[PhileasF @replies]

There was a lot to like, and a lot to think about. I’ve enjoyed reading everyone’s thoughts.

It was almost but not quite entirely unlike my theories. (Well… someone became a Cyberman, so I wasn’t totally wrong). I don’t mind. It just meant there were more surprises than I was expecting. Which… I guess is what makes them surprises.

But now I’m relying on the Christmas special to tell me all the episodes I didn’t like didn’t really happen.

And if it doesn’t, I’ll spend the next hundred years expecting that every new Moffat episode is finally going to resolve that ‘fantasy’ arc from 2014  🙂

The opening credit sequence, with Jenna’s name first, and her eyes, was a laugh. (I must admit I didn’t notice the first time I saw the episode, and probably wouldn’t have the second time either, if not for comments in this forum. So thanks.) It’s almost as if they anticipated all the complaints about the show becoming ‘Clara Who’ and decided to poke all those people with a stick. Or maybe they actually added that bit fairly recently, after reading one too many Guardian comments.

For whole wild minutes I was flashing back to that theory from season 7, that Clara is a future Doctor. Apart from hater-baiting, I think the real ‘purpose’ of that sequence was to suggest there was going to be some massively complicated bonkers explanation, such as people like me were expecting; so it comes as an even bigger surprise that the episode was a straightforward human story rather than an exercise in being clever with time travel and technobabble.

Poor Danny. Clara went to hell and back to rescue him from death, but then she was the one who ‘killed’ him. And after that she seemed content to let him stay dead, rather than wanting another crack at rescuing him. Now he’s had several non-boring deaths, a saving the world death and a saving one child death. So that’s OK.

That bad news Clara was trying to tell the Doctor at the end: was she about to say Danny didn’t escape? Or does she have some other — THREE MONTHS — bad news?

And in the end the Doctor and Clara separate as they have lived together, with lies. And by now they must know each other well enough to each know the other is lying. They’re each playing, I think, with their deep knowledge of the other, saying what they really think by saying something entirely untrue and knowing the other will know the opposite is true. The Doctor settle down on Gallifrey? Come on. And I think the Doctor knows Danny didn’t make it, and stops Clara telling him this unpleasant truth, encourages her to lie because it spares them both an uncomfortable emotional scene. They know the time has come to part, and these obvious, harmless lies make it easier. Honesty leads to crying and shouting. Lies let them part as friends.

But their relationship is complex and subtle enough that I might be completely wrong.

To the bullet points:

– Missy tipped off UNIT about the Cybermen in St Paul’s. Like a lot of Missy’s actions, the motivation is obscure. I guess it was so she could meet some of the Doctor’s friends and kill them. Really, UNIT should know enough about the Master not to be tricked like they were. As soon as Missy woke up she should have been sedated again.

– As for being the Woman in the Shop: there must have been easier ways to ensure the Doctor would find 3W, than to manipulate his life for hundreds of years!

– Does Kate really need an explanation for how you could fit 91 Cybermen inside St Paul’s? I’ve never been there, but it looks big enough without invoking ‘bigger on the inside’.

– This episode courted controversy a bit. Firstly, a flippant reference to suicide bombing: ‘Cybermen don’t just blow themselves up for no good reason, dear. They’re not human.’ Secondly, it appears that Missy has run an artificial afterlife for the human race for a very long time, and that this is why humans have ‘myths’ about an afterlife. (Which we now know weren’t myths.) So much for religion then — they were all the Master’s fault!

– So… people who died a thousand years ago… Ten thousand… A hundred thousand years ago? Have they been in the Nethersphere that whole time? What have they been up to?

– ‘Unlike the reports we have on file…’ In the mortuary scene and others, the news media seem to know about the Cybermen. We seem to have returned to the situation at the end of the Russell T Davies era, where it was no longer feasible to pretend people didn’t know all about the alien invasions that had been seen in the show. As I saw it, Moffat went to some trouble to ‘reboot the universe’ so that wouldn’t be true any more, but now we’re back there, with a ‘here and now’ in the series that is significantly different than ours.

– Clearly the world in which the leader of every country agreed to make the Doctor the CEO of Earth in the event of an alien invasion is a very different world than ours.

– As I recall, there was some spoilerific location footage in which the Doctor seemed to react to Clara’s death (or apparent death). It now looks like that was staged to deceive fans spying on the location shoot! The lengths program-makers have to go to to keep secrets nowadays.

– The Doctor knew Sylvia Anderson. Fun, but I think about 99% of the audience just went ‘huh?’

– When the Cybermen are tearing the plane apart, why doesn’t someone suggest they all escape in the TARDIS?

– Why did Danny take Clara to the cemetery? (Bonkers theory… because he was aware of the Brigadier-Cyberman, through the Cyber-internet, and wanted to be near another reliable Cyberised dead person.)

– And Danny stopped to pick up a warm jacket for Clara? I guess this was because Jenna needed a jacket at that location, and her comfort and health were more important than story plausibility. And fair enough.

– There’s another dreamlike sequence when Clara wakes up in the cemetery. Things – presumably Cybermen – seem to run past the camera, but she doesn’t see them properly until later. But if they ran past her like that — only visible out of the corner of her eye — she really should have been able to get a good look at them.

– I guess all those Cybermen who died burning the cloud had their consciousnesses uploaded into the Nethersphere, which is why Danny was able to save the child, who had presumably also been turned into a Cyberman. I guess Danny only figured out that ‘walking out of the Nethersphere’ capability of the bracelet at the last minute. He needs someone with a TARDIS and some Time Lord technology to rescue him from the Nethersphere sometime between that moment and when the Nethersphere ‘dies’. I wonder Who?

– Given that the Doctor and Clara should be able to figure out there’s a possibility the Nethersphere is still operating, I wonder why they don’t try to break out… ooh, everyone who died during the episode. And everyone else who ever lived. Everybody lives! As soon as we’ve found somewhere for an extra hundred billion people to live.

– If Time Lord technology is capable of creating an afterlife for the human race, and the Doctor knows this, is he now obliged to make it happen?

– Will we ever see the Cyber-Brigadier again? I imagine he’ll be watching over the Earth, and especially his daughter and the Doctor. Next time Kate’s in trouble he’ll appear out of nowhere to save her. Look out for a broad-shouldered guy in a long coat and a very big hat who whirrs when he walks.

– Missy has an obvious escape route: she runs the Nethersphere, which collects the consciousness of everyone who dies. No doubt she’d have a spare bracelet (or equivalent device) hidden away somewhere inside it, and be able to walk out. For her, death is pretty much indistinguishable from teleportation into her own lair.

[PhileasF @replies]

Re various speculations about living people in the Nethersphere.

In the BG series, a living person’s brain can be connected to the Matrix. On the occasions we saw this happen, they didn’t interact with the dead people who’s minds are in the Matrix, but there was nothing to say that couldn’t happen.

So Missy, Seb, and anyone else could be outside the Nethersphere but projected into it.

In theory, the Doctor and Clara could even be plugged into the Nethersphere, and the floating Nethersphere ball they saw could be an illusion of the Nethersphere inside the Nethersphere…

[PhileasF @replies]

@cathannabel – I’ve had a pretty good look at the post-it notes, and I don’t think they tell us much that we didn’t already know. They mostly seem to be ‘bullet point’ (or post-it?) summaries of the episodes this season. There seem to be a few we never get a close look at though. And there’s one that may tell us something we don’t already know.

Here are all that were legible (to me):

• PSI
• IMPOSSIBLE GIRL
• SAIBRA
• VASTRA
• ROBIN HOOD  [There are actually two ROBIN HOOD post-its. He must have made quite an impression.]
• LYING…
• LYING [double underlined]
• DINOSAUR IN LONDON
• MAISIE
• JENNY
• COURTNEY ON THE MOON
• COURTNEY BECOMES THE PRESIDENT [this is attached to the ‘COURTNEY ON THE MOON’ post-it]
• BONELESS
• THE DOCTOR
• ORIENT EXPRESS
• MINIATURE CLARA  [I guess this refers to Into the Dalek]
• JUST SAY IT  [with SAY underlined – this is the one Clara plucks from the shelf and then returns to it while talking to Danny]
• TRUTH  [underlined]
• RUPERT PINK
• DAN, DAN THE SOLDIER MAN  [attached to the RUPERT PINK post-it]
• KILL THE MOON
• KARABRAXOS
• ROB THE BANK
• THREE MONTHS
• WHOLE COUNTRY UNDER FOREST  [this was hard to read, and I ‘interpreted’ it by thinking about everything that’s happened this year and trying to match it to the text]

Of these, the one that doesn’t seem to match what we’ve seen is THREE MONTHS, which someone above has pointed out as possible evidence that Clara is pregnant.

[PhileasF @replies]

@scaryb –  Apart from Doctor Who, my favourite thing is books, so I love looking at people’s bookshelves, especially TV and movie characters. It’s great when someone has put some proper effort into stocking a character’s shelves, and you can see that their books match who they are.

Sadly, the Doctor’s books are mainly of a vintage that makes identification very difficult, and I fear they were mostly purchased by the kilo or foot from a set dressing company that keeps a massive stock of more-or-less valueless old books. They look great on the set, but I suspect they’re ‘really’ just old parliamentary debates and council minutes and similar stuff that looks nice on a shelf but which only a historian with very specific interests would want to read. Every time I see them I mainly worry that next time the TARDIS experiences some turbulence in the vortex they’ll all fly off the shelves and get damaged.

I happened upon the shelf more or less by accident, while trying to identify the park Danny was walking through. It looked nice, and I wouldn’t mind visiting it. I assumed it was in London, which made identification difficult. It’s actually in Cardiff. And yet I don’t think it was only chosen for convenience to the studio, because that striking colonnade and statue Danny walks past right at the start of the episode, which really caught my eye, is the Welsh National War Memorial in Cathays Park.

I suspect we’re not supposed to draw any conclusions from the fact that Danny was in a park in Cardiff while he was apparently minutes’ walk from Clara’s home, which is probably in London. I’m sure the park was chosen because it was convenient, looks really great, and contains a war memorial which ties it in with ongoing themes. I’m sure that we’re supposed to think that in the Doctor Who universe that’s a London park, and not think too much about it.

[PhileasF @replies]

@badwulf – Thanks for that! Looks like I can put all my half-formed body-swapping theories back on the shelf, so to speak.

It turns out I have the 2013 Proms show on BluRay, in the 50th anniversary collection, I just haven’t watched it yet. I tend to watch them with my parents on Christmas day (when Australia’s ABC usually puts them on in the afternoon). Christmas is about the only day of the year I really feel like a good dose of proms… probably because I start drinking so early 🙂

[PhileasF @replies]

I’ve been looking at Clara’s bookcase. Saw something odd, a ‘Body Swap Ticket’ (the preceding word is illegible… MIxxxSCAPE?

Presumably this is a ticket for a recreational body swapping experience.

Here’s a screen shot:

I’ve also delved into Clara’s Milton book. It’s hard to be sure, but I believe it’s a biography by Anna Beer, full title Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer and Patriot. Clara’s appears to be the Bloomsbury edition, first published in 2008. ISBN 074759628X / 9780747596288. I’m basing this on the assumption that the lettering and image on the spine resemble the book’s cover, which is easy to find on the web. (The spine, not so much.)

[PhileasF @replies]

And I’m done.

I didn’t realise I had so much love for Pertwee! Possibly it’s just too long since I saw his stories, and I’ve forgotten the boring bits in between the good bits I remember. The overwhelming emotion I remember while watching the episodes is wishing the stories were a lot shorter.

And I seem to be really into River. I think this is because she only appears in episodes written by Steven Moffat, which I tend to like.

My ratings confirm my general impression of one of the key differences between the BG and AG series: that the BG series was much more variable in quality than the AG series. Of course, when the BG series pulled out something really special, it could stand out more amid the dross.

I mainly refrained from rating missing stories, though I’ve experienced most of them in one way or another, either as ‘telesnap reconstructions’, or photonovels, or script books, or CD soundtracks, or novelisations. I made an exception of Evil of the Daleks, which I feel I know very well. Next time I refresh my memory of any others (by e.g. listening to their soundtracks) I’ll come back and give them a score.

[PhileasF @replies]

@badwulf – Oh no! There goes my afternoon! 🙂

[PhileasF @replies]

@apopheniac – Yes, some of what we’ve seen this year brought The Mind Robber to mind. Meeting Robin Hood, for instance, and the mythic and fairytale elements that have made the season seem less real than usual. For a while I vaguely entertained the idea that ‘Missy’ might be short for ‘Mistress of the Land of Fiction’, but then decided that Moffat probably wouldn’t set a whole season in the Land of Fiction, due to the likely audience outrage. One episode yes, a whole season probably not.

I hadn’t noticed the other parallels you mention, like the apparent death of Jamie, and the Master (of the Land of Fiction) watching the Doctor’s adventures on TV, but now that you mention them I can see there are clearly similarities. I guess Moffat has been influenced by the Mind Robber and consciously or unconsciously incorporated some of its best ideas into this story.

[PhileasF @replies]

@miapatrick – Yes, I’m also a Coupling fan. I found it after watching Blink and thinking it was one of the best pieces of TV I’d ever seen. I was aware of Steven Moffat already, from watching a few episodes of Press Gang when it was new, and (very) occasionally seeing him post in the old rec.arts.drwho newsgroup, but I hadn’t seen much of his stuff.

Actually, it’s years since I last watched Coupling. I’m less than half way through my rewatch, and I don’t recall the episodes you mention. (Checks episode guide.) But at my current rate I’ll probably see the French accent episode tonight.

I had very vivid memories of this show, and yet now that I’m rewatching it I’ve realised I only vividly remembered about five episodes, most of which I’ve already seen in my rewatch. So it’s been a lot of fun to see so many episodes that are practically new to me.

