Also Capaldi carried that whole difficult episode by himself, and the music was just amazing. There was even an old school Radiophonic Workshop BLAART! WAH WAH WAGGH!
^^^This. And “Clara, Clara, Clara.”
I don’t care for Capaldi and didn’t find Clara fun as a Companion. She reminded me of Andrea on The Walking Dead.
Without a whale-tail scene.
I miss Rose, Donna and any of the last 3 Doctors. They weren’t all that attractive (companions or doctors) but all were at least young enough to generate a frisson of sexual tension between whichever Doctor and whichever Companion.
Which makes for good tv nowadays.
Well, if that’s what you’re watching for, I guess. Personally I hated the Impossible Boyfriend mire the show was slipping into.
OMG! That’s where Eric Kripke found Crowley! I read that link in Mark Sheppard’s and Misha Collins’ voices
Yeah it was!
It’s a confession disk which is like a last will and testament for Time Lords
But not good Doctor Who. Go back and watch some of Doctors One through Seven
The first time it came up in NuWho was in Dalek when the Dalek asked Nine (paraphrasing) what good were emotions if you won’t save the woman you love?. That bristled me right then and there.
Heaven Sent was an excellent episode, but I still missed bits of monologue due to my crappy speakers.
The brass cuff buttons get regenerated every time, too, since he materializes wearing them. They just spend an additional iteration drying by the fire before getting zotted. Presumably the Doctor finished the first iteration naked.
You were saying? Every week for 2 billion years by the look of that last episode 
(oh alright, I know he wasn’t actually regenerating, but this was too good a hook to use, to be ignored!)
In hindsight, I could have done without the ‘Clara writing on chalk in the Tardis’ scenes. I found the shift in context a bit strange. But if that’s my biggest complaint about an episode, I’m happy. Bottom line - this is one of the only Capaldi episodes that I can think of that I’m going to look forward to rewatching at some point, because there are things I’m sure I missed the first time through.
The thing is…the first episode I watched was a re-run with 11. Then a bunch of 10 and 11 mixed together. Then some 9. I’ve rarely seen any of the original ones.
The Doctor Who that I enjoy is a somewhat whimsical doctor, with a young-ish companion or two. That’s part of why I don’t like Capaldi as much - he’s clearly a fine actor, but not the style of Doctor that I’m used to.
Oh…thanks to whoever made the off-hand comment about closed captioning! I never needed it with the 9 through 11, but I tend to struggle understating Capaldi at times. Watched the episode last night with CC turned on, and it really helped.
Wow. Just wow. That was amazing.
I still think the best thing Capaldi’s ever done is the last few minutes of “The Zygon Inversion” (that speech still makes the room dusty for me, and I’ve watched it several times) but…holy crap, that was good.
I notice a lot of people are bringing up Groundhog Day, but did anyone else think:
The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
I can’t wait to see what they do next week!
Also, much as I adore Tennant’s doctor (and I do, totally), I agree that it’s nice to be away from the Boyfriend Doctor. If they want to add sexual tension to Doctor Who, toss in a couple of companions. Leave the Doctor out of it (except occasionally with River Song).
Not seasons one through seven, Doctors One through Seven: Hartnell, Traughton, Pertwee, T.Baker, Davison, C.Baker, and McCoy! You cannot call yourself a fan without having seen them.
I don’t know if I agree with this (there are a lot of fans out there who’ve never seen Classic Who) but I do think it’s a good idea to at least know the roots of the show. Watch a few episodes of the classic stuff (I suggest Tom Baker’s Fourth and Pertwee’s Third, myself) at minimum. If nothing else, you’ll know what older fans are talking about when they mention the truly “special” special effects. 
But yeah, there was very little of even a whiff of hanky-panky going on between Doctors and Companions in classic Who. Most of the time it was more of a kindly teacher/student thing, which I much preferred.
PS: Troughton.
THE GOOD NEWS: Capaldi is really hitting his stride as the Doctor.
THE BAD NEWS: I have seen very little this season to justify all the damn two part episodes. If you can’t carry a story arc AND tell a story in a single self contained episode, you’d better have a story that can carry two episodes.
This is extrapolating a bit, but:
The Doctor has been carrying his testament disk around. According to the Master, this is a normal Time Lord thing, and it’s also normal to pass it on to another Time Lord if you think you’re dying. The disk is kind of like a final confession. It tells your secrets. However, the Doctor also said he doesn’t know how it works. Carrying your testament disk and passing it on is just a Time Lord thing that Time Lords do and he’s been doing it without thinking much about it.
