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@arbutus

Lovely! Thank you.  I have only ever seen Gluck’s Orfeo in a televised production, and that a very long time ago, but Che faro is one of my favourite arias.

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@badwolf

your so-called archaeological remains could easily be faked

I have excavated – and seen the analyses – of too many Saxon and medieval burials to be convinced by that assertion.  Prove it, I say!  (And, just for the record, the gravedigger scene in Hamlet is exactly true to life/death).

As for the moon egg, I thought I had provided a very satisfactory exposition of the pseudo-science behind that: the ‘egg’ the space dragon laid was not moon sized; it was a super-dense egg – a neutron egg, if you like (which accounted for the increase in mass of the moon without increase in size)  which inflated to moon size after it had been laid.   I concede on the matter of the eukaryotic prokaryotes, though 🙂

 

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Re Dr Skarosa, I see that while I was composing the lengthy comment above  @lewis97 got there before me, so a tip of the hat and an acknowledgement are due.

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Now that I have had time for a second watch and to gather my thoughts a bit more …

To return, first of all, to the theme of Orpheus and Eurydice which I mentioned yesterday evening; apart from the very powerful and realistic portrayal of numbed grief, this was the thing that struck me most forcibly during the opening sequences.  Even the volcano imagery seemed relevant since, in the world of Classical antiquity, one of the principal entrances to the underworld was believed to be Avernus, a  volcanic crater near Cumae, and in the eastern Mediterranean volcanic vents and fissures were often thought to be portals by means of which the chthonic powers could be accessed for divination and other purposes.  And, just in passing, Hades, god of the ancient underworld, was one of the sons of Cronos (time).

@pedant   I am with you in thinking that Clara’s words to Danny in the opening, saying that he was the last person who would ever hear her say ‘I love you’ carried a very particular significance. It was such an odd way of putting things, and I had the feeling from the first that what she was keying herself up to tell him amounted to more than a confession of the extent to which she had been lying to him about her travels in the Tardis.   This would make sense if, as @miapatrick  suggested, it was a Clara of the future making the phone call (which might also account for why Clara did not hear the sounds of the accident relayed from Danny’s phone), but I think that there is a lot more still to be revealed about her,  including quite how and why Missy had ‘chosen’ her, along with quite a number of other matters raised in previous episodes.

Some questions have been answered: the ‘promised land’/heaven/nethersphere where the newly dead found themselves was indeed a virtual reality – inside a portion of the Gallifreyan matrix, and presumably when Missy greeted HFM and Gretchen here it was in the form of an avatar.  I thought when Danny first looked out of the window that what he saw appeared to be the interior of a sphere, and a second viewing confirmed this.  It could also have been the interior of an artificial habitat in space, but that would make less sense in the context. The mausoleum with the tanks containing the cybermen, on the other hand, clearly had a physical reality. It opened onto the steps of St Paul’s, but I assume that, rather than being housed within St Paul’s (which could scarcely have escaped notice),  it was in an alternative dimension superimposed on the interior of the cathedral or with a portal at its entrance.  Unlike @apopheniac, I see no reason to suppose that the people in the Nethersphere are not dead.  Just as Missy says, their consciousness has been uploaded, like that of Time Lords into the Matrix.  From there they can communicate electronically with those, such as the Doctor and Clara, who are in the physical reality of the mausoleum.

Missy can only be lying, or at least grossly exaggerating, when she implies that all the dead on earth can be resurrected as cybermen.  All the people who have ever died on earth may just about outnumber those alive now, as she claims, although given the exponential growth of population in the last two centuries it probably isn’t by a very large margin, but it must be borne in mind that a very high proportion of those who died in the past died as infants or children. And even if a time travelling entity could download the consciousness of each and every one of them, I can vouch for the fact that they could not have harvested all the bodies  – trust me, I’m an archaeologist 🙂

As for Missy herself, she may be the Master redux, but I have a feeling that there remains a good deal more about her and her purposes still to be revealed.

Some random observations to finish with (for now).

Did anyone else spot that the person who was said to have founded 3W was Dr Skarosa 😕

3W  =  www/world wide web.  Hmmm,  is that how Missy has been keeping tabs on the Doctor and Clara?  (well, that and the I-pads).

The mausoleum with the tanks containing the cybermen bore a distinct resemblance to the tanks containing the Silents in The Wedding of River Song.  Coincidence?  I think not.

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@miapatrick  Yes! Cocteau’s ‘Orphee’; very appropriate.  And in that, if I remember rightly, isn’t Death represented by a woman?

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Just one further thought, before I finish my glass of Sauvignon Blanc and call it a day:  for the classicists out there, this is set up to Orpheus and Eurydice (in reverse), but perhaps with a different outcome 😕

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This was so richly layered that I would not dare attempt an analysis after only the first watch, and it will in any case be a while before I am fully coherent, so for now I will confine myself to the observation that it was utterly riveting, ranging from gut-wrenching to laugh-aloud funny and back again.  Even the reveal of Missy’s identity, though the most likely given the clues leading up to it, was so contrived as to have maximum impact; and in the lead up to it we were teased with some of the other possibilities, including the claim that she was a computer interface.  I particularly liked the double meaning (in hindsight) of Missy’s claim to the Doctor that it was the doctor who kept her going (I paraphrase, possibly inaccurately, because I will need to watch again to get the exact wording). And, as @scaryb noted, there were the references to A Matter of Life and Death, especially the bureaucratic processing of the newly dead, but with a decidedly sinister twist.

Jenna, as Clara, was the best she has been so far; and Capaldi was simply amazing!

 

 

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Erratum for any pedants out there:

In my post # 34152 above, for Poetic Edda, read Prose Edda  (the  Elder Edda and the Poetic Edda are alternative names for the same book)

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@purofilion

I think that our way of writing, our very language and our immersion in language causes us to create scenery close to the modern, classical heart .

Our language then creates a studied art, a subdued world, free of diabolical agencies and spontaneity.

I think that I understand what you mean, but I am not sure that I agree.  Language, as Tolkien pointed out in his essay ‘On Fairy-Stories’, is what enables the imagination and gives it form;  it gives names to things which we have never seen and never will see, and adjectives to describe them and the realms they inhabit.  Even in a world shaped by the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries, in which we are encouraged to classify things and ideas into neat compartments and to shape the natural world into ordered farms and gardens, language still has that power if we choose to use it so; and the English language is well suited to this, with its huge and eclectic  vocabulary, its flexibility and its general lack of discipline – a ‘wild child’ of the Indo-European family.  If we limit ourselves and our imaginations, it is not for lack of linguistic tools.

It is true that there has been a tendency to prettify and sanitise the old stories and, increasingly since the 19th century, to regard them as being primarily or solely for children, but I think that in England, at least, the main problem is that our surviving store of early myths, legends and traditional tales is relatively impoverished.  The Welsh have a wealth of early tales, some of which were written down in the medieval period and translated in The Mabinogion, and others which can be glimpsed in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain.  The Irish are even more fortunate, partly because their Iron Age culture and bardic tradition was not disrupted by a Roman occupation and Anglo-Saxon acculturation and partly because the old legends and folk tales were kept alive and immediate as an oral tradition by traditional storytellers, some of whom were still practising their art in the late 19th century.

