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I enjoyed this episode very much. Do I say that every week? If I haven’t, I’ve meant to. I have enjoyed everything this half-season a lot, with the exception of RingsoA, which I only enjoyed. Perhaps that doesn’t say much for this episode, as it may mean I’m easily pleased. Better than being easily displeased, like so many at that other place, which I could only tolerate for a few minutes this week.

When was the last time I actually disliked an episode?

I wasn’t crazy about A Town Called Mercy — I’ve seen the kind of moral dilemma that was central to it too often to be very interested in it again.

I was bothered by the hand-waving at the end of Angels Take Manhattan. I’ve read Steven Moffat’s explanation, which I accept as making sense (but really, if it’s not in the show it’s just another fan theory). Maybe I respect his talents more than he does, but I think he could have pulled off an explanation that would make sense and be acceptable for a TV audience. And I think it was necessary to justify such an important plot/character development in the show. I still liked the episode, though, as the rest more than makes up for the hole.

I wasn’t overly fond of the Almost People.. It seemed driven a lot by what I think of as ‘phony conflict’, where characters do stupid and aggressive things to generate conflict that doesn’t arise naturally out of their previously established character or the situation, but out of a need to add some fighting and running to a story. The best writers create characters and situations from which the necessary conflict will arise in a way that seems natural; lesser writers sometimes make too many characters nice reasonable people like themselves, so conflict has to be shoehorned in.

OK, the last episode I actually disliked was The Curse of the Black Spot, because the pirates were so unrealistically family-TV-friendly, and the threat turned out to be a damp squib.

So I’m generally well-disposed to the show, especially over the last few years. And I think this latest half-season is the best half-season since… oh, maybe season 14.

Anyway, Nightmare in Silver. Loved Mr Clever, and Warwick Davis, and the upgraded Cybermen. Arguably this is Porridge’s episode, he’s the character who gets an ‘arc’, who undergoes a change, as he learns to accept his terrible responsibilities. How much does his story parallel the Doctor’s? Is the Doctor erasing himself from history just as much about hiding from his ‘responsibilities’ as about protecting the universe? Porridge’s story (killing everyone in a whole galaxy, to defeat the Cybermen) is a lot like the Doctor’s experiences in the time war. If this is all a dream he could easily be a dream-version of the Doctor.

The Doctor-shaped hole in space-time. One notion that has been simmering in the back of my mind the last few weeks is this: If the Doctor didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent him (with apologies to Voltaire). His absence might reduce the fear factor for the monsters, but everyone else must be awfully worried.

So, new bonkers theory: someone or something capable of making things like the Doctor… made the Doctor, to fill the void left by the Doctor’s (apparent) nonexistence. But this has happened before, and this is where the Doctor came from to begin with… So maybe the apparent doubling we’ve been seeing this season is because the original Doctor, and another created to fill the void left by his apparent nonexistence, have been created almost identically, and are in almost the same place at almost the same time. But what could make a Doctor? How about the TARDIS’s machine-that-can-make-anything?

Plausibility… low. If you can’t explain to a TV audience why the Doctor can’t ever see Amy again, I don’t think you could explain what I just said. I said it and I’m not sure I get it.

Mr Clever is a sexualised Doctor… The Doctor’s progressed from being very uncomfortable about private human things, to air-kissing, to actual kissing, to ‘… squeezed into a skirt that is just a little bit… too tight.’ Every little boy falls in love with his nanny. The Doctor has finally entered puberty… (It’s a little hard to reconcile this with his marriage and the supposedly kinky stuff he and River were getting up to a few years ago.) But River was a sort-of Time Lord, while Clara presumably isn’t. Perhaps he’s become human, and is starting to experience humany wumany feelings? There’s that fob-watch he’s been carrying around. Maybe this is the final stage in ‘hiding’ from history, to make the Doctor cease to exist by becoming human? This might also explain his drinking alcohol, too.

Clara as a commanding officer. She’s good at taking on whatever role is required. Junior Entertainment Manager, Dalek, governess, barmaid, nanny, time traveller, general. Someone else has pointed out that this is like the experience of reading stories and becoming like the characters in the stories, as you identify with them. (It’s like writing stories, too.)

Clara can’t disobey the Doctor. (As pointed out by various people upthread.) It seemed absurd that she would give away so much information about their defences to Mr Clever; but it makes sense if she really can’t disobey the Doctor, and if her programming is too unsophisticated to differentiate between the Doctor and Mr Clever. This points a little disturbingly toward Clara being some kind of robot-like person (even if she is biologically human), which wouldn’t be much fun.

Clara from the 19th century could disobey the Doctor. Oswin? I don’t think there’s any evidence. Clara’s compliance may have something to do with a growing dislike I detect towards the character. I’m fairly sure it will be dispensed with by the end of the season.

Theory: she is like she is because the GI made her so — when she was downloaded back into her body (BellsofSJ), she carried a sort of virus which was probably intended to make her the kind of person the Doctor would want to keep around. Little does the GI know that a companion always doing what the Doctor says is just going to make him suspicious.

I enjoyed the theory that the mystery will turn out to be something that happened between Doctors ten and eleven, and that Clara might be the real eleventh Doctor, or else that we just haven’t seen the real eleventh. However, I just rewatched the regeneration, and you can clearly see ten become eleven.

The Cybermen have a sort of hive-mind. People are saying this is like the Borg — but really, it’s like the Daleks. In fact, ‘hive-mind’ is the term first used to describe the Dalek pathweb in Asylum. IIRC it’s Oswin who says ‘The Daleks, they have a hive mind — well they don’t, but they have a sort of telepathic web.’ Everyone has an internet these days. The real theme of the season may be the danger of becoming trapped in the internet (and thus being removed from real life).

See You Next Wednesday: IIRC John Landis said the line stuck in his mind because it was the most emotional line in the otherwise almost entirely emotionless 2001. It stuck out as weird, in Doctor Who. Firstly, the Doctor and Clara only meet once a week? And on a Wednesday? (Maybe there’s nothing good on TV on a Wednesday? Maybe it’s Clara’s night off.) Traditionally a reference like this could be expected to refer to the day of broadcast. Buffy’s ‘just another Tuesday night in Sunnydale’ line, for instance, referred to the usual day of broadcast of the show.

Various milestone episodes of the Moffat era have been set on the day of broadcast — the day the TARDIS exploded was the day the Pandorica Opens was broadcast, if I recall correctly. So why Wednesday? Those ‘in-joke’ references in movies always seem like a bad idea to me, as they destroy the illusion for the most enthusiastic members of the audience (i.e. the sort of people who get the references). The moment Clara said it I was thinking about movie references (What are the odds that the next episode will be surprisingly broadcast three days early?)

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I enjoy the Lindalee videos, but I don’t imagine for a moment that they’re entirely her own thoughts. Still, even if she’s reading an autocue written by her parents, she’s very talented and very comfortable in front of the camera, and no doubt will go on to bigger and better things. In this video, I thought maybe the last few lines, about how pretty Clara was and how good it was to see Mr Potatohead again, were her own thoughts. (I agree entirely.)

I remember being Lindalee’s age, and how I thought about TV then. It was all intensely real. In fact, I remember the very moment, at about age 6, when I realised that people who die in TV shows don’t really die. It was during an episode of ‘Whodunnit?’, a mystery series hosted by Jon Pertwee. At the end of the episode the actors, including those playing characters who’d died, reappeared and took a bow, like at the end of a stage production. I remember being puzzled that they weren’t dead after all, and asking my parents how this could be. They looked at me kind of weird, no doubt wondering if I needed some kind of help, and explained that the actors had only been pretending.

It was a real light-bulb moment. At that time, I understood that the people on TV were actors acting out a script… but in the back of my mind there was always the nagging problem of why an actor would be willing to die just for a TV show…. If they were only pretending to die, it all made sense.

