The Christmas Invasion

[Craig @craig Emperor]

It may be Easter, but for our Russell T. Davies retrospective it is most certainly Christmas. And what do we get for a/in the present? Doctor (supposedly) Sexy! In those jimjams? Really? Still, this skinny bloke kind of has potential, accent’s a bit weird though. I won’t judge him just yet. 😉

It’s a corker of an episode, even if it IS Doctor light. The whole of mankind falls under the shadow of the alien race The Sycorax. Rose needs the Doctor’s help, but can she trust this man with a new face. Is he really The Doctor? Is he HER Doctor?

[The Krynoid Man @thekrynoidman]

I didn’t see this when it was first aired. I forgot that it was on and when I realised it was I had already missed the first half, so I didn’t bother to watch the rest. My philosophy is that if you’re going to watch something, watch the whole thing, there’s no point in only watching part of something.
Anyway back the episode, I quite liked it when I first saw it. This was just after I had watched the rest of series 2 and at that point I still liked the tenth doctor so I was disappointed that he was unconscious for most of the episode but the last 10 minutes when he was awake were fantastic, again I liked the tenth doctor when I was 11, now I just yell out a variation of Obi Wan’s “you were the chosen one” speech from Revenge of the Sith whenever he’s onscreen. I found the humour that makes up the most of the rest of the episode forced even back then. The running gag about Harriet Jones was cute the first time they did it but it got irritating quickly. I guess this is what happens when you model your series after Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
I guess it’s one of the better Christmas specials, but that’s really not saying much.

[Bluesqueakpip @bluesqueakpip]

There’s also a bridging mini-sode, written for the 2005 Children In Need telethon. It basically just explains regeneration in more detail, and establishes that ‘the new bloke’ really is The Doctor.

[wolfweed @wolfweed]

Doesn’t London have beautifully graffitied bins?

Loving the Pilot Fish (brilliant tuba-gun!) and the Xmas tree.

The Sycorax are obviously huge Queen fans…

Nice continuity with the scaffolding on  the repaired Big Ben.

The Sycorax ship is wonderfully bizarre.

Anyone know what wiped out a third of Torchwood just before this story?

Nice horrific deaths – Not enough of those in Who anymore…

Why is there no food in the TARDIS (or is Jackie just being ‘a mum’?)?

This is the best advert for tea since ‘The Awakening’…

Not ginger.

In the Whoniverse, Arthur Dent is a real person.

If  Howard the greengrocer wasn’t so ‘friendly’ with Jackie, there’d have been no satsuma (or indeed dressing gown) and the Doctor would have been cleft in twain. Thankfully he was, so the Sycorax was plunged into the Eastenders title sequence.

Harriet’s decision is a bit like the sinking of the Belgrano…

Isn’t the 6 word destruction a satire on Tony Blair (or was it somebody else?)?
Yawn!

I bet the clean up bill for all that foul ash will eat into Jackie’s extra £18 a week. Plus she’s got all those Xmas tree shaped gaps in her walls which will cost a lot to repair. What a short Golden Age!

[janetteB @janetteb]

The first of the Christmas Specials and it’s little wonder that on the strength of this the BBC decided to make it a “tradition”. Keeping the Doctor stricken in bed for most of the episode was sheer genius. It left the viewer wondering just who this new Doctor was going to be and when Doctor 10 leaps out of the Tradis he more than compensates for his absence. In jsut a few minutes he has established himself as the Doctor and won our hearts.

In this household this is one of the most re-watched stories from the RTD years and certainly our favourite is his stories. It has all the best elements of his run, Micky and Jackie, Christmas, Harriot Jones, a moral dilemma, and that annoying damn Slade song. (I had to include it in my Christmas music mix after it become so reminiscent of Dr Who). The aliens are a little “kiddy” but then it is Christmas and they are only there for the main character drama to kick off from.

The Satsuma did cause some confusion here though. In Australia the fruit is called a mandarin. Took us several years to work out just what it was that he had in his pocket.

