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So it seems that the episodes this season have all been out of order. I just keep thinking about when he said to Clara in response to thinking she was dead that it was the longest month of his life. So did he visit Clara before she died after seeing her death to help cool his temper? Or is he going to end up saving her somehow?
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Nov 29, 2015 10:15
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There seemed to be a major clue this episode as well: The numbering of the doors in the castle were all out of order. Maybe the events in the confession dial are all a synecdoche for the season at large?
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Nov 29, 2015 10:24
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Jsor posted:Apparently the diamond wall punch erosion is possible, but they probably underestimated the time scale a bit.. The Doctor's clearly got a space skeleton. Codependent Poster posted:So it seems that the episodes this season have all been out of order. I just keep thinking about when he said to Clara in response to thinking she was dead that it was the longest month of his life. I'm almost expecting this to turn into a bootstrap paradox. He hands over the confession dial to Ashildr who sends him into the confession dial which he hands over again.
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Nov 29, 2015 10:25
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saucerman posted:That's true but I am thinking he may have had some idea of what's going on while he punched his way further and further. After all, someone must have broken the wall. He knew every time he got in there and saw what was waiting, that's what his big thing to Clara about wanting to give in was about - each time he figures out towards the end what has been happening and how many versions of himself have already died, and realizes how many more will have to before he can make it through. Then Clara refuses to let him fall into despair and he gets up and goes straight back to punching, all while telling that same bird story, and each time getting just a little further through it. The Doctor who broke through at the end was in the castle for a week or two, but he knew that "he" had been there much, much longer than that. Codependent Poster posted:So it seems that the episodes this season have all been out of order. I just keep thinking about when he said to Clara in response to thinking she was dead that it was the longest month of his life. I will laugh my rear end off if the Doctor ends up avoiding deliberately crossing his own time stream by giving the Master his confession dial knowing that she'd be so frustrated at not being able to open it that she'd jump back to when Clara was alive and inadvertently bring her to the Doctor so he could have fresh adventures with her, thus kicking off The Magician's Apprentice 
Jerusalem fucked around with this message at 10:34 on Nov 29, 2015 |
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Nov 29, 2015 10:29
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And More posted:I'm almost expecting this to turn into a bootstrap paradox. He hands over the confession dial to Ashildr who sends him into the confession dial which he hands over again. That makes sense, given that bootstrap paradoxes were the point of a whole episode. This episode was Quake meets The Prestige. Yes, it's a magic trick, no it's not real, but that's not the point. Abracadabra.
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Nov 29, 2015 10:37
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Okay, so the wall was actually made of 400x as strong as diamond unobtainium. What if it was actually diamond? As people have said before, it *would* have weathered down eventually. However, there are much easier ways to get rid of diamond, if you have this much time. First of all, according to the laws of thermodynamics, over a long enough period, diamond will naturally fall back to the more stable state of carbon, graphite. However, this is kinetically so unfavourable that at room temperature, it will take a very, very long time. It seems impossible to find an accurate figure, but one webpage said billions to hundreds of billions of years. But at least you wouldn't be breaking your fists. This can be sped up significantly by heating up the place or by bombarding the diamond with ions. Alternatively, diamond can burn. You need a really hot fire and a very oxygen-rich environment for that to have any effect at time scales we usually work with. But, as a rather wild guess, I think that if the wall was actual diamond, and the doctor had been able to stack up a bunch of wood against the wall and put it on fire, breaking down the wall would've taken millions of years (or maybe only thousands of years) instead of billions.
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Nov 29, 2015 10:50
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There was the slight issue of the shuffling corpse of a childhood fear looming only a few feet away when he comes to his revelation though! He pretty much only had time to punch the wall.
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Nov 29, 2015 11:18
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I have a hard time processing Doctor Who when watching it. I often spend more time laughing at the jokes and admiring the spectacle, for example, that I don't see the obvious twists anymore. So I have to come to this board to help me digest the plot and figure out what I just saw. So, uh, the way I read this episode and it's big reveal is not that Gallifrey was lost and that he needed to rescue it, but that it was deliberately hidden to keep him from getting to it, and this place was the Time Lords's last gambit to keep him out. Was that wrong?
