War and Peace: An Overanalysis of "The Name of the Doctor"

My Friend (and co-blogger at T9YD) Adam:   I assume you're writing War and Peace right now?

Me: Oh yes! So much to analyze. So much to hate.

Steve:  What I'm saying is, after the John Hurt part--
Susan:  No, no, no, Steve!  Can we just clear this up once and for all:  Alien is not 'really about parenthood.'
Steve:  Well...
Susan:  For just this once, could we manage to discuss childbirth without involving John Hurt.
Steve:  Susan!  No man can do that!
Susan:  Okay.
Steve:  I mean, imagine what it's like for John Hurt.
Susan:  Oh please, can we not!
Steve:  If he was visiting a maternity ward all the guys in obstetrics would be crowding round going "Hey, it's da man!  Cheers, John, you're the one that got me into this racket."

-Coupling, Season 4, Episode 1, "9 1/2 Minutes," written by Steven Moffat

Sometimes, if you sift through episodes of Moffat's brilliant sitcom, Coupling, you can see where some of his motivations in writing Doctor Who really come from.  Here, we see why he cast John Hurt as the estranged 9th-ish Doctor.  If you watch an episode called "Size Matters," I guarantee you that you will never hear the Doctor say "Geronimo" in quite the same way again.

The "John Hurt Moment"

Moffat is a talented writer, and there's so much evidence to support that.  He has bounced between genres freely, succeeding in nearly all of them, from children's programming (Press Gang), to sex comedy (Coupling), to horror (Jekyll), to popular, American animated films (Tintin), to a modern day adaptation of classic literature (Sherlock), to taking the reigns of the greatest science-fiction franchise in British history.  While he's made a few slight missteps (Jekyll, his short lived sitcom Chalk, and some parts of the 4th season of Coupling), he's an excellent writer all around.  He wrote an episode for each of the first four seasons of the revived series, and each one won or was nominated for a major award.  When he took over the show, he had a monumental task ahead of him, recasting the Doctor after the wildly successful David Tennant era whose popularity may never be surpassed.  Rather than try to copy his predecessor, Russel T. Davies, he took the entire show in a different direction, constructing a multi-year long arc that has kept the show extremely popular, despite all of the whiny teenage girls insisting that David Tennant be brought back.  He created some of the most complex and satisfying individual episodes, as well as the greatest overarching stories that this show has ever seen.  He has been, in my opinion, the best writer that the franchise has ever seen, and that's including both Neil Gaiman and Douglas Adams.

It is because of all of these things that I must say the following with a very, very heavy heart:

Steven Moffat has lost his touch.  At least with Doctor Who.

This season has been a disappointment from the beginning.  "Asylum of the Daleks" was fun if you ignored the fact that the very premise of it made no sense whatsoever.  "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship" was fun but idiotic.  "The Angels Take Manhattan" was the first Angels episode without a strong internal logic to it that tied up the loose ends perfectly. Two of the greatest companions in the history of the series were unceremoniously ejected in the midst of a two-part episode that was uncomfortably shoved into 45 minutes like a 300 pound man uncomfortably shoved into a speedo.  "The Snowmen" and "The Bells of Saint John" gave us hope for a better season, only for those hopes to be dashed by the uncompelling "Rings of Something or Other," the disappointing "Hide," the embarassingly horrible "The Crimson Horror," and an episode that is an insult to the very name of Neil Gaiman, "Nightmare in Silver."

GF:  Do you have to pace around the room like there's a war on while you discuss Doctor Who?  Sit down and discuss it with me like a normal person.

I understand a lot of people loved this episode, including my co-bloggers over at The 900 Year Diary, Adam Stone and Kevin Spak.  Normally Spak and I disagree about Doctor Who, but it's normally me loving the episode that he hates, not the other way around.  I have no idea how this episode is becoming so popular.  With the exception of the last 30 seconds, this episode was a convoluted mess?

"The Name of the Doctor" will hopefully go down in Doctor Who history as Moffat's worst episode, as I hope he never produces anything as convoluted and nonsensical as this episode.  After hearing for almost 2 years that the Doctor's name must never be said, it was barely consequential to the episode.  The title, "The Name of the Doctor," in the end, seemed to have nothing to do with the actual "question," but was a trick phrase to refer to something we weren't thinking of.  The prophesy was not fulfilled.  Dorium said that, on the fields of Trenzalore, no living being can fail to speak or answer falsely.  Well, that didn't fucking happen.  The Doctor was asked his name point blank and failed to answer.  River had to answer for him so that the door could be opened.  It's like Moffat changed his mind about what this episode was going to be after "The Wedding of River Song" had already aired.

GF:  The only good thing about this episode so far is that River is in it.

What the fuck, River?  We were told we would be seeing a "post-Library" River, which was true, but it was pulled off in the most disappointing way possible.  Somehow River can be brought into conversation with the Doctor and other people from her home in the computer in the Library?  That's convenient.  A pre-library River would have been much less convoluted.  River was not entirely necessary in this episode, other than the fact that every Moffat season finale seems to have to have River in it as a requirement.  I love River, but she added nothing to this episode.

The fact that the Doctor was forced to go to his grave would have been interesting, if pulled off successfully.  Moffat said, in an interview after "The Impossible Astronaut," how fascinating he found it that, however far the Doctor travelled, he was moving through all of time and space, and somewhere out there is his grave.  He could always stumble upon it.  Fascinating concept, if it weren't for the fact that Dorium told us it was going to be something fundamentally different.

"It's like my mother always said:  The soufflé isn't the soufflé, the soufflé is the recipe."

Shut up, Moffat.  I know you think that's a profound metaphor for Clara scattering herself over the Doctor's timeline, but it's not.  It's a tortured metaphor that doesn't really work.

Clara's splintering across his timeline was a bizarre explanation.  It works for the ways she saved him in "Asylum of the Daleks" and "The Snowmen," but how did she save him from all the other times that the Great Intelligence tried to kill him?  The only explanation is that the reason we've never seen Clara or the Great Intelligence in any of the classic series episodes is because they didn't reflect the altered timeline that the GI changed.  But that doesn't make sense because, if that were true, we'd never have seen Clara in either the Asylum or Victorian London.  Was she always just hiding in the shadows every time the GI covertly tried to kill the Doctor off-screen, battling him and winning for over 900 years?  That seems highly unlikely.

And somehow Clara could jump into the time stream and make those echoes, but since the Doctor went in (went in where?) and saved her, the echoes still exist, but the original Clara doesn't die?  Yeah, that makes a ton of sense.  Was Moffat tripping when he wrote this episode?  And the entire time between writing and production when he could have fixed the episode?

