Though it's quite possible that this family always survived because the Doctor always saved them as opposed to once having died until the Doctor was allowed to change time (whether or not it was advisable in that case that he should have) like in Waters of Mars. It's impossible to say which is which unless they tell…

Dare to dream.

Reintroducing uncertainty into the very survival of the companions would be a good idea to bring back tension and raise the stakes but given what's already happened, it may well be that Clara is the one person they can't do it with. Probably the most pivotal causal loops that led to the very creation of the man the…

I reckon they're playing the really long game. Every race that conquers them ends up taking back something to their own worlds without realising it and one day they're going to pull a Doakes and it's "Surprise motherfuckers!".

Just thought of the ultimate bootstrap paradox of the entire show is because of Clara. As big as it was when she leaps into the Doctor's time stream to splinter into every moment he needed help, having done so originally because she learned about her splinters beforehand (relatively) from the Doctor, this one's even…

On the other hand, Peter Capaldi's probably the biggest fanboy of them all and he's doing all right so far. After all, I doubt any other fan has had a BBC internal letter written about them where someone on staff said they wouldn't have minded if a Dalek exterminated him after he insisted that the president of the…

Actually (and I'm embarrassed it didn't occur to me as I'd just rewatched it a few days ago) as already pointed out by someone else in this comment section, Listen did almost exactly the same thing (only difference was that that time the Doctor was asking us a question while this time he was telling us something) and…

Well, maybe it can. Isn't that the whole point of multiverse theory in the first place?

Well, Doctor Who has always been a mix of bootstrap paradoxes, changing the future/past and even creating alternate timelines while the original may or may not remain intact somehow. Which set of rules are used at any given time is completely arbitrary and often no particular reason as to why which one is chosen. It's…

Sure, why not?

I think just about everyone here thought that. Still it's not always about the surprise (sometimes that's very difficult if not impossible to hide with this audience, especially the commenters here are on the whole very genre savvy) but what you do with it.

Well, that was one of the if not the major plot driver of Human Nature/The Family of Blood as recently as the Tenth Doctor where it turned out he was trying to run away for as long as possible, though of course he had his reasons.

Z Nation did exactly that with a character escaping death that way (yes I occasionally watch it so what shut up) and it was quite funny.

Some of the most effective terror in the show comes from the things they don't actually show such as in Midnight, which was just through having an entity that had taken over a human repeating everything the Doctor said before drawing level and then there's the moment when it pulls ahead. I think that's one of the most…

For anyone interested in the non-bootstrap type time travel stories, there's a couple interesting pilots out there on the most likely video streaming site you could think of out there on the Internet which really is a bit more complicated than just a "series of tubes".

Totally worth it not only for the money they saved but for the time in The Hand of Fear where they landed in what turned out to be an actual quarry. Which was in the middle of having explosives set off in it to provide more material to be … quarried? That turned out to be awkward for all concerned.

Look, not only do I not mind that most of the Doctor Who stories are ones I either think are ordinary at best to mediocre to bad at worst, I actually prefer it that way. If I personally found every episode to be a masterpiece, the show would be off the air in 6 months if I was lucky, 6 weeks if I was not.

Seriously though, they should bring back Peter Davison as what looks like the Fifth Doctor but then *twist* turns out it was Omega all along. That'd be ace.

Could well have. As unlikely as it sounds, Douglas Adams got the name Hotblack Desiato (band member of the loudest rock group in existence, Disaster Area) from an already established real estate agent in London (being the decent man he was, he asked permission).

Well, yes and no. Whichever type of time travel story it is (you can't change the past/you can change the past/time travel creates alternate universes etc), whatever rules the story sets up, it needs to be consistent about them (and that goes for more than just time travel stories too).