A cute scene and well played by Neve McIntosh and Peter Capaldi. I just hope the kids weren’t watching too closely. 
cheeky monkey. indeed. 
Vestra: project an image of perfect sleep into the center of my mind.
Doctor: What, you want to psychic link with me? The size of my brain would be like tucking a piano in you.
Vestra: be gentle then.
Doctor: I’ll try, brace yourself. Piano
The Doctor collapses on bed.
Vestra: I love monkeys they are so funny.
The way Vestra said “be gentle then” in response to “size of” was the innuendo. Brace yourself made it more obvious. Even my wife remarked it was a bit risque for a kid’s show.
Maybe its just Americanism. But those two phrases used together are used a lot in sex jokes. Doctor Who is known for being a bit cheeky.
Was it just me or did others get the joke?
I hated that scene, and the sound effect.
Once the doctor spoke with the tramp it started to pick up. I liked his and Clara’s back and forth. Everything before that I was bored with.
I enjoyed it and while I liked seeing more Matt Smith, I thought that might be a bit confusing for both Clara and the new2who crowd.
So many good quotes:
Inspector Gregson: It’s just laid an egg.
Madame Vastra: It dropped a blue box marked “Police” out of its mouth. Your grasp of biology troubles me.
Jenny Flint: I don’t understand. Who is he? Where’s the Doctor?
Clara: Right here. That’s him. That’s the Doctor.
Madame Vastra: Well then. Here we go again.
Madame Vastra: I love monkeys. They’re so funny.
Jenny: Oh I see. So people are monkeys now, are they?
Madame Vastra: No dear. People are apes. Men are monkeys.
The Doctor: Sorry. I’m going to have to relieve you of your pet.
Cabbie: You’re what?
The Doctor: Shut up. I was talking to the horse.
Strax: Military tactics. The Doctor is still missing, but he will always come looking for his box. By bringing it here, he will be lured from the dangers of London to this place of safety and we will melt him with acid.
Clara: Okay, that last part?
Strax: And we will not melt him with acid. Old habits.
The Doctor: I am Scottish. I can complain about things. I can really complain about things now.
Barney: What devilry is this, sir?
The Doctor: I don’t know. But I probably blame the English.
Madame Vastra: The establishment upstairs has been disabled with maximum prejudice and the authorities summoned.
Clara: Hang on, she called the police. We never do that. We should start.
The Doctor: Droids and apostrophes, I could write a book.
The Doctor: You realize of course, one of us is lying about our basic programming.
Half-Face Man: Yes.
The Doctor: And I think we both know who that is.
(standingwave: I’m pretty sure the Doctor cause half-face man’s death. We’ve seen the Doctor kill before and, after all, the Doctor always lies)
Madame Vastra: Clara! Give him hell. He’ll always need it.
Clara: You’ve redecorated.
The Doctor: Yes.
Clara: I don’t like it.
The Doctor: I’m not entirely convinced myself. I think there should be more round things on the walls. I used to have a lot of round things. I wonder where I put them.
lara: Thank you.
The Doctor: For what?
Clara: Phoning. {she hugs him}
The Doctor: I don’t think that I’m a hugging person now.
Clara: I’m not sure you get a vote.
The Doctor: Whatever you say.
Clara: This isn’t my home by the way.
Don’t expose their agenda by pointing out bad writing and internal inconsistency.
Really, Vastra, Jenny & Strax are best used in small doses. I’ve now had enough of them. Vastra’s overly trying-to-sound-profound veil BS speech pretty much ruined the episode for me. “Your grasp of biology troubles me” nearly saved it, but over all the episode should have been tighter and shorter. Thumbs down, IMO one of the weaker episodes I’ve seen.
Also, the mechanical men were still just brooms. There was no evidence that they’d altered their minds at all, and pushing the one out of the box wouldn’t be murder, it’d be no different from pulling the spark plugs from a car. Nothing in the episode indicated otherwise.
This is typical of the lazy Moffat writing of the last few seasons. Things happen because reasons, because script, etc. We rewatched the Five(ish) doctors over the weekend with the kids and found the writing of that spoof eminently more entertaining than this mess.
Capaldi was pretty great though, and managed a performance much better than the script he had to work with.
I thought the last scene was supposed to represent a French garden. Given the robot’s obsession with Madame de Pompadour and Marie Antoinette, I thought the promised land might simply be France. Where else could he go with a skin balloon?
I interpreted the last scene as a “happy” conclusion to the robot’s quest. But I have no idea who Missy is or why she danced around.
I enjoyed the episode. It was rough at the beginning, with the Doctor channeling the crazy. But it got better. I suppose Clara struggling with the change in the Doctor is a lens to reflect the audience’s struggle with the change to a new Doctor, but it just felt a bit weird.
Once the Doctor toned down a bit, he got better. I didn’t get the references to the clockwork men, though I knew something was up with the references to the ship and all, but the AfterWho show answered that question - yes, deliberate references to The Girl in the Fireplace.
Yes, the dinosaur was way too big. I looked it up to confirm.
I didn’t watch Doctor Who as a kid, so my introduction was Christopher Eccleston. So this direction for the Doctor is rather new to me, though it’s drawn from older incarnations in a way. Peter Capaldi wants his Doctor to be more mysterious and more alien and have some standoffishness. It will be an interesting change for me.
I did appreciate this episode for giving Clara a lot to do, and really show off Jenna Coleman’s acting abilities. Finally not just there to fawn over Matt Smith.