Cheers

Janette

[PhaseShift @phaseshift Time Lord]

I think looking at this with fresh eyes, I can’t help but admire it, even though for “introducing the Doctor” stories it’s been well and truly supplanted by The Eleventh Hour for me.

When he brought the Doctor back in Rose, Russell obviously referenced Spearhead from Space, with the Autons and their attack on London shoppers. Here he does so again, because Pertwee spent the first couple of episodes in bed in that with someone (in that case the Brig) trying to work out whether this was the same Doctor he knew.

Here Rose and her family are the route to ask just Who is this Doctor, and will he be any good? I think for the first regeneration of the new series it was exactly the right thing to do. Keeping it lighthearted in threat initially (Robot Santas and Christmas Trees) while Rose works through her fears and doubts. Having another person in the mix who approaches the question from a different standpoint (Harriet Jones) just adds to the mix.

There are a lot of small details of continuation (which @wolfweed has mentioned) to keep you occupied. The plot about a probe to Mars being intercepted at Christmas obviously referenced the loss of “Beagle 2” which had been scheduled to land on Mars two years before on a Christmas Day. Damned aliens. 😉

I think Billie Piper and support do an awful lot here, but you are aware that we’re treading water. Hats of to her though for her attempt to sound commanding as she confronts the Sycorax and rapidly loses the plot. Basically we need the Doctor.

And here he is. It’s a bravura performance and a whirlwind of words. When I first saw it I though – “bloody hell, the Doctors turned into Lord Flashheart!”. Here is your Doctor: funny, with an easy charm, able to talk the back legs of a Betelgeusian mega-donkey before convincing it to crawl down to the shops to pick up a packet of fags.

Is that the sort of man I am now? Am I rude? Rude and not ginger?

Yep – for the perfect combinations of Rude and Ginger we had to wait for Donna and Amy. 😀

I literally do not know who I am. It’s all untested. Am I funny? Am I sarcastic? Sexy? Right old misery? Life and soul? Right-handed, left-handed? A gambler, a fighter, a coward, a traitor, a liar, a nervous wreck? I mean judging by the evidence I’ve certainly got a gob.

It’s the steel as he dispatches the leader after the sword fight, and his confrontation with Harriet that tend to linger through the fun though.

@wolfweed

Isn’t the 6 word destruction a satire on Tony Blair (or was it somebody else?)?

After the Belgrano-a-like actions, we’re back to dear Margaret. I think it was Alan Clarks diaries which revealed “Don’t you think she looks tired” was the method backbench MPs sounded each other out about whether she could survive at the end of her tenure. I have a feeling it may have cropped up since then though.

Must mention Murray Gold who we hear at the end doing “Song for Ten”. Apparently that was a last minute thing, but I love the slightly Phil Spector-ish feel of that as 10 selects his new threads.

[The Krynoid Man @thekrynoidman]

@phaseshift It’s a shame that the version of Song for 10 on the soundtrack album is a diffrent version.

[Bluesqueakpip @bluesqueakpip]

Okay, so – I’ve drunk slightly too much and am definitely on a chocolate high. About the right state for watching a Doctor Who Christmas Special.

It’s worth remembering that – as @janetteb says – this is the story that started the whole ‘traditional Doctor Who Christmas Special’ thing. It worked so well as a Christmas Special that – so RTD says – the BBC execs were happily referring to it as ‘traditional’ when they were planning their 2006 Christmas. They were quite shocked to discover that Christmas episodes had never been a Doctor Who tradition – the only previous one had been back in 1966.

The graffiti does have a bit of an ‘art department’ look about it, doesn’t it? The Powell Estate probably has a Banksy somewhere. 😉

Does Russell T. Davies actually like Christmas? Killer Santas, Christmas tree drones. ‘Snow’ that turns out to be cremation ash. To be followed by evil bridegrooms, crashing spaceships for the insurance… compare them with Moffat’s Christmas episodes.

The first use of the Tower of London as a UNIT headquarters. And a lovely little joke that ‘Martians look completely different’.

