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@blenkinsopthebrave
😀
And this seems apt also

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@miapatrick

All good wishes to you and your boyfriend, and fingers and toes crossed that you avoid further complications from the virus.

@bluesqueakpip

Hope that you are not suffering from cabin fever and that you find a source of revenue, preferably not just UC, but even that at a pinch.

Yes, the obsession with bog roll hoarding does seem weird, especially as it is not the most indispensable of commodities, and you don’t even have to resort to cutting Murdoch rags into squares. In an emergency, or at any time for that matter, a serviceable bidet can be improvised with a washing-up bowl, provided you have access to clean water and, ideally, a means to disinfect the washing-up bowl.

I had to go into the city yesterday for my annual eye check-up, and on the way home I called into Sainsbury’s in the hope of finding some fresh veg and 500 grams of butter to add to my stockpile. The remaining choice of veg was very limited, although the leeks and  carrots I was looking for were available. No spuds whatsoever, though, and only one depleted bin of onions. Butter was limited to unsalted and the more expensive French brands. Wandering other aisles out of interest I noticed that the shelves of rice and pasta of all kinds were completely bare and most of the bread was gone, canned veg was in short supply and canned tomatoes had vanished. I didn’t even bother to check the aisle for toilet tissue and kitchen paper.

It’s not as if this region has been noticeably affected as yet – until a couple of days ago there were no confirmed cases in Norfolk – and the city centre was not entirely deserted, but people are evidently taking nothing for granted.

Hey-ho! I have a library of well over 1000 novels to divert me, a backlog of recorded TV programmes and DVDs, a garden crying out for attention, not to mention a research project that has been on hold for far too long if I can find the energy.

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For anybody who hasn’t already seen this, a refreshingly blunt summation of the crisis and the response

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@nightingale

I had a very strong suspicion that was the case, but on the internet you never can tell, so I had to ask 🙂

 

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@whisht

Thank you for that thought.

Although potentially in the at-risk category I am, I hope, keeping things in perspective and taking all reasonable precautions. The worry-meter did waver up a notch when No.1 brother, who is a retired paediatrician, phoned to enquire delicately, and in a roundabout way, whether I had stockpiled provisions – answer, yes, though in the event of a long-term lockdown I might get a little sick of dishes based on pasta, pulses and contents of the freezer. But my milk is delivered by people who can also supply fresh, organic produce and a fairly wide range of basics, and I bake my own bread. My only concern would be if I ran out of booze 😮

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@nightingale

That certainly provides an interesting perspective on Endgame, but if anyone told you that it was a sequel to Infinity War it’s no wonder that you were confused 🙂 Or did you write this with tongue in cheek?   If not the latter,  Endgame was written as a one act play, originally in French but later translated by the playwright himself, and first performed in a French language production in London in April 1957.

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@blenkinsopthebrave   and others who have speculated about the seemingly ageless ‘minders’.

Could they have been Time Lords who were chameleon arched and have now rediscovered their identity?  Or maybe they were entities who simply assumed the appearance of the father and the senior policeman. Either way the presentation clock is obviously a Chekov’s clock.

As for the rest, I am reserving judgement until I have seen the finale. The episode was well paced on the whole, often visually spectacular, posed some intriguing questions and built up to an appropriate cliff hanger, and the lone cyberman continues to be effectively menacing as well as an enigma, but I was nevertheless left feeling vaguely frustrated and I’m not sure why, unless it was that, as you said, Blenkinsop, this had more the character of an over-extended trailer than a fully realised episode.

I could also wish that over these two series we could have seen more of how the three companions acquired the degree of knowledge  and competence they have shown recently’ rather than being left to imagine unseen adventures; and although in general I have liked Graham as a character, his chirpy flippancy in this instance grated.  I could almost hear some of those lines delivered to different effect by Tom Baker, but whether in this case it was the context or the speaker, they seemed somehow inappropriate.

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@unclewalter

Since Theta and Sigma are letters in the earthling Greek alphabet, how likely is it that they constitute a Gallifreyan name 😉  At best they might approximate to the initials of his original name, but even that is pure speculation.

As a matter of interest, why haven’t you been tempted to follow the After Gap episodes?  The quality is not entirely uniform, any more than was the quality of the pre-gap series, but they are well worth it on the whole, and are now fairly widely available.

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@bluesqueakpip

I did not mean to disparage Chibnall’s ability as a writer in general; he just seems so much more at home dealing with people in the world as it is or was in the past.

Over the past 60+ years I have read a great deal of science fiction and a somewhat lesser amount of fantasy by numerous different authors. Many have written entertaining and occasionally even thought provoking narratives based on ideas already current and widespread in the genre: there are a few, though, who have the singular gift of imagination and the ability to show us life, the universe and everything from a completely new and original perspective, and to draw us into their vision so completely that we become immersed for the duration and thereby changed.

Doctor Who is not entirely science fiction, of course, or entirely fantasy, though it draws on both, but at its best it has that ability to draw us in to the world it creates and to enable us to view ourselves and the world in a new light.  In the futuristic episodes Chibnall has written some interesting and entertaining variations on long established themes such as the Daleks or the Cybermen, but I doubt very much whether he could have dreamed up those concepts ab origine. He does also, as @blenkinsopthebrave has noted, seem to think that episodes set in an imagined future need to be frenetically paced and full of flashy effects – things which in fact often tend to detract from their effectiveness.

