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Post by mrperson on Dec 7, 2015 16:45:06 GMT
Maybe. I'm just tired of what feels to me like cop-out after cop-out. But now that you mention the raven.....wasn't it supposed to be able to find its mark anywhere in spacetime? Shouldn't it have tracked her to Gallifrey in short order? Shouldn't it be able to track her to the TARDIS he stole for her? If not, then you can run from the raven. Seems to me that either the main plot of this episode is fatally flawed, or the main plot of Face the Raven was fatally flawed. I don't see how it was a cop-out. She wasn't actually brought back to life and the episode did not imply that she was alive for all that time that the Doctor was trapped (however many billions of years that was supposed to be). What I understood was that the Time Lords brought her to consciousness (not to life - no heartbeat) for what was meant to be a brief moment between the next to the last and last heartbeat before her death. It turned out to be a little more than that, but she still has no heartbeat and she herself still understands that her death is actually a fixed point in time and inevitable. One more heartbeat. I think the episode was more about the Doctor's unwillingness to let go of a companion. Except that there was not even an implication that there was a limit on how long Clara could remain in that state of grace. She's alive for all relevant intents and purposes, so long as her body is ambulatory and she is conscious. And the ending implies that she is going to take as much time as she pleases. She could presumably spend a thousand years flying about before reporting for her execution. I also have a problem with the business of the raven. Its not like Earth is frozen in time. They removed her from her own timeline before her moment of death, yes, but time is still passing on Earth. It's not like history would just stop and wait for the Timelords to put her back. Shouldn't time have started breaking at that moment, just like it started breaking the moment River stopped her suit from shooting the Doctor? Shouldn't time be broken until she is placed back in front of the raven, just like time was broken until the Doctor-selecta was shot? In comparison, if the Doctor were to kidnap the U.S. president and pop forward 100 years in time, history would have changed to reflect that. He would then have to return the president to put history back on its proper course. History wouldn't just freeze at the point of the kidnapping because it "knew" he would eventually come back and return the president When the Timelords yank Clara billions of years into the future, that raven should still be seeking her regardless of her intention to one day get the Timelords to put her back where she belongs. It should be able to find her on Gallifrey. It should be able to finder her in the stolen TARDIS. If it can't, then Face the Raven fails as an episode because it means she really could have ran with the Doctor. (I am also actively trying to put out of mind the problem of saying her internal processes are locked in a time loop indefinitely such that her heart doesn't beat, BUT, she can breath in air to speak with, run around and do things, etc. It might make sense to me if she had to be held in some kind of machinery or field on Gallifrey for this type of thing to work. But to be free to travel anywhere for however long?) I'd have been much happier if they just left her dead in E10, and have had this episode about the Doctor dealing with the "hell" he said would be unleashed if Gallifrey returned back in Time of the Doctor. Then, settling the score with the Timelords.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 7, 2015 16:58:55 GMT
I think the Raven can tell the difference between Clara and the Tesselecta. Maybe. I'm just tired of what feels to me like cop-out after cop-out. But now that you mention the raven.....wasn't it supposed to be able to find its mark anywhere in spacetime? Shouldn't it have tracked her to Gallifrey in short order? Shouldn't it be able to track her to the TARDIS he stole for her? If not, then you can run from the raven. Seems to me that either the main plot of this episode is fatally flawed, or the main plot of Face the Raven was fatally flawed. But everything in this episode for Clara happened between her last two heartbeats. She's still on trap street, with the raven still about to touch her and take her soul so why would it chase her. Now if she doesn't go back to Gallifrey and get reinserted into her timeline then the whole of time could explode, but hey, time is relative so lets have some adventures on the way.
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Post by icecreamdf on Dec 7, 2015 17:14:22 GMT
I think the Raven can tell the difference between Clara and the Tesselecta. Maybe. I'm just tired of what feels to me like cop-out after cop-out. But now that you mention the raven.....wasn't it supposed to be able to find its mark anywhere in spacetime? Shouldn't it have tracked her to Gallifrey in short order? Shouldn't it be able to track her to the TARDIS he stole for her? If not, then you can run from the raven. Seems to me that either the main plot of this episode is fatally flawed, or the main plot of Face the Raven was fatally flawed. From the Raven's point of view, Clara never left Trap Street, and it already killed her.