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Some people consider the trailer at the end of an episode to be a spoiler, so I’m posting this in the spoiler forum. In the trailer for Nightmare in Silver, we see Clara acting like a trained soldier able to command other soldiers. (Like a ‘boss’?) How?

a) Clara is pretty good at pretending to be a soldier (due to watching lots of movies)

b) She gets a ‘soldier’ implant, just like the computer skills module added to her mind in BellsoSJ.

c) This is her real personality, finally brought to the fore. Maybe she’s one of those militant Anglicans seen several times over the past few years. Since this is a spoiler forum, I can mention that JLC has said Clara’s someone the Doctor met during the past few years. Is she… Lorna Bucket? I always liked Lorna Bucket. She was very brave. And pretty.

d) The Clara in the clip is… another Clara/Oswin! So ‘our’ Clara will finally be confronted with the knowledge that she isn’t unique.

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@Bluesqueakpip, re spoilers.

Sorry if I startled you with spoiler talk. The @htpbdet post I was referring to was in the spoiler forum, but his ‘Doctor’s funeral’ idea was based on spoiler-free thoughts (mostly in fact predating season 7).

 

On the topic of spoilers, I feel I have been pretty badly spoiled in the last week or so, by none other than Steven Moffat. I read an interview with him, assuming he would only tease, as he’s gotten so cross about spoilers in the past. But the interview seemed horribly spoilerific. I can only hope he knows what he’s doing, and everything he said about the finale will happen in the first three minutes, or not at all.

And because I don’t really believe he would give away anything really important, my theories outlined above aren’t based on what he said.

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I have a few theories (naturally).

Theory number 1.

At least three people the Doctor cared about have been uploaded into computer systems. River, Oswin and Clara. (Oswin was uploaded into the Dalek pathweb in Asylum, as revealed in a brief flashback near the end that seems pointedly similar to Clara’s upload in BellsofSJ.) The Doctor can rescue them… using gangers. Given what we know about how gangers work, it seems a few waves of the sonic screwdriver should make it possible to download those stored personalities (or at least copies thereof) into flesh and give them all a real life again. And the thing about stored data is, it can be endlessly copied. You can have as many Rivers and Oswins as you like. But maybe, before you can find just the right setting on the sonic screwdriver, you might have a few false starts, a few trial runs. So you get a couple of Oswins/Clara’s that aren’t quite right. You can’t just put them down (because gangers have feelings too), so you send them to random places in time and space to live out their lives. This sort of serious messing with time must have dire consequences, such as exploding TARDISes and cracks in space-time.

Theory number 2.

… And it was all a dream. Well, not just a dream, because the dream dramatises (dreamatises?) a real and important conflict going on inside Doctor-Dalek (Dalektor?). Was it Freud or Jung who said it was wrong to discount one’s inner experiences as less real than one’s ‘outer’ experiences? The Asylum prequel certainly seems to support this theory. What else? (Apart from all the stuff I’ve posted previously in favour of the Doctor-is-a-Dreaming-Dalek theory.) All the inconsistencies we’ve seen (bowtie on, bowtie off; Doctor is red, Doctor isn’t red), as well as colour symbolism could be explained by the episodes being dreams. The sense that the Doctor is time-loopily retracing his steps could be explained by a recurring dream that he keeps dreaming until he gets it right.

Here’s an alternative to the Doctor-is-a-Dalek theory. In Asylum of the Daleks, the Doctor said he tried to hack the Dalek pathweb and failed. Oswin has been copied to the pathweb. Perhaps part of the hacking attempt was to upload his personality into the pathweb. Thus, there is a copy of both the Doctor and Oswin in that pathweb. Perhaps all the stories we’ve been seeing for a while are the adventures of the copies in the pathweb. The copy of the Doctor’s personality will still be trying to succeed in its hacking attempt, and to rescue Oswin.

A little piece of pseudo-evidence for the ‘dream’ theories: we’re constantly told that Clara is impossible. A Sherlockian like Steven Moffat knows that when you have eliminated the impossible, that which remains, however improbable, must be the truth. So if Clara’s impossible, we must conclude that nothing we’ve seen since she appeared is the truth. This is the clue hidden in plain sight: we’re constantly told she’s impossible. And she is.

Theory number 3.

Forget clues within the show, let’s tackle it from a narratological perspective. Traditionally, there were two kinds of story: comedy and tragedy. A comedy ended with a wedding (The Big Bang, The Wedding of River Song); a tragedy with a death (Angels Take Manhattan, The Name of the Doctor?) Given that wedding bells don’t seem to be in the air, that suggests this season might be a tragedy. A tragedy, technically, is the story of a great man (sorry, that’s a very traditional definition, and naturally it could also be a great… Time Lord) brought low by his one fatal flaw. If the Doctor is a tragic hero, then what’s his fatal flaw? That he cares too much? That he can’t bear to lose the people he loves? Who can? But with his godlike time travel powers he can do something about it.

So if it’s a tragedy, the Doctor has to die.

Would they kill the Doctor? It would be a hell of a surprise, and that’s what we TV audiences love.

The death and resurrection of the hero is another of those old story tropes. And it’s not just for religious figures like Jesus and Osiris; Mr Punch, another quintessentially British character, also fights and defeats Mr Death (the skeleton) in some versions of the Punch and Judy show. Punch also fights the Devil and wins. Can we expect the Doctor to die and face a judgement day, and come out on top, just like in War Games episode 10?

Could he be brought back to life… well, there’s always the ganger theory (see theory 1). And by now his sonic might be capable of storing a ghost image (see Silence in the Library), so he could use it to ‘save’ himself.

(Oooh, I thought this was pretty original, but just after drafting it I saw @HTPBET ingeniously predicts the Doctor’s death in the spoiler thread. Great minds…)

 

Theory number 4.

The truth will be nothing like any of the above, but instead will be simple, and dramatically and emotionally satisfying.

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Thanks @ardaraith, I hadn’t seen that before. Very interesting. There are distinct Dream Lord undertones there, and of course it seems to support the theory that the whole season is taking place in the Doctor’s head.

At about 28s we see a man and a woman sitting across from each other. Could they be Harvey and Darla von Karlsen? It may not mean anything — perhaps it was just easy to use actors who were there already to make Asylum of the Daleks.

Would it be too sneaky to include vital clues in a prequel seen only by a few people on the internet? I hope so 🙂

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A passing thought… Clara Oswin Oswald. COO. Chief Of Operations / Chief Operating Officer. ‘I’m the boss’.

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Actually, now that I re-read your post, @Bluesqueakpip, I think I’ve just said what you said, but less concisely 🙂

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@bluesqueakpip (message #7819) – your mention of Thomas Thomas and the JttCotT time loop in the same post has set me thinking… Maybe this ties in with my thought after JttCotT that the Doctor is now in the habit of going back again and again until he gets it right. So a future Doctor — perhaps this is what he’s up to when he goes off at the end of the episode — creates a satnav that won’t seem out of place in the Victorian era (using the TARDIS’s machine that makes machines), and sends it to meet Strax and direct him to be in the right place at the right time.

If the Doctor called him Thomas Thomas, then it wouldn’t be the jarring contemporary reference that it is to some people. It’s the Doctor’s joke, not the writer’s.

Trying to figure out how this works hurts my head like timey-wimey things always do. Does it mean the Doctor experienced a version of the events where things didn’t work out well, before the version of events we saw? (It might explain the seeming discrepancy between the images in the dead man’s eye). Or was the version we saw the only version of the events, and the Doctor recognised Strax’s fortuitous presence as too good to be true, too lucky to have happened without a little nudge — so he went back in time and made it happen.

And speaking of using kids to manipulate events… Could he have sent Angie and Artie those photos (including the one of the other Clara) to see if they triggered a reaction?

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@Shazzbot, thanks.

@HTPBDET — I think the ‘Doctor’s origin story is that he originates from the story’ could work. I’m willing to believe the author of Blink and Asylum of the Daleks could pull it off, especially in an anniversary celebration story.

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I’ve also been enjoying the discussion of Omega. The militant future Anglicans had an Omega logo, as has been pointed out. This is probably appropriate for a religious organisation. Apart from the religious association, it serves as a message to their enemies: when you face them, it’s the end.

The religious association: the book of Revelation says ‘I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.’ Very timey-wimey. As they say in the classics, this is getting needlessly messianic. By all accounts, The Name of the Doctor will be a kind of Book of Revelations for Doctor Who. Well, it’s supposed to contain revelations.