The inheritors of the Anglo-Saxon tradition can claim little more than Beowulf as their own, although I think that for many of us, even so, the imaginative legacy of the Germanic folk tales and of the myths and legends of an older northern world, such as those recorded in the  Elder Edda and Poetic Edda and some of the Icelandic sagas, have a greater resonance than the mythology of the Mediterranean world (which we tend to think of in any case in the somewhat tidy and bloodless form in which it was generally recorded by Classical Roman writers).

 

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Sadly, this episode left me overall with a slight feeling of disappointment, even though it included some very good elements.   The ‘scientific’ explanation could be ignored, because this was purely and explicitly fairy-tale, albeit with a strong ecological message, with many standard ingredients and specific references to The Sleeping Beauty, Red Riding Hood and Hansel and Gretel.

The trouble was that for me it didn’t really work as a fairy tale, and I have always loved fairy tales and folk tales.  My favourite book as a young child was Grimm’s Fairy Tales, published by Routledge in 1948 and given to me when I was six.  This wasn’t the usual carefully selected and bowdlerised version usually offered to children, but the real deal – the whole collection translated from the German, with an introduction by Padraic Colum and a scholarly essay by Joseph Campbell at the end.  And I loved it all, cannibal witches, murderous bridegrooms, gruesome punishments for the wicked – the lot.

The main problem, I think, was the forest, which to me did not convey any sense of magic or threat, despite the wolves.  The forests of fairy tales are dark, mysterious, unexplored and dangerous places: the Teutoburger Wald into which Varus’s legions disappeared, or the vast primary forests of medieval Central and Eastern Europe.  Surely a world-spanning magical forest which appeared overnight should resemble these, rather than the tamed remnant woodlands of the British Isles?  But the wood in which this episode was filmed was all too obviously managed and coppiced by man – because even the oldest surviving woods in Britain have been managed for a variety of purposes for over a thousand years – and in broad daylight it held no mystery for me. (Yes, this is nit-picking, I know, but with my Landscape Archaeologist’s hat on it was something that I could not help but notice). Nor could I sustain belief that this was the centre of London, despite the scattered  traffic lights, bollards, park railings and Underground Station signs and notwithstanding the rather impressive Nelson’s Column. And when the forests disappeared they apparently left no trace behind; not so much as a leaf, let along a cracked paving stone or disturbed road surface.

That said, there were many things I loved about it.  Maebh, in particular,  was an enchanting creation; the kind of child who accepts without comment anything ‘grown-up’ which she does not understand, including the interior of the Tardis, because she assumes that is the way things, however strange, are supposed to be,  but nevertheless has a sense of wonder.  The other ‘problem’ children also were a delight.

We also saw the characters of Clara, the Doctor and Danny and their interaction explored a little more.  Danny, in particular, emerged further into the light as the professional teacher whose first responsibility is to the children in his charge and who uses skills learned as a soldier to marshal and reassure them.  We saw, too, glimpses of the Doctor’s ‘Dad skills’ in the way he managed them within the Tardis, without in any way talking down to them.  Clara, on the other hand, was distracted from her primary duty and still lying to Danny.  Her first response to seeing the overnight forest was to phone the Doctor rather than try to contact the children’s parents, and when Danny takes her to task for this she lies, saying that the Doctor called her first.  But in the end, when it seemed as if humanity was doomed, her true loyalty emerged in her decision to stay, having first once again acted as the Girl Born to Save the Doctor.

There were also some good lines including

That’s another of the drawbacks to being the last of your species – no one to ask when your Tardis won’t start

and

Even my incredibly long life is too short for Les Miserables

 

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@thommck

Perhaps she has been miniaturised into a cyberman (just like the Doctor in Into the Dalek)

M-m-m ..  I like that.  And perhaps she is using miniaturised devices – nanobots (or nanodrones, if you like) – to stalk or ‘bug’ the Doctor and Clara, which would account for his sense of being watched, of being not alone in Listen.  I was never convinced that this feeling was solely down to his experience as a child, having his ankle grabbed by an unseen Clara under his bed.

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@thommck

PerhapsI am imagining things, but in that last scene with Missy does the window/opening/symbol or whatever it is on the right resemble the shape of a cyberman’s eyehole.  Furthermore, in the circular opening to the left there is a slightly fuzzy small circular glowing thing – sun? planet? moon?

On another topic, the reference to the weight of the Tardis delighted me, because that is something I have wondered about.  In The Mark of the Rani, I think it was, people were able to pick it up and move it about as if it were just a wooden box in fact as well as appearance.  Maybe it is something that has been explained before, but if so I missed it.

 

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@janetteb

  Stamps foot. I was going to say that

😀 .  That is my reaction most weeks.  By the time I have the opportunity to post my thoughts on an episode there are already two or three pages of comments and all the points I had intended to make have been discussed by others.  So I mooch off muttering to myself and trying to think of something else to say that might be remotely original.  ‘Tis a hard world 🙁 .

@purofilion    May I belatedly add my voice to those who expressed pleasure and relief at seeing you back and restored to (relative) health.

Re Clara

After the claricles completed their job was she reborn into another being, re-atomised with the help of Missy

I much prefer your suggestion that Missy somehow selected Clara at the point where she re-emerged from the Doctor’s timeline to my idea that she had been ‘grooming’ her from childhood.  It also chimes with my notion that the Clara we see now is Clara Prime plus, a reintegration  incorporating the sum of all the claricles with their varied experience.  I’m not sure about the involvement of the Time Lords in the process, though, since at that point we were still in a universe where the Time Lords had been destroyed (with the exception of the Master, of course, and perhaps one or two others).

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@lisa and @robertdaller brought up the idea that Missy was the Woman in the Shop, and after this latest glimpse of Missy and her ‘My Clara …I have chosen well‘, I agree that it looks as if we are being pointed in that direction!  Certainly Missy or someone acting as her agent would fit the part, according to what we know so far.  In fact I am beginning to suspect something like a Madame Kovarian scenario here, although I am reluctant to think so, because we have already ‘been there, done that’.  But if she ‘chose’ Clara for a purpose, in order to ‘plant’ her on the TARDIS, as @juniperfish put it, presumably she did so well before the events of the Bells of St John, perhaps when Clara was a young child, and shaped her for that purpose, if more subtly than Madame K and the Silence did with River.  Even after the revelations in The Name of the Doctor, there is still much about Clara and her early life that hasn’t been fully explained.   Throughout Series 7 she seemed little more than a cipher or plot device as many people have noted,-  ‘too perfect’ as @Bluequeakpip said;  it was only after the Doctor brought her back out of his time line that she began to develop more fully as a character in her own right, as if all the claricles had reintegrated to form a whole person, finally.  And if Missy did choose her before she first encountered the Doctor, was that leap into the Doctor’s timeline part of what Missy intended, or incidental to her purpose?

