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Elizabeth Sandifer

Elizabeth Sandifer created Eruditorum Press. She’s not really sure why she did that, and she apologizes for the inconvenience. She currently writes Last War in Albion, a history of the magical war between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. She used to write TARDIS Eruditorum, a history of Britain told through the lens of a ropey sci-fi series. She also wrote Neoreaction a Basilisk, writes comics these days, and has ADHD so will probably just randomly write some other shit sooner or later. Support Elizabeth on Patreon.

118 Comments

  1. Jack Graham
    December 6, 2013 @ 12:56 am

    Great stuff, particularly the bit about the debates that can only be made to look challenging because one side is not allowed to give the thunderingly obvious answers (cf The Satan Pit).

    Also, it's nice to see someone acknowledge that sometimes the problem isn't the feels in themselves, its that the feels are spectacularly clumsy and insincere.

    Re: Gallifrey. I'm increasingly thinking that the only way to fix the Gallifrey problem is to erase it from all history and have the Doctor existing alone, as a paradox, with no memory of his deleted origins. This would never be referred to again. No story arc, etc. The show would gradually just forget the Time Lords and the Doctor could go back to being a guy with no provenance who just bimbled around.

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  2. Dan
    December 6, 2013 @ 1:11 am

    A mystery to himself, wandering around like a confused tramp, looking in bins. "I am the Doctor. God knows what that means but apparently it's true."

    I dunno. I like Gallifrey, and the Time Lords themselves can be many different things.

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  3. Darren K.
    December 6, 2013 @ 1:25 am

    Back around '42', Phil posited that it was in the worst run of four episodes of the new series, but for me, this episode is the nadir of the five worst episodes. The entire front half of Season Four is just garish, pointless noise, with Tennant running on an autopilot set to "gurn"; massive, massive off-putting shifts in tone around every corner; bland characters and characterisation; and an utter sense that Davies has run out of ideas. The only thing that really redeams them is Catherine Tate, and even she is often suspect as her dramatic acting often loses the wonderful naturalness of her lighter work and becomes leaden and stagey when she tries to get serious.

    I was so disheartened by the show at this point, the production just seemed arrogant more than anything else, a sense that if the show shouted loud enough, no one would notice anything wrong. (Although the true nadir did not come until 'The End of Time', which took everything that was wrong here and MADE IT EVEN LOUDER).

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  4. Alex Antonijevic
    December 6, 2013 @ 1:48 am

    I'm the Doctor, the Last of the Time Lords, the Oncoming Storm, the Man Who Never Would!

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  5. Spacewarp
    December 6, 2013 @ 2:00 am

    As regards the underlying wisdom that this story is "universally hated"… it is difficult to ascertain by who. The viewing public certainly seemed to enjoy it as 7.3 million of them tuned in, an improvement on the preceding Sontaran two-parter, and a million better than the forthcoming "Silence in the Library". It does seem to me to be a case of fans disliking the story because they have read that fans dislike the story…something that Who is particularly prone to. In fact as I recall at the time there was certainly trepidation on the forums prior to broadcast, based solely on the story's title, something we saw repeated years later with "The Doctor's Wife".

    Yes it is a fairly lightweight story, and the Hath seem to only have been created to give Martha someone to bond with (and therefore something for Freema to do), but the concept of the war only actually being a week old is quite an interesting one, especially if you're not expecting it. Plus Georgia Moffett is perfectly watchable in this, and Jenny's chemistry with the Doctor certainly sparkles.

    I'm not sure that introducing a game-changing character only to kill them off is a particularly bad thing to do either. It's the main-stay of most personal drama anyway. You only have to look at "Last of the Time Lords" where the Doctor gains the Master, only to lose him again, and "The End of Time" where the Doctor gets Gallifrey back only to lose it again. The only alternative is to have the game-changing character survive, and that is pretty dramatically unsatisfying anyway (see "Scream of the Shalka" which effectively continues the "alternative" ending of "Last of the Time Lords", where the Master does survive to travel with the Doctor).

    "The Doctor's Daughter" probably gave us the best ending we could realistically get – the Doctor loses Jenny, not because she dies, but because he doesn't know she lives…so he leaves.

    Try as I might I cannot shake the idea out of my head that the perceived dislike of this story within fandom stems very much from the idea of a blood relation to the Doctor. We will see the same kind of fan reaction when we get to "The End of Time" and Claire Bloom's character "The Woman". Online fandom seemed desperate for her to be anyone (The Rani! Romana!) other than who Davies admitted she was meant to be – the Doctor's mother – even to the point of claiming that regardless of authorial intent, if it didn't appear on-screen then it wasn't so.

    Funnily enough the idea of Claire Bloom's character being Susan seemed totally acceptable to the same people who shunned the idea of her being the Doc's Mum, and the concept of the Doctor having a grandchild appears to be immune from the "Doctor-not-have-sex!" taboos of the classic era.

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  6. Ununnilium
    December 6, 2013 @ 2:04 am

    The problem is, though, Doctor Who needs its past. There's such a thing as too much focus on the past, but there's a reason the first monster of the new series was the Autons. What's the point of traveling in time if you can't visit the past?

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  7. Mark Patterson
    December 6, 2013 @ 2:05 am

    It's worth noting that this is beat-for-beat exactly what they did with the BBC 8th Doctor novels from 'The Burning' on (I forget, but I'm pretty sure Phil touched on this in his essays on one or more books from this period). It didn't take, although not for want of trying. The problem with any sort of amnesia story is that a large portion of the audience, however much you try to convince them otherwise, are going to assume, and keep on assuming, that it's something that's eventually going to be undone when the character regains his/her memory (to be fair, the reason for assuming this is that it's turned out to be true of most, if not all, memorable amnesia stories elsewhere – even something like 'Memento', in which the character is physically incapable of regaining his memory, at least gives the "oh, so that's what he forgot" reveal to the audience in the end). There really is no way anyone could possibly write out Gallifrey in a completely irreversible way, so there are always going to be people clamouring, or secretly hankering, to bring it back – if one of these people becomes showrunner in future, then back it will come.

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  8. Ununnilium
    December 6, 2013 @ 2:06 am

    The main thing I remember from this is how much I liked the twist. The main thing I don't remember from this is that Martha's in it, at all – even after being repeatedly reminded, I can't summon up a single mental impression with her in it other than a few frames during the part they're revealing the twist.

    Also – was this your planned direction before Day of the Doctor aired?

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  9. Ununnilium
    December 6, 2013 @ 2:10 am

    "even to the point of claiming that regardless of authorial intent, if it didn't appear on-screen then it wasn't so."

    Isn't "regardless of authorial intent" a perfectly good lens to view this through?

    And IMHO, the Master or Gallifrey are different from a newly-introduced character, even if both of those are newly introduced within the series. I completely get what Moffat meant by "very Star Trek" – it's the idea of introducing a character who would turn the narrative upside-down, only they don't, because they're dead, haha! It's turned a lot of really good premises into anticlimactic shit in its day, on TV and off, in "genre" shows, in straightforward dramas, in sitcoms, and in anything unwilling to rock the boat. You could make a good case that the development of arc-based TV is in large part a reaction to this one trope.

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  10. ferret
    December 6, 2013 @ 2:22 am

    Another piss-poor treatment for Martha: quickly separated from the main cast with characters who the audience can't understand, giving Freema Agyeman a horribly tough acting gig with minimal screentime in a B-plot that could just as easily have remained on the cutting room floor.