I agree that Billie Piper and her support cast are basically having to carry the show. She’s the continuity; while everyone’s getting used to the new guy, Rose and family are subtly reassuring everyone that we are still in the same show. That’s probably why they also decided to ask Penelope Wilton to reprise her role and included UNIT from the BG series. All little hints that this is still the same programme; the Doctor is regenerating, just like he always did. The kids would remember Rose and Harriet Jones, their parents UNIT and the previous regenerations.

A vial of blood on a space probe? A vial of actual blood? To Mars? Couldn’t RTD have made it cell classification data or something? Space scientists would go ballistic at the thought of possibly contaminating any Martian life forms – probes are sent out as sterile as possible.

Oh, well, it’s the British Rocket Group. Probably by the time they’d survived the mutating plant-person, the weird industrial waste and the 100,000 year old genetic experiments, they were getting a bit casual about cross contamination. 😈

The Sycorax spaceship looks like a giant hollowed out asteroid. Make air-tight, fit propulsion. Mind you, you’d need a decent forcefield to fly it into atmosphere without bits burning off. 😉

That’s another thing RTD is very fond of – the impossible moral dilemma. In fact, his Ninth Doctor starts his entire tenure in the after effects of an impossible moral dilemma – kill billions of children or let the entire universe be destroyed.

We saw the new guy’s steel earlier than the sword fight, though. When he despatches the buzz-saw Christmas tree and talks about the pilot fish – that steel core is very visible. You could see what Tennant would later develop into the Time Lord Victorious…

Another little bit of continuity with the BG series – the Doctor has always been good at sword fighting. Did he pick it up on Earth or is it a Time Lord sport? Certainly the Master is also a good swordsman…

Mandarins are a different fruit to Satsumas. 🙂

Yeah, the destruction of the Sycorax ship does have a strong resemblance to the propaganda version of the Belgrano’s sinking [To be fair, this was back in 2005, and the full intelligence details hadn’t been released]. Politics aside, I’d say this is another example of RTD’s rather bleak view of humans – that even perfectly decent people can turn into monsters at the drop of a hat. Or the threat of an invasion.

But I do think it’s rather hypocritical of a guy who’s committed genocide to complain about someone blowing up one starship. 😉

Ah, Song for Ten. I do like the album version. I think there’s about four different versions of the vocals and of course, the orchestral theme from it appears in several episodes.

[thegirlinthewind @thegirlinthewind]

This episode was one of my favorites for Tennant. From the moment he says, ” I don’t know! See that’s the thing. I’m the Doctor. But beyond that I just don’t know. I literally do not know who I am. It’s all untested. Am I funny? Am I sarcastic? Sexy? Right old misery? Life and Soul? Right- Handed? Left- Handed? A gambler, a fighter, a coward, a traitor, a liar, a nervous wreck?” He had won my heart. What I liked about Ten in this episode is that he acknowledges that he was rude to Rose right away. That is a quality needed to be on my favorite Doctor list, the ability to admit you have done wrong.

• This reply was modified 9 years, 11 months ago by  thegirlinthewind. Reason: Misspelling

[Havoc @havoc]

Wow.  the last 10 minutes when he was awake were fantastic, again I liked the4 tenth doctor when I was 11, now I just yell out a variation of Obi Wan’s “you were the chosen one” speech from Revenge of the Sith whenever he’s onscreen. I found the humour that makes up the most of the rest of the episode forced even back then. The running gag about Harriet Jones was cute the first time they did it but it got irritating quickly. I guess this is what happens when you model your series after Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

The Krynoid Man” Claims Dr Who is based on Buffy, which I think is supposed to be derogatory. Here’s what he said-scroll Up to read it in full)

Nnnnah. You don’t get to make derogatory statements about The. Best. Doctor’s debut.  Or Buffy. Not while you’re someone who was 11 quite recently. And ESPECIALLY Not when you quote Revenge Of The Clones or whichever rubbish film Lucas Put Out (pun intended) in your short and entitled life.