What does seem to be going according to Missy’s plan is the way Clara is starting to act like the Doctor.  @lisa , I think it was, suggested that the Doctor was training her to be more like him, but I got a very strong impression to the contrary – that he is dismayed at the results of his influence on her.   Clara says ‘ …I was the Doctor, and I was Good’  and he responds ‘ You were an exceptional Doctor; goodness had nothing to do with it’.  @soundworld debated the meaning of goodness in this context, but Clara and the Doctor were clearly using the word ‘good ‘ in two different senses – Clara meaning  ‘competent’ , ‘possessing all the necessary qualities to be effective’, just as the Doctor had used the word earlier, when he wasn’t sure she could hear him. (It was also the sense in which Rusty the defective Dalek had used it when he described the Doctor as a ‘good Dalek’).  But when the Doctor says ‘… goodness had nothing to do with it’ he was referring to moral excellence or rightness, a quality which he clearly believes he does not possess, and which he does not think Clara possesses when she emulates him.

Think back to A Good Man Goes to War:  he says  ‘Good men don’t need rules; today is not the day to find out why I have so many’.  And in Into the Dalek, perhaps while still in a state of slight confusion about his post-regeneration identity, he asks ‘… am I a good man?‘  to which Clara can only reply  ‘I don’t know’.    He knows himself to be morally compromised, as any soldier must be who has been in combat, however righteous his cause.  He no longer has the deaths of the children of Gallifrey on his conscience, but he has nevertheless been responsible, directly or indirectly, for the deaths of or damage to many people because, as has been discussed earlier in this thread, sometimes there are no good choices and damage is inevitable.

 

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@scaryb   Oddly enough, that speech to the monsters at the end –  the equivalent of the  ‘I’m the Doctor.  Basically, run’ line of his preceding  incarnations – was one the bit that jarred for me. It seems to me that, although this Doctor is every bit as, if not more arrogant than Tennant or Smith’s Doctors, his arrogance is much more contained – and in consequence more forbidding, and this was a bit out of (his new) character.  But his final exchange with Clara spoke volumes about the way he regards himself, and it bodes nothing good for Clara.  Chilling, indeed!

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Well, I loved that: seriously sinister and creepy monsters, sense of threat, pace, energy, and some rather dark implications for Clara and her future well being.  And the sceptical and obstructive jobsworth was a nice touch.

The Doctor channelling Mae West  – ‘Goodness had nothing to do with it’, but clearly he didn’t mean what she meant.

No doubt, though, there will be many complaining that there was too much Clara and not enough Doctor, and completely missing the point.  I hardly dare visit The Guardian and Dan Martin’s blog.

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@barnable

Re GUS :  I was seeing him/it (assuming that he/it is an Artificial Intelligence or, alternatively, an entity ‘saved’ to a computer) more as a disembodied criminal master-mind – a kind of Blofeld of the far future, with monocle but minus the white cat – moving his chosen pieces round the metaphorical chess board.  He does so in order to achieve his ends – in this case to capture the Foretold – but derives amusement from setting puzzles for his pawns to solve, rather than providing the information in a straightforward manner.  It is abundantly clear that his purposes are not altruistic and that he is ruthless – after his the ‘pawns’ had solved the mystery, though without capturing the Foretold, he stated that as he had no further use for them he was not going to keep them alive.  I doubt whether Clara entered into his calculations at all, though I could be wrong about that, of course.

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@jimthefish

look at how character development in cop shows has changed in roughly the same time period

You may be too young to remember Z Cars (says granny), but the first episode of that caused seismic shock waves throughout the nation. Policemen with personal problems, whose job cause difficulties in their private lives and vice versa.  There was certainly quite a lot of focus on character and character development there, and it was a long way from ‘Dixon of Dock Green’ (and its unfeasibly ancient police sergeant)!

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@phaseshift    Like you, I am no fan of soap operas in general, but the term covers such a broad range in kind and quality that it seems at the very least misguided to use it as a blanket term of criticism, let alone condemnation.  And I find it hard to sympathise with objections to any attempt to flesh out the characters of companions and provide them with a bit of background life beyond the Tardis, if that is what is meant by ‘soap opera’ in this context.

You mentioned Coronation Street, and this is in its early days was a long way removed from the heightened drama and hectic storylines which I gather are now considered necessary to hold an audience.  As Tony Warren originally conceived and wrote it, it was character led and firmly rooted in the life of terraced streets at that time.  My mother, who grew up only twelve miles or so from Salford (Wetherfield), though on the Cheshire side of the Ship Canal, commented on those early episodes that she had known people very like the characters, and that their speech and dialogue was absolutely true to life.  I gather that when the idea was first proposed there was opposition from the suits, but that Tony Warren got his way. It was only very gradually that it morphed into something more formulaic and further removed from the ‘kitchen sink’ school of drama.

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@handles

Gus/Executive might be ………………….. a needy game player.

This was pretty much my understanding of GUS – as a manipulator and game player, and that this was his/its usual modus operandi as a kind of disembodied criminal mastermind.  We know from the documents which Clara found in the strong room that a similar scenario had been set up in other ships, presumably also by GUS, with the aim of trapping the mummy but without ultimate success.  As an AI he would need human or robotic agents to carry out his purposes, but instead of recruiting them in the normal way he prefers to do so in this devious manner.  This seems to fit all the facts presented rather better than your suggestion that it was a trap set by Time Agents or whoever.  It will be interesting to see if GUS appears in a future episode

I also had the feeling that GUS already knew quite a lot about the mummy and was amusing himself watching the team of experts trying to work out the puzzle,  and I agree with the theory that he may have arranged for the briefcase with the papers to be planted as a clue – that, at least, was my first impression.  If it was Perkins who had assembled the papers and left them, would he have been able to get into the strong room to place them there, given that GUS controlled access?   Unless he was acting for GUS, which I doubt.

It did look as if there was rather more to Perkins than his position as engineer suggested, though it has to be borne in mind that he was an engineer of the future on a facsimile of a train in space.  The way he was introduced, as a voice in the shadows before he stepped forward into the light could simply have been to heighten the sense of mystery, but there did seem to me to be indications that he might have known more about the tardis and the Doctor than he was letting on.

 

 

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Early on there was an exchange between the Doctor and Clara which seems highly significant.  He says  ‘You smile, but you’re sad; it’s confusing, it’s like two emotions at once, it’s like you’re malfunctioning’.   So despite his seemingly obtuse remarks about her appearance in previous episodes, and whether or not he is capable of true empathy with human beings, he is here acutely observant of and sensitive to the emotional signals that Clara is giving out.  Perhaps this is a sign that he is settling further into his new incarnation and becoming more closely attuned to Clara as a person, also evident in the fact that he can now tolerate her taking his arm and leaning her head on his shoulder.  He may be more obviously cerebral than Matt Smith’s Doctor in the way he deals with problems, and much less inclined to overt displays of emotion, but I don’t get any sense that he lacks feelings. It is just that in this Doctor the head most definitely rules the hearts.