I thought the Doctor might be alluding to Omega in Rings of Akhaten, when he mentioned visiting a pocket universe where the laws of physics were devised by a madman. Pocket universes do seem to keep popping up.

The pioneering time traveller trapped in a pocket universe in Hide — this is Omega’s story in a nutshell. Except he was in his for a very long time, not just a few minutes.

The Eye of Harmony is in the TARDIS, seemingly arrested at a time shortly before it became a black hole. Which seems to mean that Omega must also be there, because he was present when the star became a black hole. So whatever it means for the eye of harmony to be in the TARDIS, it would seem that Omega’s in there too.

Would they introduce Omega all of a sudden in the finale or the anniversary story, without ever having mentioned him in the new series? Some say no. I think maybe. They did it last time (in The Three Doctors, that is). And nobody was too bothered that Rassilon came back with no prior warning in The End of Time.

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There’s been lots of good stuff to think about in this forum since my last visit.

One of the things that has especially caught my imagination is the importance of stories and storytelling in the past few years.

I’ve been thinking about this a bit myself lately, thinking of all the references to stories over the past few seasons.

Amelia Pond’s raggedy man was an imaginary friend who turned out to be real. An imaginary friend is sort of a story that a child tells to herself, and at some level imagines to be real. The people who knew adult Amy thought of the Doctor as an imaginary being she used to tell stories about, who then ‘became’ real.

If the series had started with the Eleventh Hour, audiences might have thought that Amelia/Amy had somehow conjured the Doctor out of her fantasies by some really intense wishful thinking, perhaps enhanced by that crack in her wall. IIRC, Amy’s opening credits narration in those days supported this. And if the theory that the 11th Doctor started it all by stealing a TARDIS and giving it to the 1st Doctor turns out to be right (love it, by the way), then the Eleventh Hour is sort of the start of it all.

Amy conjured up the Doctor when she wished for him in a prayer to Santa — and Christmas has been mentioned repeatedly in season 7.

Amy’s departure is a story about a story, told in a book the Doctor can’t bear to read because reading it makes it true. And since then Amy has continued to tell stories (as Amelia Williams).

In The Pandorica Opens, the Doctor is sure the Pandorica is a legend, and the mighty warrior it was supposed to hold a myth. And it turns out to be true… and about him, of course. Quite a lot of what we saw in the episode was conjured up out of Amy’s childhood imagination, just like the Doctor — the Romans at Stonehenge and Pandora’s box.

The common thread here is that something imaginary (or apparently imaginary) becomes real. So, how’s this for a 50th anniversary story: the BBC makes a great TV show about a time traveller called the Doctor, and so many people across time and space fall in love with this great story, that it becomes real. Through some sci-fi mechanism, a fictional character believed in (or at least loved) by millions of people becomes (like Pinocchio) ‘a real boy’. All that love conjures the Doctor out of the quantum foam. The Doctor’s origin story is that he originates from the story.

Anyway, here are some other story references:

Asylum of the Daleks opens with Darla von K telling a story about the man who fought the Daleks and died, but who might still return. And there he is standing right behind her. Telling his story conjures him up. Maybe this is how she contacted him?

A Town Called Mercy is told as a story narrated by someone from (presumably) the present. We’re invited to think the story is about the Doctor, initially, but it turns out to be about someone else.

The Angels Take Manhattan. As said before, the story is told in a book which becomes true. Amy’s narration is prominent.

In The Snowmen, Clara has been telling the children stories about monsters (IIRC — I won’t see it again until it’s available to buy). Then, after meeting the Doctor, she tells them a story which sounds fantastical but which is true, about the man who lives on a cloud. (And then the Doctor shows up. Again the motif: you tell a story about the Doctor, and then there he is). And the little girl is conjuring the governess-monster from her nightmares, just as Amy conjured the Doctor in her prayer to Santa.

The Bells of St John: Amy’s novel is seen and discussed.

The Rings of Akhaten: The little girl knows all the stories; songs are stories.

Journey ttCotT: There’s a lot of books, especially the History of the Time War.

And I just realised. Tricky was Cinderella! Like her, he was made a slave by his siblings. He’s also Pinocchio; a sort-of-puppet-who-becomes-a-real-boy. And Clara mentioned Pinocchio a few episodes ago.

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@juniperfish, agree with you re the Doctor’s apparent lack of empathy in Hide. In JttCotT he seems pretty  cheerful when he burns the message into the Big Friendly Button, knowing it’s going to burn / has already burnt Clara.

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I’ve finally caught up on all the messages. Enjoying everyone’s thoughts a lot.

Here’s a few brief ideas about the woman in the shop. (They might even really be brief this time!)

The idea that Clara saw the woman from the shop in the book seems like a good one. But I don’t think River could have been involved in the time war, based on our (well, my) current understanding… Unless it becomes a plot point that the time war is escaping from its timelock, or that you can visit it in a pocket universe. Of course River could still be the woman in the shop, and what Clara saw in the book could be something else entirely.

Here’s a few alternative theories for the woman in the shop:

As I recall, the phone in the TARDIS door had never rung before, and the Doctor didn’t even know it could ring, so it must be a different number than the TARDIS telephone we sometimes see the Doctor using. It seems right to me (and consistent with Steven Moffat’s modus operandi) that this number would ‘magically’ appear out of a timey-wimey loop where it effectively creates itself. Which leads me to think the woman in the shop was…

Clara herself, but older, or in some way disguised so she won’t recognise herself. Maybe she was wearing a hijab? Bandages? Would you believe sunglasses and a headscarf?

Clara’s daughter or some other descendant. This makes the failure to recognise her more plausible. It also fits in with the family theme.

The Doctor, with a wig and a silly voice. (Using time travel to rewrite people’s lives, including his own, seems consistent with his current behaviour… He has to drag up because Clara already told him a woman gave her the number.) Of course, the woman in the shop could have been both Clara and the Doctor, according to one theory…

 

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@HaveYouFedTheFish (message #7048) – re the illustration(?) in the book, which seems to reveal to Clara that ‘the Doctor’ is not the Doctor’s name.

The rather strained chain of reasoning I was following was this:

1. Clara sees the Doctor’s cot. Somehow she recognises writing on it as being the name of the cot’s prior occupant. At this time she has no way of knowing that this was the Doctor’s cot.

2. Clara finds The History of the Time War. She opens it and sees…

3. An illustration including the very cot she saw earlier, with a caption reading ‘The Doctor as a baby.’ Now she knows it was the Doctor’s cot, and that the name on it must be his ‘real’ name. As the name is in old High Gallifreyan she has no idea what it is.

Not that I think that’s necessarily what happened. Just a thought.

 

I just re-watched the episode, and made a few observations which seemed striking to me (though perhaps obvious to others, and possibly mentioned already.)

The cloth at the end. In the ‘new reality’ that results from the prevention of the TARDIS being damaged, the two crews never met. The cloth seems to be evidence that the Doctor has secretly visited the brothers in the past and rewritten their lives. Sinister much? What would Clara think if she knew he was rewriting the lives of random people they meet in their travels? She’d think ‘Has he done this to me?’ Is it not a coincidence that she’s so much like Oswin/Victorian Clara… because the Doctor has messed with her ancestors and her childhood to create the woman he wanted to find? (So he threw that leaf.) Think ‘Vertigo’ (1958). Dark Jimmy Stewart in that movie is about as dark as a good-guy gets. ‘Clara… I need you to be Oswin for a while.’

The TARDIS’s heart is broken. What could do that? The Doctor’s death? The Doctor doing Really Bad Things?

The writing on Clara’s hand — similar to the method of communicating with a person’s future self in the movie Looper. To say more might be a spoiler for the movie.

How many iterations of the loop do the characters experience? At least two… As I rewatched the episode, it occurred to me this story is like Groundhog Day from the point of view of any character besides Bill Murray’s. The Doctor has been through this before (and remembers) — he’s the Bill Murray character, who seems amazingly knowledgeable and prescient and lucky to the other characters. This is especially striking when Gregor tries to cut the TARDIS’s machine making machine, and the Doctor shows up just in time to stop him. I’m guessing bad things resulted from the laser-cutting, in previous iterations of the day. And of course the Doctor knows what the zombies are all along.