Furthermore, the sacrifice Clara made was a bit ridiculous because she doesn't seem to have enough loyalty to the Doctor yet to justify such an immense sacrifice.  The mystery of Clara drove a huge spike between the Doctor and Clara, and really kept them from developing a strong chemistry.  Now that they know so much about each other, hopefully that chemistry will really develop over the course of the next season.  But so far, I don't buy that she cared about the Doctor enough to sacrifice her life for him. Amy would have.  Rose would have.  Even Martha or Donna would have.  Clara isn't there yet, and it didn't seem plausible.

The brief glimpses at all of the past Doctors was excellent, and it looks like this might be the closest we'll ever get to a 12 Doctors special.  I started yelling out each Doctor's number as they passed by, until my girlfriend asked me to stop.  What I thought was interesting is that, while Clara adjusted her outfit in each era to make it appropriate to the time, some of her outfits looked suspiciously similar to outfits worn by the Doctor's companions.  The one existing in the same time as the 6th Doctor had an outfit that did not match either of 6's companions in any way.  But the one following the 2nd Doctor seemed to have the same outfit as the 2nd Doctor's companion, Victoria.  And the one following the 7th Doctor looks a lot like the 7th Doctor's best companion, Ace.  Even the 1st Doctor Clara looked a little Susan-ish.  I was hoping to find out that Clara was actually Susan, since the expanded universe suggests that Susan might not be his actual granddaughter, just some girl he picked up to travel with him.  I call this the "Amber Alert TARDIS" theory.

GF:  Why is this guy so intent on revenge against the Doctor?  It would be one thing if he was a central villain throughout the season who was responsible for nearly everything in the season.  We didn't see enough for him to have this kind of vendetta against the Doctor.
Me:  Yeah.  He was an old 2nd Doctor villain, but even if you factor that in, this is only the Doctor's fifth time meeting him.

Good point, honey!  While Clara's sacrifice for the Doctor is a bit of a stretch, the GI's strong desire for revenge against the Doctor is just as much of a stretch, if not more of one.  The GI doesn't have enough of a history with the Doctor to be that hellbent on revenge.  There are tons of enemies that Moffat could have used that would have made more sense in that situation, including the most drop dead obvious choice of them all:  The Master.  But Moffat apparently wanted to use a more obscure villain, even though The Master would have made his whole story arc make sense.

GF:  This season sucked.  There wasn't even a good plot arc that led to this.
Me:  Yeah.  As much as I loved Amy and Rory, I have to admit that it was a mistake to keep them on for half a season.  The first half of the season revolved around their departure so much that they didn't even bother to get the real story of the season going until they left.

That's five episodes that could have been used to better set up this episode, and five episodes that were completely wasted in the process.  They couldn't even make the Great Intelligence the villain in some Amy and Rory episodes?  He wouldn't have to be the primary villain, he could just be someone lurking behind the villain, the secret, silent partner to someone.  But instead, we were given two mysteries (the name, and Clara) that were never developed, just reiterated in dialogue.  Actually, Clara's mystery was reiterated in dialogue without developing the plot any further.  The Doctor's name has barely been mentioned since "The Wedding of River Song," which aired nearly two years ago.  Good luck if you didn't remember that episode.

In the mire of stupidity that was "The Name of the Doctor," Moffat nearly redeemed himself with the last 30 seconds, which did exactly what Moffat said the episode would do:  change Doctor Who forever.  Because now there's a whole other Doctor in there that we never knew about it.  It also means we have a whole new Doctor to learn about, and he's going to be a big part of the 50th anniversary special.  John Hurt was announced as a cast member for the 50th Anniversary special months ago, but I never imagined he'd be a Doctor.  It has rocked my world in a way that I never expected.  My mind has been so set in an 11th Doctor world.  I wasn't prepared to meet another Doctor in this episode, let alone a previous Doctor.  The chronology of the Doctor's lives is stored in a large part of my brain, and I've just been told that there a huge and important chunk in the middle of there that I never imagined was there.  It's a matter of cognitive dissonance.  I'm literally going to need until November 23rd, the date of the big Special, to fully accept this radical change in Doctor Who chronology.  Seriously, this is a matter of letting my brain recover.  It really knocked me on my ass.

But even in rocking the entire franchise, Moffat did it in the most ridiculously convoluted way possible.  I'm sorry to have to admit this, but my girlfriend actually had to explain the ending to me.

(The episode ends)
Me:  (Throws a pillow in the direction) What the fuck was that?!
GF:  I got it.
Me:  You did?
GF:  You've never seen what happened in the Time War, right?
Me:  No.  Even the expanded Universe stuff hasn't touched it.
GF:  Yeah.  That's the Doctor during the Time War.
Me:  But that makes the current Doctor the 12th?  How can that be?
GF:  Because he doesn't acknowledge him as the Doctor.  He said he didn't do things in the name of the Doctor, so he isn't a real Doctor.
Me:  So he ignores him in the numbering system, and that's why he calls himself the 11th, even though he's actually the 12th.

So, here's a list of things that have significantly changed due to the ending of "The Name of the Doctor":

-The last 3 Doctors' numbers, even if they don't acknowledge them, are all bumped forward by 1 number.  Eccleston was now the 10th Doctor.  Tennant the 11th.  Smith the 12th.
-The Doctor can only regenerate 12 times, meaning that there can only be 13 Doctors.  This means that, after Matt Smith, the Doctor can only have one more regeneration before they have to at least acknowledge that the Doctor should be out of regenerations (if they don't decide to just ignore it like Davies planned to).
-The 8th and 9th Doctors* probably didn't spend much, if any time, in the Time War.  The 9th Doctor appeared to have just been regenerating in "Rose," acting as if he had just seen himself in the mirror for the first time.  The 10th Doctor said that he had to finally destroy the Time Lords to keep them from becoming God-like creatures, destroying the rest of the Universe so they could exist as the only creatures, in pure consciousness.  I feel like this is probably the true chronology:  The 8th Doctor regenerated early in the Time War into True 9.  True 9 had a change of heart towards the end, and destroyed the Time Lords, forcing him to regenerate into 9 in the process.  Alternately, True 9 might have regenerated into 9 before he destroyed the Time Lords, and his regeneration caused his radical change of heart.
-The 50th Anniversary special will actually have a past Doctor other than 10, it's just not a Doctor we knew about.
-If John Hurt has already been cast for the 50th Anniversary special (we have), then True 9 is going to be a sort of a villain in the special.
-The Doctor is even older than he claims.  The 6th Doctor claimed to be 900 years old, and so did the 11th Doctor at the beginning of his regeneration.  So the Doctor had to be much older than 900 at the beginning of his 11th regeneration.  This might explain the lie better, because there's an entire regeneration he doesn't acknowledge.  How many years did True 9 live?  Because however many years True 9 lived, the Doctor is probably subtracting those years from the age he claims to be.