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@juniperfish   The ‘mummy’ and other elements may be evocative of ancient Egypt and Egyptian mythology, but I am duty bound to point out that the symbols on the scroll which conjures the Foretold are cuneiform writing or facsimiles thereof, so Sumerian/Babylonian/Assyrian – make of that what you will 🙂

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Poirot crossed with Hammer Horror indeed, but with added depth and layers.

I approached this one with caution, hoping that it would at least be rattling good fun but fearing the worst. In the event it offered a good deal more than just that and I was completely won over.

It looked gorgeous, of course, from the train interior and the costumes, to the views of the train snaking through a cosmos lit by all the colours of nebulae and star nurseries.  The Hubble photos have brought us a long way from old-style SF backdrops of black speckled with white dots.

In many respects the story followed the mechanics of an Agatha Christie plot, with GUS in the role of Christie insofar as he/it set the scene and assembled all the pieces/players in position. And I do wonder whether he actually knew the nature of the mummy beforehand and therefore the solution to the puzzle.  He/it had made a point of trying to lure the Doctor into undertaking this, but maybe it was not a unique situation and he/it makes a practice of setting people puzzles which they have to risk their lives to solve; in which case, with what motive?

As in a Christie whodunit, many of the characters were disposable; little more than puppets – in this case more literally than most, as we saw when it was revealed that most of the passengers were hard light holograms which vanished when the projector was switched off.  There were also clues, as for example in the ‘nice bit of kit’ which had kept Mrs Pitt alive and healthy and which so interested the Doctor earlier in the episode, which prefigured the rather more compact gadget which kept the mummy/ancient soldier alive. But at the centre there was more going on than the simple solving of a mystery, and in the interaction between the doomed passengers and the Doctor, and in the way in which their past experiences reflected his traumas, we learned more about this incarnation of the Doctor himself.  The relationship between the Doctor and Clara, though subsidiary to the main plot, was also explored further and in interesting ways.

The exchange between the Doctor and Clara about addiction, which @geoffers has already noted,  struck me as significant also, and I agree that it probably applies more to Clara than the Doctor.  We might draw a parallel with gambling addiction, where the addictive factor is believed to be the adrenaline rush experienced by the gambler in taking a risk.  The Doctor does what he does because, at a fundamental level, that is his nature. He left Gallifrey because Time Lord society was too restrictive, too conservative, and he had a strong non-conformist streak; and ever since he has been taking risks to satisfy his curiosity, saving a few civilisations in the process but also leaving casualties in his wake. And from our first encounter with him he has often been willing to put others at risk in the process, even if he can usually find the means also to get them out of danger.  Clara has come to enjoy the risk, to the extent that she is willing to lie to Danny and to the Doctor in order to continue travelling in the Tardis, because that is what addicts do if it is necessary to get their fix: they lie to others and to themselves.

Finally, by way of a few random observations, there were some lovely touches, most of which have already been noted.

The jelly babies in the cigarette case, because of course someone travelling on a luxury train in the 1920s would have carried an elegant cigarette case.

‘Are you my mummy?’

And, more subtly, as the Doctor and Clara enter the dining car and he explains:

‘A completely faithful recreation of the original Orient Express, except slightly bigger, and in space; but in every other respect identical.  Painstaking attention to detail’  and then he registers the song Foxes is singing – Don’t Stop Me Now –  dating from 50+ years after the period which has been recreated  ‘ – most of the time’.

 

 

 

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@janetteb    Thanks for the compliment!   I had fun thinking it up 🙂

As regards the self-cloning part of my theory, the Doctor said the moon dragon was unique, which might mean only that he had never come across one before – in which case it could simply be very rare and the only one of its kind in this region of the universe. In either case, the only way it could reproduce would be by parthenogenesis  (lit. ‘virgin birth’ from the Greek) of some kind.

After I had posted the theory it occurred to me that the debris from the breaking of the ‘crust’ of moon rock around the egg would not need to be pulverised to render it harmless to earth.  It would have been caught by the gravitational pull of the new egg (which would have been very strong when the egg was still in its super-dense form , before it inflated) and formed once again a protective casing.  Perhaps moon dragon eggs have a sticky surface to hold such a casing in place.

Re. Danny’s ‘bad day’; I took it that he was referring to the bad day which had led to his decision to leave the army, which was clearly a traumatic experience, not to a bad day he had experienced since he had last seen Clara.

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@thommck

 it could lay an extremely dense egg which then inflated to moon size.

 

Who’s to say the “Dragon” didn’t lay a small egg to which it instantly expanded due to the space vacuum environment

Two minds …. (well, more or less) 🙂

@bluesqueakpip   Well, that’s a possibility if we assume that the egg itself consisted originally of rock almost all the way down, with the embryo in a relatively small central cavity; the embryo would then have grown by consuming this rocky substance, thus hollowing out the moon gradually. The mother would have had a very uncomfortable time laying it, though,  because the surface of the moon is jagged.

But there was no indication in this episode that the surface of the moon was not still rock – and rock is composed of minerals, even if we assume that some of those minerals had been leached out and consumed by the baby dragon.  Furthermore, if the prospectors had been drilling for core samples to any depth they would have broken into the central cavity containing the dragon and realised what they were dealing with, unless the rocky crust was still fairly thick.

 

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I have been toying with ideas on how the moon-as-egg might be rationalised in a quasi-scientific way within the context of the Who universe. It probably goes against the rules of science fantasy, but for once I am in the mood for a bit of bonkers theorising.

So I will ignore what we know of the age of our moon and its composition and start from the premise that it is an egg, or at least something analogous to an egg, and it is 100 million years old.  In the Who universe as well as our own the Apollo missions took place (Day of the Moon)and presumably, as in our universe, rock samples were brought back and analysed; so the statement that there are no minerals on the moon is nonsense in either universe, unless we assume that what was meant was in the prospectors’ sense of, no commercially viable mineral deposits (probably true in our universe if we are talking about minerals to be transported back for use on earth, but questionable if we are talking about setting up a moon base – but I digress).  It is unlikely that the rocks formed an original part of the egg or egg analogue itself as it came from the ovipositor of the mother dragon, so it is presumably an accretion of the debris left over from the formation of the earth and the rest of the planetary bodies, perhaps simply attracted by the gravitational pull of the egg, or else somehow constructed purposefully to protect the egg, in the way that a caddis fly larva constructs a carapace to protect itself.  So the moon could be an egg containing a developing foetus, or a casing containing a larva, or both at different stages of development.

