The Repeated Meme: John Frakking Hurt

The Name of the Doctor
(with thanks to Nick Lewis)

Central Premise Recycled From: "Alien Bodies", and Zelig.

Moffat Autorecycling: Timey-wimey companion, with sobriquet (The Girl who Waited = The Impossible Girl). Nursery rhymes (do the Whispermen just sit around all day trying to come up with rhymes for Trenzalore?). Madame Vastra, her household, and her hooters and honkers. Gratuitous Scottish jokes. Souffle Girl. Another person being clinically dead for long enough to cause brain damage, but revived unharmed through the use of a defibrillator. More Gentlemen-lite (the Whispermen). The stars all going out due to absence of Doctor (originally from “Turn Left", but more recently in the Pandorica two-parter). A crack in the universe. River bloody Song.

John Hurt. Any questions?

Recycling Other People: Inception (conference calls in dreams); Dracula (lunatic in Victorian prison with some sort of inside knowledge). The Matrix (Agent Smith's ability to manifest himself in any of the agents in the Matrix, like the Great Intelligence with the Whispermen). Sherlock Holmes (taking up bee-keeping as a retirement hobby). Star Trek: DS9 "Trials and Tribble-ations" (which also featured present-day characters green-screened into past adventures). Logopolis/Castrovalva (weird things happening to the Tardis during and after the Doctor's death). Quantum Leap, Battlestar Galactica (original and new), and every other story involving a person with an invisible advisor only they can see all the way back to Blithe Spirit (and the Doctor commenting that his kiss with River must have looked strange, is a direct reference to Baltar's sexual relationship with Head Six). Continuity references back to “Dinosaurs on a Spaceship”, “The Christmas Invasion” and “Trial of a Time Lord”. Back to the Future (characters disappearing or transforming as the past changes). “Edge of Destruction” (the fast-return protocol, or switch as it may be). “Trial of a Time Lord” (an evil secret incarnation of the Doctor). The time-rewriting thing has been done a lot, but the most obvious immediate referents are Buffy the Vampire Slayer and JJ Abrams' Star Trek.

Evil Household Objects: Candles.

Doctor Who!: Spoken by Simeon/The Great Intelligence, but then it would have been surprising if nobody had said it.

Outfits!: The brief clip of the Doctor's Christmas-episode stovepipe hat.

Small Child!: A Scottish urchin, the annoying Maitlands, a young Clara.

Murray Gold's Top Ten: Starts channelling Enrico Morricone, for some reason, when the Doctor and River have their snog.

Clara Dies Due To: Quite a lot of things, apparently. Jenny manages it twice.

Clara's Job of the Week: Saviour of the universe (ah-ahha!)

“Run, you clever boy, and remember”: Clara says it, most notably right before chucking herself into the gap.

Topical Reference to Puzzle Future Generations: Richard E. Grant played an alternative ninth Doctor in the cartoon “Scream of the Shalka”; could there be a sly reference here?

Continuity Frakup of the Week: Strax is rendered unconscious through a blow to the head-- not the probic vent. If the Doctor almost never noticed Clara during his adventures, how is it we see the First, Third and Seventh Doctors all seeing her and reacting? And how is it he hasn't noticed her, given all the interfering she does? For that matter, how is it none of his companions or foes noticed her? Also, how is it the Doctor never noticed The Great Intelligence (other than, presumably, “The Abominable Snowmen”, “The Web of Fear”, “The Snowmen” and “The Bells of St John”)? When did the Second Doctor go to California? It's a Physics Fail rather than a continuity frakup, but a) you don't need antigravs to keep you floating in space above a planet, and b) turning them off wouldn't mean you plummet towards the planet, but that you'd go into orbit around it. Why don't the Daleks, who have a damn sight more reason to hate the Doctor than the Great Intelligence does, just go to Trenzalore and ram six million Daleks through his timeline? Also, if Clara is born, lives and dies in many places, how does she somehow invade the uteruses of millions of women throughout time and space? Why is the First Doctor dressed in Victorian clothes on Gallifrey, and when did the Sixth lose all that weight? In “The Doctor's Wife”, we learn that the Tardis chose the Doctor, rather than the Doctor being steered towards a particular Tardis by Clara (and if Clara did direct him towards the right Tardis, why does the Tardis dislike her?). Clara sees eleven faces of the Doctor, but she should see at least twelve, and more likely thirteen (depending on what or who John Hurt actually is). If John Hurt deliberately chose not to go by the name “The Doctor”, why the caption “Introducing John Hurt as The Doctor” (and he's credited as the Doctor in the end credits as well). Lincoln and Haisman still not credited as creators of The Great Intelligence.

The World's Biggest Continuity Frakup: So, now that time has been rewritten, it seems the Doctor has never actually saved the universe; it's all Clara. Every single Doctor Who story has now gone completely differently; that's fifty years down the pan then.

Nostalgia UK: More Victoriana.

Item Most Likely to Wind Up as a Toy: The Whispermen, probably.