TWICE UPON A TIME, animated short - Animated film about split personality and split time! It’s about dual nature of kings and things and how playing cards came to be! - http://kck.st/1JHrKBb
TWICE UPON A TIME, animated short - Animated film about split personality and split time! It’s about dual nature of kings and things and how playing cards came to be! - http://kck.st/1JHrKBb
First of all, I was thinking about the “Time” we saw in Flux. While TARDIS wiki and others have taken her to be Time the Eternal, who we met in the VNAs, a lot doesn’t match up perfectly.
There’s never any previous indication of that Time having to be imprisoned by the Time Lords, nor is she particulalrly connected to the pre-Anchoring universe. In fact, if anything, she seems quite the opposite, taking up the Seventh Doctor as her Champion, whose duty was to pretect history.
Now, a lot of this can arguably be put down to different forms. since we see members of the Menti Celesti being ‘born’ in the VNAs (and we have met multiple versions of Death, from Torchwood’s grim reaper to the goth girl resembling Death from The Sandman at Benny’s wedding), but it’s still not a perfect match.
Instead I have an alternative suggestion: the “Time” in Flux is actually the Carnival Queen.
I’m the one who starts the carnivals, Christopher Cwej. The one who makes the music that plays when civilizations fall. Sister to superstitions, grandmother of gynoids. The spirit imprisoned in every piece of clockwork.
Both were imprisoned by the Time Lords around the time of the Anchoring of the Thread to make the universe logical and establish the laws of physics as we know them. The Carnvial Queen also seemed to be captured on a desert world set out of time.
Her personality and history matches the Time we meet a lot better than VNA!Time. She attempts to escape back into the universe for much the same reason the Ravagers wanted to free Time - to undo the Anchoring.
– All that time. All that time I’ve been trapped here, shut off from the universe outside. Ohh, I’ve managed to influence things a little. Pushing a few irrational ideas out into the Majestic Clockwork. Little spanners in the works. A sorceress here, an alchemaître there, a pocket universe somewhere else. I’ve whispered words into the occasional ear. I’ve even managed to nurture a few, ah, special powers. Latent abilities, waiting to be triggered, wrapped in little genetic parcels marked ‘Do Not Open Till Xmas’…
– But I could never venture out into the rational universe. Not without an invitation.
Though she pushes it as a paradise, there is of course a lot of danger in an irrational universe, as we get to see a glimpse of in Flux, let alone all the Eldritch beings that would be able to exist again.
Interestingly, the “Watchmakers” in Christmas on a Rational Planet also refer to “their temple” a couple of times. They also grant Catcher a gun from their temple which marks him clearly as an agent - an “electro-static galvanistic rifle“.
Perhaps the kicker though? Just as the TARDIS seemed sick throughout Flux and into Eve of the Daleks, so too was the TARDIS directly threatened by the unleashing of the Carnival Queen to the point she even gives Chris false memories to be sure he’ll choose order over chaos, out of self-preservation.
No?’ The mouth twitched at the corner. ‘Please, Doctor, consider the situation. The “force” in the desert, as you describe it, wanted to create an irrational universe. Yes?’
‘Yes, yes.’
“And who has the most to lose from that? Consider what the TARDIS represents. The ship is the ultimate expression of reason. Its heart is made of mathematics, its architecture the very model of order.’
This isn’t to say that this Time / the Carnival Queen couldn’t in a sense still be the Time of the VNAs. If we are imagining the Menti Celesti split into multiple incarnations, then it’s just as reasonable that Time could have been split into the rational Gallifreyan God and an irrational imprisoned demon.
In fact, they almost definitely ARE linked. It’s already known that Time was born from Time Lord dreams and while the Carnival Queen was “born from the irrational parts of their souls”, she too is linked to Time Lord dreams in some way:
‘You’re the one the Watchmakers… I mean, you’re the thing that…’
– That they couldn’t live with . They don’t remember me at all now, and don’t even let themselves dream of me. On their homeworld, buried in the deepest archives, there are books, that only the Highest of the High are ever allowed to read. The only books that describe the old time before the days of the clockwork universe, locked away from the eyes of the world.
Side note: the “Highest of the High” and the “Deepest Archives”? 100% the Division.
The Missing Link of TARDIS Evolution?