Furthermore, we know from the Fourth Doctor that Gallifrey has a repository of the memories of dead Time Lords called the Matrix. When the Fourth Doctor was president of Gallifrey, he actually had to go into the Matrix and it was a deadly, surreal dreamscape.
Now, suppose the disks are how the memories of the Time Lords get in the Matrix. While you’re living it records them, and when you’re dead they’re transferred to the communal pool.
So, the Time Lords are back. And they’re worried about the Hybrid. And they know the Doctor is the only one who knows about it. They want to know what he knows. So they set a trap for him using Ashildr. They trap him inside his own testament disk. And since the disk contains his memories they can use his worst fears against him. Specifically a childhood memory he has of a dead woman wrapped in a shroud covered in flies. They set it up so that he’s being stalked by the scariest thing he can imagine. And every time he’s caught by the scariest thing he can imagine, the only way to get away is to tell a secret. And they wait for him to tell them about the Hybrid. It’s the Time Lord version of Room 101.
But the Doctor is stubborn. The disk is connected to Gallifrey and he can sense that that’s a way out, even though the way is blocked and he doesn’t know where it goes. So instead of telling the secret the Time Lords want to hear (and being allowed to escape) he bashes his head against the impenetrable barrier for several billion years and breaks through.
What do you think, sirs?
I missed this the first time around, but I saw somebody pointed it out on a different list. Who thinks:
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When the Doctor says “the hybrid is me,” he didn’t mean himself. He meant…Me.
She’s in next week’s episode, so it could be possible. And she is sort of a hybrid, with that alien tech keeping her alive. The two great warrior races could potentially be the Vikings and the Bane…
(oops, I meant Mire, not Bane!)
Definitely do so. Knowing what you know (and what the Doctor has to know when he sees the wall) all of a sudden makes his moment of despair and his “Can’t I lose, just this once?” jump out into sharp relief.
I think the timeline is that the first doctor was the one with the choice. He chose death over revealing the secret of the hybrid, and only as he was dying of dead-veiled-woman-touch did he see the path to victory, stretching over a billion years. But he needed to make sure that the next billion hims got the message. So he fired up the Timelord Timeless Decision Engine, asked himself “What message can I leave to myself to make sure that the next me starts punching the wall, and passes it on?”, and writes the word in the dust.
My one quibble was that I’m pretty sure that based on the rate of “4000 years -> even layer of skulls around the castle”, by the two billion year mark, the ocean should be mostly bone.
Did anyone get any time estimates of how long each cycle lasted? It has to be a round number of days, and needs to be several days (to include the day and a half struggle all the way up the castle while dying time). It would be interesting to estimate how many times the Doctor actually did die and recreate himself.
Well yes that does seem to be what is implied but again … it assumes that the Gallifreyans are somehow already unlocked from being trapped in the pocket universe or minimally found some way to reach out of it, get the believable threat and the teleport device to “Me”, and modify his confession disc to have a portal to Gallifrey (unless every disc does so Time Lords can finish their deaths with their own kind … that at least was stated as something Time Lords want to do, so makes sense). Moffat has a track record of just waving away explaining stuff like that, but maybe Missy did actually know where Gallifrey was even if she gave the Doctor the wrong coordinates, and is involved as their agent for her own purposes?
Stars inside his confession disc? Was it open to air the whole billions of years time? On the ground on Gallifrey? Does the portal transport him to a particular point in the Gallifreyan timeline? Or do we just not worry about timey-whimey?
And yes Infovore I think so too. Effective misdirection.
I need to rewatch this with subtitles on though. I miss lots of what is spoken on this show even with decent speakers!
Or you could look up the transcripts. It usually updated within 48 hours of an episode’s first run
Undersood…I know I’m missing out on all the backstory and history and such. I do plan on watching some of the old ones - I just don’t have much of a way to get to some of them right now. (No, I don’t have Netflix. Or Amazon Prime. Or any other pay streaming service other than U-Verse.)
My point was that there are probably lots of NuWho fans that got hooked on, and became accustomed to the show as presented by Doctors 8, 9, and 10. The past two seasons have been noticeably different.
If you’re willing to do a bit of clicking (because they’re usually up in three sections of ten minutes each) the video site Dailymotion has a lot of the classic Who episodes. Probably not practical for watching long runs, but if there are particular episodes you’re interested in seeing you might find them there.
I thought the same thing. It took me until about the last ten minutes of the episode for it all to start making sense but then I said out loud:
"It’s The Doctor’s Dark Tower!
Great episode! Like some others upthread have said I also have to watch with the closed captioning on. I have trouble hearing when there’s background noise and sometimes Capaldi’s accent gets hard for me to understand.