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Post by mrperson on Dec 7, 2015 17:32:22 GMT
From the Raven's point of view, Clara never left Trap Street, and it already killed her. I just called up the scene on amazon. At 40:42 minutes left in the episode, time around Clara has just been frozen. The raven is in front of her, now flying directly at her (curiously, it is now at neck level, not stomach level). The camera is aimed at its rear end. It has not hit her yet. It is not in her. She actually steps cautiously around it to join the Doctor. She is not shown stepping out of a frozen copy of her body or something. She, herself, steps out of Trap Street through to Gallifrey. Now, we are not shown whether time remains frozen after the extraction. The only thing mentioned in the scene about freezing is that Clara's internal processes have been time looped such that she doesn't need a beating heart or to breath. I suppose the only way for this to make any sort of sense is if the Timelords are keeping Trap Street frozen (and hidden from sight but still in place on Earth?) until such a point as she returns to Gallifrey to be reinserted. Otherwise, I don't see how the problems I've identified (see fuller explanation top of this page) aren't there.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 7, 2015 18:03:39 GMT
This episode was a mixed bag for me, some strong storytelling and great performances, especially from Capaldi once again. But I really am sick of Clara here there and everywhere. I'd give Hell Bent 7/10, and for me this episode brought to a close what has been a very good season of Doctor Who. I especially liked the gender/race change regeneration, which has probably made them froth at the mouth over on GB, but it certainly sets up plenty of discussion for when Peter Capaldi leaves the show, as now, The Doctor can (officially) be any sex or any race. So maybe BF did the right thing to close their forums before those discussions take place!
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Post by randomjc on Dec 7, 2015 18:06:27 GMT
I especially liked the gender/race change regeneration, which has probably made them froth at the mouth over on GB, but it certainly sets up plenty of discussion for when Peter Capaldi leaves the show, as now, The Doctor can (officially) be any sex or any race. So maybe BF did the right thing to close their forums before those discussions take place! I'd have had fun if they had. I miss Magnus sometimes.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 7, 2015 18:08:32 GMT
I especially liked the gender/race change regeneration, which has probably made them froth at the mouth over on GB, but it certainly sets up plenty of discussion for when Peter Capaldi leaves the show, as now, The Doctor can (officially) be any sex or any race. So maybe BF did the right thing to close their forums before those discussions take place! I'd have had fun if they had. I miss Magnus sometimes. Me too. He could be very entertaining... at times!
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Post by hackmodford on Dec 7, 2015 18:41:49 GMT
The episode was fine, but they really hyped it up as being about "the hybrid" and gallifrey. But in reality it was just a way to bring back Clara? I already thought her death was tragically pointless... now they have postponed her tragically pointless death They were so close to addressing the half human doctor thing too! Oh well... I still had fun watching it
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Post by Ela on Dec 7, 2015 18:43:51 GMT
Maybe. I'm just tired of what feels to me like cop-out after cop-out. But now that you mention the raven.....wasn't it supposed to be able to find its mark anywhere in spacetime? Shouldn't it have tracked her to Gallifrey in short order? Shouldn't it be able to track her to the TARDIS he stole for her? If not, then you can run from the raven. Seems to me that either the main plot of this episode is fatally flawed, or the main plot of Face the Raven was fatally flawed. But everything in this episode for Clara happened between her last two heartbeats. She's still on trap street, with the raven still about to touch her and take her soul so why would it chase her. Now if she doesn't go back to Gallifrey and get reinserted into her timeline then the whole of time could explode, but hey, time is relative so lets have some adventures on the way. Yes, I guess that's why she gets away with running around in time and space between her last two heartbeats. I guess she can get away with it until she is reinserted into her timeline.
