Wireless in the Blood: An Overanalysis of "The Bells of Saint John"

Okay, so much is happening that I can't possibly explain it all in just one blog entry.  Besides, I'm trying to start marketing this blog to a wider audience, and I can't write 10 page dissertations on each episode without scaring everyone off.  The breaking news that's just come out will have to be covered in a separate entry (assuming that it doesn't turn out to be an April Fools joke), and I'm even going to have to expand on the villain a little later.  Don't worry.  I'll get to everything.  Now, on with the show...

SPOILERS!!!

On November 18, 1993, Nirvana, the kings of grunge, appeared on MTV to record an episode of the show Unplugged.  What ensued was the most popular recording in the history of the program, and possibly the most iconic moment in the history of MTV.  Refusing fans' requests for them to play their hits, like "Smells Like Teen Spirit," the band intentionally did the opposite, playing mostly older songs and covers.  They promised they would bring on a special guest artist to perform with them.  People speculated that it would be Rod Stewart or David Bowie or something.  Nope.  They brought an obscure underground band they were friends with:  The Meat Puppets.  But it was, in a large part, because they blatantly refused to do what was expected of them that their recording became such an important part of American popular culture.

In "The Bells of Saint John," Moffat showed us very early on that a recurring villain was going to be behind it all. Where we expected the Master, Davros, the Rani, the Meddling Monk, or maybe the Valeyard, Moffat gave us an obscure, Second Doctor villain:  The Great Intelligence.  In other words, Moffat gave us The Meat Puppets.

It's brilliant, but I'm still a little pissed about it.  It fucks with my plans and, I swear to God, Moffat's doing this to me on purpose. I start this new blog. I go to a lot of effort to start promoting this new blog. I figure this blog will be something very easy to write in my free time because I already have an encyclopedic knowledge of Doctor Who, so it won't require research or anything. The first episode I write about, Moffat stumps me and I have to do "research" for my blog post. Fuck you, you wonderful, brilliant man, you.  I'm writing two conference papers!  I don't have time to go back and rewatch both of the Great Intelligence's episodes from the Second Doctor era, not to mention Downtime, the semi-official spin-off movie from the 90's about the Great Intelligence.  Thus, I'm going to write this post based on what little I remember of the Great Intelligence, and then supplement it later with a longer post about the GI.

Moffat has stated publicly, many times, that he doesn't want to dip back into the past too often because the point of [i]Doctor Who[/i] is to move forward.  Therefore, most of his episodes are about villains he created, occasionally throwing in Daleks, Sontarans, and Cybermen as supporting characters, never the central menace.  "Asylum of the Daleks" was unique in that it was the first time Moffat ever wrote an episode in which the primary villain was one that was created in the classic series.

Moffat has also publicly stated that he hates the black and white era of the classic series.  He said that the first episode was fantastic, and everything after that was rubbish.  So it seems really odd that, for his last two episodes in a row, he not only brought back a classic series villain, but a classic series villain from the black and white era.  Plus there's the fact that the two serials that the Great Intelligence appeared in in the black and white era were thrown out in the great BBC purge where they got rid of episodes of old shows that they never thought they'd need in the future, failing to anticipate the lucrative DVD aftermarket that would develop in the 21st century.  Therefore, the only way to watch the first two serials about the Great Intelligence is through fan reconstructions where they use photographs, existing audio, and whatever video does remain of the episodes, to recreate the episodes.

What this all amounts to is that the Great Intelligence is a really strange choice for a recurring villain.

What I think happened is that Moffat created this arc where a sinister, non-physical force would stalk the Doctor throughout time and space.  The BBC then told him that, since it was the 50th anniversary season, he should make the overall arc about a recurring villain instead.  So he just slapped on the name of the first classic series villain he could think of who resembled the villain he was trying to create:  The Great Intelligence.

But enough about GI for now, let's talk about this really fun episode.

About halfway through the episode, I checked to see how much time was left, because I was hoping there was a lot more time left than there actually was.  Partially because I was having so much fun with this episode, but also because I was afraid they wouldn't have time to wrap this up in a satisfying way.  What I loved was that, at the end of the episode, the solution made sense.  It wasn't as perfect of an ending as "Flesh and Stone" or "Blink" or "Day of the Moon," but at least the internal logic of the episode made sense, unlike something like "Asylum of the Daleks" or "The Angels Take Manhattan." And, unlike "The Angels Take Manhattan," it didn't feel like a 2-parter that was uncomfortably shoved into a 1-parter.