@blenkinsopthebrave

…  it is knowing how to engage the viewer in a world that has been presented to them that bears no relationship the world they know, amd yet capture them, almost hypnotically, until the resolution.

Exactly so 🙂

 

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@blenkinsopthebrave

Clearly Graham is not of a generation which can remember the po’ under the bed or the commode – necessities if one was to avoid a nocturnal trip to the privy at the bottom of the garden 🙂  The water closet was not unknown in the early 19th century, but it was still a rarity and not terribly efficient.

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@bluesqueakpip

I wonder why it is that the Chibnall historicals seem to be so much the best episodes of his era? It’s like everyone (actors, writers, production team) have the ‘touch’ with historicals. – which then proceeds to promptly desert them when they have to do something else.

I suspect the reason is that Chibnall lacks the kind of free-wheeling imagination and/or specialised knowledge required to create truly original and effective science fiction or fantasy, which is probably also the reason why he seems to be relying so much on recycled material and references from old episodes, and why the monsters of his creation have tended  to be a bit underwhelming. With historical material, on the other hand,  he is  on safer and more solid ground, even if he chooses to play a bit fast and loose with the recorded facts, because he is – or feels himself to be – dealing with a world, events and people he can more easily identify with.

 

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Another random observation which I forgot to include; I was very amused to see Byron’s repeated attempts to flirt with the Doctor meet with a decided and blunt rebuff. How very different from the 10th Doctor 😉

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For the first 10 minutes or so of this episode I had a sinking feeling that it wasn’t going to live up to its promise. The Austen pastiche dialogue seemed a bit forced at first, and while the notion of delivering the background information on the somewhat convoluted domestic arrangements of the occupants of Villa Diodati as gossip between partners during a dance might have seemed a clever alternative to the Doctor briefing her companions before they gate crashed the party, it did come across as a bit contrived. As did the idea that Mary Shelley would in any case have responded to the arrival of four unexpected and half-drowned guests by immediately proposing an impromptu dance – though I suppose that any excuse for a party would suffice if you had been confined indoors for days by the weather.

After that, though, it certainly picked up the pace and delivered in terms of story and spooky atmosphere, and I have no real complaints. The Escher style puzzle of the house apparently folding in on itself was very effective, although it might seem a bit surprising that the Doctor was not reminded immediately of the examples of recursion s/he encountered in Castrovalva and Logopolis. But then I suppose that from her point of view that was a very long time ago.  The way that Dr Polidori’s sleepwalking was exploited as a means of solving the puzzle was ingenious, also.

The semi-converted, somewhat battered looking, and by inference patched together cyberman was, for me at least, disturbingly gruesome and threatening in a way that massed ranks of shiny metal men are not, and I really liked the suggestion that it was this encounter which inspired Mary Shelley to dream up Frankenstein’s monster*.  In that philosophical context the cherry-picked lines from Queen Mab which this cyberman recited, channelling Shelley, were an apt commentary on mankind in a historical perspective and the kind of recurrent folly and twisted thinking which could lead to the creation of his kind. We were also reminded that for the Doctor the encounter is a painful reminder of what happened to Bill.

Humans like all of you, changed into empty, soulless shells; no feelings, no control, no way back. I will not lose anyone else to that.

@blenkinsopthebrave

 the Doctor’s decision to give the Lone Cyberman what he wanted in order to save Shelley (and therefore the future) made total sense

Yes, given that dilemma, what could she do but choose the least bad option. I gather that some commenters elsewhere have argued that Shelley was not that great a poet and the Doctor’s decision should have gone the other way, but Shelley as a social and political philosopher had an influence far beyond his reputation as a Romantic poet. If he had died in 1816 instead of 1822 he would not have written The Mask of Anarchy, written in 1819 in response to the news of the Peterloo Massacre, which had far reaching influence in shaping the concept of non-violent resistance. It is far more punchy than the earlier Queen Mab, which covers some of the same ground but does go on a bit. As the Doctor said, words matter.

Random observations:

The way in which the 18th century characters persisted in calling the Doctor ‘Mrs Doctor’ was a subtle touch because, of course, at that date the idea that a woman could have been styled ‘Doctor’ in her own right would have been inconceivable, even if there may have been one or two idealists dreaming of a day when it might be possible.

I’m not sure that the inclusion of articulated and animated skeletal hands skittering around in spider fashion or the odd misplaced skull added much to the tale, beyond providing a touch of the conventionally ghoulish. It was also surprising that the protagonists, after a just brief glance into a box full of assorted bones, were able to determine that one or more of the hands of the skeleton were missing, given that the hands when not under supernatural influence would have been a scattered jumble of assorted very small, disarticulated bones which would almost certainly have fallen through to the bottom of the box. It is difficult enough to ensure that you have identified all of the hand or foot bones even when excavating a skeleton in situ 🙂

*Though I seem to recall reading that the initial idea probably arose out of a philosophical discussion one evening during their stay at the Villa.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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@davros

Since you will be covering all the post-gap Doctors but understandably don’t want to keep it as a continuous thread, Faces of the Doctor might be the most appropriate forum.

