UNIT are back and facing a deadly new threat - The Shreek!
This is a bit of the usual media package fluff that talks more about how lovely everybody else was on set, avoiding any substantial plot reveals. But we do get insights into the background of Ruby’s boyfriend, and the dynamics at UNIT. And of course the name of this week’s monster, “the Shreek”.
For the writer and director’s part, there seem to be some deliberate callbacks to classic Who stories “The five Doctors” and “The dæmons”, so that’s promising!
This being the rote standard interview form, everybody is asked where they’d go in the TARDIS given the chance. Speaking of classic episodes, I rather like writer Pete McTighe’s response:
I would park myself on a comfy sofa in cold November 1963, and spend the next six years watching (and recording, to share with you guys) all the missing episodes of Doctor Who!
Yes please! Just beam “Marco Polo” into my living room already 🙂
I’m really excited to be back, it was a fun few episodes to read for Ruby.
I can’t remember, do we know for certain how many episodes she’s in? Is it this one and the two-part finale?
Oh, for classic series fans we also have Paul Jericho in the episode - he played The Castellan, an officious, shady Time Lord during Peter Davison’s era. He’s playing a new character now, publican Alfie. Or is he? Maybe the Castellan wasn’t killed in ‘The Five Doctors’ (1983), escaped the destruction of Gallifrey and ended up running a pub in an English village? Much better, let’s go with that.
How funny would it be if this turned out to be true?
do we know for certain how many episodes she’s in? Is it this one and the two-part finale?
That’s what I heard early on, or perhaps I imagined it in the meantime. So no, not for certain 😄
an officious, shady Time Lord during Peter Davison’s era
Lines up perfectly with my theory about the Doctor’s coat in this episode! I do think we need more retired Time Lords just casually pottering about in the British countryside.
Wasn’t there a beekeeper in “Delta and the bannermen” that had the fandom theorising like mad? Oh, and Professor Chronotis!
a beekeeper in “Delta and the bannermen”
Goronwy! Moffat endorsed the fan theory that he’s a future Doctor in retirement like the Curator. Honestly, this is why I happen to actually like the bigeneration - the idea that the Doctor would ever just retire and leave the universe to sort itself out while he collects art and beekeeps used to bother me, but if he himself is still out there running around, then it becomes delightful and sweet.
And then there’s Dr Moon from “Silence in the library”/“Forest of the dead” — the very last Doctor according to Moffat, his mind uploaded to a moon-scale computer after death. All of those (primarily head canons) can exist at the same time, but we don’t really need bigeneration for that, do we?
My issue with this theory is that up until “The giggle”, nobody’d heard of bigeneration; the Doctor called it a myth or something to that effect. It was something that just never happens — except of course RTD undermined that immediately out of universe with his suggestion that this might indeed happen all the time.
My point is, though, the Doctor has messed with the time stream on so many occasions, bringing people, planets and the entire universe back from the dead more than once. At certain stages of history, there has to be >1 Doctor in the universe — in “Devil’s chord” there are at least two in London alone. They’re a complex time-space event.
Complexity inevitably increases until it’s a mess. Eventually there would have to be so many, each influencing the web of time in subtle or not-so-much ways, it stands to reason a few could make choices that cause them to splinter off from the Doctor’s main timeline and nobody would be the wiser. Until of course they inevitably cross paths way down the line.
But again, just my personal mental safeguards against the notion that “Hey, you know what? Maybe the Doctor has retroactively bigenerated all the way back!”
There’s also a non-spoilery image gallery from the episode at Media Mole. Just a couple of samples here:
That lapel trimming’s gotta be a deep wardrobe cut to the fifth Doctor’s coat, right?
Oh shit, there’s a Yellowjacket on the set. Hide all sharp objects and crack out the drug tests!