Headscratchers / Doctor Who Series 8

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"Deep Breath"

• Why is Clara having such a hard time adjusting to the Doctor's regeneration, since she saw all his incarnations in "The Name of the Doctor"?
  • Well, she understood the concept of regeneration, but that's not to say she accepted it or was okay with it happening—we're very much in "Some new man goes sauntering away" territory here, it's just that it's the companion rather than the Doctor who can't help but think of the regeneration as a death. Especially given the stark contrast. If Eleven had regenerated into someone more like, say, Ten, she likely wouldn't have such a rough time of it, but instead he became someone who (as we can see quite quickly) is a darker, less personable Doctor. ~Celi
  • Oh, and Clara didn't see the Doctor's future incarnations—at that time, the Doctor was fated to die on Trenzalore.
  • We're talking about the woman who went through his entire time stream and saw every iteration of the Doctor that has existed thus far, who personally MET nine, ten, and ten 1/2, and who has had the whole regeneration thing explained to her multiple times. She should be the LAST person shocked by this. I'd understand it as a panic-in-the-moment kind of thing until she gets used to the new doctor, but even at the end she's treating him like a completely different person who she doesn't like or trust until she gets the phone-call from 11.
    • In "The Day of the Doctor" Clara met 10 and War, and already met 11, so what is meant by ten 1/2?
  • She wasn't shocked by the regeneration exactly. It was because she fancied him, no matter what she might say, and was overreacting because of it (and Eleven fancied her, too, judging by his comments.) Everyone always tries and takes the high ground in these kinds of situations but, be honest, if your boyfriend/girlfriend suddenly and visibly aged 30-40 years wouldn't you be on the verge of breaking? Like it or not, love is always half physical. Or to put it another way: Imagine if Tennant regenerated into Eccleston; would Rose have still fancied him? She certainly shows no sign of it beforehand.
  • Except Rose was uncomfortable/shocked when Nine first regenerated into Ten, probably because she had no idea what had happened. It would be equivalent if Clara had no idea that the Doctor was going to regenerate, but she did; it was just his age she was hung up on, which was why Vastra specifically mentioned that point. The problem is that she would have already seen the Doctor much older than he was... If she was okay fancying a guy she already knew to have appeared much older, why does it bother her for him to go back to how she first remembered him? Though that would ruin the whole episode being a vehicle for a middle finger to the ageist fans who were complaining that the Doctor wasn't a young guy anymore.
  • The above is basically it; it's not the regeneration itself that upset her, it's the fact that this man she thought she knew is now completely different. Even removing the shipping aspect, if someone you knew well and were incredibly close to suddenly became an entirely different person, it would throw you a bit no matter how much you were intellectually prepared for it. There's a difference between having knowledge of something and experiencing it directly firsthand.
  • Moreover, she'd only just seen Eleven aged nearly to death, and honestly believed until the very last minute that he was going to die permanently in "Time of the Doctor". For one brief conversation, she sees him young and well again, only for him to change again into a visibly-aged man. On some level, she'd already equated the Doctor becoming old with the Doctor being gone forever.
  • She also saw the First, the original form of the Doctor, and an old man (older than any other version other than the dying Eleventh). In fact, she has seen all of his 2000 years of life, by jumping into his timestream. Grieving over the "death" of Eleven would be fine, but her reaction is completely incoherent with what she has gone through on a very basic level, and this annoyed me greatly too. This episode would've made much more sense with Amy as a companion (even if it would remove the "boyfriend" thing), as she is the one who is familiar with only Eleven being the Doctor.
  • It was established in "The Day of the Doctor" that Clara only remembers "a bit" of her time in the timestream; apparently not even enough to recognize the Tenth or War Doctors on sight. In this case, it was kind of a combination of two things. 1) Even though she understood that he could regenerate, she had not experienced a regeneration first-hand. I understand that somebody could break into my house and try to rob me, but that doesn't mean that I would automatically know how to react in such a situation. When she met War and Ten, it wasn't for a terribly long time, and she made it clear then that they weren't "her" Doctor. She had no ties to them, because she effectively saw them as different people (not that one could blame her; seeing the Doctor interact with two strangers who look and act differently would give one the perception that he was interacting with two strangers who look and act differently, not literal copies of himself). She may be consciously aware of the fact that they are his past, but that's just it - they're the past. He has changed since then into the person that she has become attached to. She may not know about post-regenerative trauma and may not know why he was acting like he was. Plus, she had just been with him on Trenzalore when he told her that he once regenerated and kept the same face, and then she later saw that for herself when he regenerated on the clock tower but came out looking like... Matt Smith. So it's possible that she didn't know that those were unusual circumstances. And moreover, 2) she understood the concept of regeneration, but what threw her for a real loop was the fact that he got older. As I said, she's never experienced a regeneration first-hand. What reason would she have to think that he should go from young to old if he's being "renewed"? She saw War, yes, but she knew that he'd been in a high-stress war zone for his entire life and may have (correctly) assumed that he started out looking younger. In this case, she had just seen Eleven age tremendously over the time on Trenzalore, and she clearly didn't understand why he was starting out aged here. So there are a lot of factors present that could contribute to her mindset in this episode.
  • Eleven was sort of her "reference frame", she would've looked for traits of him in the others and done all of her heroic-sacrifice-ing with subconcious hopes that 'her' version would be safe and maybe even that she'd return to him in the end. Clara herself does give Vashtra a speech about how she understands this business and doesn't care what he looks like, but intellectually knowing is not the same as emotionally accepting. She's trying not to have a disconnect there, but it's there, that frustrates her, and she blames the guy that seems to be causing the frustration. Also, the message of this and the following episodes in general seems to be that no matter how much you know about them, you'll never be able to fully predict and control everybody about them. She's not a shallow girl who no longer loves him because he isn't pretty anymore; she's a control freak upset that a familiar person turned out harder to place than she expected after she thought she had him fully figured out - She could read Eleven's body language like an open book, now she has to readjust.
  • She's not having difficulty with the concept of regeneration, she's having difficulty facing the fact that "her" Doctor, Eleven, is gone and not coming back. She's not snubbing Twelve on purpose, she's upset that she's lost the Eleven she knew so well.
  • Clara's biggest concern might be highlighted when she's watching over Twelve napping in bed, and looking worried for him. She mentions that she's not sure whether the fact he looks older now is a sign the regeneration went well. In short, she's scared the older visage might point to the regeneration being botched and Twelve being ill. As Clara doesn't seem to know about the "post-regeneration madness" aspect of the whole thing, and looks genuinely stressed about the Doctor's behaviour before Vastra helps her calm him down and tuck him into bed, it's not at all surprising she might be scared that the regen went badly and the Doctor is suffering. If anything, Clara doesn't so much show annoyance at the change, as show worry and concern about whether everything's all right with her pal.
  • It's worthwhile to compare Clara's reaction with Rose's reaction when Ten starts to regenerate at the end of "The Stolen Earth". Rose reacts very much as if the Doctor is dying outright, even though she's *been through* a regeneration before and knows what to expect. Or, precisely because she's been through a regeneration before. She knows the Doctor will in many ways become a new man and her relationship with him will change.
  • When Clara looked into the War Doctor's eyes in "The Day of the Doctor", she could see that he was much younger than the other Doctors, but she may not have really understood yet in what way it was the same person. When she finally recognizes the new Doctor for who he is, it's by looking in his eyes; possibly she saw traces of the same man she'd seen in the War Doctor's eyes, much older, finally making the connection between them all.
• So the robots were the same kind as those aboard the spaceship in The Girl in the Fireplace? But in that episode the robots went crazy and started replacing the spaceship parts with human parts only because they were stranded in space, and had nothing else to use. However, the robots in this episode would have had all the inorganic raw materials they need, yet harvesting organs now seems to be their default mode? Does not compute.
  • You can't say the robots on the SS Madame de Pompadour had nothing but human parts to use, at least not by the time of the episode. The spatio-temporal hyperlinks gave them at least as much access to raw materials as the SS Marie Antoinette had but they still insisted on using people—or at least Reinette—for the repairs.
  • Okay, but if that's true, the question still remains: why were these robots programmed to use parts taken from living humans to repair things? If it had only happened with the robots of Madame de Pompadour, you could brush it off as a malfunction, but since the same happened with this other set of robots too, it seems to part of their basic programming. However, they were built and programmed by humans to help humans, so why introduce an element to their programming that can cause them to kill humans?
  • We don't know how widespread that bug was. All we can say is that it turned up on two sister ships (specifically noted in this episode that it is the Pompadour's sister ship) that had the same type of accident. For all we know those ships were purpose built, using the same code, and sent off together to explore strange new worlds and boldly split infinitives. Then they ran into a temporal anomaly, and the robots (for reasons of sloppy coding; good old GIGO) both defaulted to the same technique. It is entirely possible that this bug existed only on these two ships because they were paired.
  • For that matter, it's possible that the two ships were traveling in convoy when whatever mishap that disabled the Pompadour occurred. A control Droid on one of the ships suffered a malfunction that told it to using organic materials for repairs, and passed this instruction on to its counterpart on the other vessel. Both ships' crews were broken down for parts, but it wasn't enough to restore the vessels. The Marie attempted a time-jump to acquire the needed material for both ships, but crashed upon its arrival on Mesozoic Earth. The Pompadour's Droids, seeing that their sister ship hadn't come back, tried using time-windows instead of jumping their whole vessel into the past.
  • Remember that these Droids had been rebuilding themselves since the time of dinosaurs, and that incorporating parts of humans had led the Half Faced Man to acquire human qualities. Possibly, when they first arrived in the distant past, these Droids had begun incorporating Silurian tissues into their bodies, and inadvertently acquired the ancient Silurians' attitude towards hominids — namely, that they're livestock to be bred and slaughtered for meat — from their tissues. (Note that, when the Half-Faced Man says they'd repaired their ship with "you", he's addressing a group that includes Vastra.)
• Why was it left ambiguous whether or not the Doctor killed the cyborg guy? The Doctor doesn't have a "no killing" code like Superman, we've seen numerous times that he's perfectly willing to kill when necessary. And in this case he was fighting for his life (as well as the lives of his friends, if he realized stopping the head cyborg would stop the others). So why is it all of a sudden ambiguous whether or not he's a killer?
  • Because different doctors have had very different attitudes to killing, so the question here is if this particular doctor is a killer or not.
  • Even if a given Doctor is okay with killing, that doesn't mean that the cyborg killing himself isn't a morally preferable situation all around. Plus, the writers probably considered the mystery valuable in itself, such that "We don't want this Doctor to be a killer" isn't the only possible reason to leave it ambiguous.
• How did the dinosaur survive the trip through time vortex unharmed?
  • The Time Vortex isn't necessarily fatal; so long as you don't try to absorb the thing, it's survivable. It's not like she was going to lose her grip in transit, what with the TARDIS stuck in her throat and all.
  • Probably the same way that Clara survived being exposed to the Time Vortex in the previous episode: The TARDIS reflexively extended its force field.