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  11. Mark Patterson
    December 6, 2013 @ 2:24 am

    "Online fandom seemed desperate for her to be anyone (The Rani! Romana!) other than who Davies admitted she was meant to be – the Doctor's mother – even to the point of claiming that regardless of authorial intent, if it didn't appear on-screen then it wasn't so."

    To be fair, authorial intent in this case is pretty firmly in support of the fans in question. Davies has made it clear (I forget where/when, but I'm fairly sure my memory isn't making it up) that, while the character in his head was clearly the Doctor's' mother, he left it unexplained on screen for precisely that reason – so she could be whoever the viewer thought/wanted her to be. Romana, Susan, Flavia, some as-yet-unknown Other…any or all are every bit as valid an interpretation as the one in Davies' head, and deliberately so.

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  12. Ununnilium
    December 6, 2013 @ 2:31 am

    Patience!

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  13. David Anderson
    December 6, 2013 @ 2:42 am

    I do think there's some reasonably sound metal underneath the dross. It's Donna's best story so far and Catherine Tate walks off with every scene she's in. (And however badly misjudged the content of the emotional beats may be, I find the way they're written more likeable than the way Davies writes emotional beats.) I enjoyed quite a lot of it when I rewatched.

    The idea that the war's been going on for only a week has a Lilliputian deflationary effect upon the idea of an epic struggle. (Shame we have the Doctor's overblown 'never would' speech – doesn't really fit.)

    Another reason the script doesn't have room to breathe is that Martha is off on a pointless quest to get back to the Doctor. Actually there's a good bit: Agyeman's acting and the direction just after the Hath sacrifices itself to save Martha manage to sell an event that would otherwise be pointless and cynical. But then, it has no effect on anything Martha's actions or anybody else's actions later in the story, so that's a shame.
    I can imagine a different treatment of the basic scenario where Martha's subplot was about Martha turning into a soldier, seeing as lots of people have read that into the Sontaran story – but nothing's done with that at all.

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  14. peeeeeeet
    December 6, 2013 @ 2:45 am

    Try as I might I cannot shake the idea out of my head that the perceived dislike of this story within fandom stems very much from the idea of a blood relation to the Doctor.

    Don't be silly. Asexualists like me don't dislike this episode because it has a blood relation of the Doctor in it – if anything, the idea that she pops out fully formed from a magic box he shoves his hand in plays into our loom-loving hands. I dislike it for pretty much the reasons Phil gives; it's a clumsy mess of ideas which, while they have merit in themselves, lack confidence and consistency in their execution.

    who Davies admitted she was meant to be – the Doctor's mother – even to the point of claiming that regardless of authorial intent, if it didn't appear on-screen then it wasn't so.

    I know it's not very fashionable around these parts, but that seems entirely reasonable to me. To paraphrase Dickens, anything you want to say about your story you should endeavour to say in it. Davies was obviously fine with it being left open to interpretation, so why shouldn't we play around with it?

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  15. Spacewarp
    December 6, 2013 @ 3:18 am

    Indeed. The Master was pretty irrevocably written out during "The End of Time", by being sent back into the Time War which as we all know resulted in the Total Destruction of Gallifrey (TM).

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  16. Spacewarp
    December 6, 2013 @ 3:33 am

    Being free to play around with the idea is not the same as actively and vocally denying the concept just because it was not explicitly stated.

    Yes, for the reason you give, RTD didn't state that The Woman was the Rani, Susan, Leela, or Romana, and I agree that this was easily the best thing to do.

    But by far the most aggressive denials were reserved for her "not" being the Doctor's Mother…despite "The Writer's Tale" actually mentioning this (and RTD going so far as to advise David Tennant of this, thus informing his acting to a certain extent).

    However I must disagree that the author's intent has no more validity than the viewer's. A similar case is made for JK Rowling claiming that she always thought of Dumbledore as gay. That doesn't mean he's definitely not gay and must surely be seen as evidence that he could be.

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  17. Mark Patterson
    December 6, 2013 @ 3:59 am

    On a purely trivial note, I really wish the mention of "memorable amnesia stories" in my last comment was a deliberate play on words. Alas, it was just inadequate on-the-fly copy editing.

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  18. John Anderson
    December 6, 2013 @ 4:05 am

    I agree with Ununnilium. Another vote for Patience.

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  19. Seeing_I
    December 6, 2013 @ 4:07 am

    This comment has been removed by the author.

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  20. BerserkRL
    December 6, 2013 @ 4:10 am

    Huh. I didn't know that this episode was so widely hated. I always found it rather delightful.

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  21. BerserkRL
    December 6, 2013 @ 4:12 am

    This is one place where I particularly regret the fact that Phil's willingness to defy fan consensus with redemptive readings seems to have dwindled over the course of the blog.

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  22. Seeing_I
    December 6, 2013 @ 4:20 am

    I liked the Hath, I thought they idea of fish-people wearing water-filled respirators was cute, and I liked their bubbly speech. Paul Kasey did a great mime job and really managed gave Peck some personality. But still trying to work out how a fish person in a gas mask can bloody DROWN!

    I do agree that Donna had a great moment in this episode – where she turns on a dime from giving the Doctor a hard time about his "daughter" to suddenly being concerned and solicitous of his feelings. "You always talk but you never say anything" she says, and offers her moral support in a way that Rose and Martha really never could, somehow, wrapped up as they both were in their own personal dramas. Good stuff.

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  23. Ed Jolley
    December 6, 2013 @ 4:24 am

    This may be an American English/British English thing, but I've never encountered the verb 'thump' in a context unrelated to the use of physical force. You might want to rephrase the final sentence of your opening paragraph so as to lose the implication that Obama assaulted Clinton, especially in the light of your having called out Chris Brown's violent abuse of a woman just a few posts back.

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  24. Garth Simmons
    December 6, 2013 @ 4:25 am

    I really like the Doctor's Daughter (character and episode). It's all just good fun. My girlfriend at the time cried when the fish person died up on the planet's surface… there is something deeply upsetting about that scene though it probably illustrates your point about the emotional aspects of the episode in no way compliment the themes of the story.

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  25. Alexander J Bateman
    December 6, 2013 @ 4:27 am

    Must admit I was surprised too, it has never struck me as particularly unpopular episode.

    Audience Appreciation 88
    Ranked in 57th place out of 83 episodes by Gallifrey Base fan polls.

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  26. Seeing_I
    December 6, 2013 @ 4:29 am

    I thought the way it was handled was great – when Wilf asks directly who the Woman was, the Doctor glances significantly at Donna, with Sylvia framed prominently in the foreground, so you get Mother, Daughter, Granddaughter, Companion, Wife,all in one shot.

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  27. Seeing_I
    December 6, 2013 @ 4:33 am

    Oh I disagree with you there, I thought that she came off very well in this episode. Being given a horribly tough acting gig is proof that the producers think you can pull it off, after all. She got to carry her own plotline, display a lot of competence and bravery, she got to make friends with a friendly fish person and have a big scene of grief when he (inexplicably) drowned…all in all I'd say she acquits herself pretty well in this episode.

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  28. Seeing_I
    December 6, 2013 @ 4:38 am

    Except that one time. And those other times.

