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@arbutus   Yes indeed!  People who refuse to distinguish, or perhaps cannot distinguish opinion from fact and/or who seem to think that assertion equals argument are one of my bugbears too, and one of the reasons I find it increasingly unrewarding to read the comments on opinion pieces on sites such as the Guardian.  Maybe I expect too much of people, but it still surprises me that so many seem to lack the objectivity to appreciate artistry and good writing independently from what appeals to them or engages them personally.  Moffat’s writing is, as several people here have noted, concise and economical and, at its best, deeply and richly layered, and it repays close attention and analysis and multiple viewings. I get the strong impression that the majority of those who do not like it and dismiss it as ‘bad’, are those who are uncomfortable with anything other than a straightforward narrative, or at least one which can be comprehended immediately without too much effort, and are impatient with too much timey-wimey complication.   But in a show in which one of the essential and foundational concepts is time travel, why shouldn’t a writer explore the paradoxes and possibilities implicit in that concept?  The whole beauty of Doctor Who is that the possibilities are almost infinite 🙂

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Expletive deleted!  I have just lost two almost complete drafts of posts as a result of interruptions.  Maybe the third attempt will be successful.

The debate about whether or not the monsters are real has reminded me of the invisible monster in the film Forbidden Planet. The monster was real enough, because it had dangerous physical effects, but it turned out to be a projection of the darkest fears and primeval instincts of the people living on the planetary base.  The Doctor has recovered from his immediate post-regeneration fugue, but this was not a normal regeneration and maybe he is still experiencing longer term effects, stirring up old fears in his subconscious mind.  Could it be that the monster or monsters are therefore projections from his subconscious,  perhaps amplified by the telepathic field of the Tardis?

As for the reality or otherwise of the monster outside Orson Pink’s capsule, he has been on his own for months, stranded at the end of the universe, and I doubt if there are many people could remain entirely sane in those circumstances. He would be experiencing cabin fever ratcheted up to the nth degree, with every sound from the operating of the capsule and the heating and cooling of the hull magnified in his consciousness and grating on his nerves.  The warning sign on the door might not be to remind him that there is something out there which could get in, but to remind him to resist the impulse to go outside, because there is nothing and it would be fatal.  What we see is what happens after the arrival of the Doctor, which is left ambiguous, but the banging on the hull sounds purposeful (cf the unseen entity in  ‘Midnight’ which the Doctor might be reminded of in this environment) and, unless there is something I missed, the door appears to start opening on its own and the Doctor is the only one who wants to see what is out there.  So is he unwittingly causing these effects?

Changing the subject slightly, there are differences in the shots of the word LISTEN on the chalkboard, as @xad4 so cleverly spotted, but they both look to be written in the same hand which Clara recognises is the Doctor’s, even though the Doctor has no recollection of having written it. The difference might be the result of a slight glitch in continuity (boring explanation), but perhaps both the difference and the fact that the Doctor could not remember writing it in the first place is because he has been doubling back on his timeline, as in Flesh and Stone, always assuming that the Tardis can enable such a thing within herself. (I don’t think anyone else has suggested this, but if they have, my apologies; I haven’t had time to reread all the posts on this thread).

@purofilion  I haven’t yet had time for a second viewing, but on the strength of the first I agree entirely with your revised thoughts on the episode; it struck me immediately as a beautifully crafted piece of writing.  So much so that I ventured to read some of the comments on Dan’s blog on the Guardian sight, thinking that very few of even the most determined critics of Moffat as show runner and writer would not be able to find much to complain of here.  How wrong I was!  For everyone who loved it or even liked it moderately there was someone saying that they found it over complicated/too self-referential/a tired recycling of old ideas and plots/the characters two dimensional/the monsters not frightening because they were not shown etc. etc.(strike whatever is inapplicable) and that Moffat is therefore a bad writer (not sure I follow the logic there).  I can understand those who would prefer the show to be more like ‘proper’ science fiction, or for there to be more action and less talk – that is a matter of taste – but I find it surreal, the way people can watch the same thing and come away with such radically different opinions of the merits or otherwise of the writing, dialogue and construction.