 

Now For My Theory: Well, I need theories, On what happened to people unable to make it to a roof?  Prisoners & The very Elderly & young, and the lame…

 

Yes the Blood Magic stopped Type A from jumping But how Badly do people think they Hurt themselves Trying To climb?

Avoc

 

IF your Uncle Jack helped you off an elephant, would you help your uncle jack off an elephant?

[Arbutus @arbutus]

@havoc     You don’t get to make derogatory statements about The. Best. Doctor’s debut.  Or Buffy. Not while you’re someone who was 11 quite recently. And ESPECIALLY Not when you quote Revenge Of The Clones or whichever rubbish film Lucas Put Out (pun intended) in your short and entitled life.

Actually, I’m pretty sure we are allowed to hold whatever views we like as to the quality of an episode, or a Doctor, or any other TV show or film, regardless of our age. And we are welcome to share those views in a courteous manner, and others are welcome to respectfully disagree.

[PhaseShift @phaseshift Time Lord]

@thekrynoidman

Cherish this moment, my young friend. Your casual (but honestly expressed) thoughts on this episode have enraged a passing verifiable idiot to the extent he just had to sign in to challenge you in the most inept way possible. I get three a month now, but it did take me a large amount of time to accrue the first.

Consider his prose. Consider his form. Consider his ill-considered ad-homs.

This, @thekrynoidman, is not JUST an idiot. This is an organically produced, full fat, extra caffeinated heir to the throne of the kingdom of idiots.

I particularly liked:

Not while you’re someone who was 11 quite recently

As written by someone who is eleven now. Or whose IQ can be represented by those numbers.

Bless.

Cry @havoc, and let slip the dogs of idiocy, to be sure.

[IAmNotAFishIAmAFreeMan @pedant]

@havoc

Are you a professional moron, or just a gifted amateur?

[Bluesqueakpip @bluesqueakpip]

@pedant

I was going for ‘drunk’, myself. On his Mum’s sherry.

[IAmNotAFishIAmAFreeMan @pedant]

@bluesqueakpip

Yeah, I’d go for that.

Although having looked an @thekrynoidman‘s reference to Buffy, its snark does make it appear he is suffering a loss entirely of his own making (as @purofilion will attest). Youngsters, eh?

Now, let’s get back to pointing at the troll and laughing.

Or discussing Doctor Who, if you want to be blue boringer about it.

[Arbutus @arbutus]

Yes, well, I thought about trying to be funny. But in the end, I knew that @pedant and @phaseshift would do much better job of it than I could, so I settled for earnest and slightly sarcastic. Well done, y’all, as always!

[The Krynoid Man @thekrynoidman]

@havoc Yes I was 11, 9 years ago when series 2 started. 9 years isn’t recent. And so what if was 11, are 11 year olds not allowed to have an opinion. Also just because you think Tennant is the best doesn’t make it a fact.

And ESPECIALLY Not when you quote Revenge Of The Clones or whichever rubbish film Lucas Put Out (pun intended) in your short and entitled life.

Revenge of the Clones?? Now I know you’re just trolling.

[The Krynoid Man @thekrynoidman]

@pedant It’s not that I think Buffy is bad, I used to love it when I was 5, I’m just not a fan of the way Joss Whedon always has his characters have something clever or witty to say, which is something modern Who as adopted. I really liked Avengers Assemble and Serenity though, and Toy Story is a masterpiece.

[IAmNotAFishIAmAFreeMan @pedant]

@thekrynoidman

That’s OK, as noted all are entitled to their view.

This is going to sound awfully patronising but I have been around the block too many times to really give that much of a toss.

You are in that age group when you Know Everything – not in any way a barb – it is an unavoidable part of growing up that between (roughly) 18 and (roughly) 23 people Know Everything. Then we being to grasp the limits of our understanding (note that I do not say knowledge). Then over the next few years we develop and, somewhere between (roughly) 28 and (roughly) 32 we reach the point of having a decent grasp of the limitations of our understanding, so can finally discern the best question to ask and can therefore have sensible discussion with scientists, artists,  philosophers(1) and tradesmen. Failure to grasp this at the time is why (I now realise) I was overly ambitious in my post-graduate work.