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Nov 29, 2015 11:21
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Yeah, by the time he's got all the pieces he's trapped in a dead end with the shuffling horror blocking the way out.
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Nov 29, 2015 11:22
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Craptacular! posted:I have a hard time processing Doctor Who when watching it. I often spend more time laughing at the jokes and admiring the spectacle, for example, that I don't see the obvious twists anymore. So I have to come to this board to help me digest the plot and figure out what I just saw. It appears the time lords were after the location of the prophesied hybrid and the whole castle was designed to get him to give it to them. Him escaping the castle onto Gallifrey probably wasn't part of the plan.
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Nov 29, 2015 11:23
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NoNotTheMindProbe posted:I wonder if his skulls affected the local gravity due to 2 billion years worth of extra skull mass coming into existence? I was worried he'd eventually break his neck jumping out the window and diving into a pile of skulls. 
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Nov 29, 2015 11:39
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Craptacular! posted:So, uh, the way I read this episode and it's big reveal is not that Gallifrey was lost and that he needed to rescue it, but that it was deliberately hidden to keep him from getting to it, and this place was the Time Lords's last gambit to keep him out. Possibly, there's a few different ways it can go. The thinking that "the hybrid is Me" is the one I'm going with right now
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Nov 29, 2015 11:42
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For what it's worth, the subtitles say "me", but the continuity announcer did say "if you haven't figured it out yet, there's a Next Time trailer". The "two warrior races" line almost explicitly screams out that one of those is Human, though.
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Nov 29, 2015 11:48
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Time Lords: The prophecy says the hybrid will destroy the universe! Doctor: Oh THAT.... yeah that was River.... twice. We fixed it though. Where have you guys bee.... oh yeah 
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Nov 29, 2015 11:56
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I suspected what the twist was literally from the beginning, and when everything kept aligning with that I allowed myself to hope, and then yep they really went for it. I definitely had a  moment when I realized he was punching his way through the super-diamond, which I caught on to just before they showed it.So much to break down and analyze, and what a cliffhanger for the next episode! Edit: And I guess it's lucky for the Doctor that in the death-castle full of resetting rooms, only the diamond in the final room doesn't reset! I wonder what message he might have left if he knew he was creating a copy of himself as a last resort, what he'd try to convey to break the cycle, etc. NowonSA fucked around with this message at 12:06 on Nov 29, 2015 |
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Nov 29, 2015 12:01
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NowonSA posted:I wonder what message he might have left if he knew he was creating a copy of himself as a last resort, what he'd try to convey to break the cycle, etc. BIRD
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Nov 29, 2015 12:27
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Greyhawk posted:BIRD That conveys the plan, doesn't help if breaking the wall proves impossible, just keeps him locked in the loop.
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Nov 29, 2015 12:33
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Fil5000 posted:That conveys the plan, doesn't help if breaking the wall proves impossible, just keeps him locked in the loop. Yeah, as something left for your copy to remember when they come up to the big ol' wall (at least, before it's got a man-sized hole punched into it) BIRD makes sense. I'm just curious what he'd have put down there if he wanted his next version to go down a different path. Maybe "no 12"?
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Nov 29, 2015 12:40
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NowonSA posted:Yeah, as something left for your copy to remember when they come up to the big ol' wall (at least, before it's got a man-sized hole punched into it) BIRD makes sense. I'm just curious what he'd have put down there if he wanted his next version to go down a different path. Maybe "no 12"? BIRD IS poo poo
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Nov 29, 2015 12:49
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I can imagine Gallifrey developed a torture chamber for Time Lords at some point in the war. Maybe they were super paranoid about betrayal. I think this episode was stronger for not dwelling on sci-fi explanations too much. Everything made intuitive sense. Also this device was presumably created by the same people who made the TARDIS, which is equally inscrutable and miles beyond any other race's technology.
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Nov 29, 2015 13:05
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Holy moley. Capaldi's a hell of a Doctor.
