The Name of the Doctor

[julesjones]

Well, that was fun. :-) And nice to see the Paternoster Gang being shown with a bit more depth -- Strax in particular, as he's suffered a bit from being the comic relief.



"In the name of peace and sanity." So, are we about to be shown that Nine was actually Ten, or is that just what Moffatt wants us to think?

Comments

[dreamatdrew]

Newp. You seem to forget that the 'space' they were in, it was the doctor's ENTIRE timestream, not just "up till now". Although I suggest you look up 'The Valeyard"

[julesjones]

Copy-n-paste from the comment thread at LJ:

From what I remember, the Valeyard was presented as selfish and actively evil, while Hurt!Doctor is implied to be "the ends justify the means" while still trying to do the right thing. So I think it's more consistent with him having had a hand in the Time War. The other obvious possibility is that he's pre-Hartnell.

There's nothing to stop him from being a future incarnation, and that was my initial impression. But the Valeyard as previously presented doesn't quite fit, even if he was explicitly mentioned in the episode -- although retconning the trial arc could be an interesting story in itself.

[megaptera]

Yeah, I'm not getting it. I suspect Nine was actually Ten, in that this new guy is an intermediate Doctor.

Thing is, if Clara is supposed to have seen the Doctor's entire life up until "her" Doctor, why didn't she see this guy? The Doctor not liking to think of that incarnation of himself as the Doctor shouldn't have stopped him from being part of his own timeline.

For that matter, why doesn't Clara know anything about Doctors past Matt!Doc? Did anyone who entered that timestream -- namely Clara, the Great Intelligence, and the Doctor himself -- have to fall out at the same point they fell in? What stopped them from going right to the end of the Doctor's life and all of his incarnations? Other than the fact that we can't have Clara survive knowing the Doctor's future, of course.

[jhall1.livejournal.com]

That Nine is actually Ten was the first possibility that occurred to me, the regeneration from Eight to Nine being the only one that we haven't been shown on screen. But then the mention of the Valeyard led me to refresh my memory about him courtesy of Wikipedia, and I wonder if it could be him.

[julesjones]

From what I remember, the Valeyard was presented as selfish and actively evil, while Hurt!Doctor is implied to be "the ends justify the means" while still trying to do the right thing. So I think it's more consistent with him having had a hand in the Time War. The other obvious possibility is that he's pre-Hartnell.

[jhall1.livejournal.com]

while Hurt!Doctor is implied to be "the ends justify the means"

I must have missed that, as I didn't pick up on anything about him other than that he had rejected being known as the Doctor.

I suppose it could be pre-Hartnell. I'd always assumed that his Doctor was the first in the line, but I suppose we don't know that for a fact.

[julesjones]

The last minute of the episode is online as a self-contained video, if you want to check what they actually say to each other: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p019731j

It's... interesting. There's a lot of different ways you could read that, which is doubtless exactly what the Moff intended.

[jhall1.livejournal.com]

Thanks. I'll listen to that.

[da-pol.livejournal.com]

Two 9th incarnations - one timelocked in the Time War, the other one Eccleston.

[yourbob.livejournal.com]

Clara established in this ep Hartnell as the one who stole the Tardis. Doesn't mean there wasn't a pre-him, only that it any such would not have This Tarsus.