I watched this again this morning when I got up and noticed a couple of things. When the Doctor first picks Clara up from her roof her behavior is foreshadowing that she’s an old woman. She acts as if she hasn’t seen the Doctor and the Tardis for a lifetime. It’s clear that this script was originally written to be an ending for Clara with the tack on at the end to her youth added after the fact to give Jenna another season. I’m glad too, I really like the chemistry between the two of them.
I noticed that Shona’s DVD play list included a binge of “Thrones” - I suspect that’s “Game of Thrones”. A nice shout out to Jenna Coleman who in real life is dating the actor who plays Rob Stark.
According to TV Tropes, in the opening shots in Clara’s house, just before she “wakes” to find Santa on the roof, her stairs have a lift track for an elderly woman.
So originally the episode would end with the old Clara reveal…so it would turn out that Clara was only dreaming herself as a young woman for some reason.
That still doesn’t explain where the hell the crabs came from, or why the doctor would wait a lifetime before returning. Wonder why none of the other dreamers mentioned the current year, and didn’t Shona have a list of DVDs? Do DVDs become the hot hipster retro thing in 50 years?
Well, recall that the Doctor said that they needn’t all be from the same time period—time travel is always possible in dreams! Also, the Doctor didn’t really return when they met on Clara’s roof—that was already part of the dream. So in fact, both of them just went on thinking that their lie had afforded the other the comfort they needed, until at some point, the Doctor was crabbed, which then led to the crabbing of elderly Clara, and to their reunion within the dream—which then, in the tacked-on bit, led to their reunion in real life (presumably).
And the chair is parked at the top. Her reactions to the Doctor are also those of someone who hasn’t seen him in many years, not just a few weeks. She is a rather good actor. Not a common thing during the Old Who decades.
I must be old! In older times, it was always special to get citrus in your Christmas stocking - being able to obtain or afford citrus in December was a treat! I’m not even fifty, but an orange in your stocking was a regular thing in our house.
We were just talking this Christmas about how when we were little we used to always get tangerines in our stockings, and Brazil nuts, too. I confessed I never ever ate any of the Brazil nuts–they looked too weird. Mom said she did it because she got those in her Christmas stockings as a kid. This is in Texas, and we go back many generations here.