I am far from the only person to have spotted some similarities between the “Passenger-forms” (which, we should note, sounds quite similar to the “N-forms” used first against the Great Vampires then later in the Time War) and TARDISes, which themselves can be humanoid.
Well while thinking about the previous theory, I considered the “Gynoids”, the Carnival Queen’s granddaughters. They’re kinda set up as a gender-essentialist manifestation of feminity in the universe, vs the ‘orderly masculinity’ of the Time Lords. Which, is uh…
But getting past that, there’s a lot more interesting about them. For one thing, they can change their forms:
It had just lain there, pockmarked and sand-blown, its big, bloated body expanding and contracting, like a sea creature washed up on a beach and gasping for water. Quite dead, the Doctor had insisted, though he couldn’t tell the cause. Its movement had been some kind of automatic function, the thing constantly adjusting and re-adjusting its shape even after death, still uncertain of the exact form it should take.
They also aren’t built, but exist independently of a creator:
‘Gynoids aren’t “built”. Only androids are “built”. Gynoids just are.’
And are bigger on the inside…
There was a whole new world trapped inside every little piece of glass, and whenever the pieces locked together to form a ‘circuit’, an entire alien universe was born inside its body, the shape becoming something totally new and unfamiliar, sculpted by different laws of physics. Roz felt she was just looking at a fragment of the thing, if ‘thing’ was a big enough word, one face of something that had a million faces. And was that all the gynoids really were? Walking windows, that you could look through to catch glimpses of something bigger and older and stranger?
You should see what I’m getting at. TARDISes too are largely considered female (not that TARDISes would have gender identities anything like humans or other species, but they have usually been referred to as “sisters” or by “she”), of course dimensionally transcendental, and can change their form. They also are speculated to exist, in a sense, beyond their creation by the Time Lords, according to Toy Story. They also, again, can be humanoid.
InChristmas on a Rational Planet, where we learn about these Gynoids, we even also see an “un-TARDIS” which literally manifested seemingly on its own, without being manufactured (which I’d argue also sounds a lot like I.M. Foreman’s Travelling Show).
The fact that the Gynoids are described as Cacophany’s granddaughters also rather evokes the idea of the TARDISes being children of the Matrix, as if establishing a lineage between them.
Then add Passenger-forms in as well. Physically, they may not seem to exactly have the more stereotypically ‘feminine’ forms of Gynoids or TARDISes (‘masculine’ TARDISes seem to exist to some extent too though) but there is a pretty strong resemblance in abilities and their roles in regards to the Carnival Queen / Time. And hey, who knows, it’s not like we know that much about Passengers:
But there’s one more creature / technology that resembles all of the above. Feminine-seeming, glass robots, capable of shapeshifting, time manipulation, perception filters. Literally full of people, who interestingly are being preserved in a manner akin to Matrix soul-catching.
Am I suggesting that Testimony’s glass avatars are literally TARDISes? Not exactly. But I think, in the same way we see certain themes echo through some of the major time-sensitive civilisations that could have been / could become the Lords of Time (eg. regeneration/renewal, central databases/afterlifes, bridges to the next universe), the avatars may well be humanity’s technology equivalent to the gynoids or TARDISes.
And perhaps these are all indeed parts of the one conceptual species with multiple possible histories we know primarily as TARDISes, depending on the time track of the universe (pre-Anchoring, post-Anchoring, War in Heaven, post-Ancestor Cell, Time War etc.)?
Maybe they really do, quite literally, form a meta family of sorts?
“However, there are other things that can have distortional effects on the continuum.’
Peter Capaldi’s 12th Doctor regeneration was everything he deserved. Twelve was the most tormented Doctor, the most haunted by his past, so full of secret pains we would never know about. He really felt like he was hiding back so much, and was putting on a mask so much of the time. Seeing the Doctor find peace in himself, and the optimism in himself (herself!!!) for the future, was absolutely incredible. I honestly can’t think of a more suiting end for Twelve. It was bittersweet, but I feel like I can comfortably and peacefully say goodbye.
Letting go is always the hardest part. And yet, letting go is how this show survives. We have to let go of Doctors and companions, TARDIS windows and sonic devices, and producers and showrunners to let new ones come in. It’s how Doctor Who has survived for 54 years. Change and go on, or die as we are, as the Doctor would say. But it doesn’t make saying goodbye any easier. “Twice Upon a Time” gave us an episode filled with both sadness and hope, a perfect balance between a heartfelt goodbye to Peter Capaldi and a generous welcome to Jodie Whittaker.