There's so much to be learned about True 9, and I can't wait to see what happens with him.  The Doctor's hatred of True 9 seems to be a little irrational.  When True 9 said he did everything he did in the name of peace and sanity, the 11th Doctor didn't disagree with him.  He said it wasn't "in the name of the Doctor."  I could understand the 11th Doctor being mad at him if he thought everything True 9 did was wrong.  But it seems like he knows that True 9 had to do what he had to do, he's just pushing him to the back of his mind so he can ignore it.  Some of us don't have the ability to section off our past and leave it behind, Doctor.  You need to deal with True 9.

I'm guessing this is what we can expect from the 50th Anniversary.

Until then, I'll still be updating, just not with episode reviews.  But stay tuned!  Can't wait for Season 8.

*Since the introduction of another Doctor complicates the numbering system so much, I'm going to come up with my only special system.  I'm still going to refer to Eccleston's Doctor as 9, Tennant's as 10, Smith's as 11.  I'm going to call John Hurt's Doctor "True 9."

Dead Men Tell No Truths: A Preview of "The Name of the Doctor"

In Season 5, right after watching "Flesh and Stone," I correctly predicted that River would not kill the Doctor (as that was obviously what Moffat wanted us to think, so I knew it had to be untrue) and that she would, instead, help the Doctor fake his death to hide from someone and then take the fall for it by going to prison. I accurately predicted, when watching "The Lodger," that the stranded ship was a Silence ship. I accurately predicted what "The Question" was going to be. The only real thing that I feel like an idiot for missing was that River was Amy and Rory's daughter, which I thought was a crackpot fan theory that could never be true.  I made a vow after that to not reject "crackpot" theories and to make sure that I don't rule something out just because it sounds too "out there."

My point here is not to brag.  Okay, my point totally is to brag.  But my point is, I can get a lot of things. Or, at the very least, I know the right questions to ask.  So let's look at the questions that need to be asked before we head into the big finale of the season.

What did the Cyber Planner's clue mean?

I swear to God, every single time I finish one of my weekly write-ups of an episode, I immediately think of something I completely forgot to mention. This week, it was a big one, and that's the big clue that the Cyber Planner gave the Doctor:

"You know you could be reconstructed by the hole you've left behind."

Sometimes, I think that Moffat needs to set up rules for his own Universe that wouldn't be obvious. He did it in "The Impossible Astronaut" where he, essentially, explained to us the rules of the new mystery, that they couldn't go back in time and stop the incident from happening because it would create a paradox. The Doctor broke more laws of time than that when he rescued himself from the Pandorica, so the only reason this was being brought up in that episode was to explain to us that they can't cheat that way in this season. In this season, that'll be against the rules.

I can't imagine how exactly you could "reconstruct" the Doctor by the "hole he left behind," but the rules in this season say that it's possible, and the Cyber Planner wouldn't bring it up if it wasn't incredibly significant and would affect the plot of "The Name of the Doctor." My guess is that this is how the Great Intelligence is going to find out about the prophesy: "On the fields of Trenzalore, at the fall of the eleventh, when no living creature can speak falsely or fail to answer, a Question will be asked, a question that must never, ever be answered: Doctor who?" We've seen from the preview that the Great Intelligence will be in this episode, and the preview even showed him asking the Doctor his name.

But why does the GI want to know?

I keep thinking of the name "The Great Intelligence." There are some indications that the Great Intelligence's primary goal is to gain intelligence. In the classic series, it wanted to drain the Doctor's brain so that it could absorb his knowledge. Perhaps the Doctor's name is important knowledge, and so the GI wants to know it because it wants to know everything. It's kind of like the Brain Spawn monsters from Futurama.

The Brain Spawn have absorbed so much information that they know that bow ties are cool

Post-Library River?!

This is the most fucking insane clue that we've been given.  River has somehow survived the fucking Library?  This changes everything.  So, how might it have happened?  Here's a few theories:

River Found Her Way Out of the Computer

River's consciousness, at the very least, isn't dead.  The Library is still holding what is presumably the version of her consciousness she had at the moment she died.  She'd just need a body to put her consciousness into.  We never saw in "Silence of the Library" what happened to her actual body.  And whichever future Doctor prepared the screwdriver that saved her probably knew her ultimate fate.  Perhaps it wasn't just a plan to save her consciousness, but a chance to save her life completely.

River Didn't Really Use Up All of Her Regenerations

How exactly did the Doctor and Amy know in "Let's Kill Hitler" that River used up all of her regenerations?  Hell, how did she use up all of her regenerations?  It seems really strange that she would need to use up all of her regenerations to save the Doctor.  If we assume Melody Pond was the first regeneration, Mels was the second, and River was the third (there could be other regenerations in there, but there are strong hints to suggest that there are not) then she could have regenerated up to 10 more times.  That seems like a lot of regenerations to save the Doctor just once.  Again, we didn't see her body after she died.  Perhaps she had to be taken away from the Doctor's sight so she could regenerate in secret.

Everybody knows that everybody dies,
unless you're a recurring Doctor Who character.
Then you can live for-fucking-ever!

Clara is a "Post-Library" Regeneration of River

This would solve two mysteries with one stone, but don't ask me how the fuck it would work.

Which leads us to the next question:

Who the Fuck is Clara?

The problem with this question is that we don't have many clues as to what's happening.  It's an annoying way to handle a big mystery.  So let's sum up the very, very few and very small clues we've gotten about this mystery.*

-Clara was born from two parents who met by complete chance.  She wasn't bred or created.

-Emma, the empath, confirmed that Clara is completely normal.  I doubt that she'd say the same if she met Oswin or Clara Oswin.

-They have all, at some point, used the phrase "Run you clever boy and remember."

That's more or less it.  I still think that the possibility of her being a regeneration of River is perfectly conceivable, but I still can't work out how that would actually explain anything.  I would love it if she turned out to be a regeneration of Susan, but that would make the scene where Clara Oswin kissed the Doctor in "The Snowmen" really gross.  Like Luke kissing Leia in A New Hope.  If she is River, then it's fine.  If she's some random person, that I think River should slap her.  Just because a River/Clara cat fight would be hot.  (I apologize for being a male.)

I also keep thinking of the villain Scaroth, from the classic, Douglas Adams written Fourth Doctor episode "City of Death."  Scaroth had different versions of himself scattered across time, in different centuries, because of his space ship exploding.  The big difference there was that Scaroth's different selves all shared a consciousness and could think as one.  The Claras don't seem to be able to do that.

