Doctor Who [8]

I have been reading here and there grumblings that some of the thing that happened in series 5-7 are without explanation.

Its a common charge against the Moffat/Smith era, that plot points were highlighted then never picked up on again. Favourites include who blew up the TARDIS and why at the end of series 5, what was all that stuff with the spacesuit about? What was Kovarian plan all along and why? As well as a few others.

So I thought I would lay out my take on the events, and it seemed the best way to do so was to take it from the perspective of those who were behind all those events- Madame Kovarian and the Silence Movement.

The Silence are a faction of the dominant religion of the 51th Century. The main religion is a hybrid of different groups roughly Christian in broad strokes and ruled by a Papacy, headed by Tasha Lem.
It also has its own army.

We know the main religion is factionalised because we see at least two distinct factions within in it- The Silence, led by Madame Kovarian and the Headless Monks who are attached to the Church but act autonomously. And we know it has an army as we see them in action in Time of Angels, A Good Man Goes to War and Time of the Doctor.

The Church are present at Tenzelore to hold the galactic peace together. They are defending the planet and the Doctor from everyone else.
Although they are only partly successful at this as different groups continually make various attempts to take the planet.
The people of Trenzalore join the Doctor in defending their home and generation after generation the graveyard to the war dead gets bigger and bigger.

The reason for all this being that a signal being broadcast from there is coming from the Time Lords, and if the Time Lords come back then the Time War will start all over again as the Daleks have regained their former strength (as seen in Asylum of the Daleks) and if the Time Lords don’t ever come back and the Daleks or someone else blows up the planet or kills the Doctor then the Daleks will have no one to stop them.

The lynch pin to all this is the Doctor. He is the only personal who can bring the Time Lords back, all he has to do is speak his true name to prove it is him and they can home in on him and return.

All those who want to avoid the Time War therefore want him dead, no Doctor to speak his name, no Time Lords returning, no problem.

But the consequence of that which the Church sees is the Daleks will probably do what they were on the verge of doing in the Last Time War- winning. And there will be noone to stop them.
So the Church needs to keep the Doctor alive, Tasha has previous with the Doctor and knows he wont actually say his name for so long as the threat of a new Time War hangs over it.

So stalemate.
The Church defend the Doctor, everyone else takes turns trying to come up with ways to kill him. No one wants the Time Lords back, and the Doctor can't bring them back anyway as things stand without unleashing the nightmare of the Time War again.

But then eventually the odds change, the Daleks take over the Papal Mainframe and seize control of the Church ship defending the planet and the Doctor.

The siege has now gone on for centuries and the Doctor has now been defending Trenzalore for 1200 years and is too old to go on. He has no more regenerations left- he is about to die of old age.

And we know from Name of the Doctor what the outcome of this timeline is- the Doctor dies, Tenzalore is destroyed, its indigenous life wiped out and it becomes a part molten wasteland with the Doctor's tomb at the centre of a huge cemetery containing all the dead of Trenzalore who fought alongside the Doctor to defend it for 1200 years.

“In the end it was just to much for the old man.”

This is the final straw which prompts the Kovarian faction into drastic action. With the Church taken over by the Daleks and Trenzalore lost and all hope of anyone who can stop the Daleks gone everything is lost.

But Kovarian has a desperate backup plan, her faction have a time machine. They can go back in time and fix it from there.
We see this timemachine in Day of the Moon, where it is badly damaged by the Doctor and River and its crew killed, the machine itself would attempt to travel back to the 51st Century but only make it as far as to become the flat above Craig's house in the Lodger.

If the Doctor however can be prevented from ever gettin to Trenzalore in the first place the whole scenario will not arise.

Here is what we learn about the Silence roughly in the order we find out about it- That 'Silence will Fall' , that it will 'Fall when the Pandorica Opens' (This predication fails because the Doctor gets out of it) we then learn the Silence are a religious order, and further that 'silence will fall when the oldest question, hidden in plain sight, is asked.”