[PhileasF @replies]

That was really good.

‘Don’t cremate me!’ I think being conscious inside a dead and decaying body would be so horrible I’d be thinking ‘please cremate me!’ I think the Doctor’s right, anyway: that aspect of 3W’s operations is a fake. They just want to persuade everyone to stop being cremated, so their bodies can be turned into Cybermen.

I also suspect much of what Danny and, presumably, other dead people are being told is a lie, intended to persuade them to allow their personalities to be deleted.

Here’s my attempt to make sense of it all:

Missy is harvesting the dead to turn them into Cybermen. Their bodies are kept in tanks and ‘upgraded’. Their minds are processed in the Nethersphere, which is like Gallifrey’s Matrix. In the Nethersphere, the emotions and other personality traits of the dead are deleted. Presumably there is some advantage in deletion being voluntary, as they seem to be trying to make Danny delete himself.

All this is being done with the cooperation of many of the world’s governments. The governments provide the material and financial resources and prevent people being cremated. There appears to be an intention to ‘sell’ the idea to the public – Missy’s sales pitch. The deception of the governments, and the intended future deception of the public, is based on the lie that consciousness persists after death and always has, as supposedly proved by the voices heard in TV static. Therefore no-one should ever be cremated, and the dead should instead sit comfortably in an exoskeleton in a tank of water… No doubt the Master’s famous hypnotic skills were useful in selling that last idea.

How does the apparent explanation of the Nethersphere fit in with Missy collecting the dead from other times and places, as we’ve seen in previous episodes? Is she collecting everyone everywhere everywhen, which would be a pretty big job, or only people who die on present-day Earth, and a handful of people she sees dying while stalking the Doctor?

To the bullet points:

– The idea that the dead remain conscious isn’t as new as Dr Chang seems to think. It’s the premise of Philip K Dick’s novel Ubik, which may be an influence on this episode. In Ubik the dead are frozen and you can visit their tanks and talk to them on the telephone. The dead experience a continued existence in a sort of dreamworld. Philip K Dick was in turn inspired by the Bardo Thodol, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which apparently also contains this idea of consciousness continuing for a while after death, as the soul is prepared for reincarnation.

– My Missy-is-Handles theory is looking a little less likely. It was fun while it lasted. Unless the Master was Handles too…? No. Sigh, Handles is off the theory table.

– For a while my other favourite theory — Missy is the Doctor’s wife from before he left Gallifrey — seemed like a winner. The episode seemed to be baiting that theory, or perhaps the Missy-is-River theory, with The Time Traveller’s Wife on the Doctor’s bookshelf, the kiss, the complaint of abandonment, ‘Two hearts’/’And both of them yours’.

– A lot of the Doctor / Master relationship for the past 44 years just got translated by Captain Subtext’s Helmet of Truth. (This is an idea from an episode of Steven Moffat’s Coupling which I saw last night, ‘Her Best Friend’s Bottom’, in which a scene is played with the subtext translated into text by Captain Subtext’s Helmet of Truth.)

– Some are wondering how the Master got away from the time bubble in which Rassilon and co are imprisoned. But there’s a long tradition of the Master escaping from certain death with no explanation, and I suspect that tradition will be honoured in this case too. Once we actually saw him get ‘burnt to a crisp’, as the Doctor put it, and when he was later seen to be all right he didn’t explain why, even when it was pointed out that he was last seen being burnt to a crisp. Like the Doctor, he just always gets away.

– The scenes surrounding Danny’s death had a dreamlike quality, in the way they seamlessly segued from Clara arriving at the crash scene, to Clara standing in the road looking at the tributes left by Danny’s friends. Maybe this was just economical storytelling, or maybe it was expressing the sense of unreality that can come with sudden changes in one’s life. But it seemed to invoke the sudden time-shifts that Donna experienced when she was living in the computer-generated world in Forest of the Dead.

I think @miapatrick is right: this scene will turn out to be out of sequence, and we may see it, or parts of it, again, when it will seem very different in a new context.

– Dream patches. Those are the sort of thing the Dream Lord might use…

– On the way to the ‘afterlife’ the TARDIS noise seemed more prolonged than usual — it sounded like a callback to the BG series, and the extended TARDIS noise that was heard occasionally. This seemed to imply it was going further than usual — and yet, its destination was seemingly just modern London.

– Danny’s flashback to his really bad day seems to be intentionally induced by Seb. This lends some credence to the idea that the season is in Clara’s head, and we’ve been seeing her involuntary Nethersphere ‘flashbacks’.

And now, my last attempt at bonkers theorising before next week (unless I come up with something else before then):

Clara will die and be put in the matrix. Possibly because she thinks she can get Danny out.

Her slightly unreliable memories of her adventures with the Doctor will be extracted by Missy or Seb. We will realise this is what we’ve been seeing on TV. (I just realised this is similar to the idea of ‘The Trial of a Time Lord’ from the BG series… So this season might be ‘the 6th Doctor done right’ in more ways than one.)

The Doctor has suspected this surveillance-from-the-future-using-Clara’s-memories for a while, and he has from time to time given Clara a memory worm so she won’t be able to tell the watcher-from-the-future certain things — about the Doctor’s plans for detecting and defeating him or her, for instance. Hence the bizarre end of Mummy on the Orient Express, where Clara wakes up on the beach.

The Doctor has occasionally given Clara dream patches, so some of her memories will be so bizarre as to cast doubt on all of them, thus making the intelligence extracted from her less useful.

Clara becomes a Cyberman. This is why her face is too wide (in her slightly distorted recollections). This is why she smells bad. This is why she looks happy and sad at the same time.

Danny is saved, but only by being transplanted into the future, where his continued existence won’t create any paradoxes. He becomes Orson, a pioneer time traveller, so he can meet Clara one last time, when she comes to visit him at the end of the universe. But to avoid paradox, he is condemned to deny he knows her, and to live the encounter exactly as it happened to Clara when she experienced it.

[PhileasF @replies]

@blenkinsopthebrave

My final call on Missy: She’s the Doctor’s wife/girlfriend/significant other, Susan’s grandmother. She somehow hitched a ride out of the Doctor’s timestream with the Doctor and Clara. Or possibly escaped through the crack.

The evidence:

– her prior knowledge of the Doctor, with a different accent (Deep Breath)

– she refers to him as her boyfriend (Deep Breath)

– she seems to have access to time travel

– she knows the Doctor’s phone number

My other final call… Handles! (Did you know there was a Missy in Nightmare in Silver? Me either, until a few minutes ago when I googled Missy and came up with this unexpected result. She was a soldier, and was probably converted into a Cyberman… Could Handles have been this Missy; and could she have been regenerated accidentally when the Time Lords sent that regeneration energy through the crack?)

As for what’s going on with Clara…

Thinking back on some of the weirder things that have happened during the season, I keep coming back to the idea Clara’s having an Oswin-in-‘Asylum of the Daleks’ experience. She’s been converted into… I’d better not say what as it’s in trailers/posters/location footage, and so might be considered a spoiler. She’s living in a dream-world, in much the same way Oswin did.

How can this avoid outraging the audience with ‘it was all a dream’? If Clara is remembering her adventures, and the episodes we see are her memories, then it isn’t only a dream. Most of what we’ve seen this year really happened. But sometimes the truth breaks into her recollections. People tell her her face is too wide. She’s smiling and looking sad at the same time. She smells bad. She’s always lying (to herself, mainly, about still being human.)

When Missy sees Clara at the end of Flatline, she’s really looking into Clara’s dream-world. Missy is tracking the Doctor by extracting information from Clara’s memories. She’s then able to ‘collect’ the dead.

Clara is partially aware of what’s going on, so is feeding her unseen watcher misinformation, making up absurd adventures like Kill the Moon and In the Forest of the Night.

So how come we sometimes see things Clara couldn’t have (the Doctor on his own in Listen, for instance)? She imagines these scenes, based on what he told her later.

Mind you, I had a near-identical theory about what would be revealed in The Name of the Doctor… except then I thought the Doctor was a Dalek. So possibly my brain just works this way 🙂

[PhileasF @replies]

@blenkinsopthebrave – I had mixed feelings about Danny in this episode.

I like Danny, so I was looking forward to an episode in which he’d play a bigger part, after being on the sidelines for the past few weeks. I was a bit disappointed. Although he was on-screen a lot more this week, I didn’t feel we saw any deeper into him than we’ve seen before.

Maybe the most interesting ‘new’ thing in Danny is that he effectively has the ‘officer’ role that he has previously disdained. He is the commander of his team/troop of ‘gifted and talented’ kids, and Clara also seems to be under his command. He seems to be good at taking charge, and his first concern is always the well-being of those under his command.

My feelings about his relationship with Clara wavered. At times he seemed awfully officious with her; but on reflection it would seem that, as in The Caretaker, he was just being sensible and professional.

When he realises Clara is lying to him, and says he doesn’t care what the truth is, he just wants her to tell him the truth, he seems to be the perfect Sensitive New Age Guy (SNAG), as we called them when I was a youth.

But there is something unsavoury in the next moment, where Clara is about to tell him the truth, and he stops her, and says she needs to go home, do her marking, and then tell him. The unsavouriness lies in the fact he tells her to do her marking. He’s being her boss there, telling her to do the job she’s being paid for, when he’s not actually her boss.

I think a subtle ambiguity is being carefully maintained in Danny’s character. Sometimes he seems a bit ‘off’, a bit wrong, a bit controlling, like an officer perhaps. And sometimes he seems very understanding and accepting of Clara’s uniquely weird eccentricities. Given Danny’s well-established communication issues (as seen in Listen) I’m perfectly willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and accept that he’s really a good guy who isn’t always good at expressing himself.

I would go so far as to say that what is interesting about Danny is that he’s basically a good guy who isn’t good at expressing himself. Most sympathetic male characters are either:

a) idealised versions of the male author who are, unlike the author, capable of expressing themselves as really great guys; or

b) idealised male sex-partners imagined by female authors.

A good guy who’s not very good at expressing what’s inside himself is, I think, rare in fiction and common in real life.

I think the key to Danny’s character is in his first appearance, in Into the Dalek. A kid asks if he’s ever killed anyone who wasn’t a soldier, and he sheds a tear. No-one who can cry because he killed someone can be a bad person. It is a narratological fact. I have met people who have similar histories to Danny, and they were very very severely f****d up. That Danny has his apparent history as a soldier, and is as sensible and together as he is, makes him a hero, however imperfect he may seem in any given line of dialogue.

@spider and others. I was a little insensitive when I dissed the episode for being anti-medication. Clearly, this is a matter that can only be judged on a case-by-case basis, and a lot of psychiatric professionals lazily make the wrong call.

But even if many psychiatric professionals carelessly prescribe medication where it isn’t appropriate, I still think it’s weird and wrong for Doctor Who to say that people who ‘hear voices’ should stop taking their medication and listen to the voices. Some people who hear voices really should keep taking their medication.

[PhileasF @replies]

I really liked the premise of this episode, and thought it was very well realised on screen. But as for the explanation and resolution…

The hardest thing to believe is that the Doctor accepts that any of this could happen. I thought Kill the Moon was a lapse in judgement on the part of the show’s makers, but now that it’s happened again I think the improbability must be part of the story. I think the Doctor knows that a lot of what’s going on this year is just not possible, and he’s pretending to believe it to deceive his hidden watcher/listener (who we know to be Missy).

I resisted the idea that this season might be taking place in some kind of a ‘Land of Fiction’ where myths, legends and fairytales are real, or a computer simulation of the universe that some people can manipulate. Either of those would be a little too close to ‘it was all a dream’, which bothers a lot of people. (Me, I can live with it.) But the only way this episode can make sense to me is if the show is (sometimes) not set in our reality, or even its own usual reality, but in a different kind of reality with very different rules.

I could just about believe in the forest appearing overnight — something similar happened in my back yard recently, but it took about two weeks 🙂 As was the case with the Moon-dragon’s shell evaporating in a puff of harmless fairy dust and the Moon being conveniently replaced with a new Moon, the hardest part of the episode to believe was at the very end, when the forest just vanished.

Having decided that it wasn’t real, the utter impossibility of it all wasn’t too off-putting.

Before I go all bullet-pointy and start bonkers theorising, I’ll just say that it’s pretty amazingly irresponsible to have the Doctor say, in effect, that people who hear voices should stop taking their prescribed medication. Wow. Not sure how that one got through.

Anyway, here are some parallels with Kill the Moon:

– A massive world-changing event unexpectedly takes place, and the best thing to do is just let nature take its course.

– The massive world-changing event is impossible. In Kill the Moon, the Moon inexplicably gains a lot of mass; in this case, all the stuff those trees were made of seems to have come out of nowhere, and to have vanished into nowhere.

– The impossible event involves the growth of living things on a planetary scale.

– There were cobwebs in the clearing where all was revealed. They stood out enough, after cobwebs hadn’t really featured much in the episode, that they seemed an intentional callback to Kill the Moon.

– The scene where Clara sends the Doctor away parallels both the Doctor’s departure, and Clara’s dismissal of him in Kill the Moon. But with interesting variations indicating how he and Clara have changed since then.

– The Doctor quotes Clara’s ‘you walk our earth and you breathe our air’ speech.

– There’s a broadcast to the whole world.

I don’t think this is a coincidence. These episodes, and Robot of Sherwood, are the big clues to the story arc, cunningly hidden from our arc-interpreting attention by being written by people other than Steven Moffat.

The sense of unreality in In the Forest of the Night is supported by:

– the lack of people in central London — there should be lots of people walking around during every scene, but only people essential to the story are ever seen;

– the kids’ lack of reaction to the TARDIS;

– Danny’s lack of interest in the wonders of the universe; and

– the way no-one is worried about meeting wolves or tigers after the scene with the wolves and the tiger.