In this scenario the moon remains outwardly unchanged and unvarying in mass (so far as we know) for the greater part of 100 million years and then, suddenly, gains mass very rapidly.  So what if the space dragon embryo develops very, very slowly until it is ready to enter a larval stage and then undergoes accelerated growth to maturity, before emerging, like a dragon fly, as an adult?  The gain in mass cannot be explained simply by the growth of the embryo/larva within the moon, because of the law of conservation of mass, which I think must apply in the Who universe as in ours, but what if there were some way that the larva could increase significantly in density rather than size by employing some superefficient means of converting solar energy into mass:  dragons are supposed to be particularly efficient at converting mass into energy in the form of great heat, so if this is a space dragon, why not the reverse?

When the mature space dragon finally emerges, the rocky casing is pulverised into harmless dust in the process, so the earth suffers no further damage and might even experience a spectacular meteor display as a bonus. Then, seemingly a few minutes after emergence, the dragon deposits another egg/moon apparently as large as the one it came from – i.e. as large as itself, or nearly.  Perhaps that is why it increased so much in density in its final stages of growth, so it could lay an extremely dense egg which then inflated to moon size.  The method of reproduction would have to be parthenogenesis (self cloning) which some invertebrates on earth are capable of – aphids, for example, which is one reason why they are such pestilent little buggers. It means, also, that the dragon beast would have to emerge already pregnant.

Alternatively, the space dragon exists in more than one dimension of a multiverse, pops into one in which time runs at a faster rate (The Girl Who Waited), and pops back, having undergone a period of gestation, to lay its egg.

As an afterthought, what kind of life form could exist in space?  One of the minerals found in significant quantities in some of the samples of moon rock is silicone dioxide, so could it the moon dragon be partly silicone based?  Probably not, but I am dubious about the notion that it is the only one of its kind.  The species had to have evolved somehow, which suggests there must be or must once have been a population of the critters.  Either that, or the original, ur-dragon was artificially created.

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@badwulf   Thanks very much for the link to the YouTube video; it sums up the problem beautifully.  Science fantasy is fine in its own way, but not when contaminated by the misuse of current scientific terms.  Anyone who understands the meaning of those terms is likely to have great difficulty in hanging on to the thread, wire or cable from which their disbelief is suspended.

As an archaeologist/historian who has some understanding of the scientific method and has an interested but unmathematically gifted layman’s knowledge of biology, physics and cosmology I tend to be distracted not only by this problem but by the historical anachronisms which @arbutus mentioned, which is unfortunate.  Your example of someone writing a story set in Australia without bothering to ascertain the geographical location of Canberra reminded me of the problem I had with Connie Willis’s novel in two volumes about time travellers stranded in the London Blitz in 1940/41 (‘Blackout’ and ‘All Clear’).  The reviews of this were favourable, and she had done a pretty thorough job of researching the facts of the blitz – what bombs fell where and on what date.  But she seems largely to have ignored the vast amount of material documenting the everyday lives and experience of people there at the time, and the whole thing was full of inaccuracies and cultural false notes.  And although she has visited the UK  she comes across also as being somewhat clueless about the geography of England and its flora and fauna .

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On the subject of Clara’s decision and her relationship with the Doctor I don’t think that I can add much to what has been said already.  This was the Doctor pushing her to achieve, in the way that Danny had already described to her, and when someone does that to you, you often feel resentful, even when you benefit.  Her anger  afterwards was a natural reaction to the stress she had experienced.  If it had been the eleventh Doctor she would probably have felt differently, because he would have appealed to her emotionally and shown empathy, but this incarnation is not touchy-feely; he is logical and cool in his assessment of the situation, and is, from his point of view, paying her the highest compliment by trusting her judgement in a matter which is, in the end, something only a human being is entitled to make.  It isn’t that he doesn’t care for her; in fact, without being over demonstrative, he has shown that he does.

His apparent insensitivity towards Courtney is disconcerting but is, I think, just another manifestation of the failure to entirely understand humans which was apparent in the eleventh Doctor.  In the latter case this was rendered disarming because of his anxiety to please and to fit in. The latest incarnation feels no such need, perhaps because he is becoming fundamentally more secure in his identity.

It occurred to me, incidentally, that when Clara tried to pass the buck by appealing to the people on earth, she was, in practice, leaving it for the governments of the world to decide.  With only forty five minutes left there is no way that everyone could have been informed, even on the night side hemisphere, and the only way the mass switching off of lights which we saw could be achieved would be by an official order for the temporary cutting off of the electricity supply (the largest component of the lights visible from space consists in any case street lights and lights in offices and shops).

 

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Real life has been getting in the way over the past couple of days, leaving me barely enough time to keep up with this thread, let alone post my own reactions, and most of the points arising from my thoughts on first viewing have already been raised and discussed at length.

My feelings about this episode are mixed.  I found the dramatic tension, the interplay of characters and the posing and resolution of the moral dilemma absorbing, but all the while a part of my rational brain was trying to interrupt with objections such as ‘…but that’s impossible … spider things as parasites, possibly, but as unicellular bacteria analogues, no way!”, and for all the other reasons which @scotsman418 and @mtgradwell pointed out.  If the ‘science’ in an episode which has the trappings of science fiction isn’t remotely plausible this is jarring, especially in a story of the near future.  It didn’t exactly spoil it for me, but it left me with reservations.

Of course this does happen from time to time in the show; the only way to deal with it is to just accept that the universe of Doctor Who is not our universe exactly, and to go along for the ride.  @phileasf ‘s suggestion that it is the post-reboot universe influenced by Amy’s memory is one good way of resolving the issue, at least from that point on.

Several people, I think, have said that, as it is science fiction, anything goes. Well, no, not in my opinion; in science fiction there are limits (and I have been reading science fiction since the late 1950s and have the collection of novels and anthologies to prove it).  As I understand the genre it can be defined as stories set in possible futures which are founded on extrapolations from current scientific knowledge and theory, or social and economic trends, or stories set in an internally consistent future based on a plausible and coherent, if not necessarily likely, science and technology. It also includes explorations of possible alien life, biology, ecosystems and societies, and  can be extended to include alternative or counterfactual histories, arising from the idea of a universe/multiverse of fractally branching possibilities.

By that definition Doctor Who isn’t wholly science fiction, although it includes many elements of SF as well as fantasy, but in the end it is sui generis, and perhaps that it is the secret of its appeal over more than 50 years.

 

 

 

 

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@badwulf    I realised on first waking this morning that through some mental aberration I had misnamed the author of ‘The Discovered Country’.  It is Ian R McCleod,  (of ‘The Light Ages’ and ‘The House of Storms’), not Ian McDonald (‘River of Gods’ etc.).  But the story is written in the historic present.  As I said, I have no problem with this type of narrative if it is handled skilfully, as I think it is in this instance and in ‘Wolf Hall’ and ‘Bring Up the Bodies’;  I find it can bring an immediacy to the narrative, allowing me a more completely immersive experience in reading, but I can see how for others it might be an irritating affectation.