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Post by icecreamdf on Dec 7, 2015 18:53:28 GMT
From the Raven's point of view, Clara never left Trap Street, and it already killed her. I just called up the scene on amazon. At 40:42 minutes left in the episode, time around Clara has just been frozen. The raven is in front of her, now flying directly at her (curiously, it is now at neck level, not stomach level). The camera is aimed at its rear end. It has not hit her yet. It is not in her. She actually steps cautiously around it to join the Doctor. She is not shown stepping out of a frozen copy of her body or something. She, herself, steps out of Trap Street through to Gallifrey. Now, we are not shown whether time remains frozen after the extraction. The only thing mentioned in the scene about freezing is that Clara's internal processes have been time looped such that she doesn't need a beating heart or to breath. I suppose the only way for this to make any sort of sense is if the Timelords are keeping Trap Street frozen (and hidden from sight but still in place on Earth?) until such a point as she returns to Gallifrey to be reinserted. Otherwise, I don't see how the problems I've identified (see fuller explanation top of this page) aren't there. Eventually she'll go back, and from the Raven's point of view it will be as if she was never gone.
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Post by icecreamdf on Dec 7, 2015 18:56:21 GMT
The episode was fine, but they really hyped it up as being about "the hybrid" and gallifrey. But in reality it was just a way to bring back Clara? I already thought her death was tragically pointless... now they have postponed her tragically pointless death They were so close to addressing the half human doctor thing too! Oh well... I still had fun watching it Clara was either half the hybrid, or the reason the Doctor became the hybrid, depending on which of Me's theories are correct. Either way, Clara is an incredibly important part of the Hybrid's story. I liked how the Doctor never actually confirmed or denied Me's statement that he was half human. The fans can interpret that however they want.
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Post by hackmodford on Dec 7, 2015 19:29:59 GMT
I liked how the Doctor never actually confirmed or denied Me's statement that he was half human. The fans can interpret that however they want. Yes, that was interesting. I'm still interpreting it to mean that the Doctor is half human. The Doctor is basically a crazy Time Lord experiment that escaped to earth. It's a fun hypothesis and maybe it's good that they're keeping it that way for now...
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Post by mrperson on Dec 7, 2015 19:47:10 GMT
I just called up the scene on amazon. At 40:42 minutes left in the episode, time around Clara has just been frozen. The raven is in front of her, now flying directly at her (curiously, it is now at neck level, not stomach level). The camera is aimed at its rear end. It has not hit her yet. It is not in her. She actually steps cautiously around it to join the Doctor. She is not shown stepping out of a frozen copy of her body or something. She, herself, steps out of Trap Street through to Gallifrey. Now, we are not shown whether time remains frozen after the extraction. The only thing mentioned in the scene about freezing is that Clara's internal processes have been time looped such that she doesn't need a beating heart or to breath. I suppose the only way for this to make any sort of sense is if the Timelords are keeping Trap Street frozen (and hidden from sight but still in place on Earth?) until such a point as she returns to Gallifrey to be reinserted. Otherwise, I don't see how the problems I've identified (see fuller explanation top of this page) aren't there. Eventually she'll go back, and from the Raven's point of view it will be as if she was never gone. As if she was never gone, yes, but that's in the same sense that you could change history by kidnapping the President, but you could snap history back into place by going back to return him. In the interim, however, an alternate timeline would exist. Here the alternate timeline is one in which the raven never hits Clara because Clara vanishes from in front of it, so it should keep chasing - unless the Timelords really are freezing time around Trap Street until Clara is reinserted. I dunno. I'm being a bit nitpicky with this, but it still doesn't really make sense to me absent that off-screen "fix".
