I think the Smith cameo would've worked better near the start of the episode. Not at the end, when Capaldi/12 was entitled to be allowed to stand on his own.
I can't see Moffat wanting to make her the Master, since he already knows that would be everyone's first guess. Not to mention that disguising his identity is a trick we've already seen, and there's no real point in doing it again.
Capaldi was excellent and as much as I have enjoyed the David/Matt era there needed to be a refreshing. There are only two things I disliked about the show which I otherwise thought was fine for a post regeneration episode. The completely out of place Looney Toons sound effect when Vastra "knocked out" the Doctor, up until that point I only had one thing on my list that truly got under my skin since the reboot (farting Slovene's). It seemed even more out of place given how much darker in tone Capaldi is playing the Doctor. The other thing was the apparent need to so heavily rely on Matt Smith's incarnation of the Doctor in this episode. Unfortunately I haven't seen a lot of post regeneration episodes outside of Pertwee, Tennant, and Smith but none of them seemed to dwell on the previous incarnation of the Doctor at all. Here we have a lot of references, a link to him via the paternoster gang, and the obvious cameo. While I think for dramatic purposes the Smith cameo was well done and served the story I couldn't shake the feeling that BBC was truly worried they would lose a huge chunk of the fan base now that the lead is no longer a cute young man and instead a older curmudgeonly type. I mean they felt the need to have Matt Smith's Doctor basically beg Clara to see past the face and please keep watching the show every week.
Pleased to meet you, hope you've guessed my name...oh yeah... but what's puzzling you is the nature of my game... Maybe we're asking the wrong question.
I don't blame Clara for being a bit out of sorts. She'd been through a lot in the previous 24 hours. Been under attack by daleks, been abandoned by the Doctor twice, had to put together an entire Thanksgiving dinner, and come up with an excuse to explain the Doctor, seen him get old and thought he was dead, seen him change faces, been in a crash landing, been chased by a giant dinosaur. All that's enough to stretch anyone a little past the breaking point. Well if that helps keep her around long enough to realize that 12 really is a different person, I don't see the problem. Shes been through a shock, and it seems baby steps is the best answer.
When last we saw the Master, he was being whisked back to Gallifrey with Rassilon. Wouldn't he still be time-locked with them and therefore be unable to be out and about as this "Missy"? I'd rather she be the Rani anyway, but I guess we'll find out sooner or (more likely) later.
agree very much with the second part-I was amazed at all the references to the new Doctor's age in this episode. It reached the point of being almost insulting. "Do you get it? He's OLD!" The closest parallel in regeneration stories I could think of was in "twin dilemma" when Peri kept saying how much she missed and liked the Fifth Doctor. I thought casting an older Doctor was a bold choice, but it's going to get annoying if they keep rubbing the viewers' collective face in it. As for the new episode, I was underwhelmed. The plot was just fairly ordinary. Since it's a post-regeneration story we don't learn much about the Twelfth Doctor and who he is, although he seems interesting enough so far.
So I don't think anyone else mentioned this, but on rewatching I noticed that Clara's black sweater is covered in bow-ties...
I often think the same thing but in reverse. Like how the RTD haters rag on Love and Monsters, but Love and Monsters was the most Moffat-like thing that RTD ever did.
I don't really have much to say that hasn't already been said here; I really liked it. I think it wasn't quite as good an introduction as The Eleventh Hour was, but it's far from the worst post-regeneration story I've seen. Also, this feels like a strange thing to say, but I'm almost getting an early Tom Baker vibe from Capaldi. In his early stories like Robot and The Ark in Space, I got a similar feeling that this new Doctor was a bit unreliable, and potentially as frightening as the villain. Heck, in Robot, the Fourth Doctor has to be tricked into staying on Earth to help out.
If Moffat was really concerned about that, he'd never write again. I've noted this before. Moff's Doctor and Moff's Sherlock are basically the same show. There's the lead character who is always the smartest person in the room, sees connections other don't, thinks and talks way too fast for anyone to keep up with, is dismissive and rude to anyone who doesn't understand what he's talking about, and has little to no understanding of basic human social niceties. And the companion who is always there to ask questions, be an audience surrogate, be the friendship the Other never expected to have, be the human anchoring the flighty weird one... Just like River and Clara are the same story. Just like every woman he writes is a mystery to be solved rather than a person in her own right. Now that we've solved "Who Is River" and "The Impossible Girl", Clara has a chance to be her own person, and I quite like her. So naturally we now have another mysterious woman to take her place. What I noticed was that, according to Strax's brain scan, Clara watches gay porn. .
Watched the episode a second time, and I have to admit the story works and flows a lot better than I originally thought. And Capaldi's performance just gets even more impressive the more you watch it as well. I especially love that final scene with the cyborg, when he starts out by calmly saying "I've got the horrible feeling that I'm going to have to kill you." It's such a great delivery, and such a different characterization than we've seen with the Doctor in a while. As much fun as it was to watch Smith bounce around the room and talk a mile a minute, watching Capaldi simply stand in one place and be intimidating as hell should likely be just as fun.
I got a bit of that vibe too. Baker was the Doctor when I was a child and though I didn't see much of it, he used to scare me as much as the villains. The googly eyes and manic grin. I think it may be Capaldi's eyes that evoke the same sort of vibe for me.
To me, the "Doctor always has my back" moment could have been the moment she realized he was the Doctor still.
It's called Christmas over here, hence why Time of the Doctor was broadcast on Christmas day. Or lesbian porn or heterosexual porn given Strax's inability to tell genders apart. As for the episode, we rewatched it last night, as these things go, it was a good episode, loved the Scottishness, I thought at first Moffat was recycling GitFP out of laziness, but glad he made reference and The Doctor not actually remembering (given Ten never knew the name of the ship then) and I almost welled up watching the phone call. As for Clara I could feel/relate to her pain through the episode concerning The Doctor, he went from a 30 year old male who looked young and in his prime of his live to a 50 plus year old male with grey hairs and lines. Of the versions Clara witnessed, of all the regens we've seen, that's never happened. I knew he was the Doctor, but because it was such a shift to what I and Clara knew, then that's what threw her, and me and that's the whole point of the vail scene and the phone call at the end. He may look different, he may act differently, but he is still The Doctor. Something Clara knew deep down, as she was calling him that from the first instant she appeared, but in her eyes, something must have gone wrong and he may not be The Doctor she knew.