My new bonkers theory: somehow, Clara is able to make things happen by imagining them:

– Clara read Maebh’s homework book and then the solar flare and the new forest Maebh drew became real.

– When Clara thinks about Maebh as a girl lost in the forest in a story, the very same animals Clara would have seen at the museum appear and threaten Maebh.

– The kids aren’t amazed by the TARDIS, because Clara is so familiar with it she can no longer imagine other people being amazed by it.

– She wanted Maebh to think she wasn’t responsible for the (apparent) disaster, and a mysterious voice said she wasn’t.

– She wanted Maebh’s sister to come back, after being moved by Maebh’s broadcast.

– Danny doesn’t want to see wonders of the Universe, because Clara wants to keep him out of the TARDIS. She doesn’t want her ‘worlds to collide’.

She wanted to meet Robin Hood, and Robin Hood turned out to be real. This was the only time the Doctor has mentioned how unlikely the goings on of the season are: since then, I think, he’s decided to play his cards closer to his chest.

And, maybe, Clara doesn’t want anyone to die, so she’s imagined there’s a place where they all go and live happily ever after. So now there is, in whatever version of reality she and the Doctor are in.

[PhileasF @replies]

I liked it.

I’m a little perplexed by complaints that the show is too much about Clara these days. The show started as the companions’ story in 1963, and only really became the Doctor’s story when Ian and Barbara left. After years of companions without ‘arcs’, it became the companion’s story again in Dragonfire (1987) and ever since. I’d say the balance right now is about the same as its been through the whole of the AG series (and the last few seasons of the BG series), with the exception of those specials where the Doctor travelled alone.

An interesting difference is that Clara has an ‘adult relationship’ on the go while she’s travelling with the Doctor, while other companions the post-Dragonfire show has focused on had child/parent or sibling relationships. It is as though the Doctor and his adventures are essentially childlike, so he tends to surround himself with childlike companions. Clara stands out, as a grown-up interloper in our children’s world.

My theory that Missy works for the Doctor — running a pseudo-afterlife where the Doctor’s sending people he’s rescued after they appeared to die during his adventures — took a hit this week. But I think I can deal with it. After all, Clara had just saved the Doctor (and the world). Missy can still be on the Doctor’s side: she chose Clara well, because Clara’s a good protector for the Doctor. The snort and the… well, evil laughter… well, that’s just… would you believe, cultural difference? Where she comes from, snorts and evil laughter are perfectly ordinary everyday noises that anyone might make. Bwa hahahaaa! Like that.

OK, I’m less convinced of that theory now, but I think it’s still a possibility, and the snort and seemingly evil laughter are just misdirection. Or was she working for him, but has now Gone Bad?

Missy’s tablet. Has she hacked the Doctor’s optic nerve? (We saw Clara on Missy’s screen, but not the Doctor.) Does he know about this? There has been a recurring theme this year of performing for unseen watchers/listeners (the Listeners, the Architect and GUS). Was the Doctor’s obsession with the hidden listeners in Listen sparked by a sense that he’s being watched?

In season 6 the Teselecta was established in Let’s Kill Hitler and then became the solution to the season arc. I wonder if a lot of the technology etc being introduced throughout this season will turn out to be part of the explanation of Missy and what she’s doing: the teleporters, the optic nerve hack, the shapeshifting, maybe the miniaturiser in Into the Dalek?

[PhileasF @replies]

Sometimes there are no good choices. But you still have to choose. One of the great instances of this in fiction is in the Odyssey, in the Scylla and Charybdis sequence. Scylla and Charybdis are two ‘hazards to shipping’ that Odysseus has to sail between. He has to sail closer to one or the other. Whichever one he gets closer to will kill some of his men, so he chooses the one he thinks will kill fewer men. Later, he visits the underworld and meets the men who died as a result of his choice. Its a long time since I read the Odyssey, but I remember it being a really interesting sequence — it’s one of the earliest instances in fiction of a man feeling a ‘duty of care’ for other men because they were under his command and depending on him to make the right choices.

I’ve always felt that Doctor Who is basically a descendant of the Odyssey, that the core characteristic of the Doctor is that he comes up with ingenious methods of escaping or defeating monsters. This latest season has foregrounded this other point of similarity, the hero’s regret regarding the people he can’t save.

So… Missy = Penelope? The Doctor’s Missus, who’s been waiting a bloody long time for him to come home?

[PhileasF @replies]

Loved that.

So, straight to the bullet points:

– Apart from Gus the shipboard computer (a la Eddie the Shipboard Computer, in the Hitch-Hikers’ Guide to the Galaxy), there were also ‘hard light holograms’, a term coined in Red Dwarf.

– When the Doctor talks to himself I was reminded of that scene in Day of the Doctor where the Doctors argue, and Matt Smith says ‘This is what I’m like when I’m alone’. But note also that while he talks to himself he’s in bed, a la Listen.

– There were two thousands-of-years-old soldiers who just can’t stop fighting on that train… one of them has worn better than the other.

– Gus, or whoever was running Gus, was like the ‘Architect’ in Time Heist, except (s)he’s working hard to make sure no-one survives rather than that everyone does. The ‘Architect’ in Time Heist was trying to save a unique creature; the object in Mummy on the Orient Express was (maybe) to destroy a unique creature. Mind you, the Mummy probably wasn’t complaining, and might well consider this a rescue.

– It’s been speculated by someone above that Gus (or whoever was running Gus) will turn out to be the Doctor. That’s reasonable, given the parallels with the Architect, but I don’t think the show would go down that road.

– Unless… they were all holograms (except maybe Perkins) and the Doctor engineered the whole scenario to show Clara that he’s not such a bad fellow after all. (OK, this is pretty unlikely.)

– All the ‘real’ people on the train are either staff, or experts who may contribute to defeating the Mummy. Except Mrs Pitt and Maisie. I suggest they were lured to the train as Mummy fodder. They could be killed without diminishing the team’s ability to solve the problem, so the experts would have some evidence to work with before the experts themselves started dying. Mrs Pitt was the most obviously vulnerable person on the train, and if grief would make you a target then Maisie would also be a likely early target.

– @lisa, I agree that Perkins seemed a little suspicious. His keenness to assist the Doctor’s investigation would be consistent with him running the operation. And who would be better placed than the chief engineer to manipulate the computer? The Doctor left him alone in the TARDIS – who knows what he might have got up to?

– The final scenes are very odd. Everyone’s gone away except Perkins. Why is he still there? The Doctor tells Clara he let her sleep… but why is she on the beach? He teleported her, unconscious, into the TARDIS. Then he carried or teleported her out onto the beach? With a blanket, because it’s cold? I think there’s some lying going on here. Perhaps Perkins and the Doctor had a very interesting conversation related to the Missy arc, or to what really happened on the train, and Clara had to be memory-wormed so she’d forget it. Their final conversation in Clara’s presence may be stage-managed for her benefit.

– Perhaps it just seemed nice to end another story on a beach, to create a parallel with the end of Kill the Moon. (This could apply to either the writers, or to the Doctor himself.)

– This episode resembles several episodes of The Avengers, especially The Superlative Seven, which someone mentioned in these fora not long ago. In that episode someone sends false invitations to a number of experts in different fighting techniques, including Steed, to attend a party on a plane. They’re taken to a remote island where they’re pitted against a supposedly unbeatable opponent.

The Superlative Seven was fairly similar to the earlier episode ‘Dressed to Kill’, where various people, including Steed, are lured by means of false invitations onto a train – the reasons are totally different, but the train makes it seem worth mentioning.

– I was intrigued by the records Clara found. I think she said that on one ship where something similar occurred there were only four casualties, suggesting the passengers on that ship also figured out how to ‘deactivate’ the Mummy. Their progress was assessed as ‘Promising’. Was there any evidence those ships also encountered the Mummy? Might they have had their own different monsters to deal with? (I can’t be bothered checking.)

– It seems a bit suspect that this information would happen to be on the train. It implies that whoever was running the operation, or an agent thereof, was present. This dangling thread, and the fact that the real villain of the story went undiscovered and unpunished, makes me think this must be part of the story arc.

A few possible conclusions:

a) The Mummy is a weapon that’s being tested. Can people figure out how to stop it? Assessing the passengers who presumably defeated the Mummy as ‘Promising’ would tend to contradict this conclusion. But it would explain why you’d keep trying the experiment after one ship has apparently solved the problem.

or

b) It’s the people on the train who are being tested. Someone wants to find very clever people who are good at dealing with difficult problems, and kill them. This would make sense if the person looking for clever problem solvers has access to the dead. i.e. Missy. If this is true, assessing those passengers as ‘promising’ would make sense.

or

c) The organiser was mainly interested in killing the Mummy. (Or disabling it, hence the sarcophagus). Either Missy is bothered that the Mummy is immortal, and therefore out of her control; or she’s bothered that it’s killing so many people and thus creating queues in ‘Heaven’. Perhaps the other ship’s passengers had only managed to protect themselves from the Mummy without actually killing it.

– Missy’s associate ‘Seb’, in The Caretaker: his name is a diminutive of Sebastian, a popular saint.
‘Gus’ is also a diminutive of a famous saint’s name: Augustine.

– Sebastian was a soldier in the Roman army. He is the patron saint of athletes, archers and soldiers. Possibly also of PE teachers.

– Augustine’s ‘Confessions’ is probably the earliest autobiography that is still much read. He was, among other things, a teacher of grammar. He’s the patron saint of brewers, because he liked a drink before he got religious. Clara is an English teacher, and lately is often seen drinking. I suspect these seeming connections are meaningless noise.

[PhileasF @replies]

@purofilion – Has another companion gone so completely berserk before?

Good question. I just fast-forwarded through the first 26 years (what a rush!) Strangely, I remember the BG series better than most of the AG series, despite not watching very much of the BG series during the last 10 years.

There are a few close contenders that I can recall.

In the early episodes, the Doctor and Ian were occasionally at each other’s throats. Here’s a memorable example from The Daleks episode 1. The Doctor has just revealed he sabotaged the TARDIS to provide a pretext for exploring the Dalek city, when everyone else wanted to leave the planet. This transcript, and others below, are from the very useful ‘Doctor Who transcripts‘ site:

IAN: You fool. You old fool!
DOCTOR: Abuse me as much as you like, Chesterton. The point is we need an immediate return to the ship, and I suggest we leave at once.
IAN: We’re not leaving until we’ve found Barbara.
DOCTOR: Very well. You may stay and search for her if you wish, but Susan and I are going back to the ship. Now, come along, child.
IAN: All right, carry on, fine. How far do you think you’ll get without this? (the fluid link)
DOCTOR: Give that to me.
IAN: Not until we’ve found Barbara.
DOCTOR: Give it to me, I say.
IAN: No! It’s time you faced up to your responsibilities. You got us here. Now I’m going to make sure that you get us back.

In The Massacre episode 4, Steven is bothered by the Doctor’s refusal to save his friend Anne Chaplet from the massacre of St Bartholemew’s Eve. It’s one of the great lost moments of Doctor Who. I think part of it was recreated for An Adventure in Time and Space, but I may be wrong.

STEVEN: Surely there was something we could have done?
DOCTOR: No, nothing. Nothing. In any case, I cannot change the course of history, you know that. The massacre continued for several days in Paris and then spread itself to other parts of France. Oh, what a senseless waste. What a terrible page of the past.
STEVEN: Did they all die?
DOCTOR: Yes, most of them. About ten thousand in Paris alone.
STEVEN: The Admiral?
DOCTOR: Yes.
STEVEN: Nicholas? You had to leave Anne Chaplet there to die.
DOCTOR: Anne Chaplet?
STEVEN: The girl! The girl who was with me! If you’d brought her with us she needn’t have died. But no, you had to leave her there to be slaughtered.
DOCTOR: Well, it is possible of course she didn’t die, and I was right to leave her.
STEVEN: Possible? Look, how possible? That girl was already hunted by the Catholic guards. If they killed ten thousand how did they spare her? You don’t know, do you? You can’t say for certain that you weren’t responsible for that girl’s death.
DOCTOR: I was not responsible.
STEVEN: Oh, no. You just sent her back to her aunt’s house where the guards were waiting to catch her. I tell you this much, Doctor, wherever this machine of yours lands next I’m getting off. If your researches have so little regard for human life then I want no part of it.
DOCTOR: We’ve landed. Your mind is made up?
(The Tardis doors open.)
STEVEN: Goodbye.
DOCTOR: My dear Steven, history sometimes gives us a terrible shock, and that is because we don’t quite fully understand. Why should we? After all, we’re all too small to realise its final pattern. Therefore don’t try and judge it from where you stand. I was right to do as I did. Yes, that I firmly believe.
(Steven leaves the Tardis without another word.)
DOCTOR: Even after all this time he cannot understand. I dare not change the course of history. Well, at least I taught him to take some precautions. He did remember to look at the scanner before he opened the doors. Now they’re all gone. All gone. None of them could understand. Not even my little Susan, or Vicki. And as for Barbara and Chatterton. Chesterton. They were all too impatient to get back to their own time. And now, Steven. Perhaps I should go home, back to my own planet. But I can’t. I can’t.

In the next scene they meet Dodo Chaplet, a girl who seems to be a 1960s descendant of Anne: if they’re right, Anne must have lived. This conclusion only really makes sense if Anne had an illegitimate son, which lends support to the bonkers theory that Dodo is also Steven’s descendant.