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  29. Seeing_I
    December 6, 2013 @ 4:41 am

    As for Jenny, I was more concerned with the notion that the magical cloning box also apparently has a function to apply eyeliner. Good on Moffat for calling RTD out on introducing her just to get rid of her; even BETTER on Moffat for never bringing her back.

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  30. Galadriel
    December 6, 2013 @ 4:41 am

    I'd agree about the front half of season four being rather week–but the last half has some corkers. Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead, Midnight and even Turn Left. And your comment about possibly game-changing characters dying at the end of the episode makes me wonder how you'll interpret River in the next episode….

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  31. Adam Riggio
    December 6, 2013 @ 4:43 am

    My own thoughts were that it wasn't the greatest episode of the season (those would be the Silence/Forest two-parter and Midnight), but that it wasn't absolutely terrible. I didn't consider any episode this season to be outright bad. A solid 7.0 in my view: low for the post-revival standard, but still decent enough to watch again periodically. It certainly does have its problems, as Phil describes. But they aren't catastrophic.

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  32. David Thiel
    December 6, 2013 @ 4:51 am

    I too think that this is the nadir of nuWho, and it's not because I object to the Doctor having children. Susan is the Doctor's granddaughter; it's pretty much the first thing we learn about him, and it's never once refuted or even questioned within the series.

    No, I despise "The Doctor's Daughter" because:

    1) It's the one in which a fish drowns.

    2) The title is from the JNT school of fan-baiting, except that even JNT had the good sense not to act on it. Besides, any hope/fear that this might actually be about a previously unheard-of relative is dispelled before the title sequence. From the first scene, we know it's a cheat.

    3) Jenny is not the Doctor's daughter, except on a technicality. As Philip points out, she shares none of the Doctor's traits. The relationship between them rings false. No matter how much the story plays up the DNA angle, Jenny really is this woman he's just met. She's just another bit of weirdness in an already extraordinary existence.

    4) Instant cloning? I suppose that I can accept that. Instant cloning that includes clothing, weapons training, a fully formed personality and instant recognition of one's "parent?" That's a bit of a stretch. Instant cloning that produces grizzled, old war veterans? I give up.

    5) The drowning fish.

    6) The inevitability of Jenny's death. It's not only very "Star Trek," it's "Bonanza" (Little Joe's wife) and every other drama from the early decades of TV. It's also very nuWho; any time the Doctor invites the guest star to travel with him, the clock begins ticking. She joins Astrid and Lynda-with-a-Y in the roster of companions-not-to-be. Her last minute resurrection doesn't make her death any less of an entirely-expected "twist."

    7) A f***ing fish drowns. Seriously. I suppose that someone thought that they were being clever, but the fish is WEARING A BREATHING DEVICE. Martha watches him sink below the surface, sobbing, yet not doing one damned thing to save him. How long did he lie there in the quicksand thinking, "Hey, I'm perfectly fine. Someone get me a rope, or a stick. Surely that human won't be stupid enough to just walk away."

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  33. David Ainsworth
    December 6, 2013 @ 4:53 am

    The central problem here is that this episode is about too many unrelated things at once. War, family, communication, renewal, action, trust. Martha gets an Enemy-Mine looking subplot and the ending seems to underline the problem that "classic" sci-fi Who always ends up with magic being the solution.

    The interesting and challenging part of the story gets pushed aside for all the war stuff, and the "debate" that relies on the Doctor's incoherence and culminates in a statement of principle that even an extreme advocate for gun control is going to have problems with. This episode has Martha, who worshiped the Doctor but parted with him, Donna, who challenges Ten like nobody else does, and Jenny, who poses an immediate problem in terms of what she is to the Doctor, especially if Time Lord reproduction permits this kind of technology. Martha should be asking questions about why, if the Doctor is so choked up about being last of the Time Lords, he never sought out this technology to reproduce them; Donna, who's still growing as a person at this stage, can drop snide comments about men, families and marriages. Jenny could be fascinated by her heritage instead of being "I am programmed to fight." And in defending himself, the Doctor could let slip about Susan, which invites Martha to ask the natural question: when the Doctor destroyed Gallifrey, did he kill his entire family along with it? And what ever happened to Susan?

    Not until the Williams/Pond family is there a better TARDIS crew for this kind of conversation.

    Instead, we get a man who murdered every last one of his own people (the Master excepted) to defeat a foe that survived the attempt, taking the moral high ground. Ten's arrogance doesn't make the morality here any easier to swallow, even without all the contrivences required to make the story work. Nor does the canon logic behind the Time War, which End of Time will make worse by trying to claim that the Time Lords deserved to die. If the Doctor claimed only two innocents, both of which seem like they were willing to die to stop the horrors of the Time War, then the real source of his guilt must be that he destroyed his home. Which, ironically, makes that the one place the New Series Doctor takes with him everywhere, instead of being able to leave it behind.

    Like the New Series itself, The Doctor's Daughter is haunted by the past history of the show by this point, and its refusal to build a story around that past is what stops it from working. But I think most of the problems here are at least shared by the larger Davies vision by now. In fairness, it's a problem I'm not sure the series is ready to solve yet, at least not without a compelling mustering of the show's new history to allow it to relate to its past as an equal. The writing here could work through these problems on screen in compelling ways, but instead insists on a situation founded upon newness, replication and the loss of memory. These themes don't engage the deeper problems; they look to be a deliberate refusal to do so, in fact. The Doctor is running away from himself, but for now the writing is cooperating.

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  34. Scott
    December 6, 2013 @ 5:06 am

    No matter what you do, Gallifrey's going to be an elephant in the room. If you destroy it, the fans are going to be wondering when you're going to bring it back. Come up with some hyper-complicated way of wiping it out of time and space itself and wiping it from the Doctor's memory? They'll be wondering when you're going to undo that as well. Bring it back? Then you bring back the gravitational pull as well.

    For me, though, it's looking increasingly like the best way to deal with Gallifrey is just not to fight it. Accept it's there, deal with it when you have to or want to, and just forget about it the rest of the time. For all that the stories on Gallifrey were increasingly clogged with their own mythology and importance, there's entire swathes of the series where we didn't see nor hear anything of Gallifrey and the Doctor was just contentedly running around doing his own thing. Personally, For me, the perfect way to deal with Gallifrey in the new series is have the Twelfth Doctor bring it back, spend five minutes wandering around, going from wistful to increasingly bored and restless, saying something like "Now I remember why I ran away from here in the first place,"and then running off in the TARDIS again.

    Gallifrey only becomes a problem if you let it. And besides; the odd Gallifrey epic can be fun.

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  35. peeeeeeet
    December 6, 2013 @ 5:07 am

    Besides, any hope/fear that this might actually be about a previously unheard-of relative is dispelled before the title sequence. From the first scene, we know it's a cheat.

    Indeed. I'm not the biggest fan of The Next Doctor, but at least it doesn't reveal the true story behind Jackson Lake in the first five minutes.

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  36. Matthew Celestis
    December 6, 2013 @ 5:14 am

    Scott, that is one of the most sensible comments on the Gallifrey 'problem' I have ever read.

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  37. Scott
    December 6, 2013 @ 5:22 am

    Oh, but there was one time when I — no… no. I did it then as well.

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  38. Matthew Celestis
    December 6, 2013 @ 5:22 am

    I'm probably the biggest Patience fanboy around, but I say no to the Patience idea.