Clara's a little badass, isn't she?  The Doctor did spend some time "protecting" her, but she held her own a little, too.  At the point in the cafe when Clara said she'd find where the people were being uploaded to and she told the Doctor to go away while she did her work, I said to my girlfriend "It takes a great companion to tell the Doctor to shoo while she takes care of things."  She said to me "Or the Doctor needed to leave so that she can be captured and, thus, advance the plot."  A few minutes later, she was proven right.  But remember, Kizlet gave Clara the computer skills, but the idea of using the webcams to figure out where the headquarters was was more than just computer knowledge.  That was a clever tactic that the Doctor didn't think of.  That's what you need in a good companion:  someone who can add something, not just someone who's just along for the ride (Peri, Mel, Tegan, etc.)

Weren't the spoonheads such wonderfully terrifying villains?  Now I know what those things were in the broken glass poster that looked like a gas pump with an oval coming out of it.  Moffat said the point of this episode was to make kids scared of wi-fi, because it's about time that they were.  So, for this episode, I tried to view it through a child's eyes, and yeah, it looked absolutely terrifying.  Sure, as adults we're jaded enough that we don't see that when we watch the episode.  But, if I was a small child and I watched that episode, I might have trouble sleeping, knowing that wi-fi networks are all around me, in the air, and there's nothing I can do to hide from them.

Another little snippet of my conversation with my girlfriend as I watched this:
Her:  I find it hard to believe that so many people would click on a wi-fi network they don't recognize.  Don't they know that's dangerous?
Me:  ...I do that all the time.
Her:  Why?
Me:  Sometimes you're in an unfamiliar place, you want to get online, so you steal a wi-fi connection that's nearby.
Her:  That's dangerous!  For this exact reason!

She's right, but it's still something we all do.  Right?

The plane crashing was awesome, but it was only a small glimpse at what a wi-fi monster could really do if unleashed on the public.  There were a lot of other great things they could have shown.

Although, the thing with Kizlet talking through people, that was a brilliantly imaginative idea.  Multiple appreciation threads have popped up on the Gallifrey Base message board for the last guy Kizlet spoke through, who is being referred to as either "Man with Chips," "Man with Sandwich," or "Man with Beard."  A man eating sloppily as he walked down the street who suddenly stops to threaten the Doctor in a very effeminate voice is apparently a very popular idea.

Some people have complained that this episode was too much like "The Idiot's Lantern."  The have a point.  But there's one thing about this episode that makes it much better than "The Idiot's Lantern":  It wasn't written by Mark Fucking Gatiss (#anyonebutgatiss).

The episode raised more questions than it answered, and really didn't address the Clara mystery very much.  What it did do, though, was demonstrate to us that the Doctor and Clara aren't just meeting coincidentally.  Something very specific is drawing them together.  In the prequel video, we saw the Doctor in the 20th century trying to find Clara, accidentally finding a 6 year old version of her instead, not knowing who it was.  In this episode, she managed to turn the police box...into an actual police box!

Moffat said at one point that we had heard the bells of St. John before.  This was a cute misdirection that left us wondering what he meant.  Clearly what he meant was that it's the second time someone turned the TARDIS into a working police box.  The first time was in "The Empty Child," where the boy was able to call the TARDIS's phone, which it isn't even supposed to have.  The TARDIS is supposed to have a phone inside, at the console (entirely Moffat's idea), but it's not supposed to have a working phone outside.  It's not even supposed to have a phone on the outside for display purposes.  It's not a phone box.  The fact that her call could create a phone where there shouldn't be one shows that there's a very significant connection between them.

Not to mention that she reached him by calling a number that "a woman at the shops gave her."  My initial instinct was that it was either Amy or River.  Or maybe Jenny (Vastra's Jenny, not the Doctor's daughter).  Maybe it's a future version of Clara herself.  It could have been an agent of the GI that gave her the number, but considering that this mystery woman told Clara it was the greatest helpline in the universe, I'm guessing it was someone who admires the Doctor.

I got the feeling that the Great Intelligence wanted Kizlet to fail for some reason.  The main reason I thought this was that the Great Intelligence warned Kizlet about the Doctor, but not the TARDIS.  Kizlet and her minions had no idea why the TARDIS disappeared, or how two people fit inside of it.  I asked some people on the GB forum if they had any thoughts on why the GI didn't warn them about the TARDIS.  One person said that, just because it's a "Great Intelligence" doesn't mean it's an "all knowing" intelligence.  However, another person pointed out that, in the Second Doctor episode, "The Web of Fear," the Great Intelligence saw the TARDIS, so it should know what it is.  Then again, the Great Intelligence didn't seem to recognize the Doctor in "The Snowmen."  Maybe its memory is limited?  Maybe this is farther back in its timeline than the one who met the Second Doctor.