Silence is always used metaphorically to represent the Doctors death as well as literally when he dies he will be unable to speak his name and bring the Time Lords back.

We then learn that, On the fields of Trenzalore where no one can tell a lie, a question will be asked. A question which must not be answered. The oldest question in the universe. And finally we learn that the question is Doctor who?

The Doctor's name is the answer, which is the proof the Time Lords need to make the connection and return through the crack on Trenzalore.
A crack which ironically only exists because Kovarian goes back in time to try to stop the Doctor reaching Trenzalore and blows up the TARDIS cracking the fabric of space time.

So from the beginning Kovarian has had one simple, if difficult, aim to carry out, change time by going back in the past and by any costs stop the Doctor reaching Trenzalore thus preventing either the Time Lords returning or the Daleks gaining supremacy.
Getting rid of the TARDIS is therefore a good starting place.

The snag here is there is one thing everyone knows about the TARDIS- only the Doctor can fly it.
And having inside knowledge of the Doctor means they know no-one has ever succeeded who took him head on.

So they check up on his companions, and discover he is travelling with a newly married couple, and that Amy is in the early stages of pregnancy, with a child conceived inside the Vortex. This present an opportunity.

And brings us to the Flesh. When the Doctor goes to the factory where they use Flesh he is trying to find out its origins to understand it better.

“This is the flesh in its early days.” He already knows about it before he goers there. Most of the Silence activity is centred around the 51st century. By which time we are told the Flesh has evolved.

Kovarian, who has enlisted the help of the current 51st time period Church (who we also see in Time of Angels which also takes place at this time), base themselves on the asteroid base Demons Run and its here in this time frame many key events occur including where they hold kidnapped Amy, where Melody was born, the time period in which Dorian operates and the Time Agents and the Tesselector, its also the time period of the later developed stages of the Flesh. And is the period when River joins University and qualifies as a Professor of Archaeology and in which she serves her prison sentence for the murder of the Doctor.

River is a 51st Century girl.

Kovarian uses the Flesh to mimic Amy and that both gives her a permanent eye on the Doctor no matter where he goes in space and time, but also allows them to conduct their experiments on the real Amy and her baby to turn it into a hybrid Time Lord and to be able to control her to their ends.

The baby, Melody Pond, is raised in an orphanage in America where she is further manipulated and brainwashed.

At this point Kovarian has three plans in action, one simple, one dangerous, and one complex.

Plan A is simply to have River be brainwashed so that should she ever find herself in proximity to the Doctor she will attempt to assassinate him.

Plan B is that should she find herself in a position to take control of the TARDIS she should destroy it.

Plan C is that they use River to kill the Doctor in such a fashion that it will become legendary and part of galactic folklore, (as it does becoming a variety of poems and myths and legends) and to do so at a physical location where there is still point in time, Lake Silencio, by making the death memorable it turns a 'still moment in time' into a 'fixed moment in time' that must always happen no matter what.

Young Melody however escapes the orphanage and finds herself dying on the Streets of New York, she regenerates and we learn in Lets Kill Hitler she regenerated into a toddler.

Which means she would have been there when Amy and Rory found themselves permanently trapped in that time frame in New York by the Weeping Angels.
As knowledge of Melody being here as a toddler is in their past they search for her and find her.

This is why when Amy asks the Doctor if the angel will send her to the same time as Rory he replies with seeming honesty “I don't know, nobody knows.”
But River interrupts with an absolutely certain, “Yes! Yes it will!”

She knows it will because she was raised by them in New York and then sent by them to stay in Ledworth before they died and to grow up with their younger selves.

So how did Kovarians plans work out?

Plan A occurs in Lets Kill Hitler, and very nearly succeeds. A young Mels, newly regenerated into River poisons the Doctor, and as he is on his last regeneration he cant do anything to stop it. An in fact momentarily dies. He is bought back by River having realised who she really is.
River is also taught to fly the TARDIS at this time.
So Plan A fails in the end. A young impressionable River falls in love with her target instead.