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Post by icecreamdf on Dec 7, 2015 21:07:08 GMT
Eventually she'll go back, and from the Raven's point of view it will be as if she was never gone. As if she was never gone, yes, but that's in the same sense that you could change history by kidnapping the President, but you could snap history back into place by going back to return him. In the interim, however, an alternate timeline would exist. Here the alternate timeline is one in which the raven never hits Clara because Clara vanishes from in front of it, so it should keep chasing - unless the Timelords really are freezing time around Trap Street until Clara is reinserted. I dunno. I'm being a bit nitpicky with this, but it still doesn't really make sense to me absent that off-screen "fix". There's no alternate timeline, because its a fixed point. The universe doesn't break, because Clara will eventually go back. For the Raven and everyone else on Trap Street, the events happened just as we saw them in Face the Raven. For Clara, she was taken away just before the Raven hit her, travelled around with Me for a while, then went back to Trap Street to get hit by the Raven. Or, to use your analogy, if the President (lets say Lincoln), were to travel forward in time to the present day, he wouldn't find an alternate timeline where slavery is still legal in America. He would find the world as it is, so long as he planned to go back to his own time and fulfill his destiny eventually.
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Post by charlesuirdhein on Dec 7, 2015 21:48:34 GMT
As if she was never gone, yes, but that's in the same sense that you could change history by kidnapping the President, but you could snap history back into place by going back to return him. In the interim, however, an alternate timeline would exist. Here the alternate timeline is one in which the raven never hits Clara because Clara vanishes from in front of it, so it should keep chasing - unless the Timelords really are freezing time around Trap Street until Clara is reinserted. I dunno. I'm being a bit nitpicky with this, but it still doesn't really make sense to me absent that off-screen "fix". There's no alternate timeline, because its a fixed point. The universe doesn't break, because Clara will eventually go back. For the Raven and everyone else on Trap Street, the events happened just as we saw them in Face the Raven. For Clara, she was taken away just before the Raven hit her, travelled around with Me for a while, then went back to Trap Street to get hit by the Raven. Or, to use your analogy, if the President (lets say Lincoln), were to travel forward in time to the present day, he wouldn't find an alternate timeline where slavery is still legal in America. He would find the world as it is, so long as he planned to go back to his own time and fulfill his destiny eventually. It's even tighter than that. It isn't so long as he planned to go back. Due to it being a fixed point he can't not go back. Somtime will bring him back eventually and it will be the same as if he never left. It's a side loop rather than a forward freezing.
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Post by mrperson on Dec 7, 2015 22:21:51 GMT
There's no alternate timeline, because its a fixed point. The universe doesn't break, because Clara will eventually go back. For the Raven and everyone else on Trap Street, the events happened just as we saw them in Face the Raven. For Clara, she was taken away just before the Raven hit her, travelled around with Me for a while, then went back to Trap Street to get hit by the Raven. Or, to use your analogy, if the President (lets say Lincoln), were to travel forward in time to the present day, he wouldn't find an alternate timeline where slavery is still legal in America. He would find the world as it is, so long as he planned to go back to his own time and fulfill his destiny eventually. Except that this is not how these situations have been portrayed, not even by Moffat. If that's how it was supposed to work in this show, then The Wedding of River Song makes zero sense. If the above is how it's supposed to work, then River's failure to shoot the doctor could not have broken time because the doctor always went back and have her shoot "him." Instead, she fails to shoot him at a fixed point where she always had shot him. Time breaks. Stuff happens within the broken time, including the Doctor revealing that he's actually been in the Teleselecta. This - somehow - allows them to redo the events at Lake Silencio, River shoots the Doctor, and time gets back on track. And in general, my understanding of the show's view of time travel has never been that changing history is not a problem so long as you have the means and intent of eventually returning to fix what you changed. Given the portrayal of how changing history works thus far, I cannot imagine how plucking Clara out of Trap Street before the raven hit did not either create a broken-timeline scenario like the one we were shown in Wedding, or an alternate timeline where the raven finds Clara during her travel and kills her there.
