I'm sorry. It's really not the same at all. Sure, the intent is the same: to obscure something about what really happened so the audience gets a surprise with the actual reveal later on.

The intent is the same as: keeping the muderer's face in the deep shadows; carefully obscuring anything that might identify the murderer by choice of camera angle; only showing the murderer's feet and so on.

The intent is the same as having a crucial scene, such as the murderer making an attack, and cutting away before the scene gives away the full story, before, say, revealing whether the intended victim survived, or just as the leader starts to explain his plan, before revealing the plan.

In all those cases the narrative shows us parts of what happened, leaving gaps for the audience to ponder until the actual reveal.

In this case the original narrative shows something that didn't happen. No Zygons and Clara leaving unscathed. It did more than obscure or look away. The reveal, the reprise of Clara in the flat with the little boy's parents, contradicts the original version.

They made the narrative lie. They broke the implied trust that the narrative is a reliable witness.

I will concede the DW if its as has been described but youre not having SOTL. No way, Thats not a cheat. At all.

Fair enough. YMMV after all.

Going back to DW. I've just re-watched both bits again. In the end the bit I feel is "wrong" amounts to just a couple of seconds at most. The bit that makes it feel worse (than it probably is) is that the original version just skips over the Zygon bit, leaving the impression that when we see (we now know to be ) Bonnie outside, fixing her hair, it's a continuation of the scene in the flat. If they'd cut away to somewhere else between the flat and Bonnie just outside, it would've created the necessary impression of time passing.

Yes - your edited version is more interesting. Hmmm....yeah. See what you mean. Still - bloody good editing, wasn't it? I remain too impressed with SOTL to agree with you.

No, that's not what happened. The point wasn't about simply making a cut and then something happened afterwards which we didn't see, it was about the fact that the original event and the flashback event happened differently.

I personally liked that bit. I did think it was odd Clara behaviour, but it didn't really click till later that she was definitely a zygon. To be honest I thought she was a zygon earlier because of not answering the Doctor's phone calls.

It's just a narrative device to keep the viewer from knowing the whole truth for the big reveal. Where would Sixth Sense be without those types of narrative devices!

Maybe the narrative device wasn't the best one to use, but it still worked.

I deliberately haven't re-watched those scenes after reading this thread, because I want to work with just my memory of what I saw the first time. After all that's all that the vast majority of the audience who don't re-watch episodes would have.
At the time I watched I didn't see anything wrong with the way it was done.
Surely all that was misleading was that we didn't see the middle bit of the scene the first time, so we didn't see Clara get zapped.
Many clues were there I'm sure afterwards that she had been replaced, and if the parents were Zygons as was the obvious assumption, if was actually pretty obvious that she must have been zapped in the flat as otherwise how could they have let her just stroll out as if nothing had happened after what she'd seen?!
With hindsight it's blatantly obvious what must have happened to her, but many were fooled as intended, including me I'm now embarrassed to say!
The only criticism that could be levelled in my opinion, as has been said, is that there was a time jump in the scene the first time, with nothing to indicate that any time had passed between the interior and the shot of Clara leaving the flat, but that's a minor niggle as far as I'm concerned, and hardly unique!

Classic Who used to do that a lot. The cliffhanger showed one scene, the following week's recap showed something slightly different to resolve the situation

I am really at a loss at why people are getting so up in arms about this. The point of the cut was to deliver a shock towards the end of the episode by not showing the whole scene. Some people may have guessed is was Bonnie now and some might not of have done. I didn't and enjoyed the surprise.

However they could have allowed us to see the changeover and have the drama of us knowing Bonnie is a fake and the characters not but the whole story was about mis-direction. The two boxes, both empty, this wasn't the first time it had happened....

With fiction it is more enjoyable to go with the writer's flow rather than nitpick everything.