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@phaseshift   Maybe cold hands is the secret, as well as speed and handling it as little as possible, also not being heavy handed with the rolling out.  For most of the time that I was still living with my parents we had no fridge, so there was no question of chilling it that way.  On the other hand, neither did we have central heating, and all of the houses we lived in up to the point I left had either a walk-in cold larder or a cellar or both. In one house we also had the option, for keeping milk and butter cool, of immersing them in a cistern in the garden which took the overflow from the artesian bore which was our water supply.

Mother generally used lard only, or sometimes cooking fat, but never butter or margarine.  I was quite good at the rubbing in part, but somehow the result, while passable, was never as good as hers.

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@badwulf   The title of the story is ‘The Discovered Country’, and it is included in the latest ‘Years Best’ anthology (Gardner Dozois ed.).  According to the acknowledgements it was published first in Asimov’s Science Fiction in September last year.  It is, though, another one of McDonald’s narrated in the historic present. For my part I don’t usually  have a problem with this, though it does rather depend on how it is used.

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@spider  @ idiotsavon  Re Missy’s ‘heaven’, I have, coincidentally just read a short story by Ian McDonald which featured a virtual heaven (‘Farside’), hugely elaborate and realistic, into which the ultra-rich could upload themselves. They had to die as part of the process, but once uploaded could continue to interact with the real world (‘Lifeside’), managing their money and investing in projects which might or might not be designed to improve conditions for the living.

@idiotsavon  re your post 32939, yes, I took it that this was very much an underlying theme of Robot of Sherwood.

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@arbutus   Yes, I realise that we have to some extent been at cross purposes.  It’s just that I love words, and it saddens me when secondary and derivative usages supplant the primary meaning.  When we try to use the two meanings in the same context, though, it does cause problems.  To describe the argument in the Tardis as a dramatic passage in the drama sounds silly.  Perhaps (going back to Greek drama again) it could be termed a cathartic passage within the drama.

We do seem to like categorising things, don’t we?  Perhaps our species should be labelled homo taxonomicus  (and yes, I know that taxonomy is from the Greek, not Latin) 🙂

@purofilion  If we take the Artaud/Brecht definition of drama

copying  reality, possible realities and metaphoric reality

then I think Doctor Who covers all the bases 🙂

I smiled at your reference to internet purchases and the offers ‘If you liked this then …’.  I do not very often buy books on line because I like bookshops and want to keep them in business*  but when I do I am often bemused by what they think I would like.  The suggestions tend to comprise either books I already possess or have read, or books I would never touch unless I were desperate for reading matter and there was nothing else available!

 

* Our local branch of Waterstones had, until very recently, a real, full sized Dalek on the ground floor.  It even used to utter EX TER MIN ATE at irregular intervals until  its voice gave out. It seems to have been taken off display now, possibly because it was getting old and fragile and children did so want to touch it.

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@phaseshift  I saw the first part of Cameron’s Conference Rap last night on HIGNFY and laughed myself silly!  It is even better in full, and if it has not already gone viral it deserves to.

On the subject of pastry, a agree that a basic shortcrust is really all that is necessary.  My mother used to make the lightest and flakiest shortcrust I have ever encountered and used it for all pies and tarts, sweet and savoury; she didn’t even have to weigh out the ingredients but judged it all by eye.  For sweet pies she simply brushed the top with a little water and sprinkled with sugar.  Sadly I never succeeded in making it so perfectly, however careful I was 🙁

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@arbutus @idiotsavon   I am pretty sure that the original creators of Doctor Who thought of it as drama; initially as drama with an educational purpose.   Sydney Newman who came up with the idea in the first place and played a large part in developing it was, at any rate, Head of Drama at the BBC at the time.

Comedy has always been regarded as a branch of drama, and I certainly don’t see why a fictional adventure story (with or without science fiction and fantasy elements) should not be classed as drama if it is performed by actors for an audience.  If you compare it with another type of fiction, the novel is generally understood to embrace a very wide range of genres, including comic, crime, adventure, historical, science fiction etc.  as well as ‘mainstream’, and the quality of the writing in any of these may be good, bad or indifferent.  I don’t think many people would define the category more narrowly, even if some are inclined to look down their noses at genre fiction.

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@idiotsavon  @handles   As I understand it the term drama covers any work designed to be performed to an audience by actors, whether on stage or via the broadcast media, and includes tragedy, comedy and whatever lies in between.  The term itself derives from a Greek word, as do the terms comedy and tragedy ( @purofilion referred to classical Greek drama) and, since classical Greek drama included music and dancing, we should also include musicals and opera within the category.   Sub categories might include melodrama – a sensational form designed to appeal rather crudely to the emotions and very popular in the 19th century.

By that broad definition, Doctor Who is a drama.  I think confusion arises because of the development, in radio and television mainly, of the serial drama and the soap opera which have the potential to be extended indefinitely.  But these are, I think, just the equivalent of the roman fleuve  – a continuing narrative which may be extended over a series of any number of novels; they are still dramas of a kind.

The narrow definition of drama to denote only plays on ‘serious’ subjects but excluding tragedies, comedies and all other categories seems to be a relatively modern tendency.

Other usages, as when applied to any exciting or out-of-the-ordinary event, or in the  pejorative sense (‘she’s such a drama queen’) , are secondary.

Just my two penn’orth, if it helps 😕

 

 

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@bluesqueakpip     Re: the Skovox Blitzer – I don’t think there was to be a real sense of jepor… jeapor.. danger. As a few others have said: it wasn’t the focus of the story. It was simply the reason for the Doctor to come into Clara’s everyday life.

Well yes.  That was meant to be implicit in what I wrote, but since I could think of nothing to add to what others had already said concerning the actual focus of the episode I did not expand on it, so it looks as if the point got lost in the verbiage.

All I intended to convey was that, in a different story, told in a different way, the Skovox Blitzer could have been developed into a much scarier monster.

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@purofilion   Interesting that you describe the Skovox Blitzer as a clever and scary monster when the majority of us who have commented on it at thought otherwise.  I agree with @serahni that it could have been different if the monster had been the focus of the story; a robot soldier capable of destroying planets, whose apparent default was to identify everything animate as a threat to be destroyed, clearly has potential to be terrifying.  As it was, there was no sense of jeopardy; the Doctor had already identified the threat (no doubt he had encountered its like and worse during the time war) and had devised a means of eliminating it.  Even when Danny’s meddling foiled the original plan the Doctor remained in control and seemed to have no difficulty in devising an alternative.   I can see why people who like a strong SF element with lots of action and  pyrotechnics might be dissatisfied, but action and pyrotechnics have never been the core ingredient of Doctor Who.

On the subject of Danny’s meddling, one would have thought that in a security conscious age the discovery of unfamiliar and unexplained devices would have set alarm bells ringing, especially in the mind of a former soldier, whereas Danny seemed simply curious and a bit puzzled.  Presumably he realised who had planted them, and perhaps the fact that Clara seemed to know the Doctor was enough to reassure him, but even so …

 

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@arbutus     Yes, it was Matt Smith in The Lodger that I was thinking of in particular.  Matt’s Doctor in such situations seemed to have a puppyish desire to please, constantly undermined by his failure to understand human thinking and human customs and by an almost complete blindness to social cues.  Tom Baker’s Doctor was, as you say, just oblivious: he bumbled around being himself without a thought for how it might appear to others.