    She's dead, lost. She's a part of Dr. Who's past that he can never get back. If the Doctor lost his people during the Time War, he lost Patience before the Time War had even begun. Even her memory eludes him most of the time.

    Having her hanging around him like a ghost violates the way the character works.

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  39. Ununnilium
    December 6, 2013 @ 5:27 am

    Basically that.

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  40. Ununnilium
    December 6, 2013 @ 5:29 am

    Isn't she a long-lost far-past memory who's inexplicably come back both times she appears, though?

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  41. David Ainsworth
    December 6, 2013 @ 5:37 am

    This comment has been removed by the author.

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  42. David Ainsworth
    December 6, 2013 @ 5:40 am

    I'm not too fond of this one, but I'm willing to give a redemptive reading a shot:

    What I wrote below about family? Forget it. Family is a red herring here, in the same way the "war for generations" is. Jenny isn't the Doctor's daughter, she's a replica. Just as the new Master was a replica of the Doctor. Just as Captain Jack on Torchwood is a replica. Just as Martha is. This episode represents a bold statement which will culminate in the accusation at season's end that the Doctor turns his companions into warriors. That the man who never would leaves behind him a string of abandoned replicas who frequently do.

    Martha's subplot in this episode makes perfect sense if read as an exploration of the possibility of a replica Doctor. She is, of all the companions, closest to being a doctor already. And she refuses war in favor of communication. But in the end, she can't save a fish-man from drowning. The Hath doesn't really drown here, he suffocates, in the weight of all the aliens the Doctor refuses to fight who he still can't save, from Silurians to Sycorax. Perhaps the Doctor never would (again), but his replicas can't not, it seems.

    No wonder that Jenny's challenges to the Doctor go unanswered. If she is a replica of him, why is she a young woman who seems more of a clone of a famous Whedon character? If anything, she should remind the Doctor of Rose, the action-girl he fell for. But she argues for war, she fights, she's good at fighting, she enjoys it. How is she not what the Doctor made Rose into? Rose pleads with Nine not to shoot one Dalek (he never would), but ends up erasing hundreds of thousands of them from history (after he declares he never would) and later helps him condemn more to the dark void of whatever (I suppose firing Chekov's gun doesn't count). The kind of replica she becomes in her alternate world, the kind of replica we see Martha become, these women look like Jenny is here. They fight, they shoot big guns, they can't save everyone. He never would, but they do.

    And they do because he leaves them behind. He scatters replicas of himself through multiple dimensions, imperfect replicas, unexploded bombs. From time to time, he comes across one he's responsible for, refuses to recognize it, maybe whispers to someone that it looks tired. When Jenny goes off to have adventures, do we imagine that she never will? Isn't the Doctor partly responsible if she does? Is it enough to inspire someone else to shoot the gun? And if the Doctor can stop someone from pulling the trigger by example, why are all his replicas so violent?

    The Doctor may be done killing. But the replicas he scatters along his path, like shed appendages, are fighting in his wake. And they are his handiwork.

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  43. encyclops
    December 6, 2013 @ 5:49 am

    This must be a dumb question, but how does viewing audience tell us anything about whether that audience liked it? Tuning in means they wanted to watch it, surely, not that they were happy after it was done?

    I can't really think of an identity for "the Woman" that would be an interesting reveal, in part because she doesn't exist as a character. She's just a mouthpiece for prophecy. One reason having her be the Doctor's mom is even worse is that he never gets to interact with her, directly or indirectly, so what is the point of having her be such an important person in his life and then never explore that connection even for a second?

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  44. Variaga
    December 6, 2013 @ 5:51 am

    I have a vision of -after the restoration of Gallifrey- an older Jenny coming back bearing an infant daughter named Susan, and wondering if maybe the Doctor doesn't have some relatives back home who could help raise her

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  45. Dr. Happypants
    December 6, 2013 @ 5:52 am

    What I remember most about The Doctor's Daughter is: Martha drowns a fish.

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  46. Theonlyspiral
    December 6, 2013 @ 6:34 am

    +1 To Everything David said. That is all.

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  47. Theonlyspiral
    December 6, 2013 @ 6:36 am

    I agree with Scott.

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  48. Spacewarp
    December 6, 2013 @ 6:53 am

    Totally agreed Scott. Doctor Who thrives on change, and change keeps it going for a few years each time. Thus we get 6 years of vaguely running around Time & Space before the Doctor admits it was the Time Lords he ran away from. Exile to Earth keeps the series ticking over for the next 4 years or so. Then the Time Lords are reimagined as "Dusty old Senators" and that keeps us trundling along until more or less the end of the classic series.

    Then RTD gives us the Time War and No More Gallifrey, which sees the new series through (with the odd tweak here and there) from 2005 until 2013…when the Moff writes a new chapter – The Search For Gallifrey. Hopefully that will suffice for at least the next 3 or 4 years (and maybe 1 more Doctor) before inevitably we get The Return Of Gallifrey or possibly Gallifrey Gets Lost Again.

    But in between we'll hopefully get the same innovative, startling, moving, boring, annoying programme we've all come to love/hate (delete where applicable).

    After which the series will probably get cancelled for another decade or so…

    Do I give the impression I've seen all this before?

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  49. Lewis Christian
    December 6, 2013 @ 6:56 am

    Agreed with Scott.

    In this show, nothing stays dead/gone. Davros, the Master, Gallifrey. And I do actually think it's a shame sometimes, but alas. That's the way it is.

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  50. Lewis Christian
    December 6, 2013 @ 6:59 am

    Whilst she did what you say, Seeing_I, you could happily cut her strand of the story and not lose a single thing. She doesn't really contribute to the major story – she's only there to show us what the Hath side is like, but you could do with without her. Even if they don't speak understandable language, it's easy to grasp their side of the story. All she does is scramble over the surface of the planet to fill time and reach the Doctor and Donna when they arrive near the Source. And then she just stands there from that moment on. She really doesn't do a thing.

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  51. Lewis Christian
    December 6, 2013 @ 7:03 am

    So many people hate the fact a fish drowned. Now, whilst I can see their POV, I do think Davies and the gang could've easily rectified this with a small "breaking glass" sound effect as the Hath went under. A tiny thing which would shut so many people up.

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  52. Lewis Christian
    December 6, 2013 @ 7:07 am

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  53. Spacewarp
    December 6, 2013 @ 7:09 am

    "This must be a dumb question, but how does viewing audience tell us anything about whether that audience liked it? Tuning in means they wanted to watch it, surely, not that they were happy after it was done?"

    You're right of course, that sheer numbers doesn't (although it does indicate that those viewers stuck with it all the way through). With episodic television like Doctor Who the majority of viewers for each story are those who continue to watch after last week, and in particular last week's "Next Time" Trailer. However the AI does tell us whether it was liked or not. "The Doctor's Daughter" got an AI of 88, which means it was liked less than "Silence" (89) but more than "Unicorn & Wasp"(86).

    "I can't really think of an identity for "the Woman" that would be an interesting reveal, in part because she doesn't exist as a character. She's just a mouthpiece for prophecy. One reason having her be the Doctor's mom is even worse is that he never gets to interact with her, directly or indirectly, so what is the point of having her be such an important person in his life and then never explore that connection even for a second?"