"Into the Dalek"

• Why did the other Daleks let Rusty kill them without firing a single shot at it? Sure, it must be shocking to see one of your own turn against you, but are the Daleks really so inefficient they couldn't process this new information and try to shoot Rusty back?
  • I'm pretty sure at least one of them started to say "exterminate" or something, but was blown up. Even if they didn't, Daleks don't really seem to kill Daleks unless they're impure or something. In this case, I think they were just surprised and were struggling to understand why a Dalek (who they were sort of coming to save) would start killing them. It probably takes something drastic to make a Dalek kill another and these just couldn't react in time. I mean, when they had that planet full of insane Daleks, I'm sure it would have been better for them to be wiped out, but the 'sane' Daleks didn't want to kill them (and probably viewed them as being fantastic, if uncontrollable Daleks). They also seem to need ordered to do a lot of things and maybe found it difficult to attack without a superiorly ranked Dalek saying "stop killing humans, start killing that Dalek!"
    • EXPLAIN! EXPLAIN! EXPLAIN!
  • Rusty also had an automatic sort of weapon, meaning that he Fire a lot faster than the other ones could.
  • The "Magician's Apprentice"/"Witch's Familiar" two-parter would later reveal that Dalek weaponry requires the Dalek to focus its own anger and hatred in order to activate. The other Daleks were more baffled than enraged by Rusty's behavior, at least for the split second it took Rusty to get the drop on them.
• Why is the Doctor so insistent that a 'good' Dalek cannot exist? Hasn't he met a fair few in his time? Alpha, Beta and Omega, Dalek Sec, Dalek Caan, Oswin, etc.
  • None of those really qualify as "good Daleks" in any proper sense. Alpha, Beta, and Omega were given the Human Factor, Sec turned himself into a human hybrid, Oswin was transitioning from human to Dalek and her ability to resist is shown breaking down at the end. They're not really good 'Daleks' in the same way a mule isn't really a horse. And Caan is legitimately insane rather than 'good'.
  • Even just in the new series, there very many, many scenes where the Doctor tries to reason with the Daleks or Davros (a good example being the Manhattan Two-Parter and his offer to Caan at the end), and every time he spared them, they went on to do more bad things, costing him Donna among other things and people. Of course he's jaded by now, especially after spending centuries battling them on Trenzalore.
• How did they enter the eye? Isn't it solid glass? Or at least, something solid?
  • Apparently not. That glowing curtain of light that they pass through upon leaving the shrunken capsule? That was the same blue dot that's in the center of a Dalek eyestalk.
• The antibodies are attracted to weapons and grappling hooks, but otherwise ignore intrusions until the systems are being directly tampered with. Does being invaded my miniturized enemy soldiers seriously come up that often? It seems like they'd be worthless for any other scenario, like an insect infestation.
  • Probably because when Davros created the Daleks he was too arrogant to think of things like insect infestations causing his creation problems, but totally insane enough to seriously consider miniaturised soldiers.
  • Daleks use nanotechnology themselves to convert their enemies into drones, so their "antibodies" are probably programmed to hunt down and destroy other races' weaponized nanites. The soldiers' mechanical equipment was similar enough to such nanites to trip Rusty's defense systems. Biological threats like bacteria or insects, a Dalek would probably deal with by heating the infested compartments of its battle shell or flushing them with radiation, not by hunting them down individually with antibodies.

"Robot of Sherwood"

• Are the robots really stupid enough to launch their ship into air without having enough gold, even though this means it won't reach escape velocity, so it will explode? And even they are that stupid, shouldn't the ship itself have some safety measures, so it won't launch until there's enough gold?
  • Using gold in the first place was pure improvisation on the robots' part, because they couldn't acquire the proper materials to repair their vessel in the 12th century. And considering that even managing to improvise was remarkable for a bunch of robots: yes, they really are that stupid, or at least that single-minded.
  • Perhaps the robots did not realize that the arrow had been stolen, and thus included it in their calculations. It would explain why they were only *just* able to reach orbit — they took off as soon as they thought they had enough gold. Once the Doctor, Robin, and Clara shot the arrow up to them, they *did* have enough gold, so it being included in their math seems likely.
• When the golden arrow hits the ship, it now has enough power to reach space. So why does it explode anyway on Earth's orbit?
  • No amount of gold would have been sufficient, since the engines were so damaged it would have exploded whatever happened - they were leaking radiation everywhere. The robots didn't realise this, and thought they could fix it with enough gold.
  • Lift and explodeyness are two separate problems. The ship is going to explode because of the faulty engines and also the engines are not going to be able to deliver enough lift to gain orbit. The Doctor can fix the problem of not being able to gain orbit, but nothing can stop the explosion. It was just a question of where the explosion happened.
• If Robin Hood was not a robot or a simulation, how was he able to split multiple arrows in the archery contest? As proven by The Mythbusters, the Splitting the Arrow trick is physically impossible to do as it's done in the Robin Hood legend, and in this episode. Even the Doctor had to cheat to pull it off.
  • He's just that good. Also, no one watches Mythbusters in 12thC England, so he doesn't know it won't work.
  • Because he is the Robin Hood legend. The whole point is that the legend, in this case, is entirely true, no matter how absurd or implausible it seems. Granted, it's completely physically impossible, but then so's housing a massive spaceship and time machine within the confines of a telephone booth, so if we can stretch our willing suspension of disbelief to accept the Doctor's TARDIS despite the fact that it's completely physically impossible, then we can (or should) accept Robin's ability to split an arrow despite it also being completely physically impossible. As Robin says to the Doctor, they're both just as real as each other, and that includes the utterly impossible things they can both do.
  • Also, the real impressive feat is not that he split an arrow in half with another arrow. The impressive feat is that he hit the center of an arrow with another arrow.
  • I saw another similar show test it out, and they determined it actually was possible, just incredibly unlikely. After around thirty tries the expert archer they got managed to split one arrow with another (though not the whole way down) as Robin Hood is the best archer in England, at a time when boys were trained to be archers from around seven, I guess we can assume he is just that good.
• Why was the Doctor so dead set that Robin Hood was a fake? From the very beginning he's adamant that there never was a Robin Hood as if he has some underlying reason to think that way (such as looking for him previously and finding he was just a story). But since we find out that it really was the real Robin Hood, just what gave him the impression that despite how many human myths he finds out are real, this one in particular just has to be fake despite the extensive testing he performs that comes out positive?
  • Because he hasn't previously found out that other human myths are "real": he's previously found out that hundreds of other human myths are just confused natives' ignorant interpretations of past alien encounters. He doesn't credence the idea that the Robin Hood legend could be Exactly What It Says on the Tin - the tale of a purely human outlaw's selfless heroism - rather than some alien "Scooby-Doo" Hoax.
  • It doesn’t even have to be that far along. He would only need one reason to doubt it, and no reasons to believe it. While he has not seen everything that way, he has seen more than enough to convince him. And as we see, the Doctor can be wrong.
• Why is the episode titled "Robot" of Sherwood when there was more than one robot?
  • Parallelism to "Robin of Sherwood", no doubt. Possibly also because the pressing question throughout the episode was less about how many robots and more about whether Robin was himself one.
  • It actually started development as "Robots of Sherwood" the name change dropping the S came later. For Executive Meddling's sake.
• Why was there a gold arrow at the archery contest when the robots needed the gold?
  • Because the Sheriff wasn't intending to give it away, he wanted to lure Robin Hood there.
  • The Merry Men explicitly say they nicked it in the confusion too.

"Listen"

• The Doctor is determined to solve the mystery of what hides in the darkness under the bed... but he already knows that the Vashta Nerada are monsters that hide in the shadows. Why would he think there's another one?
  • As far as we know, Vashta Nerada can't write on a chalkboard, which is what got the Doctor spooked and suspicious in the first place.
  • Because Vashta Nerada under a child's bed would've come out and eaten the child, leaving nobody to tell stories about the monster under the bed.
  • The universe is vast. Many different species could share similar traits. And the Doctor was also curious about why people speak aloud when they are alone. Really, he was just trying to determine whether or not his theoretical "perfect hiders" actually existed. He was looking for something specific.
  • If the Vashta Nerada were perfect hiders, then logically even the Doctor wouldn't know they existed. He does know about them, ergo their hiding ability is not perfect.
• I thought TARDISes weren't able to travel into Gallifrey's past?
  • Could the Moment's actions have altered the locks on the TARDIS?
  • Stable Time Loop forcing the TARDIS to break its normal rules, seeing as without it she probably won't be saved?
  • The Doctor mentioned that the safe-guards were turned off in the TARDIS earlier. Safeguards regarding Gallifrey's past must have been among them.
  • We already know that traveling through someone's personal timeline can bypass the time lock on Gallifrey, as one of Clara's duplicates got there to help One choose the right TARDIS. Twelve seems to have adapted the TARDIS to navigate by the same means, without the inconvenience of being shattered into thousands of copies of one's self.
  • Adding onto this, we have never seen the TARDIS (specifically the Doctor's, which is outdated (and therefore probably has inferior security features) and was stolen from a repair shop) piloted telepathically instead of mechanically before, no less with the safeguards deactivated. It already went one place that it wasn't supposed to (the end of the universe), why not another?
  • Who said that was necessarily on Gallifrey?
  • Indeed. The sky was not burnt orange in the clip from The Day of the Doctor; it could be a sister planet or moon that the Doctor lived on for a time as a child.
  • Or maybe Gallifrey's sky varies in color depending on the weather and time of day, same as Earth's.
  • It's entirely possible that the barn was not on Gallifrey. There's no evidence of the Dalek blockade in the sky, or the Sky Trenches seen in The Last Day. The Moment may not have operated as a bomb to explode on Gallifrey's surface, but a projectile, such as the Death Star's super laser, for instance.
  • Or maybe Gallifrey's natural sky color is blue, as could be expected for a planet with an Earth-like composition to its atmosphere, but it's appeared orange up to now because of the Transduction Barrier: a defense which, like the Sky Trenches, has already fallen by "Day of the Doctor". It'd be poetically ironic if the Doctor and his fellow Time Lords had never actually seen what their own world's sky looked like until their home planet was on the brink of annihilation.
• If the "silent companion" meant to reference Clara, why did the Doctor talk as if everyone had them? What was the point of everyone having the dream of someone grabbing their ankle when they step out of bed? What was under that damned blanket? What was trying to get into the TARDIS? Seriously, was this episode an entire accidental What Happened to the Mouse? or was writing everything off as "maybe, maybe not" just good enough that day?
  • "Maybe, maybe not" was more than "just good enough that day"; it was sort of the entire point of the episode. Whether there's actually a perfect hider or not there are answers both ways. As the Doctor says, the thing under the blanket could be the thing he's looking for or it could just be another kid trying to play a trick and deciding that it was better to take the free pass to leave rather than get in trouble with the two adults that were unexpectedly there. The noises at the end of the universe could—again, as the Doctor suggests—basically "pipes banging", pressure equalising, the hall cooling, and a pressure lock on automatic after it's been released. As for the dream that everyone has, it's possible for everyone to have the same dream without having a basis in reality; in fact, this pretty much is the case in reality. Maybe there's actually a creature, maybe the Doctor is playing up the importance of something unimportant because of his experience as a kid. The entire point of the episode is "maybe, maybe not" and resolving it either way would have been rather silly.
  • Ultimately, the episode was about dealing with fear, not dealing with either monsters or bratty kids pretending to be monsters. Fear is something that must be coped with, irregardless of whether or not it's all in one's imagination.
• It was shown in The Rings of Akhaten that the Doctor followed Clara's entire history, including her childhood, in an attempt to figure out the mystery of her multiple existences. So why would he think that she'd be in a children's home?
  • This might be kind of a lame explanation, but that was over 900 years ago from the doctor's point of view, maybe he just forgot. Like how he'd forgotten the clockwork robots in Deep Breath. (But then again, he remembered Tegan the "gobby Australian" perfectly well, and that was over 1,300 years ago from the Doctor's point of view.)
  • Another slightly lame explanation might be that as Clara's mother died, he might have presumed she'd been taken into care for a while after that. Except, of course, that Clara was born on November 23, 1986, and her mother died on March 5, 2005.
    • Some children's homes weren't just for orphans and children with problems. Occasionally they would take in kids for short periods for fees, simply to give them a place to stay while their parents were traveling, in hospital, incarcerated, or otherwise unavailable. We don't know what Dave or Ellie did for a living, so possibly the Doctor suspected they'd had to leave little Clara behind while traveling overseas for work.
  • A related question is why the Doctor ignored Clara when she told him in so many words that this was NOT her childhood memory — especially since he had just finished (1) warning Clara not to get distracted and (2) dismissing the idea that a ringing phone might distract her. Why didn't he abort the minute her phone started ringing?
  
