I think that might actually work. Kid Davros couldn’t see the Tardis - there was too much smoke and fog on the battlefield. From his point of view, he heard someone talking to him out of a cloud bank, they threw him a sonic screwdriver, and then the next thing he knew there was a Scottish guy sticking a gun in his face. The only solid link between this event, and the Doctor’s previous incarnations, is the screwdriver, and AFAIK, those aren’t unique to him.
Presumably, at some point since his last regeneration, Davros’s spies found out what the Doctor looks like now, and Davros made the connection between the Doctor’s new face, and the angry Scot with a gun from his childhood, prompting the drama in this episode.
Lots of ways to fanwank this one.
The Doctor would only send one of those things to a fellow Time Lord. The last three times we saw the Master in the new show, it was a shock to the Doctor that he was still alive. All the other times his life was in danger, he thought he was the last of his kind, and had no one to send it to. This time, though, he already knew Missy was alive, and had some idea how to contact her.
In all the other instances of certain death, the Doctor had some plan, or at least hope of a plan, that would allow him to survive the circumstances. In this story, in his guilt over abandoning an innocent child, he’s accepted that he deserves whatever Davros is going to do to him, and is fully willing to accept it, and his death. So he sends Missy the compact to settle matters between them.
The Doctor does have a plan, and the plan requires Missy in some way, and he knew the only way he could get her attention (and simultaneously prove that it came from him) was by something as dramatic as sending her his Last Will and Make-Up Mirror.
None of these explanations are likely to survive viewing the second part of this story.
Hand mines! Like land mines, but creepier, and significantly less effective.
Since always. There was one episode in the first season where much was made of the inability of the Daleks to pierce the shields around the Tardis, but that was later retconned by explaining that those particular Daleks were damaged and weak, as compared to the Dalek empire in its full glory, who during the Time War perfected techniques for tearing apart a Tardis.
Re The whole timey wimey issue of when the Doctor and Davros met, yes, **Genesis of ** was the first time they met, but using the same history changing device last seen in A Christmas Carol, wherein, as soon as Eleven appeared in his bedroom as a child, old man Kazran remembered him, Twelve, in his own timeline, did just stumble on young Davros, and as soon as he did, old sick dying Davros remembered.
The handling of Missy’s not being dead seems very much in line with Sherlock’s not dead bit and perhaps even an allusion to it.
It seems Moffat has some problem here with wanting to kill off characters readily and tires of even trying to be creative about why they Kenny-like are always back. It makes me fear that Danny might come back! (Shudder.) Missy okay … all viewers knew that was going to happen. But not even any brief explanation of how Davros survived his last apparent death (stayed back as everything blew up, yes?) Nope just “Not dead. Big Surprise. But dying this time. Really.”
I loved the hand mines because this was a meme with my jock friends for years, women I played soccer and ice hockey with. At the end of a game, tired and on the ice too long, a player could go down way too easy by catching an edge when nobody else was nearby, and we always joked that we saw the hand reach up from the ice and grab her ankle.
Which I think was deliberate. Wasn’t there some line about ‘all of me are invited’ or something?
Also, was the parallel between the Doctor and the Daleks (the man in a box versus the, uh, mutant in a tank) deliberate, too? Something about the ‘how scared must you be to seal everybody you love in a tank’ line…
The Doctor said something like, “I’ve had my bow tie and my scarf and now all of me are invited”.
“fish … tank” and yes something like “man in a box, mutant in a tank”. Until I saw the Tardis later behind the curtain (don’t look at the man behind the curtain!), I thought The Doctor had adjusted his chameleon circuit to make the Tardis into a tank for the occasion.
Maybe Miller is right and Davros didn’t see a Tardis through the fog … like we did?
Maybe Missy and Clara jumped one hour ahead in time when they died so they could rescue The Doctor.
You know what? I’m gonna go ahead and predict that Missy and Clara actually did bite it in that scene. No backsies. Because somewhere in the infinite multiverse, there’s some me who’ll make that prediction and be right about it. And that me might just be me.
I’ll take what I can get. Sure, his behavior in the beginning of the episode was a tad off, but his behavior for all of last season was ANYTHING but fun. He seemed to kind of be channeling William Hartnell or something; the First Doctor was not a fun guy. But since then, what with the last three Doctors, modern audiences have gotten a bit more accustomed to some cheer.
[Rorschach voice] Even in the face of armageddon. [/Rorschach voice]
I just rewatched the opening scene, and looks like I’m wrong. At one point, right after throwing him the screwdriver, the Doctor asks, “Can you see me?” and the kid nods - it then cuts to a shot of Capaldi in front of the Tardis, which is largely unobscured. However, it’s at this point that the Doctor says something about “creating a sonic tunnel so they could talk,” when they don’t appear to be that distant from each other. So perhaps the distance between them is larger than the cinematography made it appear, and that shot was supposed to be for our benefit, and not a POV from Davros?
I also noticed that there’s no Tardis materialization sound effect before the Doctor starts talking, which suggests that he’s either been there the entire time (unlikely) or he’s supposed to have materialized so far away that the sound didn’t reach Davros - which supports the idea that the Tardis was too distant to be readily identified.
It occurs to me that*** leaving a sonic screwdriver*** in the hands of the Skarosians, (yes, yes, I know, Thals and Kaleds), a people who’ve had a genocidal war going on for most of their history… in the hands of the boy who will grow up to be a great scientist, develop into a complete megalomaniac, and invent the Daleks…
…was NOT the most responsible thing the Doctor ever did. Kaled technology wasn’t up to that level when Davros created the Daleks in the first place…
…hey, maybe that’s it. In the finale, instead of shooting Davros, he simply dances over there and snatches away the screwdriver, and then leaves!
I don’t think a sonic screwdriver is meant to be all that high-tech, relatively speaking. We’ve seen other people with access to “sonic tech,” including Jack Harkness in his first appearance. And Skaros isn’t technologically backwards - just badly damaged by war and with equipment in short supply. Their tech base should actually be highly advanced. You can see by those hand mines that the gene tech that’s eventually going to turn the Dalek race into little globs of highly armored mucous is already pretty far along.
I think most of us are presuming he threw the screwdriver so he would be within screwdriver throwing range. Presumably.
Knowing Davroseses’s xenophobic tendencies I think he’d see someone with unknown high tech equipment saying he created a sonic tunnel as a rival for his genius and inspire him to hunt the guy down even if it meant going to the ends of space and time.
Well, Jack was also a time traveler so fairly high tech by any standard.
