One aspect I've not seen any comments on was the nature of the reveal that Clara was Bonnie.

I feel they cheated the audience by the way the original encounter between Clara and the boy's parents was presented. What was originally shown was a lie.

It was a lie because the original version of events had no clue that Clara had been replaced. So, the parents were acting oddly (and so obviously we're meant to think they were Zygon duplicates) but the scene continued with Clara apparently escaping unscathed. No sudden cutaway just as the critical moment of capture approached. To all intents and purposes it was a continuous scene with no discontinuities. All the usual visual story telling techniques and conventions (the visual "punctuation" if you like) the audience is expected to follow indicated this was one continuous scene.

And then later, when Bonnie is revealed, we get another version, showing what really happened. Bah! A cheat.

I haven't felt that way since seeing the sequence in Silence of the Lambs when the Police were entering the house where the serial killer was supposed to be. It was all cut together showing the basement where the victims were kept, as if (what turned out to be) the two locations were one and the same. I felt cheated when it was revealed the Police were at the wrong house.

For me, this was the worst niggle I have with this story.

Anyone else agree or disagree? What did you think?

It's a cinematic technique to create suspense or interest by not telling a story in all its detail from A, B, C, D, etc, which most would find deathly dull and boring. Mr Hestia won't even watch an old episode of Columbo on the television because you knew who the murderer was at the beginning!

How can it be a cheat or a lie?

I liked Hustle until the end, but felt that after a while they often resorted to this kind of tactic, passing it off as a twist or revelation but really they just left out an important part of the plot and chucked it in at the end.

I don't think there's even a clever hint for repeat viewing that tips you off it wasn't the real Clara all along.

OK, I thought I'd been clear enough in my opening post, but here goes...

If that part of the story had been told in flashback by Bonnie, say, telling the Doctor what had happened, I'd have no problem with it.

If that part of the story had any sort of clue in the flow of it, like cutting away at the vital moment, I'd have no problem with it.

There's normally some sort of device in the telling of the story that diverts attention away from the critical moment, without actually showing a false version of the critical moment.

The original version of the scene had no such cutaway, and was not being told to us by a character. If you like, the "hidden voice" of the silent, trusted narrator of the story itself was telling a lie.

It's playing with and cheating the audience's expectations of how the story should be told by making the story itself an unreliable witness. It breaks the trust of the audience.

That's the essence of my complaint.

Well, even though I wasn't looking out for any oddities, I did think there was something a little strange about the way that scene in the neighbours' flat ended. We had the parents confronting Clara, then without any explanation she was leaving the flat without so much as a backwards glance, only briefly stopping to tie her hair up.
On first viewing it seemed odd.
As did Clara insisting to Jac that she neeed to return to her flat to collect some things - the significance of which only became apparent later when they followed the neighbours down to the Zygon underworld.
Annoyingly these little oddities weren't enough to alert me to the fact that Clara was now not Clara anymore. But the clues were definitely there.

Another way to look at this...

If they had simply cutaway to a different scene involving other characters just as Clara was confronted by the "parents", then I also wouldn't have a problem with it.

What they did was present a false version of what happened as if it was a normal part of the trusted narrative.

That's what makes it a lie in my book.

They were indeed there, I had my suspicions immediately upon that cut to Clara leaving the flat, nonchalantly returning The Doctor's calls. But then I'm a naturally cynical and suspicious bugger. I didn't find the structuring to be any kind of cheat, just a pretty standard narrative technique so far as these things go.

Saw it coming immediately.

And the scene GDK mentions in Silence of the Lambs is one of the most tense in the movie (and in the novel).

That scene in the film is one of the best examples of such a technique put to screen. Damn near perfect movie.

I thought it was pretty obvious from the original version of events that Clara had been replaced.

Goes into a flat where (given we know it's a story about shape shifters) the boys parents are likely Zygons.


Cuts to Clara leaving the flat where she straight away acts a little differently (ties her hair back, something the real Clara never (or very rarely) does).

Its not a cheat. It wasnt very artfully done but it wasnt a cheat. They idnt show on screen any events that did not happen. There was no false scene which lied to the viewers. They merely cut out a portion of what occurred. It would be cheating if they showed a scene where the parents engaged in normal discussion and it was made clear they were fine,. They didnt do this. The scene cut right before the Zygon emerged from the bedroom to confront Clara. The made a time jump. No cheating.

Same with your complaint about SOTL- thats masterful (mis)direction! I advise you never to watch The Usual Suspects!

As others have said it was so goddamn obvious it blows my mind that anyone was surprised. It was just so blatant! But then its the same when I hear Doctor Who called scary. I wonder what on earth people are watching the rest of the time.

Not that's not correct, the OP is right.
It wasn't a case of missing out detail by cutting it off early, it replayed the scene differently to how it originally occurred.
At the time it jolted me out of my suspension of disbelief because I remembered the original scene not being the same up until the point where the Zygon appeared.
I watched it again and in the original scene the Zygon didn't appear when Clara asked "Is he okay?". But in the flashback scene it did and it played out quite differently.

It's like in those old bad drama serials where there is a flashback showing a car going over a cliff and you see the character is definitely in the car as it goes over, but in the returning episode at the start you see that the character isn't even in the car, and you think hang on a minute, that's not how it ended last time.

But wow, wasn't Jenna good at being an evil Clara?
I sort of wonder if it might have been better for her to play an evil character in Doctor Who.

I don't know if that's a political answer in that if you add the scenes together then technically you can say they didn't show anything that didn't happen, but they had something happen in the original scene which did not happen in the flashback.