Or maybe he set up a plan that was supposed to fail.  It felt like some sort of test case.  A pilot study.  Something to test the waters while on the way to some much bigger plan.  He fed off of the minds of all those people, yes, but he clearly has something bigger in mind.  Now, what is the GI planning?  There's not enough to guess yet.  But I have a feeling that the GI is going to be the one who finally asks the Doctor his name at the Fields of Trenzalore.

Or he'll be the one that asks the Doctor[i]s[/i] their names if the Fields of Trenzalore are going to be part of the 50th Anniversary special, because I think it's going to be.  Moffat said that, in the finale, the Doctor would reveal his biggest secret, which we all know is his name.  And he can only say his name on the Fields of Trenzalore, where no one can speak falsely or fail to answer.

And, of course, River has to be there to hear his name since she knows it in "Silence in the Library."  She told him her real identity.  She showed you hers, Doctor, you have to show her yours.

And River loves to play Doctor.

Operation Blue Harvest (Part 2): A Preview of Season 7 (Part 2)

If I've gotten the scheduler to work correctly, this should be posting exactly 24 hours before the mid-season premiere in the UK.  If I haven't gotten the scheduler to work correctly...then I guess I haven't.

Have you ever wondered why Family Guy’s Star Wars episode (with its great Doctor Who reference) is called “Blue Harvest”?  Blue Harvest was the fake production name given to Return of the Jedi to keep fans from finding out about the production.  The ruse got pretty big, with posters and t-shirts for their fake movie.  All of this just to make sure fans were properly surprised.  And it’s not like fans wouldn’t be that dedicated.  In the early days of the show Survivor, there were Internet message boards full of “Survivor spoilers” who went to extreme lengths to find out things about the upcoming season of Survivor as it was being filmed, including a spoiler finding a hotel room in the area where Survivor was being filmed to take photos of the set.  With this level of surveillance in the age of the Internet, and the immense international popularity of Doctor Who, is it any surprise that Steven Moffat would institute his own “Blue Harvest” ruse?  With just about every single actor in the history of Doctor Who denying that they’re returning for the 50^th Anniversary special and the BBC announcing that filming of the 50^th Anniversary special hasn’t even begun yet, we can be pretty certain we’ve established another rule:

Rule 2:  Moffat gets other people to lie.

SPOILERS!!!

The episode titles have been announced recently.  Except for one.  They are as follows:

The Bells of Saint John

The Rings of Akhaten

Cold War

Hide

Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS

The Crimson Horror

The Last Cybermen

TBA

The lack of a name for the last episode is tantalizing, because we know what Moffat is trying to make us think it’s going to be “The Eleven Doctors.”  More on that later.

The first episode is being called “The Bells of St. John.”  The original title that was released was “Phantom of the Hex,” and then all of a sudden it changed without anyone really having acknowledged that anything had changed.  I mean, seriously, it almost looks like some Internet-wide conspiracy.  One moment, everyone's calling it "Phantom of the Hex," the next minute it's "The Bells of St. John."  I can find no articles even mentioning that the name changed.  "Phantom of the Hex" and "The Bells of St. John" don't seven seem to appear on the same page in any Google search.  Probably means nothing, but I thought it was weird.

The title, "The Bells of St. John," comes from an old British nursery rhyme called “Oranges and Lemons.”  Wikipedia has two versions of it, but the second, longer one has the relevant passage, so I’m only posting that one:

Gay go up and gay go down,

To ring the bells of London town.

Oranges and lemons,

Say the bells of St. Clements.

Bull's eyes and targets,

Say the bells of St. Margret's.

Brickbats and tiles,

Say the bells of St. Giles'.

Halfpence and farthings,

Say the bells of St. Martin's.

Pancakes and fritters,

Say the bells of St. Peter's.

Two sticks and an apple,

Say the bells of Whitechapel.

Pokers and tongs,

Say the bells of St. John's.

Kettles and pans,

Say the bells of St. Ann's.

Old Father Baldpate,

Say the slow bells of Aldgate.

You owe me ten shillings,

Say the bells of St. Helen's.

When will you pay me?

Say the bells of Old Bailey.

When I grow rich,

Say the bells of Shoreditch.

Pray when will that be?

Say the bells of Stepney.

I do not know,

Says the great bell of Bow.

Here comes a candle to light you to bed,

Here comes a chopper to chop off your head.

Chop chop chop chop

The last man's dead!

If you’re an American (if you're reading this, I’m sure you are) and you've never heard this rhyme before but wonder where you’ve heard those last lines, the first guy to die in “The God Complex” said it to the Doctor when he was tied up in a room with all those living ventrilusquists’ dummies.  (I can’t believe I wrote that sentence in complete seriousness.)

