I wonder why it was so prominently positioned? Ashildr didn’t have even a cameo in either episode, did she?
not that we saw on camera, no. But canon dictates she was there somewhere.
Having Ashildr appear would have sparked viewer questions about a Zygon Ashildr which would have distracted from the story they were telling.
And here I was thinking it would be cool if another Clara showed up–she is the impossible girl, after all.
So we’ve had two two-parters in which someone who really wanted to travel with the Doctor decided it was better to stay on Earth and save it. And (not sure if I need to spoil this, but) Clara’s leaving this season Hmmm…
And was there really a poison to kill all the Zygons? My impression was that the Doctor had lied about that. Anyway, Harry Sullivan didn’t seem qualified to come up with something like that anyway. Liz Shaw, maybe, but Harry was a GP. Oh, and when he was trying to get Four to go back to bed, Four put Harry’s stethoscope on both of his hearts. Harry listened and said he didn’t think that could be right. So nobody told him the Doctor had two hearts? Or if they did, he didn’t check? That scene always bothered me.
Kate certainly seemed to think the gas was real as well, and she would be in a position to know. As I said, I hate that they made Harry responsible for it–“Created deadly nerve gas” doesn’t look good on anyone’s resume.
I prefer the eulogy Harry got on The Sarah Jane Adventures, where he was said to have created vaccines that saved thousands of lives.
This was the second time this season that there was a callback to Clara’s introduction in Asylum of the Daleks.
In that show, Clara was physically a Dalek, but lived in an imaginary room in her mind where she could interact with the outside world. In the first series of this season she was physically inside of a Dalek (thanks to Missy), and this episode she was trapped in a room in her mind while interacting with the outside world through an avatar.
This has to be intentional so I wonder where they’re going with it. Part of me wonders if she’ll end up assuming the role of Oswin Oswald in the end - giving her character nice bookends.
They said ‘vaccine’, but it was a kids’ show, they meant a deadly nerve gas that saved thousands of (human) lives by making it possible to take millionss of zygon lives.
Can someone remind me what the whole deal with “Hybrids” is? Something was said in an earlier episode, but I don’t remember the importance.
Part of Davros’ schpiel was a claim that the Doctor left Gallifrey, not for his purported reason of wanting some funsies, but because there was some prophecy about his having a role in the creation of a hybrid. And he’s been creating hybrids in every episode since.
Yeah, the parallels were made fairly pointedly; the trouble was that that the solution offered in the analogy was troubling, if you look hard enough at it. Yes, you can live as immigrants here, but only as long as you mimic our culture so closely as to be invisible. In the solution offered at the end, there are no Zygon churches, no Zygon schools, no Zygon restaurants no Zygon festivals, no Zygon newspapers, and effectively, no Zygons: they can live here, but only if they ape us so perfectly as to disappear. If a TV programme suggested that as a solution to the problem of radicalised Muslim immigrants, it would be shouted down as racist. Paradoxically, it makes Bonnie’s faction more understandable, if not more sympathetic: for her, the choice is fight or vanish utterly. If the programme were truly honest it would offer a solution in which Zygons and humans could exist together openly, without the immigrant culture having to disguise itself until it became invisible, but of course that can’t happen within the framework of the programme as it stands, Zygons living alongside Londoners, and so the resolution as offered is a disturbing one.
Also (although more so in the original episode where the ceasefire was established), the Rawlsian Veil of Ignorance, which essentially posits that all actors should decide about the rules of society without any knowledge of what role they will inhabit in that society.
I’ll be honest, I still don’t get why the whole “Truth or Consequences” thing that appeared everywhere. It seemed a very forced idea that didn’t add anything to the story, especially when the Zygons kept saying it in communications to each other like some kind of astronomical Heil Hitler.
I’d prefer the concept to disappear entirely. I agree with the writers that found it overused and all powerful, which lead to it being retired in the eighties. They should never have brought it back.
Agreed. If I were the Dr. Who show runner, the very first thing I would do is contrive to have the damn thing catapulted into the centre of the sun. The episode would be called ‘Good-F%!*ing-Riddance’ and the remaining 44 and a half minutes would just be guerilla footage of me jumping around in slo-mo celebrating to the theme song from ‘Chariots of Fire’. Ratings winner, if you ask me.
The avowed purpose of the Zygons who were led by Bonnie/Clara was that they wished to live openly as Zygons, so “Truth (being able to live openly as Zygons) or Consequences (war)” was an understandable motto for them to use (whether all those Zygons really meant it, is another question).
Third time in total though: remember when she was shrunk and was running around inside a Dalek?
The episode was even called “Into the Dalek”
And the fact that so many of them had settled in Truth or Consequences, NM, was just a big coincidence?
I don’t think it was a coincidence - because a large population had settled there, there was a double meaning to the slogan, which made it more memorable (so it meant not just “Allow us Truth or get Consequences” but also “Remember what happened in New Mexico”)
It all seemed very contrived to me, especially seeing as it was outright said that the brunt had settled in the UK.
I forgot; are you in the UK? I grew up before cable, and when Americans could only see Doctor Who on PBS (Public Television). I came to the series late, so Tom Baker was The Doctor. I don’t know if PBS broadcast the Fifth Doctor shows here, as I departed my teens in the '80s. I had to get a job, I learned to fly and dive, I was making films with my friends, and so on. While I wished I could watch the series before and after Tom Baker, Life intervened. So for me, there’s always been a screwdriver. The Doctor still has one, except now they’re Wayfarers. I prefer the earlier prop.