The Doctor is coming, the Doctor is coming!!

Then that's all she would be - River's consciousness in a different body, with no reason whatsoever to suspect that her transplanted consciousness gives her new body remarkable longevity or physical toughness.

Whilst it's possible that Lem (which is Mel backwards...hmmm...) is a future incarnation of River Song - after all River Song was uploaded to a mainframe (and the church is the Papal mainframe), she has River's characteristics and acts towards the doctor much like River did - there is a flaw in the argument. Upon meeting the doctor, who it's assumed she's known for some time - she comments on his new body. River would have recognised him, surely?

Now if Lem had said "spoilers" at some point....

Kan' Sharuminar said:

Dalek Clara was one of those lives. There was no retconning involved with Clara's running about, and the episodes still stand as they are.

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It seems rather cruel to make her a Dalek, since she apparently didn't even know. From her pov she was on a spaceship and obsessed with souffle.

Kan' Sharuminar said:

Paradise Towers should never be considered a guilty pleasure: it's my favourite of the Seventh Doctor era.

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I think you may be the first person I've ever encountered online who admits to liking that episode. The monsters were ludicrous, but I loved the guest stars. Richard Briers played Tom in the Good Neighbors sitcom, one of the old women played Daisy in Keeping Up Appearances, and the leader of the Blue Kangs was/is married to Mark Strickson (Turlough).

And considering the hotel my friends and I often stayed at for the summer SF convention in Calgary had its swimming pool on the top floor, we'd all joke about elevators that go to the "pool in the sky" (that elevator was bizarre...).

I'm not sure of the argument here, beyond the fact they're all brilliant lines. This is a show that depends on being fantastical and imaginative, and shouldn't be held down by technicalities. It is trying to tell you a story.

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I think part of the problem is in the UK, Doctor Who is considered a children's show. In North America it's considered a show more for teenagers and adults. It would be nice if the show writers tried to inject a bit more adult-sounding technobabble (ie. I never had a problem with "reverse the polarity of the neutron flow").

As you like. As far as I'm concerned the earlier Doctor's weren't aware of her involvement except as much as a brief idea in their mind, and still won through with their genius and ingenuity. It doesn't require that much of a shift.

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The thing is, we've seen those old episodes, and for me that was over 30 years ago. I've seen them numerous times in most cases, and even have some of the dialogue memorized. I can separate the "Clara was here, too" nonsense, because I know how the original story was intended to be presented and what the audience was supposed to think about it. But you take a new fan, someone whose first Whovian experience was Eccleston onward, and when they see the Classic-era episodes, they'll be thinking, "Oh, yeah - Clara was here as well, saving everybody's <posterior>".

It's like Original Star Wars pre-Lucas tinkering vs post-Lucas tinkering. People who only saw the post-Lucas tinkering have a very different perception of the movies than someone who saw them in their original form in the theatre when they were first released.

And for my part: I'm not that fond of Clara's "Impossible Girl" storyline. I just don't see it being a big deal with regards to the original stories

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It just really, profoundly annoys me that they'd show a clip of Castrovalva and have Clara in the web where Adric was. That was an intense story - the Doctor was having trouble regenerating, Adric was acting strange, but was later revealed to have been captured by the Master and forced to work against the Doctor... I'm really not happy by even the merest suggestion that some decades-in-the-future Companion was also there.

(Okay, you might as well know that while Adric could be annoying at times, he's one of my favorite Companions)

Speaking as someone who has not seen the old episodes beyond a select few (including Adric's death)...I never got the impression "Clara was there" from Name of the Doctor. There were two stories going on at that point in time: the Doctor and his current companions adventuring in whatever the current story of the week was, and Clara battling the Great Intelligence off to the side as the Great Intelligence tries to interfere and undo the doctor's victories in those stories.

In some rare cases the two stories collided (eg, when the doctor noticed Clara), but at the end of the day, they were just two separate stories that happened to brush bast each other. The doctor's victories against whatever vilains he was battling remain his victories and his only; all Clara did was keep another quite unrelated villain from retconning those victories as having never happened.