Moffat said that his inspiration in writing this episode was that he felt that it was time for children to be afraid of wi-fi.  Yes, you read that correctly.  Moffat wants to make wi-fi scary.  In an episode, bafflingly called “The Bells of St. John” after being changed from “Phantom of the Hex.”  As strange as this sounds, Moffat has said that he loves to make mundane things terrifying.  That’s something Freud called “the uncanny” (there’s a great paper about this in relation to Doctor Who that I saw presented at a conference).  So let’s see, so far he’s made us afraid of gas masks, old clockwork toys, statues, shadows, dust in sunbeams, cracks in the wall, the creaking sounds you hear in your house, trees, and snowmen.  Wi-fi sounds like something he can do a good job of scaring us with.

Now, they released a prequel for "The Bells of St. John," like they seem to release for everything now. There's no information given in it, other than to suggest, yet again, that something is actually pulling the Doctor and Clara together.  If you feel the need to watch it, here it is, but I guarantee you won't be surprised by the ending:

Now, in regards to the one interesting thing about the trailer, my Doctor Who friend, Brendan Michael, brought the following image to my attention (click to enlarge):

The implication here, of course, that Rose and Mickey seem to be in the same playground as Clara and the Doctor.  Because apparently Mickey and Rose are the only blonde haired girl and black boy playing together on Earth.  But yeah, that does look like Jackie, so maybe that's them.  But I highly doubt this is a clue.  Just a little Easter Egg for the fans to find, just in time for Easter.

The Ice Warriors episode is “Cold War” and is written by Mark Gatiss.  Ugh.  #anyonebutgatiss  It’s going to involve an Ice Warrior in a submarine.  I don’t want to meet any Doctor Who villain in a submarine.  Terrifying.

Then we already covered Gaiman’s “The Last Cybermen.”

“Journey fo the Centre of the TARDIS” sounds interesting.  They said that this is because Moffat was disappointed with classic series episodes that explored the inside of the TARDIS, specifically in the Fourth Doctor episode “The Invasion of Time.”  So he wanted to make an episode that does a lot more exploration of the TARDIS.  Sounds like a good idea, but he handed over the idea to Steve Thompson.  Thompson is responsible for one of my least favorite Doctor Who episodes (“The Curse of the Black Spot”), my least favorite Sherlock episode (“The Blind Banker”), but strangely, also my favorite Sherlock episode (“The Reichenbach Fall”).  This one could go either way.

Finally, “The Eleven Doctors.”  Is it happening?  Is it not happening?  Will we have a muti-Doctor episode with fewer Doctors?  Will it actually be that last episode of the season that Moffat won’t tell us the name of?  Or will there be a completely different season finale, and a separate 50^th anniversary special on the actual 50^th anniversary date, November 23^rd.

Now, I’m going to tell you what I know, but I think some of it is flat out lies.  Remember Rule 2.

-Reports claim that the special has NOT been shot yet, and will be shot in April.  If the episode is the TBA episode at the end of this season, I call bullshit.  If it’s airing November 23^rd, then fine, I might buy that it hasn’t been shot yet.  But nobody at the BBC would cut it this close.  I have a feeling that this is part of what I’m going to call Operation Blue Harvest.

-Peter Davidson, the Fifth Doctor, has completely denied that he has been approached yet to appear in the special.  He said that he didn’t think that any of the older Doctors should be in the episode.  Again, I call Blue Harvest.  He was in a short multi-Doctor episode, “Time Crash,” and he knows full well how Moffat explained it away in that mini-episode, and how easily he can do it again.  Besides, if the Second Doctor can retire in 1969 and return in the mid-80s, and if Carole Ann Ford can return to her role as the Doctor’s teenage granddaughter 20 years after leaving the show, then you can bring back anyone.  “Having us both in the same place shorted out the time differential.”  And boom!  The problem was solved in “Time Crash.”

Davidson did say he was meeting with the Doctor Who producers later this month, but he didn’t think they were going to offer him a spot in the special.  What?  If he’s not covering something up, then he’s a moron.

-David Tennant denied that he’s been approached yet.  Bullshit.  If anyone’s coming back, it’s Tennant.

- Freema Agyeman (Martha Jones) denied having been approached.

-John Barrowman, (Captain Jack), strangely is the only person who has publicly confirmed that he had been in talks with the producers about appearing in the special. He then came out on Twitter a few days later and said he wouldn’t be in the special.  Again, I’m calling Blue Harvest.  Why would Barrowman talk to the producers and not reach an agreement.  Barrowman is a die hard Doctor Who fan who can quote chapter and verse from the classic series.  Barrowman would do the 50^th Anniversary special for free.  Hell, he’d probably pay the producers to let him do it.  What’s more likely is that Barrowman saying that he was in talks with producers turned out to be something that the producers didn’t want him leaking, so they insisted he go back on Twitter to deny that he would be in the special.  Blue Harvest.

