Maybe, but the way he said it made it sound like they were going to actually forget it entirely, to the point that the government wouldn't even need to issue a public statement or anything.

…so why was she hiding in a bush?

So, let's all freak out about "Clara Oswald never existed."

For me, it's not the lack of good explanations, it's the lack of any explanations at all. Like…I know the Doctor made some kind of point about how humans forget things, but seriously, WHY is it that the entire human race is going to forget about the trees overnight?

For the "just go and save yourself" moment to have worked, we'd have needed a WAY bigger sense of helplessness. I mean, the Doctor doesn't know of any way to save the planet, but when does he ever halfway through an episode? For the Doctor to even consider for one second leaving the Earth to its fate, he would need…

The scene inside the Doctor's mind where Smith kept switching between the Doctor and Mister Clever.

And the assumption that it's the last of its kind. The Doctor just states that without having the faintest shred of evidence for it. The moral quandary of "one life vs seven billion lives" is completely different from "one species vs another species".

Regeneration story? Huh? I didn't think we had any word on Capaldi just lasting one season.

I live by all the Doctor's rules, I really do. "Always waste time when you don't have any" has gotten me into quite a bit of trouble.

So we have a third Rule #1?

I think this is the first live-action sitcom I've really loved since Malcolm in the Middle. I love this show.

Clara's voting method was terrible, but it was still a far bigger sample size than the three of them on the moon base. A necessary evil, I guess.

I'm just not clear on what the actual consequences of either decision would have been. The Doctor mentioned something about a giant corpse floating through the sky if they killed it—how exactly would they have gotten the damn thing out of the moon if they had killed it?

Ah, it wasn't 'exclusively' exactly. "Clara is the first new series companion—and the first since the 3rd Doctor was splitting time with UNIT—to travel with the Doctor on a strictly occasional basis" I think that was what he meant, though.

He said 'exclusively'. Clara's never been full-time, which is unusual.

That could work too; we know Time Lords have some psychic ability, and maybe simpler minds like infants and animals they can just read. Still, generally speaking, I think Eleven was a bit more self-aware than he seemed, while I really believe Twelve just has no idea.

Sometimes it's hard to distinguish between the Doctor joking/messing with people and when he's genuinely naive (I firmly believe that Eleven was just making stuff up when he said he could talk to babies or horses) but I can almost buy Twelve thinking he looks 'exactly the same age' as Clara.

Keyword being "promoting".

Dear lord, what if they did that with Captain John Hart (James Marsters)? I would squee for years on end.

House wasn't a high-energy person, exactly. He just took endless joy in fucking with people, and when he wasn't just pushing people's buttons to see what happened, he was completely uninterested in any kind of human interaction.