Plan B happens in the Pandorica Opens. River is told by the Doctor to fly the TARDIS to him. Instead the TARDIS takes her to Amy's time and home where she discovers the whole thing is a trap for the Doctor and can warn him.
The Silence need the Doctor out the way so River, under the brain washing influence, can destroy the TARDIS- which she does without even realising it as soon as she returns to the Tardis and once the Doctor is securely captured.

Unfortunate Kovarian did not realise that doing this would cause the TARDIS to explode at every point in space and time simultaneously taking everything out with it.
The Doctor saves the universe but this one as to be chalked up as a serious major fail for Kovarian as she very nearly accidentally wiped everything out in attempt to stop the Doctor getting to a planet-which is serious overkill by any standard.

Plan C involves putting River back in the spacesuit, having her emerge from Lake Silencio and kill the Doctor, thus creating a fix point by layering myth and legend onto a still point in time at Lake Silencio.
This fails too as per the events of the Wedding of River Song.

We don’t actually know what became of Kovarian and her followers. Amy kills her but that was in a discontinued timeline caused by River breaking the fixed point at Lake Silencio.
The Doctor however eventually finds himself at Trenzalore and defends it for 1200 years, but this time through the time line he is saved by the intervention of the Time-Lords, who rather than return respond to a plea by Clara to change the future, by granting the Doctor a complete new set of regenerations.
Allowing him to regenerate and negate the timeline where he died and Trenzalore was lain waste.
The Time Lords used up there chance here and the crack closes with them still trapped on the wrong side. And the Doctor goes on, having defied fixed points and his own death.

Now what was so complicated about that?

Bloody hell Petty, keep the wall of texts within reason! This thread doesn't need to be THAT much bigger on the inside!   

On another note, I recently watched the Shadow in the North.
As enjoyable as it was to see Mr. Smith out and about again (and not in that strange pseudo-Freudian sexcopade Womb either), this was really not a good production.
By the end of the film, I was rooting for Piper's character to actually marry the villain. It was just not very well done I'm afraid.

What? Thats the short concise version  

yes I agree Forest, the books are 100 times better than the BBC production, although I quite enjoyed them and I always like watching Billy in anything she does. Thats why they only made two of the series, the other two were dropped because Ruby in the Smoke and Shadow in the North flopped. Its a pity that non of Philip Pullmans books have been adapted properly, even though Tom Stoppard wrote the screen play for Golden Compass he was dropped by the studio. idiots.

Nice vid with multiple reactions vids combined to the 'big' scene in Day of the Doctor, obviously its spoiler filled for that episode- but I reckon this was just the sort of reaction Moffat was hoping for when he wrote that scene, one of the scenes in the 50th that makes me wish I could have seen in it in a cinema with a crowd of fellow Whovians.

In addition to its various spin-offs, three other BBC productions also exist within the same universe as Doctor Who.

The first is the Quatermass sci fi serials of the 1950s, since the British Rocket Group is mentioned numerous times in Doctor Who, and was explicitly intended as a direct reference (concept-wise, Doctor Who owes a great deal to the earlier serial anyway).

The second is the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which first appeared on radio before becoming a book and TV series. The Doctor, in one episode, mentions that he knows Arthur Dent. Douglas Adams, of course, was a writer for Doctor Who.

The third is Eastenders, the BBC soap. The 1993 30th anniversary special, Dimensions in Time, was a crossover between Doctor Who and Eastenders. It's status as canon, however, has been questioned, despite starring quite a few former Doctors (Pertwee in his final appearance in the role, Baker, Davison, Baker and McCoy) and companions. Its status within Eastenders continuity - if there is anyone who actually cares about such a thing - is also somewhat problematical, given that it was partially set 20 years in the future (in 2013), but included characters who, in fact, had long since left by then, and in some cases had died.