The scene when they’re in the basement, and the Captain is waking, and Clara is trapped by the door, and the Doctor almost opens the door, then says “Too late, no point in both of us getting caught.” And then doesn’t give her the sonic screwdriver because he might need it, that was great because we don’t know this Doctor, and suddenly he seems really cold and selfish. But that act wasn’t an act of abandonment like it feels, it was actually an act of confidence in Clara and her ability to survive until he could get the upper hand. And she does in a brilliant way, and then he makes his return.
Of course, in retrospect, what did all that buy him? Clara getting the Captain to talk a bit? Why couldn’t the Doctor have pulled that Sonic Screwdriver in the power source gag earlier? Oh crap, now it doesn’t make any sense, does it.
Oh, and it’s Capaldi, sounds like “pal”, as in buddy, friend, chum, not like “Paul”.* So said Chris Hardwick on the AfterWho show, who said he specifically asked that question.
That makes sense. I was feeling like the TARDIS, because of the boyfriend thing, but then the crazy kicked in.
Wil Wheaton commented on this in the AfterWho show, that as much as he means well, people die all the time around him.
Seems like he was ready to die, he had lost purpose and only had one goal, getting to paradise. Death is the standard route, doncha know.
Um, they operated a trap to lure in customers to harvest for parts. And at least once we see the Captain go outside and harvest some poor guy who just has the misfortune of standing next to him in the street and having a conversation. Sure, they weren’t wandering down the roads slaughtering everyone in sight like a Dalek or Cyberman, but they were pretty innappropriately murderous.
Sometime before Motorola came out with a phone for the Android operating system that they named “DROID”?
So that’s what that conversation was about. I totally didn’t hear that right, and thought they were talking about Jenny called him a boy and Madame Vastra said they were girls. I was kinda perplexed by that conversation, it didn’t make sense that way. Now being about size, I can see.
Okay, what is “Blue Peter”?
That garden is totally laid out like a TARDIS control room. I didn’t think it was even subtle.
This is a major aside, but the name of the OS is “Android”, not “Droid”. “Droid” is the name of one particular brand of phone manufactured by Google/Motorola that runs the Android OS.
And Google/Motorola actually does pay licensing rights to Lucasfilm for use of the name “Droid”, and the ads for Droid phones mention in the fine print that Lucasfilm owns the name.
Eh. It didn’t have enough of the round things.
“Blue Peter” is an incredibly long running UK children’s program (started in 1958 and is still going on) Blue Peter - Wikipedia. They’ve had contests for children to “invent a Doctor Who monster” and some of the winners have been actually used in the show.
HUH? When was that?
The lighting made Capaldi look ghoulish, but I think that was the point. The Doctor is currently in a transitional state, and lacks warmth because he’s still reconstructing his humanity. I do like the chilly reception Clara experienced. She wants her “clever boy” back.
As much as I like the idea of resurrecting a villain from the old series, I don’t think that will be the case here with Missy. BBC wants to attract new fans and not make them feel like they have to be Who historians to understand the show. They’ll mention old villains like the Valeyard off the cuff to throw the Whostorians a bone, but that’s it. Maybe Missy is the unidentified woman from The End of Time? Maybe they’ll resolve that dangling plot line some day.
Hardwick and company speculated that Missy could be a Tardis. She acts herky-jerky like Idris/Sexy did, and shares the same sense of possessiveness for the Doctor. The day after Capaldi’s debut, BBCA ran past DW episodes of interest, including The Doctor’s Wife and The Girl in the Fireplace. Despite these clues, I don’t think the DW makers want to allow fans the chance to predict anything correctly, so Missy will be something entirely new.
The Doctor said so in the episode The Doctor’s Wife.
I want a t-shirt that says, “Nothing is more important than my egomania!”
I’ll second the question. Can time lords change gender? I think the Doctor is male so I always figure he’ll regenerate male.
Having said that, a non-white Doctor seems pretty likely. I tend to think the Time Lords would see gender, but not race.
That was my guess, and my hope.
As Dendarii Dame alludes to, the episode The Doctor’s Wife confirms they can; The Doctor reminisces about his old pal, The Corsair, a Time Lord who he’d known to have both male and female bodies.
In addition, it was mentioned as a possibility in Night of the Doctor, although that could be interpreted as “with the assistance of the Sisterhood of Karn”, but they did describe it as “it doesn’t have to be random” instead of “we can do things that can’t happen naturally”.
It was also implied earlier, thought it was easy to miss. When the Tenth Doctor regenerated into the Eleventh he felt his long hair and said something like “am I a girl this time?” I do have the feeling that it’s unusual for Time Lords to change gender, but that’s just a gut feeling and I have absolutely nothing to back it up.
All this talk about the fair folk of Gallifrey has given me an idea about Missy. If she really is a Time Lord,* and that garden looked awfully TARDIS-y, she might not be a big bad. The last Christmas episode confirmed that Gallifrey was saved and they’re trying to get back into the Universe. Maybe she was sent to find the Doctor and help him get his home planet out of that pocket universe.
Time Lady? Didn’t the Fourth Doctor call Romanna that once?
There are a couple of questions I have about this episode.
Why is Strax such an idiot? He seems to be getting dumber and dumber instead of more attuned to the humans he is in contact with on an almost daily basis. Sontarans are egostic, not moronic.
Why is Clara so freaked out about this change? She is the one and only companion who has seen every single Doctor. By this time, she shouldn’t be concerned with his physical appearance.
And why doesn’t the Doctor remember Madame De Pompadour? Especially once he read the name of the sister ship to the Marie Antoinette?
Overall, I really enjoyed this episode, and I’m looking forward to the rest of the time that Clara has on the show. I thought that I had read something online that the BBC released a statement that the Christmas episode would be her last, but now I can’t find anything about it online.
Overall I liked