    Loss. Heartache. Agony. If we're talking about the audience filling in the gaps here, then having the two of them just look longingly at eachother provides an enormous gap for each viewer to fill in with their own emotions. To see your mother across an unreachable distance? Someone you've not seen for thousands of years? And to know that if you do what you have to do…what your mother wants you to do…you will send her back into Hell, with no chance of ever seeing her again? Good God, that's drama for you.

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  54. Lewis Christian
    December 6, 2013 @ 7:13 am

    In his book, Russell states that often he'll have the "endgame" and then move his characters and pawns around the board to make them end up at that place. The most obvious example of this is Journey's End – he has the major scenes, and then has to strategically work out how X gets to Y etc.

    Here, though, it's the opposite. He has the first idea, the gimmick, but nowhere to really go with it beyond a massive grin and a doodle of it in his book. So he palms it off to someone else. Like, I do love Russell, but if you have a big idea like that then, from my POV, you should be the one to take it on. Russell should've handled his own idea, and then there'd only be himself to blame if it fell flat (like, for many, it did).

    I'm not sure I'd come up with "the Doctor's daughter – kinda" and then give it to the chap who wrote The Lazarus Experiment.

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  55. Spacewarp
    December 6, 2013 @ 7:21 am

    Yeah, but it's quicksand. If you drop any kind of fish into quicksand, it'll drown.

    Plus I always assumed the Hath apparatus worked on gas exchange from the air, like a reverse gill. Submerge it in what is basically oxygen-starved mud, and it'll no longer work whether you hear it break or not.

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  56. Matthew Celestis
    December 6, 2013 @ 7:36 am

    Yes, she's come back twice and Dr. Who has lost her again. Do it too often and it gets silly.

    The woman in End of Time seems connected to the world of Gallifrey that the Doctor lost in the Time War. Patience is even further removed from that world. The Doctor has fond memories of Gallifrey pre-Time War, but he barely seems to remember Patience most of the time (leaving aside the Infinity Doctor who remembers her).

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  57. Lewis Christian
    December 6, 2013 @ 7:38 am

    To be honest, I agree. I never really had a problem of the Hath drowning. It might've been able to breathe still, but it'd still been pulled under and effectively trapped, 'drowned' alive. If anything, that scene should be laughed at for Freema's reaction rather than the Hath.

    And you make a good point about the apparatus. To be fair, we don't have a clue how it works, so you could well be right. What the reaction of some fans shows is that they've just assumed "oh, it can breathe coz it has the bubble tank, and it's a fish". When, really, we have no idea how this creature breathes – for all we know, that bubble tank is purely for 'speech', and it breathes through the facial gills or something, in which case it would've drowned. (And it's never stated "he drowns" – Martha just can't save him, he gets pulled under. That's another word fans have just assumed. I think if you swap it with "trapped below" it'd be better, and maybe would help silence some people.)

    Having watched it recently, I think it's just the easiest thing to "bash" in the story for a lot of people. Whilst you can pick at a whole range of topics and odd lines and scenes here, "oh look a fish that drowned" is just an easy example to point and laugh at if people are too lazy to find something else and properly criticise.

    My original comment, about the breaking sound effect – well that was just me going 'I wish they'd done this' just to shut people up. I don't have an issue with it, but it's one of those where I just see "a fish drowned!!??!?!" and it's so wearisome that I sometimes just think "really?"

    It's the Talons Giant Rat of Series 4.

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  58. David Thiel
    December 6, 2013 @ 7:54 am

    Yeah, but at least I hate it for at least four reasons other than the drowning fish. And for me, it's really that we've been given no reason to believe that the breathing apparatus is anything other than self-contained. I came away feeling that the poor thing probably had quite a while to ponder why the human was blubbing on the shore rather than taking off her jacket and using it as a lifeline.

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  59. Alexander J Bateman
    December 6, 2013 @ 8:09 am

    I haven't watched it in a while, but I am pretty sure you do hear breaking glass when the Hath gets crushed.

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  60. Gareth Rees
    December 6, 2013 @ 8:11 am

    easily rectified this with a small "breaking glass" sound effect

    Not as easily as all that! There is a small breaking glass sound effect at 27:06. Maybe what was needed was a big breaking glass sound effect?

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  61. encyclops
    December 6, 2013 @ 8:23 am

    having the two of them just look longingly at eachother

    Yes, but aren't her eyes covered in "dissent"?

    Good God, that's drama for you.

    I suppose it might be if we had any fucking clue who she was supposed to be. The Writer's Tale is a fascinating book (most of which I have yet to read, gloriously) but it wasn't sitting next to the remote when "The End of Time" was broadcast.

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  62. Seeing_I
    December 6, 2013 @ 8:29 am

    Yes, true, but that's a fault of the lackluster scripting overall, more than any lack of respect for the character or failure to at least try to give her her own storyline.

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  63. encyclops
    December 6, 2013 @ 8:31 am

    That's certainly better than I could do at redeeming this one. The best I can do is "at least it's not 'The Lazarus Experiment.'"

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  64. Seeing_I
    December 6, 2013 @ 8:31 am

    "The Drowning Fish" = great name for a pub.

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  65. encyclops
    December 6, 2013 @ 8:35 am

    On the subject of Dumbledore being gay: I'm all for it, and I'd like very much to believe that Rowling really did intend him to be gay from early on, and not just because someone pointed out late in the game that the Harry Potter series has no explicitly non-hetero characters.

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  66. Ununnilium
    December 6, 2013 @ 8:38 am

    His relationship with Grindlewald in the flashbacks in Half-Blood Prince are coded pretty dang gay.

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  67. Theonlyspiral
    December 6, 2013 @ 8:41 am

    I don't think it needed spelling out. This is obviously someone important to him, that sending them back to the war pains him greatly. Do you really need more?

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  68. encyclops
    December 6, 2013 @ 9:03 am

    His relationship with Grindlewald in the flashbacks in Half-Blood Prince are coded pretty dang gay.

    I guess I'll have to read it again.

    I don't think it needed spelling out. This is obviously someone important to him, that sending them back to the war pains him greatly. Do you really need more?

    Really? I just watched "The End of Time" again recently and I don't remember any explicit onscreen indication that "this is obviously someone important to him." I don't even remember seeing the Doctor noticing her at all; the only time I can recall that might have happened was at the very end when she was hiding her face. What am I forgetting?

    Because obviously he's someone important to her, but even there I didn't get the sense that it was definitely because they had some personal relationship, as opposed to her having knowledge that he's important somehow to Gallifrey's present/future.

    So maybe I was just too blinded by the pain of, you know, sitting through "The End of Time," but yeah, I guess I do need more.

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  69. Elizabeth Sandifer
    December 6, 2013 @ 9:13 am

    Part of why I'm not as swift to offer redemptive readings in the Davies era is that every single episode has three of them already – two commentary tracks and a Doctor Who Confidential devoted to making the affirmative case for them. And that eats up a lot of the free space for interesting counterfactual redemptions.

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  70. Elizabeth Sandifer
    December 6, 2013 @ 9:14 am

    Interesting – I think of it mainly as a word used to describe the outcome of sporting events. But that may be wholly idiosyncratic on my part.

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  71. liminal fruitbat
    December 6, 2013 @ 9:20 am

    She uncovers her eyes to give him a Meaningful Look. Presumably she's someone whose judgement the Doctor respects, but for all we know, she could be a regenerated Spandrell. (Personally I always assumed she was Susan based on her miraculous convenient telepathic communications with Wilf through the unbreakable time lock – Susan was always the telepathic one in the family.)

