The Winchester

[ps1l0v3y0u @ps1l0v3y0u]

@nerys

Malcolm Tucker and The Thick of It was revolutionary here. And Peter owned that hostility and vulnerability… which it seemed Moffat deliberately airlifted into Who. Not so much swearing.

Just had/having an online argument with a Big Finish fan for whom Moff is antichrist. Truly Who is broad church. But not for Chib maybe.

[winston @winston]

@ps1l0v3y0u     I loved The Thick of It  and particularly Malcolm. The contempt he had for idiots and incompetents and the way he expressed that contempt was delicious. I learned some totally new swears ,things I’d never heard before and I worked in a bar for 6 years. Peter was perfect as usual.

stay safe

[ps1l0v3y0u @ps1l0v3y0u]

@winston

The detailed instructions he gave Ollie Reeder on where he should insert his I-pod and how Malcolm would then change the playlist…

Roger Allam was as (genuinely) classy as ever as Peter Mannion.

 

[Dentarthurdent @dentarthurdent]

@nerys   I just listened to that.   Peter’s part of the broadcast runs from 8 minutes to 43 minutes, if anyone is pressed for time.   (And, somewhat to my surprise, yt-dlp (which is a fork of youtube-dl) successfully downloaded it as an mp3 file – handy if you’re on a data limit and don’t want the other internetty things to nibble away at you data while you’re listening.   Just go to the page, copy the URL from the browser, open a text window and type ‘yt-dlp ‘ and paste the URL and away it goes and downloads the whole thing in ten seconds.)   But anyway, interesting.   Myself, having listened to a little bit of Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of It and being quite impressed by his linguistic abilities, I was quite surprised that he could cool it down for the Doctor.   (I would have even even more surprised had I known that quite a lot of the invective on A Thick of It was apparently Peter’s own invention – he said the writers set up the situation and left him to fill in the blanks.)

@ps1l0v3y0u    You said “the Mondassian Cybermen were Peter’s rec.”   ‘Recommendation’?   (You can be a little cryptic at times  :).    I had thought they were Moff’s, but I could easily have misremembered, or of course they might both have been aficionados of them.   I’ve said before, I used to think the original Cybermen were the most cringingly naff villains in all of Who, painfully obviously just human extras in overalls.   It took Moff’s genius in World Enough and Time to make me realise that was exactly the point and how painfully horrific it could be.

[nerys @nerys]

@dentarthurdent @ps1l0v3y0u @winston I confess that I’d completely missed out on Peter Capaldi’s earlier work, with the exception of seeing him in Pinochet’s Last Stand (2006 TV film), which I believe we watched on HBO. And, of course, his earlier guest turn on Doctor Who. I’ll have to see if there’s a way for us to watch The Thick of It. Sounds good.

Oh, and I just discovered that he and Lewis Capaldi are distantly related! Makes sense, given where they are from and the fact that they share the same last name.

[ps1l0v3y0u @ps1l0v3y0u]

@dentarthurdent

yes, rec = recommendation.

I’m fairly sure Peter told Steven Moffat that the Mondasian Cybermen were the scariest thing he remembered. Moff thought they were rubbish but went away and thought about it. What a feat of imagination to imagine the Cyber factory as a terrifying Bakelite hospital and set it on a time dilated spaceship. The scene where the nurse seems to adjust the ‘baghead’s’ drip but then Bill discovers she’s just turned the volume of his speaker down…

[winston @winston]

@dentarthurdent    He “filled in the blanks ” in a most excellent way. He must have had fun with that. @nerys  The Thick of It is good for a laugh if you can find it. I got it at my library.

@ps1l0v3y0u   The Mondasion Cybermen are really horrifying because they show so clearly what or who they used to be. So human and yet they are monsters like Frankenstein’s creature. As much as you feel pity for them you are repulsed and frightened by them. Great episodes.

play safe

[WhoHar @whohar]

Just dipping my toe back in.

On the Capaldi recommendation for the Mondaisan Cybermen: IIRC Capaldi and Moffat had a conversation about Classic monsters that had not appeared in the new version of Who.

Capaldi challenged Moffat to write a story with a classic monster of his choosing, which Moffat accepted. Capaldi came up with the Mondassian Cybermen or The Axons.

Moffat (rightly) baulked at the Axons…

[Dentarthurdent @dentarthurdent]

@whohar   That story is so good it just has to be true.

(And if it isn’t true then it ought to be…)

@ps1l0v3y0u   That moment of turning down the ‘patient’s’ speaker was probably the most horrific of the entire episode.