To prepare for this historic regeneration, we’re brought all the way back to another iconic regeneration – the very first one. After playing William Hartnell himself in An Adventure in Space and Time, David Bradley returns to Doctor Who to play the First Doctor in “Twice Upon A Time.” His portrayal of the First Doctor is incredibly well done, recreating the feel of Hartnell’s performance while also providing his own subtle interpretation of the role. In the unseen moments between the First Doctor’s escape from the Cyberman ship and his regeneration in the TARDIS, Steven Moffat slips in a story about how he, too, might have resisted regeneration.
Although it doesn’t quite break the fourth wall, I can’t recall an episode of Doctor Who that acknowledges quite as much as “Twice Upon a Time” that we are, in fact, watching a television show. The “Previously…” opener doesn’t just show us an abbreviated version of “The Tenth Planet,” it tells us that it took place 709 episodes ago. Black and white footage from “Tenth Planet” is show in its original, smaller dimensions before it beautifully transitions from Hartnell’s Doctor to Bradley’s Doctor, in color and in modern television dimensions.
There’s also a bit of a retrospective on the era and the actor which influenced the character of the First Doctor. Though this is a show about an alien time traveller, Doctor Who has always been a product of the people of its time, and has reflected their biases and prejudices. This was something that Steven Moffat was very aware of when writing his version of Hartnell’s Doctor. He told SFX magazine that the First Doctor reflected "old fashioned attitudes” in ways that stand out to modern audiences but were “normal and invisible” at the time. And instead of ignoring that, he tried to embrace it and confront it head on.
The first Doctor has several astounding moments that lay his sexism bare in “Twice Upon A Time,” several of which are grounded in comments and actions from previous stories. The First Doctor threatens to give Bill a “jolly good smacked bottom,” which is exactly what he threatened Susan with in “The Dalek Invasion of Earth” (a line which Hartnell may have improvised himself). And the First Doctor mentions to both the Twelfth Doctor and Bill about how he expects female companions to clean up the TARDIS and fetch him things. That moment is handled much better than a similar one from “The Five Doctors,” where the Fifth Doctor asks a very offended Tegan to “humor” the First Doctor when he makes a similar demand of her.
Although I understand and appreciate what Moffat was attempting to do, I have to admit that after the fourth or fifth sexist comment it began to feel overplayed. His point could have been made with just one or two lines. Eventually, they began to actively detract from my enjoyment of “Twice Upon a Time.” The last thing I wanted to hear in the episode introducing Jodie Whittaker was two men sniggering over how all women are made of glass, even if they were clearly in the wrong. Hartnell and the First Doctor were hardly progressive, and it’s perfectly reasonable to want to address that. But to have some of the worst moments of that era of Doctor Who thrown so frequently in your face was just exhausting.
And yet, I have to admit there might be a generational difference here. I later watched "Twice Upon a Time” with my mother, who’s just one year younger than Moffat, and she actually appreciated those moments. She grew up watching the same era of television as Moffat did, and remembered just how pervasive and accepted those sexist attitudes and comments were. These types of comments were already outrageously outdated and caricaturish by the time I was watching television in the 90s. But they were the background radiation of the media my mom consumed at a young age – a poison in the foundation of our current media that we are still, generations later, trying to clear out. She felt it was important to have those moments called out for what they were, instead of letting them be swept away and forgotten.
And she felt that those moments perhaps revealed the endemic bigotry that kept a woman Doctor from being able to come forward earlier. Is it really believable that an alien time traveller would believe it is appropriate to spank a grown woman or would be befuddled by lesbians? No. Is it also believable that an alien capable of totally changing their physical appearance has only ever appeared as a white man? No. But did we really need to belabor the point and escalate the problematic comments? From my perspective, no.