  Clara: I never lived in either an orphanage or Gloucester.
  The Doctor: Come to think of it, you're right. I even met your parents and talked with you while you were swinging on a swingset. In Blackpool. Then I saw you again with your father when your mother died in 2005, roughly 13 years from when we are now. In Blackpool. Then I came for Christmas with you and your still-living father and your still-living grandmother, presumably in Blackpool, although it looked a lot like the council estate in "Night Terrors." Your grandmother liked the way I looked naked. Something has gone wrong; let's get out of here.
  • When has the Doctor EVER decided, "We shouldn't be here; let's leave"?
• In this episode, Orson Pink lands on the last planet in existence, at the very end of the universe. However, in "Hell Bent", it seems that the last planet that remains at the end of the universe is Gallifrey. So does this mean that the planet Orson Pink lands on is Gallifrey?
  • More likely, it's the last planet not counting Gallifrey, which the Time Lords left shielded from harm and thus inaccessible to intrusion by primitive human time-travel technology.
• If we suppose the hypothetical creatures of "Listen" are real, then why are they scary? Consider, the creatures the Doctor supposes don't seem malevolent. The one in Rupert/Danny's bedroom actually left peacefully when asked. When was the last time that worked on Doctor Who? What's more, the dream, recounted through human history, is recorded by the dreamers, meaning they survived the encounter unharmed (or they would have known it wasn't a dream). These hypothetical creatures seem to have no ill will. In fact, Clara's interactions with the young first Doctor present a very real possibility that the unseen creatures could mean well, and only want to observe us.
  • It's still pretty creepy that these things are always watching us, and we never see them. We're afraid when we turn around and see something written on the wall, when we thought we were alone. We are afraid of the unknown. They're creepy little stalkers, basically.
• The Doctor says that a dream where someone's hand comes from under your bed and grabs your leg is an universal phenomenon that's recurred throughout human history. But as a time traveler he should know that for most of human history, the majority of people haven't had the sort of solid, elevated beds that would allow something to hide underneath them – and a large number of humans still don't have them in the 2010s. How can such a dream be as common as the Doctor claims, then?
  • The idea of having one's ankle grabbed in the dark would still apply, even for people who sleep on mats on the floor. They'd simply dream of something seizing their ankles after they're standing, having woken up to investigate a noise or go take a leak or whatever.
  • Or of having their foot grabbed because it slipped out from under the blanket.

"Time Heist"

• The Doctor is a time traveller, and it seems the Bank of Karabraxos was the most famous bank in the universe. So wouldn't he have known it was destroyed in a solar storm in 2014?
  • The Doctor has always been indifferent towards money, and the Solar Storm seems to be a natural event so there is nothing he would consider exciting in its destruction. It is probably just one of those things he was vaguely aware of having happened but because it didn't impinge on any of the things that do interest him, he doesn't really know much about it. The universe is full of great institutions rising and falling, in and of itself it is not an attention grabbing thing.
  • For that matter, the fact that old dying Karabraxos has to tell him she was once the richest person in the universe suggests she and the bank have never been particularly famous, just known to the right (ultra-super-mega-rich) people.
  • He only knew about the bank because she told him about it, when she called him to ask for his help. She had to explain what exactly the job would entail.
  • He clearly knew about it since his plan hinged on it. But it's probably not 2014—augmented and mutated off-world humans probably aren't around at that point—and, thanks to the memory worm and the whole 'traveling through time' thing he can't know *when* it is while pulling off the heist.
  • There's a mention near the end of "all our facilities", which implies there are other branches of the Bank of Karabraxos all over the universe. The branch where the robbery took place was its headquarters and the location of its most secure vaults, but the corporation presumably remained in operation after the storm, albeit much-reduced in prestige and finances.
• At the end, the Doctor implies that the two Tellers will be happier in the mentally-quiet peace of an uncrowded planet. But if they feed on thoughts/brains, won't that make them hungry, or even starve?
  • Perhaps the mindreading/mind-eating is only a defense mechanism, not a preferred basis of carnivory, and the male Teller's condition was similar to forcing an animal to survive solely by licking your floor clean.
  • They can probably feed from non-sapient animals.
• The Doctor says that they couldn't use the TARDIS to get into the vault because there's a solar storm going on at that moment which prevents TARDIS travel. But why couldn't they use the TARDIS the day before the storm, thus bypassing all the security?
  • Because then the Doctor would not have gotten caught and be able to give his number to Karabraxos and been asked to do the heist in the first place (Moffat loves his ontological paradoxes).
  • Also, it appears that Karabraxos actually lives in the vault. Up until the solar-flare evacuation, there wouldn't have been any opportunity to land the TARDIS there without its resident summoning the guards.
• When the Teller confronts the Doctor in the vault, why doesn't it eat his brain? Why does he bring him back for a little chat with the security chief? He didn't do that with any of his other targets.
  • Considering just how powerful the Doctor's brain is, its entirely possible it had already taken more than it had even eaten before when it stopped, but that was still less than one per cent gone for the Doctor.
  • He and Clara had presumably made it far enough into the bank to spark the director's curiosity as to how they'd managed it, and who'd put them up to making the attempt.
• Why did they have to erase their memories? It was said they did it to reduce their "guilt" and mask it so the Teller wouldn't find them as easily, but when it's revealed what their mission is, is "guilt" really the right word? They're there with the blessing of the owner's future self, on a rescue mission to save an endangered species. The Teller's species. Does that really qualify as feelings of "guilt"? And would the Teller even attack them if it knew why they were there?
  • It's suggested that Karabraxos is linked to the Teller's mind, so would be instantly alerted if her enslaved guard-alien suddenly got excited about the realization that someone is trying to rescue the pair of them. In which case, she'd call in her non-Teller security guards to capture the would-be robbers, while keeping the Teller himself from intervening by threatening his mate, same as she compels him to work for her. Only after she's left the vault is it safe for the Doctor to let the Teller dig out their true agenda.
  • Clara and the Doctor wouldn't feel guilty about breaking into a bank to save the last of a Dying Race from enslavement. But Psi and Saibra are robbing the bank for personal gain, albeit of a non-monetary kind.
  • "Guilt", in this context, specifically means "having a desire to rob the Bank of Karabraxos", not "feeling you're doing a bad thing" or "being guilty of crime". Karabraxos wouldn't want people who are Just Like Robin Hood to be able to bypass the Teller because they're stealing for a good cause, nor for the likes of the Harmony and Redemption's clientele - i.e. evil but incredibly rich people - to refrain from doing their banking there.
• Why did the Doctor, as the Architect, disguise the teleport devices as shredders instead of just letting everyone know the're teleport devices? What if one of them had decided to take his chances with the Teller rather than choose certain death by shredder? If the Doctor was afraid that, had the teleport devices been clearly marked as such, Psi or Saibra might chicken out and use teleport away too early, he could've simply revealed what their prices for the heist were at an earlier point to encourage them to continue. As such, the Doctor's entire plan hinges on the Contrived Coincidence that they just happen to witness the Teller squishing the brain of someone else, and seeing this will encourage them to use the shredder instead of facing the Teller. If they'd missed seeing the Teller in action (which would've happened if they'd arrived five minutes earlier or later), they probably wouldn't have connected the cells with people with caved-in skulls to the alien roaming the premise, so it's quite likely they wouldn't have used the shredder until it was too late.

"The Caretaker"

• So Danny's not a PE teacher? But his first scene is him teaching PE.
  • That wasn't PE. That was, as their shirts said in that scene, the "Coal Hill Cadet Squad".