I'm only sorry they never got round to making a Doctor Who - Star Trek crossover, which was apparently seriously on the cards had Enterprise not been cancelled. As it is, both Doctor Who and Star Trek, as the two most venerable sci fi franchises in the world (with Doctor Who the senior by three years) have long since contained in-joke references to each other in their scripts.

And of course there have been at least two K-9 spin offs, including one made and set in Australia.
And the Sarah Jane Adventures of course.

Quatermass was supposed to be the character investigating the house in the season 7 episode Hide, but sadly there were issues with rights that were not resolved in time for filming.

Hitchhikers has had several mentions in NuWho, the Dent one comes from Tennants first episode when he is still in the dressing gown and references Arthur as a 'lovely man'.
The DVD box set of Hitchhikers circa 90's the DVD menu opens with a the TARDIS flying by.
Still waiting to catch a towel reference in Who however.

I think regards the EastEnders crossover thing its best put off to the side somewhere in n embarrassing side avenue of time that was aborted by the Time Lords out of good taste!

There is an official Star Trek/Who comic crossover featuring the Borg and the Cybermen teaming up. The story is actually not bad, but the art work is very variable and often,if you know your 11th Doctor era well enough, you can see exactly what episode, and which scene they have simply copied the characters from. (Although one thing I did like about the art, when the Doctor goes back in ST time- to what would be original series time period, the panels are drawn like 1960's comic art to reflect it)

Is it true that Neil Gaiman was pissed off with the fact they made his 2 parter episodes into one and he felt they had ruined the episode therefore wont be back to write again?

Not that I know of. Which episode are you referring too, Doctors Wife or Nightmare in Silver (if the latter I am rather glad that wasnt a two parter as for me its the weakest episode of series seven). As far as I know he doesn't have an episode this series as he is too busy with other commitments, but he is planning on writing one for series 9. He has publicly said he wants to write for Capaldi's Doctor.

I know there were some problems that had to resolved in Nightmare in Silver. It was written very early on when the concept at the time was that Victorian Clara was not going to die but be the permanent companion version.
Hence the hastily written in kids, who were supposed to be Victorian Clara's wards, and why Clara speaks with a silently different, more clipped manner as she did in the Snowmen and her personality doesnt seem to quite fit with the Clara we have come to know form previous episodes.

But the main problem with the episode for me is the new cybermen- they are not cybermen, they are Borg; all the same, instant upgrading.

I know the Borg ripped the cybermen off but even so, these were not cybermen- whats scarey about classic Cybermen is not that they have all been turned into cybermen drones, but that they are still individuals, just stripped of anything which could give them any empathy or pity or sense of mercy, they are us still, intelligent, capable of rational and imaginative thought.
Whats really scary about them is not they are us turned into a drone with no individuality, its that they are clearly still us in there, just all the bad in everyone of us is brought to the fore and the humanity discarded as an unnecessary burden.

Steven Moffat in the Radio Times-

"[Peter] goes back to being the trickier version of the Doctor, the fiercer alien wanderer.
He's not a human being, however much he larks around pretending he is.
"He is different and it's time to stop play-acting. He's not apologising, he's not flirting with you - that's over."

Interesting. I am so looking forward to seeing just what Capaldi is doing with the role.

When does the new series air? I've got some catching up to do....

Autumn, no specific date yet.
I think they are still filming at the moment.

August-October most likely, series 8 is supposed to be shown in one straight go, and I guess they'd want to leave a cliffhanger of sorts leading into Xmas.

I think they are filming block 3 or 4 now.

Pettytyrant101 wrote:Steven Moffat in the Radio Times-

"...He is different and it's time to stop play-acting. He's not apologising, he's not flirting with you - that's over."

I was listening to that cover I posted in the other thread and now I'm really sad.
I miss Tennant.
I'm going to go cry for a while. Maybe watch Girl in the Fireplace.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8waJ7W3QcJc




Edit:
Go away Moffat, and Capaldi.

