Missy = Master
See icon.
But thanks to Brid-Aine for referencing the Buffy episode that remains, for me anyway, the most moving and accurate depiction of the confusing feelings surrounding the death of a parent.
Clara goes to the dark side, with dark secrets revealed in Dark Water
Brid-Aine says: So that was honestly unexpected. Danny Pink dies. And as Clara says, not in a spectacular fashion, not in a Doctor Who way, just in a regular old death kind of a way. Reminiscent of that deeply moving, almost soundless episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer where Buffy’s mother dies of just being an older person …
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Monday 3rd November 2014 13:49 GMT Keith Langmead
Re: "Moffatt has set the precedent for Timelords switching gender"
Indeed, the Doctor has already said that The Corsair regenerated as both men and women, so while the Doctor hasn't yet it doesn't mean he can't. Same as how he hasn't yet regenerated as ginger.
"The mark of The Corsair. Fantastic bloke. He had that snake as a tattoo in every regeneration. Didn't feel like himself unless he had that tattoo. Or herself a couple of times. Oo hoo! She was a bad girl!"
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Sunday 2nd November 2014 02:16 GMT Jordan Davenport
Re: Well I loved it..
I always suspected it was the Master, given there were rumors of [her] reappearance this season, but at that line, I'd considered that too... except for the fact she referred to the Doctor as her boyfriend the very first episode when introduced talking to the clockwork droid. Plus I very much doubt anyone, human or otherwise, would kiss their grandfather so intimately. At least I hope they wouldn't.
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Sunday 2nd November 2014 15:33 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Well I loved it..
except for the fact she referred to the Doctor as her boyfriend the very first episode when introduced talking to the clockwork droid.
Which raises the question of why the Master and Cybermen would want to save a clockword droid ?
Although he had repaired his systems with some organic components and was technically thus a cyberman his brain was mechanical and hence he wasn't compatible for conversion into a Cyberman.
As we now know Missy is the Master I suppose we just have to assume the boyfriend remark was meant to be a contraction of boyhood friend - unless of course the young Doctor and Master had a much closer relationship than has hitherto been hinted at.
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Monday 3rd November 2014 09:47 GMT Psyx
Re: Well I loved it..
"I always suspected it was the Master, given"...
...the obvious name and Moffat's inability to create NEW bad guys, and his endless recycling of the same old bad guys, time and time again?
A woman off-the-grid Timelord popping up and raising new questions would have been good. Moffat pulling a 'never mind how many regens he's had, lets do some gender swapping, that will be daring' was not.
The best 'reveal' of the episode was the company logo. sadly, that had already been utterly undermined by the BBC's trailers. /facepalm.
"You tell me if you understand the half of it. Missy has apparently figured out a way to grab dying minds as they exit dying bodies"
I suspect that it's a bit different and that he's actually alive and ok, and maybe the ambulance crew took the body to the secret lair instead of the morgue. Hence the 'souls' have to be conned into physical cybermanship. This - of course - makes ZERO sense as regards earlier episodes in the series, but Moffat repeatedly undermines his own canon on a whim, and assumes that 'family show' means 'watchers are morons' [cf: Weeping angels that are now perfectly capable of looking at each other].
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Friday 7th November 2014 10:17 GMT lorisarvendu
Re: Well I loved it..
"...the obvious name and Moffat's inability to create NEW bad guys, and his endless recycling of the same old bad guys, time and time again?"
RTD's attitude towards bringing back past foes was that if you had a monster in a story, and a previous one would fit the bill, you might as well use it for purposes of economy and a free tip of the hat to the fans. This was his reasoning behind using the Macra in "Gridlock".
Same here. If you're going to have a female villain with a human consciousness-snaffling hard drive, why bother inventing both when Doctor Who's rich history has already got what you need on the shelf - evil Time Lords and the Matrix. And once you've decided to go down that route, why invent a new Time Lady when you've already got several to choose from (Susan, Romana, Rodan, the Rani). Hell, why not really have your cake and eat it - have the Master change sex!
You please the fans, and the casual viewer who remembers John Simm from 5 years back, and let's face it, when Missy was all "Yes I'm a Time Lord and you know who I am", wasn't every hardened fan screaming "It's the Rani! Susan! The Inquisitor!" at the screen? How disappointing would it have been for her then to announce herself as some Time Lord we'd never even heard of?
I've seen several comments that seem to imply Moffat is lazy for simply using the Master and not bothering to invent a new foe. WTF? Are we supposed to believe that it would be so incredibly difficult to just create a new Time Lord and give her an evil motive that Moffat just thought "Hell, I can't be arsed to type anything today, let's just make her the Master."??
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Monday 3rd November 2014 08:53 GMT Cthonus
Re: Missy
Yeah. I prefer my Master to be as suave and sophisticated as Roger Delgado's. Proper devils like Fu Manchu never needed to girn to camera to look menacing, or ham it up like the infamous Zaroff or Soldeed death scenes...
I always though John Sim played the character as if he was brain damaged rather than truely, awesomely bad-ass.
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Tuesday 4th November 2014 12:10 GMT David L Webb
Re: Missy
I always though John Sim played the character as if he was brain damaged rather than truely, awesomely bad-ass.