At 34minutes 35seconds the Doctor notices he has his hand on his face, and seemingly realises for the first time that the hand-stuck-to-face zombie is himself, having died moments later. This wasn’t at all clear on the first viewing. I couldn’t understand why the brothers touching would cause ‘reality to reassert itself’. This time it was clear: the Doctor had realised the fused zombies were the brothers, and the future that produced those fused zombies would be averted if they never touched (and thus couldn’t be fused).

The Doctor and Clara holding hands and jumping. Just like Amy and Rory undoing an unwanted version of history in The Angels Take Manhattan by holding hands and jumping off a building.

‘Lancashire. Sass’. I had no idea what this meant the first time. The second time I had the benefit of subtitles. I guess it’s a joke: the detector is detecting Clara’s sass. (I always thought sassy chicks had ‘sassiness’, not sass. )

Clara-zombie seems to be a person, at least when we first see her up close in the echo console room. She doesn’t seem like a crazed zombie thing; she just can’t speak. The other zombies, including the Doctor zombie, seem like monsters.

Clara not only understands the consequences of the TARDIS’s fuel rods cooling, she finishes the Doctor’s sentence, as if she’s remembering the previous iteration.

This might be bordering on the pseud… but this episode gives the Doctor the chance to experience an episode as we theorisers do. Over and over, until it makes sense 🙂

At the end, the Doctor asks Clara if she feels safe. One reading of this is that he isn’t concerned about whether she remembers the TARDIS being infested with zombies. He’s checking that she’s forgotten the conversation where she said she was afraid of him (the same conversation in which he confronted her about what she is). So…… a dark dark Doctor theory here. The whole exploding-TARDIS scenario was contrived by the Doctor so he could confront Clara about who she is at what would seem like the verge of death, and then rewrite her life so the conversation never happened. He wants to confront her about this stuff, but he doesn’t want to ruin their relationship by telling her about his suspicions, and about her predecessors. So he has the conversation and then makes it unhappen, but in such a way as he remembers it. The same thing happens with the self-destruct countdown. It’s creepy and kind of wrong, but it doesn’t matter if he can write it out of history. Sick man. Maybe this is how time wars start.

How much of the odd stuff we’ve seen this year can be explained by ‘the Doctor went back in time and fixed all his mistakes, and kept going back until he got it right’. It would explain the bow-tied Doctor suddenly appearing in the forest in Hide, when in the rest of the scene he didn’t have a bow-tie. And probably other stuff too. This might be how @HaveYouFedTheFish‘s three TARDIS’s collide: the Doctor gets careless while trying to revisit the same events multiple times.

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I’ll try to keep it brief (that’s a struggle I sometimes lose). [On re-reading this just before hitting ‘Submit’ — I see I’ve lost it again.]

Sorry, I haven’t had time to read anything on this forum yet. By the time the episodes screen in Australia this place and the other (i.e. The Guardian) have about 400 messages between them. And some of them are as long as this one.

Well-spotted @bluesqueakpip (in the other place), re the changing photo. Everything seems to make sense in terms of conventional time-paradox stories, apart from that. The brother might have just got over being such a dick; Clara might have found the swimming pool again without remembering it. But the photo is unequivocal: what happened in the episode did not entirely unhappen just because it never happened. (Where’s that meta-temporal grammar when you need it?) There is a corner of reality in which it all still occurred, and from which consequences can leak out. (Consequences that hit the salvage team in the past, it would seem: about the time the ‘android’ brother was injured.)

So I think a lot of people who were disappointed by the ‘reset’ will be… re-appointed? soon.

‘So that’s who–‘ and the Doctor’s name. How fast can Clara read? She sees four pages of the book, and we see her eyes very quickly scanning the pages. On the last page she sees, her eyes don’t scan, she just looks, then looks closer and says ‘So that’s who–‘ From the way her eyes move I infer that the last page she saw contained an illustration. Would the show’s makers think through their clues right down to the level of eye movement? Can I really tell what people are looking at based on this? Maybe.

Later: ‘You were mentioned in a book.’ ‘I’m mentioned in a lot of books.’ ‘You call yourself Doctor. Why do you do that? You have a name, I’ve seen it, in one corner of that tiny–‘ The Doctor silences her with a finger to her lips. A surprisingly intimate gesture. And not nice.

I’m pretty sure the Doctor’s name wasn’t in the book, that she saw it somewhere else while running around in the TARDIS. Someone in the other place thought it was on the Doctor’s cot, which seems reasonable. As I recall, River could read the Doctor’s real name on it, but no-one else could. So… could Clara read it? Or could she just tell it was his name, without being able to read it? To recognise it as a name, and to recognise the cot as the Doctor’s, seem like vast leaps of intuition. Unless they were pictured in the book. ‘So that’s who slept in that cot.’

If ‘So that’s who…’ was not about the Doctor’s name, then what? ‘So that’s who killed Kennedy?’ ‘So that’s who gave mankind fire?’ ‘So that’s who threw that leaf at my Dad’s face.’ She recognises something, but is it a famous something, or a personal something. If it’s a personal something, what’s it doing in a book about the time war?

The book’s title. As I understand it, these days historians (and biographers) pay some attention to whether they should call such a work ‘the history’ or ‘a history’. To call it ‘a history’ is to acknowledge other points of view, the possibility that other, different, histories of the subject could be written. To call it ‘the history’ is to claim authority, to assume definitiveness. Historians are so aware of this issue now, it seems to me, that no academic historian would call a book ‘the history’ of something. I doubt the ‘the’ will come to mean anything, but it caught my eye. Probably Gallifrey’s historians believed in their authority as the definitive tellers of history.

Theories…

Clara criticises the Doctor for not being like a good guy in a story… Fodder for the notion that Clara is somehow ‘the show’. I still can’t quite see how this could work. If she were to end up telling the story of the Doctor’s life in a book (OK, lots of books), that might make sense… The universe forgetting about the Doctor was a bad idea, and Clara has to redress this by spending a few hundred years furiously typing. That’s why they need so many Claras… they’re the Doctor’s typing pool. Or the Doctor’s stories will all flow out of Clara’s head and into videotapes at the BBC  🙂

A lot of people are thinking that the arc we’re seeing relates not only to this season and the mystery of Clara, but to the whole Moffatt era. The reappearance of the crack sure seems to confirm this. Is it significant that the Doctor didn’t react very much, like ‘Oh no, the crack’s back!’? Could he have forgotten about it? Or did he just not want to explain. Did it never happen, because Amy made it unhappen when the universe was rebooted… but it can leak out of that unhappened reality? I’m warming to the possibility that the TARDIS exploding might explain the multiple Claras mystery.

Anyway, starting with this episode I’m starting to think that it’s more than just the last three years that are involved in the arc: that it reaches back to before the series came back in 2005. I presume the date of the series’ return is also when the first episode was set. Clara’s Mum died just before the show’s revival — the last casualty of the time war? ‘So that’s who… killed my Mum’?

My new theory: the time war is still going on, in a corner of reality that can leak, in the same way that a few things leaked out of the closed loop in this episode. In The End of Time (or was it Journey’s End?) the Doctor says that during the time war millions of people died and then died again, endlessly, as history was continually rewritten. And Clara keeps dying and dying again. Exactly how this could make sense in story terms is hard to imagine, as time-rewriting-wars make my head hurt. But it might imply that the Doctor is in a version of reality (a pocket universe?) where this kind of warfare is still going on.

Trivia:

The subtitles in the ABC’s ‘iView’ version of the episode identify the voices we hear when the console is dismantled. Neat.

At about 17 minutes 20 seconds you can just about make out the title of the book behind Clara. I suspect this is a real book used to dress the set, that we’re not supposed to pay attention to. The almost-legible part of the title seems to be ‘City of Canterbury’. Probably it’s some dreary old city council minutes picked up at a sale after they were chucked out by a library.

As I mentioned in my comments on Asylum of the Daleks recently, the TARDIS corridors seem to have been designed by Daleks.

Near the end of the episode, at the ‘snarl’: ‘We can’t die. This isn’t real.’ They could play this line back when it’s finally revealed that the Doctor’s a dreaming Dalek

I’m sure I heard a few notes of the Blake’s 7 theme when the salvage crew were introduced.

