Dr Who Series 6

[Jonsmad]

Begins…

http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/dw/videos/p00fxf06

And I’m wondering if the presidents name is Adam Klaus-Clinton.

Topic

[srmcd1]

Who thinks Rory is the “good man” that River kills? Anyone? Chances are he’ll find his way back to the living, but she’ll still go to jail for killing him in the first place.

[Ridley]

[ChrisM]

Heh. I like that.

[Ridley]

[genericnerdyusername]

Hahaha!

[Danny Stephenson]

The woman with the eye patch is Jenny Mutant from Red Dwarf. Do we already know this?

[Jo]

Yup! :o)

http://ganymede.tv/forum/2011/05/doctor-dwarf

[hummingbird]

I’m spoiler free so I don’t know if this has been speculated already, but feel free to laugh and point if it has.

I’m just wondering if the fact that we now have a ganger of the Doctor explains who was killed in episode 1?

[Ian Symes]

That’s the obvious solution to the problem, but it almost seems too obvious to me. I suspect we’ll know more on Saturday – if the Gangerdoctor survives the episode, it seems likely, but I doubt he will.

[Phil1034]

Doctor Who is the Radio Times moment of the week. Apparently it’s a big surprise which eagle eyed viewers will already have figured out or something. Whether the Radio Times’ definition of a surprise is the same as fandoms remains to be seen.

[hummingbird]

> That’s the obvious solution to the problem, but it almost seems too obvious to me. I suspect we’ll know more on Saturday – if the Gangerdoctor survives the episode, it seems likely, but I doubt he will.

It does seem a little *too* obvious, but I sort of like the idea that we’d have GangerDoctor running around the universe with his own agenda. Add that to the fact that he survives for 200 years … presumably outliving the eleventh incarnation of the Doctor, which opens things up for the twelfth Doctor to interact with the ganger of his former self. Which would be quite interesting.

[Gwynnie]

Just watched episode 6…. the end, eek! What is going on!? ^_^

[pfm]

Best combined twist/resolution/ending to an episode in ages. Oh yes!

[hummingbird]

I don’t know … I thought it was a good twist, but I feel as if we’ve been there before. It’s all a little too X-files.

[si]

I was awake at twenty to five this morning, thinking about Doctor Who and writing odd theories on Twitter. I wrote this:

http://bit.ly/m51avD

[Nick R]

In the Doctor Dwarf thread, Seb wrote:

Also, he didn’t kill the Amy Ganger. He severed the psychic link between Amy and it

Must’ve been a hell of a psychic link, if they were able to stay connected not just across different time periods, but even – as in TDW – outside the universe!

[Seb Patrick]

Yeah, that’s been said a few times. But we don’t know how powerful the people who created the ganger are. I mean, they’re powerful enough to kidnap Amy without the Doctor knowing. They’re probably generally pretty powerful, overall.

A bigger question for me, and one that I haven’t seen posed yet, is why it was in the Doctor’s interests to immediately get rid of the ganger, rather than (a) making use of Amy’s connection to it to try and help find where she is, and (b) offer her mind company and solace while the “real” her is stuck wherever she is.

[ChrisM]

Also, he didn’t kill the Amy Ganger. He severed the psychic link between Amy and it

I understand that it wasn’t quite the same in that the duplicate doctor used his screwdriver to generate a resonance signal to break down the ganger, while our Doctor just broke the link. He did state that he would try to make it as humane as possible though which suggests that it was a painful experience for the Flesh.

[Gwynnie]

On some of the other DW forums people are debating when exactly Amy was “taken” and swapped. At first I thought it was when she disappeared and they found her psychic link recorder on the floor, but we saw the creepy eyepatch woman before that… so when did it happen?

I did find it surprising that the Doctor didn’t use her to locate the signal, yes… although perhaps he already did that when we weren’t looking. My mind is desperately trying to work out the connection between this baby, the girl in the spacesuit and apparently River Song… and why the girl was regenerating in the alley! I really hope it’s a good twist and isn’t written off with a cheap plot device.