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@missrori

In that link the BBC do make a valid point. It is true that a lot of people have difficulty responding to those who have suffered a bereavement or who are in mental distress, and they do tend either to avoid the issue altogether or to resort to euphemisms or platitudes; if someone has died it seems people have difficulty saying the words ‘died’ or ‘death’ or referring directly to bereavement at all, and if someone is suffering from depression people too often try to jolly them along or, if particularly tone deaf, tell them to ‘pull themselves together’. Then again, in my experience even those who have difficulty expressing their sympathy verbally, may do so in their supportive actions.

That said, in the case of the Doctor’s reaction to Graham’s confidences I don’t think that the issue was handled as subtly or as sensitively as it might have been. Instead we got her, as so often, thinking aloud – telling rather than showing – and then briskly changing the subject with a cheerful suggestion that they go and look up Mary Shelley et al. and witness the genesis of Frankenstein. Moffat would, I think, have handled it a lot better.

And while on the subject of inner demons and Moffat, embedded in the article you linked to was another link to Christopher Eccleston’s autobiography and his account of working on Doctor Who, and he has nothing but praise for Moffat’s writing – which accords with the verdict of every actor whose opinion on the subject I have read so far – and who should know better! So much for the nihilists and the ARSE brigade 🙄

 

 

 

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The first thing that struck me about this episode were the parallels with Listen, and not just in the sequence of the titles – Listen, Can You Hear Me?  Both dealt with the hidden fears which lurk in our subconscious and in our nightmares; the insecurities and doubts which generate the monsters under the bed and the bogeymen haunting the shadows, although in this case it was more specifically in relation to adolescent and adult depression and anxiety rather than childhood terrors. Zellin and his  detachable fingers – a literal digital storage system – were certainly scary and creepy enough to inspire some more sadistically minded younger viewers with a means to terrorise their even younger siblings.

Listen is no doubt the better written and better crafted of the two, but for me this was nevertheless effective, and the ‘message’ was delivered with a little more finesse than in Orphan 55 or even Praxeus. Tahira’s problems, which appear to include kleptomania, are somewhat sketchily outlined but, traumatised by the deaths of her family (? – the date is too late for the crusades but about right for the Black Death) and seeking asylum in the hospital in Aleppo, she is perhaps intended to foreshadow the mental casualties of more recent disasters and conflicts; otherwise the inclusion of someone from medieval Syria seems a bit unnecessary, even if it does provide a picturesque setting.  Buom Tihngang as Tibo portrayed an image of clinical depression that I think most of us who have ever suffered from this condition would recognise. Yas’s teenage problems are covered chiefly in flashback; she has evidently come to terms with them to a large extent, but Zellin is still able to exploit the insecurity which lurks below the surface, just as he is able to tap Graham’s suppressed anxiety about the possible resurgence of his cancer as well as his grief and survivor’s guilt over Grace’s death. Ryan turns out in many ways to be the most grounded of the ‘fam’, but he is prompted to voice the dilemma which inevitably faces everyone who travels with the Doctor for any length of time.

The Doctor’s crass avoidance when Graham tries to confide in her about his anxieties is, as @jimthefish says, jarring in the extreme, and a regression from Smith Doctor’s socially awkward but well intentioned bumbling or Capaldi Doctor’s increasing capacity for empathy and ultimate exhortation to ‘be kind’, although it might be seen as a rather clumsy call back to the latter’s initial unwillingness to engage. On the other hand, the Doctor here is  preoccupied with her own fears and worries, aroused by the cryptic information imparted by the Master and aggravated by Zellin’s intervention, and she, unlike the others, is still keeping these fears and worries to herself.

Capaldi Doctor told us that fear is a superpower which enables us to confront and overcome  what threatens us, and so it proves here, when Tahira learns to face and therefore control the monsters which Zellin has made manifest from her nightmares* and then used to trap people so that he may continue to feed their terrors to Rakaya.  Controlling them she and the Doctor can then turn these monsters of the mind back onto the Immortals in order to trap them in their turn and imprison them for eternity with only their own fears to entertain them. This is the Doctor at his/her most implacable in meting out justice to monsters, as in Family of Blood.

‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods’,  and these immortals are if anything even worse than the capricious gods of Olympus as described in the Iliad, who take sides and play with the lives of mortals as if they were pieces on a gaming board; but the stakes in this game are not just the lives of mortals but their minds and their mental integrity.

‘The Eternals have their games, the Guardians have their power struggles. For me this dimension is a beautiful board for a game. The Toymaker would approve’. These references harking back to episodes in BG Who are almost certainly just a nod to long term viewers and the more dedicated fans and not of any particular significance in the narrative arc,  though one never knows.

* Shades of Forbidden Planet

 

 

 

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@davros

It looks as if your memory is playing tricks on you, because it was Graham who had cancer and Grace who was his oncology nurse. That said, it did seem odd that he didn’t know the meaning of pathogen. Pathogens aren’t known to be a cause of Cancer, but even so …

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@galaxymage

Sympathy over the commercial breaks 🙁  Living in the UK where that is not a problem I can only imagine how frustrating that must be, especially since BBC productions are not designed to accommodate them. It’s irritating enough on commercial channels where the shows are generally structured around the ads.