But don’t worry – as I said this is completely unavoidable, everybody goes through it, barring impairment, and most come out the other side with the beginnings of that all-important human trait, wisdom.

In particular, once you get there, you will be able to review this sentence:

I’m just not a fan of the way Joss Whedon always has his characters have something clever or witty to say

and realise just how much you would like to take it back. To help you along that path, I invite you to consider its opposite.

Go about it in the right way and you will enjoy every moment. Either way, storytelling is way too important for me to not poke youthful absolutism with a stick.

None of that, of course, alters the fact that @havoc is a thundering bellend.

 

 

 

(1) With the exception of deconstructionists who are, without exception, complete twats.

[Anonymous @]

@thekrynoidman – I finally understand your name now. Of course it is classic Who. Nice!

I don’t have any words of wisdom like @pedant, but I was surprised by the same line.

I’m just not a fan of the way Joss Whedon always has his characters have something clever or witty to say, which is something modern Who as adopted.

I think you agree the characters in Doctor Who have always been witty, especially the Doctor. You are probably right the AG companions have more witty lines though? Although that depends on which ones, I think. Zoe had witty lines for a BG companion.

But I think you are meaning witty lines like Geronimo (Amy in AotD) and “I’m the Doctor” (Clara). That is definitely AG Who.

I like action heroes so that doesn’t bother me, but I can see you point (if I guessed your meaning right). I hope so, or I’m just agreeing with my own point. XD

Anyway always interesting Krynoidman.

[JimTheFish @jimthefish Time Lord]

I’m just not a fan of the way Joss Whedon always has his characters have something clever or witty to say

@thekrynoidman — I know it can sometimes seem like that but the humour is not the point, I think. It’s about injecting character into even the innocuous line. Otherwise what you get, especially in genre shows, is just flat exposition. Old Who is full of examples of especially the companions becoming cyphers to feed along exposition lines. I think Whedon and Moffat and RTD realised that drama is to a large extent character and not just plot. It’s not funny just for the sake of it. It’s funny to a) disguise the mechanics of the narrative and b) to tell us something either new or reinforce something we already new about who is saying it.

Also don’t let the trolls bug you. Although you seem to have netted a particular doozy example of the breed there.

[Whisht @whisht]

@thekrynoidman pedant may be right, may be wrong but please don’t get annoyed or worse leave if what he said came across as a whole bunch of patronising twaddle.

Keep voicing opinions – it is after all what everyone else is doing.

On a separate but related note generally, it struck me that only the trolls that come here occasionally, ever use the “I saw Hartnell at the start and now standards.. blah blah absolutist blah”

The people here who have seen it from the start tend to merely say how happy they are it’s still around and never use it as a badge of “my opinion is better than yours”.

Which is one reason I like it here and a good way to spot a variety of troll.

[The Krynoid Man @thekrynoidman]

@pedant You don’t come across as patronising, you seem more like you’re just trying to offer some helpful advice.

[IAmNotAFishIAmAFreeMan @pedant]

@thekrynoidman

Damn. I must be losing my touch 😉

[winston @winston]

Having finished Parting of the Ways I had to watch 10s first outing again although I watch it every Christmas. It is not very Christmassy but then neither am I and it has a killer Xmas tree which I can happily say I don’t have.

We are holding our breath as we watch our old friends Rose ,Jackie ,Mickey and Harriet Jones fight aliens without the Doctor. When is he going to wake up and what will he be like when he does? Well he does have a gob and he is not ginger but he is pretty sexy and he has a fightin’ hand. He is the defender of Earthand tells us , after the great satsuma throw that  ends the battle “No second chances ,that’s the kind of man I am” (paraphrasing)

Finally he chooses his clothes and I love the long coat and the great hair and my crush on the 10th Doctor starts and continues to this day.On to Xmas dinner with the family and then the adventure begins. One of my faves and a Christmas tradition in my house.

