Knock Knock

[Missy @missy]

@alexwho: For my money, all of them are even better at a second, third and fourth viewing.

Missy

[Anonymous @]

@missy

I just judged her by what I would have done in her place. Wanting to know who and what he was, his planet, why he’s called a Time Lord etcetera. But then again, perhaps in her situation and her age, I wouldn’t have – who nose.

It’s hard to know exactly what we’d do, you know? I think each of us, in our own way, would respond differently to an unknown alien with two hearts who says, “hey, I’m a time lord and I regenerate on the odd occasion I sleep [seriously paraphrased]” 😀

Thane

[Missy @missy]

Exactly what I meant. it’s what I feel I would have done and still would, but one has to be in that situation to really know.

Missy

[wolfweed @wolfweed]

Student accommodation has changed since my day. It seems that nowadays 6 people gather & declare each other housemates before they start househunting…..

The BBC Click article on binaural sound suggest it’s going to be the next big thing because everyone goes around with headphones on all the time now. First signs of becoming Cybermen…?

knock knock transcript

[PNWfan @pnwfan]

Ok, I’ve been out of the country for months and unable to watch my favorite show so I’m lost on the storyline. The Doctor is stuck on earth? Why? Which episode explained this? And who is the weird bald guy? Help???

[IAmNotAFishIAmAFreeMan @pedant]

@pnwfan

All will be revealed.

[PNWfan @pnwfan]

So are you saying no one knows yet what this storyline is?

[tardigrade @tardigrade]

@pnwfan

If you watch from the start of the series (The Pilot), then you’ll know who the bald guy is (Nardole- he did appear previously in the last two Xmas specials) and why the Doctor is staying on Earth. I don’t want to say more for reasons of spoilers. You’re posting on an month-old episode. More is known at the currently aired point in the series.

[Missy @missy]

@wolfweed: The BBC Click article on binaural sound suggest it’s going to be the next big thing because everyone goes around with headphones on all the time now. First signs of becoming Cybermen…?

Either that or dumb.  People have stopped talking to each other, they spend their time prodding away at their mobile phones – gawd I hate those things. All they are good for are emergencies. it amused me the other day when I was asked for my mobile phone number. When I said that I didn’t have one, the person looked at me as though I was from another planet.

Missy

[Dentarthurdent @dentarthurdent]

Bill using the Tardis for a removal van? That just feels a little bit wrong.

The Doctor is really weird in this one, I felt a little embarrassed for Bill. It’s like going out to dinner with a relative who turns out to be socially tone deaf.

The creepy noises in the kitchen turn out to be – the Doctor. Looking a bit like Boris Karloff in some lights. And there is no way I’d use an oil heater in an old timber building like that. And then the landlord mysteriously appears – almost as creepy as the Doctor.

Doesn’t David Suchet do mild-but-sinister well? I half expected the contract to be signed in blood 🙂 He is extraordinarily good as the Landlord. An amiable benevolent-looking old gentleman who is unsettlingly creepy under his benign exterior. And then he goes all Evil Villain bwahaha. And then, quite incredibly, he becomes a tragic if misguided character that we actually feel sorry for. Until he decides to carry on with his nefarious tenant-consuming scheme.

I keep wanting to call the house ‘Wester Drumlins’ for no good reason.
But it’s a lovely old house, I *love* old slightly dilapidated buildings, preferably wooden. (When I’m travelling, I much prefer downmarket pensions or hikers’ ‘refuges’ in little out-of-the-way villages. Though huge rooms in grand hotels, let at stupidly cheap off-season rates just to keep the place running, have their appeal too. I’m rambling.)
The standard haunted-house stuff is really very well done – creaks and bangs and slamming doors.

I like the relief in Paul’s voice when Bill tells him she prefers girls – “Oh. Oh, right! I was never in with a chance. Awesome!” That is just so true to life. He can relax and stop trying it on and doesn’t feel he’s missing a chance.

Eliza is creepy but one of the less successful ‘creatures’ in the series, visually. Her restoring all the flatmates to life was a nice touch, though a bit hard to credit the mechanics of it. But then they were alien woodlice with weird powers so I guess I can manage to believe it. But the ending came incredibly abruptly.

And the little coda with Nardole and the vault was sufficiently weird and intriguing to force me to watch the next episode! (I was going to anyway, of course)

So this was actually a pretty good episode. Nothing spectacular but well put together.