[PhileasF @replies]

@ardaraith – good call on the Doctor drinking whiskey, I’d completely forgotten about that. He’s come a long way from having to spit out a glass of wine in The Impossible Astronaut (IIRC).

@bluesqueakpip, I think you’re right that the biggest objection to the Doctor-aDalek-like-Oswin theory is that they just wouldn’t do this, as audiences hate to be told it was all a dream. And yet so much seems to point that way that I feel it will be used somehow, even if it’s just a theory that ends up being mentioned and debunked within the show. If it turns out to have any truth, it will be that the Doctor is being turned into a Dalek puppet by those nanocloud things.

In the cold light of day, after a good sleep has flushed away lots of probably fruitless theorising, what still seems significant is the concept of the Daleks’ telepathic internet, and that the Doctor has attempted to hack it and failed. Maybe it hacked him right back?

And I can’t remember who first pointed it out on this site, but there appeared to be an intentional link made between the images and dialogue accompanying Oswin being Dalekised, and her upload in Bells of St John. This implies that her persona could still be out there in the Dalek pathweb, ready to be rescued by the Doctor… or the Great Intelligence… or River, or herself, or parties unknown.

One thing I didn’t mention (surely the post was long enough already ) — the episode had plenty of red and blue for the colour symbolists.

[PhileasF @replies]

I’ve just rewatched Asylum of the Daleks, bearing in mind my favourite theories, and of course the later episodes up to Hide.

Now more than ever I think either:
a) the Doctor is a Dalek, or
b) the Doctor will come to think he’s a Dalek.

or c, d, or e, which are new theories I came up with while watching.

I jotted down a few thoughts while I was watching… probably a lot more thoughts than anyone will ever want to read.

So here are the highlights:

Darla and Clara: they can both contact the Doctor.

We first see the Doctor inside a Dalek. (OK, a great big Dalek statue.)

Music (i.e. Carmen) is coming from a room at the ‘heart of the Asylum’. The music room was the heart of Caliburn House in Hide. And music and songs feature quite a lot in the second half of the season.

With a little imagination you could interpret this episode as being about a mad Dalek who imagines himself to be the Doctor, and is taken to the Asylum and imprisoned there. And then goes really crazy, having imaginary adventures with that hot Dalek in the next padded cell. ‘Sucker punch?’

When Amy starts to turn into a Dalek puppet, she perceives the Daleks in the Asylum as human. One pair of Daleks could be Clara’s parents. (The woman looks like Clara’s Mum to me — we don’t get a very good look at him). There’s a little girl wearing a crown, not entirely unlike the Queen of Years in Rings of Akhaten. As she dances we hear music.

Is fear a Dalek trait? The Doctor tells Amy to hang on to her fear, because fear isn’t Dalek. But later he’s told the Daleks have become strong through fear of him. Perhaps he’s being context-specific for Amy — if she stops being afraid of turning into a Dalek puppet, or of the Daleks, that would be bad.

The Daleks have a telepathic web, the pathweb. The Doctor tried to hack it and failed. So is this season what happens to someone who tries and fails to hack a ‘telepathic web’. Is the Doctor lost in the Dalek internet? How do you hack the pathweb? Do you capture a Dalek, scoop it out, and install yourself in its case? Is the mad Dalek they send to the asylum, if you go with that idea, the Doctor himself stuck inside a Dalek casing, or an unfortunate Dalek he’s connected his mind to while trying to hack the pathweb, and which now thinks it’s him?

These are my detailed notes. They’re preceded by timings based on the UK BluRay edition, rounded to the nearest five seconds.

0m50s: ‘I got your message. Not many people can do that–send me a message.’ Clara could in The Bells of St John. (So can Martha, and Rose probably, if she was in the same universe as him. The Brigadier could too, in the old days.)

1m: ‘I love your choice of meeting place.’ I don’t think I realised this on my previous viewings, but they’re inside the Dalek statue! On the BluRay you can see Darla in the statue’s eyestalk — since Australia’s ABC doesn’t show Doctor Who in high-definition any more, this may not have been clear before. Or I might have forgotten. Does this ‘Doctor looks through the eye of a Dalek’ moment reveal the secret of the season?

1m50s: ‘It’s a trap.’ ‘What is?’ ‘You are, and you don’t even know it.’ If this opening scene foreshadows the season, then that seems to support the Oswin/Clara-is-a-trap theory.

2m 10s: Amy’s knuckles (in the photoshoot): ‘LOVE’ ‘HATE’. Foreshadowing her coming inner conflict.

3m: The lights flicker when a Dalek puppet walks into the room. What if you interpret every flickering light this season as signifying the presence of a Dalek puppet?

4m05s: ‘How much trouble, Mr Pond?’ We see a Dalek coming into the room, and we hear the Doctor’s voice. For a moment it’s as though the Doctor’s voice is coming from the Dalek.

4m15s: ‘Out of ten? Eleven.’ The season’s first ’11’.

5m05s: ‘What do we do?’ ‘Make them remember you.’

7m40s: Oswin wears a ring. Is it the same one Clara has in Rings of Akhaten? Oswin’s red outfit, and the way red is always (or at least usually) a part of Clara’s outfit: the obvious connection seems to be to red riding hood. In that story, a wolf puts on red riding hood’s grandmother’s clothing. If the Doctor is trying to hack the pathweb by pretending to be a Dalek, that would make him the wolf. (And remember ‘hungry like the wolf’ in Cold War.) So, is Clara part of the pathweb security system, a program specifically designed to trap the Doctor, in case he ever tried to hack it? Any moment she’s going to call for the woodsman.

9m15s: Here’s a new bonkers theory… What if the ‘Doctor’ in this episode is a mad Dalek that imagines itself to be the Doctor? They take it to the asylum, ask it a few questions to confirm that it’s as mad as a sackful of kaled mutants, and then send it down. And the real Doctor’s been on holiday all year. A theory that I sometimes entertain is that there are two ‘streams’ of stories going on this half-season, with two Doctor-and-Claras having separate adventures. Maybe one pair are Daleks in the asylum, and the other… not.

9m50s: The Daleks find hatred beautiful. ‘Perhaps that is why we have never been able to kill you.’ The Dalek PM could just as easily be talking to a mad Dalek who thinks he’s the Doctor, as to the Doctor.

10m35s: ‘This signal is being received from the very heart of the Asylum.’ Cue Oswin’s music. So the ‘music room’ — Oswin’s hiding place — is the heart of the asylum… cf the music room being the heart of the house in Hide. The basic situation in Hide recalls the basic situation in Asylum, except in Hide the Doctor is able to save the lost traveller. And reuniting the crooked people corresponds to reuniting Amy and Rory.

12m10s: “Where do you get the milk.’ You could so easily think this is a joke, just the Doctor being flippant. Such a clever bit. In addition to watching out for eggs all this year, maybe we should have been looking for milk too. The Doctor rather ostentatiously drank milk from a bottle in Hide.

12m40s: ‘The Asylum force field is impenetrable.’ So how did the Alaska get through?

14m40s: So, that Dalek puppet is trying to repair the Alaska’s escape capsule, or thinks he is, when the Doctor and co fall from the sky. But surely he hasn’t been tinkering up there for the past 363 days? Does he relive the couple of hours post-crash over and over? Or has he been activated to watch for the Doctor, Amy and Rory. Oswin has ‘eyes’ on the surface, and can also see into the cabin of the escape capsule with the zombie puppets. Could she be running this whole show, so to speak? She knew the Doctor and co were coming, after talking to them over the radio earlier. Could she have activated the guy on the surface? If she can control him, could she control, say, a dead girl like Clara? If her body were preserved in ice in the 19th century… (But what about the parents? No, this theory doesn’t make much sense.)

17m15s: The big hole Rory fell into — that’s a big well. As various commentators have noted of the well in Hide, wells can be seen as a way of connecting with the unconscious. With the things that are too horrible to accept.

24m20s: ‘Egggs.’ Isn’t it interesting that the Doctor wasn’t curious about where Oswin was getting the eggs? It’s as if he has a mental block on ‘eggs’, as he might if he’s trying not to be a Dalek. Is he afraid to say it in case he starts exterminating?