Personally, I’ve been hoping to see the 11^th Doctor meet Jack.  I really hope Jack chews the Doctor out for not showing up during either of the crises in Seasons 3 and 4 of Torchwood.

-The only clue Matt Smith was willing to give out was the word “paintings”

-The episode will be aired in 3-D.  WHO CARES?!

-Moffat promised the season finale will be “seriously fan-boy centric,” further suggesting that the season finale and the 50^th anniversary special will be the same episode.

-Moffat also said that the Doctor’s greatest secret will be revealed in the season finale.  If you look back on a note I wrote called “A Brief History of the Cartmel Masterplan,” (https://www.facebook.com/notes/trevor-liam-byrne-smith/a-brief-history-of-the-cartmel-masterplan-a-trevors-doctor-who-overanalysis-supp/10150355733448688), you’ll see what I think the secret is.  (Maybe I'll move that over here, because I think that will be very important.)

-Executive producer Caro Skinner summed up the episode in three words:  “It.  Will.  Be.  Big.”

It better be.

Look, most of you are New Whovians, those who got into the show with the new series, not the old.  You might not all know this, but so am I.  I’m a little embarrassed to admit to all of you how recently I got into the show, but it’s much more recent than you might think considering how much ridiculous knowledge I have about this show.  I’ve gone through a lot of nerd stages in my life, from Star Trek to Star Wars to Buffy, and it looks like Doctor Who is just the one that’s really sticking with me.  I hope it always does.

Recently, the show Community had a great episode about a convention for a fictional TV series the show refers to often called Inspector Spacetime, which is, without a doubt, meant to be Doctor Who.  The character, Abed, only got into Inspector Spacetime a few years earlier, but became acknowledged online as Inspector Spacetime’s second biggest fan.

My point is, whether you’re a new Whovian or an old one, no matter how much or how little you know about the show, you're all welcome in...well, Whoville.  The reason I got into this show is that I’ve always loved franchises that create entire universes, with characters that can come back over and over again, and heroes that can continue to fight them until the end of time.  I love serials that leave you hanging on wondering what’s coming next, and stories that bring back a character or element you’ve been waiting to see return forever, but surprise you with it at the very end of the episode.  Doctor Who is everything I love about serial fiction.  I hope you can find some of the same joy in it that I do.

So I can’t wait to see how much fun this gets this season.  I know, we’re all a little bit disappointed with the first 5 episodes of the season, but the Christmas special brought us back some hope with a great story and some great writing.  There’s probably going to be a few stinkers this season (like Gatiss’s episodes, #anyonebutgatiss), but there’s one thing we know about what this season is going to be leading up to:

“It.  Will.  Be.  Big.”


UPDATE:  This came out as another little preview for "The Bells of St. John" after I finished writing this:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01706q4

Never Trust Anyone Over 50 (Part I): A Preview of Season 7 (Part 2)

Just because Moffat decided to be a spoilsport this season and get rid of all the twoparters doesn’t mean we have to.  Welcome to the new home of my Doctor Who musings, “The Horror of Fan Blog.”  We’re going to start things off here with a two-part introduction to the season in the days leading up to the March 30^th premiere.  I had so much to say about the 50^th anniversary season, that I had to chop it up into separate pieces.

SPOILERS!!!

Okay, so, in retrospect, I realize now that Moffat might have had the 50^th Anniversary on his mind for longer than we thought, because, if you think about it, he’s been rolling out the whole rogues gallery this season.  First we started off with the all time most iconic villain of the series, the Daleks themselves.  Then we had sort of a Silurian episode, albeit without many actual Silurians appearing on screen.  But it was still Silurian-centric.  Then we saw, once again, the most popular recurring villain to have originated in the new series: the Weeping Angels.  Hell, even the Christmas Special was actually the return of an old recurring villain, The Great Intelligence, even though they only revealed it to be The Great Intelligence in the last seconds of the episode.  On top of that, the special even had a Sontaran and a Silurian (as good guys!).  Now, in the second half of the season we’re going to see the return of the Cybermen and the Ice Warriors, and who knows what else is there to surprise us.  Because, on Doctor Who, there really should always be surprises.  That’s what the classic series was always about.  But that won’t stop me from trying to guess what those surprises are going to be.

First, let’s talk about Villains We Know Are Coming:

The Cybermen:
We’ve all been getting bored with the Cybermen, to be honest.  Frankly, how the series has ever had room for both Daleks and Cybermen has always baffled me.  You’d think they’d be so similar that people would lose interest in the Cybermen.  But since their appearance in the 1^st Doctor’s final episode, their popularity has endured.