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  72. deriksmith
    December 6, 2013 @ 9:30 am

    Agree with Scott, but I'm also very trepedatious about the way Gallifrey comes back.
    As it currently stands the "Absence of Gallifrey" is a great big Proper Noun in the series; an emotional cornerstone and a totem of great narrative strength. How do you bring it back in a way that's not just a slow deflating of a leaky balloon?
    "Yay, we found Gallifrey and… it's back?" Yes, the actual events around that may be dramatic but is the return itself an Event, or just Something That Happened?
    (This ties into my misgivings about how Moffat made the Time War, with its eldrich abominations and Nightmare Kings and Never-Nevers and redeclared it to be a bunch of Daleks shooting at Gallifrey so that it would be small enough to fit into his plot.)

    Bringing Gallifrey back well, with some real payoff of the tension it's built up, will be hard and easy to screw up. (And I think Moffat's payoffs are the worst part of his plots.)

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  73. heroesandrivals
    December 6, 2013 @ 9:34 am

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  74. Nyq Only
    December 6, 2013 @ 10:13 am

    I walked into the cafe and I ordered a classic sci-fi war story with a twist. They served me this episode. I walked away satisfied.
    It was competent. It followed classic sci-fi show plot arcs. It introduced some neat ideas (not terribly original ones but still neat).
    That it isn't universally loved is for a reason we've seen in previous seasons – the latter half of the season is something else.

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  75. Spacewarp
    December 6, 2013 @ 10:21 am

    And this is why no Doctor Who episode can ever please everyone. Mark Patterson seems quite happy for the identity of "The Woman" to be left open to the viewer's interpretation, while encylops appears annoyed about not knowing exactly who she fucking was! 😀

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  76. Nyq Only
    December 6, 2013 @ 10:21 am

    🙂 good point also "The Doctor's Daughter" sounds like a pub name – not as good as "The Drowning Fish". I can't think of other episodes that could be co-opted as pub names – maybe The End of Time.

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  77. Nyq Only
    December 6, 2013 @ 10:24 am

    It suffocated – it didn't drown.

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  78. Jenda
    December 6, 2013 @ 10:33 am

    I thought it was a typo and you were thinking of the word "trumps" which would be much more common in a UK dialect in this context.

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  79. Theonlyspiral
    December 6, 2013 @ 10:35 am

    Sorry deriksmith but you've hit a nerve: How could they have shown any of that and had it been satisfying? They can't. They never could. Instead we get just enough: the last days of the war, when the Omega Vaults have been emptied. The great works lie destroyed, the impossible weapons have been used, and at the end, two almighty civilizations burning, all they have left are crude, burlesque technologies.

    As to the Absence of Gallifrey? We're not loosing anything with it gone. It's given all it can. It's just another thing that happened. Season 7 proper (excluding the 50th) had nothing to do with it's loss. It's time for some new toys in the narrative box: Now we can have Evil and Conflicted Renegade Time Lords, impossible technologies, and all sorts of other drama. Even the occasional romp on Gallifrey itself.

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  80. Alex Antonijevic
    December 6, 2013 @ 11:06 am

    I'm so, so sorry.

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  81. encyclops
    December 6, 2013 @ 11:10 am

    Heh. 🙂 Well, let me be clear: I think she's a terrible idea and should not be part of the episode, period, whoever she is. Her role as foreshadower struck me (maybe JUST me, and that's fine) as hackneyed and unnecessary in a story already overstuffed with foreshadowing. And her role as a Gallifreyan the Doctor might feel regret and anguish at banishing — that's a great reason to have her there, but if she's going to do that…I don't think I need to know exactly who she is, but I need to see a stronger connection to have it work for me dramatically.

    Put another way, I don't think the Doctor's mom should really be an Easter egg. If that's all we're going to get, though, I definitely agree, keep her as vague as possible. Sweep her under the rug, if possible.

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  82. Daibhid C
    December 6, 2013 @ 11:59 am

    Barack Obama thumps Hillary Clinton in the North Carolina Primary, leading Tim Russert to declare that it is clear who is going to win, and turning Clinton’s campaign into a strange sort of zombie, which, to be fair, anyone who was looking at the numbers realized was true months ago.

    Weird and irrelevent coincidence time: At work today I put my iPod on shuffle through my collection of Radio 4 Comedy Podcasts and was rewarded with an episode of The Now Show from around this time in which Mitch Benn sang:
    Well the people have spoken and they think he's great now,
    (Obama-bama-bama-bama-bama-bama)
    'Cos he's gonna be the Democrat candidate now,
    (Obama-bama-bama-bama-bama-bama)
    Well six months ago he had already won,
    And everyone knew it except Hilary Clinton.
    (Obama-bama-bama-bama-bama-bama)
    (Obama-bama-bama-bama-bama-bama-bamaba)

    Er, yeah, so anyway, Doctor Who. I don't have much to say here; one of those stories where I liked it, but I can't actually disagree with much of the criticisms. Although I would say that while there's certainly a case to be made that Jenny isn't the Doctor's daughter in any real sense, I don't follow the logic that it's because there are no noticable traits they share. Honestly, if there's a criticism to be made about the Child Who's Nothing Like Their Parent But They're Still Family Plot it's that it's such a cliche.

    Oh, one other thing; following how some people (rightly) loved Donna noting the lack of sick days in Sontaran Stratagem, how about the moment here where she solves the central mystery (such as it is) with Mad Referencing Skillz?

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  83. Nick Smale
    December 6, 2013 @ 11:59 am

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  84. Nick Smale
    December 6, 2013 @ 12:00 pm

    The thing I find most entertaining about this story is the casting. Georgia Moffett's father is, of course, Peter Davison. Which is to say that the Doctor's daughter really is the Doctor's daughter…

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  85. Josh Marsfelder
    December 6, 2013 @ 12:01 pm

    "This is a point so drably predictable that Steven Moffat called Davies out on it, pointing out that introducing major new character who alters the status quo of the series and then immediately killing them off at the end of the episode is very Star Trek."

    Uh, what?

    Sorry, but I just got through the period of the franchise with Gene Roddenberry's biggest involvement and even he didn't pull that trick. The only instance I can think of in the entire Original Series that is remotely comparable is Kirk's family being introduced just to kill them off to give him emotional baggage in "Operation: Annihilate!" and that was one episode that I rightly called the show out for.

    There's Kirk's studio-mandated-girls-of-the-week, but almost none of them died, a fair few were terribly interesting characters in their own right and the franchises cuts that shit out starting with the Animated Series.

    Speaking of, every Star Trek since the Animated Series has just about relied on its guest cast becoming regular, recognisable and important parts of the series' tapestry. I've counted two or three reoccurring characters already and I'm only three episodes in as of this writing. I don't see how Moffat's argument holds any water.

    I mean Star Trek has plenty of problems of its own, I'm just not seeing how this is one of them.

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  86. Daibhid C
    December 6, 2013 @ 12:15 pm

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  87. Daibhid C
    December 6, 2013 @ 12:17 pm

    A quick Google confirms my suspicion that there are in fact at least two pubs called "Journey's End" (one in Birmingham, one in Devon). There's a "Warrior's Gate" in St-Leonards-On-Sea, Sussex.

