Almost through a rewatch of “The Husbands of River Song”.
It’s a good’un 
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This is very interesting, although I’m not sure if I agree with it entirely, especially because it’s clear that there ARE essential traits which make all Doctors the same character? Personality wise, character wise, they are all the same, but their individual personas emphasize different elements differently (like how statistically there would be ONE good iteration of The Eleven, one Missy who wonders about the other path). And we’ve always understood their regenerative abilities to be biological, so I don’t see how The Timeless Child changes anything at all about the character. They are absolutely still the sum of all things we have seen happen to them and every choice they’ve made as they’ve gone along, there was just quite a lot of story before that which we didn’t know about (but again, this was always plainly true, Hartnell wasn’t born old, plus granddaughter).
We’ve been hinting at various things The Doctor might be beyond just another Time Lord for a very long time, it might as well be this, it makes sense. I certainly disagree that it shouldn’t come up again, The Division is interesting, The Doctor’s past is interesting and it clearly bothers them still that they don’t know where they are from (15 brings it up at every opportunity). To me, it’s like no rush to answer any of this, it was over a decade before anybody said “Gallifrey” on the original show, so just let this be a nice background mystery to call upon if a killer story presents itself. I never understood anyone reacting negatively to it, beyond seeing people questioning whether Chibnall had “the right” to do it, and it’s like absolutely yes of course, the show is the world’s longest-running game of Exquisite Corpse, you have to add new twists and elements to it and everyone after you has to find a way to make it work, this is the game.
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Planning a 5th Doctor rewatch, but of course I can’t watch Castrovalva without first watching Logopolis. & I can’t watch Logopolis without first watching The Keeper of Traken. So that is what I am watching 
Edit: Yes I am eating jelly babies.
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You called?
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I’m not quite sure I understand what you mean by this, the way I’m reading it, it seems like you’re talking about the meta narrative aspect of essential character traits, as in when writing an incarnation of the Doctor, they should have xyz traits. I believe DoctorDisco was talking about essentialism from an in-universe perspective, that the reason the Doctor is the Doctor is due to some innate quality of their being, and not based on life experience. The first Doctor, a high-born Gallifreyan who clearly didn’t fit in with his society, decides to steal a time machine and run away with his granddaughter, adopting the name of the Doctor. The Fugitive Doctor on the other hand doesn’t have that history, she lived a different, presumably more violent life working for the Division. Yet, despite the different life experience, she still adopts the name of the Doctor, which to me takes away from the idea that the Doctor is just some person who through the experiences, became the hero, compared to the Doctor being a hero because of course they’re a hero, they’re the Doctor. Just my 2c
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Arachnids in the UK.
@mvancore you were right about Ryan in this one. The shadow puppets!!
I also want to see an edit where Know Me From is replaced with Dugga Doo
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Lol glad you liked it!
I just watched Praxeus, and Ryan is a riot in that one.
“I’ve been carrying a dead bird around in my backpack”
and
“I do it all for you guys!”
kills me every time
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The final scene was great as well, this episode is always fun to rewatch!
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Yes, that distinction is super interesting! But to me they do boil down to the same thing: the character we have been following is the way they are primarily because of the experiences we have seen them go through, I don’t think there’s any biologically essential thing that makes them a hero, that’s an active choice that has to be made afresh every day they’re alive (Interstellar Song Contest or Family
Of Blood or Dinosaurs On A Spaceship give us glimpses of a Doctor who doesn’t make that choice, or momentarily lets their anger guide them instead of their compassion, always very interesting to me).
I don’t know how much I personally give weight to the moniker of The Doctor, we can’t really know how much or what it represents to the character to go by that name, though there’s been a lot of explanations for it (quite a few in the Moffat era, he was really interested in the name and what it means). But just for a purely in-universe reading of the character, I interpret that they are a being from an unknown elsewhere with the natural ability to regenerate which we have always known, but this ability was used as the basis of the society we have always seen, a ruling class created from The Doctor’s own stolen DNA; they were employed for seemingly quite some time doing nefarious tasks, but at some point a thing that IS always going to be baked into the core personality of any Doctor took hold, they do not like to be controlled, they do not like to be used, and the thing they prize above all else is their freedom. And so their mind was wiped and they began again with no conscious knowledge of any prior lives.
It remains to be seen/depicted how this job worked, or how the split from them worked, and how different our Hartnell-onwards Doctor is from any previous version, but I don’t personally see this as a “chosen one” trope, because this was all done against their will, and the society it built was largely rotten, founded on corruption and exploitation. It’s never been depicted as a utopia, or even an aspirational society, it’s very backstabby. This only makes more sense to me of why The Doctor would want to get shot of the place and keep their distance, even if they only have a vague feeling as to why, even if they are only remembering it through suppressed memories, that planet would always rub them the wrong way on a fundamental level, they would never feel comfortable there. It’s interesting to talk about!
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I am now watching Zygon…
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Keep your hands where we can see them…
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How is it going so far?
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Its uh… going 
Lets just hope my husband doesn’t walk past because the scene thats on right now is…
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Is the plot getting interesting atleast?
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You could say that… Honestly this character falls for the wrong people. Cyberon now this?!
Also since my last message I’ve seen a cock so…
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there will be more cocks. there are only two and a half sex scenes though. I counted
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What I’m hearing is this is something that shouldn’t be watched with other people, hypothetically on a Discord voice chat 
.
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I fear I was too impatient to wait for us to get there, cause 1 stranger a week is too little for me.. I may end up joining once we get to it
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honestly, it’s all pretty tame in terms of sex. I found the violence towards the end slightly more disturbing but even there the bad effects dampen it. Oh, note for anyone who is emetophobic though, at about 20 minutes in the main character throws up.
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