"Kill the Moon"

• If the Moon's changing mass has taken out satellite communications, then just how much of the planet would Clara's message have actually reached? How many cities would have been on the wrong side of the planet to hear her, and thus have their lights on as normal? And how many major power plants are close enough to coastlines that they were taken out by flooding? Enough to cause a cascade, taking out others?
  • All of which leaves aside the problems of (a) how they'd see everyone at once, and (b) the fact that the entire planet en masse voted to execute the creature in under an hour. You can't get all humanity to do anything as a group in 45 minutes.
  • No, but maybe all the power plant managers. Which would explain why the lights go off in huge chunks the size of countries at a time.
  • Or maybe by that era, the electrical grids are all centrally-controlled, and equipped to be switched off en masse in response to an emergency that could damage a live grid (e.g. an EMP pulse or massive solar disturbance).
  • Or more alternatively, the governments of the world got in touch with each other after receiving Clara's message, deliberated a vote, and then expressed that vote using the lights on the side of the Earth that was visible from the moon. Regular citizens likely wouldn't get any say in a situation like this anyway. I don't think even Clara's intention was to judge by the majority of porch lights still on.
• So, the world is no longer interested in space, and yet Mexico had a moon mining expedition? How does that make sense?
  • Most of the world. People just say "the world" out of convenience. It's like saying "everyone likes ice cream" even though there's people who don't.
  • They did say the Mexican outpost had been abandoned for years, having found no mineral wealth there.
    • It wasn't abandoned. They were there when the moon's gravity suddenly increased, and we see at least one webbed up by a spider-bacteria.
• What kind of a life form lays an egg immediately after it's been born? And how could it lay an egg that was roughly the same size as the old moon, even though the alien itself was smaller than the moon (since it fit inside it)? How is that physically possible?
  • Aphids can be born pregnant, for one. And as for the moon, the "new" moon wasn't as big as the old moon; it was considerably smaller◊ (although granted, still bigger than the creature itself - perhaps there was a simple graphics limitation or mistake?).
  • The new moon could be smaller than the creature and still look the same size from Earth's surface if it's orbiting closer than the old one. The real moon has moved farther and farther from the Earth over millions of years; the new moon-egg can start out near and move outward as the new embryo grows.
  • Possibly the creature can convert solar energy stored up during its long gestation into matter, which would also explain how it could gain mass without eating anything. (Hey, weirder things happen all the time in the Whoniverse.) As for it laying an egg right after it's born, the real discrepancy is why it would go on living after it's reproduced? Possibly it isn't actually content to be a Single Specimen Species, and it flew off to lay another egg around Venus or Mars, rather than leaving two eggs orbiting the same planet where they might collide with one another.
• But that still raises another question: in all the times the Doctor and his companions have traveled to the future (beyond 2049), how come none of them have noticed the moon is considerably smaller than it was in the 20th and early 21st century?
  • It's not like the Doctor and co. actively look at the moon and decides to measure it. Most of his involvements on Earth is to either have fun or stop the alien invasion/Apocalypse he doesn't have time to look at the moon and think "Hey that moon looks smaller than I remember".
  • Perspective does funny things to the Moon's apparent size even in Real Life: it looks considerably bigger when it's near the horizon than when it's high overhead. The size change might not be all that conspicuous, although the sudden absence of markings on its surface (since the new egg hasn't been sprinkled with debris from meteorite impacts, etc) would certainly be a giveaway. That's assuming the newly-interested-in-spaceflight humanity didn't decide to paint the darned thing to match the previous Moon, same as their descendants moved Earth's continents back into their historical positions a few billion years later.
  • I got the impression that the original moon had been growing in recent years, hence the surface beginning to crack. The creature inside was getting bigger. So on that, I figured that the "new" moon was the same size as the original one had been before it began to hatch.
• Clara is as much an outsider to this time as the Doctor; she didn't suffer through the misery and death the tidal shifts caused. If he felt the need to stay out of the decision, why did he let her stay?
  • It's still Clara's home planet, and Courtney's too, so they surely have as much of a say in its fate as he'd ever had in Gallifrey's. Also, the year is only 2049. The Doctor probably figured that Clara would eventually settle down on Earth once she'd had enough of exploring the universe, so she's probably living down there as a senior citizen.
    • Clara and Courtney haven't lived through the disasters. They haven't seen the mounting death tolls and watched their loved ones die over years as the world falls apart. So no, they have no right to override the decisions of the people from that time.

"Mummy on the Orient Express"

• What would happen to the soldier if the flag on the wall is destroyed? (Not necessarily during this episode.)
  • Probably nothing. He'd just have kept on fighting, because it's the tech inside his body that was making him do so, not a piece of cloth. He'd have stayed in the same place rather than following the flag around, however.
• If the Foretold is an ancient soldier, why is he dressed in embalming wrappers?
  • Simple: That isn't his funeral wrap. Those are his bandages after whatever burned off his skin.
• What would have happened if a passenger marked for death killed themselves before their 66 seconds were up?
  • Presumably the Mummy would have detected that they no longer had energy to drain and simply moved on to another target.
  • Considering how it's a soldier controlled even in death by cybernetic implants, it's probably equipped to switch targets in the event that its current target gets hit by some other attack before it can reach them.
  • It would switch just as it does when the Doctor somehow injects himself with Maisie's mental problems.
• We find out what the Foretold is after is energy, but it's never explained why it goes after the physically or mentally weak first? You'd think these people have less energy than healthy ones? In the previous experiments with the Foretold it eventually killed everyone on board, so it doesn't seem like it has trouble killing healthy folks just the same as ill ones. So there's doesn't seem to be any logic to its preferred order of killings. The Foretold's nature as a soldier doesn't explain it either, because a soldier would presumably first try to get rid of the most dangerous (and therefore most healthy) enemies, not harmless 100-year old grannies.
  • It's not the first time that it's been set loose on a group of scientists and one group partially figured it out before all dying or getting killed off, picking off the weakest people around the scientists would make this group of scientists panic and less likely to figure anything out about it, without the doctor they would've failed just like all the others.
  • Killing random people in the train is gonna make the others panic anyway, I don't see how the panic would be dependent or whether or not they are weak. Also, people actually got less panicky when they figured out the pattern to the mummy's killings. If it had killed people truly at random, that would've actually increased the panic, since anyone could be the next victim.
  • The fact it only killed those soon about to die, quick and painless I might add, it seems this Mummy may be more merciful than we think. In fact, maybe it had PTSD and wanted to put these people out of their misery while still gaining its desired goal of absorbing their life force.
  • It may have been compelled to kill, but the Mummy still had the ability to choose the victim. It was making the most merciful choice it could while still carrying out its orders. As the Doctor put it...
    "Sometimes the only choices you have are bad ones but you still have to choose"
  • The mercy thing would explain killing the old woman, but there's no indication that the guy with bionic lungs or the woman with some psychological issues are "soon about to die"; for all we know they could live just as long as any other person on the train. And it was never said the mummy picked people about to die, the Doctor only states that it picks weak people first.
  • Given that the Foretold's cybernetic heart was directing its actions, presumably its programmers wanted to target the weakest enemies first, pick off the strong ones' backup.
  • Perhaps the cybernetic heart has concluded that the Foretold is weak, and so it's safest to choose targets who are least likely to fight back. (Of course, the Foretold is invincible against conventional weapons, but maybe the heart isn't thinking straight.)
  • Or possibly the Foretold was originally more of an assassin than an infantry soldier, as evidenced by its stealth capabilities. If it was originally used to slip past an enemy force's heavily-armed grunt troops and take out their lightly-armed commanders, then it may have simply designated the train's less-healthy passengers as "enemy officers" by comparison with the fit ones.
  • That explanation doesn't make much sense either: for example, the Foretold kills Quell because he can somehow sense Quell's PTSD, but grunts are much more likely to suffer from PTSD than officers, who stay behind the front lines and don't take part in the action. And for the same reason grunts are more likely to suffer from all sorts of injuries than officers, who'd probably be healthier.
  • The Foretold itself is an enhanced Super-Soldier, so presumably the grunts it'd be ordered to bypass when it went for the enemy commanders would've been enhanced as well, i.e. a lot stronger and hardier than their un-tinkered-with (or only mentally enhanced) superiors.
• How did the Doctor figure out the 66 second thing from video of the first murder? The old woman didn't react to the Foretold until the on-screen clock shows 50 seconds.
  • Wasn't the 66 seconds already known in the legends that he discussed with the professor of mythology.
  • Yes, the mythology professor mentioned that. Also, he timed it from when the lights flickered, not from when she first reacted.
• How did the idea that saying the right phrase would cause the Foretold to spare someone's life become part of the legend? When the Doctor figured it out and said "We surrender", the creature quit killing people and disintegrated, suggesting that if anyone had said the right thing to make it stop before now, the mummy would've been laid to rest long ago.
  • It's possible that there is another combination of words merely makes it spare the person that says them - perhaps merely saying "I surrender" or words close enough to that (which someone panicking for their life may well do by accident) would have this effect. Because no one had realised what the Foretold actually was, it wouldn't be clear what exactly the survivor had said right to be spared, until the Doctor was able to work out how to get it to stand down entirely.
  • Perhaps the Doctor later ends up at the point in time when the legend first started being told, and ended up talking about how he defeated it with "just two words."
  • Or maybe there's more than one Foretold. Whatever military force the Orient Express mummy had served, it might not be the only wounded soldier to have been subjected to such extreme and stubborn medical procedures, that trapped them in a half-life long after their cause was forgotten. Each such walking-wounded soldier would be called up in turn to defend their flag, until such time that a victim hit upon the "We/I surrender!" escape clause. So long as the tattered flag's treatment by the attacks' survivors remained respectful, that would be the end of it; however, in time the story of "the Foretold" would be dismissed as myth, and new attempts to study the old rag would be interpreted by the next soldier-mummy's implants as a resumption of hostilities.

"Flatline"

• How in the world did that kid (Rigsby? I think that was it) create such a convincing replica of a door using a single can of black paint in a matter of minutes?
  • The name Rigsy, not Rigsby. That could just be autocorrect.
  • It didn't have to be that realistic to fool the Boneless, as their ability to perceive things in our 3D universe was probably just as sloppy and inexperienced as their ability to replicate a 3D human body. Also, he probably had a paintbrush in his pocket left over from his community-service, that he could use to touch up the sprayed image wherever crisp edges were needed (e.g. the edges of the wheel that opens the "door"). And working fast is an important knack for any graffiti artist who's working where tagging is illegal or places you at risk of being run over, like in a train yard.
• How did jumping out of that train not kill Clara and Rigsby?
  • It wasn't moving fast enough to kill someone if they jumped off.
• Why did the Boneless' influence cause the TARDIS to shrink, when their effect on everything and everyone else was to turn them two-dimensional?
  • The TARDIS is dimensionally transcendental, which is why it's bigger on the inside. The Boneless were warping the dimensions so the dimension circuits were reducing the size of the outside in a similar (but opposite) way to the huge TARDIS in "The Name of the Doctor".
  • The TARDIS exterior requires energy to make the exterior a certain size, the Boneless were somehow draining the energy making the TARDIS smaller the more energy got drained.
  • To be specific, they were constantly removing the internal dimensions of the TARDIS, and she was using up her energy to put them back instantly and keep the Doctor and everything else inside her from being flattened. Having less and less energy to spare, the old girl cut back on how much went into manifesting an exterior, so that exterior kept shrinking and eventually (in siege mode) lost its chameleon-circuit camouflage.
• Why did the overseer suddenly try to nick the TARDIS from Clara?
  • Seems like he was a designated Hate Sink since it's easy to hate what the Boneless did but there's no obvious individuals to direct hate towards. In Universe, he's a stupid Jerkass who probably figured the Doctor was giving Clara instructions and tried to leave the others for dead.
  • He didn't, he tried to nick the Toodis (which you can then see him struggling with Rigsby for), and the TARDIS was knocked away in the process.
• A minor one: at one point, Clara appears to be able to scramble the Doctor's reception of what she sees by waving the Sonic Screwdriver in front of the mirror she was looking into. How is that supposed to work?
  • There's nanotech connected to her optic nerves, bouncing the beam off the mirror into her eyes would make it disrupt the nanotech's reception.
  • Basically, mirrors reflect everything.