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Nov 29, 2015 13:18
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echoplex posted:Re: people saying the current TARDIS isn't a very good dramatic space or that it isn't used properly: They were indeed absolutely fantastic, but part of it is because they only had to follow the Doctor around the set. The big issue (mine admittedly, at least) is that as soon as there's two or more people involved in a TARDIS scene (ie; about 95% of the time), it starts going sideways fast because there seem to be very few angles to work with that keep everyone in-shot without the console rotor getting in the way. Once you really notice this, it starts feeling like they're fighting the set to keep shots centered as best they can. Also are... are they actually going to follow on the Doctor Who movie reveal? 
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Nov 29, 2015 13:23
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Forktoss posted:Holy moley. Since the revival began I've always felt the actors portraying the Doctor to be a notch beyond the material they've been given, and they've often elevated relatively weak material with their performances, but with good material they always kill it, and after this episode Capaldi may be passing Smith as my favourite right now. I'm trying to picture how this episode could have worked with any of the other Doctors. I just don't think it works with anybody but Capaldi. Neddy Seagoon posted:Also are... are they actually going to follow on the Doctor Who movie reveal? I asked this earlier but I don't think anybody answered: does the BBC have the rights to reproduce any footage from the movie?
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Nov 29, 2015 13:52
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I could see Smith or Tennant being able to perform in this episode quite well, but I don't think they would have been able to pull off the ending quite as well as Capaldi does. I actually think it would have been very fun to see Smith's young looking and mostly happy-go-lucky Doctor get serious and be shown enduring some true suffering. Instead of going into it after Clara's death, go into it after he's just been regularly outmaneuvered, and he's all jokey-jokey through like 75% of the episode, then he gets to the wall, connects the dots and gets serious. Knowing how they went with 11's character though, he totally would have just been joking it up as he was repeatedly punching a wall and dying, manic laughter aplenty.
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Nov 29, 2015 14:00
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NowonSA posted:I could see Smith or Tennant being able to perform in this episode quite well, but I don't think they would have been able to pull off the ending quite as well as Capaldi does. I think Smith would've done furious as well. He was very good at dropping the smiles and jokes for quiet seething fury when he needed to.
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Nov 29, 2015 14:04
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That was a really, really good episode, minus some hybrid stuff at the end.
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Nov 29, 2015 14:05
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The opening speech actually made me think of Tennant. It was such a good concept I think any of them could have done it justice, but Capaldi was brilliant.
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Nov 29, 2015 14:06
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Neddy Seagoon posted:I think Smith would've done furious as well. He was very good at dropping the smiles and jokes for quiet seething fury when he needed to. Yeah, that's how I'd of liked to have seen him handle it, there were just so many moments where he kept the smiles and jokes that I wouldn't put it past the writer/director of the episode to go that way too. I think that would have been a pretty valid approach, the Doctor unflappable and punching away smiling and laughing because he's realized a way to "win". Or some combination of fury and jokey smiles. They could've made the episode about someone trying to get him to reveal his name, since they kept teasing that during 11's tenure. I mean that ultimately built up to a decent but not amazing payoff, but I think it would've hyped us up more along the way if in the middle of a season we had this episode and we were just like drat, he'd rather go through THAT for two billion years than say his name, Trenzalore is going to kick rear end! I definitely think this has to be the best episode of the season, it's so good it's got me wanting to see other Doctors in the same situation which is always a sign of quality in my opinion. I'd love for the finale to top it though!
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Nov 29, 2015 14:15
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Carbon dioxide posted:Okay, so the wall was actually made of 400x as strong as diamond unobtainium. Yeah, but like LividLiquid says, it's not a "real" room, castle, sea, diamond wall, etc. It's a construct made by the Time Lords inside a tiny device. It's basically a virtual world, so things like physics as pertains to the diamond or the skulls displacing the ocean are meaningless. Why didn't the water erode the castle? Why didn't the Doctor, mortally wounded by the monster, just regenerate instead of clawing his way up the stairs to burn himself out? Why didn't he take 2 more minutes to scrawl a larger note than "BIRD"? It's allegorical. The rules were set by the Time Lords to get him to spill the beans about the Hybrid. He found the one loophole in the programming, the fact that the diamond wall didn't reset, and was a backdoor he could use to get out. That's all it was.
