Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-1827503-20141102022000/@comment-188432-20141104170219

Hey guys :)

As Skittles said, above, let's keep this civil. Let me take a moment to further clarify what's going on. No one in the administrative staff is "in denial" over the apparent "truth" of Gomez' character. We all have seen the episode, seen the Doctor Who Extra and gone to the website. We know that everything in the world is pointing towards Gomez being the Master.

[And indeed, speaking quite personally, nothing would make me happier than Gomez turning out to be the Master. I've been a big fan of her work since Green Wing, and think the possibility of her as the Master is one of the more extraordinarily exciting notions of the Moffat era.]

But.

We've been here before. The end of the cliffhanger of the final story of the series is pretty much never what it appeared to be. Did David Tennant regenerate at the end of The Stolen Earth? Not really. (Well, not until we learned otherwise five years later.) Was The Army of Ghosts genuinely "the story of how [Rose Tyler] died'? Only metaphorically. Could we state with any authority what the true nature of the Toclafane were at the end of The Sound of Drums?  Absolutely not.  Did we know what the Pandorica was at the end of The Pandorica Opens?  Of course not; otherwise the teaser to The Big Bang didn't work.

With two part finales, the first part pretty much always misleads in some substantive fashion.

And though the out-of-universe indicators are super-strong for Gomez being the Master, the narrative ones are fairly murky. Since series 1, we've been told that the Doctor would know if there were other Time Lords around. (Heck, since the old series, he's been able to instantly recognise old friends, despite intervening regenerations.) He doesn't appear to this time, at all. Remember how he literally sniffed his way to the Master in The End of Time, part one? The Master's standing right in front of this time — he's actually in intimate contact with her — and yet there's not the faintest hint of recognition. Because we have a long view of Doctor Who around here, we have to ask why that is. And we also have to say that it would probably be unwise to trust anything during a series where the theme is quite clearly "lying". Narratively, there are genuine issues here that give us reason for caution.

So this tiny little roadblock is indeed rooted simply in a desire to make sure that we really are getting what the production team tell us is happening. Remember, in-unverse articles are built only on narratives. So we have to pay attention to the story, and take heed of things that don't seem to make sense when considered against other recent stories.

Please do not mistake our caution for any kind of emotional reaction.