Capaldi’s Doctor’s failure to fit in seems to stem, not only from a failure to understand but from a childlike egotism, so that even when he should be keeping a low profile he cannot refrain from, figuratively speaking, jumping up and down and shouting ‘Look, over here, look at me!’

It occurs to me that there might be another explanation for why the Doctor, despite his long acquaintance with the human race, still shows little sign of having learned much about their social behaviour.  Following on from the discussion of his memory, perhaps he simply does not retain information which his mind does not recognise as important; or alternatively, when he regenerates there is a general reorganisation of memory in which such ‘irrelevant’  information is discarded.

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@juniperfish  You must have posted your comment concerning the Doctor’s remarks to Clara about her appearance around the time I started writing my post #32698 (which took a long time, owing to interruptions), otherwise I would have referenced it.  As I said, I think it is deliberate, if rather clumsy.  After all, he cannot really think that she looks the same age as he does, can he?  He has just been taking lessons from Strax 🙂

I forgot to add that I am amongst those for whom Capaldi is now 100% The Doctor, regardless of the fact that he says he is still working his way into the part.   I keep seeing flashes of different earlier incarnations and he has so many of the best qualities of each, but in a way that is uniquely his.

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This is rather late in the day to be arriving at the party, so my reactions and observations are unlikely to add much of substance to what has been said already, but here goes, anyway.

Granted that the monster-of-the week was a bit rubbish, I agree that this was another good episode with a lot in it to savour.  To my mind the comic potential of the Doctor trying to pass for human has never been better realised and, operating under his idea of ‘deep cover’, he is about as inconspicuous as a neon sign in a dark alley.  For all the time that he has spent in the company of humans, it has almost always been on his terms (other than when he was chameleon arched, of course), and I doubt whether he has ever had the patience to make a study of their  behaviour in normal circumstances.  On the other hand, his frequent remarks on Clara’s appearance and his apparent failure to make the connection between child Rupert, Danny and Orson, while suggesting Strax levels of obtuseness, are almost certainly a deliberate ploy as @phileasf suggests.  In this way he is reminding Clara that he is an alien and keeping a certain distance between them, but not, I think, trying to push her away entirely because, as @bluesqueakpip says, he needs her.

Despite his somewhat flippant remark that ‘she cares so that I don’t have to’, in this episode it is he who is the caretaker, and not just in the sense of janitor.  He is trying single-handedly to take care of a potentially very dangerous threat to the school and possibly the earth – albeit a threat for which he may be indirectly responsible, since the artron energy which has attracted the Skovox Blitzer could be residual from his previous visits. And of course his concern for Clara, little as she appreciates it in this instance, is shown in his reaction to Danny.  It isn’t just the fact that Danny has been a soldier, his attitude from the beginning suggests that he senses something about him does not add up.

Danny’s reaction to the Doctor is also interesting.  Obviously there is the shock of discovering that Clara has secretly been leading this double life, and a natural suspicion, if not jealousy of the other person involved, but it is the Doctor’s referring to himself as a Time Lord which provokes the passive-aggressive outburst (and when you think of it, there is enormous arrogance implicit in that title).   Danny makes the link lord=aristocrat; aristocrat who takes charge with an air of superiority= army officer, and for all that his later conversation with Clara on the sofa suggests respect for the kind of officer who pushes his subordinates to achieve more than they thought possible, it looks as if his history with officers has been problematic.  His reaction in Listen, when Clara mentioned his original name, Rupert, could also be seen as evidence of this; I certainly took it that his immediate assumption that she was making fun of him was because of its connotations in the army.

The Doctor’s dislike of soldiers was heavily emphasised in this episode, from ‘I hate soldiers’ in the opening montage onwards, but whereas @phileasf saw this as both sudden and hypocritical, I think it entirely consistent with his past history.  Certainly he spent quite a long time working with UNIT but, unless my memory is at fault, he was often impatient with the military mindset and tended to get tetchy when the Brigadier went too readily into ‘five rounds rapid’ mode.  It took the time war to turn him into a soldier, but when he decided in The Night of the Doctor to regenerate as a warrior, it was because it seemed to be the only option left.  He had tried to stay aloof from the conflict, as @pedant has already pointed out, and had just had it brought home to him forcibly that it had been for nothing, and that to those caught up in the fighting there was no longer any difference between Time Lord and Dalek.  Granted that as a Time Lord he would have been expected to assume leadership in whatever capacity he fought and that he was and is not the kind of person to take orders readily, if he was an officer it would have been on the T E Lawrence model; he could never have been a ‘rupert’ .  We can only guess at his experiences between the events of The Night of the Doctor and The Day of the Doctor, but it is hardly surprising that he might emerge with a heightened dislike of soldiering and a distrust of soldiers.

Finally, as regards the status of Time Lords, is it known whether a person had to be born into a patrician class to be eligible, or could anyone with the necessary ability be a candidate, in the way that mandarins were selected in Imperial China?

 

 

 

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@arbutus  Re Abduction from the Seraglio: just in case you are attributing to me an expertise I do not possess, I am bound to confess that  my knowledge of music is patchy at best.  In this instance I recognised the piece as by Mozart and suspected that it might be significant, but I had to do a bit of searching to identify it.  Once the identification was confirmed the rest was easy, because Abduction from the Seraglio happens to be one of the Mozart operas I have seen, albeit many years ago in a BBC televised production, and I recalled enough of the plot to see how appropriate it was!

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@purofilion  P S  ‘Wetware’ is not of my coinage, so I cannot lay claim to originality in this instance.  It is, so I understand, a term sometimes used by IT geeks and I borrowed it 🙂

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@purofilion   re the music:  I think your meaning was clear, so there was no need for the ‘sorry’.  If I gave you the impression that I had misunderstood, then it must have been my choice of words which was misleading, so if anyone should be apologising it is me.  What I meant to say was that, without any deliberate effort to do so, I ‘tune out’ most of the accompanying score – I am not conscious of hearing it, though it clearly registers at a subliminal level and affects my response.  I was simply interested in a) the fact that you had the means to disable the score and b) the difference that its absence made.  When the music is not part of the commissioned score and has particular meaning in terms of the plot or character, then I do notice it.  The choice of the Mozart piece which was playing in the Vault was I presume very deliberate, since the plot of the opera involves the attempted rescue,  by a man posing as an architect no less, of a lady and her maidservant who have been captured and immured in the harem of a Turkish Pasha.