In Evil of the Daleks episode 5, Jamie has a similar outburst:

JAMIE: Och, don’t touch me!
DOCTOR: Oh, now what’s the matter?
JAMIE: Anyone would think this was a little game.
DOCTOR: No it is not a game.
JAMIE: Of course it isn’t, Doctor. People have died. The Daleks are all over the place, fit to murder the lot of us, and all you can say is you’ve had a good night’s work.
DOCTOR: Jamie.
JAMIE: No, Doctor. Look, I’m telling you this. You and me, we’re finished. You’re just too callous for me. Anything goes by the board. Anything at all.
DOCTOR: That’s just not true, Jamie. I’ve never held that the end justifies the means.
JAMIE: Och, words. What do I care about words? You don’t give that much for a living soul except yourself.
DOCTOR: I care about life. I care about human beings. Do you think I let you go through that Dalek test lightly?
JAMIE: I don’t know. Did you? Look, Doctor, just whose side are you on?

He gets over it pretty quickly.

[PhileasF @replies]

@idiotsavon – Thanks for the kind words. Nice to know someone enjoys the posts.

I’ve been thinking about the Doctor’s ‘grey area’ regarding the future, and trying to work out the metaphysics of time travel (according to Kill the Moon).

As far as I can tell, the Doctor never had a ‘grey area’ about post-2049 history before. I think the grey area appears the moment the TARDIS arrived in 2049.

Prior to the TARDIS’s arrival, history was probably like this: the expedition to the Moon failed, because everyone was killed by spider germs before they could harm the Moon Dragon. The Moon Dragon hatched, and inspired the world to start thinking about space travel again.

As soon as the TARDIS arrives, a grey area appears in the Doctor’s knowledge of post-2049 history, because the TARDIS crew will interact with the shuttle mission and potentially change this important piece of history. By helping Lundvik survive the spider germs, so now she may or may not kill the Moon Dragon, the TARDIS crew has created a situation where humanity may or may not become a major spacefaring civilisation.

I think that in the ‘new’ version of history that results from the TARDIS crew’s interference, humanity become even more of a spacefaring civilisation than it was in the original version of future history. Because humanity has been inspired by the Moon Dragon, and Lundvik is also alive to bring her knowledge, experience and passion to the new space program.

@quantumassassin – I love the idea that Sally Sparrow is the woman in the shop. Wouldn’t it be awesome if she were to return for another ‘timey-wimey’ adventure, in which the Doctor gives her his phone number and she gives it to Clara. Thus the whole Clara arc could become a massive Moffat loop similar to Blink — but also with Sally Sparrow from Blink at the heart of it. I almost believe it could happen. Carey Mulligan is a big star now, but if John Hurt can secretly record some Doctor Who, then maybe she could and would too. (I just googled her… apparently her family lives in Wales, so she could probably pop in to Cardiff for a day or two to shoot a Doctor Who episode while visiting them.) An additional piece of evidence for this theory: Clara seems fond of classic books, so she might well visit an antiquarian bookshop.

@melloyello – The connection between Courtney and Mels: I like this idea, but I doubt it will turn out to be literally true. But maybe the Doctor likes Courtney and wants to take her on a few trips in the TARDIS because she reminds him so much of River when she was young.

@No-one-in-particular – There is another possible significance of the Dickens quote. The ‘unseen’ character in those opening sentences of David Copperfield is his mother, Clara. Some have suggested Clara might be pregnant, so her choice of a text in which a Clara gives birth may be another clue supporting that.

[PhileasF @replies]

@thebrainofmoffat – 7. The Doctor says something about the Moon being, what, 100 million years old? The Moon is actually thought to be billions of years old, yet no one said anything about the age he said it was?!

He says the Moon’s been tagging along with our planet for 100 million years. So it can still be billions of years old, but it only entered Earth orbit about 100 million years ago. (In the BG story Doctor Who and the Silurians, the approach of the Moon led the Silurians to go into hibernation to survive the expected impact. The date at which that occurred is vague. But there were dinosaurs.)

@scaryb – I agree the vote was Clara’s attempt to avoid responsibility. I think she hoped they’d vote to save the creature, then she could do what she wanted all along and it wouldn’t be her fault if the Earth was destroyed.

[PhileasF @replies]

PS… on a bonkers theorising note: if this episode had aired last year we’d have discussed the flickering lights and the egg. Maybe all those flickering lights and eggs are still going to turn out to mean something?

[PhileasF @replies]

I disliked this episode less on the second viewing…

In between viewings I had a chance to think about my main gripe, the increase in the Moon’s gravity. I think the increased gravity, as experienced by people standing on the Moon’s surface, could actually be explained by localised increases in the density of the matter beneath certain points on the surface — i.e. because that matter was being concentrated into a big space creature. However, I don’t think it is at all feasible that Courtney could experience ‘normal’ 1/6g lunar gravity while the other characters were still experiencing gravity of 1g. They were all so close together that any plausible mass within the moon, consistent with the story, exerting a gravitational influence on one of them, would affect them all about equally.

Also, localised increases in density within the Moon would not explain why the Moon now exerts a greater gravitational influence on the Earth. That must have a different explanation, such as the Moon moving a lot closer to the Earth, while still looking about the same size in the sky. Or lots of matter arriving on the Moon from somewhere else without anyone noticing.

And if the Moon’s gravitational attraction increased a lot, I think more would be affected than tides. The whole Earth/Moon relationship would be altered. Unless the Moon started revolving about the Earth a lot faster, I think it and the Earth would probably start to spiral towards each other and eventually collide. But I Am Not a Physicist.

These gravitational nitpicks could, I’m sure, be explained in a way that makes sense in the Doctor Who universe. But they weren’t.

Also, the seeming cluelessness of one of the astronauts seemed unlikely. Maybe he joined the mission late, but you’d think someone would have thought to mention how the bombs work during the trip. It seemed like a laugh at the expense of plausibility.

My last nitpick: why did they go to the trouble of bringing all those bombs to the Moon? Before they knew the nature of the problem, how did they think those would help? The screams of the miners may have made them suspect hostile aliens in need of nuking… but then why not bring guns as well?

This, by the way, explains everything: the universe was rebooted from Amy’s memories, so any implausibilities must result from her lack of knowledge of science. Maybe when she was a kid she wondered if the Moon could be an egg. So it is. 🙂

Now that I think of it… what were Amy’s views on the afterlife?

Some non-nitpick thoughts and observations.

– Clara is, in a manner of speaking, in the Doctor’s orbit; at the end she seems to break away from his influence. The Moon Dragon flying away from the Earth is a metaphor for what’s going on in Clara’s story.

– This is one of the few Doctor Who episodes that would pass the ‘Bechdel test‘. (There’s more than one woman in the story, and women talk about something other than a man.) Not many Doctor Who episodes pass the test, which is unsurprising for a show with a male main character. If I recall correctly, Into the Dalek passes (because of Gretchen and Missy’s scene). And The Big Bang (Amelia and the child psychologist). I’m sure there are more.

– Given the limited information available, if I believed setting off the bombs would save the Earth and kill the creature, I’d have set off the bombs. Interestingly, the moral question seems entirely focused on whether it’s OK to kill the creature to save the Earth. Clara, Courtney and Lundvik would also die. Don’t their lives count for something?

– Nobody knows if the creature is sentient or not. Would you risk the Earth to save a baby squirrel? A baby rat? A mosquito larva?

– And hey, what if the question was reversed: should you gamble with the Earth to save one unknown space creature? I think, as a general rule, you shouldn’t gamble with the Earth.

– Clara’s decision is consistent with her tendency to take care of children.

– The Doctor’s lack of awareness of the outcome was interesting. I accepted that he really didn’t know how things would turn out or what would be the outcome of each choice. As far as I could tell, a previously unknown future was created the moment Clara and Courtney acted on their choice. From that instant, the Doctor knows how the future will unfold because he remembers that future. It’s only after that moment that he can return to Clara and co without influencing their decision, to save them from the breakup of the egg.

– The Doctor’s lack of knowledge of the future has a great parallel in the BG series, in Pyramids of Mars. In that story, set in 1911, Sarah says they should just get in the TARDIS and leave, because they know everything is fine in 1980, where she comes from. So the Doctor takes her to 1980, where the Earth is now a lifeless rock. In that case, choosing to go ’causes’ a future where the Earth is destroyed. They get a preview of what ‘happened’ when they left without trying to defeat the villain. I’m not sure this version of time travel is consistent with the current series though.

– What if they’d left when Clara said they should? I think almost everything would have been OK, except that Lundvik would have died too. She’d almost certainly have been killed by spider germs before being able to detonate the bombs. And all the panic created by Clara telling the world ‘There’s a huge space creature in the Moon! It might kill us all!’ would have been averted. They weren’t voting when the lights went out. That was the fear-crazed rioters taking out the power grid 🙂

– Perhaps unusually, judging by other comments, I think the Doctor did the right thing by leaving humans to make the choice. He displays a kind of humility in ensuring he doesn’t dictate humanity’s future. For one thing, he might take risks with humanity’s future that humans wouldn’t, because he isn’t one and he might not care more about them than he cares about a unique space creature. If he even offered an opinion about what he thought would happen, that would certainly influence Clara and would be little different than just making the decision himself. And he can’t really just stand there trying not to express an opinion on what’s going on. Given that the outcome of the choice is genuinely a gamble, it seems right to me that humans should take that gamble.

– In The Caretaker, the Doctor was criticised for being an officer. In Kill the Moon Clara wants him to be more like an officer and remove her need to exercise judgment and make choices.

– The Doctor tells Courtney, ‘Don’t try that at home.’ I think this was to stop kids in the audience from spraying spiders with disinfectant, which would be cruel.

– If only Sally Sparrow had known she had to hang onto the console 🙂

– I laughed at Courtney’s parody of Neil Armstrong’s speech after first stepping onto the Moon.

– On a completely trivial note, the Doctor works out the date by noting the presence of an early ‘Bennett oscillator’. A Bennett oscillator also helps him estimate the date in The Ark in Space. (It was named for the director of that story, Rodney Bennett.) You can see it on tumblr 🙂

– The Charles Dickens quote on the whiteboard, the first few sentences of David Copperfield, may be pertinent to Clara’s story:

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.

(I can’t easily see how much of the quote is included on the whiteboard. It may show less than I have quoted.)

Will Clara be the hero of her own story, or will that station be held by anybody else? And like David, Twelve made her cry 🙂

[PhileasF @replies]

@badwulf – I agree that The Five Doctors is underrated. The best BG Doctor Who writer, Robert Holmes, had a crack at writing a 20th anniversary special that brought back all the characters it was supposed to bring back, and he couldn’t. That Terrance Dicks could bring them all together in a story that’s fun, makes sense, and also contributes some great new stuff to the show, like the Raston Warrior Robot and the Death Zone, says much about his underrated skills as a writer.

[PhileasF @replies]

@badwulf – I always take the latest understanding in cosmology with a grain of salt, as it’s prone to change as new discoveries are made. Given the massive unknowns (dark matter, dark energy) that seem to make up much of what’s going on in the universe, and all the unknown unknowns that we don’t even know we don’t know about yet, I think the fate of the universe is still an open question.

@thommck – Thanks.

I just had a look at the BBC site, and you’re right, it will be a good place to look after seeing each episode. It blows away my idea that the derelict building was the junkyard (by not mentioning it, when it mentions evey other nod to the past).

@various – There’s been some discussion of why the Doctor said he didn’t want Clara to come on his next adventure. I think he was just playing. The next adventure was at her work, so she didn’t have to come with him, he came to her! And I think he genuinely wanted to surprise her and see if she could see through his disguise.

[PhileasF @replies]

@purofilion – I thought it was ‘sing with the orphans’. I hate to join the ranks of those who can’t understand accents outside New York/LA/received pronunciation/Australian capital cities… but I have to admit, a couple of times per episode I’m just guessing at what the Doctor’s saying. This isn’t unique to Doctor Who, though — when watching movies and TV shows on DVD I’m always rewinding and turning on the subtitles. When I watch a movie at the cinema I’m always thinking, ‘When I buy the DVD of this I’ll be able to turn on the subtitles to find out what that guy said.’ Probably I notice it more in Doctor Who because of the online discussion of the new Doctor’s accent.

I really think TV and movie makers need to initiate a comprehensibility review, where someone with normal hearing points out all the dialogue that they can’t understand, so it can be re-recorded. I think comprehensibility reviewer would be a good job. I’d consider it.

Also, now that you remind me of the dialogue in the episode, I realise my review should have mentioned how good it was. I think I’ve become so used to such good, funny dialogue in the new show (which is my term for everything since Rose) that I hardly notice how good it usually is. Hardly any episodes of the old show (i.e. the 20th century show) had such good dialogue. Mainly just City of Death.

@lordallons-y – Hi. The War Doctor was a very well-developed character. But there’s a big difference between him and the 12th Doctor – the War Doctor was designed to be fully developed and done with in an hour or less of screen time, whereas the 12th Doctor has plenty of time to be developed, probably two seasons or longer. His story is still only beginning.

@serahni – Hmmmm… re The City of the Saved, which I have heard about but haven’t read. You have reminded me of a real-world theory which fits with Missy’s world.