Between three Doctors and two regenerations, we hardly have any time for Bill Potts, who makes a re-appearance to help urge the Doctor towards regenerating. Although it’s always a delight to have Pearl Mackie back on our screens, Bill is unfortunately not much more than a plot device in “Twice Upon a Time.” She’s used as a tool by the Testimony to either manipulate or understand the Doctor. She asks the right questions so the Doctors can provide us with exposition. And she’s there to put in the emotional labor to convince the Twelfth Doctor that he should regenerate. Bill does have moments of charm but … that’s it. Moments. In the end, nothing much has changed since “The Doctor Falls.” She still lacks a satisfying story arc that is wholly her own, and exists almost entirely to further the Doctor’s arc. It makes me long even more for the next season of Doctor Who, where a woman will be the lead protagonist and a woman of color will be one of her companions, and it will be much harder to make their stories center around white male characters.
But for the time being, this is still Peter Capaldi’s story, and I cannot begrudge him the incredible ending that he so justly deserved. The man who was introduced as the Doctor while holding his lapels in an imitation of Hartnell ends his tenure by encouraging the First Doctor towards regeneration. The man who began by creating a “darker, less user-friendly” Doctor lands on his defining ethos: “Be kind.”
There is fear and sadness here, too. Regenerating isn’t dying, but it is an ending, and both of the Doctors are afraid of what comes next. The First is afraid of who he might become. The Twelfth is afraid that he might never leave the battlefield. But they still get another chance at life — which is why it is so very fitting to put them up against a British Army Captain from WWI, who is facing a very real and very final death. He was resigned to his death, until the Doctors accidentally gave him hope. Now he’s had time to think about everything he will lose, and he is afraid.
But kindness underlies everything. The Doctor pushes time forward to save a stranger’s life, relying on the simple and yet extraordinary kindness two armies showed each other in the middle of a brutal war. That selfless act of kindness gives the First Doctor the courage and conviction to regenerate. The Testimony allows the Twelfth Doctor to see his companions one last time and restores his memories of Clara Oswald, giving him peace. But it is one more call for help, one more act of kindness, that finally convinces the Twelfth Doctor he must regenerate.
His final triumphant speech epitomized the Twelfth Doctor, and the man who played him. Peter Capaldi will be remembered above all for being one of the kindest, most generous actors to ever pilot the TARDIS. He understands intimately what it is like to be a fan of the show, and what the Doctor means to so many. He was generous with his time and went the extra mile to show his appreciation. And he never, ever gave a condescending answer to children. His final lines about how children can hear the Doctor’s name came directly from his answer to a young fan at an episode screening.
I’ll admit that I have never before cried at a Doctor’s regeneration. During Capaldi’s, I sobbed. Bill was right — the hardest part of knowing the Doctor is letting him go.
Enormous credit has to be given to Rachel Talalay for creating such a gorgeous episode. I feel like I say that every time I review one of her episodes, and yet it has never been more true. She faced such a variety of challenges in this episode, from faithfully recreating scenes from the 1966 story “The Tenth Planet” to a grim and damp WW1 battlefield, from spaceships and glass ladies to explosions galore. And never is an opportunity wasted to turn what could be a simple scene into a work of art. When the two Doctors first meet at the South Pole, the scene is infused with the shifting, changing blues and greens of the Aurora Australis. When the Twelfth Doctor is considering whether or not to regenerate, the sky is filled with a fading golden light.
And never has a regeneration been quite as incredible as Jodie Whittaker’s. Most regenerations are efficient – one Doctor burns or fades (or sneezes) into the next, and he plunges straight into a new adventure. But Whittaker is revealed in a mix of intimate glimpses and long, slow shots. We see her lit from behind, standing amongst smoke and light. We see her stumbling to see her own reflection, our first glimpse of regeneration from the Doctor’s perspective. Each scene, beautiful on its own, builds up our anticipation until we finally get our first full reveal of the Thirteenth Doctor. It’s a regeneration that will be remembered as being truly iconic.
Steven Moffat may never have cast a woman to play the Doctor himself, but he has been laying the groundwork within the narrative of the show for a woman Doctor for a very long time. And in an episode that could’ve been focused solely on memorializing Capaldi and Moffat’s time on the show, they both instead provided an incredible generous welcome to Jodie Whittaker.
“Twice Upon a Time” is, above all, a story about letting go. The First Doctor believes it is courageous to simply live and die as himself, but it is later revealed to be fear — and perhaps vanity and selfishness too. The viewers know, from seeing all the Doctors who have followed, that he has so much left to do. There are so many adventures to be had, planets to be saved, and friends waiting to be known. Things can’t end with the First Doctor.
