I like the theory that he is UNIT, but ex-UNIT, as going out with Clara would obviously cross some boundaries if he had been assigned to keep tabs on her / the Doctor / the school.

He comes across as a bit jaded concerning traveling in the Tardis or into space, hence the ex-UNIT idea. Not sure if he knew who the Doctor was, but again, he was not too freaked out by the Blitzer, either. If he was active-duty UNIT he would know who the Doctor was (at this school, anyways) and would not have removed the Doctor's devices.

All I know is I am 90% sure that Danny and Orson are the same person. Somehow they just are!

It's pretty obvious that there is something to him, although it's weird how mainstream reviewers don't seem to have picked up on it, but maybe they're just keeping quiet so as not to blow any surprises.

I won't say it's weird how some fans haven't picked up on it because I know that certain types become infuriated and irrational the second anything is said or done onscreen they don't like and so are not likely to make any interesting observations at all.

In what way is he lame? He's competent, practical, reliable, sensitive - in fact he's too not-lame to be real!

Lame as in seemingly nothing much too him, boring, dull - at least that's what most people seem to think? Don't get me wrong, Im quite hopeful about Danny's character. I can see some strength and grit to his character particularly a confrontational side which I think will play off with the Doctor well in future episodes. What I would prefer not to see is a boring Boyfriend/Girlfriend relationship play out as I feel this would be a bit of waste of his character..

Yes, and he was Rupert in a children's home (I remember him saying he hadn't been called that for years).

Imagine of there isn't. Imagine if it gets to the end of the series and he's actually just plain Danny Pink, ex soldier.

That would make him officially the most monumentally boring Who character ever.

I think the majority are hoping there's more to him because surely if there isn't he's been a giant waste of screen time.

He'll save the day by doing some big leaps & somersaults, you just mark my words.

He has to.. That leap was epic in The Caretaker! Must be more of an explanation for that Olympic effort.

It would be good fun if the Doctor's constantly calling him 'P.E.' meant something. 'Pink Entity'? xD Well, the Doctor does seem convinced that Danny is not a Maths teacher, and that could be the case, somehow...

It's obvious that, by showing us one occasion of him doing major gymnastics, in the midst of him otherwise being a rather banal pedestrian character, they are clearly giving us an indication that he has resources in reserve that we do not normally see-and why do that, unless these hidden reserves are to be deployed spectacularly at some point, without seeming like a total deus ex machina?

As I said the jump was to good even for the best gymnast in history I think it's going to show he may have received a upgrade and is "bionic"

So far this year we have seen
Half face man who was half man half robot
The Sheriff was going to be shown to be half robot if that scene wasn't cut out
Psi has cyber implants
The Mummy was a human/alien who had some kind of implanted tech

I suppose you could even count The Dalek as that/they are shown to be a mixture of organic and robotic parts

So there is a bit of a theme for it this year.

have we actually SEEN any military paraphernalia of his yet?
or have i missed it

yeah he's an odd one

I have to say the commentary on Danny Pink seems a good deal more interesting than Danny Pink. It is hard to understand why he generates such passions.

It has been a pretty lifeless so far but of course that leads to the conclusion that he is probably dead already.

As a fan of maximalism (at least in a Who context) I think this sort of small performance is a bit of a cheat but there is no doubt about it- you can read a great deal into an absence.

I do think that a lot of hostility to the character is actually a proxy for hostility to Clara for having human relationships. It has been the same with all the female companions in New Who- they are constantly chastised for relationships in the real world.

Not really I was kinda glad before the show started when it said she would have a BF I thought it made sense it's just the character is so off.

Again not really if anything with Amy and Rory I thought she wasn't good enough for him I wanted them to dump her keep him as a companion and get himself a nice girl

Umm, I don't know how far to go with this but I will put it as nicely as I can. The concept of a 'nice girl' for a fully grown adult woman (and I assume this is what you want for Rory) perhaps needs reconsidering. This applies particularly strongly when you are implying that another woman is not a 'nice girl', even if Amy is fictional.

This is going to go down like a lead balloon but it needs to be said.

The character of Amy was a full on bitch to Rory always putting him down letting him know she was so much better then him and even slapped him on occasion she made it obvious she didn't want him but he would have to do because The Doctor didn't want her.

In terms of the show if Rory or any other male character treated a female character like she treated him there would have been complaints from fans and various women's rights groups.

Is nice person any better
Someone would would be nice to him
someone who would really love him


That's what I meant

Umm, well as so often with exchanges on message boards this is becoming rather less edifying as it proceeds. It would probably have been better if I had left this with 'nice girls' v. 'not nice girls' rather than allowing the thing to move on to 'full on bitch'. I don't know whether you think that kind of language as provocative and like provocation or whether you think it is perfectly normal. In either case it is offensive. But a Doctor Who message board is probably not the best place to debate it.

And, by extension, the most interesting.

In a forum where every so often the subject comes up of "how come the Doctor doesn't have any companions that are just normal people and not super-powery-timey-wimey-space-entities", he gets a semi-regular character who is exactly that, and suddenly he's the more boring person ever, and so he's probably a super-powery-timey-wimey-space-entity-in-disguise?

I can understanding objecting to 'girl' as a term for adult woman, but James Frederick was not using 'bitch' as a general term for women, but rather for a specific type of woman who behaves in a nasty way, so criticism is not so valid there-although maybe there is an argument to be had about using an abusive term ('bitch') that would not be used to denote a man.

Well if roles were reversed and Rory treated Amy bad I would have called him complete and utter bastard

He can't be though, Orson was about 100 years in their futures so Orson has to be the child or more likely grandchild of Danny, possibly Clara's possibly not we don't know yet. What was made clear was that Orson is not Danny just in the same way that Gwen was not the servant girl in The Unquiet Dead.

If he was in his early-to-mid thirties a century into the future he would surely be a great-grandchild.

When one of those character is a time traveller who suggests that his ancestors were also time travellers, it does open up a little more scope for weirdness.

Unless Danny or Danny JR did a Chaplin