There is a theory, the reputation of which stands somewhere between semi-respectable and totally mad, called the Omega Point. Google will explain much. In a nutshell, the theory is this:

• Unless someone stops it, the universe will eventually collapse in a ‘big crunch’.
• Our remote near-the-end-of-the-universe descendants will be much cleverer than us, and will use the energy of the collapsing universe to create a massive computer consisting of all the matter and energy in the universe.
• This computer, called the ‘Omega Point’, will be designed to run a simulation of the universe which will be indistinguishable from the real thing.
• It will seem, from the point of view of the simulated intelligences inside it, to last forever.
• In this eternal ‘Omega Point’ simulation of the universe, every sentient being that ever lived will live again. And possibly every sentient being that ever could have lived. Because the ‘Omega point’ will last forever, the mathematics of infinity gets involved. Every possible permutation of possible intelligent beings gets to meet.
• If you accept Omega Point theory, you must acknowledge this: the ‘real’ universe had a lifespan of perhaps 30 to 100 billion years. I made those numbers up, but basically the ‘real’ universe has a finite lifespan. The Omega Point has a lifespan of eternity. Therefore, any intelligent being that accepts the truth of Omega Point theory must conclude that they probably live in the Omega Point. If you look at a timeline of the time in which intelligent beings exist, the period that the ‘real’ universe exists is a literally infinitesimal fraction of the eternity that the Omega Point exists. Therefore you and I must live in the Omega Point. The world you and I live in is a computer-generated simulation designed to look and feel like the ‘real’ universe did, and you and I may or may not be perfect copies of people who actually lived in the real universe.

I believe in Omega Point theory… for about three minutes every third Tuesday.

It may or may not be a coincidence that Frank Tipler, the physicist who published this theory in his book The Physics of Immortality, is best known for designing a number of time machines that would work, according to the known laws of physics. (Building any of them requires a technological capability far beyond what we have at the moment or are likely to have for thousands of years.)

@rob – I don’t think that’s coffee. Sounds like Merlot to me 🙂 I’m more of a shiraz man myself.

@flirtingdinosaur – I always try hard to see what those books are, but I’ve never managed to see a title yet.

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It occurs to me that my posts tend to consist mostly of trivial bullet points and improbable theories. So here, for once, is something more like an actual review, with opinions and everything.

My initial reaction to this episode was that I mostly enjoyed the Doctor/Clara/Danny sequences, but found the ‘monster subplot’ pretty poor.

Even the ‘relationship arc’ had elements I wasn’t sure of. The Doctor’s unpleasantness to Clara seems increasingly over the top. I keep having to tell myself I’m watching a complexly irony-rich relationship, where every time the Doctor says Clara needs a wash he really means: ‘Remember, as if your life depends on it, I’m not human’; and every time she puts up with his insults she’s saying, ‘I know you’re just being complexly ironic at me and I’m sort of OK with that as it is offset by the amazingness.’

His insults aren’t random noise: they seem intentionally hurtful — only someone with a good understanding of human social mores could transgress them so thoroughly. If we discount the idea that the Doctor’s social blindness is designed by scriptwriters to be humorous to a human audience, we’d have to assume he knows exactly what he’s doing and is intentionally pushing Clara away.

I’m reminded of Susan’s departure in The Dalek Invasion of Earth, where the Doctor locks Susan out of the TARDIS, seemingly because he thinks she should be having an adult human relationship rather than hanging out with her grandfather all the time. She is 16-ish after all and, OK, civilisation has collapsed and all that, but David seems like a nice boy who’d be easily led by a strong woman.

Anyway, my gut feel is that the best explanation for the Doctor’s bullying behaviour is that he wants Clara to grow out of him and have a life of her own. Clara is the Susan-analogue in this series. She’s the Unearthly Girl, passing herself off as a normal human at Coal Hill school, while a number of teachers and students take an interest in her. But instead of being flung from that situation into adventures in time and space, she’s going to be flung into the adventure of ordinary life. Possibly.

Another element that stuck in my craw on first viewing is the seriousness of Danny and Clara’s relationship, the realism.

I fully understand the people who react against this aspect of The Caretaker. At an emotional level I agree; rationally I have managed to talk myself around. Danny does seem controlling, and bordering on aggressive in his insistence that Clara promise to do what he wants. But this seems perfectly real, and consistent with Danny being a good guy who cares about Clara but isn’t very good at expressing himself. We’re used to treating the Doctor’s death-defying adventures as a bit of a laugh, so someone who treats them realistically, who treats serious risks as serious risks, sticks out in the series as a spoiler of fun. When Danny suggests they evacuate the school, that seems sensible, easily achieved using a fire alarm, and easily explained away afterwards.

If you think of the episode from Danny’s point of view, it’s the Doctor and Clara who’s behaviour seems bizarrely and offensively wrong, needlessly risking the lives of the students and teachers for whom they’re responsible. The series on the whole has a cavalier attitude to death and risk, and it’s easy for the audience to adopt a mindset of ignoring the death in Doctor Who because it’s all part of the fun. Danny brings to the series a more real-world attitude, which might be a refreshing and revitalising change. But right now it sticks out as a note of deadly seriousness in our fun show.

I’ve enjoyed Gareth Roberts’s work since way back. I own hundreds (really? yes!) of original Doctor Who novels, but back when I was buying them all, his were among the few I’d actually read. I really dug his enjoyment of season 17 of the original series, when Doctor Who was a comedy science fiction show, which at its best (City of Death, Shada) was great comedy science fiction, and one of the best versions of Doctor Who — and at its worst (most of the rest of season 17) was pretty bad. There’s a case to be made that that version of Doctor Who — let’s say, to be precise, the City of Death version of Doctor Who — is one of the best things Doctor Who can be, but only if it’s being written by a genius like Douglas Adams.

Over the past ten years I haven’t watched much original series Doctor Who. For a few months in 2013 I watched some classics as part of my observance of the 50th anniversary. But in the past ten years I must’ve watched City of Death three times. I’d watch it again tonight, except I’m going to watch the last four episodes of Elementary season 2 instead. Tomorrow, then.

After writing his original Doctor Who novels, Gareth became a TV pro, and so with his Doctor Who love and pro-TV smarts I have pretty high expectations of him. His previous Doctor Who episodes met those expectations for me. But the Skovox Blitzer didn’t. Yes, this episode is all about relationships and there’s only room for a few minutes of monster. But the few minutes of monster should have been better. The Skovox Blitzer feels too postmodern, too self-consciously ‘I’m intended to be a very silly Doctor Who monster, so don’t pay too much attention to me, there’s more interesting things happening elsewhere in this episode.’ The episode would have been stronger if the alien threat was less absurd-looking and absurd-sounding, but still able to be realised in five minutes or less of screen time, and still able to fulfil its thematic role as a thoughtless order-following soldier who the Doctor could command, ‘officer’ style. No, I can’t think of a better alternative off-hand, but I think Gareth Roberts could.

So all things considered, this was one of the weaker episodes for me this year: funny, which makes up for almost everything, not great as a story in itself, but making good contributions to the ongoing storyline.

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@blenkinsopthebrave – thanks for the clip, I really need to watch that movie again. As I recall, the question of what’s really going on is left ambiguous – the ‘heaven’ we see might be real, or a result of the airman’s neurological condition.

You’ve set me thinking about a possible Powell/Pressberger influence on this season… The Life and Death of Colonel Pink? Danny’s concerns about the Doctor’s ability to make Clara take risks bears comparison to The Red Shoes. That movie’s heroine also has to choose between love and an all-consuming career.

[PhileasF @replies]

This might be obvious, but I felt a need to spell it out, if only for my own benefit, to crystallise my thoughts about the show: the Doctor’s sudden distaste for soldiers (since Into the Dalek), seems hypocritical and inconsistent with his friendships with soldiers in the original series. Clearly it’s part of his new self-hatred thing. He doesn’t like soldiers, or ex-soldiers, because he’s an ex-soldier and he doesn’t like himself. (This, I think, is also why he couldn’t believe in Robin Hood: because he doesn’t believe in himself any more.)

Clara: I hate you!
The Doctor: That’s fine, it’s a perfectly normal reaction.

This has no doubt been mentioned before, but just in case: Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, one of the Doctor’s most enduring friends, became a maths teacher when he left UNIT.

The Doctor’s insults against Clara: his heavy-handed attempt to pretend he has no idea about humans any more, or is he working hard to convince Clara that he no longer imagines himself to be her boyfriend? Does he protest too much? Or does he really have no idea about humans any more?

Danny’s somersault: with skills like that, maybe he could be a PE teacher, if the maths thing doesn’t work out. Perhaps this is a skill he’s learned in his time travelling adventures (assuming my theory that he has his own time-traveller who takes him on adventures pans out).

Courtney’s parents seem to have met Danny at last year’s parent-teacher night. (‘Yeah, but last year you said she was a very disruptive influence’.) But we saw Danny’s first day at the school in Into the Dalek. So, has more than a year elapsed in Clara’s ‘real’ life since then? Was Courtney previously at a different school where Danny was also a teacher? Did Danny travel back in time, meet Courtney’s parents and… oh forget it, that’s too silly. Probably.

The policeman investigating the derelict building echoes the opening scene of the original series, where a policeman takes a brief interest in the junkyard where the TARDIS is parked, and then moves off.

The policeman dies because of the Doctor, like everyone else we’ve seen going to the nethersphere. If the Doctor didn’t keep visiting Coal Hill school and its surroundings, presumably the Skovox Blitzer wouldn’t have been drawn to Earth and the area around the school.

Could the derelict building actually be the junkyard? It’s within walking distance of Coal Hill school. It has creepy mannequins, as did the original junkyard. Since the TARDIS was parked there for a time, and the Doctor’s visited it a number of times since, it’s likely to be a major source of the artron energy that attracted the Skovox Blitzer to Earth. When the Doctor arrives at the building he says, ‘Home sweet home.’ Because it’s the home of the Skovox Blitzer, or his own old home?

Re Clara and the mirrors. This may have been suggested before, but I think this is a stylistic device reflecting (ahem) her attempt to live two separate lives, one as a normal person and one as a time-travelling adventurer. The mirrors seem to appear when she’s finding it difficult to juggle her two lives.

I like the idea that the tesselator (or something very like it) is bringing people to the nethersphere; and that maybe the people who ran the tesselator also run the nethersphere.

[PhileasF @replies]

@thommck – I like the diagram. It matches my understanding of the episode.

The phone number is in a ‘Moffat loop’, as the cast and crew apparently call it. Old Karabraxos phoned the Doctor. The Doctor time-travelled into her past and gave Young Karabraxos his phone number. Young Karabraxos became Old Karabraxos and called the number.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine coined the term ‘predestination paradox’ for this kind of thing. Possibly its earliest appearance in Doctor Who is in Day of the Daleks, where time travellers cause the very thing they were trying to prevent. IIRC, Stephen Moffat is in the Day of the Daleks DVD extras talking about how much he loved it as a kid.

This idea has been a staple of time travel fiction for more then 100 years. The earliest example I know, and one of the best, is the short story ‘Enoch Soames’ by Max Beerbohm, which can be read (legally) for free on the internet. I recommend it as one of the best short stories ever. It almost out-Moffats Moffat. (My favourite bit is at the end, where the narrator seems to anticipate nitpickers, as if aware that someday there will be an internet, and painstakingly explains away the logic holes people might imagine they’ve found.)

Another great example is in the novel The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers.

That such ‘acausal loops’ can occur feels wrong, but some physicists speculate that they’re happening all the time at the atomic level. An event that apparently occurs routinely is the ‘spontaneous’ creation of a positron and an electron: they seem to be created out of nothing at the same point in space, then they briefly fly apart, and then, due to their electrostatic attraction as oppositely charged particles, they collide and annihilate each other. Some physicists have speculated that the positron is actually the electron travelling backwards in time, and that when we observe this electron/positron creation/annihilation, we’re really observing an ‘acausal loop’ in which an electron travels forward in time, then changes direction and travels backward in time.

[PhileasF @replies]

@janetteb – ‘why that face?’ – I’d forgotten about that, but it ties in nicely.

And re Stephen Moffat recycling ideas. You’ve reminded me of something I meant to mention in the Listen discussion: it resembles one of the best episodes of Moffat’s earlier series Press Gang: ‘Going Back to Jasper Street’.

In that episode, Lynda sees a photo of a wooden figurine she owned as a child. She doesn’t know where it came from or where it went. As soon as the lights went out, this ‘wooden man’ would become a figure of terror. She hasn’t seen it in years, but it’s just been reported stolen from an elderly woman’s home. The episode blends Lynda’s present-day investigation with the childhood memories the investigation rekindles. The mystery is, I thought, ingeniously resolved.

The episode foreshadows a lot of Moffat’s later work, with a non-linear narrative (with scenes in the present intercut with scenes from Lynda’s childhood) used to tell a story that couldn’t be told as well any other way.

The episode is also notable for one character’s explanation for the mystery:

Well, it’s obvious isn’t it? A freak worm hole has opened up in the fabric of the space-time continuum. This seemingly insignificant woodcarving has been sucked back in time ten years to the bedroom of the infant Lynda Day. But what awesome celestial forces are behind this strange phenomenon? And what, Lynda, is their evil purpose? We shall have to act quickly to save the entire Universe!

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@purofilion – re whether the Doctor is keeping what he’s doing secret because he’ll have to rescue Clara in the same way.

I think not necessarily. He’s just a nice man 🙂

I think several things might have led him to start ‘rescuing’ people:

a) He’s cheated death, by getting a new set of regenerations. So he might feel more than ever that it’s unfair that so many people give up their one short life on his behalf.

b) Finding out about the Claricles, many of whom must have sacrificed themselves for him without him even noticing they existed, might make him feel a bit guilty.

c) Having saved Gallifrey, it’s occurred to him that he could save lots of other people in the same way, without breaking any laws of time, if he’s really careful.

d) On Trenzalore he must have had a lot of time to think, and perhaps reflected on his past life and all the times he could have saved someone if he’d really tried.

[PhileasF @replies]

@purofilion – But how is it that in this episode he says pointedly, “You’re alive. You’re not dead. You’re here”

The Doctor seems genuinely surprised that Saibre and Psi aren’t dead.

He (as the architect) has engineered a situation where he (amnesiac bank robber) and his colleagues will genuinely believe anyone who escaped during the bank heist has died, in order to deceive the Teller when it reads their minds.