As opposed to Scaroth, however, the world is richer for having more people who look like Clara.

What is the Doctor's name and why is it dangerous?

I'm still sticking with my the-Doctor-is-a-God theory, which ties into The Cartmel Masterplan.  The much bigger question is going to be how much of this is going to really be revealed in this episode.  I think it's going to cut away very quickly so that, somehow, River will be the only one to hear it.

I'm looking forward to the episode.  There are a lot of mysteries to be solved.  I just hope they all have satisfying conclusions. 

*I’m going to start instituting a new naming system to keep the Clara’s straight, because that’s starting to confuse me. So, from now on:

Dalek Asylum Clara = Oswin
Modern Day Clara = Clara
19th Century Clara = Clara Oswin

Besides being much easier to actually write, it also reminds us that Clara’s three different names are clearly very important. Also, it’s like Moffat made these names specifically for me, as the version of Clara that I have to write about the most is the one with the shortest name. Thank you, Steven. (I can call him Steven now.)

A Borg by Any Other Name: An Overanalysis of "Nightmare in Silver"

Disclaimer:  No silver was actually used in the construction of these Cybermen.
Cybermen are made out of steel.

Let's start this week off with "quotes from the girlfriend":

GF:  Why is the Cyberman moving so fast?  It's like zombies.  The reason they're scary is because they're slow, but you still know that there's nothing you can do to stop them because they'll never give up. Once they get fast, they're not as scary anymore.

GF:  Why is he putting her in charge?  She doesn't really seem to be qualified for that.

GF:  (Regarding the Doctor becoming the Cyber Planner) It's like when Picard became Locutus of Borg.

GF:  Was Neil Gaiman under the impression that he was writing an episode of Star Trek and when he figured out his mistake he just swapped out the characters for Doctor Who characters?

GF:  When your episode is already knocking off Star Trek, to the point where their "freeze chamber" or whatever looks exactly like a Borg cube (she Googled a picture of a Borg cube to prove this to me), you need to do something other than transporting everyone at the end of the episode.  That's just the final nail in the coffin.  It's a "transmatter"?  Seriously!?

She's not wrong

GF:  I just feel like, if you're going to have a season like this without a good overarching plot, you need more interesting individual episodes.  Otherwise it's not worth it.
Me:  Well, I think that he ran into difficulty because of the companion shift taking place mid-season.
GF:  Right! And since then, we've only had one overarching mystery which is "Who is Clara?" which he just keeps saying.  He hasn't gotten any closer to figuring it out.

-----------------------

Okay, she has some points and some things I disagree with.  As a 28 Days Later fan, I actually like fast "zombies."  I think they're far scarier.  But I see her point about the Star Trek stuff.

I outlined some of the main differences between Mondas and Cybus Cybermen in my last post, but I forgot one main thing:  Mondas Cybermen were much less Borg-y.

Star Trek and Doctor Who have always had a really symbiotic relationship.  You can sift through either franchise and find countless references to the other.  They are each their own country's most iconic science-fiction franchise, and they started around the same time.  Therefore, it's natural that these two shows draw influences from each other from time to time.  The Sontarans, for example, were a blatant knock-off of the Klingons.  To their credit, though, the writers of Doctor Who put their own ironic twist on their version of the Klingons:  where the Klingons look like a great fighting force in the galaxy, the Sontarans look like the opposite of intimidating.  They're short, fat potato men.  Where you would expect something that looked like a Klingon to be a warrior, you would expect something that looks like a Sontaran to be a door stop.

As for the Cybermen and the Borg, it should be pointed out that the Cybermen predate the Borg by over 25 years.  That being said, the Mondas Cybermen (the Cybermen of the classic series) were much less Borg-y.  By that, I mean that turning other people into themselves was not their primary objective.  They did it, plenty of times, but it was not the be all and end all of their plans.  For the most part, they sought power.  They sought control over new worlds in lieu of the one they lost attacking Earth.  They tried to change time to bring their planet back.  They tried to gain weapons that would make them a more formidable force in the Universe.

The first Borg episode of Star Trek aired in 1989, the last year of the Doctor Who classic series's run, only a few months before both the Doctor Who finale, and only a few months after the final Cyberman episode of the classic series.  It could not be said that the Cybermen were knock offs of the Borg.  Nor is it that fair to say, the other way around, that Borg were a knock off of the Cybermen.  Certainly there seems to have been some Cybermen to Borg influence, but, as I pointed out before, the Mondas Cybermen weren't that Borg-y to begin with.

The only thing I can say for sure is that, when the show came back for the revived series, the newly rebooted Cybermen had completely gone back and, rather than playing off of the more complex motivations that moved the Cybermen in the classic series, they literally just turned them into a Borg clone.  The Cybermen were not a knock-off of the Borg, but as soon as they had a chance to do a Cybermen episode in the years after the Borg were invented, they turned them into Borg.

Another reason the modern, Cybus Cybermen are so much more Borg-y than the classic series, Mondas Cybermen is that the Mondas Cybermen weren't as automated.  They didn't need a less robotic person, like John Lumic, Mercy Hartigan, or, in this episode, the Cyber Planner, to speak for them.  There was always a lead Cyberman who was able to have conversations with the Doctor that almost hinted at crude emotions.  The Mondas Cybermen considered themselves to be above and devoid of emotion, but their desperate desire to restore their home planet suggested otherwise.  There was always at least one Cyberman with enough personality to taunt the Doctor.  The Cybus Cybermen are so robotic that they can't really threaten or intimidate the Doctor.  They function as an anonymous whole, just as the Borg do (or as they did before the introduction of the Borg Queen).

Now, it was rumored that these were going to be Mondas rather than Cybus Cybermen.  While this was never stated outright in the episode, these Cybermen had a few old Mondasian traits.  The first was their weakness to gold.  The Mondas Cybermen's respiratory units were clogged up by gold (but not, I should point out, by having a thin strip of gold-colored paper stuck to their faces).  Early on they could also be destroyed with certain chemicals found in cleaning products, as the Doctor mentioned.  They were able to overcome the chemical weakness, but never really the gold one.  There has been no indication before that Cybus Cybermen share this weakness, although, since they are parallel, there's always a possibility that they share the same weakness. The fact that the Doctor could partially fight off the Cyber Planner's control using gold was a hint that these might have been Mondas Cybermen.

Another hint towards them potentially being Mondas Cybermen is the Cyber Planner.  The Cyber Planner actually only appeared in 2nd Doctor Cybermen episodes, "The Wheel in Space" and "The Invasion."  Again, since Cybus Cybermen are parallel, it's possible for them to have a parallel Cyber Planner, but it still hints towards Mondas.

