One major implication I don't think that episode really took the time to settle on is the implication that the Toymaker has already massively messed up the universe?
Toymaker: I came to this universe with such delight. And I played them all, Doctor. I toyed with supernovas, turned galaxies into spin tops. I gambled with God and made him a jack-in-the-box.
Toymaker: I made a jigsaw out of your history... did you like it?
Toymaker: The Master was dying and begged for his life with one final game, and when he lost, I sealed him for all eternity within my gold tooth.
And later:
Toymaker: Do you think a grand total of two can cause me to shiver when I've played against the Guardians of Time and Space and shrank them into voodoo dolls?
So to summarise:
It's implied the universe is now even more destroyed by the Toymaker's reality warping. Granted we don't know what the scale of this is, unlike the Flux, but it's possibly proportionally quite big considering how little of the universe is left already? That being said, he could have done this in history before the Flux, since it was a linear event, in which case this is far less of an issue.
That being said, it's likely this was reversed by the Toymaker being banished - so we're probably not going to see galaxy-sized spin-tops in the future. How many people died, and if they come back however, is less clear.
The Master (presumably dying after POTD), and the Black and White Guardians (at least - possibly the other 3 guardians too, excluding the Toymaker - though they're the main ones, and it's "order and chaos" specifically which are mentioned in the episode) have all gamed with the Toymaker and lost. The tooth!Master is at least left in our universe, and may possibly be secure with UNIT. The fate of the Guardians is a bit less clear, as is the implications for the balance of the universe.
But perhaps the biggest thing, and the one the episode actually took the time to give us a confused 14 reaction shot to:
The Toymaker has a made a 'jigsaw' out of the Doctor's history (or maybe history in general, although he does say 'your').
So what does that mean?
The hint is that the Doctor has already experienced whatever it is... so what was it that he caused with his interference?
To me there's perhaps three possible options:
The Star Beast - this would be an oddly minor thing to refer to, but arguably makes the most sense in the 'arc' of the specials. Perhaps he's referring to the Doctor encountering Beep the Meep for the first time again? ie. taken one jigsaw piece and exchanged its position in his timeline. For now this might be my headcanon regarding it, but would be really odd to be the intention, especially since we're already disregarding most of the other appearances of the Toymaker in the EU? It's also of course not the first time we've had an adaptation of an EU story in the main show without referencing the original (the no. 1 example being Human Nature - there are others like The Lodger and Dalek, but they're different enough that they can co-exist in a continuity with their source material).
The Timeless Child / Fugitive Doctor - RTD has said he's not going retcon the arc, but this arguably makes the most sense as a 'puzzle' being made out of the Doctor's history? Especially with regards to the Fugitive Doctor anyway, given there's the additional complications of her a) being the "Doctor", b) having a Police Box TARDIS, yet c) seemingly being from around the time of the Anchoring of the Thread.
The Toymaker's being time-wimey, it hasn't happened yet / it's nothing in particular - While it would be a bit confusing to contradict the one detail we got in the episode, this is always a possibility too. After all, there was a lot of sequel hooking all across these specials, so it might be something RTD will come back to, especially if we are going to be seeing more of the past Doctors in future series? Hopefully not by the biregeneration theory he gave about them all being split retroactively, because that is literally insane and doesn't even make the little sense the 14-15 one does....wtf.
So overall, what do I think?
Well I think I can be somewhat forgiving with the damage to the rest of the universe, just because it's implied that it might be reset, and the scale/lethality was never established. Plus like I said, there is some justification to the proportional issue not being too bad when combined with the Flux.
The Black and White Guardians implication is... interesting. We are gradually building up more and more of those 'Great Old One' / pre-universe elements in (New)NewWho, so there's a good chance this could come back in the future. It probably won't have immediate effects on the universe, as the Guardians seemed to be more concerned with specific dangers like the Key to Time. It could perhaps lead to more Eternals popping up across the universe, given the Guardians were the only force they really answered to. RTD I think is also quite aware of some of the Eternal-type lore too, since he played around with it quite a bit in those Series 1 articles talking about the Time War.
The Master's obviously coming back and as silly as this was, it does at least justify him being alive after POTD. It actually opens up the possibility of seeing Dhawan himself again too, which would be great! The nail-polished hand picking it up felt like a bit of a trolling moment, after how underwelming all the theories of who did it were when the End of Time came along. Someone pointed out that Kate actually has the same nail-polish, which would be interesting. Perhaps when we next see the Master, they'll be in UNIT captivity, Delgado style?
Finally, the jigsaw line, which is possibly the most interesting. Originally I was going to lean towards this being nothing / a vague setup for future past-Doctor stuff, since that seems to be the default, but now that I've laid it out... I think this could be a setup for more Fugitive!Doctor appearances. It makes the most sense from a story perspective anyway, given what the Toymaker said and some of the questions surrounding her not being answered, whether or not it's the direction the franchise would actually want to go.
After all, as controversial as the Timeless Child lore was, as far as I'm aware Jo Martin was pretty well recieved, and I'm sure RTD would love to look for opportunities to do more with her somehow. Whether he'd want something so continuity dependent from a showrunning perspective, however, is a bit more questionable.
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decided to boot up Black Reliquary again bc we got tired of refusing to play it until the 1.0 update and just wanted to play it. we completely forgot that the difficulty spike from apprentice to veteran quests is a wall, and that we have... very poor opinions of how punishing the bosses are. don't get us wrong, we get it's supposed to be hard and it's probably just a skill issue, but we genuinely believe that specifically enemy damage needs to be toned the fuck down. we do not think regular enemies should be able to hit for 30+ if they get a good roll at a level where tanky characters have around 100 HP and squishy characters are lucky to break 60. we also call bullshit on the idea that "the third spot is typically safe in most fights except in the caverns", bc literally every area has SOME basic or specialist enemy in every fight that can nuke the third row, it's not just the caverns. third row will get hit by a 56 crit damage flying guillotine or a 30+ crit damage trained slash and there's nothing you can fucking do about it.
we love Black Reliquary, but the second we decide to go above apprentice, or god forbid fight a boss, it stops being fun and starts being frustrating, because it feels like every enemy has enough damage to just kill you, and every boss is tuned to be completely unbeatable if you don't bring a perfect team to counter everything they do and still completely ruin you anyway even if you do bring a perfect team because fuck you. Darkest Dungeon, even at its worst, has never given us this feeling, not even on Stygian/Bloodmoon difficulty. it's always the early game that lulls us into a sense of security, bc the early game, once you get used to BR's flow, is WAY less punishing than DD's early game(you start with more money, the prep round gives you time to think, heroes have more health and damage overall, basically all items have larger stack sizes and you get more money overall and you start with everything unlocked, as opposed to DD's early game; where you start with basically no money, money is incredibly scarce for a while, you do not unlock everything until a few quests in, and every hero is generally useless until enough investment is made), but then the second you hit the mid game, or even the late early game, and try to start fighting bosses and doing harder quests, the game stops fucking around and you suddenly live in a constant state of everything being able to kill you in two turns, sometimes one turn if they focus you hard enough, with no warning and no way to really ever stop them, because no healing is going to outpace barbarians hitting your front AND backline for 14-36 multiple times a turn, especially if they roll high and god help you if they crit.
we understand that we're probably just not good at the game, but unless you have actual advice to help us get better we don't wanna hear it.
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