That was supposedly because the drumming he was hearing in his head was getting worse.
However the cause of that drumming was identified as a signal from Gallifrey intended to allow the Timelords to escape from the last days of the timewar in End Of Time Part 2. So I'd have expected that after that the signal would either have stopped or the Master, having identifed its source, would have found someway of blocking it. Therefore I'd have expected a later regeneration such as Missy to be less mentally unstable and more like the earlier classic series incarnations of the Master.
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Friday 7th November 2014 10:22 GMT lorisarvendu
Re: Missy
"Therefore I'd have expected a later regeneration such as Missy to be less mentally unstable and more like the earlier classic series incarnations of the Master."
Ah but how do we know Missy is a later regeneration? If the Doctor can meet himself from previously in his time stream, why can't he meet a pre-Time War Master? Bet your bottom dollar Moffat's considered that at one time or another.
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Saturday 1st November 2014 23:32 GMT David L Webb
Are these actually cybermen ?
What good is an angry soul trapped in a Cybersuit? Break them first or get them to go willingly, into what they believe is a beautiful but fake afterlife.
The cybermen haven't seemed to care much about their donor's willingness to be transformed in the past. They seemed to have been able to get rid of their emotions during the transformation process easily enough. Why the need for the souls to agree to "delete" themselves and surely once they woke up in the cybersuit they would quickly see they weren't in a beautiful afterlife.
Also are these actually cybermen - with human brains in the cybersuit - or completly mechanical ?
If the former how are they removing the newly dead's brains to transplant - especially if the dead can still supposedly feel cold because their body is in a morgue freezer.
If either the brain or any other parts of the bodies are being used in the construction of the cybermen then you'd expect people to notice (those carrying out autopsies for starters) unless it were done long after they had died ie they beamed the body out mid-cremation or after it was buried. But as far as I am aware the timelords never had any special abilities to resurrect the long dead so I'm not sure the brains or other organs would be much use grafted into a cybersuit.
If on the otherhand they are purely mechanical then why do they need souls ?
I'm sure lots of people will say I'm over-analysing it but I'm just not sure the premise is consistent with the histories of either the original or new cybermen.
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Sunday 2nd November 2014 07:36 GMT Suricou Raven
Re: Are these actually cybermen ?
The suits seem to operate pretty well without anything living in them in some past episodes too. It has been suggested by some fans that the requirement for a person inside is largely cultural. Even cybernetic creations may have some psychological issues: If they aren't a person, then what are they?
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Sunday 2nd November 2014 18:54 GMT David L Webb
The best episode of the series so far IMHO.
Unfortunately I think it was a bit of a missed opportunity. The concept of the newly dead still being able to feel what was happening to their body had great horror potential but practically disappeared.
It would have been easy enough to make this seem plausible - individual cells have been found to be viable at least 17 days after death
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v3/n6/full/ncomms1890.html
so the concept of a soul tied to the body and still receiving sensations from such surviving cells isn't totally inconceivable.
One possibility would be to have had an advanced civilisation attempting to alleviate such suffering by separating souls from their bodies and attentuating the sensations they were receiving from their newly dead bodies. Then the Master having regenerated as Missy but still suffering from the instabilty caused by his last botched resurrection could have taken over the establishment in order to secretly feed off the vestiges of life energy of the saved souls. Thus setting up the Doctor for working out how to either defeat the Master without destroying the establishment or face the dilemma of whether to condemn souls to suffer as their bodies decayed by destroying the establishment in order to defeat the Master or to allow the Master to continue to consume some of their remaining lifeforce.
Instead we have Cybermen.
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Sunday 2nd November 2014 22:52 GMT illiad
" individual cells have been found to be viable at least 17 days after death"
only trouble is, the brain that feels the pain, dies after a few minutes...
please dont confuse 'timelord tech' with real life, at least until it's possible, in a few millennia... :P
Another 'problem' .. - Danny's body is still in the morgue.. It is his mind that is in 3W.. some kind of 'matrix' thing...
but as the doc said..."fakery!!" :)
Babylon 5 had similar.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soul_Hunter_%28Babylon_5%29
so next week the doc has to kill the Cybermen, reverse the 3W, and rescue Danny... though he may just 'wake up' in the morgue... :P
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Sunday 2nd November 2014 23:46 GMT David L Webb
only trouble is, the brain that feels the pain, dies after a few minutes...
please dont confuse 'timelord tech' with real life, at least until it's possible, in a few millennia... :P
I didn't say it was real life - just that it could be made plausible for a work of fiction if you could swallow a soul having a limited interaction with the body independently of the brain. After all anyone who believes in a soul surviving after death into an after-life is half way there already since the soul would be existing without any connection to either body or brain.
(and after all the Doctor must be at least open to the possibility of a soul and afterlife or why would he have even tried to find Danny after he had died ? )
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Monday 3rd November 2014 16:25 GMT Ugotta B. Kiddingme
I would go so far as to say
that if you throw out the forest and moon stories, this whole series has been one of the best in the current generation. Yes, there have been some pretty significant blunders in writing and character development but Capaldi's superb acting ability has, for me at least, completely overcome all but the two abysmal stories mentioned at the beginning of my post. There were even a few redeeming bits in those two stories - albeit mostly snappy one-liners from Capaldi, which furthers my point. Supremely interested to see which part of the cliff we will be left dangling from next week.