[Ben Paddon]

A bigger question for me, and one that I haven’t seen posed yet, is why it was in the Doctor’s interests to immediately get rid of the ganger, rather than (a) making use of Amy’s connection to it to try and help find where she is, and (b) offer her mind company and solace while the “real” her is stuck wherever she is.

Amy was going into labour. It may have been medically risky to keep her connected to the Ganger. Plus the Doctor may still have been able to discern the location of the link based on the information he’d accumulated.

Or maybe not. Big show like this, anything could happen.

He did state that he would try to make it as humane as possible though which suggests that it was a painful experience for the Flesh.

It suggests that it could be a painful experience, but that the Doctor has donbe his best to make it as painless as possible.

[Tarka Dal]

> (a) making use of Amy’s connection to it to try and help find where she is

Best guess? He has a clue where and when it happened.

> (b) offer her mind company and solace while the “real” her is stuck wherever she is.

The real Amy’s a smart-girl. He trusts her. Whilst on the one hand he has abandoned her, his action also allows her to fully concentrate on wherever she now is and what she’s up against.

[si]

Typical. I was almost there, yet couldn’t bring myself to write it down. I had to all around the houses.

http://bit.ly/m51avD

(EP 7 SPOILERS/SUGGESTIONS)

[Ian Symes]

LET’S KILL HITLER.

[si]

I’m *still* laughing at that.

[pfm]

More like…LET’S KILL MOFFAT!!

Why do his episodes feel like they’re written by a giddy teenage boy trying too hard? It’s all about statements, cockiness, remarking on how cool and how clever everyone and everything is without earning those honours, not remotely.

Not that AGMGTW was a bad episode. The effects and performances were mostly outstanding. I particularly love how Arthur Darvill gets better and better with each episode. Making Rory so solid, commanding and dependable here, especially compared with the increasingly flakey Doctor. One of Karen’s best episodes too.

The River revelation…something easily guessable from the opening 2-parter, and there’s always been speculation about the River/Pond connection. It’s a good little twist but not half as jaw-dropping as Moffat bigged it up to be. Plus, it’s not something that would have meant much to the Doctor until this point in time. i.e. when he’s asked her who she is before she could have told him and it would have been…..so what?? The revelation of ‘who she really is’ should connect more with the Doctor rather than just Amy. Amy didn’t even exist when Moffat wrote River’s first episodes.

[Gwynnie]

Was it planned all along, or did they wing it? Spoiler time!

I’d say that “who River is” does have a connection to the Doctor… even if her Time Lord DNA was only caused by being conceived in the TARDIS, it means that he isn’t truly the last of his kind (again)… perhaps then he can piece together why she can fly the TARDIS and read Galifreyan, how she time travels and why he supposedly loves her. Although it makes her earlier comments to Rory about how he swept her off her feet when she was a young girl, knowing so much about her, a little creepy as I’m wondering just how young she was when he “met” her again… are we talking back to America 1969? I’m assuming it was her in the space suit, of course… at least all signs point to that, and the writers do tend to go with the obvious storyline rather than the fantastic twists that the fans come up with ;)!

Not surprisingly the Doctor Who page on Facebook has a lot of badly spelt comments such as “OMG wot an amazing twist i didnt c that comin!!!” while the nerdier fans point out that it was pretty obvious. I suppose that once we learned that the baby’s name was Melody, it was quite easy to piece together the child in the orphanage, the picture of Amy with the baby, the space suit, the regeneration in the alleyway (where did that accent go though, River?), the TARDIS in human form’s comment, the name connection.

What this means, though, is that later in River’s timeline she meets Amy and Rory again, but she can’t tell them who she is. Also this whole “I was jailed for killing a good man” business… if it was her in the space suit, she would have known all along. Although I’m wondering whether we’re just meant to assume that she means she killed the Doctor, and then it turns out to be Rory (when Amy described Melody’s father to her it sounded as if she meant the Doctor, but hey, she meant the Last Centurian) – a hero to many? Perhaps. It’s not really sci-fi unless someone kills a family member, eh?