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@bluesqueakpip

Perhaps the contrast between last week’s episode caused me to be a bit harsh in my comments yesterday evening, but I certainly didn’t think it was as bad as Orphan 55 and, as I said, it held my attention. After a second viewing, now that perhaps I am in a more tolerant mood, I feel less inclined to be critical, but I still have the feeling that this was a story founded on a very good idea which could have been developed more effectively if it had been given more room to breathe, and the structure of the episode still seemed less than fluidly coherent. The ‘science’ of the pathogen and its effects doesn’t bear too close an inspection either, but it isn’t so outrageously ‘off’ that it constitutes a major flaw in itself as long as you were prepared to suspend disbelief from a reasonably stout cable.  The sheer amount of exposition consisting of the Doctor thinking aloud is nevertheless something I am finding increasingly irritating, perhaps because so much of it seems to be delivered in big chunks and all at much the same level. @psymon pinpointed the problem, I think, in contrasting it with the way it might have been done with Tennant Doctor.

@miapatrick

I feel that the companions were possibly at their best here, exhibiting a kind of confidence, competence, and in Yaz’s case, breathtaking recklessness that slightly adds to my feeling that a lot of their work and development is taking place off screen.

That growth in the companions was certainly very much in evidence but, as you say, we haven’t really been shown it happening to the extent we were shown the gradual development in their predecessors, and to that extent I found it a bit jarring. Too much has been happening ‘off screen’, so to speak. On the other hand the Doctor has, from the first, been encouraging them to act as a team and to use their initiative, so the result is a logical conclusion.

As for Yaz,  @bluesqueakpip   @spider , yes definitely something going on there with her growing tendency to exhibit the kind of reckless confidence and risk-taking we saw in Clara.

 

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That was certainly topical, but the way in which the message was delivered was far from subtle, with rather too much high-speed exposition for my taste. It is the kind of subject which multi-episode stories have dealt with rather more effectively, and The Green Death is a prime example as @jimthefish has already pointed out; and that did it without aliens. What came more immediately to my mind though was The Plastic Eaters – the first episode of Doomwatch for those in the UK who can remember that far back. For those not familiar with the series, it centred on engineered bacteria, developed in a lab as a possible solution to the problem of non-degrading plastics. A sample of the bacteria got loose, demonstrating in alarming fashion just how much of our technology and its applications depends on plastic components.

The episode certainly looked good, and it succeeded in holding my attention throughout, but structurally it seemed to me to be incoherent, jumping back and forth in dizzying fashion from location to location and person to person. But then what do I know about script writing and television production 😕

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On this sad day for the UK, in defiance, the anthem of the EU

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@davros

Good point about the amnesia inducing effect of the chameleon arch. On the other hand there is clearly a lot more going on with Lee than there was with Martha as a companion to Tennant Doctor, and a good many indications that he is more than just Martin Doctor’s human companion.

1) He has a service medal made of chronotelluric alloy which the sonic  registers as not of earth origin, and this service medal is evidently of sufficient sentimental value for him to have risked taking it with him even though it is trackable – which isn’t to say that he hasn’t been keeping it for the Doctor, although the indications were that it was his own.

2) He and Gat have a shared (military?) past. She greets him as ironically as ‘old friend’  and refers to their ‘identical training’, which suggests that he is from Gallifrey even if the sonic does register him as completely human, and he evidently feigned his own death in order to escape from that shared past and accompany Martin Doctor in her escape.

Could it be that there are means other than a chameleon arch to convincingly mask a Gallifreyan as human without the amnesiac effect? Or is he a human who was recruited by the Time Lords and served in their military force?

 

 

 

 

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@blenkinsopthebrave

Another thought: we’ve been assuming that all the people who vanished when zapped by the Judoon were killed, but I’ve been wondering about that. The Doctor described the weapon used as a temporal isolator, designed to freeze time, but that when used it causes horrific collateral damage to anyone and anything in its path. ‘Collateral damage’ probably does mean killed, but it could also apply if the weapon simply isolated the targeted individuals in time – i.e. left them in stasis and perhaps retrievable, at least in theory.

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@blenkinsopthebrave

what was in the little metal box that Gat recognizes?

Lee did in fact open the box and we got a brief glimpse of what was in it. He said it was his service medal. Gant implied that it was made of or included a distinctive alloy which enabled her to trace him to Earth. Everything points to Lee also being a Time Lord, as you say, and presumably also chameleon arched, since he registered as human in the Judoon’s scanner.

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@brewski

The discussion which I referred to isn’t really  spoilery, just the report that sparked it off.

This gist of the hypothesis which I proposed there is that the coincidence of the paired regenerations of Hartnell Doctor and Capaldi Doctor which immediately followed their meeting, which could be seen in one sense as simultaneous although technically separated by the time of their lives between, triggered some kind of timey-wimey disruption which resulted in a twinning in Hartnell Doctor’s regeneration and a corresponding forking or splitting of the time lines. These time lines would eventually merge again with the regeneration of Capaldi Doctor into Whittaker Doctor, thus forming a closed loop or ellipse bookended by Hartnell ->Troughton Doctor at one end and Capaldi -> Whittaker Doctor at the other.  So, according to the hypothesis,  the regeneration of Hartnell Doc into Troughton Doc which we saw was mirrored by an alternative regeneration which we didn’t see and which resulted in a separate lineage of incarnations and a slightly divergent history for the Time Lords and for those individuals and species on whom the Doctor’s actions impinged.  This would explain why Mason Doctor didn’t seem to recognise a sonic screwdriver and thought that having two versions of herself and two manifestations of the same Tardis in proximity was dangerous – an early concept later demonstrated to be untrue – and why the destruction of Gallifrey apparently hadn’t happened for her and Gat.