Also, he knows they couldn’t be rescued in the TARDIS later, because the solar storm prevents it visiting the place and time they ‘died’. And even if he could somehow find a way to save them, he’d send them to Missy, so they wouldn’t be here. He’s not only surprised they’re not dead; he’s also surprised they’re ‘here’.

I think the Doctor is probably trying to keep what he’s doing from Clara. He must think she’d disapprove of the risk he’s taking in repeatedly crossing his own timeline.

So while Clara is keeping her private life secret from him, he also has a private life that he’s keeping from her.

[PhileasF @replies]

@idiotsavon – (Karabraxos: “I am old, with many many regrets”. Doctor: “I’ve made many mistakes. It’s about time I did something about that”.) Yes, I think there’s a definite parallel.

@janetteb – I think here the Doctor really shows just how much he does care. I think you’re right. I’ve completely reversed my ‘sociopath’ opinion since last night, due to… what else but a bonkers theory?

Here it is:

Deep Breath has its famous gap just before we see the cyborg impaled, so we don’t know if the Doctor pushed him, or if the cyborg jumped. But maybe the gap contains a third option: the Doctor arranges an escape plan for the cyborg. We might think: he killed the cyborg, that’s dark. We might think: he talked the cyborg into killing himself… that’s still pretty dark. The truth: he saved the cyborg — so he’s still nice!

In Into the Dalek we are all led to believe those soldiers are really dying. More importantly, all the other characters are led to believe it.

But if the Doctor arranged for them to be rescued, but allowed it to appear that they were killed, then who is he deceiving?

Time.

Because he’s not clever enough to figure out how to save everyone in advance, like he did with Saibre and Psi. That required detailed planning.

No: after each adventure, the Doctor is taking the TARDIS back to a convenient spot and secretly saving everyone who died. At least those who died because of him, or while helping him. The benefit of hindsight and lots of working out on the blackboard allows him to come up with a way to save them.

Time travelling into his own past is a big no-no as it risks paradox and the collapse of the space time continuum. But if the ‘dead’ can be removed to a place of safety a moment before they were killed, and their removal looks exactly the same as being killed, then history is not being messed with, much. The Doctor just has to follow a simple rule: because he’s interacting with his own and Clara’s past, he has to save the ‘dead’ in a way that doesn’t make any difference to the way the events appeared to happen when he and Clara first experienced them.

History isn’t being changed. There isn’t a version of the events where the people die and another version that looks the same but where they are secretly rescued. We and Clara just didn’t realise those people were being saved. The Doctor knows they look like they’ve died, but haven’t really, because he will have saved them. But since they appeared to die, he knows that when he goes back to save them he’ll have to save them in a way that makes them appear to have died. In short, he has to make sure everything looks exactly like it did when he and Clara and any other witnesses saw it happen.

This explains why he seems a bit callous when people die: he knows they’re fine.

I’m sure it all makes sense if you fill up enough butcher’s paper… and your butcher’s paper can be folded through four dimensions.

This is similar to the way the Doctor escaped his certain death in season 6.

And it’s what happened to Gallifrey. He thought Gallifrey had been destroyed, but it had been saved all along, by the Doctor(s) time-travelling into his own past and saving Gallifrey in a way that made it look as though it had been destroyed.

Time Heist is the first time Clara and the audience actually see him save someone who appeared to have died. He had to give the likely victims their escape route in advance, because the TARDIS wouldn’t be able to visit the place and time where they would die, so he wouldn’t be able to save them later. But unlike most of his adventures, he was able to plan every detail of this one in advance. And because he didn’t have to time travel into his own past to rescue Saibre and Psi, paradox didn’t need to be avoided by sending them to Missy’s place.

In summary, the arc is based on a classic Stephen Moffat idea, bound to infuriate his haters: ‘Everybody lives!’

Where might this go, story-wise? The Doctor or Clara might catch the future Doctor in the act of saving someone. The future Doctor will say, ‘Oh no, this didn’t happen the first time!’ Hence paradox, hence collapse of the spacetime continuum a la The Wedding of River Song.

[PhileasF @replies]

Another thought. This episode felt less ‘dark’ than we’ve seen lately. But perhaps this is the darkest we’ve ever seen the Doctor.

This is the first time, as far as I can recall, that the Doctor has had employees. They’ve agreed to risk their lives to obtain the thing they most want. The Doctor has identified their heart’s desire, found or made it, and placed it in the bank’s vault so they’ll agree to help him.

This level of manipulation would make Doctor 7 blush. There’s been a tendency in recent years to label the Doctor a sociopath, but this might be the first really sociopathic thing we’ve seen him do.

[PhileasF @replies]

I didn’t really care for Stephen Thompson’s first episode (Curse of the Black Spot), but thought Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS was pretty good. If he keeps improving at this rate, he could become one of the great Doctor Who writers.

At first I couldn’t quite see how the Doctor was able to plant the suitcases prior to the heist. On second viewing I think the idea is that the TARDIS can visit the bank prior to the solar storm, but not during it. But the Doctor can’t rescue the Teller and his friend until the very last moment before the bank closes down, when Karabraxos has left. Thus he needs to be there at the very time that the TARDIS can’t get into the private vault, hence the whole complicated heist set-up.

Why did the Doctor think the teleport devices were suicide machines? My guess is that he intentionally made them to resemble some suicide machine technology he’s seen, so that whenever anyone used one, the ‘survivors’ would think they had died, and thus fool the Teller into thinking so too.

The Doctor first seems to work out who the Architect is by realising that he hates the Architect. Even after he seems to have worked out that the Architect is himself, he reiterates that he hates him. Thus it would seem that this Doctor hates himself. A career break for a therapist indeed. Karabraxos’s self-burning is a mirror for his self-hatred. And Saibre’s belief that no-one can trust someone who looks just like themselves caps the self-hating theme. Hell isn’t other people; it’s a mirror. And we keep seeing Clara mirrored: last week, with her three-sided mirror, and the time-travelly path-crossing that let her watch herself walk away from the restaurant; this week, when Saibre imitates her; and next week the mirror is back, according to the ‘next week’ trailer.

Clara and Danny’s brief scene at the start of the episode: for once, we don’t see it edited into a non-linear sequence — instead, Danny speaks ‘out of order’.

The Teller and friend were wearing outfits a little like Orson Pink’s suit.

What is Clara guilty about? Could it be something to do with her mother? As I recall, we’ve never found out what happened to her. I’m reminded of Amy’s parents. Somehow Clara’s mother has somehow been swallowed up by time paradoxes sparked by Clara’s time-travelling lifestyle.

[PhileasF @replies]

@Purofilion and @thommck – thanks for the welcome back!

@raeyeth04 – Hi raeyeth04, I also assumed the young Doctor’s guardians were not his parents. I think you’re right — the reference to ‘the other boys’ strongly suggests he is in a children’s home, not among his own family.

It seemed odd to me that a frightened child would want to leave the security of a house full of people to be outside, alone in the dark — but then I realised he’s the Doctor: that’s what he does.

@Joehovah – The extra chair — brilliant spot! But listen to the scene where Clara first meets Rupert, and tells him he should have another chair, for visitors. Now I am ever more convinced that Rupert = Orson. And Danny. He took Clara’s advice and insisted there be a second chair in his bedroom/capsule.

@TimeCahoot – The bear connection is interesting. Rupert is also a fictional bear’s name. It may have no significance to the arc, but I’m reminded that ‘bear’ is one of the primal concepts in European languages, and a surprising number of words are descended from words for bear. As I recall, Artie’s problem was that he could make his fears become real, which provides a possible explanation for the Thing Under the Bedspread, if Rupert is like Artie. It could also explain why Danny might still seem young a hundred years later, if he’s an alien pretending to be human.

By the way, I couldn’t quite squeeze this into my mammoth first post… but I had several versions of ‘the dream’ when I was a child. They were such a big deal at the time that while I watched Listen my first thought was: When my parents watch this they’ll look at each other and the hairs on the backs of their necks will stand up.

There was nowhere for monsters to hide under my childhood bed — perhaps my parents knew me too well — there were drawers filled with toys and schoolbooks. But one night I screamed, and when my parents rushed to my bedroom I told them that a hand had reached up through the bed and touched me. I don’t remember the touch itself, but I remember telling them about it a few moments later, and that at the time I believed what I was telling them. We eventually concluded that the culprit was probably a womble I shared my bed with — that I’d rolled over onto its nose. Probably.

Another night I screamed, very very loudly — apparently people on my street remembered it for years afterward. For a while I was ‘the kid who screamed that night’. My parents found me standing alongside my bed, terrified, looking at the window. When they asked what was the matter, I said I thought something had come into my room. They asked ‘What?’, and I absurdly said I thought it was a fox. I remember having no idea what I thought it was, and being confused about not knowing, and the fox was just the first thing that came into my head while trying to invent an explanation.

If Moffat ever writes an episode about the shadow people who walked along the walls when I was an infant I’ll be very cross. (I’m saving them for my own stories.)

[PhileasF @replies]

I really enjoyed that. Even more the second time.

It was also the season’s first episode with much scope for bonkers theorising.

Do we all have a hidden companion? Or were the Doctor’s interpretations of events driven by a buried childhood memory and being too long alone, and he persuaded Clara and us to share his belief for a while? I don’t think there’s a definite answer to this question, and that’s OK.

Personally, I like the psychological explanation — the Doctor wrote ‘LISTEN’ on the blackboard and then forgot; it was a kid under the bedspread; and the noises at the end of the universe were caused by temperature differentials — but there’s no reason this explanation must be the truth.

Danny’s an orphan but has ‘family stuff’. I didn’t notice that during the episode – thanks @bluesqueakpip.

As in days of old (i.e. when I used to regularly post here) my thoughts on this episode might strain readers’ patience. Hopefully headings will make them easier on the eye.

Bonkers theory
Danny’s ‘family stuff’ involves a time-travelling descendant who visits him and takes him on adventures. Perhaps Orson, perhaps a descendant of Orson. When Danny asks Clara who told her his real name, I think he suspects she’s met his time-traveller and that he told her. Possibly his time-traveller is the sort of person who might mess with him like that.

Other bonkers theory
Orson is Danny. He was proud of those wells, so he adopted the name Orson. As in Orson Welles. No… no I don’t really think so either. Or do I? Maybe a little. Sometimes Orson seems so sad when he looks at Clara. Rewatching some of their scenes together just now, I’ve almost convinced myself of this one. He’s Danny, and for some reason he’ll never see Clara again, due to death, time travel, being trapped in separate parallel universes, or something.

So… Clara will tell Danny all about Orson. A hundred years later he becomes Orson, knowing that’s the only way he’ll ever see Clara again. But he must pretend he doesn’t know her, to avoid messing with her and his past.

This might mean his life was foreshadowed or inspired by two of his childhood toys: Dan the soldier man, and the red robot that might be a red-suited spaceman. And Orson was afraid of the dark because as a child the Doctor communicated to him the idea that the thing under the bed was real. So, alone at the end of time, his interpretation of the spooky sounds he hears at night is influenced by his scrambled childhood memory of the Doctor’s visit. The Doctor told him he mustn’t ever look at the thing. By not unlocking the door to his time capsule, he’s keeping that promise. And he must want to open the door and look, or why does he need to write a note to himself to keep the door locked?

Why did Orson wear his helmet in the restaurant?
If Orson is Danny, this would make sense because he would be keen not to be seen by his earlier self. Because he remembers not seeing himself.

But even if he isn’t Danny, there might be some sensible reasons:

a) Danny would recognise him as a close relation and be freaked out and distracted, and this might alter the rest of his evening, which Orson knows is an important one;

b) Danny would shout ‘Orson, what the hell are you doing here?’, revealing they’ve already met; or

c) Orson knows, from his ancestor’s stories, that he’ll meet Danny, but not yet (in Orson’s personal time line), so he has to avoid meeting Danny in the wrong order and messing up his own future and past. Well, it made sense when I started writing it.

Why did Danny phone Clara?
When Clara first gets home from the restaurant and enters the TARDIS, Danny phones her. We think he wants to talk to her after she stormed out of the restaurant. Later, we discover that she returned moments later. So, was he calling after he himself had left the restaurant, which would have made it a very confusing conversation if Clara had answered the phone, as she hadn’t yet experienced that?

Or was he calling from a parallel timeline in which she didn’t go back to the restaurant? It’s hard to say, without knowing how much time elapsed between Clara leaving the restaurant and her phone ringing, and without knowing how long she stayed at the restaurant after she went back. Given the way timey-wimey tends to work in a Moffat episode, I’d say the phone call is consistent with the ‘final’ version of events, and was not from a parallel world where some of the time-travelling didn’t happen.

After taking Orson to the restaurant, how did the Doctor persuade him they needed to go back to the end of time before taking him home?
The Doctor wanted to show Clara some strong evidence of his belief in the hidden creatures, and to see them himself. But how did he sell that idea to Orson? If Orson is Danny it would make perfect sense, as he’d want to meet Clara and spend as much time with her as possible. And he’d probably know all about what happens next, and be forced to say and do what he already knows he will.

Random thoughts
Orson, like Oswin, spent six months alone in a capsule, besieged by monsters that are (probably) in his own mind. Is he going to turn out to be scattered through space and time too?

Clara and Danny’s ‘romance’ scenes are often non-linear — i.e. we see scenes out of order. (Often? Well, twice, in Deep Breath and Listen.) This works well dramatically and comedically, but might also be a foreshadowing of how their relationship will be affected by time travel.

I didn’t see anyone answer the question about when the first Doctor said ‘Fear makes companions of us all’. (Apologies if this has been answered — I only skimmed some comments.) He says it to Barbara in ‘The Forest of Fear’, episode three of An Unearthly Child. The actual line is, ‘Fear makes companions of all of us.’

