You make it sound like one of those ‘grab your ankles’ rides.
Nope. The Valeyard/Doctor was attempting to change his own past by framing his previous self so that his previous self could have his remaining regenerations taken away and given to the Valeyard/Doctor. So, once he attempts to change his past, he then can’t remember how he reacted to it precisely because of that interference. The number of alternate possible timelines being created because of that is very timey wimey and you can’t assume that meddling in the past causes an immediate change in the future… the timelines need to collapse and finalize after all the possible meddlings are played through.
Although, the Great Intelligence tells the current Doctor he will be known by many names, including “The Valeyard.”
Oh you’re good. You’re very good.
(Emphasis mine)
Well, so were the Daleks, and that’s never slowed them down…
Does Valeyard have any sort of meaning outside of Whodom? Is it some British term I don’t know about or something just made up for the show? I understand he’s some sort of evil or villainous alternate future version of the Doctor from the original run, I just don’t know if there’s some sort of meaning to the name (like how Doctor has plenty of meaning) or just something they made up to sound cool.
This was GI of the future who has probably suffered at the hands of the Doctor another umpteen times by then …
From here
Watched it again. Pretty good. Jenna-Louise Coleman is a better actress than the typical Companion.
I was thinking of starting another thread on this, but I still don’t get , “A souffle isn’t a souffle. A souffle is the recipe.” 
The journey isn’t the destination, it’s the journey.
Clara isn’t Clara, she’s the concept of Clara.
Recipe for Clara souffle
1 time scar
1 Clara
(optional) tears of the Doctor
drop the Clara into the time scar
shake
add tears to taste
allow to settle
shake again but vigorously - like you really, really mean it
serves one Doctor and one Clara for infinity
I’m guessing it has to do with a person being the sum total of their life experiences, or something?
It kind of sounds like something deep on the surface, but when you examine it it turns out to be nonsense.
It’s not what you make with it, it’s what you make it with.
And a recipe is a finished product on its own. If you follow it exactly* you will get a souffle exactly like the prototype, but cooking it is only** factory work. The recipe is the idea. The souffle is just dinner, a few hours away from being raw sewage…
-
- Yes, I know that with cooking, especially, “exactly” is not nearly as precise as I make it sound. Thus:
** - Hey, I’m an engineer, so everything I design is perfect. But I don’t really dismiss my friends in the shop because their own expertise has saved my bacon many times.
A souffle isn’t a souffle. A souffle is the recipe
My take on this statement is that Clara is the pattern, the recipe that gets copied, over and over again throughout the Doctor’s timeline. Each of those instances of Clara are as much her as the original.
I suspect, although I can’t be sure, that Moffat is alluding to the philosophical contortions that people get into when they consider things like teleportation and mind-cloning. If you step into a teleporter, and you are destroyed, but an exact copy of you appears elsewhere, are you dead or just in anothet place? The same thing happens with Clara, except she is copied and transmitted to elsewhen, rather than elsewhere.
If we take Clara’s platitude seriously, then she isn’t just the one souffle girl, she is the recipe for **all of them **- she is the pattern, endlessly repeated. Each souffle girl is different, but they are all the same.
We have had numerous threads on this philosophical conundrum over at General Questions:
here’s one
[QUOTE=eburacum45]
Two schools of thought can perhaps be discerned here;
1/ the Continuous Identity theory, which supposes that consciousness is a continuous process, and must continue to exist in a particular physical body an cannot be copied or transferred. One thought experiment that seems to argue against the continuity theory is Mangetout’s stasis box experiment; but since stasis boxes don’t exist, it doesn’t really prove very much.
2/ the Pattern Identity theory, which says that consciousness is a pattern of memories and programs inside the body, mostly but not all in the CNS, and like any other collection of programs and memories it could in theory be copied exactly. If you have a perfectly working teleporter the pattern can be transferred perfectly (or within an acceptable margin of error-see above) to another location, and it will have the same identity as before. If the teleport goes wonky and produces copies, both inherit the same identity, but as ‘dividuals’ they instantly start to diverge from each other.
But since we don’t have a teleport machine we can’t prove this one way or the other, and I suspect that even if we did the whole issue would still be unresolved.
[/quote]
Clara Oswin Oswald apperaes to believe in the Pattern Identity interpretation of mind-cloning; either that, or she has convinced herself that she does by repeating the
“a souffle is the recipe” matra.
Ah, so you’re familiar with Steven Moffat.
I’m afraid so.
Thanks.
You’re welcome.