In this scenario the question of whether or not Hartnell Doctor had knowledge of transmat technology is irrelevant because, just as there have been thirteen incarnations of the Doctor following him in the time line we have seen, x number of incarnations will have separated Mason Doctor from Hartnell Doctor in the time line we haven’t seen.

The possible flaw in my argument is that, with a merging of time lines, even if they had followed a broadly similar course in most respects, we could potentially have a very large number of doppelgangers now wandering around, or else individuals with two versions of reality in their memory, and also a Gallifrey which is both destroyed and not destroyed, which seems a bit implausible but not, I suppose, impossible in a quantum universe.

Note that I use the term hypothesis rather than theory, as I have been trained to reason scientifically 😕 and try to live up to that training. It seems to fit what little we really know so far but remains to be proved. I just hope that the resolution Chibnall has dreamed up isn’t more mundane.

 

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@blenkinsopthebrave

Are we to suppose that at the moment of regeneration of the Hartnell Doctor that, even though we clearly see Hartnell’s face slowly turn into Troughton’s, somewhere else there is another Hartnell  turning into the Martin Doctor? And when that happens another Tardis, another Gallifrey (one that include Gat), et al, emerges as the result of a split time line?

That’s it, more or less. From a universal point of view the divergence of the time lines might have been barely noticeable to begin with but, given the effect of the Doctor we have known on the universe over the course of the time line we have seen, it could have increased gradually. Furthermore, in the centuries since the initial twinning the alternative Doctor could also have regenerated many times and Martin Doctor only the latest of many. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the main actors in both time lines – Time Lords, Daleks, Cybermen, Judoon and so on -shouldn’t be more or less the same, just that their actions and interactions may have differed in some ways.

Think of the divergence and eventual re-merging of the time lines as an ellipse, at one end of which is the regeneration of Hartnell Doctor and at the other the corresponding regeneration of Capaldi Doctor.

The flaw in this argument is that it supposes that the divergent time lines differed only in respect of the Doctor(s), the Time Lords and those whom they interacted with or affected directly, otherwise their merging would result in utter chaos. And probably bad news for planet Earth 😈

 

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@brewski

The reviewer in question clearly lacks imagination 🙄

There is a relevant discussion which might be of interest if you are prepared to venture onto the Spoiler forum.

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@bluesqueakpip

Anyway, Mudlark, would between Troughton and Pertwee be a possible slot for a ‘wiped’ Doctor?

That did occur to me as a possible alternative, since the circumstances of Troughton Doctor’s regeneration were somewhat unusual; but I opted for the Hartnell/Capaldi regeneration scenario as more likely because of the symmetry between what could be viewed as a double or paired regeneration and the emergence of twin Doctors ignorant of one another’s existence. What seemed less likely to me was twin Doctors resulting solely from the Capaldi Doctors regeneration, for the reasons stated above.

My hypothesis here doesn’t involve an alt-universe, only a time line which divides and then merges again, bookending the regeneration of Hartnell Doctor and that of Capaldi Doctor, which seems to me a fairly neat solution and not all that hackneyed. In any event, I just hope that the solution Chibnall has dreamed up is not blue boringers.

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@jimthefish

The idea of some kind of twinned regeneration does seem a good deal more persuasive overall than that of a parallel universe, because it could be developed to account for pretty much every anomaly. Martin Doctor didn’t seem to recognise Whittaker Doctor’s sonic, though, which would suggest that her predecessor was an early incarnation. She also seemed to believe that two incarnations of the Doctor and Tardis couldn’t exist in proximity without causing serious problems, which is an early concept, long since demonstrated to be false.

Could the double regeneration of the first and twelfth Doctors immediately following their encounter have triggered such an anomalous twinning effect, but specifically in the regeneration of the first Doctor not that of the twelfth? Which is not to say that the effect of the black hole on the Capaldi Doctor and the Tardis couldn’t have been a contributory factor.

If this twinning did occur so early on but was unobserved by either resulting version of the Doctor, it suggests that the result was a split time line, so not technically a parallel or alternative universe, and that this split time line has somehow merged again following the second and technically later of the two regenerations which triggered the effect in the first place, closing a neat loop. A merging of split time lines would certainly account for the apparent differences between what we know of the Time Lords, and the  Time Lord history – and possibly culture – behind Martin Doctor and Gat, including the fact that for the latter the destruction of Gallifrey, actual or apparent, never seems to have happened.

As a random afterthought, might this anomaly also be the reason that the first act of the Tardis after Capaldi Doctor regenerated as Whittaker Doctor was seemingly to jettison her? Or did she just press the wrong button?