There were a lot of other nods back to the Mondas Cybermen as well, but none that definitively proved that these were Mondas Cybermen.  One is their facial design, which was a little more old-school than we've seen in the Cybus Cybermen.  The longer mouth looks a little more Mondasian, particularly like the Cybermen in "Tomb of the Cybermen" (unlike the Daleks, the Cybermen's design has changed significantly over the years).  This episode also bore a striking resemblance to "Tomb of the Cybermen" in certain plot elements, which makes sense as Gaiman said that he was partially inspired by "Tomb of the Cybermen" for this episode.  The plot of "Tomb of the Cybermen" is that a group of archeologists,  believing that the Cybermen are now extinct, look for the fabled "Tomb of the Cybermen" on their adopted planet, Telos, only to find that "tomb" was a codeword for "fully functioning cryogenic storage units that the Cybermen can easily be awakened from when disturbed."  The insistance that the Cybermen were extinct and the fact that they were in similar "tombs" shows a strong influence from "Tomb of the Cybermen."

And while we're on the subject, why the fuck did they think that the Cybermen were extinct?  We, as viewers, know that the Cybermen were still alive as recently as "Closing Time."  But that could have been a small ship that nobody else in the universe knew was still out there.  So then we have to go back to "A Good Man Goes to War" for our last Cyberman reference.  There, the Cybermen were a huge military presence in the universe, one that was feared by all races.  They had massive fleets all over the galaxy.  They didn't seem very extinct to me.

Therefore, it's possible that what they really meant was "Mondas Cybermen are extinct."  Still, that's not definitive.  As many fans have pointed out, the Cybermen in "A Good Man Goes to War" and "Closing Time," and even (I think) in "The Pandorica Opens" all lack Cybus industry logos.  This could mean that they were Mondas Cybermen.  Or it could mean that they no longer had any loyalty to their creators, Cybus Industries, and stripped themselves of their logos.  What is more likely, as I've stated before, is that the writers don't care about the different types of Cybermen anymore.  Cybermen are just Cybermen, they exist all over the universe, and they don't think the backstory is important so they just focus on the Cybermen's present.  I understand why this simplifies things, but it also reduces the Cybermen to a much less interesting character than they were in the classic series.  It just makes them Borg.

And, of all people, I thought Gaiman would be up for ferreting out this distinction between Mondas and Cybus Cybermen.  His script for "The Doctor's Wife" was so nerdy that even the stage directions had classic series references, referring to the bubble universe as a "76 Trotters Lane at the end of the Universe."  "The Doctor's Wife" was filled with so many fun, fanboy references.  "Nightmare in Silver," unfortunately, lacks most of these, and when it does indulge it is very subtle.  Harkening back to the old Cybermen was a little cool, but there was a lot more he could have done.

The choice of setting was almost Moffat-esque.  This story could have taken place virtually anywhere in the Universe, but Gaiman thought it would be more fun to place it in an abandoned amusement park.  And he was right.  Like I said, whenever Gaiman thinks he's being scary, he isn't scary, he just creates a general air of creepiness.  But he's always good at creating that air of creepiness.

The Time Lords invented chess?  That's a nice "Fuck you, India" from Gaiman.

The addition of the children that Clara was taking care of was very interesting.  I was happy to see that. Moffat might be moving towards putting them in the TARDIS with the Doctor on a regular basis.  There's an upside and a downside to it.  The upside is that, after having two companions for so long (Amy and Rory), a single companion makes the TARDIS seem a little lonely.  Certainly, the show has always gone back and forth between single and multiple companion eras, but something about the Doctor-Amy-Rory dynamic was so good that I think I at least want to see the TARDIS turn into a sort of family home again, regardless of who the characters are.  The downside, of course, is that it's much more perilous for him to be bringing small children into danger.  It's one thing for him to bring fully consenting adults wherever danger may rear its head.  It's another thing to do the same with kids.  It might not be something that parents groups are going to want to see.

It might also help if Clara and the Doctor started to click a little more.  Clara is a wonderfully strong companion, I strongly believe that, but I don't feel like she and the Doctor have the kind of chemistry that Amy and the Doctor had at this point in their relationship.

Matt Smith did an excellent job of playing himself and the Cyber Planner at the same time.  If we ever needed to see Matt Smith play an evil clone of the Doctor, we now know how good he'd be at it.  He can play a villain just as well as he can play a hero.

The greatest quote this week from the Doctor Who message board Gallifrey Base was this:  "Is this the part where you regale me with a long list of dramatically interesting televised chess scenes?"  He's right:  Playing chess is not very exciting unless, as we saw in "The Wedding of River Song," the queen gets increasingly and fatally electrified the more you move it while futuristic Andy Warhol people cheer you on.  But the Doctor's "mate in 3" ploy was pretty cool.

But let's be honest, that was a bit of an easy ending.  If the midget Emperor just activated the bomb at the beginning, none of this would have ever happened?  I understand why he wanted to preserve the planet and why he didn't want to be the emperor, but at least one person died, and there were more lives lying in the balance, two of them children's.  Just activate the thing, you dick!

Overall, I found this below average for a Gaiman episode, but above average for a Cyberman episode.  It was a good bit of fun with the old Cybermen, and it subtly revelled in Cyberman lore, but not quite in the joyful way that Gaiman did it in "The Doctor's Wife."  Still, I want him to write a lot more episodes so that he becomes a viable candidate to take over for Moffat when Moffat leaves.  Hey, it's not impossible, right?  #anyonebutgatiss

But we now come into the season finale, which looks like it could change things significantly, even if--as I suspect--it will not actually reveal the Doctor's name.  And it will be nice to get the Clara mystery out of the way.  I was interested in it at first but, as the girlfriend pointed out, all we've gotten has been the Doctor saying over and over again "She's not possible!"  Very few clues have emerged.  We're not very much closer to knowing who she is than we were before.  It could have been a great mystery, but it's time to just get it over with if they're not going to add anything to it.

But the Doctor's name is something much bigger.  It is the culmination of everything that has come so far in the Moffat era, as well as the culmination of the great prophesy we were first introduced to with Prisoner Zero's cryptic warning:  "The Pandorica will open.  Silence will fall."  We now know what the Pandorica and the Silence are, but their entire purpose had to do with keeping the Doctor from going to the fields of Trenzalore.

Next week...off to Trenzalore.

You Don't Love Me, You Love Magazines: An Operation Blue Harvest Update

Things have been pretty quiet here at The Horror this week.  It's been a very emotionally taxing week in my life.  But a new issue of Doctor Who Magazine just came out, and it gave us some big information about both the season finale and the 50th Anniversary special.  I should probably subscribe to DWM, but for the time being, a Google News alert for "doctor who" seems to be working just fine.