I have another question. If Rory is still plastic/robot, how does his sperm work?

[Ben Paddon]

Well golly gee, PerformingMonkey, you sure are a big ol’ bag of kittens and rainbows, in’tcha?

[Gwynnie]

Why why WHY did I just spend the last two hours reading the Digital Spy DW forum? Some of the comments on there…

[Ben Paddon]

I have another question. If Rory is still plastic/robot, how does his sperm work?

He’s not. He just has the memories.

[Gwynnie]

When did he become human again – Big Bang 2? Because he definitely still had gun-hands in the museum (after his 2000 year wait). I’m also wondering why Amy referred to Rory as “the last of his kind”, or was that just a cheap trick to lure is into thinking “OMG THE DOCTOR IS THE DAD”?

[genericnerdyusername]

Rory is the last Roman Centurion is what she meant by last of his kind. There aren’t any Roman Centurions in the future. :)

[genericnerdyusername]

P.S LET’S KILL PERFORMINGMONKEY!

[si]

Maybe I was just caught up in the sense of occasion, but when Amy was talking about Rory being hundreds of years old, being the last of his kind, and having a name but ‘our people’ knowing him by a different title, I *was* kind of thinking ‘WTF?’. Then I had a major ‘Of course she means Rory, you dozy fuckwit, Simon’ moment.

[Pete Part Three]

>was that just a cheap trick to lure is into thinking “OMG THE DOCTOR IS THE DAD”?

Yes.

>Then I had a major ‘Of course she means Rory, you dozy fuckwit, Simon’ moment.

Oh look, it worked!

[ChrisM]

>our people’ knowing him by a different title

I guessed near the end that she was referring to Rory, partly due to the fact they did a bit of similar misdirection in the earlier episodes when Rory overheard her remarks while incarcerated via her hand implant.

I didn’t buy her comment about ‘our people knowing him’ though as it made Rory out to be much more famous than he ever was. The majority of people from the present day wouldn’t know anything about him. She was likely referring to those historical references, while his auton waited through the years, but even that’s a bit of a stretch.

A minor nit for me to pick though.

I’d say that “who River is” does have a connection to the Doctor… even if her Time Lord DNA was only caused by being conceived in the TARDIS, it means that he isn’t truly the last of his kind (again)…

There’s Gennie/Jenny too! Although she might have died off-screen at this point…

I am very curious at the time lord DNA though. It means that being a Time Lord (at least from a species if not from a vocational perspective) is as much to do with time-vortex mutation as genetic inheritance. And the fact The Doctor states that it happened with his people over billions of years means it’s not just something that happens when when a Galifreyan child is forced to look into the vortex. (Mind you I initially thought that the effect there was mental rather than physical. It drove The Master insane…)

[Jo]

it was quite easy to piece together the child in the orphanage, the picture of Amy with the baby, the space suit, the regeneration in the alleyway (where did that accent go though, River?)

That’s assuming that the little girl in the alleyway is River. I’m not convinced it’s her.

[Gwynnie]

“Jenny who?” – oh, eyepatch lady! Sorry, that belongs in the Doctor Dwarf thread… but yes, forgot about Jenny! I hope she comes back… she was cute!

I’m not sure about this whole “being conceived in the TARDIS gives you TimeLord DNA” either, it sounds perhaps as if the whole thing is a lie. I don’t even know whether to believe River.. she could easily have adopted her name for the very purpose of throwing the gang off the scent. Of course, some theories being thrown around the internet are that the baby IS the Doctor’s child, and that the Silence or whoever was responsible took his seed and planted it into Amy… of course, that would make the whole River-Doctor kissing thing very disturbing.