 

 

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@badwolfalice

Of course! how could I have overlooked that instance 😳

And assuming that we are dealing with an alternative universe, this scenario would seem to be the most likely, especially as Chibnall does seem to be mining the RTD era at the moment.  A parallel universe in an adjoining dimension in which everything is almost but not quite the same would allow for an alternative Doctor, alternative Time Lords with a slightly different history and attitude, and a Gallifrey which was never destroyed or sequestered. All that would be needed then was an explanation of the intrusion of one into the other without anyone apparently realising it had happened.

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@spider

I know the Doctor scans RuthDoc she says they are the ‘same person’ but then not that long before this the sonic scan was reading her as human. Although the veil has dropped, perhaps there is still another veil there that we don’t know about?

That idea of a double bluff, a chameleon arch within the chameleon arch, is very appealing, even if it proves to be a bonkerisation too far 😀

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Something in Jack’s warning about the cyberman which flew past me first time around registered as significant on second viewing and, on the reasonable assumption that there has been joined-up thinking in the plotting of the developing narrative arc, I have a suspicion it could have a bearing on the problem of the two Doctors and/or on the Lie, depending on whether or not the two things are connected.

After telling the companions to warn the Doctor about the lone cyberman, and explaining that the cybermen were from an evil empire, now destroyed and in ruins,  Jack says

‘But that could all change if she doesn’t listen to this message. To defeat them the Alliance (?) sent this thing back through time and space … ‘ at which point he is interrupted by the nanogene attack.

When they passed on the message about the lone cyberman to the Doctor they didn’t mention this detail, which might I suspect could be a cause for regret later on. What if  the ‘thing’ which was sent back  tampered with the time lines and gave rise to the kind of proactive and exceptionally aggressive Time Lord seemingly represented by Gat?

As for why neither Martin Doctor nor Whittaker Doctor recognised the other,  I think that it was you, @bluesqueakpip , who suggested here and in t’other place that the memory wipe might be involved, and I very much like that idea. If you wanted to tamper with time lines and conceal the tampering, or to perpetrate a monstrous lie and make it stick, the ability to erase or block memories would certainly come in very handy.

 

 

 

 

 

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@psymon

As you say, there have been multiple instances of two or more incarnations of the Doctor and his/her Tardis assembling without obvious problems, though I think that there have occasionally been allusions to potential problems arising. What has been shown to cause a serious paradox is when the Tardis materialises inside her past or future self, which on at least one occasion caused a problem of infinite recursion. But I’m not sure that there has always been consistency even on that point

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@thane16 Syzygy the younger

There seem to be several types of bread described as rye bread. Bread made entirely with whole grain rye flour results in pumpernickel – very dense and moist in texture and almost black in colour, but if the rye is mixed with other grains the result  can still be described as rye bread so long as the predominant ingredient is rye, though to a varying degree it will be lighter in texture and colour.  In my experience they all go best with butter and/or cheese.

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Viewed in the cold light of morning  it seems obvious Jo Martin’s Doctor cannot be a regenerated Jenny,  so scrub that hypothesis of mine. In the first place, Jenny would surely not have forgotten the existence of her parent, even if she believed that parent had not survived beyond the end of his twelfth regeneration and she decided to take on his mantle and call herself The Doctor, perhaps reasoning that they were in a genetic sense the same person. Secondly, even if she had stumbled on the complicated truth of the matter, she would have known that in the universe as a whole Gallifrey was at least generally ‘known’ to have been destroyed. Thirdly, even if she were somehow been rendered amnesiac*  the hypothesis would need to construct a plausible explanation of how she became so thoroughly entangled with the Time Lords in the first place, and how she got hold of a Tardis of her own.

I should know better by now than to try and dream up theories late in the evening when I am tired and sleepy.

@juniperfish @rob

When thinking in terms of alternative universes there are at least three options to consider.

There is the concept of bubble or pocket universes which has been used on several occasions in Doctor Who and which we know can be accessed given the right conditions and necessary technology; for example e space, House’s somewhat unstable bubble universe in The Doctor’s Wife, and perhaps the dimension in which Gallifrey was sequestered at the end of The Day of the Doctor.

Then there are alternative time lines generated according to decisions or actions taken or not taken at critical points, as the Doctor explained in Orphan 55, and as we have seen in episodes such as Turn Left. What isn’t entirely clear to me is whether these forking alternative time lines can result in permanently coexisting universes or whether such universes normally exist only in potential, like Schroedinger’s cat in its box; and if the latter, shouldn’t the Doctor visiting them have the effect of collapsing the wave function, so to speak?  On the other hand we have  seen the kind of mayhem which can result from altering past events, as in Father’s Day, so is it a case of flexible nexuses versus fixed points in time?

Finally there is the concept of the multiverse, in which a potentially infinite number of superimposed but separate universes theoretically exist and have always existed, but I don’t recall that having been referenced in Doctor Who.

If Occam’s razor is applied to the hints and clues we’ve been given so far, then the most likely explanation for the dual Doctor and the seeming paradoxes entailed should relate to the big Lie which the Master discovered – which does allow for the possibility that the Time Lords had at some point been manipulating alternative realities. Perhaps Occam’s razor shouldn’t be invoked on this home of bonkers theories, but in this case it still leaves ample room for speculation.

 

*Other than when chameleon arched, obviously, but not wholly improbable, given Time Lord abilities.