I wholeheartedly agree

But surely no one can deny that Clara is the Doctor's hottest piece of totty since Jo?

I think they are aiming more for a Sarah Jane myself, and if she stays about with Capaldi as Doctor that would be an appropriate comparison as Sarah Jane was Pertwee's last companion but is best remembered as Bakers companion.

I miss Tennant.- Forest

I still miss 1,2 and 4 pretty bad, but its Who, got to keep moving and changing.

"Go away Moffat, and Capaldi."

Fair enough on the Moff, he has done five series, long enough for you to decide if you like his style of Who or not, but harsh on Capaldi of whom we have seen nothing in the role yet.

"Maybe watch Girl in the Fireplace."

Good choice- a classic Moffat penned episode.   

Seems the BBC having been convinced to take a gamble and put the 50th Anniversary event on in cinemas have noticed the ginormous pot of cash it made them-

'BBC Worldwide and Fathom Events have announced a cinematic presentation of Rise of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel as part of a two-evening celebration of David Tennant in the United States. The special, 'theatrical cut' of the story will be shown in some 620 cinema locations across the USA on Monday 16th June, with tickets also including the Tennant-narrated documentary Wings-3D the following evening.'


Good idea but why cut down to a 'theatrical cut'. Its only two 50 minute episodes, less minus credits and intro.

Wings 3D incidentally is a natural history doc.

Kenelm wrote:
I'm only sorry they never got round to making a Doctor Who - Star Trek crossover, which was apparently seriously on the cards had Enterprise not been cancelled. As it is, both Doctor Who and Star Trek, as the two most venerable sci fi franchises in the world (with Doctor Who the senior by three years) have long since contained in-joke references to each other in their scripts.

When did Star Trek refer to Who?

Googled it, never mind. Numerous small, tongue in cheek references, easily missed. Nothing overt.

'The BBC have announced that comedian Frank Skinner will be playing a role in the new series of Doctor Who. The Room 101 presenter, who previously cameoed in Peter Davison's 50th Anniversary's tribute The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot, is to feature in the episode written by Jamie Mathieson, whose story is in the current filming block directed by Paul Wilmshurst.

Skinner, a long-term fan, said:
"I love this show. I subscribe to Dr Who magazine, I've got a TARDIS ringtone, a five-foot cardboard Dalek in my bedroom and when I got the call saying they wanted me to read for the part, I was in the back of my tour bus watching episode three of The Sensorites. I am beyond excited."

Lead writer and executive producer Steven Moffat commented:
"It's no secret that Frank's been pitching vigorously to get into Doctor Who for a while. He's been volunteering to be 'third monster on the left' as long as I've been in this job. But now, in Jamie Mathieson's sparkling script, we finally have a part that can showcase all of Frank's famous wit and charm. Hopefully he'll get out of my garden now."- Gallifrey Base

Pettytyrant101 wrote:'The BBC have announced that comedian Frank Skinner will be playing a role in the new series of Doctor Who. The Room 101 presenter

Sounds like series eight is gonna get really dark, really fast.

Edit: wait, they're saying he was previously part of something called Room 101. Nevermind, then.

Room 101 was a decent tv show thats now a stupid quiz show.
It used to be an original take on the chatshow format- the set up being the guest would have a list of things they would like to see shoved forever into Room 101 where it is erased from existence- with the list being an excuse to interview the guest. But now its a bit crappy in my view, with guests competing to have stuff put into Room 101 in more of a quiz show format.

So this is rather odd!

I don't even care all that greatly for the double-feature they've selected (the two-part Dr. Who episode, not the geese-mating or whatever).

The choice is odd as I agree its hardly an outstanding two parter, but I can see the sense in doing something like this for the BBC after they raked it in on the 50th cinema showings.
No idea why they would decide to make it a double feature with a wildlife docu though- that is odd.