I liked it, and agree it was the best episode of this half-season at least. While I was hoping for better from Moffat this season, I’ll still take him any day over RTD. Many of the best eps in RTD’s reign were written by Moffat. RTD’s stories were often bombastic and climactic, but tended to be a little shallow.
Likes:
I’ve always liked River, and I liked how she was used in this ep. It could be a fitting final episode for her, but I won’t be sorry if we see her again.
The explanation of how Clara became the impossible girl. A noble, self-sacrificing act to save the Doctor.
John Hurt! I’m very intrigued to see how they use him.
Dislikes:
The Great Intelligence’s henchmen/extra bodies. They just looked a little too derivative.
Jenny’s dead! Wait–let’s just jumpstart her… there, all’s well! :rolleyes: (I like Jenny, but if you’re going to kill a character to raise the stakes, she was a good choice and you should have left her dead.)
I do tend to agree that the show has become too focused on the Doctor himself (and his companions), when it should be more about him saving others.
It’s going to be a long wait until November!
I think I have every extant episode dl’ed somewhere, so I guess I’ll be watching those over the summer. I threaten to do that every year and end up watching anime, but I think this year I need to do it.
“On the fields of Trenzalore, at the fall of the eleventh, when no living creature can speak falsely or fail to answer…a question will be asked.” Well, the question was asked, but he failed to answer…
It says neither that the question must be answered immediately nor that the doctor must be the one to answer it. Therefore, the River Song tied to Clara via the dream channel must be a pre-library Song and qualifies as a living being for the purposes of the, for lack of a better word, geas.
Alternatively, while they were at the fields of Trenzalore, this was not the fall of the 11th or at least, not a fall accompanied by an impetus to answer questions.
Although I would say that what made “Human Nature/Family of Blood” memorable was mainly down to David Tennant’s acting. The last scene of him as John Smith, saying goodbye to Joan, is simply the very best demonstration of the craft of acting I’ve ever seen on Doctor Who.
On the other hand, “Blink” was due to fantastic acting matched with brilliant writing. The acting was Carey Mulligan (and to a lesser extent, Findlay Robertson), and the writing was…Steven Moffat.
So? If the doctor had answered then River Song would have failed to which leaves us with the same problem. As it is, failing the introduction of some mystical force endemic to Trenzalore, I can only assume the insurance against lying or stalling was simply that only the answer would open the doors and only the opening of the doors would save Jenny, Strax, Vastra, and Clara.
Here’s my guess about John Hurt’s Doctor: He’s the arse end of the 8th incarnation. All we’ve seen of the 8th was the TV movie. What do we actually know (as in cannon, not the books) of the later adventures of Dr 8?
My guess is that Dr 8, as played by John Hurt, is the genocidal Doctor of the Time War, the secret shame of the Doctor and the reason Dr 9 was such a morose git.
Tardis Wiki says that the 10th Doctor’s flashback scene, which took place in the Library, isn’t in the episode shown on BBC America or the iTunes one. The 8th Doctor is a blink and you’ll miss it scene. At the beginning of the episode, just after the 3rd Doctor flashback, the 8th Doctor runs past Clara just before you see the 2nd Doctor run past her.
Ah yes, the Tenth Doctor scene was the shot that reminded me of the Library, but not enough for me to realise that’s what it actually was, as he’s not obvious in the shot.
Which is exactly why I don’t think he’s the Doctor that ended the Time War. We’ve heard the Doctor refer to that a number of times: " ‘Fear me, I’ve killed thousands of Time Lords.’ ‘Fear me, I’ve killed them all.’ " He’s appalled by what he had to do, but he ultimately thinks it was the only course.
No, I think that the Hurt Doctor is the very original Doctor, who committed some horrible crime for which he’s been atoning ever since.
Am I right that we saw the 9th doctor walk by very quickly, wearing his leather jacket…and obviously a stand-in actor? Or was he shown via old-footage and I missed it?
I’m 90% sure it was in the iTunes one, because I was sure I saw the 10th, though I didn’t get that he was in Cal’s Library until I read the wiki.
ETA: I’m glad that Clara appears to be coming back, she’s definitely my favorite companion – I almost want to say “by far”. I could do with another Doctor though, Matt Smith does a good job, and his personality is okay, but there’s something about him that kind of annoys me in weird inarticulable ways the 9th and 10th didn’t.
This probably isn’t a very original thought, but by creating these time-related plot arcs, the writers (and it isn’t just Moffatt, RTD did this too) guarantee that no explanation will be a good payoff for the audience.
One of the quaint charms of Dr Who is the total inconsistency with respect to the rules of time travel. With no rules there is no clever solution that is going to make sense than any other arbitrary solution. We won’t be impressed - at best mildly interested based on how much we care about the characters.
If John Hurt has something to do with the Time War, there’s nothing left to be revealed except the detail of what happened. If we knew the exact rules at play, it would be a Big Reveal exactly how the Doctor got into a situation where wiping out all of the Time Lords was the only solution. There can’t be a satisfactory answer to this, though, just an arbitrary declaration related to timey-wimey stuff - which we already have without the meaningless detail.
I was actually interested in the Clara plotline (I think I’m in a minority there), and I was pleasantly suprised that we didn’t have a hand-wave explanation based on some new rule of the universe. There’s actually plot integrity in their being nothing special about Clara, because the Clara the Doctor was investigating was the original. Presumably there would have been strangeness if he’d done the same investigations of any of the copies. The idea that the copies were made using a brand new property of time travel never previously mentioned? Meh.
I like River Song as a character, but her whole plotline suffers from the same effect. The writers can make anything happen with her, just by inventing new wrinkles of time travel. Whatever does happen is never going to feel satisfying.
Wait–let’s just jumpstart her… there, all’s well! :rolleyes: (I like Jenny, but if you’re going to kill a character to raise the stakes, she was a good choice and you should have left her dead.)