Yeah, though honestly a lot of the character work for Clara in 7B is not bad. Not great, but also not bad! But failing to rewrite an Amy script for her in "Nightmare in Silver" and then the clusterfuck of "The Name of the Doctor" soured that whole thing, and then she's defined so entirely in terms of the Doctor in…

I'm eager to see how "Heaven Sent" turns out, because it would be interesting to get really down into the weeds about how series 5 and 9 stack up. The one big thing series 9 can't offer is, as you put it, that humor and whimy, and I think it's not coincidental that we only have the one (pretty meh) standalone this…

He was too injured to regenerate. Come now, does the Doctor need to start showing people his charts before he can die?

I think a Time Lord's mind, what with its temporal senses and psychic abilities, might be capable of some things a human mind wouldn't. But who's to say, really.

I think it's pretty fair to say that the Daleks would never allow a hybrid like Dalek Sec, given what almost immediately happens to him.

Yeah, I'd still say the balance of the text (and the subtext) favors the idea that the Doctor is protecting the same secret every time, and there's nothing special about this particular Doctor. Your interpretation strikes me as, not necessarily *wrong*, perhaps, but certainly the less elegant of the two possibilities.…

I wouldn't disagree with that. I'd also say that a lot of that stuff tends to hold up better on rewatch, and there are definitely times — again, particularly in season 6 — where Moffat's emotional austerity veers from legit writing choice to just an outright flaw in the storytelling.

Nah, this isn't really "agree to disagree" territory, since you're purposefully interpreting my stated opinion in a way that clearly isn't what I intended to say.

I think how Moffat handled Amy and Rory's story in series 6 — where they really seemed dimly, or at least inconsistently interested in the fate of their own child — tends to loom large over these discussions and inform how a lot of people see subsequent episodes, which do often handle the human side of things better.

Oh, so we're saying the first version of the Doctor left Room 12, took care of all his business, then set about punching the wall naked until the Veil showed up?

Ah, but the Doctor *does* say he remembers every time before, as though the sight of the word "Bird" triggers all the past experiences to break through for him. So, again, maybe not full-formed memories, but he's got some sense of all that came before.

/police box disappears

Does your love of 7 incorporate expanded media, either of the book or audio variety?

Capaldi 1, Eternity 0

I think that really undercuts the whole point of this episode, which is to say that the Doctor has suffered through the exact same pain hundreds of thousands of times before we even meet him, and will do so hundreds of billions of times more.

Right, we disagree on how good those episodes are. For the purposes of this (admittedly pointless) exercise, where we're assessing the value of one of my "A" grades relative to the other four, we kind of have to set that to one side, as we're really only considering the logic of one particular set of subjective…

Since the Doctor has completely reset all the cells in his body 13 times already, it's probably best to think of him not in terms of the continuity of any specific body but rather as the sum of his memories. As such, I'd say he's still about 2,000+ years old, though with at least some sense of the billions of years he…

The Who Police are waiting outside, sir.

On the one hand, there's a decent argument to be made that "Heaven Sent" reset the grade curve for this season. On the other … I do think those four earlier episodes represent the best of what Doctor Who can be. This just happens to represent the absolute best of what the show can be. Both categories are "A" in my…

I'd say that's implicitly though pretty strongly contradicted by the final scene, in which the Doctor — and I'm going to resist calling him the "last" Doctor, because he's all the same person the whole time, really — addresses whoever has been interrogating him and reveals the truth about the hybrid. So I'd say he's…