Twelfth Doctor promotional image:

He needs a new tailor. Those pant legs are terrible.

The jacket's a nice nod to the Jon Pertwee era, though.

I have to agree - I don't like his trousers.

They look better than most of my trousers. I'm more worried by the alarming realisation that he looks just like Frank Skinner!

The top part isn't bad - in fact, somebody has already made a rather... energetic gif of him dancing.

The lower pant legs look like the material wasn't cut properly and they don't fit right.

Well, he usually seems to grab the first random outfit he finds on a coat hanger after regeneration, so it's a wonder his clothes ever fit him at all.

I'm not criticizing the Doctor for his clothing choices. I'm criticizing the BBC costumers. If somebody like me, who is a total klutz at sewing fabric, can tell when a garment isn't done right... they need to fix it.

I've watched this show since the revival, and I love it to death, but if BBC doesn't change the cut of his pant legs I'm afraid I'm going to have to stop watching for good.

Mark Gatiss said:

Capaldi's incarnation is "a more dangerous, more urgent Doctor. It has a side of crazy"

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Quote from next week's Radio Times (UK). I always get worried when I see this type of phraseology. I hope I'm worrying unnecessarily. Apparently we can expect a full run of episodes i.e. no split season sometime in the autumn.

A friend of mine from university is a screen writer. He is writing one of this autumn's episodes.

He had a great picture on Facebook recently of himself staring at a monitor in awe - watching the TARDIS doing something he'd written.

All of my contemporaries have gone on to do far more impressive stuff than I have!

Link to video.

Err, I mean:


Link to video.

Wait... 2,000 years? Am I misremembering something? I thought Smith Doctor said something around 1,400 years or so.

Plotinus said:

All of my contemporaries have gone on to do far more impressive stuff than I have!

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That's not true at all. How many of them can boast that they have the most successful series of theology threads on a computer gaming forum?

bhsup said:

Wait... 2,000 years? Am I misremembering something? I thought Smith Doctor said something around 1,400 years or so.

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Remember, the Smith Doctor always lies.

Valka D'Ur said:

That's not true at all. How many of them can boast that they have the most successful series of theology threads on a computer gaming forum? :good job:

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Thank you! None of them, I'm sure!

Valka D'Ur said:

Remember, the Smith Doctor always lies.

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And also he aged a lot of centuries in his final episode - he may have been the longest lived incarnation by the end. Plus, perhaps the Capaldi Doctor has had a few centuries of his own before uttering that line. You never know with the Doctor.

Plotinus said:

And also he aged a lot of centuries in his final episode - he may have been the longest lived incarnation by the end. Plus, perhaps the Capaldi Doctor has had a few centuries of his own before uttering that line. You never know with the Doctor.

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Yeah, he had 900 years on Trenzalore, plus a good 200 years in the arc of season 6. The 8th Doctor had 600 years on Orbis, but he could have lived longer since we don't have a great frame of reference for the events and his life or which ones of them actually "count" for purposes of the show. And then the War Doctor clearly ages a lot visibly in between Night and Day, but there's no clear timeframe provided, and Time Lord aging seems to work weirdly, since the Eleventh doesn't age at all during his 200 years of avoiding death but gets significantly older when stuck on Trenzalore. Perhaps it's affected by exposure to the vortex. The best explanation we'll get comes from Day of the Doctor, when the Eleventh Doctor admits he's too old to remember if he's lying about his age anymore.

But yeah, I've read the leaked scripts, and while I won't go into spoiler territory unless someone else who has once to chat about them, I will say I'm pretty pumped to see it visually realized. The Twelfth Doctor reminds me of the First in a lot of ways, while still seeming like a natural evolution of the Eleventh. The best episode was Listen, which could be Blink-caliber if it's pulled off right. The weakest was probably Robots of Sherwood, but my issues with it sound really nit-picky when I articulate them, and it promises to be a good bit of fun, if nothing else.

We're all off to the cinema, right? Everyone coming to Scotland to join me?

Doctor Who Opener to be Screened in Cinemas