26m50s: Amy is being converted into a Dalek puppet. ‘I want you scared. Scared isn’t Dalek.’ I’ve been assuming fear was a big part of the Dalek condition, and that the more the Doctor shows fear in recent episodes (e.g. Hide), the more he reveals himself to be Dalek-like. Fear leads to anger.. anger leads to hate… and all that. Is the Doctor wrong? If he’s a Dalek already — or if he’s a Dalek who thinks he’s the Doctor — he may incorrectly think that fear is a good thing. Or he might be simplifying — in this context a human would be afraid, but a Dalek puppet wouldn’t.

27m30s: Note the classic Dalek corridors. The TARDIS corridors, in photos for Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS, look a lot like classic Dalek corridors. (I assume those were TARDIS corridors in the photos… the title sort of suggests it.)

28m20s: Amy sees the Daleks as nice people. Well, as well-dressed people. What is being communicated by this scene?

– Is Amy literally perceiving the Daleks as human?
– Does it figuratively express the idea that she sees them as nice people now? Or as an elite group (suggested by the high-status clothes), the kind of people she’s supposed to serve? So what we are seeing may not be literally what Amy is seeing, but a representation of her emotional response to these Daleks.
– Bearing in mind that these Daleks are mad, is she seeing them as they see themselves?

There’s a little girl among them, dancing, wearing a crown like the Queen of Years. There’s also music (or is that humming?) A man Dalek and a woman Dalek air kiss. (The Doctor air kisses now, remember.) The woman resemble Clara’s mother, or at least I think so. We don’t see the man’s face.

32m05s: ‘Do you know how you make someone into a Dalek? Subtract love, add anger.’ I’ve been misremembering this quote as having to do with memory loss, but that was something the Doctor said to Amy earlier.

37m55s: The Doctor fixes Amy and Rory as easily as fixing his bow tie. If the Doctor didn’t need an anti-nanocloud bracelet, then why did the Daleks give him one? Oh. Maybe he knows he can’t be made into a Dalek puppet because he’s already a Dalek puppet… but a puppet of a Dalek he himself controls as part of his effort to hack the pathweb. Too much? Could something so elaborate possibly be the explanation behind everything? Only if Asylum were to be repeated as part of the story, in much the same way as Evil of the Daleks was repeated after The Wheel in Space, as a projection from the Doctor’s mind to show Zoe what kind of adventures he and Jamie have. It would be pretty awesome if a ‘repeat’ of Asylum decoded it by being an alternate version where everything to do with the arc was made clear. It would also be pretty awesome if they did this for the whole season. If the ‘real’ version wasn’t very different from what we’ve been watching, it might not be that expensive to make an alternate season… Too bonkers? Yeah.

39m25s: ‘Those ones don’t usually wake up for anything.’ Oswin clearly knows a lot about the Asylum. Is this entirely consistent with how she represents herself in her early statements? Or can any inconsistency be explained psychologically — that her awareness of the truth about her surroundings increases as she comes closer to realising who she really is. That the Doctor asking about the milk has set her on the path to understanding what’s happened.

0m30s: ‘The Daleks, they have a hive mind — well they don’t, but they have a sort of telepathic web.’ ‘The pathweb’. So, is this setting up the idea that the Doctor-Dalek and the Oswin-Dalek are sitting alongside each other in the Asylum, making up stories involving their fellow inmates? The season isn’t just in the Doctor’s head, or Oswin’s head, but both their heads at once.

40m50s: ‘I tried hacking into the pathweb. Even I can’t do it.’ Ah haa! The Doctor’s tried hacking into the Dalek’s telepathic web. Is that what’s happening this entire season? Is this what it looks like when you try to hack into the Dalek pathweb and fail? The Doctor’s lost in the Dalek internet, like Clara in Bells of St John (and us, of course) in the Earth internet. How do you hack into it anyway? Do you capture a Dalek and try to mind-meld with it? Do you pretend to be a Dalek?

42m10s: Is the Oswin-Dalek the same Dalek that led the Doctor to Amy and Rory at 4m05s? They both have a sort of name tag at the base of the head.

42m55s: ‘Where am I? Where am I?’ a la the lost souls in Bells of St John. Is this Oswin becoming connected to the pathweb, and thus becoming a lost soul on the Dalek internet? Darla’s memories are stored for when they’re needed for deep cover. Maybe they’re stored in the same way as in Bells? So if Oswin’s memories are stored in the pathweb, could they be extracted and put into a suitable body?

44m38s: ‘They have grown stronger in fear of you.’ ‘I know.’ See, the Daleks have fear.

45m15s: ‘Run you clever boy. And remember.’ And as she says ‘remember’ she looks to the camera, virtually breaking the fourth wall. She’s telling us to remember, not him. Because we’ll need to remember every tiny detail of this episode if the explanation in the season finale is going to make any sense.

[PhileasF @replies]

@bluesqueakpip, there’s another famous ‘name of the rose’ reference besides Eco’s book and the movie — in a work alluded to in Hide:

What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title.

From which I infer that ‘The Name of the Doctor’ might well be about the Doctor’s name, without revealing it, because it doesn’t matter.

Juliet, as I recall, ‘died’ twice… Romeo only once.

I rewatched Hide again just now. Speaking of Romeo, I was struck by a scene near the end, where the Doctor realises what’s going on with the lovelorn monster who needs his companion, and puts his arm around Clara.

‘Separated by events, war, politics, accidents in time’ …  ‘Since then they’ve been yearning for each other across time and space’. ‘This isn’t a ghost story, it’s a love story!’

I know this contradicts the various other theories I’ve been promoting… but that last line in particular felt like a meta-reference to the story we’re watching. If we take it literally… with a dash of imagination… Clara is the Doctor’s long lost love, separated by events… She isn’t Susan, she’s Susan’s grandmother!

Another thing that popped into my head while watching Hide was one of Steven Moffat’s earlier works: a great episode of Press Gang called ‘Going Back to Jasper Street’. It involves a wooden man, with the existence of a second wooden man a surprise revelation. The wooden man (a carved figure) is associated with a guilty memory the protagonist has suppressed, and which is now forcing its way into her consciousness through nightmares. Apart from just being great, the episode is memorable as one of Moffat’s early ‘structure’ stories, where a non-linear structure is a big part of what makes it work as a story. The episode ingeniously intercuts two time periods, both involving the same place but ten years apart, with seamless segueing from one time period to the other. Each time period’s storyline works on its own, but also contributes information and emotional resonance to the other. It’s a bit ‘Blink’.  A bit.

There’s a memorable scene where the protagonist asks a friend about a mystery that’s puzzling her, and he sarcastically explains it with an elaborate wormholes-in-the-space-time-continuum theory which probably sums up several of Moffat’s Doctor Who episodes.

[PhileasF @replies]

Love and fear are once again fighting it out at the core of the story. As has been noted, it seems odd that the Doctor would be afraid of the crooked man. The instinctive fear of the alien, as well as his apparent fear of Clara, would seem to support the idea that he’s being Dalekised… And if he still fears Clara after learning she’s ‘just a girl’… well, a Dalek would, wouldn’t it?

Does it say something about the audience that so many people (at the Guardian, I mean) seem bothered by the love theme that recurs this season? That people want the alien to be a horrible monster that has to be killed? Who are the real Daleks, the Doctor and Clara, or the people watching at home?

When I saw all those spoilerific photos at the Radio Times site I wondered if that landscape which the spacesuited Doctor visited might be primeval Earth. I also wondered if the ghost would turn out to be a very old one, i.e. dating back to primeval Earth, a la the ghost in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. And of course that ghost was a sort of alternate version of Scaroth, who has inspired a number of Clara theories. Like others, I thought that blue crystal would turn out to be the (or at least a) Metebelis crystal. For an old-time fan it generated a fair bit of suspense, as the last time the Doctor gave a Metebelis crystal to a psychic hooked up to lots of high-tech psychic research equipment in 1974, he died of fright. Which would have been fair enough in this episode. Those photos came from somewhere very deep in the uncanny valley.