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Sunday 2nd November 2014 07:44 GMT Suricou Raven
Re: Fav moment
A moment that would have been far more effective had it been a genuine revelation, like the 'dark water' reveal. They did a great job of forshadowing, laying just enough hints for people to speculate, right up until the end of the previous episode - when they gave everything away by showing cybermen in the post-episode teaser.
There's no fun in spotting the cyberman symbol if you already know there will be cybermen along before the episode is over!
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Sunday 2nd November 2014 00:25 GMT Andrew Jones 2
Hated it -
really was hoping the whole afterlife thing was going to turn out to be something gripping and new - but no - the usual enemies, now with huge holes in the plotline.
As for it's been done before:
The Library - conciousness' living in a computer.
The Bells of Saint John - uploading people to a data cloud.
Come on Moffatt - bring us something new!
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Sunday 2nd November 2014 01:00 GMT David L Webb
As for it's been done before:
Even the idea of using the dead to construct the doctors enemies isn't new - though that was with the Daleks
From the classic series
Revelation of the Daleks (Daleks constructed from material from the cryogenically frozen dead)
and in the new series
Bad Wolf/Parting of the Ways
(Though since the humans were transmatted from the Gamestation rather than disintegrated when they lost the games it wasn't entirely clear if they were dead when their cells were harvested to construct the Daleks)
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Sunday 2nd November 2014 07:42 GMT Suricou Raven
When it was referred to as the 'nethersphere' I was hoping it would be revealed as a dyson sphere - the work of future civilisation discovering the lack of an afterlife, and finding the concept of death so appalling they built such a vast structure and started time-scooping the people of their past into it at the moment of death to save them.
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Monday 3rd November 2014 11:41 GMT Psyx
"When it was referred to as the 'nethersphere' I was hoping it would be revealed as a dyson sphere"
Yeah, that also was a bit lame. Though not as lame as another story being based in London.
The Doc really needs to look at his TARDIS, because it seems to have lost the ability to tell him when it's landed in 21st century London.
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Sunday 2nd November 2014 08:50 GMT Anonymous Coward
An entire universe of space and time in which to let the imagination run riot, and the big mystery turns out to be the same old villains invading the Earth again like they always do, with some unconvincing fantasy nonsense thrown in for good measure.
It's lucky for Moffat that most people seem to have very low expectations.
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Friday 7th November 2014 10:50 GMT lorisarvendu
"An entire universe of space and time in which to let the imagination run riot, and the big mystery turns out to be the same old villains invading the Earth again like they always do, with some unconvincing fantasy nonsense thrown in for good measure."
Yeah because Doctor Who never did that before Moffat took over. Well apart from "The Dalek Invasion of Earth", "The Seeds of Death", "The Invasion", "The Web of Fear", "Terror of the Autons", "The Sea Devils", "Day of the Daleks", Warriors of the Deep", "Remembrance of the Daleks", "Silver Nemesis", "Rose", "Rise of the Cybermen", "Army of Ghosts"...
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Sunday 2nd November 2014 07:40 GMT Suricou Raven
Re: I'll score you a Miss on that one...
I was really hoping for th Rani.
I was hoping more when she was revealed as a time lady.
I was quite sure of it when she referred to the doctor having left her for dead, just as he had for the Rani so many series ago.
And then she ruined it.
The Master is a great villain, yes. But the Rani is something else: She's a great villain, who had the misfortune to appear only in some episodes that were deeply flawed and generally crap for other reasons. The concept deserves better treatment. The Master might try to take over the universe - but the Rani would take it apart, just so she can learn how it was put together.
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Sunday 2nd November 2014 06:32 GMT ukgnome
You tell me.....
....if you understand the half of it.
Ok pay attention - the time lords have a technology called the matrix. Yes like that one but they got there first. It's a hard drive for people's souls. The time lords use it as a repository of knowledge.
I'm not used to you write in a balanced way Brid, so you caught me off guard. I think that's the least trollish thing you have written.
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Sunday 2nd November 2014 07:26 GMT MrDamage
How?
"And, how was it that the Doctor pushes open the doors to the mausoleum to walk down the steps of St Pauls’ in Central London? More “Time Lord” technology?"
Tardis perhaps? Bigger on the inside as it is on the outside, as we have quite often heard repeated so many times in previous episodes.
With fancy schmancy teleportation doodads, the general public walking into thnecathedral could easily be whisked away to some room that looks like the interior of the cathedral proper, while those with the correct credentials enter the 3W complex
If the Master was trapped on Gallifrey, then not only would he have had access to the TL hard drive, then he had just as much access to a Tardis. Being the Doctor's equal, he too could have just over-ridden safety protocols, flicked a few switch, smacked the console with a pipe wrench (or shoe as per the threat that was in this episode), and burst his way out of his prison, just as we see the Doctor doing on several occasions.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