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Maybe it was the input of Vinay Patel as co-writer, but this episode seemed to display a surer touch than almost any since Chibnall took over, and for me at least conveyed more of the essential  Doctor and her universe; and for the first time I had the feeling of Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor as a fully realised incarnation of her predecessors, with all the necessary intimations of alienness and mystery – or, as @jimthefish put it, it was the first time she truly clicked for me in the role. The additional scope for speculation on all things timey-wimey is also liberating, particularly in the context of this forum, and hugely welcome. As @devilishrobby says, ‘Let the bonkerising begin’.

As for the mystery Doctor, divergent time lines generating alternative universes is a possibility, as @juniperfish suggests. The fact that the Ruth Doctor had no knowledge of Gallifrey’s destruction would be consistent with this, but it would mean working out a way in which alternative – as opposed to parallel or bubble universes – could intersect. On the other hand we have the possibility of a dual lineage of Doctors stemming from  Jenny the Doctor’s daughter who, as a clone of the Doctor (give or take a bit of initial chromosomal tweaking given that the Doctor was male at the time), would register in a scan as identical, as would regenerated male or female incarnations, allowing perhaps for a few random genetic mutations incurred along the way.  Jenny was left as a dangling thread, and if Captain Jack can re-enter the story, why not her?

I agree with @jimthefish that the Judoon worked much better here than they did in their previous appearances, and I too am ambivalent about Captain Jack. A little of him goes a long way as far as I’m concerned, and by the end of Torchwood he’d lost any appeal he might once have had. But who knows (nose) this time around?

 

 

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@peacefrog

The Wall of Voodoo video stirred an atavistic memory, and I’ve only just realised what it was.

And I apologise in advance

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and they don’t travel back to a different planet from that of their origin

That should, of course, read ‘ … and they do travel back …’ 😳

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@miapatrick

I think quite possibly somewhere else.   This still means they’ve still majorly meddled with the time line to wipe out the human development of

If that is the case, and they don’t travel back to a different planet from that of their origin and don’t thereby generate an alternative future for themselves, then I don’t see why they would need to meddle with the time line to wipe out human development of the technology; in fact doing so would create a particularly knotty  paradox. What they could do, and all they would need to do according to this hypothesis, would be to snaffle the means of powering the technology – i.e. the Eye of Harmony – and then take measures to deprive humans of the means to create a replacement.

When I wrote

a divergent time line in which the existence of the Time Lords depends on ancestors in a future which no longer exists.

I should have specified ‘no longer exists for them’, because that theory presupposes a universe in which multiple alternative futures are generated, such as the Doctor implies in Orphan 55. The destruction and/or saving of Gallifrey in The Day of the Doctor doesn’t depend on such a universe, only on what the inhabitants of the universe perceive and believe, and only the 11th incarnation of the Doctor and his successors, plus the survivors on Gallifrey in its pocket universe, need be aware of the truth of the matter.

As for the Master’s claim that he has destroyed Gallifrey, does that mean that he has destroyed the whole planet?  The ninth Doctor believed that by using the Moment he had destroyed it and everyone on it, but what we glimpsed at the end of Spyfall were only the ruins of the Time Lord citadel, and presumably the Time Lords in it. And the Master’s monumental grudge was clearly directed at the Time Lords. From his point of view, being the kind of person he is, the ordinary Gallifreyans wouldn’t even register.

 

 

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Just in case there is anyone unaware of the context of the video I posted above, it is the finale of the concert Roy Orbison and Friends: a Black and White Night, an assembly of the great and the good which is well worth checking out.

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@peacefrog

Watching the Orange Aberration droning about his devotion to the environment at Davos whilst knowing how his administration (if it can be dignified with that term) has gutted the departments and legislative measures set in place to protect the health of the environment in the USA, that Tom Lehrer song was what came immediately to mind 🙁

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@arbutus

As you are presumably aware how ancient I am it will probably not come as a surprise that the music which is most evocative for me is of the period roughly from the late 1950s to the early 1970s so, off the top of my head, including Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison, Dusty Springfield, the whole Folk revival scene, The Animals,The Kinks, The Beatles, The Stones, etc. etc. Not that I have been totally switched off since then, but this forum is proving an education 🙂 Voices have always been an important factor for me and I very much liked Tom Jones’s voice, though not so much his choice of songs. And if you were as young as you imply, I very much hope that you didn’t understand the lyrics of Delilah !

But for the ultimate jam session there is this

And this particular song has a Doctor Who connection, since it is referenced in The Magician’s Apprentice.

And for anyone who hasn’t seen the whole thing, the backing singers included k.d.lang

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@miapatrick @bluesqueakpip

The possibility that it involved some jiggery-pokery with time did flit across my mind but I dismissed it, perhaps over hastily, as a time-loop too far.  But then again,  why not give it a whirl.

In a possible future or alternative time line, ape-descendants on or from earth discover the principles of time travel and develop the technology to exploit it. Along comes an unprincipled race of space travelling humanoids who pirate the technology and appropriate the means to use it, presumably including the eye of harmony and means of access to the untempered schism, then scuttle back  with the whole kit and caboodle into the far distant past and establish Time Lord civilisation on Gallifrey.