"In the Forest of the Night"

• Even if we accept the incorrect science stated in the episode that solar flares are fire (when in fact they are radiation), there are still problems... The magical "oxygen pillow" created by the trees stopped the flare from reaching Earth's surface, but wouldn't the heat created by the Earth's whole atmosphere burning still have grilled every living being on the planet?
  • That solar flare shouldn't even have reached the Earth's atmosphere, since fire requires oxygen to burn, but we don't have that in space, do we? This is a case where the writer probably felt cleverer than they were, and wasn't going to do any amount of research, because who does that if there's a clever idea for an episode? It doesn't matter that not even a single detail was right with this episode. The only way to stop that fire would've been to somehow remove all the oxygen from the Earth for a limited time, but that would've been quite dangerous and less dramatic, not to mention how this solar fire thingy can travel in space. The only explanation I can think of is that the episode operates under the assumption that it is the flame itself that hurts, not the heat it generates.
  • Also this episode, I think, is meant to be mysterious even for the Doctor. It's like we've met the nice variation of the fairies from Torchwood and they use their strange powers to protect the earth. Essentially, it's magic or as close as the Doctor Who universe gets. The solar flare might be something a little mysterious as well but I think my theory at least describes the trees and why it seems that the death count was remarkably low. Yes there were negative side effects but the fairy like things were trying their best to save the planet as a whole.
  • Perhaps the "fire" imagery was just a visual metaphor for radiation, and the oxygen wasn't a shield, but a byproduct of the trees' real purpose ... namely, to convert the sun's energies to sugar via an augmented and hyper-accelerated variant of photosynthesis. If the "faerie" creatures enhanced the trees' normal ability to absorb visible light as a metabolic energy source to operate on any form of electromagnetic radiation, they could have hypothetically reduced the radiation levels to something survivable. The Doctor mistook the oxygen generated by all that super-photosynthesis for a shield, when it was actually a waste product from the trees' point of view.
• Wouldn't huge trees appearing everywhere cause massive amount of carnage in traffic alone? Not to mention the deaths caused by the infrastructure falling, when patients can't make it to hospitals, food and medication can't be delivered to people who need it, etc... I guess this is preferable to the whole Earth being destroyed, but it's still weird that no deaths are mentioned? The news reports seen in the episode seem to treat the magical forestation as a nuisance at best.
  • We don't actually see how the trees start to emerge, because all the characters we see were indoors when it happened. It's likely that the trees didn't appear in a literal instant, as the Doctor says the forest is still growing and we see how the TARDIS got covered with vines between when it arrives and when he returns to it. Rather, they'd probably sprouted up from seedlings to mature forest over the course of a few hours, giving cars time to stop and planes, to land, on roads and runways covered in brush, not old-growth tree trunks.
• Who stole Maeve's older sister, and why?
  • The best implication we get is that Annabelle ran away.
• I'm fairly new to DW so I may have missed something, but in past episodes it's stated that Earth gets roasted by solar flares with humanity barely escaping. So, where were these magic trees when that future event happened?
  • For all we know, the forests did reappear when that happened, but humanity had already left the Earth before the trees sprouted and had no clue that such mass evacuations had been a wasted effort.

"Dark Water"

• What is the point in throwing away the TARDIS keys when the Doctor has been able to open the door by snapping his fingers since his Tenth incarnation? What is the dilemma here exactly?
  • Clara wasn't in a rational frame of mind and it turned out to be a dreamscape anyway.
  • Possibly Clara dreamed that she deactivated the TARDIS's finger-snap access while the Doctor was (supposedly) tranquilized.
  • Alternatively, there's a difference between unlocking the door, and merely opening it.
  • Has Clara ever seen him do the finger-snap thing? She might just be unaware of it.
  • Clara's done the finger-snap thing, albeit to close the door rather than open it. That said, I assumed the snap was linked to the keys and so destroying them would render the snap useless as well.
  • It could be a key fob sort of deal, you have to be in possession of a key for the finger snap to work. But more likely the main reason is Clara's frame of mind.
• So, why would bringing Pink back to life necessitate finding the equivalent of the afterlife? Didn't the Doctor imply in episodes like "The Doctor Dances" that life is incredibly simple to create for some alien races' tech? The Chula nanomachines in that episode brought a dead child back to life! Not only that, but it wasn't like the fix ended up harming the child in any meaningful way. When he was returned from being a gas mask zombie in the end he had his mind and his original personality still intact. So life can be restored to a completely dead person in this universe. So why doesn't the Doctor even bring up the idea of finding some alien tech (either through connections or some kind of market, black or otherwise) to bring Pink back to life rather than the incredibly risky strategy of messing with time?
  • Clara didn't actually tell the Doctor how Danny died. So far as he knew, Danny could have died of something that left his body in no condition for Chula nanomachines to restore. Also, to judge by the roadside shrine and her grandmother's consoling visit, several days had passed before the Doctor called her: by then, Danny's body had probably been autopsied and embalmed.
• If the dark water only allows you to see biological matter through it, then it seems the only organic parts left in the Cybermen are their skeletons... We don't see any brain or nerve tissue in them, just bones. However, a skeleton would the most useless part to preserve when turning someone into a Cyberman, because a Cyberman is made of hard metal, and therefore has it already has a support structure much tougher than human bones. So why preserve the skeletons?
  • You can't say that the brains are missing, because you wouldn't have been able to see them anyway. Brains are housed inside the cranium. While I can't speak for the majority of the skeletal structure, keeping the spinal column makes a fair bit of sense, as it dictates a number of responses like the brain does (primarily your reflexes). Other forms of nerve tissue don't come across as necessary, or even beneficial, to me.
  • Even if the spinal column might be useful, a full skeleton still wouldn't be. The whole thing seems to have been done only to have the cool visuals of skeletons sitting in tanks and turning their heads, it makes little sense on a practical level.
  • The Cybermen largely don't make too much sense on a practical level, but that's fine because they're not interested in practicality, they're interested in upgrading humans. Remember, they think they're doing people a favor. They preserve everything they can because that's the point of Cybermen. They could do the whole thing more efficiently with a pure robot, but they want a cyborg, even when the organic part is little more than calcium.
  • That would be true if we were talking about the original Cybermen. But these Cybermen were specifically designed by The Master/Missy. Why would she care whether or not they have some organic parts inside of them?
  • Because turning humans into monsters has always been one of the Master's favorite ways of screwing with the Doctor. Remember the Toclafane? There's no practical reason why the Simm-Master couldn't have just made them pure robots, but sticking the heads of human children inside them was a calculated ploy to drive the Doctor to despair.
  • Bones don't just provide a supporting framework, they're also the site of blood cell production for the body. Even if the Cybermen no longer have a full circulatory system, their brains and spinal cords are still living tissue, so would need some blood flow to prevent cellular necrosis, even if the blood in question is delivered through pipes and receives oxygen and nutrients via machinery.
• Similarly, why were the Cyberman skeletons put on display at all? It didn't seem like 3W was open for people to have a look around or anything. Couldn't they have just stuck the Cybermen in opaque boxes?
  • Trophies for Missy, probably. Those were presumably the bodies of some of Great Britain's most famous and respected people, to have been laid to rest there: she wanted to gloat over having turned the national heroes of the country whose UNIT branch had given the Delgado-Master so many headaches into cyborg minions.
  • Dr. Chang said that they use dark water so that they can observe the bodies "unimpeded by their support mechanisms."
  • 3w probably is open for viewing; it's just not open to the general public. But if you're a millionaire who wants to preserve yourself or your loved ones, they'll give you the grand tour before you sign up.
• The Doctor has always been able to recognize the Master on the spot, no matter what body he's in. And he mentioned in The Sound of Drums that this was a Time Lord ability. So why was he suddenly not able to detect who Missy was, or that she was even a Time Lady at first?
  • Something in the mausoleum was inhibiting the TARDIS's scanners when they arrived. Perhaps Missy had something rigged up to scramble both TARDIS sensors and Time Lords' ability to recognize their own kind. Alternately, perhaps the Doctor was taking his own advice to Clara a little too much to hearts, and was remaining so coldly-analytic and unemotional that he ignored his own intuition.
  • Missy repeatedly tells the Doctor that "you know who I am", so it seems she expects him to recognize her. Perhaps the Doctor does instinctively know who she is, but doesn't want to admit it to himself, because he would then have to acknowldge that, A) The Master is back and is planning some horrid scheme involving dead humans, B) if The Master was able to escape the time lock placed on Gallifrey, people like Rassilon may escape it as well, and C) Danny is part of the aforementioned horrid scheme, so it's quite unlikely they can ever bring him back. A, B, and C put together is such a depressing prospect that the Doctor would rather deny what his instincts are telling him, until Missy spells out the truth and he can deny it no more.
  • Actually, the Doctor has not, in fact, always had that ability. The classic series was always very inconsistent about whether or not Time Lords could recognize each other across regenerations. Sometimes they did, sometimes they didn't. The Utopia trilogy is just another checked box on the "yes, they can" side of the ballot, which remains as undecided as ever.
• I understand that Clara wasn't exactly thinking clearly in the dream sequence where she throws away the keys of the TARDIS, but she gives that cold, calculating remark about being the only one between them who's in control... and then throws out the last key of the TARDIS, leaving both of them stranded in a volcano? Even hypothetically, how was she planning to A) get off the volcano by herself or B) get past the Doctor while holding one last key?
  • She wasn't. As you said, she wasn't thinking clearly. She was in the throes of grief and didn't think her plan through, since she was expecting immediate gratification. Everything that she said was just big talk.
  • We just saw in the previous episode that Clara would rather die at Danny's side than live on after everything she loved had been destroyed, and Nethersphere-Danny later becomes terrified that Clara will kill herself to be with him. Throwing the last of the keys may have been as much a subconscious suicide attempt as anything else, even if the writers couldn't quite come out and say it was.
• Father's Day had the Doctor so adamant about not changing history that he threatens to kick Rose out of the TARDIS for trying to change fate, and in another incarnation he tells Amy that he can't bring Rory back. Granted Clara was trying to rescue Danny from the afterlife (if it is one), but all she told the Doctor was to save Danny and bring him back. Why would he suddenly change his mind and decide to alter Danny's fate after being so adamant against it before?
  • Bringing Danny back from the afterlife would be sequential and linear, and if it were possible, perfectly doable without causing any (foreseeable) problems. Rewriting history so that he never died at all would create a massive paradox.
  • Alternately, the Doctor never actually expected to be able to bring Danny back, he was just humoring Clara in the hope that she'd work through her grief in the course of chasing Pink's personal timeline. For all he knew, Clara would have guided the TARDIS to various people Danny had helped during his lifetime, seen how they'd gone on to succeed thanks to having known him, and eventually come to terms with his death.
  • Also, he met someone who was heavily implied to be Danny's identical great-grandson with Clara, and figured that since Clara wasn't pregnant yet, Danny needed to survive to preserve the timeline.
• Since when is "Master" not a gender-neutral term? He chose that name in the first place because he wanted be the "master of all", so I don't see why he felt the need to start going by "The Mistress" just because he's female now.
  • As Missy herself says, she's old-fashioned. It's Time Lady, not Time Lord and Mistress not Master.
  • He did it because he's the Master, and he does this sort of thing all. The fracking. Time. If he thinks he's onto a "clever" pun that can work as an alias, you can bet your left foot that he'll take it.
  • "Master" and "mistress" are the unmarried equivalent of "mister" and "missus". In this one specific meaning, it is indeed a gendered term. It's the kind of address an antiquated butler would use (i.e. Alfred Pennyworth from Batman always saying "Master Bruce").
  • So does that mean that the Simm-Master ought to have called himself "The Mister"? He was married, after all...
• The way that people experience the Nethersphere as described in this episode doesn't really seem to jibe with earlier scenes that were set in the Nethersphere. If your body continues to feel everything that happens to it in the real world even after you die, then why didn't Half-Face act as though he had been impaled? And why didn't that officer react to having his hand blown off? And, if cremation is so traumatic (although surely it would be only a few moments of suffering compared to long-term decomposition?), then what of Gretchin, the soldier from the Dalek episode who was disintegrated? She seemed to be keeping it together pretty well.
  • Given that the entire thing turned out to be a con/front for Missy and the Cybermen, it's likely that all that stuff about feeling everything was either untrue or only true from a certain point of view.
  • Indeed, someone who died the way Danny did would surely have been autopsied, if only to document the extent of his injuries in case any motor-manslaughter charges are brought against the driver, yet at no time does Danny start screaming in agony from feeling his corpse being dissected by an M.E. Danny felt cold because the Data Slice made him feel that way, not because his body was being kept refrigerated, and everything Seb told him was a line of hooey intended to coerce him into deleting his own personality.
  • The guide to the afterlife provided information to the people trapped in the nethersphere, it would be easy for the master to record their reactions and use it to build a company to produce cybermen, there's no real evidence for it being true.
  • From a more doylist perspective, the Master is simply a recurring villain, and one important thing about recurring villains is that you want to keep the audience guessing as to who it is - So if there's a chance to switch it around, they'll use it if only for misdirection's sake.
• Speaking of half face why was he in the Nethersphere to begin with? It doesn't make much sense to convert something which is already a robot/ cyborg into a Cyberman.
  • Missy said that she had been going "up and down the Doctor's timeline," meeting everyone who died to keep him alive. Now strictly speaking, Half-Face didn't die *to* keep the Doctor alive, but he did die because of the Doctor and had very personal interactions with him. And Gretchin from "Into the Dalek", whose body was disintegrated and would have been similarly ineligible, did die to save him. Which explains why both Half-Face Man and Gretchin got to meet Missy personally in a pleasant garden/tea room, while the officer in "The Caretaker", who never met the Doctor at all, wound up in an office with Seb. Missy picked Half-Face, Gretchin, and others out specifically because they had close interactions with the Doctor and she wanted to talk to them herself, while everyone who was due to become Cyber-fodder was simply uploaded to the big Dyson Sphere city to fill out forms and wait.
  • The garden where Half-Face finds himself doesn't look anything like the jam-packed cityscape Danny awakens into, which suggests that the clockwork droid must have been one of Missy's earliest "recruits", possibly even the first mind collected by the Data Slice from her POV. It could be that she used him as a prototype on which to base her "boys", given that he'd spent millions of years perfecting the technique of converting dead bodies (or parts of them) into cyborgs.