Although I would like to have as many framed pictures of Matt Smith as possible.
In a totally heterosexual way.

Let's start with the season finale...

The Name of the Doctor

I got this all from Blogtor Who.

Like I predicted, Vastra, Strax, and Jenny are all coming back.  When the episode description said that the Doctor's "friends" would be captured and taken to the fields of Trenzalore, I figured it had to be more than just Clara.

Richard E. Grant is coming back in this episode as a "posthumous" Dr. Simeon, which I think we all know means that the Great Intelligence is the main villain of the episode.  This is further confirmed with a quote that has been revealed from the episode.  "How's the intelligence--still great?" - The Doctor.

Clara's true identity will be revealed in this particular episode.  Does this mean her weirdness is linked to the Doctor's real name?  That might explain why the TARDIS showed Clara the Doctor's real name. It might be a clue that she needed to hear.  We've seen the TARDIS give clues about the future before ("The only water in the forest is the river"), and we know that it can predict the future.  There's no doubt that the TARDIS knows who Clara is, hence why it doesn't like her.  Although it seemed to like her enough to save her...

Okay, so most of that is stuff we already knew.  But here's the bombshell:  Not only will River be there...it's going to be a "post-[L]ibrary" River!  It seems that the word "impossible" means very little on this show.  River seemed to be clearly killed in "Silence in the Library"/"Forest of the Dead."  How on Earth has she survived?  One possibility is that she somehow faked her death.  Why that would be necessary is beyond me.  Another possibility is that she hasn't actually given up all of her regenerations after all.  Will we be see a future regeneration of River in this episode?  Or possibly some other time in the future?

Another interesting idea is the fact that, just because the Doctor "saved" River's consciousness in "Forest of the Dead," doesn't necessarily mean she had to die there.  A version of her consciousness could easily have been "saved" even if she wasn't about to die.  Somehow, River found a way to survive, but an echo of her consciousness was still on the sonic screwdriver.  Or maybe her consciousness found a way out of the Library computer.

The magazine also reported that not everyone will make it out of this episode alive.  Hopefully the person to die will be someone relatively inconsequential, like Jenny.  We'll see.  It would be pretty cruel to bring a post-Library River back and then kill her off again immediately afterwards.  But Moffat has said that he has an "endgame" for River.  Who knows what that means.

Now, on to...

The 50th Anniversary Special

Doctor Who Magazine also reported that David Tennant is without a doubt the only Doctor coming back.  I still stand by Rule 1.  It stands proudly as the subtitle of this blog.  It's absolutely possible that Moffat is lying.  Doctor Who Magazine is not opposed to lying on Moffat's behalf.  When "The Impossible Astronaut" was coming out, DWM had 4 collectable covers, each one with a different main character on it:  River, Amy, Rory, and the Doctor.  The headline said that one of them would die, and this time it wasn't a trick.  Clearly, it was a trick.  We all know that the Doctor's escape from the Silence was absolutely a trick.  So maybe they're lying.

However, we have to begin preparing ourselves for the possibility that this isn't a lie.  If that's the case, we all need to remember that David Tennant and Matt Smith paired together in the same episode is an awesome thing!  If we had to choose only one past Doctor to bring back for the special, my number one choice would be David Tennant.  Tennant's cool as a cucumber Doctor will contrast well against Smith's bumbling hipster version of the same character.

However, io9 dug up a brief 19 second video of the filming that clearly shows the crew filming an old fashioned police constable walking past the I.M. Foreman scrap yard at 76 Trotter's Lane.  For those of you who don't know, that's the exact shot that the first episode of the classic series opened with.  It looks like, somehow, we're returning to the beginning.  While Moffat says he wants to move the series forward at all times, the little tidbits that we get from behind the scenes show that that's not entirely true.  The villains are going to be the Zygons, the 10th Doctor will return, and we're going back to Trotter's Lane where it all began.

Even if we don't see the return of any Doctors before Tennant, there's nothing that stops them from bringing back other characters.  Carole Anne Ford, who played the Doctor's granddaughter, Susan, and William Russell, who played Ian Chesterton, remain the only original cast members from 1963 that are still alive.  Either of them would be a perfect addition to this episode, especially if the episode is going back to Trotter's Lane.  Someone else has to come back, even if it isn't a Doctor.

You know what would be a great idea for a special?  "The Five Masters."

While I've been saying that I think Susan will come back soon, and I still think there's a good chance of it, I have one concern.  I've recently started to listen to and read expanded universe material.  In Eighth Doctor adventures, Susan meets her grandfather again.  I used to say that we can't claim that expanded universe is cannon, but since there are actually a lot fewer contradictions between expanded universe and television than I thought, I'm starting to view those stories as all cannon.  This is not to say that a return of Susan can't happen without contradicting the Eighth Doctor adventures, I can't imagine that it wouldn't contradict it.  If you bring back Susan, you have to have the conversation about how the Doctor left her behind.

Tomorrow, my least favorite Doctor Who writer is going to be writing an episode that looks really boring.  Let's hope I'm wrong.

Deep Inside of You: An Overanalysis of "Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS"

SPOILERS!

Did you know that this episode aired on my birthday, April 27th!?  Did you know that I apparently share a birthday with Jenna-Louise Coleman?  Did you know that she's exactly 2 years younger than me? (I thought she was a lot younger than me.  I know that her character is.)  Did you know that only two episodes of Doctor Who before this one had ever aired on April 27th (one in 1968 and one in 1974).  Did you know that April 27th is an awesome day invariably?  Because it was the day I was born, it was the day that Jenna was born, and it's the day we got this really fun episode.

Also, did you know that Clara looks hot in red?

The TARDIS itself has been a ripe source of story since the first season back in 1963 with the episode “The Edge of Destruction,” which might be the worst episode of the entire franchise.  We scathingly reviewed it over at The 900 Year Diary (you didn’t think I forgot about T9YD, do you) where it became the first episode we all hated.  Seriously, the episode makes less than no sense.

You can't really see it here, but they're actually screaming at a clock
that has just magically appeared in the TARDIS.  Not kidding.

The TARDIS has been a coveted object by millions of races who wanted to steal it and use it as a weapon.  As we learned this week, even if any of them had managed to steal the TARDIS and its key and got the Time Lord DNA needed to pilot it (long story), the TARDIS is pretty good at defending herself.  It makes the plots of a lot of past episodes look damn silly.

The inside of the TARDIS has been seen only briefly in glimpses over the years.  "The Edge of Destruction" brought us briefly into the companions' bedrooms.  The Fourth Doctor episode "The Invasion of Time" showed us the much fabled swimming pool for the first time.