But it’s not just the Doctor who needs to hear this —it’s the viewers too. We all have favorite eras and favorite Doctors, and that’s okay. But some fans go even further to say that the show should have ended after their favorite time or Doctor, as if because they got no enjoyment out of what followed that it held no value for anyone else. To end the story now, to deny all those stories that are waiting to be told, is selfishness.
Some are just nervous or afraid about what comes next. And that’s okay. I won’t deny I’m nervous about what the future holds too. But “Twice Upon a Time” has a message for us too — this is a chance worth taking. We wouldn’t have Peter Capaldi if someone didn’t take a chance on Patrick Troughton, or all the men who followed him.
Jodie Whittaker is a chance worth taking.
The Doctor has to grow and change, or the show will die. This is a change that brings the character forward into a new and exciting direction. This opens up a whole new universe of stories, and gives another wonderful actor a chance to define the role. And it gives a whole new generation of young girls and boys a new hero to look up to.
In one beautifully delightful moment, we get a glimpse of Jodie Whittaker and the Doctor she might be. And I cannot wait to see where we go from here.
First of all, I was thinking about the “Time” we saw in Flux. While TARDIS wiki and others have taken her to be Time the Eternal, who we met in the VNAs, a lot doesn’t match up perfectly.
There’s never any previous indication of that Time having to be imprisoned by the Time Lords, nor is she particulalrly connected to the pre-Anchoring universe. In fact, if anything, she seems quite the opposite, taking up the Seventh Doctor as her Champion, whose duty was to protect history.
Now, a lot of this can arguably be put down to different forms. since we see members of the Menti Celesti being ‘born’ in the VNAs (and we have met multiple versions of Death, from Torchwood’s grim reaper to the goth girl resembling Death from The Sandman at Benny’s wedding), but it’s still not a perfect match.
Instead I have an alternative suggestion: the “Time” in Flux is actually the Carnival Queen.
I’m the one who starts the carnivals, Christopher Cwej. The one who makes the music that plays when civilizations fall. Sister to superstitions, grandmother of gynoids. The spirit imprisoned in every piece of clockwork.
Both were imprisoned by the Time Lords around the time of the Anchoring of the Thread to make the universe logical and establish the laws of physics as we know them. The Carnvial Queen also seemed to be captured on a desert world set out of time.
Her personality and history matches the Time we meet a lot better than VNA!Time. She attempts to escape back into the universe for much the same reason the Ravagers wanted to free Time - to undo the Anchoring.
– All that time. All that time I’ve been trapped here, shut off from the universe outside. Ohh, I’ve managed to influence things a little. Pushing a few irrational ideas out into the Majestic Clockwork. Little spanners in the works. A sorceress here, an alchemaître there, a pocket universe somewhere else. I’ve whispered words into the occasional ear. I’ve even managed to nurture a few, ah, special powers. Latent abilities, waiting to be triggered, wrapped in little genetic parcels marked ‘Do Not Open Till Xmas’…
– But I could never venture out into the rational universe. Not without an invitation.
Though she pushes it as a paradise, there is of course a lot of danger in an irrational universe, as we get to see a glimpse of in Flux, let alone all the Eldritch beings that would be able to exist again.
Interestingly, the “Watchmakers” in Christmas on a Rational Planet also refer to “their temple” a couple of times. They also grant Catcher a gun from their temple which marks him clearly as an agent - an “electro-static galvanistic rifle“.
Perhaps the kicker though? Just as the TARDIS seemed sick throughout Flux and into Eve of the Daleks, so too was the TARDIS directly threatened by the unleashing of the Carnival Queen to the point she even gives Chris false memories to be sure he’ll choose order over chaos, out of self-preservation.
No?’ The mouth twitched at the corner. ‘Please, Doctor, consider the situation. The “force” in the desert, as you describe it, wanted to create an irrational universe. Yes?’
‘Yes, yes.’
“And who has the most to lose from that? Consider what the TARDIS represents. The ship is the ultimate expression of reason. Its heart is made of mathematics, its architecture the very model of order.’
This isn’t to say that this Time / the Carnival Queen couldn’t in a sense still be the Time of the VNAs. If we are imagining the Menti Celesti split into multiple incarnations, then it’s just as reasonable that Time could have been split into the rational Gallifreyan God and an irrational imprisoned demon.