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Nov 29, 2015 14:38
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Astroman posted:Yeah, but like LividLiquid says, it's not a "real" room, castle, sea, diamond wall, etc. It's a construct made by the Time Lords inside a tiny device. It's basically a virtual world, so things like physics as pertains to the diamond or the skulls displacing the ocean are meaningless. Why didn't the water erode the castle? Why didn't the Doctor, mortally wounded by the monster, just regenerate instead of clawing his way up the stairs to burn himself out? Why didn't he take 2 more minutes to scrawl a larger note than "BIRD"? Along these lines, it's possible that the entire experience was a simulation that the Doctor experienced. The knowledge of one of his childhood fears and Clara's portrait could support this, although the Time Lords could just as easily have done their homework. It's much more compelling as a real thing he did in a custom-built Time Lord (or whoever made it) trap though.
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Nov 29, 2015 14:45
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I wonder what happened in the occasional cycle when The Doctor gouged himself on a shard of glass when jumping out of the window or something similar.
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Nov 29, 2015 14:50
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I don't think it matters that much whether the location itself exists anywhere in space or not, it was very much an engineered and personal experience regardless.
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Nov 29, 2015 14:56
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Senor Tron posted:I wonder what happened in the occasional cycle when The Doctor gouged himself on a shard of glass when jumping out of the window or something similar. The entire thing was set up to create a constant situation. The Doctor always has the same memories and experiences, and he always responds the same way to the same stimuli. That stimuli (The rooms and the veil monster) never change because they're always resetting. It's a bit like re-watching a Who episode, it's always going to play out the same way. The only significant changes along the way are him noticing an increasingly large passage of time, presumably seeing more and more skulls, and the increasingly big hole in the diamond wall. To think of it another way, if you were in a groundhog day situation where you were constantly reliving the same day but you had no knowledge or memory to inform you that was the case, you'd do all the same stuff in the same way and at the same time. The Doctor just encounters enough clues to realize he is in a loop and uses that fact to beat a system that is very heavily rigged against him.
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Nov 29, 2015 15:11
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The first loop could potentially be different because he wouldn't get the 'bird' hint. You can imagine him coming up with the idea independently in room 12 though.
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Nov 29, 2015 15:21
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qntm posted:
It was a BBC co-production, so probably.
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Nov 29, 2015 15:25
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HappyCamperGL posted:It was a BBC co-production, so probably. They've used footage of McGann and Eric Roberts on the show, if they want to go there they absolutely can.
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Nov 29, 2015 15:39
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NowonSA posted:The entire thing was set up to create a constant situation. The Doctor always has the same memories and experiences, and he always responds the same way to the same stimuli. That stimuli (The rooms and the veil monster) never change because they're always resetting. It's a bit like re-watching a Who episode, it's always going to play out the same way. The only significant changes along the way are him noticing an increasingly large passage of time, presumably seeing more and more skulls, and the increasingly big hole in the diamond wall. It's very poor system if the eventual purpose of the castle is to interrogate the Doctor. He'll just give exactly the same answers each and every time. Now if the goal was to punish him eternally, it was working perfectly until he Brute forced it.
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Nov 29, 2015 15:45
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I don't think the groundhog loop was intentional on the part of the captors, it's something The Doctor instigated himself. Then again we don't know their motives right now.
Irony Be My Shield fucked around with this message at 16:18 on Nov 29, 2015 |
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Nov 29, 2015 15:57
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It's about willpower, not actual physics - it was a pocket dimension/simulation cut off from normal space. The Doctor could have simply given up, and not reset the teleporter, but he chose to continue the loop endlessly until he could break free. It was a great character piece.
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Nov 29, 2015 15:59
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Irony Be My Shield posted:I don't think the groundhog loop was intentional on the part of the captors, it's something The Doctor instigated himself. Then again we don't know their motives right nowm Yeah, the Doctor realized he could create a loop instead of caving in and telling his captors what they wanted. You could say he's one hell of a bird.
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Nov 29, 2015 16:08
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