 

 

 

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@handles   Missy as a Sibyl?  That is a very interesting suggestion, especially as the only thing we know about her for certain from the advance publicity and cast lists is that her title is Guardian of the Nethersphere.  I’m not sure that the sibyls of the ancient Greek and Roman world could be described as psychics, though. They were priestesses at certain shrines and cult centres who were believed to be able to prophesy the future when inspired by the god Apollo, usually after they had ingested or inhaled a mind-altering substance,  and were therefore consulted as oracles.  Their oracular utterances seem to have been of the ambiguous kind that could be read as applying to whatever actually happened. It was up to the party asking the question to interpret the meaning of her answer, and if he chose the wrong interpretation it was not the sibyl’s fault!

The Sibyls in Michelangelo’s painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican (which I presume is the church you are referring to) are depicted as the pagan equivalent of the Old Testament Prophets because it was believed that, like the O T prophets, they had foretold the coming of Christ.

But who knows what they are or what their role is or has been in the Whoniverse 🙂

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That was Moffat at his terrifying best and I pity any parents of young children trying to get their offspring off to sleep last night.  These days there isn’t much that scares me but it featured a recurrent nightmare which I had when I was aged three or four* and which I can still recall vividly: not a monster under the bed but the monster under a blanket, though in my case the blanket was cream-coloured not red, and it was always ahead of me on the footpath or halfway down the stairs, lying in wait.  After that it took a while for my heart rate to return to normal.

Apart from the primeval scare factor, there was so much to relish and some time-looping which was truly elegant and satisfying, like the resolution of an equation in maths.  It is good, also, that we are now being shown Clara, not only as a more rounded individual but taking an increasingly active, even leading part in the Doctor’s life, rather than just being told of her crucial role with only minimal evidence to back it up (the girl born to save the Doctor).  Perhaps she is even responsible for him becoming the Doctor in the first place, if her calming of his childhood fears gives him the courage and determination to qualify for entry to the Academy and thus to become a timelord.  If so this is Clara prime doubling as a  claricle.

I may have further thoughts after a second viewing but in the meantime

Doctor:  What if no one is ever alone?  What if every single living being has a companion; a silent passenger; a shadow?

Clara:  How long have you been travelling alone?

Doctor:  Perhaps I never have.

May I refer you to the last paragraph of post no. 31409 in the RoS thread.

(Wanders off nonchalantly, looking not in the least smug)

 

* This and other dreams I can recall from that time can be dated fairly closely because we left the house where I had them when I was four.

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My vote would be for either Survival or The Greatest Show in the Galaxy since I have seen neither of these, whereas it is not long since I watched the other two on the Horror Channel.  Survival has cats, which is in its favour, but on balance I think I would plump for TGSitG.

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@handles :  I don’t think that it is the Doctor doing the ‘saving’ – not directly, anyway, and probably not consciously.  On the basis of the very limited evidence available so far I am speculating that it is someone, or some entity who/which is very closely, perhaps psychically linked to him, whether Missy herself or some kind of intermediary between him and Missy.  My first guess was that Missy represented some aspect of the Tardis, but another possibility is that the Tardis is the linking intermediary.

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Belated afterthought:  Did anyone see a possible connection between Capaldi-Doctor’s prowess with a spoon-as-fencing weapon and McCoy-Doctor’s expertise with the spoons-as-percussion instrument?

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@brewski  Did you really think that, because a momentary rift in the spacetime continuum of the unreal universe allowed a sliver of boring mundanity to slip in, I hated the whole episode?  Please say it ain’t so!   Offhand I can’t recall a single episode, BG or AG, that I hated in its entirety and I almost always find something positive to like in even the episodes generally considered to be seriously sub-standard.

If I were among the pusillanimous band of haters who infest the Guardian discussions I doubt very much I would still be watching  at my advanced age 🙂

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@purofilion  Thank you for the welcome.  I am responding to you here rather than on the RoS thread, since we have veered a bit off topic.

Your reference to me as an ‘academic’ in your first paragraph suggests that I may have given people a somewhat inflated impression of my status.  I do have a doctorate, for what it is worth, but to me the title academic implies someone who teaches and does research in a university.  What I meant by ‘academic background’ was that throughout my career a good deal of my work required the application of analytical skills and academic rigour; and yes, a certain amount of original research was involved.  All it means is that I remained at the pointy end of the profession.