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@purofilion  I was very interested to read your observations on the difference the presence or absence of the music made to the overall dramatic impact.  As accompanying music has become more obtrusive and ubiquitous in television drama I seem to have developed a faculty for tuning it out, so that I am no longer consciously aware of it unless it is overwhelmingly loud, but no doubt it still registers at a subconscious level.  In this episode the only music I noticed immediately and in particular was the Mozart in the Private Vault, and this was presumably meant to draw our attention.

@arbutus  I share your liking for the way we were propelled straight into the scene of the heist without explanation.  Some here found the opening scenes pedestrian, but it is just the kind of introduction I like and it grabbed my attention immediately.  How did they get there, who engineered it, and why?  And I couldn’t wait to find out.

I liked the use of slow motion as well – and the slow mo shot of the Doctor and accomplices entering the banking hall was pure Hustle!

 

 

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@scaryb

….. he’s also dealing with the mega overload of information from the universe, that he needs to be able to select the relevant bits from to make the right pattern. (Much like dealing with the internet being wired straight into your head I’d imagine!)

I should really have made reference to this in my musings on the nature and size of the Doctor’s memory: mea culpa. I am not sure that the analogy works though, unless there is something in the canon which suggests that Timelords have a direct mindlink to all the information in the universe – other than perhaps through the medium of a Tardis.   What your ‘internet wired into the head’ simile suggests to me is more like an artificially augmented brain with its own inbuilt wi-fi, as postulated in many an SF novel.  As I see it, the Doctor has a vast store of accumulated knowledge and an ever-increasing burden of memory (sometimes doubled memory when the time lines have looped or been tangled), but it is limited to what can be contained in the wetware.  It was too much for Donna’s human brain to encompass for long, but at what point would it exceed the limits of a Timelord’s brain?  Several writers of SF have explored the implications of a greatly extended human lifespan, assuming that a means could be found of halting the ageing process, and the consensus seems to be that some means would need to be found of editing, pruning, dumping or even downloading memories to an external medium.  Within even a normal human lifespan there comes a time when it is less easy to retain new knowledge and the retrieval system becomes sluggish (you know you know the answer, but it may take several minutes, or hours, or even days for that answer to surface).  So could Timelords edit or prune their memories as a conscious process, or might memories simply be lost or overwritten to accommodate new ones?  And might they reach a stage where they welcomed a partial amnesia however caused?

Changing the subject:  The Doctor hates the Architect, and he still hates him when it dawns on him who the Architect is, prompted by Karabraxos’s hatred of her clones and by Saibra’s words earlier.  Several people have linked this to the Doctor’s self loathing in general, and @juniperfish in particular links it to the self hatred of Doctor’s 9,10 & 11, but I see it slightly differently.  Starting with Saibra’s  observation about trusting a person who looked like you; she was talking about the reaction of other people to her when she mirrors their appearance, which is understandable.  But identical twins do not normally dislike or distrust one another, often it is quite the reverse, and while we may not always like what the mirror shows us or be happy in the knowledge of our own shortcomings, self hatred is not a healthy state of mind.  The post time war incarnations of the Doctor who lived with the knowledge of having destroyed Galifrey and his entire species developed various strategies for coping with the guilt, and the resultant self hatred was projected at least in part onto the incarnation who actually did the deed and who forfeited the right to the name of The Doctor.  But this Doctor knows that Galifrey still exists in its bubble universe, so that particular source of guilt and self hatred is gone, and whilst he regrets the mistakes he has made and whatever harm he has caused in the course of his long life and travels, he has expressed a determination to put such things right.  So no, I don’t think that he hates himself entirely; just those aspects of himself which he recognises in the Architect.  @arbutus referred to the tendency of each incarnation to dislike some of the others, but I have always taken this to be something like the cringing feeling we might experience if brought fact to face with our younger selves in one of our more embarrassing phases.

@handles  You took the Architect to be the person who designed the bank building itself, which is possible I suppose, although it requires a really mind bending temporal loop in which the Doctor, following Karabraxos’s request, goes back to design the bank in which she will later incarcerate the Teller and its mate, so that he can then break into it to rescue the said Teller and mate.  I took it that he adopted the title Architect to disguise his identity from his amnesiac self, and that it simply signified the designer or ‘architect’ of the elaborate bank heist scheme.

 

 

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Maybe I am just very easy to please, but so far I have enjoyed all the episodes this season, each in its own way and for different reasons, and this is no exception. I appreciated it even more on second viewing today since, although I grasped all the main points the first time, I was conscious that some details were slipping past me (I blame the pre-prandial G&T).  It was stylish and fast-paced,  superficially, at least, bearing a passing resemblance to one of the better episodes of Hustle, especially in the ‘how it was done’ reveal towards the end,  and Capaldi seems to be inhabiting the skin of the Doctor ever more comfortably.

The episode also features what seems to me to have been a recurrent theme over several seasons now: that of memory, and specifically memories lost and memories lost and restored (‘Run, you clever boy, and remember..’).  @scaryb has mentioned the obvious parallel with The Rings of Akhaten, but there are others.  The tragedy of Donna, who wasn’t just left behind by the Doctor as other companions have been, but deprived of all memory of her experiences travelling with him; Amy’s parents and then Rory who were lost to the universe when the Crack absorbed them, so that even the memory of them was obliterated, and who were then restored; and the Doctor himself who was restored to the rebooted universe when Amy was prompted into remembering him.  And then there is Clara whose memories have already been tampered with during her time as a companion and who, in a version of herself splintered through time, has seen the whole of the Doctor’s life up to the events on Trenzalore; how much of that might she be capable of remembering?

And what of the Doctor’s own memories? How does even the mind of a Time Lord accommodate over two thousand years’ worth of them, let alone access them at will ?   Can he in fact do so, or is there some kind of selective blocking or amnesia?  The second doctor spoke of waking the memories sleeping in his mind, but that was long ago.

Finally, some random observations. like @juniperfish I noted the alternating red and blue lighting, and it seemed to be consistent – red lit corridor for Clara; blue lit corridor for the Doctor and Psi.  Red shift/blue shift or just teasing us?

The music playing in Kalabraxos’s private vault was,  I think, the overture to Abduction from the Seraglio, appropriately enough.

[Mudlark @replies]

@drben  Exactly 🙂

[Mudlark @replies]

@drben  @arbutus   In fact, assuming that time travel in the boring real universe were possible other than in the relativistic sense, even the shortest hop backward or forward in time would entail some pretty complex calculations to establish the exact spatial whereabouts of the destination. The earth is travelling at a pretty fast lick in orbit around the sun, the sun is moving within the galaxy, the galaxy is moving in relation to other galaxies (in the remote future our own galaxy and Andromeda are due to collide) and the universe itself is inflating.

To the Tardis this is no problem, because she does not perceive space time as we mortals do: she perceives the whole of spacetime and the universe at once, to the point where she cannot really distinguish between past and future, as was made clear in The Doctor’s Wife (and the Moment in Day of the Doctor had the same problem). So I imagine that to her time and space travel is not a lot more complex than it would be for us to walk from A to B once she has been told or has decided where/when to go.

 

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