Mmm, Night of the Doctor stated the opposite of this. The one Sister said that Time Lord medicine was elevated there and that that was WHY Eight's change into War Doctor didn't have to be random. All the potions were there to help the Doctor guide his regeneration.

"Between us and him is
everything the deadliest race in all of history can throw at us. We on the other hand have a pointy stick."

Ashildir: By this time tomorrow,we'll all be dead, won't we?

Here's my thing about not liking Capaldi. I've learned to like him, but the first half of series 8 I was somewhere between optimistic and unconvinced. When 'The Caretaker' happened, where the only person in the show acting like a responsible intelligent adult (not to mention maybe the third black man to have a…

I think we already have this season's monster in The Hybrid. To me, the Minister of War seemed more like when River mentioned the Wreck of the Byzantium to Ten and then that didn't get explored until a few years later.

For all the Doctor knows, he now has infinite regenerations, hence this season's seeming theme about being able to die with dignity.

I'm sure the second chip will be how they resolve the crisis, and I think it would have been a lovely way to square the circle if the Doctor could honestly say in the next episode that the chip was always intended to be an escape valve for Ashildir. But I don't think that's supported by the text. Clara asks if it's…

What if the Doctor did the wrong thing for the wrong reason? Mathieson
wrote "Mummy on the Orient Express" and the Doctor just put the same kit
inside Ashildir that The Foretold had, something that wouldn't let him
die. And The Doctor did it after a long speech about how tired he was
of losing people important to…

Nerts to this space crab!

Okay, but to be completely fair, there's a difference between speculating that x is impossible because of causality and telling a sci-fi story where x happens, looking at the camera, and shrugging.

"Time travel as it's popularly theorized?" I don't know what that means. If you mean time travel as it appears in works of science-fiction then by definition we're still talking about writers' tricks. And it only allows things to invent themselves when a) the writer is making a mistake; b) the writer is trying to…

So far, the show still seems nicer to its fan characters than it used to be (see Whizzkid in The Greatest Show in the Galaxy).

Once you've seen the Bootstrap Paradox often enough, though (you can add Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS to your list), you realize it isn't actually a capital-P Paradox at all, it's just a name for a writer's mistake. It's a description of mediocre plotting that the viewer is willing to forgive or not, depending…

I think we agree, I just feel like it should be underlined that, of the two people in the room, only Davros knows that the Doctor comes back. The Doctor thinks he lives in a universe where Davros survived without him, where his lack of compassion created Davros.

My read: Davros's survival is always fixed. From this story's perspective, the rescue needn't necessarily have happened.

Right, I understand the clues; I said elsewhere that I've been toying with similar ideas myself. I guess my point is that I'm worried that you're right. Worried because that is a landing that can't be stuck. That is the contortion that broke the camel's back. Obviously you can explain away any of the stuff already…

Big Finish, shut up and take my money!

Right, but then you have to finally confront the hard work of totally dismantling every single episode of 7B. All the time spent watching Clara grow up and Clara's mother dying in Rings of Akhaten; all the Emma Grayling stuff in Hide; Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS; Christmas dinner with her family in Time of…

I think they could have pushed harder on that, sometimes. They were deliberately vague about how much of the Roman stuff Rory remembered (which is fine and appropriate),but viewed one way, Season 6 Rory is about 2000 years old, which (even though he's nowhere near as smart) makes him much more of a peer to the…

The big room full of Daleks seemed conspicuously short on New Paradigm models. Even Asylum managed one of those,in the Parliament scene.