Glad to see it's been remodeled since the 70's

In "Castrovalva" (that episode title just sounds dirty) we saw inside the TARDIS as the Doctor searched for the "Zero Room" (again, long story).  In the 1996 movie, we saw the room that housed the Eye of Harmony (we'll get to that later).  And, in "The Doctor's Wife," we saw a few corridors.  This isn't a complete list, but it's most of the times we've seen beyond the control room.  And in each and every one of these instances, it was a brief, fleeting glimpse.  Any random 5 minute segment from this episode contains more shots of the deep TARDIS interior than any previous episode in the series.  And, while this has probably been avoided in the series most likely because it has been assumed that showing too much would take away from the TARDIS's mystery, Steve Thompson showed us that, no matter how much of the TARDIS you show the audience, there's still a ton of mystery there to explore.

Steve Thompson is a big hit-or-miss writer.  He wrote my least favorite episode of Season 6 ("Curse of the Black Spot"), my least favorite episode of Sherlock Season 1 ("The Blind Banker"), but, by far, my favorite episode of Sherlock Season 2 ("The Reichenbach Fall").  That's right:  someone other than Steven Moffat wrote my favorite Season 2 episode of Sherlock.  It takes a lot for me to pick him over Moffat.

Thompson was a stage writer originally and then began writing for Sherlock before he wrote for Doctor Who.  Each of Sherlock's 2 seasons have only 3 episodes, which are 90 minutes a piece.  Each season has one episode written by Moffat, one written by Mark Gatiss (ugh!), and one written by Thompson.  Since the other two writers were Doctor Who writers, it was obvious that Thompson was going to be invited to write a Doctor Who at some point.  But I was never sure if he was really into Doctor Who, or just along for the ride with Gatiss and Moffat.  Now I think I can be pretty sure in saying that Thompson is a big Doctor Who fan, because only a truly obsessive fan could have written this episode.

As the TARDIS's console begins to come apart, we hear voices come out of it.  The great thing about living in the age of Wiki's is that I don't have to go back to the episode and carefully listen to the scene to figure out what episodes all of the clips were from (because I would have done it).  Instead, I can just check the Doctor Who wiki.  Call it cheating, but I'm just lazy.  This is the list of where those clips come from, with credit given to The TARDIS Data Core:

The voice of Susan Foreman says, "I made up the name 'TARDIS' from the initials: Time and Relative Dimension In Space." (TV: An Unearthly Child)

The Third Doctor saying, "The TARDIS is dimensionally transcendental" and his companion, Jo, asking "What does that mean?"
The Eleventh Doctor saying, "You sexy thing!" then Idris (the TARDIS in human form) replying, "See, you do call me that! Is it my name?" followed by the Doctor's exclamation of "You bet it's your name!" (TV: The Doctor's Wife)

The Fourth Doctor saying, "That's trans-dimensional engineering. A key Time Lord discovery." (TV: The Robots of Death)

The Ninth Doctor saying, "The assembled hordes of Genghis Khan couldn't get through that door, and believe me they've tried." (TV: Rose)

Martha Jones saying, "It's just a box with that room crammed in!". (TV:Smith and Jones)

Amy Pond saying, "We're in space!". (TV: The Beast Below)

Ian Chesterton asking, "A thing that looks like a police box, standing in a junkyard, it can move anywhere in time and space?" (TV: An Unearthly Child)

The Fifth Doctor asking, "You've changed the desktop theme, haven't you?" (TV: Time Crash)

The Eye of Harmony, as I stated last week, is from the classic series and, while first brought up in a Fourth Doctor story, wasn't really featured heavily until the awful 1996 Doctor Who TV Movie.  Like I said last week, it was said in that movie that, for no apparent reason, a human eye was needed to open the Eye.  (Maybe I spoke too soon when I called "The Edge of Destruction" the worst episode of the franchise.)  Last week, a link to it was used to power the Metebelis III crystal to enhance Emma's psychic abilities.  But, as the crystal was seen in "Planet of the Spiders" to enhance psychic abilities without a power source, it seems to me that hooking it up to the Eye is a big of an overkill.  It seems more like they're working on setting up the Eye to play a role in a major plot point soon.

Now, there are a lot of questions to be raised about this episode, but here's the number 1 question:

Why the fuck did the TARDIS let Clara see the Doctor's name?

Seriously?  Like I've said, there was literally an entire religion created to make sure the Doctor's name isn't spoken out loud.  It's a secret that, the Doctor himself admits, must never be known.  So why is it sitting in a book that's open and on display in the library?  And why did the TARDIS bring Clara into the library where she could read it.  This is going to be very important going forward, I'm sure of it.

Now, more on the "Who is Clara?" front.  The TARDIS doesn't like Clara, we've seen that, and it was sort of the spark that ignited this entire episode.  I still think it's because she's a temporal anomaly.  But, it doesn't seem like she's an anomaly yet.  What do I mean by that?  Emma thought that Clara was a normal girl.  The Doctor realized this week that Clara clearly didn't know what he was talking about with the other Claras.  Clara is clearly just a girl right now.  Whatever is going to split her across time hasn't taken place yet in her timeline.

As we move towards the season finale, which will feature River Song, I realized something that I had never thought of before:

River probably knows exactly who Clara is.  But that's a spoiler for another time.

Silence Never Falls: An Operation Blue Harvest Update and Clarification

HUGE-ASS FREAKING SPOILERS!

So, I need to make some clarifications about the season finale and the 50th Anniversary special.

For a lot of this blog, I've been talking about the season finale and the 50th Anniversary special as if they were the same thing.  I had a feeling they might not be, but I couldn't be sure.  So I asked around on the Doctor Who message board, Gallifrey Base, and they confirmed for me that the season finale and the 50th Anniversary special are two different things.  So now I believe them when they say they're just shooting it now, because the 50th Anniversary special, it seems, will be held on the exact 50th Anniversary, November 23rd, 2013.

Now, as far as the season finale itself goes, the BBC has finally announced the title of the season finale that they hadn't been announcing.  It turns out that the reason was that the title of the season finale is, in and of itself, a huge spoiler:

There's so much to analyze here just from this poster.  First of all, River's coming back.  Second of all, "his secret is revealed" is a huge clue.  Moffat said the same thing in an interview, that the Doctor's greatest secret would be revealed.  Sometimes Moffat gives us false clues to throw us off the trail.  Sometimes he's straightforward and reading too much into it is unnecessary.  He admitted at the end of Season 6 that he knew people would suspect River Song of being the one who kills the Doctor, and that he didn't care that people guessed it.

