@tardigrade

My offhand comment on labels was simply to say that if you were in a species where there are no males/females, then labels like Mr/Miss would be pretty meaningless.

Ursula Le Guin posed the question in a more interesting way in Left Hand of Darkness (have you read that yet, @Puroandson (both Prime and Puricle))? Gender in language has…[Read more]

@arbutus  see the Hybrid as the Doctor become Clara-obsessed, Clara-addicted. She gets in your mind and stays there. This allows the Hybrid arc to tie in with the Clara’s death arc

Interesting, that this had to be spelled out.  I think many fans had no trouble seeing Clara as unhealthily egotistical, especially in S8 (that’s what Moffat gets for…[Read more]

@puroandson

Son of Puro – My guess with Big Bang 2 is that the universe was largely reconstructed the way it was before – but not entirely. It may be metaphorical – before Big Bang 2 we have RTD’s Whoniverse, post Big Bang 2 we are definitely in Moffat’s Whoniverse.

The one thing I have noticed is that the Blinovitch Limitation effect is…[Read more]

@juniperfish @puroandson @tardigrade

Gosh, it’s hard to know where to start (which is pretty much the point of po-mo), so let’s start with @Arbutus who  nails it in two sentences.

The problem with having presented the Doctor in the past as the “man with the plan”, as in “I knew it all along and was ready for you”, the Doctor lies, etc., is that…

[Read more]

A couple of days ago, I had noted a few comments that I wanted to remember.

@tardigrade   freed from the expectation of what it could have been, I was free to appreciate it better for what it was.   This is really to the point, I think. Any time there is a big episode, as here when we have the wrap-up to a series’ worth of arcs, we have  a vision…[Read more]

@bluesqueakpip

Having an active SF afterlife is not ‘cheating death’.

For most people, I think an afterlife is the ultimate form of cheating death, as it’s a form of immortality for the consciousness. Those who look forward to “the singularity” certainly seem to view it as a form of immortality, not death.

If you go back to BG Who, the only dead…

[Read more]

@tardigrade

Having an active SF afterlife is not ‘cheating death’. The Time Lords upload people to the Matrix after death; that’s the SF version of an afterlife. You might as well say that Clarence in It’s a Wonderful Life cheated death because he’s putting in some serious overtime as George Bailey’s guardian angel. 🙂 Likewise, River in The…[Read more]

@morpho and @tardigrade

My interpretation of this was that the teleporter hard drive was being reset to the state in which it had the Doctor’s information.

The Doctor hints at the reason this would be the case: he dryly remarks that the victim is the only really essential person in a torture chamber.

@Puroandson

Yes but you’re saying -quite openly -that if people disagree wholeheartedly with the narrative of post structuralism and lit crit then it’s a “populist hack contempt based on a superficial understanding”

Puro, not at all – I also write in my post #49484 “there are intelligent critiques of post-structuralism”. I was specificall…[Read more]

@tardigrade

The teleporter (and its limitations) already appeared in Forest of the Dead and was very clearly an information-reconstructing teleport.

But I’m afraid it’s a standard philosophical question about teleports, because the types that work by reconstructing information (rather than some mysterious disassembling, transportation and…[Read more]

@puroandson   Puro Solo posted a lengthy and articulate discussion of the Doctor’s motivations re Clara and the hybrid, and I especially liked this: I presume the Doctor is now released from his increasingly heavy duty of care. This is significant. Therefore Missy has no power over him and other species who want the Doctor will not ‘read’ his me…[Read more]

SPOILER, SPOILER, SPOILER...

SPOILER, SPOILER, SPOILER...

@ichabod @tardigrade
Would the neural block have worked on Clara without a pulse?  In her time-looped state she might have just reset, or it may not have had time to work – it seemed to take several seconds for the Doctor to succumb to it.  It depends on how much of Clara’s system is reset in her timeloop (she is her own personal traveling O…[Read more]

@tardigrade  When it’s clear that Clara’s pulse isn’t returning, the Doctor is agitated in a way that we’ve rarely seen. He certainly seems to be doubting himself at that point, so I have difficulty in seeing him putting in place a plan at that moment.

Let alone a plan that he has developed in anticipation of this no-pulse-return developm…[Read more]

@tardigrade

I agree that the Doctor lacks  diplomacy skills. That’s where his companions can assist him

with cue cards or whatever. But he never lets that get in his way and is always  a step ahead.

I can’t  equate that with a lack of empathy.  Seems to me he has buckets of empathy.

It drives his choices but its not always critical to his succ…[Read more]

@tardigrade

The truth about the hybrid was, I think, far less important than the fact that the prophecy had seriously worried the Time Lords. Their fear would have been compounded by the knowledge that whatever the Doctor had learned when he ventured into the Cloister as a young man had scared him so badly that he ran. We were told that the…[Read more]

@jphamlore  Wow, you have an amazing imagination — wonderful bonkerizing, rich and strange!

if this is their standard of collective decision-making on issues that potentially affect the fate of the universe, this does seem to be another fairly rash one, so maybe it is better they go their separate ways.

Yes.  They don’t even know for certain w…[Read more]

@tardigrade: I think it is possible that at certain times the Doctor knows more about the hybrid and at certain times he doesn’t, because

The Doctor(O.C.): I don’t know.

Ashildr: Sometimes you do. It’s always the way with things we’d rather forget. You remember now, though, don’t you? Tell me, Doctor, who is…the Hybrid? Who threatens all of…

[Read more]

@tardigrade  For me, it’s the emotional connection that was the more important thing that’s been weakened by the wipe, more than the actual memories of what happened, which do seem to be there, even if not in their original form, so even if he does fill in the gaps over time, it seems he’ll be able to live with those memories now.

@mudlark  [Read more]