"Death in Heaven"

• If Gallifrey was saved into the lost dimension, and this occurred during War's timeline, then the events of The End Of Time were happening between dimensions, not through time. So once the dimensions separated, how was The Master able to get back to our dimension? Was he able to steal a TARDIS, despite being newly regenerated? Once (s)he got to the TARDIS, how exactly did they get away from Gallifrey?
  • The finale of "The End of Time" happened right before Gallifrey was shunted off into the other dimension. One of the Time Lords in the war council during The Day of the Doctor confirms the High Council's plans have already failed. As to the rest, Moffat has demonstrated his penchant for long-term planning, so only time will tell.
  • The Master's explanation for escaping/surviving in spite of impossible odds has always amounted to "Ha ha! Please.", her having a sensible story for once would essentially be out of character.
• Also, Missy's bracelet used red lasers to kill people, but the one The Doctor used was blue. Does that mean Missy is still alive?? Or did it teleport her somewhere else?
  • The Doctor didn't shoot Missy; before he could bring himself to, either the Cyber-Brigadier did, or she teleported away.
  • It was definitely the Cyber-Brig; on re-watch, you can clearly see a blue beam coming in from off-camera and striking her.
  • The effect used for the Master at the end was the same one as when she teleported into the Nethersphere, so apparently she's still alive somewhere.
  • She was shot by the Cyber-Brig from some distance away while the Doctor was still holding her PDA of doom and trying to figure out a third option. His is a weapon that presumably just blows stuff up; it's all he'd have, and he'd be the last person trying to help her escape if it wasn't! However, we are talking the Master here, so of course she survived anyway. Somehow. She's indestructible, the whole universe knows that.
• When the cyber-pollen converted the dead into Cybermen, where did it get all the metal for their armour?
  • Time Lord Technology
  • We saw this in Nightmare in Silver! Cybermats had become cybermites, capable of on-the-spot cyber augmentation. The rain, presumably, contained something even smaller - cybermicrobes? Cybermitochondria?
  • I assumed your usual nanotech.
• Missy gave Clara the Doctor's phone number, and put the ad in the paper in Deep Breath. Fine. Why? She doesn't mention beyond "You two suit each other."
  • She explained why: Clara is a control freak, and the Doctor is someone who could never be controlled. By manipulating Clara (in this case, by killing and cyberizing her boyfriend), she can manipulate the Doctor.
  • But it still remains unclear what the purpose of manipulating Clara was... What did Missy gain from it? Her ultimate goal seems to have been, A) to create an army of Cybermen, and B) force the Doctor to take control of the army in order to save the Earth. None of this had anything to do with Clara, and the plan would've carried out just the same if she hadn't been there.
  • Given that Clara coming into contact with the Doctor was predetermined since the moment she stepped into his timestream on Trenzalore, Missy giving Clara the number is just another factor in one of those mind boggling paradoxes the show loves. Clara seems to have been someone Missy chose at random in order to be his new companion after the loss of Rory and Amy (given that Missy's been keeping tabs on whoever died around the Doctor since at least the Victorian era, it's entirely possible that she's been watching him for centuries, but for arguments sake, let's assume that Missy gave Clara the number sometime after she first came to be involved with 3W). She muses that she 'chose well' in regards to Clara after having watched how well they work together, and so she possibly ensures Danny's death in order for Clara to lead the Doctor to 3W on the Doctor's birthday, in order to give him his 'gift'. It's the Master. Such a complex plan to get the Doctor to be her friend again is not only as unnecessarily complex as the character would likely behave, but could also be justified in her mind depending on how desperate she was.
  • Same reason she phoned UNIT and got them to show up at St. Paul's, I suppose. Theatre. She wanted the Doctor to find out about her operation by going to the center of it at the behest of his companion.
• Pardon my language, but WHERE THE EVER-LOVING FLYING HOLY INFERNAL OTHERWORLDLY SCOTTISH BRITISH AMERICAN GERMAN DUTCH FRENCH SCANDINAVIAN FUCK DID SANTA CLAUS COME FROM???!!!
  • Turkey.
  • That answer makes about as much as ending a series of Doctor Who with a gratuitous cameo from Santa Claus. Kudos.
  • No, seriously. That's where Saint Nick was born.
  • Given this is the Whoniverse, I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised if "Santa" is an alien masquerading as the annual philanthropist and has at least one ulterior motive.
  • On the other hand, Robin Hood was dismissed as myth...
  • Heh heh. It's not like there are many myths out there that haven't been blamed on Whoniverse aliens yet; having Santa turn up was just a matter of time.
  • Why's everyone acting like this is his first appearance in the Whoniverse? Jeff and Theet go way back...
  • For that matter, why is he credited as "Santa Claus?" Don't the British call him "Father Christmas?"
  • Not usually, no. Usually that just indicates someone is particularly old-fashioned.
  • Yes, in fact. I'm British, and I call him Father Christmas, and everyone I know calls him Father Christmas. None of us are old fashioned.
• What happened to the Zygons? Last time we saw Osgood and Kate Stewart (and McGillop), they were locked in a room with three Zygons impersonating them, and they'd all had their memories wiped so none of them knew who was human and who was Zygon. Granted, the Osgoods figure it out thanks to her inhaler, but what happened? Did the Zygons realise who they were and transform back, or are there two Kates and one still living Osgood running around out there? And if so, which versions did we see in this episode?
  • No reason to assume the Zygons would keep impersonating Kate and Osgood once the memory-wipe wore off. By the time it did, they'd have hashed out an armistice which, no doubt, required whichever of them turned out to be Zygons to revert to their natural shape.
  • Who's to say the memory wipe would wear off? Clara had no memory of her previous visit to the Black Archive, and if the Osgood's both figured out which of the two was the Zygon (with the inhaler), perhaps there are two Osgoods running around.
  • Yes, but presumably the Zygons would revert to their true form at some point, by accident if nothing else, and then they'd know who was who. What actually happened to them remains unexplained, though.
  • Why wouldn't the memory wipe wear off? The Doctors scrambled their memories so they could negotiate from a position of mutual ignorance and it would be altogether stupid if they didn't revert the scramble after the treaty was drafted and/or signed.
• Why and how did Missy load the Half-Face Man from Deep Breath? If the Nether-Sphere was a data cloud meant to store human consciousness' to be revived and turned into Cyber-Drones, what purpose does a reverse cyborg have? Moreover, how did she upload an AI into a system meant for human minds and why not just repair him?
  • Possibly his patchwork construction, both physical and mental, made him an ideal specimen to try out her turn-dead-bodies-into-Cybermen scheme, as he'd essentially been making himself into a prototype of that very thing for millions of years.
• Why did the Cybermen in the W3 headquarters have only skeletons left of their human bodies, but when Danny was cyberized, his original face and skin was retained? Why would a Cyberman need to have a human face underneath the metal face?
  • Danny hadn't been dead long enough to become a skeleton. As we saw, he was still on a table at a funeral home.
  • Yes, but that still doesn't explain why his face was left when his body was reconstructed into a Cyberman. It's not like the Cyberman need to have those biological parts, and since there's supposed to be a clean break between being an organic creature with emotions and cybernetic creature with logic, it would make sense that the human face (i.e. the part of the body that most reflects our emotions) is the first thing that's taken away when one is turned into a Cyberman... Yet Danny still has his left for no apparent reason.
  • You're assuming that's how Cybermen "should" work, but there's no indication that the typical Cyberman (in any given recent adventure with them) does not in fact have a human face underneath the metal.
  • Actually that's not entirely true, the Torchwood episode "Cyberwoman" dealt with a woman who was half-converted into a Cyberman and her human face was untouched, while the rest of her body was in armor. So it is "not" the first thing to go.
  • Missy's whole plan depended on her manipulating Clara's grief and the Doctor's yearning to avert others' suffering, forcing the Doctor to admit that he abandons his principles in the clinch. Making Clara and Cyber-Danny as miserable as possible was part of that, and a skeletal Cyber-Danny isn't as viscerally-pathetic as one with a face. Missy left him with flesh for that reason.
• At the end of the episode, when Danny contacts Clara after his "death", presumably he's now back in the Nethersphere, where his consciousness was uploaded when his Cyberman body exploded. It's then explained that Missy's technology can bring only one person back to life, and Danny chose the kid he had shot. But it's never really explained why this can be done to just one person? Even if Missy's technology is for some inexplicable reason limited in this way, the Clara and the Doctor still have access to the all medical and cloning technologies of other planets, and of the future... So surely they could create a new body for Danny, and for anyone else who wants to return from the Nethersphere?
  • I understood it as there was only enough power left in the bracelet for one more one-way trip from the Nethersphere to Earth.
  • If that's the case, what stopped the Doctor from recharging the bracelet? Or building a new one? Or finding another way of bringing Danny back? In the previous episode he was ready to go to Hell in order to save Danny, but now he's letting a mere technological problem stop him?
  • Even if the bracelet could be repaired, it'd still have to be returned to Danny inside the Nethersphere somehow. Anyone who puts it on to travel into the Data Slice would need it to get back out, or would need to stay behind while Danny gets out. Any volunteers out there?
  • As far as the Doctor knows, the problem has been solved. The bracelet doesn't need to be recharged, Danny doesn't need a spare body cloned, etc etc, because Danny is alive and well and settling down with Clara. Then of course there's the question why Clara didn't tell the Doctor that assumption was wrong: She was trying to tell him, but when he claimed to have found Gallifrey, instead decided to let him think everything was fine and deal with it herself, the normal human way. Besides, the Nethersphere is one of the most advanced pieces of technology created by one of the smartest and most insane people in all of time and space, so downloading minds from it probably isn't as easy as you're making it sound.