Moffat, realizing that the Cybermen had grown dull, decided he wanted to make them scary again.  While Moffat is really good at making something scary out of something mundane, he doesn’t really seem to have much desire to try to do that with classic Doctor Who villains too much.  So, what did he do?

He called Neil Mother Fucking Gaiman, that’s what he did.

That’s right, “The Last Cybermen” will be the Sandman genius himself’s second episode of the series.  Keep this up, Neil, and hopefully you’ll take over the series after Moffat leaves (#anyonebutgatiss).  If there’s anyone who can make the Cybermen scary again (or, well, creepy anyway), it’s Gaiman.  He’s said that he took the Cybermen from their first two appearances in the black and white era (“The Tenth Planet” and “The Tomb of the Cybermen”) and tried to bring back that style, but without forgetting everything that’s happened with them since.

The Ice Warriors:

The Ice Warriors were introduced in the 2^nd Doctor era and were last seen in the 3^rd Doctor era, although they haven’t appeared as a villain since the 2^nd Doctor era.  Rumors have been floating around of their return forever.  If the classic series hadn’t been cancelled in 1989, the writers said they would have brought the Ice Warriors back in the next year in an episode on a college campus in the 1960s.  In deleted material (that I wish they had never deleted) it would have been revealed that what happened in “The Waters of Mars” was actually a trap set by The Ice Warriors (it still probably was).  And they’ve appeared many times in expanded universe material.  If you wonder why they haven’t been around much, it’s probably because they’re a little too much like the Silurians and, even though the Ice Warriors came first, the Silurians seem to have captured more people’s imaginations.

The Ice Warriors are the ancient inhabitants of Mars who had a flourishing civilization 250 million years before even the most basic forms of life formed on Earth.  That’s why there is no sign of life on Mars:  It’s been so long, the civilization has faded to dust.  Somehow or another some of their race were frozen (I don’t remember how) and, over time, they eventually thawed out with the intention of turning Earth into their new home so their race can survive.

Also they hiss a lot.  Like snakes.  It sounds really cool.

The Ice Warriors episode, called “Cold War,” is going to involve an Ice Warrior stuck in a submarine.  That sounds awesome!  It’s written by Mark Gatiss.  That sounds much less awesome.  (#anyonebutgatiss)

The Trickster:

A promotional poster about this coming second half of the season was released recently and it has some clues hidden in the image.  The image shows the Doctor and Clara crashing through a giant window and, if you look at the images in the reflections, you can see some of the villains who are going to be in this second half of the season.  The largest version of the image I’ve been able to find was right here (click to enlarge):

Now, there aren’t too many things that this taught me.  There are some Cybermen and Ice Warriors who are very visible, but we already knew about them.  There are creatures in the bottom left and right of the image (who look like they might be the same creature) but I don’t recognize them, although they look vaguely like the Sycorax.  The middle right and left have some strange image in them that look like old gas station pumps with oval heads coming out of them.  Don’t ask me what that’s supposed to be.

But then, up in the left corner, not all the way up, but more than halfway up, and all the way up to the top right you see a man in a top hat without eyes.  Creepy looking, ain’t he?  That, my friends, is The Trickster.

For those of you who haven’t heard of the Trickster, that’s because, for the most part, you’re not supposed to have heard of the Trickster, because he’s not a Doctor Who villain.  He’s a villain from the Doctor Who spin-off, The Sarah Jane Adventures, which was a fun but much more kid-based show than Doctor Who.  SJA was a very wholesome show about a journalist and a group of very age inappropriate children who hung out at her house and went on life threatening adventures with her without their parents knowing about it.  As much as we all love Sarah Jane, when you think about it, that show was really weird.

As most of you know, SJA was cut short by the shocking death of Elizabeth Sladen, who played Sarah Jane Smith, after her long but very silent battle with cancer.  She died around the same time that Nicholas Courtney, who played an equally iconic character in the same era as when Sladen started out (The Brigadier), and the show has made two in-universe tributes to the Brigadier.  The first in “The Wedding of River Song” where the Doctor tries to call the Brigadier and finds he’s dead, the second in “The Power of Three,” when the Brig’s daughter is now in charge of UNIT.  Hopefully, the appearance of the Trickster means that there will be some sort of tribute to Sarah Jane.  It would be offensive to try and suggest that Sarah Jane died of anything other than natural causes, but bringing in the Trickster might mean the Doctor is extra motivated by the death of his old friend.