I am thinking, though, that the future Doctor – finding out that the others saw him die – somehow stages his own death (clone, second Doctor, flesh, who knows) to ensure that what they think they saw remains the same – that’s why he has to invite them to see it again… that way a paradox isn’t created, they just witnessed a false murder all along and he’s still safe. Hmmmm…. it all reminds me a little of Stasis Leak though…
Hologram Rimmer – “in 3 million years, you’ll be dead”
Alive Rimmer – “Will I REALLY?”
So the “present” Doctor only has 200 more years to live… oh no… that’s more than most of us get! (Also means he stays in Matt Smith incarnation for a looong time!)

[Gwynnie]

Oops, posted twice.

[Pete Part Three]

I can’t help but feel underwhelmed by this first half of the series, and I lay the blame squarely at the Gangers story which was so incredibly dreary that it gave the Silurians 2-parter from last year a run for its money. Zero originality and a thoroughly daft conclusion ( we *could* get in the TARDIS and escape, but it would be neater if we just killed ourselves…yay!)

Did this dullathon really need to be 2 parts? This series was crying out for another standalone episode like The Doctor’s Wife. Hell, even anticipating a throwaway episode like the Pirates gubbins is better than being half-way through a 2 parter in which you’re not invested.

A Good Man Goes to War redeeemed things by having a terrific pace and being a ton of fun. I must admit to being a little concerned that this arc won’t be tidied up in the most concise way possible (The Big Bang was very entertaining but it didn’t make much sense) but there’s a whole heap of questions to keep us occupied for the next few months.

[genericnerdyusername]

I really liked all of this half, except for the pirate one, and even then I didn’t HATE that episode. I’ve been as satisfied as I could be with half a series. And NOTHING could make the Silurian 2-parter seem exciting. NOTHING!

[Gwynnie]

Not even if they’d started using those tongues on each other?

[Ridley]

So the “present” Doctor only has 200 more years to live… oh no… that’s more than most of us get! (Also means he stays in Matt Smith incarnation for a looong time!)

I’m not an expert on ‘classic’ Who but hasn’t the Doctor pretty much spent the majority of his life as William Hartnell?

I’d like to see an episode that addresses the Doctor burning up his regenerations in a relatively short span of time, if so.

[Ben Paddon]

(The Big Bang was very entertaining but it didn’t make much sense)

Y’know who says things like this? People who don’t pay attention.

[Dave]

>Rory is the last Roman Centurion is what she meant by last of his kind. There aren’t any Roman Centurions in the future. :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWx4bbltTyA&feature=player_detailpage#t=82s

[Jo]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWx4bbltTyA&feature=player_detailpage#t=8…

Wibbly wobbly timey wimey.

[Pete Part Three]

>Y’know who says things like this? People who don’t pay attention.

Oh fuck off.

[Seb Patrick]

He’s right, though.

[Pete Part Three]

There’s an interesting article on DoG at the moment about whether the recent cliffhanger was a “game-changer” and what actually constitutes one.

I’d say a game-changer is where the Doctor can freely cross his own timestream without consequence, and thus get out of just about any trap laid for him using the timey-wimey get-out clause. It’s a dangerous precedent for the show as it robs suspense from the show.The cliffhanger of The Pandorica Opens was a cheat for this reason.

Also, did the events of The Big Bang actually happen? Does Amy remember her further meetings with the Doctor as a young child? If she does, doesn’t this change her character somewhat?

Reset buttons are shite. RTD got grief for it, so I don’t see why Moffat should be immune when the result is the same as The Last of the Timelords”.

[Seb Patrick]

All valid arguments – if ones that I don’t agree with – but they don’t exactly constitute “didn’t make much sense”, though, do they?

[Pete Part Three]

Any episode which has a bunch of questions that you can be pretty sure that the writer doesn’t actually have the answer to (and Moffat is generally great, but he’s not infallible)…

PLUS a load of stuff that didn’t happen/probably did happen/mixture of both…

PLUS a series of twists that calls into question why the main character didn’t make use of these abilities in hundreds of other stories…

…can, in my humble opinion, be classed as not making much sense.

[Author]

Replies