Carlisle or Carlyle? I’m just about persuaded now that that was just a cheap shot at a place called Carlisle. (As I understand it, it has a similar reputation in the UK to that of my home town, Adelaide, in Australia.) Initially I thought it must be a reference to a famous quote by Thomas Carlyle, along the lines of ‘Ignorance is the opposite of bliss’, which made me think ‘Hmmmm, Clara knows obscure literary stuff.’ Or even ‘Clara knows something that 19th century Clara might know, but 21st century Clara is somewhat less likely to know.’ But I can’t find any reference to Carlyle having said anything very much like that. My researches have, however, turned up some pretty interesting Carlyle quotes.

Carlyle, by the way, wrote a famous book about the French Revolution, and is the subject of one of the great literary anecdotes. (In brief: John Stuart Mill is asked to write a book about the French Revolution. He’s busy, so he suggests the publisher try his impoverished young friend Thomas Carlyle, who’s trying to make it as a writer. Carlyle takes up the challenge, and spends ten years [? Can’t be bothered googling it] writing his history of the French Revolution. If it’s terrible, this will reflect badly on Carlyle’s friend John Stuart Mill, so before sending it to the publisher, he sends it to Mill for his approval. Because Carlyle’s so poor, the whole manuscript is written on grubby scraps of paper, so when Mill’s maid sees it in his office, she assumes it’s a pile of scrap paper intended to be used as a firelighter… Oh, how they all laughed. Carlyle then wrote it again from memory, insisting it was improved by the opportunity to do a second draft.)

Anyway, here are the fun Carlyle quotes that seem vaguely pertinent.

‘Happy the people whose annals are blank in history books.’

‘The crash of the whole solar and stellar systems could kill you only once.’

‘Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time.’

‘I don’t pretend to understand the Universe — it’s a great deal bigger than I am.’

‘If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.’

One of the hazards of bonkers theorising is that you see clues everywhere, even when you look away from the show. Or is that just me? It never happened before this season. I started reading David Copperfield recently. David’s mother is named Clara. She was a governess.

And every time I see lights flicker, and hear or see something to do with eggs, I think to myself, ‘I Am Not A Dalek.’ I think I need a holiday.

The TARDIS and Clara. Does the TARDIS dislike Clara, or has the Doctor set it to be wary of Clara? He is pointedly failing to give her a key. And the ‘Next Week’ trailer has him confronting her with the very questions we ask: are you a trap, a trick? It seems rather early for these threads to come to a head.

Asking Emma about Clara. One possibility I have considered is that every episode since Bells has been about the Doctor testing his bonkers theories about Clara. When he goes away in Akhaten, I suspect he’s watching unseen, just as he was throughout her childhood, to see how she reacts when he’s not around. If she really is some kind of trap, maybe her persona is an act which she’ll drop when he isn’t around. And yet she still seems nice… or is she just clever enough to seem nice, because he might be watching? And then he makes the TARDIS go away in Cold War, and bingo, this seems to get a reaction. Now he’s consulting experts.

The more I think about it, and the more the seeming enigma of Clara is piled on, the more I warm to bonkers theory #712B: Clara is just an ordinary girl. This season seems so ripe for theorising, so full off odd lines and scenes that seem to fit into some currently unknown arc or arcs, that it would be a pretty good twist if it turned out there was no arc. Or if the only arc is that the Doctor’s becoming weird and paranoid. The oddness of certain scenes and lines encourages the audience to share the Doctor’s paranoia. If any other character in any other show said, when asked what she likes, that she likes ‘stuff’, we would happily interpret this as ordinary reticence, or an inability to express herself, perhaps exacerbated by stress. Only in Doctor Who (and perhaps only this year) does this make us think Android! Ganger! Dalek! TARDIS!

So, my new theory (#712c?) is that the arc is that the Doctor’s going a little nuts and imagining arcs and big bads that aren’t there… And finally the Dream Lord will appear and try to convince him that he’s being turned into a Dalek, and the whole season has been a dream (of sorts), and Clara is part of his Dalek conditioning, and the only way to save himself is to kill Clara, and when he does he’ll wake up to find his best friends, Amy and Rory. So Clara will have to overcome her innate distaste for talking about herself to convince him she’s a real person.

[PhileasF @replies]

@craig, I could imagine them not even attempting to make it look like ‘modern’ Doctor Who, but making Matt Smith’s interactions with the former Doctors resemble the old episodes. A sufficiently clever writer could come up with a reason to explain why the world suddenly looks like a low-resolution video copy of a telerecording of an old TV show. Perhaps the interactions with former Doctors would be seen on low-quality monitors. Perhaps they would appear within the story as old films and videos recorded in the past and seen in the present (Blink DVD-extra style).

Even so, as you say, the British tabloid press is so unreliable that the article has no more than ‘bonkers theory’ status.

[PhileasF @replies]

@htpbdet, re your list of theories. I may have exceeded my bonkers theory quota for this week, but I have another one, a sort of variation on your number 5.

In this theory, Dalek-Oswin manage to teleport herself into the TARDIS at the end of Asylum. She’s hidden somewhere deep within thee TARDIS, and she’s hacked into it. Now she’s started making the TARDIS project her into its environment, complete with convincing backstory and human body. A lot of this is dependent on Human Nature, where IIRC the TARDIS was able to manufacture a sort of backstory for the Doctor’s human identity. And speaking of Human Nature, perhaps a Dalek with access to the TARDIS’s knowledge could create a human version of herself just as the Doctor did in that episode. (So the ring (from Rings of Akhaten) could hold her ‘true’ Dalek identity, like the Doctor’s fobwatch.)

Anyway, I came up with this theory last year in an attempt to explain the eggs and flickering lights — my idea then was that Oswin was a sort of unreliable narrator of the episodes we were seeing, watching from inside the TARDIS. I put it aside a while ago, but now I’m entertaining it again. Why? The use of the HADS looks to me like the Doctor has had this theory himself, and is testing it. What happens to Clara when the TARDIS goes away? She passes out. Hmmmm…

[PhileasF @replies]

@juniperfish, I think you’re definitely on to something with the songs. It’s been a while since I saw it, but were there any Christmas carols in The Snowmen?

I’ve been looking at the lyrics of Vienna (one of my favourites since the early 80s, so great to see it get  a mention  and a bit of a singalong in my favourite show). Intriguingly, silence gets a mention:

Alone in the night as the daylight brings a cold empty silence
The warmth of your hand and a cold grey sky

It fades to the distance.

The image is gone
only you and I
This means nothing to me

[PhileasF @replies]

I enjoyed Cold War very much — I liked the last two episodes as well, but this is the first time since The Snowmen that I’ve rewatched an episode the next day.

Lately I’ve been thinking about one of my favourite bonkers theories: that the Doctor has been / is being converted into a Dalek. I first heard it here, and have been thinking about the pros and cons of the theory over the past few days, especially while watching Cold War.

The idea is that, just like Oswin in Asylum of the Daleks, the Doctor is living in a fantasy world in his mind, after being physically converted into a Dalek.

Those flickering lights that recurred through last year’s episodes: they were some hazy perception of the Dalekisation process. Or else a feature of his real environment that occasionally leaks into his ‘dream’ world.

The eggs from last year’s episodes. Those are the Doctor’s psyche dealing with his compulsion to eggs-terminate. Before he can complete the thought, the eggs-termination gets sublimated into some harmless egg-related word or image. In the same way, Oswin was turning her eggs into souffles.

‘First they take away love…’ said Oswin in Asylum.  The loss of Amy and Rory in his dream-world represents the Doctor’s loss of love, a critical step in his Dalekisation. (Oswin’s messages to her mother represent her retention of love.) When the Doctor completely isolates himself on his cloud the real Dalekisation work can begin.

‘Then they take away memory’ (I think that’s how it goes). The Doctor’s forgotten about the Great Intelligence. And perhaps more importantly, in his dream world the Doctor has been forgotten. The obvious last step in this process is that, when everyone else has forgotten the Doctor, so will he. OK, it’s not really obvious. But with enough caffeine and wine, or Steven Moffat levels of cleverness,I’m sure this could be made to sound like it makes sense.