[Pharell, Man! @pharellman]

I wonder if they will use someday this trick with hand in another after-regeneration episode…

[Cath Annabel @cathannabel]

This is quite a strange mix – perhaps because it’s the Christmas special.  But how dark a version of Christmas can you get – with malevolent murderous Santas and a Xmas tree transformed into a weapon.  And then to top it all, the ultimate cliche of Xmas-set family drama, ‘quick, come outside, it’s snowing!’, which is always used to create a sense of seasonal magic actually invokes something horror as it turns out it is not snow but ash.  I was reminded of the film Lore, where as WWII comes to an end, ash from burned incriminating Nazi documents falls like snow on the heroine (evoking, darker still, the stories told by people living in towns near concentration camps about the human ash from the ovens falling from the sky).

I felt Harriet Smith was dealt with rather too summarily.  I’d have liked her as PM to be developed over a longer period, rather than to be despatched so brutally by the Doc.  Her rationale for going for the Torchwood option (is this the first reference to Torchwood? I can’t remember…) is convincing enough, but I was still somewhat dissatisfied – I remember being really pleased to see her again and then dismayed when she took that final decision.

The Doc is either comatose in this or pretty full-on – but that works fine.  We need that period of the new incumbent establishing his personality, mannerisms, etc.  What I’d forgotten, and which did set something of the tone for Ten’s tenure, was how often his sexiness is mentioned.  OK, he is very lovely, but it seems a bit heavy handed, in retrospect, as if it was already determined that his relationships with companions would be complicated by attraction in a way that they hadn’t previously, and from which Eleven and Twelve have had to backtrack.

Oh, and BTW, when he says, ‘Did you miss me?’, anyone else think of Moriarty?

 

[winston @winston]

@cathannabel     I saw them in the other order so when I heard Moriarty ask “Did you miss me?” I thought of the 10th Doctor.

[AmeliaG @ameliag]

And here starts the xmas tradition. Gutted when they moved it to new years day!

[janetteB @janetteb]

@ameliag Me too. I loved the Christmas Specials however I suspect that Chibbers is not a Christmassy kind of person so perhaps it is just as well.

Cheers

Janette

[Rewvian @rewvian]

One of the first things I noticed was how much damage was being done to Jackie and Rose’s house in this episode.  First a spinning tree saws through their doorway, then all of the glass in all of the apartments gets blown out of the windows when the Sycorax ship enters the skies.  It would be interesting to see if this is commented on in the next episode where the they spend any amount of time back at her home.

The Doctor spends half or 2/3rds of the episode resting post-regeneration.  He only really comes back late in the episode after Rose is sentenced to death by the angry Sycorax.  I like that tea was the catalyst for this.  Rose made a pretty good attempt at warding off the Sycorax by mentioning the Shadow Proclamation, the name for the Slitheen race I am not going to even attempt to type, and the Daleks among other things.  If you listen to it she tried to get it really close to one of the Doctor’s warnings to threatening alien beings, before tapiring off and just naming stuff.

They never really explained what those Santas were, but they sure didn’t look like Sycorax.  Everyone being controlled by the blood control was still pretty frightening, even if it ultimately wouldn’t have worked and was more of a scare tactic by the Sycorax.  They have whips that electrocute people and leave a pile of steaming bones so I’m not gonna say they don’t mean business.

What I think the main point of this episode was, was to show David Tennant sword fighting.  They wanted the Scottish Doctor to go all Highlander for his first order of business.  The hand getting cut off would eventually carry meaning later in the Tenth Doctor’s run, as well as in Torchwood, but luckily he was still regenerating and was able to get a new hand – it would have been an awkward couple of years otherwise.

But I think the scene that is probably most memorable from this episode is the Prime Minister ordering Torchwood to destroy the Sycorax ship, and the Doctor’s question about whether the PM looks tired.  Okay, if we’re being honest I can see Harriet Jones’ point of view as well as I can the Doctor’s here.  And the ash falling like snow was also pretty memorable.  All in all a pretty good episode, but maybe not as big of a first episode for a Doctor as the Ninth or Eleventh Doctors’ firsts.