You mentioned Quatermass:  I read the discussions on the successive episodes with great interest and found the technical details provided by @bluesqueakpip particularly fascinating.  And yes, I was tempted to join in, especially when people wondered how the people who watched the original broadcasts felt.  I discussed this with my brother a while back, after I had bought the DVD and we had the opportunity to view it again.  He thought it would be impossible for later generations who had grown up with television as a part of their lives from the beginning to understand fully the impact it had on us.  As little as six years prior to that first broadcast only a fairly small minority of households had possessed television sets, and those mostly in the London area and South East England. In other regions  there was little point, since reception was poor to non-existent. We had acquired our first set in 1957 and this was way beyond anything we had seen or imagined previously.  It was utterly gripping – must-see television on a scale unimaginable in these days of myriad channels. The moment when the Martians were revealed and one slipped in the webbing was heart stopping, and I can recall vividly the feeling of horror at the sight of the undulating gravel at the end of episode 4.  As for the meaning of the story in relation to contemporary issues, I can only say that I was in my mid teens and certainly grasped the broader implications.

The White Queen was a BBC drama based on three novels by Philippa Gregory about the Wars of the Roses (or Cousins’ War).  The White Queen of the title refers to Elizabeth Woodville, but Margaret Beaufort and Anne Neville were also central characters.  One critic on the Independent newspaper wrote that you would get a better idea of medieval life, politics and warfare from Game of Thrones than from this, so to be avoided unless you enjoy cheesy historical fiction.  I gave up half way through the first episode.

I have to confess that I would be unable to contribute anything useful to the Music forum.  Although I used to enjoy singing when I was young, music has never been a major part of my life and my knowledge could be summed up as ‘I don’t know much about music but I know what I like when I hear it’.  I am rather better educated in the visual arts.

 

 

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@pedant  How dare you, sir, doubt my word as a gentlewoman. Name your friends and it’s spoons at dawn!

I should make it clear, however, that the promise only holds good for this thread, but if I do pick nits in future I will try to restrict myself to gigantic nits, on the scale of the dinosaur in Deep Breath in relation to a normal T Rex.

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I get the impression that I may have come across as a trifle blue/gold boringers in my first post 🙁   if so, my apologies, it was not my intention. @handles @brewski @purofilion  I certainly did not mean to make a big deal of the golden arrow. Where Doctor Who is concerned I am and always have been perfectly prepared and able to believe any number of impossible things both before and after breakfast. But just occasionally there is something so counterfactual that it joggles the cable by which my disbelief is suspended, and this was one such moment. My first reaction was that gold, especially pure gold, is a very heavy, soft and malleable  metal, so an arrow made of it would be totally impractical as compared with a functional arrow with a wooden shaft, fletched with feathers and with a steel head, and if it could be made to fly any distance, would deform on impact and drop like a brick. But it is a very minor point, certainly not enough to spoil my enjoyment, and we can always postulate that the hasty application of a little timelord technology, plus the combined efforts of Robin Hood, the Doctor and Clara, rendered it aerodynamic and hardened the tip 🙂

@arbutus  I agree with you entirely regarding the irrelevance of historical accuracy in the setting of this medieval romp; that was in part the point that I was trying to make. Like you, though, I find anachronisms and inaccuracies intensely irritating in historical dramas e.g. The Tudors,  The White Queen (shudder). I am an archaeologist with a sideline in social history rather than a medievalist per se, but the medieval period is one of my particular fields of interest.

So no more nitpicking from me, I promise.

Like many here I have been pondering the question of the robots’ Promised Land and the enigma that is Missy.  I get the feeling that robots might have a  culture and legendarium of their own, hidden from their designers and makers, and that the Promised Land, whether real or mythical, is a part of this – a sort of homeland where they will be free from control and their programmed imperatives.   Missy’s Promised Land/Paradise/Heaven is a virtual reality constructed on the basis of this tradition and its human -and perhaps other? – equivalents.  If it is a virtual reality then within it Missy could be presenting herself in her own image, like Vastra in the setting of the conference call in Name of the Doctor, or an avatar concealing her real identity.  My assumption at the moment is that she is ‘saving’ people/mostly-human-rubbish-robots just before the moment of their death, in the way that CAL saved people in the Library.