So we know what "The Name of the Doctor" is going to be about.  The BBC South Africa website's description said that someone's kidnapping the Doctor's friends to force him to come to the fields of Trenzalore, where he'll be forced to reveal his name.  Obviously, those friends will at least include Clara and River.  My guess is that, if Moffat's going to have some of the Doctor's friends kidnapped, he's going to throw Vastra, Jenny, and Strax in there too.

Now, somebody on Gallifrey Base suggested a possible scenario for this episode that's so perfect...I think it absolutely has to be what's going to happen, and it kind of ruins the ending.  I...I can't imagine it's going to play out in any other way other than this.  So, reading this might kind of ruin the fun of the episode.  So I'm going to make this super extra spoiler protected so you have to highlight it to read it.  I wish I hadn't even read it.

The Great Intelligence (probably, although it could be someone else) will lead the Doctor to the fields of Trenzalore.  There, the Doctor will be asked his name.  He will be forced to answer, but just as he does so, River will materialize the TARDIS around him, so that he blurts out his real name to the person in the universe it will be the most safe with:  River Song.  That's why she'll know his name in "Silence in the Library."

There's no doubt in my mind that the Doctor's real name is "The Other."  It's more or less been confirmed in expanded universe material.  I think it's about time I posted my explanation of the Cartmel Masterplan on this blog to explain what that means.  Regardless, even if that is the Doctor's real name (it is) and even if Moffat is following the Cartmel Masterplan (he is), I doubt the name is going to be said on the show.  Something will happen to allow him to say it without us, the audience, hearing it.  The Doctor IS the Other.  But they can't blatantly say that on the show.  It would ruin too much of the show's mystery.

Now, as for the 50th Anniversary Special itself.

In which we see the return of the cuddliest race in the history of the franchise

I still don't know why the fuck the Zygons are going to be the villain.  They've been in 1 episode!  This is another "Meat Puppets" move from Moffat.  (I'm creating too many inside terms on my own blog here.)

John Barrowman is sending extremely mixed messages.  Here's the timeline of what Barrowman has done:

1.  Announced he was in talks with the producers about returning.

2.  Announced that he was not returning.

3.  Announced that his absence from the special is not due to lack of interest, but because the producers never asked him.

One of these statements has to be bullshit.  I don't know which one.

A post recently on the David Tenant Facebook Fan Page said that Paul McGann's appearance in the special hasn't been ruled out.  Now, for most fans, the fact that a Doctor who appeared on screen for about 60 minutes is not that exciting, but those of us who have listened to the brilliant Eighth Doctor audio adventures know how great Paul McGann can really be.

My friend Gary asked me, what if they aren't lying?  What if it really is just going to be Matt and Dave against the Zygons?  First of all, not lying at all would be completely out of character for Moffat.  But, even if it isn't a trick, and all we're getting is Smith and Tennant...won't that still be awesome!?  Who doesn't want to see 11 meet 10.

It could be the best dialogue in the history of the series.

Creatures of Love: An Overanalysis of "Hide"

SPOILERS!

 

This looks like a very self-contained episode.  A "monster-of-the-week" episode.  But there were actually some really big classic series references in this episode.  Not to mention a few more big clues about the mystery of Clara.  So let's dig in.

It might have seemed like technobabble when the Doctor said that he could open the "well" using an aspect of the Eye of Harmony and a blue crystal from Metebelis III.  Well, it was technobabble, but it wasn't made up by the writer of this episode.  The Eye of Harmony was first introduced in the redundantly named 4th Doctor episode "The Deadly Assassin."  I can't quite tell you what it was used for then, because I don't care enough to remember.  The more memorable use of it was in the horrible made-for-TV movie, where it was said that the TARDIS had its own Eye of Harmony in a back room that powered it:

In a completely impossible twist, the Eye of Harmony could only be opened
by the retina of a human, a species that the Time Lords had little contact with.
Honestly, this movie made less sense than an M.C. Escher painting.

Okay, so the Eye of Harmony is kind of a bizarre and random thing that doesn't mean much of anything other than it's a power source.  But the cyrstal from Metebelis III is fully legit.  The Doctor first picked up the crystal in "The Green Death," but it didn't become a problem until the Third Doctor's final episode, "Planet of the Spiders."  The crystals have the ability, as the Doctor pointed out, to enhance certain abilities within a creature.  Metebelis III became the "Planet of the Spiders" because some spiders who were left behind by human explorers, and the crystals caused the spiders to become larger and hyper-intelligent.

The Third Doctor regenerates into the Fourth Doctor
out of fear after finding this thing in his shower.

The crystal turned a mentally disabled man into a genius.  It also helped a psychic to enhance his abilities.  So I was very happy about this episode using pre-established technology rather than some random bullshit that the writer made up.  It may have looked that way to the casual viewer, but I promise you that it was cleverer than that.

I was wondering what the Doctor was doing at this completely random house.  Someone on Gallifrey Base (the Doctor Who forum) suggested that maybe the Doctor was going back to the house that he met the 19th Century Clara.  It doesn't seem that it was the same house, but it's perfectly possible that it was and I missed it because I have no spatial awareness whatsoever.

What he did seem to come there for was an empathic psychic to tell him what the fuck is going on with the Claras.  She seems to think that Clara's perfectly normal, which is probably a clue, but she also thought that the Doctor had a "sliver of ice in his heart," so maybe she's just the worst psychic in the world.

Probably not.

But the fact that the empath thinks that Clara is a perfectly normal girl has to be a huge clue.  What could it mean that Clara isn't unusual?  My guess is that if Emma met either of the other two Claras, she wouldn't have had said that.  I think that whatever is going to splinter Clara across time, it hasn't happened to the 21st century Clara yet, putting versions of her in both the future and the past.

The problem is that Emma sees nothing wrong with Clara, but the TARDIS clearly does.  The running thread of the past few weeks, that the TARDIS doesn't like Clara, seems to be for an obvious reason:  The TARDIS can't handle temporal paradoxes, like Captain Jack in "Utopia," the alternate Amy in "The Girl Who Waited," and Clara Oswald, the impossible girl.  It even seemed to insult her because it said that the person she would most esteem would be...herself.  To which Clara called the TARDIS a "grumpy old cow."

You'd think the one that the TARDIS really hated would be the Doctor's real wife, River Song.

Then there's the whole weird creatures that are in love.  Aw, love can outlast time.  I don't think that matters in the long run.  Unless it's Clara's parents, and their great love story, that was splintered across time.

Next week, we go deep into the TARDIS to places the show has never been.  Moffat said he thought the classic series didn't show enough when it went inside the TARDIS.  There's a little bit in the 4th Doctor episode "The Invasion of Time," and a little more in the 5th Doctor's introductory episode, "Castrovalva," but nothing like what I think we're about to see.

See you next week!