The idea of creatures that have evolved the ability to hide from humans, and which we therefore don’t know about, has been around for a while. Philip K Dick speculated about it in some of his writings, and called it ‘Zebra’. He imagined it might be a flying creature that can change the colour of its underside to match the sky above. And the movie Wolfen is about intelligent wolves who live in our cities, eat humans who won’t be noticed missing, and have managed to remain hidden from us since the beginning of civilisation. The movie does a pretty good job of making it seem almost plausible.

[PhileasF @replies]

I enjoyed this very much.

I was moved.

I’ve long had this idea of how the Doctor should regenerate – about what constitutes a suitably heroic end. The suitably heroic self-sacrifice, where the Doctor knowingly gives up his life to save the world or one person. The series hasn’t followed my strict requirements very often. Pretty much only in Planet of the Spiders and The Caves of Androzani. (The End of Time and Logopolis, tried hard, but to me it always felt like the Doctor ‘died’ in those because the writer said he must, and these were situations he would have escaped any other time with a quip and a wave of the sonic. The absurd machine that killed 10 seemed particularly contrived: to me, he was the Doctor who was killed by really bad design.)

I expected Moffat to follow my strict requirements to the letter because he’s such a good writer. (Please detect a touch of self-deprecating irony here, as it’s sort of intended.) But he didn’t. He did something better, bless him, because he’s a better writer than me and a better writer than I imagined him to be. To have the Doctor age to death, doing what he and we loved best, was beautifully unexpected and right. And now it seems like the only way this Doctor could have gone. Amy and Rory aged to death, living good and fulfilling lives to the end, no doubt, and so did their raggedy Doctor. Perfect.

[PhileasF @replies]

Sigh. I heard the news Sunday morning (local time), checking the news on my phone. (I have Google news customised to give me Doctor Who news.)

There’s no way this could have been kept quiet in the age of the internet. It’s never been kept quiet before, and I doubt it ever will be in future, except perhaps under a totalitarian state where leakers can expect to be tortured and killed. Too many people would have to know for too long in advance. (And even if it was miraculously kept quiet until the time of broadcast, I’m sure word would reach me before it screened in Australia.)

I’ve been aware of Ian Levine since my early days in fandom. He’s a genuine eccentric who’s been fabulously successful, and I have to admire that. He’s done some regrettable things, mostly in the last few days, but on balance I’m sure he’s done more good than bad in the world of Doctor Who. He’s the man who put a stop to classic TV being put in the bin at the BBC. (At least, according to a fanzine article I read in the 1990s.)

 

Who’ll be the next Doctor? Probably someone I’ve never heard of, so not much point in guessing. Of the last three, David Tennant was the actor I was least familiar with before they were cast (i.e. I’d never heard of him). I was already aware of Matt Smith from the Sally Lockhart mysteries. He had such a low profile I never would have guessed it would be him, but when I heard, I thought ‘Yeah, he could work’.

Of the actors I’m aware of: Bill Nighy would be a great choice, but has apparently turned it down before. And may not be youthful enough. Chewitel Ejiofor would be great, but he seems a bit busy with high profile Hollywood roles.

Here’s a few suggestions that may not be out there yet (I haven’t been following the discussion on other forums or betting sites, only here):

Richard Coyle. Would he be up for it? He quit one great role (in Steven Moffat’s Coupling) because fans bothered him… so probably not. He’d be great, though. I thought so after seeing him in Coupling, and since then I’ve seen him as a leading man in Going Postal and Grabbers, which have only confirmed that belief.

Mark Strong. He has a tendency to play stony-faced villains, which might make him seem like a one-track actor, but his performance in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy showed a broader range than is usually asked of him. He has a great presence, I think. Maybe a little over the line if playing the Doctor is a ‘young man’s game’.

Laurence Fox. I only know him from Lewis, which didn’t give him an opportunity to show a massive range, but I was always impressed with what he did with a role that could have been much more limited.  (I just looked him up, and was surprised to discover he’s married to Billie Piper, star of the Sally Lockhart mysteries, and some other shows. Small world.)

[PhileasF @replies]

D’oh! That’ll teach me to Google dialog rather than checking for myself 🙂

I think most of my interpretations still make sense though.

[PhileasF @replies]

I know a lot of us have been thinking about the possible interpretations of the Whispermen’s verse (the last song in a season of songs).

The man who lies will lie no more
When he lies at Trenzalore.

Here’s my attempt to tease out a few interesting interpretations:

I’ll express my interpretations by paraphrasing the ‘lies’ in a way that removes the ambiguity.

Interpretation 1
The man who (tells) lies will (tell) lie(s) no more
When he lies (dead) at Trenzalore.

This seems to be the ‘obvious’ interpretation; that the Doctor is the man who lies, and he’ll stop telling lies when he’s dead.

Interpretation 2
The man who lies (dead) will lie (dead) no more
When he lies (dead) at Trenzalore.

Figuratively speaking, the Hurt Doctor could be said to lie in the Doctor’s tomb. So it could mean that the Hurt Doctor will be restored to life when the Doctor dies at Trenzalore.

Or ‘the man who lies (in the tomb)’ could just be ‘the Doctor’, not a specific incarnation: so it could mean that the Doctor won’t stay dead if he dies at Trenzalore.

Or everyone (at least every man) who’s buried at Trenzalore comes back to life. Trenzalore is the Planet of the Zombies! Unlikely… but it could be suitably cinematic for the 50th.

Interpretation 3
The man who lies (in this tomb) will lie (in this tomb) no more
When he (tells a) lie(s) at Trenzalore.

In this case, the Doctor (or the Hurt Doctor) will be restored to life when the Doctor (or the Hurt Doctor) tells a lie at Trenzalore. I suppose this would make sense if the Hurt Doctor somehow escaped by telling a lie.

If Clara has to save the Doctor, she might feel compelled to save the Hurt Doctor too, if he tells her he’s the Doctor (i.e. lies).

Interpretation 4
The man who (tells) lies will (tell) lie(s) no more
When he (tells a) lie(s) / or lies (dead) at Trenzalore.

However you interpret the last ‘lies’, this interpretation says the Doctor won’t be able to tell lies any more after this episode. This would seem far-fetched, but it could be consistent with Dorium’s ‘when no living creature may speak falsely’. It would also qualify as a game-changer :).

Or is it that the Doctor will stop telling a specific lie, about his past or his true identity or his name.

Interpretation 5
Forget about ‘lies’. Think about ‘The man’.  After the Doctor dies at Trenzalore, he won’t be a man who tells lies. He’ll be a woman.

[PhileasF @replies]

And she might have seen herself in the timestream and not realised she was seeing the Doctor — she’d have thought she was seeing herself, now that she’s all scattered over the Doctor’s life.

[PhileasF @replies]

@Shazzbot, you’re right (re River’s harshness). Harsh wasn’t the right word (a bit of a cheap shot really).

I was attempting to express the idea that River, despite being ‘only a copy’, still seemed fully real and fully human (or whatever). So there was an irony in her trying to warn Clara that her copies would only be echoes,when she (as a copy) knew a copy could feel just as human as an ‘original’. And the more I think about it, the more I think you’re right that this was an intentional irony (on the part of the writer), well-delivered by Alex Kingston.

I’m sure River didn’t expect Clara to heed what she said; she probably just felt better for going through the motions of trying to prevent a million Clara’s living and dying in the Doctor’s shadow (like River and her backup).

[PhileasF @replies]

Did I really say (a million posts ago) that the time for theories was over? It all seemed so straightforward immediately after that first viewing. Then I thought about it, and read some posts 🙂

It isn’t so straightforward now.

So here are some post-second-viewing thoughts.

The Hurt Doctor

I agree with @janetteb that the JH Doctor is an alternate 11. On first viewing, I just assumed he was a future Doctor, perhaps the last. Now I’m fairly sure he’s a (sort of) past Doctor. The Doctor says ‘he is my secret’. Not his name, not the location of his tomb, but this guy. Which means the Doctor must have known about him before this episode, when he started talking about the value of secrets. (JTTCOTT?) By the way, that seems to be why the location and the name are secrets too: because they provide access to the timestream, which contains the real secret.

The Doctor hasn’t been into secrets very much in previous seasons (except maybe in season 25, but let’s assume those were different secrets…) Thus I think John Hurt is a fairly new secret.

So, the theory: Ten regenerated into John Hurt, who did Bad Things, then the next Doctor unwrote the Hurt Doctor from time by inserting himself in his place. He did this by… oooooh, ramming Ten’s TARDIS as he was regenerating, or something A sort of reneged regeneration. A renegeration. John Hurt now never happened. But our 11 still remembers being John Hurt, because he remembers unwritten timelines (a la JTTCOTT). Thus the exploding TARDIS, and the three TARDISs in the van Gogh painting: Ten’s, Eleven’s and other-Eleven’s.

Speaking of unwritten time, if the Doctor remembers it, his head must be pretty full by now, with multiple versions of his whole life jammed in there.

What did other-Eleven do?

I don’t think it will be ending the Time War. Mainly because that isn’t such a big secret — the Doctor’s told some people — and the Doctor watched his friends being killed without being moved to reveal this secret. This has to be something really bad.

Also, I think the Time War is old news; the show needs fresh stories.

What happened in the timestream?

Well no wonder we’re a bit confused, they tried to show us 1200 years of action-packed life in a few seconds… twice.

So, was the GI telling lies about the Doctor, torturing him, telling his enemies how to beat him, sending strongly worded letters to the Times about what a terrible waste of taxpayers’ money UNIT was? We just see him stand there and watch the Doctor go by; but somehow the Doctor’s life is undone.

Later we see much the same happening with Clara. She even says that she almost never meets the Doctor, she just crosses his path… The exceptions we know of are at the TARDIS repair yard, the Asylum and the Snowmen. And if she really had participated more directly in all his adventures, he’d remember her from a lot more than Asylum and Snowmen.

I think Clara and the GI weren’t arm-wrestling in the timestream. And I think Clara wasn’t somehow having complicated adventures where she undid the GI’s damage.  The impression I was left with, was that Clara displaced the GI just by being there. His version of the Doctor’s life was overwritten because she created another version of the Doctor’s life, the one where she was always close by, which replaced the GI version.

My evidence for this: we see what appear to be some of the same moments in the Doctor’s life: once with the GI, then with Clara instead. The implication is that the GI version of the events now hasn’t happened, rather than Clara and the GI both being present in the Doctor’s past.

The ghost

As I rewatched the episode I kept in mind the idea that the Doctor can see River whenever we can, and is pretending not to. It makes a big difference.

But how long has this been going on? Since the Library? Since the wedding? As others have pointed out, sending her to sleep with a kiss goodbye means she’s joining the rest of his family who sleep in his mind (a la Tomb of the Cybermen). Seeing her all the time, as a ghost… that must be what it’s like when they’re awake in his mind.

Random stuff

River was still in conference call with Clara when she jumped in the timestream. So has River now seen the Doctor’s whole life too?

Is our Clara ClaraPrime? Or is she an acausal loop, another splinter?

It looks like Clara has the same mother in all her lives. If every Clara gets a whole past and future, just like any other real person… then how much of the human population of spacetime exists because she does? It would mean the same people recur throughout space and time, so Clara can always descend from them..

River seemed a little harsh when she warned Clara that her splinters would only be copies. Pot. Kettle.

When the GI revealed there was nothing behind his face: very Omega at the end of The Three Doctors.

In case nobody’s mentioned it, April 10 2013 was a Wednesday.

At about 24 minutes, Clara staggers and almost faints — just like in Cold War, except this time the Doctor catches her. The Doctor explains: ‘The TARDIS is a ruin. The telepathic circuits are awakening memories you shouldn’t even have.’

At about 27.5 minutes, the Doctor calls the GI ‘Mr G Intelligence’. An odd thing to say… But not unlike Mr Clever.

When the TARDIS can hear River: I presumed this was because she was in conference call with Clara, who was telepathically linked to the TARDIS.

The GI seems to think the Doctor has beaten him a lot. Maybe this is one of the changes in the new timeline. Either he succeeded in writing those encounters out of the Doctor’s life, or Clara’s purge of the GI from the Doctor’s life was pretty thorough. Maybe in the ‘pre-rewritten’ timeline, the GI was a more frequently recurring villain.

Up till now, our Clara always followed orders. But now she can disobey the Doctor (and his wife). Maybe the thought Clara carried into the timestream, ‘save the Doctor’, overrode whatever was making her so obedient. This presupposes that ‘our’ Clara is just as much a splinter as the others.

I now expect that in every episode until the end of the series, even long after JLC has left, we’ll see Clara, in a crowd scene, on a screen, peeking around a corner. Not participating in the episode, just being close by. (I don’t really expect this, but wouldn’t it be neat?)

[PhileasF @replies]

Regarding Susan’s claim that she coined the word ‘TARDIS’, which seems to contradict the repair shop guys using the word in TNOTD.

This has been discussed since the original series, when it was established that the Time Lords generally call TARDISes TARDISes. (When was that? The War Games? The Three Doctors? At some time someone says that the Doctor stole _a_ TARDIS.)

In the very early days of the show, TARDIS (or Tardis) may have been intended  to be the name of the ship, not the type of ship. This is fairly explicit in the early novelisations by David Whitaker, the original script editor, where ‘Tardis’ is italicised. (In fact, the 1st chapter of Doctor Who and the Crusaders also mentions the Titanic, and italicises it, just like the Tardis.)

Yikes, flicking through that first chapter, I see that, in that book, Susan’s 21st century boyfriend was named David Cameron.

Anyway, back when I was a young(er) fan, someone came up with the idea that Susan had coined the word while still living on Gallifrey, and it had caught on and entered general use. By the time the Doctor stole his TARDIS, everyone was calling them TARDISes.