Of late, the Doctor is being acclimatised to a new way of getting around. An anti-gravity motorbike. A hoverbike. A heavily-arrmed submarine. Clearly this is part of his Dalek training program. When he’s a Dalek there’ll be no more running around, and no more TARDISing. He’ll be operating a heavily armed floating travel machine. Saving the submarine was a sort of test of his ability to handle his travel machine. Some have noted that submarines don’t work like that (I wouldn’t know). But ‘lateral movement’ is very much a part of how a Dalek travel machine works.

In Cold War in particular, we see him using the sonic screwdriver as a kind of security blanket, constantly holding it out in front of himself when he’s afraid. As many have noticed, the sonic screwdriver has changed its appearance. It has, I think, come to look a lot like a Dalek gun. It’s acquired so many improbable capabilities, the Doctor’s learning to be completely dependent on it. And is it just me, or is the Doctor more fearful these days than he used to be? Fear, and the use of the gun to deal with that fear, are I think core aspects of the Dalek psyche. As he runs around that submarine pointing his sonic everywhere, he could be a little boy playing Daleks. At this stage his pseudo-gunstick isn’t armed, even in the training simulation. But for how long?

So this is how I think it works. You can’t have baby, child, adolescent Daleks running around shooting things every time they get excited or frightened. The same applies to human (and Gallifreyan) Dalek converts. They must go through a period of dormancy where they work through a Dalek childhood harmlessly, in simulation, inside their heads. It’s only when they ‘pass’ their training program that they’re ‘woken up’ and allowed to interact with the real world as fully-fledged Daleks.

So where does Clara fit in? In each of her two latest incarnations, she’s been a ‘governess’, someone who educates and entertains children. She’s part of the Dalek training program. She’s the Doctor’s perception of a module of the training program that guides, monitors and assesses him. She may even be controlling the simulation, ensuring it doesn’t get out of hand while the inexperienced Dalek is still finding his ‘feet’. Letting him handle the world with training wheels, so to speak. While Clara was unconscious, all hell seemed to break loose on the submarine, with the Doctor completely losing control of the situation. When she woke up, everyone calmed down and let the Doctor take charge again.

At times in Cold War, the Doctor seemed completely out of his depth (pun intended, I’m afraid). He just stood their gaping, like a schoolboy called on to provide an answer he doesn’t know, while Clara unobtrusively saved the situation.

Also, it seemed to me that Clara’s reaction to those horribly dismantled bodies was a little low-key. She paid a certain lip-service to being distressed, presumably to maintain her cover in the simulated world, but she didn’t seem nearly as distressed as a real person would be.

When did the Doctor become a Dalek? I’m not sure. Initially I thought maybe in 1964… but would Stephen Moffat risk the outrage that would follow retconning the whole series away? Nah. So now I think… before Asylum. The Doctor says goodbye to Amy and Rory, then goes off and gets captured by the Daleks. Asylum to Cold War are all in his head, It makes sense that he would be exposed early on to the idea of what life might be like for a Dalek convert, so it won’t come as too much of a shock when the penny drops. And because we like Clara, and she’ll probably continue after the Doctor is cured of being a Dalek (assuming he is cured) I’ll hazard a guess that his Dalek casing is right alongside hers in the Dalek nursery, and the Dalek training program has used her personality as the basis of his ‘governess’ module. And perhaps vice versa. When he’s rescued or rescues himself from being a Dalek, he’ll also save her… or vice versa.

I was pretty convinced of this theory until about 10 minutes into Cold War. Now I’m only about 20% convinced.

(Now I favour a much earlier (pre-Snowmen) theory, because Clara passed out when the TARDIS vanished. And clearly the Doctor suspects this too, which is why he set the TARDIS to vanish, to see what would happen to Clara… But that’s a bonkers theory for another time.)

[PhileasF @replies]

Hi all, new here. I’ve been lurking at the Guardian blog for a year or so, but never felt moved to speak. Now I don’t even feel moved to listen. It’s become a nasty place.

Here are my thoughts about the Rings of Akhaten. (In summary: I liked.)
Clara
For every piece of the puzzle we fill in, more mysteries appear. How did her mother die? Where’s her father? Was he born on the day Quatermass premiered? The leaf seems like a contrived ‘meet-cute’; that is to say, on the surface it appears that some powerful or clever being has contrived their getting together by engineering this seemingly random event. Is a falling leaf as easy to manipulate as a snowflake? Has Clara been carrying around a little piece of GI all her life? Or is the leaf incident no more unlikely than the way everyone actually meets in real life? Every encounter is equally the result of countless coincidences and improbabilities.

If Clara is somehow a personification of Doctor Who (the show, that is) can we infer anything from this? Twice dead (1989 and 1996) and now thriving in the 21st century. As a governess, she educates and entertains other people’s children… but the Dads love her too. Oswin is a junior entertainment manager — is ‘junior’ a rank, or is ‘junior entertainment’ a description of her job? Was Oswin in charge of providing children’s entertainment on the starship Alaska? She’s progressed from being completely non-technical to a computer genius — could this parallel the low production standards of the original series evolving into the state-of-the-art show we know today? But if Clara is the show, does that give us an insight into her mysteries? Not that I can see.

The Leaf and the Ring
Clara’s relics of her parents are a leaf and a ring. A (once-)living thing and a manufactured thing. Flesh and metal. She seems to worry that she’s the Doctor’s leaf/ring, something he wants to keep around as a sentimental reminder of someone he loved. The other Claras wanted the Doctor to remember; this Clara wants him to forget them. I think we will be seeing this ring again some time. The Master backed himself up in a ring, didn’t he? I think we’ll be seeing more of Clara’s mum…

The Beano Summer Special 1981
What was in the Beano Summer Special of 1981? On the cover, Dennis the Menace wears a cowboy hat. A stetson? Stetsons are cool. There was no Doctor Who on TV in the summer of 1981. It was in the midst of the show’s first long hiatus. Was it about this time that John Nathan-Turner wrote ‘The Doctor’s Wife’ on a BBC whiteboard?

The Doctor reading the Beano, especially the reveal of the Doctor by the lowering of the book, reminded me a lot of the opening scene of the movie Doctor Who and the Daleks, where Doctor Who reads a pulpish-looking book about monsters from outer space. Or was it Daleks Invasion Earth 2150?

The Episode
There was a certain Doctor Who at the Proms quality to it — those live stage shows they do each year. I sort of enjoy them, but have never stayed awake through a whole one. This has more to do with the way I always start watching them at 2am after watching lots of episodes of Doctor Who and then discovering there’s a Doctor Who at the Proms DVD extra, than with the shows themselves. They’re a mix of music and nostalgia and live Doctor Who adventure with audience participation by a nervous child. Merry is a sort of fan — she knows all the songs (which are also stories), like the kids plucked from the audience at the proms.

The audience in the arena is more or less watching a Doctor Who episode playing out live in front of them. I like to think the Doctor and Susan are in that crowd. No doubt they’ve accidentally sold the TARDIS to that dog lady while hiring a bike and are trying to keep their heads down and avoid interfering while they try to get it back. What would the young Doctor make of what he sees? No doubt he’d recognise the old Doctor as himself. He might find the show inspiring and wonder why he isn’t out there saving the little girl. Next time I’m here, he thinks.

Much has been made of Clara’s inability to understand the dog lady. However, there are precedents for the Doctor’s companions being unable to understand random aliens. Martha couldn’t talk to the Hath in the Doctor’s Daughter. No-one but the Doctor seems to understand the Judoon. And we know the Doctor can talk to animals and babies, while the TARDIS doesn’t translate those for his companions. I wouldn’t read too much into it. Clara could understand Merry, who we can presume wasn’t speaking English, so clearly the telepathic circuits are working for her. I think the communication problem just reinforces the sense of being a stranger in a strange land.

Likewise I wouldn’t read too much into the TARDIS doors failing to open for Clara. As has been widely pointed out, you need a key. It was, however,  odd for Clara to suggest that the TARDIS doesn’t like her, when it should be obvious to her why the doors won’t open. So perhaps she’s voicing an impression that has nothing to do with the doors failing to open.

I liked the Doctor’s little speeches. I think his pep-talk to Merry might be a key moment. Clara’s the impossible girl, but aren’t we’re all equally the result of aeons of improbable events coming together to make us happen? Maybe Clara’s secret will be that there’s no secret. She’s just an impossible girl who’s no more impossible than every other impossible girl and boy.

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