And, while I haven’t watched much of SJA (just the pilot and the two episodes the Doctor is in), I’m sure there are some loose ends to clear up.  The show didn’t get a finale since the lead actress died unexpectedly.  Maybe we’ll see some of the characters from SJA show up to give the show its real finale.  That’s a pretty old tradition with spin-offs and shows from the same creator:  to finish off your story on your other show.  Remember that horrible show from the creator of the X-Files called Millennium?  Since that got cancelled early and they didn’t get to finish the story, they tied up the loose ends of Millennium in an X-Files episode.  Same with the X-Files spin-off, The Lone Gunmen.

The Trickster has been forced outside of time and space and can only barely push his way into our world sometimes.  The only way he can gain access back into our universe is to feed off of the chaos that he creates.  The Trickster created The Trickster’s Brigade, a group that seeks to make changes in history simply to feed off of the ensuing chaos it creates in the timeline.  You’ve actually met a member of the Trickster’s brigade on Doctor Who:  she put the scarab on Donna’s back.  It was only mentioned in passing dialogue at the end of the episode that the scarab was part of the Trickster’s brigade, hence why there was this woman who seemingly had no motive to change time.  She wanted to create chaos.

Now, the fact that the Trickster’s never been on Doctor Who doesn’t mean that the Doctor has never met the Trickster.  The Tenth and Eleventh Doctors both made guest appearances on SJA, and the Tenth Doctor was in an episode called “The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith” where the Trickster tricked Sarah Jane into thinking she was in love with a human and about to get married, but there was some sinister plot behind it.  I don’t remember the whole thing.  SJA wasn’t very good.

Still, I’m excited at the idea of an SJA crossover.  The Trickster’s a cool idea for a villain, someone who cares about nothing other than creating chaos in the universe.  He could be a force to be reckoned with.  Some people have already suggested online that, perhaps, Clara’s splintering across the timeline was something the Trickster did.  Far fetched, but not more impossible than River being Amy and Rory’s daughter.

Villains I Think Might Be Coming Back

The Master:  Okay, okay, okay, hear me out!  I know some of you are bored with the Master, and frankly I don’t understand why.  He’s the anti-Doctor.  Sometimes it’s fun to see a hero up against a villain who plays to the heroe’s greatest weaknesses.  The Joker is chaotic, and Batman can’t understand chaos.  Lex Luthor is an intellectual villain, and Superman is a brute force hero.  But sometimes it’s fun anyway to see a hero matched up against someone who has his exact same strengths but uses them for evil.

Now, John Simm has denied rumors that he’s returning, but we all know what denial means on this show.  But here’s the reasons I think the Master is coming back anyway:

1.  The Master doesn’t have to be played by John Simm.  Simm was, more or less, the 6^th Master.  (The Masters are a little hard to count because, in the classic series, he was out of regenerations so he didn’t regenerate, he just stole bodies to stay alive.  The first Master we ever saw was, presumably, the 13^th Master.  Then there was the Master in “The Deadly Assassin” who was supposedly the same Master as the one played by Roger Delgado, but he was shown as being burnt to a crisp like a piece of overcooked bacon, allowing another actor to play him.  Then there’s whoever played the imprisoned Master at the beginning of the 1996 movie, and we have no idea what incarnation he’s supposed to be.  It’s all complicated.)  In the new series, he’s regained his ability to regenerate, so he can be played by whoever they want.  Also, last year reports were coming out that the rumors that Benedict Cumberbatch (who plays Sherlock Holmes in Moffat’s 21^st Century adaptation of Sherlock) was going to be the new Master were not just rumors, but that he was in serious conversations with the producers about replacing Simm.  Personally, I can’t think of a better actor to play the Master.

2.  Like I’ve said, the entire rogues gallery is coming back this season.  The Daleks, the Cybermen, The Silurians, The Sontarans, The Ice Warriors, the Weeping Angels, and even the Great Intelligence.  This isn’t an accident. This is an anniversary celebration, for certain.  Moffat’s trying to make this season a full on celebration of everything that makes Doctor Who great.  Where Davies did a good job of bringing the original unholy trinity of Doctor Who villains (The Daleks, The Cybermen, and The Master), Moffat’s done a lot to bring back all the recurring villains, even the minor ones.  With such a parade of classic villains, it seems hard to believe that Moffat would overlook The Master.

3.  The Master’s appearances should always be unadvertised surprises.  This was especially true of the 5^th Doctor era.  In every episode in which the Master appeared, he spent at least the first 30 minute segment in disguise.  Unlike Dalek, Cybermen, and Sontaran episodes, his episodes were never labeled with his name in the title.  Sometimes, Anthony Ainsley would even volunteer to not be credited in the first episode so that it wasn’t obvious that he was in the episode in disguise.  Not only does it make sense to bring back The Master, it makes perfect sense for his return to remain a surprise.