[Dentarthurdent @dentarthurdent]

Incidentally, the tiny house they were first shown into really exists – its 91a (you can actually read the number in the episode) Fairwater Grove West, Llandaff, Cardiff (you can see it in Streetview) and it’s a few houses down from Terry Nation’s birthplace at No 113, as mentioned in the commentary to the episode. (The commentary obviously didn’t give the addresses but – Google…)

The second house next to the cement factory (or is it a gasworks) I don’t know, I’m not that obsessive.

Just for completeness, the big house (Wester Drumlins from ‘Blink’) is Fields House in Fields Park Avenue, Newport.

[winston @winston]

@dentarthurdent  This as a good episode for a dark and stormy night. David Suchet was pleasantly creepy as was the house. This rental proves the saying “you get what you pay for”. It reminds me of a place a friend rented in college , it was the top floor of a huge building that had a garage a metal workshop and a couple other businesses like that. The apartment was huge ,rundown and strange with sloping floors and secret rooms and enough bedrooms for 8 students. There was nobody down below at night to complain about the loud and endless parties. A fun place to visit but I didn’t want to live there.

Back to the episode, I dislike woodlice a lot so they really gave me the creeps and shivers.

Stay safe

[Dentarthurdent @dentarthurdent]

@winston I love old slightly-run-down buildings. Some of the pleasantest nights I’ve had away from home have been in old run-down country pubs that I’ve booked into at the last minute when I ran out of time and daylight. Like the Tavistock Hotel in Waipukurau, one stormy Easter – ‘We do have a room but it’s above the bar and it’s disco night tonight’ ‘Never mind, it’ll do’. And their idea of ‘disco’ was Dire Straits and Pink Floyd – I was in heaven 🙂 Or old student flats like the one you describe – it’s a tribute to the residual strength of timber and nails that they never collapsed under the weight of wall-to-wall drunk students.

As it happens I like woodlice, I think they’re cute. Non-slimy, non-spiky, non-bitey, non-stingy and non-smelly. And fascinating the way they roll up into balls. But I admit rationality has nothing to do with our feelings towards creepy-crawlies, for example I like millipedes, don’t mind spiders, but centipedes give me the screaming hab-dabs. You know the scene in Dr No where someone puts a tarantula in James Bond’s bed? Well in the book that was a giant centipede, I don’t know why they changed it for the movie, that would really have freaked me out.

[winston @winston]

@dentarthurdent   I agree that the things that scare us make no sense at all. I like butterflies and bees but I am terrified of wasps and I have a full on phobia of moths.Of course wasps sting and one attacked me this summer and stung me under my eye 3 times before I swatted it off my face. I looked like a boxer for a week.On the other hand moths come out at night, but they don’t bite. I love toads, frogs and turtles but I will run from a little snake in the garden. No sense at all.

Centipedes also sting and bite! They give me the heebie- jeebies which must be like the hab-dabs.

I love weird and old houses myself and passing one by, I always wonder about who lives there. We have a 5 sided house near by and I love it but I have never been inside . What shape are the rooms? Oh the mystery.

stay safe

 

[Dentarthurdent @dentarthurdent]

@winston Bees I’m cautious about, though I do like lovely big hairy bumble bees. I like spiders (and in NZ there aren’t any really poisonous ones), we used to have lovely big ‘Avondale spiders’ (an immigrant Australian Huntsman) a couple of inches across, in our garden, sadly I haven’t seen one for decades. And I also like moths, the bigger the better. Hate wasps, that’s not a phobia, they’re just nasty things in every way. But I like praying mantises, savage killers that they are.

Toads and frogs are quaint and cute (we don’t have the poisonous Aussie cane toads here, just as well). I’d be fine with snakes, though a bit cautious of ones that might be poisonous, but we have no snakes at all in NZ. Probably just as well since I like walking barefoot everywhere. Oh, and I like mice.

And I quite agree most of these likes/phobias are arbitary. I have a mild phobia for giant wetas, which look like enormous grasshoppers – in theory I should love them, but I just find them somewhat gross and creepy.

Quite by coincidence David Attenborough’s Planet Earth III is on right now and some of those deep-sea creatures look – just *wrong*. Like the creatures trying to break through from the Dungeon Dimensions in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld. Or as if the Creator was off his face on magic mushrooms, acid *and* angel dust the day he knocked those out.

[Author]

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