medieval depictions of the Last Judgement show the dead rising intact from their tombs. The reality, as I sometimes envisioned it, would be a confused scene of people hobbling and crawling around looking for their missing bits, and accosting each other with queries such as ‘Have you seen a femur, about ‘this’ long, with a healed break just above the knee?’ (Sorry. Archaeologists tend to have a rather ghoulish sense of humour).
3 November 2014 at 11:07 #34625I am flattered, but I can’t claim anything like the extensive knowledge of Doctor Who history and lore that many others here possess. I am sufficiently advanced in years to have been around since the beginning of the show and watching on and off, but during the sixties and early seventies there were quite long stretches where I did not have access to a television, so there are many episodes of BG Who that I never saw at the time, and subsequently my memories of those I did see became hazy at best. I stopped watching during the Colin Baker era and never read any of the novels or listened to the audio adventures either, so for the most part all I retained was a general overview with some fairly large gaps. It is only recently, and thanks chiefly to the retrospective broadcasts on the Horror Channel, that I have begun to catch up/refresh my memory.
The possible parallels between the current run of episodes and The Mind Robber had not occurred to me until you pointed them out, and I am inclined to withhold judgement until we have seen the final episode next week. Granted there have been story book and legendary elements, but I am not (yet) convinced that they have all been generated within a dream landscape, whereas in The Mind Robber it was apparent immediately that what the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe were experiencing was happening in a surreal non-place.
Missy has certainly been operating behind the scenes to bring about her desired ends and Clara, whoever or whatever she is, is clearly her chosen agent, but I cannot see how she could have been orchestrating events to the extent of causing Danny’s death, still less his killing of the Afghani boy. On the other hand she may very well have been flitting back and forth along the various time lines, and using her awareness of past and future events to manipulate people in a rather more subtle fashion.
3 November 2014 at 10:10 #34619@badwulf In skimming through yesterday’s contributions just now (to refresh my memory) I noticed that my post #34529 in response to you was incorrectly addressed; my apologies. I didn’t notice at the time because there is someone registered with the user name badwolf – which must have caused confusion if they were alerted.
The response was, of course, made with tongue firmly lodged in cheek 🙂
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