[winston @winston]

Well once again tis the season when all things are Christmas. We go Christmas shopping, bake Christmas cookies, sing Christmas carols and watch our favourite Christmas movies. The best tradition is Christmas Who and I have started a little early with The Christmas Invasion (see all things are Christmas) .

What is not to like about tuba gun totin’ robot Santas and killer Christmas trees? Nasty old Scrooge aliens trying to ruin Christmas and only the Doctor can help but he is still regenerating. It is up to Rose, Jackie, Mickey and Harriet to save the day and they try but the alien humbugs are killers who are sadly lacking the Christmas spirit. Is all lost? No way, here comes the brand new Doctor ,buzzed on tea and ready to save the day!

The new guy is a bit of a hard ass and he gives no 2nd chances to the head baddie or Harriet Jones. The 1st he beats with a satsuma and a new hand and the 2nd with 6 words.  What a guy! Everyone has a lovely Christmas dinner  wearing Christmas hats they got from Christmas crackers.OK I will stop now.

stay merry and safe

[Dentarthurdent @dentarthurdent]

@winston I remember that as an okay episode. With the Doctor being useless for the first half of it and Rose doing her best to ‘fill in’ for him and bluff the invaders, with mixed results.

Given the aliens’ ruthless approach to killing people (and the Doctor previously being quite prepared to exterminate all the Daleks) I thought it was a bit hypocritical of him to go all moral on Harriet Jones for zapping the departing alien ship.

[winston @winston]

@dentarthurdent     The Doctor made a deal with the Sycorax I guess and he intended to honour it or he was just cranky that Harriet went over his head. Six words, just six little words. I love it! Maybe I just wish for that kind of power over my enemies. ( evil laughter ).

We are fast moving into winter here and have already had a couple feet of snow. Then it warmed a bit and rained it all away for now. I like the snow because it is far prettier than brown and …..other shades of brown. It is far easier to shovel rain than snow, although who would shovel rain?

You are fast approaching your summer and your walks on the beach and swimming in the ocean and I am by no means envious of you when I am shoveling snow in -20C . Seriously I hope you enjoy every minute of your summer. I do miss my garden and my flowers and fresh veggies but they will be back next year. Happy gardening.

Stay safe.

[VickyMallard @vickymallard]

This was my first full episode of Doctor Who, after having watched tons of BTS stuff on YouTube, and followed a day later by “The Star Beast”. So it’s been a couple of weeks and I’ve forgotten a lot of the details, but I loved it from start to finish.

• The Doctor out cold in bed was right up my street, I don’t think I’ll ever get fed up with strong heroes having their weak moment. And lying in bed sweating with fever and being cared for by the Tyler family was just what I needed (plus David Tennant in pyjamas looking rather Arthur Dent-ish – perfect!)
• I absolutely loved how Rose took up all her courage and tried to do “the Doctor thing” on the Sycorax ship. Being completely new to the show, I have no idea how much of that actually made sense and how much was made up (at least the Shadow Proclamation seems to be a “real” thing?) but it was brilliant
• The Santas with their flamethrowing instruments were nice, and I was very intrigued by the attacking Chrismas trees! I thought they would also start shooting baubles or bullets or something, but I had never in my dreams imagined that Christmas trees could turn into that kind of weapon, sawing through walls and everything. I absolutely loved it!
• And while I do like weak moments, I also love watching a nice swordfight (or any other physical fight, actually).
• Oh, and I loved the bit about the tea! First, the Doctor being unable to get further than “I need…”, and later that spilled tea which finally woke him up again! I laughed so much – for me this was just such a British thing! (I am German, I might add. 😉 )

So this episode basically had everything I wanted, and I loved it! I also likes the Doctor still trying to find out who the current incarnation actually is – I was a curious as he was 😉

[Author]

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