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Post by icecreamdf on Dec 7, 2015 22:32:47 GMT
There's no alternate timeline, because its a fixed point. The universe doesn't break, because Clara will eventually go back. For the Raven and everyone else on Trap Street, the events happened just as we saw them in Face the Raven. For Clara, she was taken away just before the Raven hit her, travelled around with Me for a while, then went back to Trap Street to get hit by the Raven. Or, to use your analogy, if the President (lets say Lincoln), were to travel forward in time to the present day, he wouldn't find an alternate timeline where slavery is still legal in America. He would find the world as it is, so long as he planned to go back to his own time and fulfill his destiny eventually. It's even tighter than that. It isn't so long as he planned to go back. Due to it being a fixed point he can't not go back. Somtime will bring him back eventually and it will be the same as if he never left. It's a side loop rather than a forward freezing. Well, they aren't always clear about whether changing a fixed point is impossible, or if its just a really bad thing to do. It might be that if Clara gets vaporized or something before she has a chance to go back to Gallifrey, the universe will just break. I actually thought of a better example than the president analogy. When the Doctor and Amy took Van Gogh to the future, none of his paintings disappeared from the museum, and Bill Nighy didn't start talking about how Van Gogh mysteriously disappeared. They still went to a future where Van Gogh spent another year painting and then killed himself. When I was a kid, I did have a VHS tape of an animated movie (I forget what its called) that worked the opposite way. A bunch of kids travelled back in time and befriended a young MLK. They took him back to the future with them, where they found that legalized segregation was still alive in America.
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Post by barnabaslives on Dec 7, 2015 23:03:37 GMT
Hmmm... Just watched Heaven Sent/Hell Bent back to back... I don't think there's anything I didn't like about them that doesn't probably permeate the New Series in general (brain f*rts & bigness), so setting aside the usual complaints, that leaves both of these rather remarkable episodes as far as I'm concerned. That they were amazingly compelling is for certain, I was seriously glued to the TV set for both. It seems like there was a lot of thought that went into them, some nice poetic touches, and there were truly moving performances. Really a great finish to an especially great season if you ask me.
I'm still not 100% settled into the idea of transgender regenerations, both because I think there may be many wrong reasons for those to happen in stories (which may or may not have already happened on the show), and because I've never worked out exactly how much volition is supposed to be operating factor - a lot apparently if you're Romana I?
Since I'm too late to stop Moffat, I just want to warn him that I think we've already had two female Doctors and their names are Romana and River Song, thank you :-)
Ah, Clara. She's very charming and impressive both and I knew the minute I saw her we'd be seeing more of her, I'm just too used to Companions not sticking around forever that it automatically tries to seem like they've overstayed their welcome if they last very long. If there's anything I've gotten out of her long and emotional goodbye, though, is that I don't want her to go. Doesn't really matter what I think of her anymore, I really don't want this Doctor to lose her, she obviously means the universe to him.
It makes me wonder what if once in a while a companion didn't have to vanish so soon, and with the preview I think I'm daydreaming about a season of The Doctor and River looking for Clara and Ashildr and all the crazy stuff that happens along the way. New companion and Clara doesn't actually go anywhere, brilliant! Will probably never last long but I really like the note that Hell Bent ended on.
Hey, Big Finish should put out a River Song audio right after Christmas, lol... It does make me really happy to see the current level of cooperation and coordination between the show and Big Finish. Bravo!
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Post by agentspark on Dec 7, 2015 23:35:54 GMT
I can't figure out why exactly,but this year's finale felt really satisfying. Clara's death in Raven fell a bit short for me, and the way she was brought back didn't feel like it invalidated her death at all. I loved the part when the Doctor & Clara were going to erase the memories of one of them, & I was thinking " Aw gimme a break", but I never actually thought It would be the Doctor. The Doctor's scenes in the desert with Clara were all excellent, I like what Moffat's been doing with the structure, E.G, using the final scene of Familliar for the Aprentice cliffhanger, & then starting Hell Bent with the final sequence. Gallifrey was ok, but not boring as some say, but it really picked up once he got in the Hartnell-TARDIS. All in All, an excellent end to a very strong season. Also, this is the 1st time I have ever been excited about a sonic screwdriver!
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Post by paulmorris7777 on Dec 8, 2015 14:15:28 GMT
Clara will regenerate into William Hartnell, and ME will grow old and become Susan!
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