  • Even if the Doctor thinks Danny is fine, what about the countless other people who are being held inside the Nethersphere against their will? Apparently neither the Doctor nor Clara bothers to do anything to help them.
  • Bringing back everyone who has ever died has huuge implications. Even ignoring the moral and ethical questions, there's the practical ones like "What do we do with them?" and "What about all the murderers and maniacs?" Bringing back one good man who sacrificed himself to save the world is easy. Bringing everyone back is something that those two should not be allowed to decide on their own. Presumably the world governments are discussing it off-screen, even if that discussion is just "We don't have the ability to do this, so let's stop arguing about it."
• What happened to the physical hardware of the Nethersphere? If Missy did survive and reclaimed it, then she's got Danny and the mindstates of thousands of other deceased people in her power. If not, and it came into the Doctor's or UNIT's hands, then the question above has still more force.
  • Danny's voice at the end did say that "this thing" was shutting down. It's unclear if he meant the bracelet or the whole Data Slice, so it's possible the Nethersphere deactivated shortly after Danny talked to Clara, freeing the minds inside to attain whatever sort of real Afterlife (if any) awaits them.
  • He said "this place is dying".
• I'm sorry but I still don't understand what the Master got out of changing his sex. He is someone who revels in every single advantage he has access to no matter how small, so the fact that he has willingly transformed into a form physically weaker than his previous body just seems extremely out of character (he was beating up Lucy Saxon so it is pretty clear that he was a man who enjoyed power in all its forms.) And why would he become middle-aged instead of young? Wasn't that one of his stated objectives after Regenerating from his YANA form? Far be it for me to be a conspiracy theorist about this, but I just can't help thinking that Moffatt realized that it would be very hard to get the public to accept a female Doctor so he did the next best thing (he could have brought back the Rani if it was purely about giving the Doctor a Time Lady as a villain.)
  • First, I have no doubt that the Doylist explanation is largely that they wanted to ease the viewers in before they eventually have a female Doctor. In-story, though, who says the Master consciously decided his form? Some Time Lords/Ladies are better at controlling that than others—compare Romana to, say, the Doctor's continuous wishing to be ginger—and we don't really have a handle on how much the Master can control or what level of control is needed for various changes. The only control we've really seen from him was a strong desire to be "young and strong" that one time (which in no way implies that he would want the same thing in later regenerations) and we don't even really know whether he actually controlled that, knew that it would happen, or just got lucky. Also, the last time we saw the Master he had Come Back Wrong and he seems to be fine in that regard now so there's no telling what effect, if any, that had over the regeneration.
  • Some fans have put forward the theory that when the Master was zapped back to Gallifrey with the rest of the Time Lords, they forced him to regenerate into a woman as punishment for his interference.
  • Also, who says Time Lord females are "weaker" than Time Lord males?
  • Or that this is the first time the Master has been female, for that matter? There were at least 10 different regenerations of the character that we never saw, between the little boy who got drums stuck in his head at the Schism and the shambling near-zombie from The Deadly Assassin, and no telling how many others between Survival and Utopia.
  • Who says that Time Lord females are weaker than Time Lord males? the original comment was clearly referring to physical strength, and unless Time Ladies have some kind of magical ability that we have never witnessed, there is no way that Missy has more muscles than John Simm, or Romana had more muscles than the Fourth, or Susan had more muscles than any other Doctor besides the First, or the Rani has more muscles than Anthony Ainley's Master (although she did at one point manage a pretty epic Groin Attack on him so there's that.)
  • The Jacobi and Simm Masters both got killed by women. Maybe he decided to become a woman to see if it would help. (Which it sort of did — the Cyber-Brigadier certainly wasn't a woman).
  • Turn it around: after being killed twice in a row by women, the Master expected that becoming female might make his next self more lethal.
  • Not to mention quoting Jacobi Master "Defeated by a girl... how embarrassing!" this indicates that the Master is sexist, which is even less of a reason for him to say "I think I'll regenerate into a woman, that'll be fun" But keep in mind, what one regenerates into IS random most of the time. He probably didn't even know it was going to happen.
  • It could be sexist, but it could be age-ist instead. The Master has probably been around as long as the Doctor has, and Chantho was rather childish in some ways, so it's possible he was embarrassed at being killed by a juvenile female, not just any female.
  • The Master loves to fuck with the Doctor. As a woman, the Master was able to stand right in front of the Doctor and not be noticed, she was hidden in plain sight.
  • And given Missy's revealed motivation of wanting her friend back, the fact that every major companion the Doctor has chosen since the Time War has been female (Mickey and Rory were mostly his companions' companions, and Jack is more of a recurring guest star) can't have escaped the Master's notice.
  • Also, it's likely than The Master/Mistress didn't expect him to regenerate into an asexual. Considering Romanna also took her 2nd look from someone she met, it's also entirely possible that at some point, The Master met a woman who looked like that, found her attractive, and went "Well, I might as well take advantage of this! Can't stop me from seeing myself naked!"
  • And don't forget that women are stereotypically supposed to be better at the subtler arts of manipulation.
  • This may be more of a WMG, but it seems more likely that Missy may not be The Master at all. She probably "thinks" she is, but she's in fact an Opposite-Sex Clone like Jenny for The Doctor. Something he created before getting trapped with the other Time Lords and she woke up, thought she was a regenerated Master and went on about her business. True that's all just a guess, and there are plot holes, but when has that ever stopped Doctor Who?
  • Why should 'physical strength' be a concern for the Master? Even if Time Lord females are weaker than males, they are still freaking Time Lords. Their intelligence and technology are their greatest strengths. If Professor Yana had regenerated into a scrawny geek and Lucy Saxon was the world's strongest woman, the Master would still be able to dominate and abuse her, even if he had to use tech/hypnosis/just being plain terrifying to do it.
• When Clara was trying to fool/stall the Cybermen by claiming she is the Doctor, why didn't they just take ten seconds to check whether she has two hearts?
  • They did. It was one of the first counter-arguments they made. She convinced them it was part of her 'Clara Oswald' disguise.
  • Adding onto that, it was shown in "Human Nature" that Time Lord possess tech that can rewrite their biology. When the Doctor turned himself into a human, he only had one heart.
  • Also, there've been times when the Master himself had one heart, namely when he'd possessed the bodies of non-Gallifreyans. If Missy programmed her Cybermen with information about her own past encounters with the Doctor, they'd know there are multiple precedents for a Time Lord to lack a second heart.
• If Danny Pink is well and truly dead, what about the paradox of Doctor and Clara meeting his Identical Grandson back in "Listen"? I suppose Clara could already be pregnant, but there are no indications of that given.
  • Time can be rewritten.
  • Just because there are no indications doesn't mean she's not. Her arc isn't over and she'll be back for the Christmas special at the very least. Besides, Santa's words at the end might mean that Danny's arc isn't over yet, either. There's still plenty of time to see where this goes and find out whether time has been rewritten or if that future will still come to pass.
  • Or Danny might already have a child out there from a previous relationship, to whom Clara will give the toy soldier in memory of his father.
  • To paraphrase Rory Williams, when do boyfriends "not" come back to life on this show?
  • He also could be a grand nephew of Danny's since it wasn't explicitly stated he was Danny and Clara descendant. (Granted, they used the same actor, but he did look a little too much like Danny.
  • Another possibility is that at some point during the events of season 9, Clara will go back in time to when Danny was alive, and have his kid then while pretending to be her past self.
  • Turns out none of the above explanations were used in the series, and the lineage of Orson Pink will probably never be explained, as all the actors and writers involved have left the series without resolving this mystery.
• Why were the Sherwood Knights in "Robot of Sherwood" originally headed for the Promised Land? Half-Face and his droids at least had the excuse of having stuffed themselves full of humanity, but that wasn't the case with these guys, at least as far as we know.
  • Possibly they learned of the "Promised Land" concept from historical records, as we know their ship had files on things like the Robin Hood legend. Heck, maybe the events of "Death In Heaven" started the cycle of "Promised Land" stories which the Sherwood Knights and clockworks believed in: up to then, the idea of robots going to Heaven would've been laughable to human theologians, but now everyone on Earth has seen whole armies of cyborgs rise from the grave!
• Missy has always been a colossal douchebag for as long as the Doctor has known her. When he found out that she lied about Gallifrey returning to normal space he was furious, pounding on the TARDIS console and suchlike. I get that he was hopeful that it might still be there which is why he went to check just in case, but after all this time does Missy lying to him really warrant such an extreme reaction? Has she never lied to him before?
  • She's lied to him pretty much every time they've spoken to one another. The Doctor wasn't so upset just because she lied, he was upset because he'd allowed himself to believe, in vain, the first Hope Spot he's had in centuries.
  • Plus, it's Gallifrey. It's clearly established to be a sore spot for him throughout the series. It shouldn't be too surprising that this lie cut a bit deeper than most of them.