The Rani:  No villain has received so much demand from fans to return without the fans wishes being fulfilled.  She only appeared in two episodes, one Sixth Doctor episode, “The Mark of the Rani,” and the Seventh Doctor’s first episode, “Time and the Rani.”  Still, she seems to have made quite of an impression on fans, perhaps because she was the one to kill the least popular Doctor in the history of the series.  The Rani was a Time Lady who, in her youngest years, was part of a popular social circle at the Gallifrey Academy which was made up of her, The Master, The Doctor, possibly the Meddling Monk, and a few others.  The Doctor seems to be the only member of this group to come out of it with a conscience.  At the end of “Last of the Time Lords,” one of the producers called the hand that took the Master’s fob watch “the hand of the Rani,” completely as a joke that he thought nobody would take seriously because he thought nobody would remember who the Rani was.  He was wrong, and had to apologize for giving them a false hint.

And there was a very large segment of fans who thought River Song was going to turn out to be a regeneration of The Rani.  Thank God that isn’t true.

The Rani is a brilliant concept for a villain.  Not so much a megalomaniac (although she kind of was in her second appearance), but her main purpose was as a biochemist.  She studied the chemicals in brains.  The problem was, she had no sense of scientific ethics.  She would play with people’s minds as an experiment without any regard for how it would affect the subjects.  While she became more bent on universe domination in her second appearance, her first appearance made her very interesting in that she wasn’t immoral, merely amoral.  That can make for a pretty dangerous villain.

The problems with this are that The Rani does come from the least popular era of Doctor Who history, the notoriously reviled, gruesome, dark, and generally rejected Season 22.  While the show wouldn’t be cancelled for a few years after that, the show was forced into hiatus for about a year because of the complaints about how violent the show became and the meaner attitude of the new, Sixth Doctor.  While they squeezed a few more seasons out of the show, I honestly believed that those were just a courtesy and that Season 22 was the reason the show was cancelled.  The producers might be reluctant to bring back a villain from that era.  Additionally, as a Time Lady, she can’t return unless we find she somehow avoided the Time War, which would contradict the Oracle’s prediction in “The End of Time (Part 2)”.  But, let’s face it, there will be more Time Lords somewhere down the line, and so, sooner or later, somebody is going to have to contradict the Oracle.  The plus side of bringing back the Rani, of course, is that, as a Time Lady, you could cast literally any woman in the world to play her.

Omega:  Before the Time Lords were the Time Lords, they were just the Gallifreyans.  Three men—Rassillon, Omega, and The Other—came up with an idea that they thought might give them the power of time travel.  This idea involved harnessing the power of a supernova.  Obviously, that was dangerous.  Rassillon and The Other survived, but Omega was sucked into the black hole, putting him in a universe of anti-matter.  Twice he tried to escape his universe, but anti-matter and matter, when they touch each other, create a huge explosion (which is one of the few instances of Doctor Who being scientifically accurate).  He still desires revenge on the Time Lords for abandoning him and not trying harder to rescue him after he gave them the gift of time travel.

(Most of this story was only hinted at in the series, and more fully articulated in a short comic called “Star Death” by Alan Moore.)

In “The Big Bang,” many fans thought that the voice that said “Silence will fall!” and then cracked the Doctor’s viewscreen in the exact pattern of the cracks in time, was Omega.  It’s possible that some still believe it since, once we saw a Silent, we could hear that their voice didn’t sound like that voice in “The Big Bang.”  I’m more inclined to chalk that up to the producers not having decided yet, by the time they made “The Bing Bang,” what the Silence should sound like.

Omega is another character a lot of people want back.  And, if they’re going to finally acknowledge that the Doctor is really a reincarnation of The Other, which I think they’re going to (more on that later), then a great plot line could be made out of Omega.  Of course, if the Doctor is the Other, and Omega is coming back, you need to bring back one more person…

Rassilon:  In the classic series, Rassilon was long dead.  He was a great historic figure in Time Lord history, by far the most honored.  He had managed, somehow, to leave a form of his own consciousness behind in his tomb to warn those who would disturb his tomb (and other stuff, long story), but he was still dead.

In “The End of Time,” Rassilon was alive again with no explanation.  I think the only thing that established him as Rassilon was the Doctor saying it at the very end, as Rassilon was being sucked back into the time lock.  So now you’ve established, twice that the Time Lords can somehow bring people (or, at least, other Time Lords) back to life.  The Master flat out said that that’s what they did to him, and now somehow they have the ability to resurrect their greatest historical figure.  All of this seems to have been just for the Time War.  Where the fuck did they get that technology?  Do the Time Lords have a Lazarus Pit?  I guess that's why Rassilon became evil only when he came back from the dead.