In the original scene when Clara asked "Is he okay?" the woman replies "He's fine", then Clara reacts to her. Then the scene cuts.
In the flashback it's different. Clara asks "Is he okay?" and then the Zygon suddenly appears and shoots her. The other bit that was in the original scene doesn't even happen in the flashback. It removes something in the flashback version.

It's only one line from the other woman and a facial reaction by Clara, but it was different. It was different enough to have made me question the earlier event, and that shouldn't have happened.
If it wasn't a cheat then it was certainly a continuity error which made me question whether it was a cheat, and I shouldn't be put in the position where I should have to question it.

My apologies! Ive held off on a rewatch until just before part 2 so was going on memory. I remembered it as playing out exactly the same just with a sneaky cut in the required place. Doh.

It's okay, no worries. It didn't completely ruin everything, the reveal of evil Clara/Bonny was done rather well which made up for it. But it did jar a bit as it made me remember the earlier scene. It could have been done better.

Thanks for the support. I have watched the episode twice so I was and am sure that the original version was false.

For me watching a movie or a TV show, part of the deal for the "willing suspension of disbelief" is the implied trust the audience has in the storytellers that the narrative is reliable. i.e. What is shown on screen is what actually happened in the story (unless it's being told in flashback by one of the characters (for example like in a traditional whodunnit?), or clearly from a character's PoV).

Silence of the Lambs is a great movie, but that one sequence I referred to jolted me straight out of the story because, while not explicitly lying to the audience, it relies on usual movie form and convention (outside the story on screen) to trick the audience. In doing so it breaks the fourth wall.

That quibble aside, I loved Jenna's performance and over the shoulder camera PoV as it became clear Bonnie was exposed.

Could the line/reaction have been cut late in the day for purposes of timing, rather than being a deliberate cheat? I didn't spot the discontinuity myself (but I was watching with a 6-year-old who continually asked "Is it a Zygon?" every time anybody new appeared on screen, which didn't help my concentration). An example of a genuine deliberate cheat in Doctor Who occurs in the cliffhanger/reprise at the junction of Episodes 2 and 3 of Planet of the Giants. By comparison, this, though annoying, is fairly small beer.

Yeah, I suppose it is small enough that it could be a continuity problem caused by an error in timing the cut.

It could be a mistake.

Either way, it's not something that should have happened.

I need to rewatch, but as you've presented it, I'd argue that the reaction you're having is exactly the point. You're supposed to be unsettled. You're supposed to question if what you're being told is what actually happened. You're supposed to have that lurching feeling of being lied to by someone you trust (i.e. the invisible narrator).

Because the story is about not trusting the things and people that you took for granted. Every person familiar to you could be a lie.

ETA: That's valid and may have been deliberate.

If so then I think it an artistic mistake.

I think that because the story is about not trusting things characters in the story appear to be or things they say, then it's a mistake to also play distrust tricks with the edited narrative from the camera point of view. It's fine to cut away and keep information back, but it's too much for the audience to not even trust whether the events they're shown actually are the events as they happened.

The camera in this story is not acting as any particular characters POV, whether trustworthy or not. It is, otherwise, a straight political thriller (albeit scifi), so I don't think adding "oh, and you can't believe anything shown by the camera to be something that actually happened" fits that.

I agree with GDK here - they shouldn't have shown two different versions of the same event. They should have just shown what happened after the events of the 1st showing of the scene.

Having said that - it's kind of small-fry. There were clues that Clara was a Zygon, albeit small ones, and even if there weren't - it's not exactly a cheat. Simply showing Clara as having encountered what were clearly Zygons early in the story was enough to counter any claims that nobody could possibly have guessed. It's not as if the flashback was the first time we were shown that Clara spent time alone with Zygons early in the story.

(The Silence of the Lambs example is different - masterfully misleading editing but nothing shown was subsequently shown to have happened other than how it did.)

I understand your point, however it fails on that artistic level because most people didn't even notice the original narrative was changed in the reveal.

Agreed. As I noted earlier. That sequence in Slience of the Lambs used the forms and conventions of normal cinema storytelling to deliberately mislead and surprise the audience. It used "meta" devices, outside the fictional reality of the events in the story itself to mislead. It broke the trust of the audience that this is a reliable narrative, which is probably why I reacted against it and was jolted "out" of the story briefly. It misled you into thinking it was filmed in more-or-less one fictional location, whereas it was actually presenting two fictional locations.

A great film though.

Maybe that bit of SOTL was too perfect! It jolted me too, but not quite to 4th wall broken level.

Sorry, I edited again while you replied. It breaks the trust the audience has that the narrative is a reliable witness.

Doctor Who does this kind of thing regularly...it uses the filming technique and scene cuts to not show us the full story.

It's the exact same concept as not fully showing a monster on-screen and forcing the camera to keep it out of sight, in spite of whoever else may see it. It's the same as filming at a certain angle so we only see that the Eleventh Doctor talking to Amy Pond is wearing a jacket, whilst the other one is just a few feet away. It's the same as establishing a cliffhanger to a particularly perilous moment that then lingers for a whole week - but in the reality of the characters was over just as fast as the rest of the story.

It's just dramatic technique, and personally one I saw coming. I didn't feel cheated or that the episode was worse because I saw it coming - if anything I found the writing and acting commendable because it made me believe throughout that it wasn't Clara we were watching (the whole "You're just middle-aged" thing was very un-Clara) and I knew the character better than that. When a show can make you 'know' a character to the extent you can tell them apart from an exact copy of them, it's actually more of a success than a cheat - even when the transition to Bonnie isn't the most artful achievement, or the most subtle.