    And I can just imagine a pub sign showing two serious-looking men in Victorian suits holding unlikely medical apparatus, above the legend "The Two Doctors",

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  88. Anton B
    December 6, 2013 @ 12:39 pm

    And now of course the Doctor's wife…which makes the Doctor his own father in law…or something. Actually this is the primary reason I can't watch this story. Tennant and Moffett getting off while she's playing his daughter is too icky. It's not quite on the same level as Tom Baker and Lalla Ward falling in love in Paris in City of Death is it?

    Seriously though the main reason is because the plot is so bad. The 'entire war happened within a week' twist just doesn't hold up and the cloning technology is not only there just to make the 'Doctor's daughter' possible but isn't even workable in the context of the show. It only works if you handwave the idea that every clone soldier is considered the child of the original rather than just, well, a clone. which is never established within the narrative.I mean there are many instances of the Doctor or his companion's DNA being sampled to create a duplicate but this interpretation has never been made. For example, is the Ganger Doctor regarded as the Doctor's son? Or from the immediately previous episode is Martha's Sontaran clone her daughter? No, the concept is only there to sell the teaser title and renders the whole episode cheap.

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  89. Anton B
    December 6, 2013 @ 12:44 pm

    My first paragraph is somewhat mitigated of course by Georgia Moffet's brilliantly funny and self parodying cameo in her (real) dad's recent Five(ish) |Doctors skit.

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  90. Bennett
    December 6, 2013 @ 12:48 pm

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  91. timber-munki
    December 6, 2013 @ 1:12 pm

    The rather banal set-up of last day of the Time War – Dalek ships firing on Gallifrey sort of reflects the last days of the war that lead into it – Just a couple of domes left from two great planetary civilisations chucking at each other whatever primitive weapons they can. (Although thankfully the Time War hasn't seen any naff giant mutant clams turning up so far)

    And I agree with Scott that's the way to deal with Gallifrey's return.

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  92. deriksmith
    December 6, 2013 @ 1:16 pm

    @Theonlyspiral
    You misunderstand: I don't want Gallifrey to stay gone. But I worry that its return is hard to "pay off." You can't just say "Okay, I guess Gallifrey's back now," there needs to be a payoff, the Storyline that restores it has to have a scope that matches the absence it's undoing.

    You can't just bring Gallifrey back via a technical cheat that simply satisfies the rules of the universe — that's the definition of anti-climax. You talk about the cool things you can do once Gallifrey is back — and I agree with you! But how do you get from point A to point B? What story can "pay off" the 8 year absence? To overturn something that big you need a payoff with enough "weight" to shift it, otherwise it takes all the energy of that absence and just… dissipates it.
    Moffat's already made the Time War small, drastically cutting it back in scope and richness, so that it could fit inside a bottle. They paid effectively no price to save Gallifrey in the 50th — quite the opposite; he unburdened the Doctor of part of his defining history (the decision to burn Gallifrey) as a "price" for saving the world. It was EASY, a piece of narrative sleight-of-hand, carried off because the scenes doing it were quick and crowned by cameos — a rush of energy that carried the episode through… but that is IN NO WAY a payoff of the story. The payoff is now deferred and the story that actually brings the planet back has to be even bigger.

    When Harve Bennett was struggling with how to bring Spock back in Star Trek III Nick Meyer (who wrote STII) told him "the genesis planet isn't enough — that satisfies the technical answer to why he's alive but in order to undo something like that, an epic death, you need to pay an even bigger price. Kirk has to pay twice what he's getting back or death becomes meaningless." (Which is why David Marcus died and the Enterprise was destroyed — to bring someone back from death you have to pay double.)
    I don't think the Doctor has to "pay a price" to bring Gallifrey back — killing his companions or destroying the TARDIS in the name of "epic" is stupid and boring. The price is the payoff, the story that comes BEFORE "back to normal so we can use Gallifrey in stories again." The return itself needs to have enough "Oomph" or 8 years of the defining character arch for the Doctor ends with "Hey, we found Spock on a planet! Cool, good to have you back."
    An anti-climax on that scale could kill the series, or at least seriously harm it.
    And I don't think Moffat's up to writing the resolution of this story; he thinks being clever is payoff enough.

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  93. deriksmith
    December 6, 2013 @ 2:05 pm

    If Gallifrey comes back we're going to see her again though.
    I mean — ther'es only one Gallifrey story. "A traitor on the high council, our politics are corrupt / battle in the matrix." The Deadly Assassin did it first and every Gallifrey story since then has had the exact same plot. When Lance Parkin wrote "The Infinity Doctors," set entirely on Gallifrey he set out to resolve all the different mythology of the planet– and was extremely annoyed with himself when he realized that the story he was writing had somehow fallen into the same plot as Every Gallifrey Story Ever; a traitor on the high council.
    >>Parkin already identified the problem here, Gallifrey is
    >>boring. He couldn’t really escape that, ultimately ending
    >>up with the same broken structure of Gallifrey that he was
    >>reacting against
    http://www.philipsandifer.com/2013/01/you-were-expecting-someone-else-15.html

    Gallifrey is boring and Mystery Woman is something interesting to do on Gallifrey that isn't Every Gallifrey Story Ever. If we get the planet back we're going to see her again and all that ambiguity is going to be removed. If we're horribly unlucky someone is going to take Rassilon sentencing her to penitence "like the Weeping Angels of Old" literally.

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  94. Lewis Christian
    December 6, 2013 @ 3:44 pm

    When Gallifrey comes back, eventually, I would place money on the fact we won't see That Woman again.

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  95. 5tephe
    December 6, 2013 @ 3:56 pm

    Can't help but agree with scott that the return is probably the right move at the moment. But I also agree with deriksmith that Moffat seems to have cheapened things a little. And I'm worried about Moffat's ability to pull this manoeuvre off.

    Of course, once he does it (satisfactorily or not) you know where the next direction is, without a doubt:

    The Doctor gets accused of some crime surrounding the events (probably as nebulous as The Laws Of Time) and has to…

    Run away.

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  96. Ross
    December 6, 2013 @ 5:09 pm

    His relationship with Grindlewald in the flashbacks in Half-Blood Prince are coded pretty dang gay.

    I'm not sure I'd peg Dumbledore as having an adult sexuality at all. It's clear he had one same-sex crush in his youth, but it seems like it led to him completely shutting down the maturation of his sexual identity.

    When Gallifrey comes back, eventually, I would place money on the fact we won't see That Woman again.

    It certainly wouldn't be something Moffat is liable ot have any interest in pursuing.

    For me, the fundamental question is: If she is his mother, what does that add to the story?

    And the answer is "Nothing. If it did, Rusty would have made it explicit who she was." So claiming she is feels like kind of a cheat; just a gimmick to add some extra weight that the story didn't deign to add itself.

    (If she's his mom, though, does that imply that the other dissenter is his dad?)

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  97. jane
    December 6, 2013 @ 6:37 pm

    The fish drowns because his water apparatus breaks under the sludge — hence the "glass breaking" sound effect in that scene. Its water respirator isn't even plain water — it's a special green mixture, obviously quite particular to its species. The black sludge in the sinkhole either suffocated the fish or poisoned it — possibly both.

    Remember, real fish will die in water that's poisonous or denuded of free oxygen radicals — which is why proper aquariums have oxygenators. So, no, the argument against the fish "drowning" is as specious as complaining about someone choking to death in mustard gas — as if mustard gas was breathable simply because it's gassy, like air.