[janetteB @janetteb]

That scene in the hospital so perfectly captured the horror of being an ICU patient, the sense of being trapped in a nightmare world, of not knowing if you ever going to walk out again, and being entirely isolated from the real world and one’s old life. Even the best are frightening alienating places. Moffat captures that and adds another level of horror to it. One of the great episodes of AGWho.

Cheers

Janette

(apologies for not adding names. there were too many and it is late here. Been a long day but @everyone. Have been enjoying the discussion. )

[ps1l0v3y0u @ps1l0v3y0u]

@dentarthurdent

And THEN Moff turns the horror UP!

Another ‘patient’ is apparently saying ‘Kill Me’. He’s lurching up behind Bill when Razor brains him.

Then, just in case we did’n’t get it, another candidate for full conversion announces, ‘Me Die, Me Die…’!

There are so many ideas there. I’m still not sure if the Saxon/Missy pay off was what it seemed.

[Dentarthurdent @dentarthurdent]

@janetteb   I think the difference with ICU is that, in the latter, the patients are receiving the best care and they have rights.  And also, either fighting for their lives or in a state of relaxed consciousness.  So I think it might be less horrific for them.   (I’ve never been in ICU, other than maybe for 24 hours after my heart operation, but I was certainly confined to a bed for a couple of days and in hospital for seven.   And – side issue – I won’t say I enjoyed it (that would give totally the wrong impression) but it wasn’t unpleasant, and what i did enjoy was the chance to relax and do nothing without the usual guilty feeling of ‘I ought to be doing something’)     I think a better comparison might be a secure institution for psychiatric patients.

@ps1l0v3y0u   Oh yes, I’d forgotten them.  I guess because the ‘speaker’ incident was the first horror.

Moff did also show how such horrors could arise from perfectly commendable motives, carried too far.   The desire to cure ailments and stop people dying.   How far should one go, and at what point should one stop?  Heart operations  – no  (I say, as the beneficiary of one).   Pacemakers – no, they surely are entirely beneficial.   Artificial hearts – I’d say that’s fine, so long as the patient agrees.   But there must be a line somewhere.   Maybe it lies with the patient to agree.   (‘Okay, you can fit me with robotic arms, wheels and half an electronic brain?  Go for it!’)    Or not….

[nerys @nerys]

@dentarthurdent Yes, I’d agree that patient consent is key.

[janetteB @janetteb]

@dentarthurdent I think the less knowledge one has of being in ICU the better. I unfortunately spent almost three weeks in one and that episodes did bring back memories for me, of the sense of being incapacitated, of being utterly trapped and isolated from the the world and the loneliness. It was fairly nightmarish especially given the various wires and tubes and throbbing machines, Our eldest fainted when he first came to visit. Certainly the awareness that one is being cared for helps but take that knowledge away and leave only the nightmare elements and you have the basis of a good horror setting, add a layer of callous brutality and cruelty and you have a deeply disturbing story. Moffat does it very very well.

I think to be trapped in a hospital, as Bill was, would be nightmarish too.

On a different note  I always wonder if the resemblance of the Master in the hospital to the character, Zathras in B.5. was accidental or deliberate. Either way it worked very well.

cheers

Janette

 

 

[ps1l0v3y0u @ps1l0v3y0u]

@janetteb @nerys @dentarthurdent

well, you all seem to be taking The Darkness at The Edge of Moff in good heart.

In the words of Graham Chapman, ‘lucky we didn’t say anything about the dirty knife…’

[Dentarthurdent @dentarthurdent]

@janetteb   It sounds as if your stay in ICU was a lot less pleasant ( and several times longer) than mine, for which you have my sympathy.   In fact I’d paid extra for a single room rather than a shared one, just to avoid the possibility a roommate might want to watch rugby, or soaps, or something equally annoying on TV.   Only had one visit, but I never felt lonely for some reason.

All I can say is  that mine was, as I said, perfectly innocuous, probably because I felt limited only by my own physical condition and the nurses encouraged me to move around as soon as I felt  comfortable.   I actually have a phobia about being trapped, but it never manifested itself.    It’s all about feeling in control.   I once spent a couple of nights on a hostel in Christchurch in the old Addington jail, repurposed.    I had great trepidation about booking there since the rooms were the old cells, complete with massive doors.   I was apprehensive of my own reaction.   But in fact I felt no worries at all, because of one big thing – I had the key to the massive door in my pocket, and that changed everything..

I was just thinking of the hanta virus ‘suspects’ in quarantine near Perth.   I hope they’re being well treated, which is to say, I hope they have all the creature comforts and room service of a five star hotel.  Partly as compensation for their inconvenience, partly because it’s easier to avoid that feeling of being trapped if the ‘imprisonment’ is comfortable.   I wonder how much the aircrew was paid for going to fetch them (since they were also having to isolate).

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