[PhileasF @replies]

The Name of the Doctor just finished airing in Australia about 20 minutes ago (at the time I started writing this post).

Whoah.

I was very moved by the awesomeness of it all.

Much as I love the Moff, and have done for years before he started running Doctor Who, I was pretty sure this episode wouldn’t be half as good as all our theories. But it was. Maybe even more than half.

Having been a fan since childhood, since Tom Baker was the Doctor, it was strange and beautiful to see the old series being brought into the new so prominently.

Despite coming to the show long after Hartnell’s departure, he has at times been my favourite. Perhaps because in real life I’m as vague-seeming and incoherently tongue-tied and prematurely aged as he was. (And we were born on the same day, decades apart.) Those first few seasons feel so fresh and imaginative, before the original series became stuck in its various formulae (sometimes very entertaining formulae). There’s no hero like that first Doctor, especially not now, when everyone on TV has to be so absurdly perfect. The production circumstances of 1960s TV, where a retake cost a lot of money (too much for Doctor Who’s budget), forced them to broadcast a lot of ‘bad takes’ by Hartnell’s Doctor, making him perhaps the most strangely authentic, human-like, larger-than-life hero in all the annals of literature, myth and legend. But the force of a great personality, a performance of real conviction, always shone through the apparent production failures of those early episodes, so you could believe the Doctor was simultaneously a genius and unable to verbalise a coherent sentence.

What I’m trying to say is, I was very happy to see the original Doctor, the definite article you might say, getting another day in the sun.

I was shocked and saddened when Jenny died — what! no Paternoster gang spinoff!? — and happy when she came back. Strax still has his old nurse’s touch. Nurse and governess, roles that weren’t all that different once upon a time, and he’s died and inexplicably come back to life at least once. If he was a pretty girl, we’d probably have spent months coming up with theories about why he isn’t dead. But theorising is over for now.

The dead TARDIS. So sad. It reminded me of that big Dalek statue in which the season started — it’s as though the season was bookended by the two great iconic images of the series made gigantic, the Dalek and the TARDIS.

I may have more thoughts later…

[PhileasF @replies]

My typically long-winded thoughts on regeneration:

The first two ‘regenerations’

I’ve always been fond of the notion that Pertwee -> Tom Baker was the first time the Doctor regenerated.

The 1st Doctor said he was ‘rejuvenating’. This was handled very ambivalently by the show (in Patrick Troughton’s first serial, The Power of the Daleks). On one hand, saying he’s ‘rejuvenated’ encourages the audience to believe he’s the same person and he’s just become younger; on the other hand, the story goes to some lengths to emphasise that he’s a different person now, which is expressed visually by the old Doctor’s ring falling off the new Doctor’s finger. His companions, especially Ben, initially reject him as an impostor, because apart from his changed appearance he also behaves like a different person. Ben has to be won over by seeing the new Doctor beat the Daleks. No doubt the program makers were hoping the audience would follow Ben’s lead, and he was standing in for an expected audience reaction against the new actor.

[Hmmm…. that’s right, the first Doctor had a ring, which was sometimes made a big deal of in the first four seasons. And Clara has a ring… and the grandfather has rings… Too much data… Theory fatigue setting in…]

In Patrick Troughton’s last story, again no one says anything about him ‘regenerating’. The Time Lords say he’s changed his appearance before, and he’ll change his appearance again. For all we know, they might have just changed his face… except that fairly soon we once again discover that he’s a completely different person now.

(As an aside, one of the first great bonkers theories was that, just before the 2nd Doctor was forcibly regenerated, a Time Lord faction rescued him and sent him and Jamie on their way, sometimes sending them on secret missions. It was only when that incarnation approached its natural end that they sent him back to the ‘execution chamber’ to be regenerated, with the rest of the Time Lords unaware they’d been tricked. This is about the only way ‘The Two Doctors’ can be made to make sense.)

It was in Planet of the Spiders (Pertwee’s last story) that ‘regeneration’ was first mentioned. (Or was it the next story, ‘Robot’, that coined the word?) (As an aside, I once read an article that claimed the word ‘incarnation’ was popularised by Doctor Who; that previously it had been a fairly obscure word that might only be used in a context of discussing eastern religions that incorporate the idea of reincarnation. Since the mid-70s it’s entered wide circulation, and its meaning has broadened.)

‘Spiders’ retconned the previous changes to the Doctor, making them ‘regenerations’ too, so that what happened at the end of that story would seem like a natural event for the Doctor, something that had happened several times before. But really, it was at this time, 11 years since the start of the series, that the idea of regeneration was first devised.

The above is a bit… academic, I suppose. It arises from the way the original series was being made up as they went along, and later hands formed the past into a coherent narrative that wasn’t always there at the time. Terrance Dicks, the script editor at the time of the Pertwee regeneration, was arguably the first ‘modern’ ‘producer’ — I say ‘producer’ as his role as script editor would nowadays make him a producer or executive producer. As well as being a script editor, he’d started writing novelisations of the earlier stories in his spare time, and he also wrote one of the earliest published episode guides, as a chapter of his book ‘The Making of Doctor Who’. So he was the first ‘producer’ of the show with a high level of awareness of the past. He was the first fan producer.

Anyway, although you could interpret the first three Doctors as being all one incarnation, I expect the series will now always treat them as three different Doctors.

Ten’s end

As for Ten’s regeneration, I thought his not wanting to go was symptomatic of his fatal character flaws (basically, his massive ego). But at the same time he inspires sympathy. It’s a great performance. Pertwee’s regeneration, in particular, was entirely the opposite. Although he seemed at least as egotistical as Ten, his last story was all about the conquest of ego by sacrificing the self, and he went out pretty serenely.

Four’s fall

I agree with @htpbdet that the Tom Baker regeneration wasn’t very well handled. He was _the_ Doctor throughout my childhood, and it seemed an unsuitably unheroic ending — just losing his grip on a cable. IIRC his death didn’t achieve anything; the universe was already safe at that point, and if he’d lived nothing would have been different. His death isn’t ‘necessary’ to the story; it only happens because the actor’s resigned, and in any other story he’d have walked away. Given my respect for the author of Logopolis, I’ve always imagined the regeneration scene must have been written by the producer.

Nine’s demise

I felt much the same way about the Ecclestone regeneration. All that time energy only kills him because the script says it must, and the script says so because the actor resigned. The deadly time energy out of the TARDIS is a sci-fi concept with sci-fi properties made up on the spot to satisfy a story need. The RTD series in a nutshell. (If the actor hadn’t resigned, they could have told the same story, and ooooooh, had the Doctor channel all that energy into a black hole or something. There’s something very wrong with that kind of storytelling.)

With Tennant, again I felt… ‘What, he’s killed by really REALLY bad design? This ridiculously contrived machine with the locking cubicles?’ Another diabolis ex machina. In too many episodes, including these most significant episodes of the series, there’s a machine at the end of the episode, and it kills the Doctor or saves him, depending on whether the actor’s resigned or not. (Yes, I’ one of those people who complain about dei ex machinae. It’s the single biggest weakness of the new series, and much less a problem now than it used to be.)

Good and bad regenerations

The only really ‘satisfying’ regenerations, to my mind, have been Pertwee’s and Davison’s.

In each case, they willingly sacrifice themselves in a way that seems entirely plausible; they don’t require some implausible contrivance like the locking cubicles in The End of Time, or some new sci-fi concept introduced because it’s time to kill the Doctor.

I acknowledge that a lot of this perception of ‘satisfying’ endings comes down to subrational impressions; spectrox toxaemia also only kills the Doctor because the script says it does. What makes it work as a story ending is the skill of the writer.

Based on what I know about the world, I can accept that lots and lots of radiation will kill the Doctor. And the situation that exposes the Pertwee Doctor to all that radiation seems entirely plausible. And that he willingly walks into it for various reasons seems dramatically satisfying and right.

Likewise, I can accept that there’s a poison that will kill the Doctor, and that he might sacrifice his only chance of survival to save his companion from the same poison.

In contrast, I don’t have any opinion about time-energy and whether it might or might not kill the Doctor. Its properties were introduced to me just moments before they caused a dramatic change in the story. And the locked cubicle is similarly outside all personal knowledge and experience; and it just seems highly implausible. And I’ve seen the Doctor hanging from so many high places and surviving unscathed, that you need to show me a really good reason why this time he falls. And you didn’t.

Seven’s regeneration (though I barely recall it, being unfond of the telemovie) is something different entirely, and probably all the better for it. When the Doctor sacrifices himself in an implausible way, it feels (to me) like a hollow pseudo sacrifice; this regeneration works, as I recall, because it isn’t a big dramatic sacrifice, but an accident. He was such a portentous character, it feels appropriately ironic that he die in such a meaningless way.

In short, when introducing a really substantial change into the show, I think the standard of storytelling has to be a lot stronger than the rest of the time. An ordinary episode can (maybe) get away with a few button presses making all the Daleks for light years around explode; but don’t kill our main character with a piece of made-up-sci-fi dialogue. When an ending really matters, I want it to be real.

[PhileasF @replies]

@craignixon, nice theory about the Guardians. They’re one of the best ideas of the original series that hasn’t been seen yet in the new series.

If there’s someone that could fill the gap left by the Doctor’s seeming absence from history, it would be one of those guys. But which one would think him more essential — the guardian of order or the guardian of chaos? Maybe they’d each want their own.

Regarding story arcs. I get that a lot of TV viewers love an arc these days. It’s something I started noticing when Babylon 5, arguably the series that popularised arcs, was on air. (I say ‘arguably’, because Twin Peaks is a strong contender). Once people fell in love with the arc, whenever the show did a standalone episode they’d hate it, because it wasn’t part of the arc. I always found it a bit sad that people would fail to enjoy a perfectly good story just because it wasn’t a chapter of a different story they wanted to see. As someone who usually has 5 or 6 books on the go at once, maybe the prospect of a delayed continuation of one story doesn’t prevent me enjoying another story.

I agree that a lot of episodes seem like they’d benefit from a second episode. But on the other hand, the two-parters written by writers other than Steven Moffat have generally been among my least favourite of the new series. I think everything moves so fast these days that two episodes of the new show is just too much, unless you can make each episode quite different. (Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone is a good example — same set of characters, but the situation changes a lot from episode 1 to 2). For episodes that seem too short, I think generally another 15 minutes would be sufficient.

[PhileasF @replies]

@WhoHar, season 14 was about the middle of Tom Baker’s run, consisting of The Masque of Mandragora, The Hand of Fear, The Deadly Assassin, The Face of Evil, The Robots of Death and The Talons of Weng-Chiang. To my mind it’s the most consistently good season of the original series. (Season 13 — Terror of the Zygons to Seeds of Doom — is a close second, but season 5, Patrick Troughton’s middle season — Tomb of the Cybermen to The Wheel in Space — might be a contender if I could see more of it.)

[PhileasF @replies]

(Draws breath. Time for a fresh post…)

It seems a little pointless to theorise when a lot of people have apparently been spoiled by a BBC trailer. (I’m trying hard not to look. It could be misdirection, and no-one’s really been spoiled. If it’s only a character saying what’s happening, it could be a clip from early in the episode, when they think they’ve worked it out but they’re wrong).

But anyway, here’s my last attempt at figuring it all out…

It’s all a dream. (Can the audience deal with it? Dallas says no; Life On Mars says yes.)

The Doctor has caused the death of his companion, someone very like Clara/Oswin. This might have been an accident. It might have been a necessary sacrifice, like his queen, or a galaxy.

This is a reality too horrible to deal with. So he retreats from the world, into his own head (a la souffle girl). Possibly he’s uploaded himself into the library computer so he can be with River after her ‘death’… but then you’d think we’d have seen a lot more of her lately. But it seems consistent with the recurring element of people’s minds being uploaded into various kinds of internet.

But there’s no peace for the Doctor inside his own head, because it’s haunted by the ghost of Clara. He can’t let himself forget her. So he’s condemned to re-experience her death repeatedly, like a recurring nightmare.

His dreams are full of versions of himself, people forced to make terrible sacrifices of innocents for a greater good:
– the monks sacrificing the little girl to the grandfather (Rings);
– himself, willing to sacrifice the submarine crew and Clara to save the world from nuclear annihilation (Cold War);
– Alec Palmer, who sent men and women to their deaths during the war (Hide);
– himself, burning Clara’s hand to save them all (Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS);
– Mrs Gillyflower, sacrificing her daughter (and a few billion other people) (Crimson Horror);
– the emperor, the loneliest man in the universe, who destroyed a galaxy to stop the Cybermen.

The emperor calls himself a monster, and this is how the Doctor sees himself now. The recurring motif of the Doctor being a monster is fairly obvious.

His dreams feature people (and monsters) hiding and being revealed:
– the monsters in Hide;
– the emperor in Nightmare.

His dreams feature people (and monsters) waking up:
– Oswin in Asylum;
– the grandfather in Rings;
– Skaldak in Cold War;
– the Cybermen in Nightmare.

His dreams feature music and songs, Melody/Song. (Not much water, though, except in Cold War.) This may be something to do with library-River trying to make contact with him.
In order to explain what happened to Amy and Rory, and to appease audience members who might hate hate hate the dream idea, it might be revealed that his dreams are all versions of things that really happened, distorted by the preoccupations of the Doctor’s unconscious.

The Doctor, in short, is pretty badly broken. What can he do about this? Undo the event that broke him. Go back to reality, go back in time, and save the original girl on whom Clara/Oswin is based, even if this threatens to unravel the spacetime continuum. And this is what makes the TARDIS explode, and what makes the crack in time and so on. But it will all work out for the best. Because anyone can sacrifice someone for a greater good, but a great character would tear down the universe to save a friend.

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