Whatever or whoever she is she is not so much stalking the Doctor as present in his life, looking over his shoulder, and appears to have been so for some time. I don’t think that the choice of the garden from The Girl Who Waited as a setting in her ‘heaven’ is coincidental, and she would have to be very close indeed to the action to have ‘saved’ half-faced man and the girl whose name escapes me at present (temporary attack of nominal aphasia aka senior moment).  My best guess at the moment is that she represents some aspect of the Tardis who has, after all, experienced temporary incorporation in the body of a woman. If so she might well be mischievous and her motives obscure, but certainly not evil.  I can, however, see the flaws in this hypothesis.

 

 

 

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As I said in my initial post on the Robot of Sherwood thread, I have been lurking here for a long time, and whether or not it turns out that I have much to contribute, it seems only polite that I should sign up to thank all of you who have kept me entertained, informed and enlightened in all things Who, bonkers theories included.

Although I have been watching the show since almost the very beginning, my memories of BG Who are for the most part of a fairly general kind and, until recently, I had never re-watched any of it.  One reason may be that on 23 November 1963 I had just celebrated my 21st birthday and was in my second year at university, so I never had the privilege of watching as a child; the equivalent for me was ‘Journey into Space’ on the wireless and, later on, when my family finally acquired a television set,  ‘Quatermass and the Pit’, and those I remember in some detail.  Early impressions endure.

I missed the earliest Hartnell episodes entirely because, although the romantic garret I shared with two fellow students benefited, as an estate agent might say, from a prime central location and spectacular views over the Firth of Forth, not to mention  hot and cold running mice and the occasional hole in the floorboards to trap the unwary, the eclectic assortment of antique furniture* did not include a television set.  Nor, for that matter, did the less romantic basement flat I occupied during the following two years. The first I heard of the programme was when one of my flatmates, whose parents lived close enough for her to go home at weekends, started burbling about Daleks.   This was sufficiently intriguing for me to look out for it when I was next home for the Christmas vacation, and I found it sufficiently imaginative and well written to continue watching whenever I had the opportunity.

During the later sixties I was leading a somewhat peripatetic existence while I gathered material for a post-graduate thesis, but for at least six months of the year I was based at home with my parents, so was able to watch on a more regular basis.  I remember my father coming into the room on one occasion when I was watching and I, perhaps feeling that I needed to justify watching what was regarded as primarily a children’s programme, remarked that I preferred it to Star Trek.  He replied that this was understandable, since it was much better than Star Trek – which surprised me, because he had no interest in SF or Fantasy as a rule.

Probably my most sustained period of watching BG Who was during the Tom Baker and Peter Davison years, but I rapidly gave up once CB took over.  The news that Sylvester McCoy had taken over the role tempted my to have another look, but it was, I think, The Happiness Patrol – the one with the Bertie Basset monster, anyway – and I decided that this was no longer for me.  Nevertheless, when the show was revived I did not hesitate to plunge in once more, and I have been firmly hooked ever since.

I am not sure how useful I can be at producing bonkers theories: by background is academic and so my first instinct when formulating hypotheses or theories is to reach for Occam’s Razor, but I will do my best.

 

*  The landlady was addicted to salerooms

 

 

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In the end resistance has proved useless; or, to put it another way, after lurking here since the early days of this forum I have finally succumbed to the urge to comment.

I will introduce myself properly in the appropriate place, but first, rather late in the day,  a few thoughts on RoS.

On the whole I enjoyed this episode more than I expected to; it was daft and funny and well paced, with just enough going on beneath the surface to keep the mind focussed, though on second viewing it required a rather more strenuous effort to keep critical faculties suspended.

Of course Robin Hood is as real as the Doctor, in a Hollywood fantasy of medieval England in which maidens are fair, buckles are swashed, and people swan around in colourful, generic ‘medieval’ costumes which appear to be inspired more by the styles of clothing worn in the 14th century than anything people in the late 12th century would have recognised. But the corollary is that the Doctor is as real as Robin Hood, and I am not sure I wish to be reminded of that while I am actually watching.

On the subject of the golden arrow, its aerodynamic qualities or lack thereof, and the probability of such a missile being capable of piercing or even lodging in the hull of a spaceship, I will refrain from further comment.

On a more general note, Peter Capaldi is so far fulfilling all my expectations and, insofar as I rank the incarnations in order of preference, he may well oust Patrick Troughton in my estimation.

 

 

 

 

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