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  98. jane
    December 6, 2013 @ 6:41 pm

    I like this one too. I don't think it's the best evah or anything, but I like it. Jenny is fun, Donna is clever, Martha is heartfelt. But yeah, Phil does have some points — the angst of a Time Lord is starting to wear thin.

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  99. David Ainsworth
    December 6, 2013 @ 6:47 pm

    I think the Doctor did pay a price. He paid with his regret, his sorrow. To save Gallifrey, he had to stop running away from it, he had to condemn Nine and Ten to suffer through their whole lives for a crime they avoided. And now he's going to have to pay the ultimate price, and grow up.

    And he's not yet finished saving his home. Not yet. He's going to have to confront his own past if he hopes to have a future.

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  100. jane
    December 6, 2013 @ 6:48 pm

    The Man Who Never Would speech is truly ironic, and stems from the Doctor's own self-hatred, but the performance of it doesn't clue us in to such a reading. It's played as taking the high and mighty moral ground, as if that's who the Doctor actually is, rather than the humbling words of a man who's made the wrong decision and truly regrets it. This whole speech would truly work if it were played differently.

    And yeah, sure, the fact he's angry is justified, he's just lost his daughter (after struggling to accept her as such), but this works against the irony of his situation.

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  101. jane
    December 6, 2013 @ 6:49 pm

    I thought the breaking glass sound effect was perfectly clear, and I'm half deaf.

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  102. BerserkRL
    December 6, 2013 @ 7:13 pm

    "The Empty Child" and "The Unicorn and the Wasp" sound almost pub-like.

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  103. BerserkRL
    December 6, 2013 @ 7:18 pm

    Maybe Phil finds the redshirts really really compelling characters.

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  104. BerserkRL
    December 6, 2013 @ 8:09 pm

    If the Doctor's daughter is also the Doctor's wife, that means she's also both the TARDIS and River Song.

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  105. mengu
    December 6, 2013 @ 9:16 pm

    The best reason for The Woman in White not to be the Doctor's mother is that we've never met her. I stick to the idea that it's Susan, because at least then there's something to connect her to.

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  106. Matthew Celestis
    December 7, 2013 @ 12:12 am

    You haven't read Lance Parkin's Gallifrey Chronicles then, Mengu?

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  107. Nyq Only
    December 7, 2013 @ 1:37 am

    Without the second definite article: "The Unicorn and Wasp" – very pub like.

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  108. Ross
    December 7, 2013 @ 4:58 am

    Y'know, it never even occurred to me that those breathing units were self-contained and not some kind of gas-exchangers.

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  109. Ross
    December 7, 2013 @ 5:05 am


    Re: Gallifrey. I'm increasingly thinking that the only way to fix the Gallifrey problem is to erase it from all history and have the Doctor existing alone, as a paradox, with no memory of his deleted origins. This would never be referred to again. No story arc, etc. The show would gradually just forget the Time Lords and the Doctor could go back to being a guy with no provenance who just bimbled around.

    Yeah. That would work. "My past is a big giant mystery; I am the only one of my kind in the entire universe and seem to have access to powers and knowledge far beyond what everyone else in the universe has. Also I seem to be more-or-less immortal. But I'm not going to pursue that at all since I'm not especially curious about huge important mysteries."

    We've already seen in the BBC books that this approach is a mess; I can't simultaneously accept that this guy is the Doctor and also that this guy would not move heavens and earths to uncover the secret behind his erased origins.

    Personally, For me, the perfect way to deal with Gallifrey in the new series is have the Twelfth Doctor bring it back, spend five minutes wandering around, going from wistful to increasingly bored and restless, saying something like "Now I remember why I ran away from here in the first place,"and then running off in the TARDIS again.

    I can't see myself havign any reaction to that outcome other than "Well that was pointless."

    Reply

  110. Ross
    December 7, 2013 @ 5:08 am

    and the concept of the Doctor having a grandchild appears to be immune from the "Doctor-not-have-sex!" taboos of the classic era.

    You seem to have missed the army of Doctor Who fans who assert that they had always, always, allthe way back in 1963, taken it for granted that Susan wasn't his biological granddaughter, just some random girl who had taken to calling him "Grandfather".

    Reply

  111. Ross
    December 7, 2013 @ 5:37 am

    Also, IIRC, by the time Kirk's family is introduced, they're already dead.

    Reply

  112. Matthew Celestis
    December 7, 2013 @ 5:56 am

    Plus the unfortunate suggestion in Lungbarrow that Susan is the granddaughter of the Other, not Dr. Who.

    Reply

  113. Spacewarp
    December 7, 2013 @ 7:35 am

    "When Gallifrey comes back, eventually, I would place money on the fact we won't see That Woman again."

    But this is the thing about getting Gallifrey back isn't it? Nobody's dead now. So that means "Spittoon" Rassilon, the mad Visionary, the Woman, and the Master. Depending on whether centuries have passed, or no time at all, Moffat's got the whole toy-box to play with.

    Reply

  114. Ross
    December 7, 2013 @ 7:43 am

    Plus the unfortunate suggestion in Lungbarrow that Susan is the granddaughter of the Other, not Dr. Who.

    Or the first piece of internet fanfic I ever read, which suggested that Susan was Dr. Who's granddaughter.

    Reply

  115. Spoilers Below
    December 7, 2013 @ 8:06 pm

    3) Jenny is not the Doctor's daughter, except on a technicality. As Philip points out, she shares none of the Doctor's traits. The relationship between them rings false. No matter how much the story plays up the DNA angle, Jenny really is this woman he's just met. She's just another bit of weirdness in an already extraordinary existence.

    Not quite sure how a daughter not being anything like her father means she's not his daughter. Lamarckian inheritance was disproven years and years ago.

    And if we're going to claim that Georgia Moffett isn't the Doctor's daughter, Peter Davison and Sandra Dickinson may have some very strong words for us 🙂

    Reply

  116. Spoilers Below
    December 7, 2013 @ 8:13 pm

    Gentle commentators, I present to you now, the Man Who Would Never:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzmnPs64K74

    Reply

  117. Ulysses Gamma-Hose
    December 27, 2013 @ 3:10 pm

    The Doctor's Daughter would have been so easy to correct.

    All that needed changing was Martha and Donna's roles.

    Think about it; to have Donna alone with the Hath would have been opportunity for both comedy (the Hath are good for little else), and Donna's chance to experience alien life without the Doctor there. It could have built on the theme of Donna bonding with those she meets, as we saw with the Ood and the residents of Pompeii.

    Second, showing the Doctor and Martha united again, but this time in the middle of a war, would illustrate how Martha's views have changed and become more militaristic since she joined UNIT – and how the Doctor disapproves.

    Reply

  118. Nicholas Tosoni
    January 14, 2014 @ 12:05 am

    If I may add on to your comment, David Ainsworth, I just had an idea that Jenny is for new "Doctor Who" fans what Ten is for those who got on board with the Classic series.

    Something about the Doctor's insistence on "shared suffering:" Remember that the 80s and the Wilderness Years were the point in time at which the show was "uncool," a well-loved but much-derided memory. Many of us endured years of bullying for it.

    Now that the show is back in the public eye (and how!), I want to venture that there could be a little bit of resentment at how those who came in with the revival haven't had those years of hardening.

    In my book, that's not at all a bad thing. I thank heaven every day that they can bond over it without fear of shame or ridicule.

    Reply

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