Question: do these piratical proto-Time Lords originate on Gallifrey-future and travel back along their own time line and beyond to the past of their own planet, or do they originate elsewhere and choose Gallifrey as a suitable base to establish their new order?  If the former, then it creates a major paradox which, as you suggest @miapatrick , implies a divergent time line in which the existence of the Time Lords depends on ancestors in a future which no longer exists.  If the latter, then I suppose the Time Lords could exist alongside their future ancestors, but I doubt if they are on speaking terms 🙂  Either way, it probably needs one of @bluesqueakpip ‘s diagrams to sort it out.

 

 

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@blenkinsopthebrave

As I said, there is no reason that your theory shouldn’t be feasible in the Whoniverse 🙂  The temptation to nit-pick has, however, always been my fatal and irritating flaw 😈

Consider me well and truly slapped down and contrite.

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@blenkinsopthebrave

It has just occurred to me that there may be another problem with your theory. It rather depends on when, exactly, the Time Lords originated, and that seems to be difficult to pin down given their ability to manipulate time once they achieved or acquired the technology.  Modern humans date back only a few tens of thousands of years, while Silurians might have been around between 100 to 60 million years ago. Maybe I’m mistaken, but I seem to recall that there have been indications that the Time Lords were around well before that, or at least have been tinkering with events for far longer.

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@blenkinsopthebrave

That trailer gives me a slight tingle up the spine, so I hope that it lives up to its promise. It certainly makes me look forward to next Sunday’s episode with more optimism, because the Judoon don’t rank among my favourite alien monsters and I wasn’t very hopeful.

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@blenkinsopthebrave

What if the Time Lords stole the secret of time travel from humans, at a stage of development long preceding our understanding of Earth’s history?

As a theory that is impressively bonkers and yet I could see it working in the Whoniverse. There is, however, a tiny problem from my professional point of view. History – i.e. the documented past – isn’t the only record, and that is where archaeology and related disciplines come in.  Sadly there is nothing in the archaeological, palaeontological or geological record to indicate that humans ever attained such a high degree of knowledge and civilisation.

Alternatively,  it could have been the Silurians whose technology the Time Lords stole; but that would be difficult to prove given that they also managed somehow to erase their existence from the archaeological/palaeontological/geological record.

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@peacefrog

Thanks for that; it certainly succeeded in raising a smile, although it also has the disconcerting effect of assembling the word salad into something which seems to make sense.  Normally just the sound of *that* voice brings me out in a rash, and any attempt to parse what he says gives me a headache!

As an aside, I like the moniker. I do my best for frog conservation in my garden, with moderate success, and I’m all in favour of peace, whether on a world scale or on this forum.

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It is entertaining to speculate about historical persons who might have been influenced by time travellers from their futures. I particularly like the idea that Francis Bacon – the 13th century Franciscan friar aka Doctor Mirabilis, not the 17th century essayist – might have had such an encounter, he seems so much ahead of his time in his thinking. The mundane fact is probably that he was simply very well read and made good use of the writings of ancient Greek philosophers and the writings of the Arab scholars who preserved and developed those writings.

Nevertheless, think of the numbers of exceptional people whose visionary ideas were never realised simply because in their time the technology did not exist to bring those ideas to fruition. In a science fantasy world in which time travel is possible, maybe that is how the time paradox is resolved 🙂

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@jimthefish  @juniperfish  @bluesqueakpip

Yes, mindwiping is a hugely problematic concept because it is an assault on the person at a very fundamental level, and the Doctor, as a moral being with high ideals, should be above that. But how many assaults on individuals or societies as a collective have been perpetrated ‘for your own good’ or ‘for the greater good’ by well intentioned people? And the Doctor, however intelligent, however ancient and experienced, and even with a vast store of knowledge of the universe and of multiple species and societies, is still fallible. That is the point; it has never been claimed that he/she is a super hero with an unerring sense of right and wrong. One has only to go back to the Doctor in 1963 to see that this has never been the case, and that insofar as he/she has grown in moral stature since then, it has been a gradual process. Furthermore, the role the Time Lords are supposed to have conceived for themselves was as monitors of time, intervening from on high to correct deviations; and although the Doctor is a maverick, he/she originally underwent that training and conditioning.

If, on the other hand,  we overlook the ethical issues and consider mindwiping simply as a narrative device, and if it is assumed that time is a linear progression of cause and effect ad infinitum, it has an obvious function. Because if there are people racketing around across the whole of time and space you need to have a means of preventing the kind of paradoxes they may create simply by their encounters with people who will have a critical effect on the future of technology or society or the course of history as a whole. If, on the other hand, time is a ‘wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey’ affair in which alternative futures can be generated at every critical nexus, which is also very much a concept within the Doctor Who canon, then this is less of a concern and mindwiping is far more difficult to justify even ‘for the greater good’.

One can attempt to rationalise the ways in which mindwiping has been used in various episodes, but in such a long-running show with so many writers, editors and show runners, it is hardly surprising if there is a lack of consistency. In the case of Donna it was a tragic necessity, because the alternative was for her mind to burn out, unable to sustain ‘Doctor-Donna’.  The twelfth Doctor intended to block Clara’s memories of him and their time together for her protection and for his own (and which was foremost in his subconscious intention?) . In other instances the reasoning is less clear cut, and I’m not sure that is a productive use of time to worry over the whys and why nots, although in considering this episode and Spyfall, I like @bluesqueakpip ‘s suggestion.

 

 

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