• So what happened after the young boy was returned to the real world? It's all well and good saying "Clara returned him to his family" but think about that for a second. The boy was last seen in an active war zone in Afghanistan, with several years having passed since. It's unlikely his parents are alive and extremely unlikely that they could be found by a normal woman from London who's never met them. And how would Clara get him to Afghanistan in the first place? It's not somewhere UK citizens are generally able to visit, and certainly not with a young child in tow, presumably without a passport. And how would she explain his re-appearance years later having not aged? All I can think of is that UNIT helped Clara out but this seems outside of their remit. It also seems unlikely that Clara adopted the child. So what happened to him?
  • Heh heh. Why would it be a problem at all? We already know Clara's good at appropriating the Doctor's assumed authority; all she has to do is forge a note from him, hand it over to Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, and claim it's an executive order from the President of Earth, issued just before his resignation. The UK and Afghan governments will trip all over themselves in their eagerness to get the kid home, and possibly bring his whole family out of the war zone if they're at risk, to please the guy who just stopped the undead-robot invasion.
  • Presumably the boy's parents are alive, else you'd think Seb would have brought them to meet (read: put the emotional thumbscrews to) Danny in the Nethersphere too.
  • The kid was a combatant in an active war zone. Assuming his parents are alive, there's a damn high likelihood that they were too, or his father at the very least. Who else thinks that, a few days after Danny returns him to Earth, he's right back in the Nethersphere?
  • The kid was definitely not a combatant. He died wearing a soccer jersey, after all, and Danny wouldn't have been so haunted by the event if he'd shot someone who wasn't just an innocent bystander.
• At one point Missy gives the Cybermen the order, to destroy Belgium. From this point until the defeat of Missy and the Cybermen ist a considerable time, and we didn't see anyone doing anything to save Belgium. Does that mean Belgium ist gone now in the Whoniverse? And what about the Masquarade? How could a Cyborg-Zombie-Apocalypse possibly ever covered up?
  • I can answer that last one. The Masquerade has been kaput since "The Christmas Invasion", way back in Series 2. Everyone knows aliens are real. So while the people of the world probably aren't being informed of the details, it's probably assumed that the whole robot zombie thing was alien stuff and people either go on with their lives or speculate wildly.
  • The TV News was even talking about the last time Cybermen attacked.
  • It's actually not that long between her giving the order and her issuing new orders for her "boys" to go through their safety-demo routine. The rain-born second wave of Cybermen were still hauling themselves out of the ground at the time, so probably couldn't actually destroy an entire country in the seven minutes between the plane going down and Missy calling them to attention.
• During Clara's faking out of the Cybermen, she listed several facts about the Doctor, including which galaxy Gallifrey was located in and the fact the Doctor was married and widowed four times. Given the personal nature of some of this information, how much of it is stuff the Doctor would have confided in her and how much is information she retained from her trip down the Doctor's timeline? On the one hand, the Doctor has confided to her about things like the Time War. On the other, she seems to not know anything about who her immediate predecessor was as late Deep Breath ("Who's Amelia?" and "Times like this I miss Amy." "Who?").
  • Possibly there was a period between "Deep Breath" and "Into The Dalek" in which Twelve's memories of his own past were still shaky, so the pair of them dug through old journals and knickknacks from his previous regenerations to help him sort out his personal history.
  • Doubtful, at least within that timeframe. The beginning of "Into the Dalek" suggests it was their next meeting after "Deep Breath" (The Doctor arrived with coffee, which Clara had sent him for in Glasgow at the end of "Deep Breath"). Plus the Doctor didn't seem to have any especially bad memory problems this time around. Sure he didn't remember one-time events like Cassius or the Madame de Pompadour, but he also didn't have anything like the complete disconnect he had after regenerating into the Fifth Doctor. He knew who Clara and the Paternoster Gang were, even if he blanked on their names. Where he had been calling Adric the wrong names in "Castrovalva". Though that's not to say they couldn't have gone through his stuff, possibly on the hunt for more Round Things.
  • With regards to the Madame de Pompadour thing, I believe that was meant to reflect just how long ago that was for him, what with Trenzalore and everything (over 1000 years ago). So yeah, nothing to do with regeneration, just a joke about how you can forget things from your youth when you grow up.
  • It wasn't him forgetting that fact, it was that he never knew it. He never found out the name of the ship. The only reason the viewer know is at the end, the show did a pull back to show us the name of the ship painted on it's hull as the TARDIS dematerialized.
• The Master/Missy has no contingency for the Doctor refusing her robot army. Maybe Evil Cannot Comprehend Good, even if Evil's known Good for several hundred years and knows that accepting a robot army to take over planets with'd be hugely inconsistent with anything else he'd ever done, but surely that'd be useful to have even as a "just in case" thing? Honestly, it's sort of surprising she didn't just shrug her shoulders and Take Over the World herself.
  • First of all, don't ignore the important fact that Missy is all kinds of crazy. Even considering her past, she is particularly unhinged in this story and it comes across at times that Missy is losing her grip on reality altogether and sees nothing beyond her and the Doctor. But aside from that, of course there was a contigency plan. If the Doctor wasn't willing to use the army, then Missy wasn't going to just send the Cybermen away. It would be up to the Doctor to get rid of them, meaning he would have to commit genocide against the Cybermen. Either way, he commits mass murder on a gigantic scale, dealing out death when he has no right to do so, and Missy gets what she wants - the Doctor proving he's no different to her. It would have worked either way, whether or not he chose to use the Cybermen - if it wasn't for Danny, there wouldn't really have been any way out of it.
• If Missy was the one who gave Clara the Doctor's phone number in The Bells of Saint John, why doesn't Clara recognize her at all? Even if it was just a quick encounter in a shop, she should've at least looked familiar to her.
  • In the Classic series the Master often used disguises, so why can't she be the same in her Missy incarnation?
• The Doctor asks Kate why they aren't using the Valiant, and Kate replies that it's too conspicuous. The problem is that the Valiant was last seen in "The Stolen Earth" being attacked by the Daleks, and implied to have been destroyed. (To quote Captain Jack, "The Valiant's down!") The Doctor not knowing about the Valiant's destruction makes sense because he's a Cloudcuckoolander and a time traveller, but why does Kate respond as if it still exists? Did they build another one? (Because if there is a Valiant II, that would be awesome.)
  • "Down" doesn't necessarily equal "destroyed". Probably the Daleks' attack damaged the Valiant badly enough that it had to make an emergency landing, but it didn't crash or get blown to smithereens. By "Death In Heaven", it's been repaired.
• I have two problems with Danny sending the child back at the end:
  • 1) How did Danny get the bracelet to the Nethersphere? He was last seen wearing it as a Cyberman flying into the sky to explode. So either his mind went back to the sphere after dying, in which case he wouldn't have the bracelet, or he teleported his Cyberman body to the Nethersphere, which is pretty cowardly for someone who just led the dead of humanity into the air to sacrifice themselves.
    • Presumably Missy designed the bracelet so that if she got disintegrated/blown up/whatever while wearing it, she'd automatically be downloaded into the Nethersphere, complete with an identical bracelet. In effect, Danny got the benefits of a Joker Immunity insurance-policy Missy'd originally intended for herself.
  • 2) How did the boy come back anyway? His body must have been Cyber-ised and then blown up along with everyone else. The Nethersphere is just a hard-drive for minds. Technically he has no body to come back to. For that matter, Danny could only have come back as a Cyberman or not at all, because his body has been blown up. Whichever way it happens, neither explanation makes sense.
    • We see Missy inside the Nethersphere repeatedly before we ever see her in the real world. Letting the wearer shift in and out of the data slice is presumably one of her bracelet's functions. If that means whipping up a new body for an outgoing wearer, that wouldn't even need Time Lord-caliber technology: it's the same modified-teleportation method that brought Donna and the Library patrons back at the end of "Forest of the Dead". As for the boy being Cybered when he died the second time, the bracelet could've copied his body as it had been before his upgrading, because the data slice would've stored that information from his previous death.
• The whole "emotions inhibitor" thing. First, was Danny really the only dead person to refuse to give up his emotions? Wait a minute: the episode itself says no, because the kid sure didn't, for example. So why is his not following orders so special? And secondly… if the Cybermen's emotions-inhibitor is right there in evidence on the front of their chest, and can be turned on and off with the Sonic Screwdriver, why does the Doctor never do that when dealing with Cybermen?
  • Personally I've considered the emotional inhibitor itself to be a bit of a headscratcher since I was first introduced to it in the Cybermen's introduction in the revived series. It's meant to keep the cyberperson from experiencing a mind-body dissonance and exploding from sheer What Have I Become?, but a mere moment's thought demonstrates that not everyone would even react in that way. Some, myself included, would just look down, should "Cool!" then go see what sort of spy gadgets, wifi adapters, or Mix-and-Match Starfish Robot Bodyparts I could get installed on my cool new robot body.
    • My understanding was it doesn’t just inhibit emotions, it also inhibits pain. I think they underplay that aspect in the series to keep it family friendly, but that’s definitely stated in series 2
• "Don't Cremate Me" isn't three words. It's four.
  • Contractions like "don't", "isn't", "can't", "we've", etc. do, in fact, count as one word.

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