In fact, they almost definitely ARE linked. It’s already known that Time was born from Time Lord dreams and while the Carnival Queen was “born from the irrational parts of their souls”, she too is linked to Time Lord dreams in some way:
‘You’re the one the Watchmakers… I mean, you’re the thing that…’
– That they couldn’t live with . They don’t remember me at all now, and don’t even let themselves dream of me. On their homeworld, buried in the deepest archives, there are books, that only the Highest of the High are ever allowed to read. The only books that describe the old time before the days of the clockwork universe, locked away from the eyes of the world.
Side note: the “Highest of the High” and the “Deepest Archives”? 100% the Division.
The Missing Link of TARDIS Evolution?
I am far from the only person to have spotted some similarities between the “Passenger-forms” (which, we should note, sounds quite similar to the “N-forms” used first against the Great Vampires then later in the Time War) and TARDISes, which themselves can be humanoid.
Well while thinking about the previous theory, I considered the “Gynoids”, the Carnival Queen’s granddaughters. They’re kinda set up as a gender-essentialist manifestation of feminity in the universe, vs the ‘orderly masculinity’ of the Time Lords. Which, is uh…
But getting past that, there’s a lot more interesting about them. For one thing, they can change their forms:
It had just lain there, pockmarked and sand-blown, its big, bloated body expanding and contracting, like a sea creature washed up on a beach and gasping for water. Quite dead, the Doctor had insisted, though he couldn’t tell the cause. Its movement had been some kind of automatic function, the thing constantly adjusting and re-adjusting its shape even after death, still uncertain of the exact form it should take.
They also aren’t built, but exist independently of a creator:
‘Gynoids aren’t “built”. Only androids are “built”. Gynoids just are.’
And are bigger on the inside…
There was a whole new world trapped inside every little piece of glass, and whenever the pieces locked together to form a ‘circuit’, an entire alien universe was born inside its body, the shape becoming something totally new and unfamiliar, sculpted by different laws of physics. Roz felt she was just looking at a fragment of the thing, if ‘thing’ was a big enough word, one face of something that had a million faces. And was that all the gynoids really were? Walking windows, that you could look through to catch glimpses of something bigger and older and stranger?
You should see what I’m getting at. TARDISes too are largely considered female (not that TARDISes would have gender identities anything like humans or other species, but they have usually been referred to as “sisters” or by “she”), of course dimensionally transcendental, and can change their form. They also are speculated to exist, in a sense, beyond their creation by the Time Lords, according to Toy Story. They also, again, can be humanoid.
InChristmas on a Rational Planet, where we learn about these Gynoids, we even also see an “un-TARDIS” which literally manifested seemingly on its own, without being manufactured (which I’d argue also sounds a lot like I.M. Foreman’s Travelling Show).
The fact that the Gynoids are described as Cacophany’s granddaughters also rather evokes the idea of the TARDISes being children of the Matrix, as if establishing a lineage between them.
Then add Passenger-forms in as well. Physically, they may not seem to exactly have the more stereotypically ‘feminine’ forms of Gynoids or TARDISes (‘masculine’ TARDISes seem to exist to some extent too though) but there is a pretty strong resemblance in abilities and their roles in regards to the Carnival Queen / Time. And hey, who knows, it’s not like we know that much about Passengers:
But there’s one more creature / technology that resembles all of the above. Feminine-seeming, glass robots, capable of shapeshifting, time manipulation, perception filters. Literally full of people, who interestingly are being preserved in a manner akin to Matrix soul-catching.
Am I suggesting that Testimony’s glass avatars are literally TARDISes? Not exactly. But I think, in the same way we see certain themes echo through some of the major time-sensitive civilisations that could have been / could become the Lords of Time (eg. regeneration/renewal, central databases/afterlifes, bridges to the next universe), the avatars may well be humanity’s technology equivalent to the gynoids or TARDISes.
And perhaps these are all indeed parts of the one conceptual species with multiple possible histories we know primarily as TARDISes, depending on the time track of the universe (pre-Anchoring, post-Anchoring, War in Heaven, post-Ancestor Cell, Time War etc.)?
Maybe they really do, quite literally, form a meta family of sorts?
“However, there are other things that can have distortional effects on the continuum.’
