The Winchester

[Dentarthurdent @dentarthurdent]

@winston    ‘Rellies’ is a good old Aussie/kiwi slang term.   I hope ‘prezzies’ wasn’t too obscure?

I should clarify that, with Pacific island families, there are vast numbers of more-or-less distant relatives.   I usually assume that anyone from Mrs D’s island is probably some sort of in-law of mine, and this is rarely incorrect.    What is more disconcerting is, I can never remember their names but they all remember me by name.    Mrs D, now, has a memory for people like the Dalek databank.   In fact she will talk about old friends of mine that I’ve forgotten existed and she met just once, years ago.   However, when it comes to places, we’re the opposite, she gets lost while I can drive infallibly to places I’ve only visited once.   Combined, we should be formidable, like the Doctor and Clara, too dangerous to exist.   But in practice, we just argue.   🙂

[ps1l0v3y0u @ps1l0v3y0u]

@dentarthurdent

Tinker Tailor… a lot of people got very angry about the film: Haydon wasn’t dispatched in the right way. Guillams’s girlfriend was the wrong type of flute player… I thought it was fine. The tv adaptation is probably superior though equally claustrophobic and dry.

Le Carre’s Britain is broke, scruffy, compromised and no one can cook anymore. Kind of realistic and hopelessly idealistic. No wonder Smiley got fat and submerged himself in German poetry.

[Dentarthurdent @dentarthurdent]

@p<span class=”useratname”>s1l0v3y0u</span> (why is your username like one of those impossible passwords the security mafia keep nagging us to use?)

I’m fully capable of going all geeky on a film (you should hear me about ‘Hogwarts Express’ sometime, and I haven’t even watched the movie)  but I usually try not to go overboard quite to that extent.   Tinker Taylor may have been a fine film, I just couldn’t ‘get into’ it.   Maybe it was just my mood, I get like that sometimes.   Or maybe (heaven forbid) too much Youtube has reduced my attention span to 5 minutes.

I do think movie adaptations of books (and vice versa) are allowed to deviate a bit from the originals, after all they are quite different mediums and what works in one doesn’t work so well in the other.   The dramatic requirements can be very different.   So I don’t mind if they change things a bit so long as it’s not something that makes a nonsense of the plot.   Oh, and it should fit reality reasonably well, it shouldn’t be blatantly and gratuitously wrong.   If Sherlock Holmes is going to Dartmoor he’d better leave from either Waterloo or Paddington, not Euston or Victoria.   But I’m never going to go “There was no 8-35 from Paddington to Exeter in 1902” or something like that.

And similarly sci-fi should not break reality unnecessarily.   (Kill the Moon I’m looking at you…)

 

[janetteB @janetteb]

A bit belated by Happy Christmas everyone.

We have been very busy, as always. I always try to do about ten times as much as humanly possible, much to the annoyance of the s/o. We have now celebrated “second Christmas”, which to all involved including extra household members if the Christmas Day that really counts. Now that it is all done I don’t quite know what to do with myself. Relax? What is that??

We finally caught up with the second and third specials and I have lots of thoughts brewing and tomorrow when I have caught up on sleep will hop onto the relevant threads. We are yet to watch the Christmas Special, perhaps Friday when everyone is around. It took a lot of persuasion but we finally got the entire family to sit down and watch the specials together yesterday.

There were plenty of Dr Who related gifts this year. The eldest got a Dr Who Magic the Gathering card pack. Which reminds me a sad note for fans of old Who. Richard Franklin, (Captain Yates, third Doctor era) passed away on Christmas Day. There were a couple of Tardis pen holders, and a Dr Who book.

Cheers

Janette

[ps1l0v3y0u @ps1l0v3y0u]

@dentarthurdent

sorry, the handle is an infeasible mix of letters and digits. My advice is type @ and copy the rest from the ‘grey’ unhyperlinked name from the previous email.

Some adaptation leeway is essential. Haydon is shot in the film. In the tv adaptation Prideaux rabbit punches him. In the book you just don’t know but Prideaux has previously ‘humanly’ killed an owl by breaking its neck. At least he didn’t get fed feet first into an industrial. As we all know only Saddam Hussein had one of those… that’s according to The Mail.

I’m not sure if Le Carre was conscious of the innuendo of Guillam’s girl being a very tall flute player (I’m not making this up) but a lot of his fans were blissfully ignorant and when Smiley warns his fellow conspirators to keep their loved ones well away the film shows ‘Cam’ to be a fellah. The warning didn’t happen in the film; it was a little fraught to tell the truth – were the 70’s really to expect a Soviet style pogrom of Rules, Minor Public Schools and Magdalene College?

Le Carre is developing a posthumous reputation for writing sexual diversity and ‘women’ badly: Roddy Martindale is a bit Fast Show. The women are given some good lines and are reasonably diverse but it’s a man’s world darlin.

The Honourable Schoolboy was the sequel to the film and it’s pretty flawed but dead sadly never been adapted. Probably impossible. But one one of the first fictions to go beyond ‘war is hell’ in respect to Indo China. The critique of empire is unflinching.

[ps1l0v3y0u @ps1l0v3y0u]

<p style=”text-align: left;”>That should read ‘The Honourable Schoolboy was the sequel to Tinker Tailor (the book) – sadly never adapted, and pretty flawed.’</p>
Don’t post on the bus!

[blenkinsopthebrave @blenkinsopthebrave]

@ps1l0v3y0u

For me, The Honourable Schoolboy was one of the great novels of the 20th century. As you say, the critique of empire was devastating. And not just “empire” in a political sense, but the whole literature of empire that supported the belief system of the politicians and public servants who imposed and administered their power structures on millions of people across the globe.

It still cries out to be made into a movie.

 

[Dentarthurdent @dentarthurdent]

@janetteb    Hi, I was wondering where you’d got to.   Merry (late) Christmas!

I have thousands of things to do, with the result that I never do any because there are too many other things and besides, this site and Youtube are too much of a distraction.   This is not good.

[Dentarthurdent @dentarthurdent]

@<span class=”useratname”>ps1l0v3y0u</span>     I do try to copy-and-paste your handle, sometimes it works, sometimes the editor chokes on it, and I can’t tell till after I hit ‘Submit’.

I was never very much into Le Carre, I found him (and Graham Greene) a bit depressing tbh.   (I’ll probably get shot for lumping them together, for reasons I won’t comprehend  🙂     I preferred Ian Fleming, I can understand why James Bond took off.   Yes I know I was just rabbiting on about ‘reality’ and James Bond bends that quite a lot, more so in the movies.   The fact that they did most of their crazy stunts ‘for real’ probably helps to give them a facade of realism.

Oh, and Victor Canning, I always liked his (widely varied) novels.

I’m trying to analyse my preference for some writers and I think it’s basically down to whether they look at an event as ‘this is exciting/adventurous’ vs ‘this is banal/depressing’.   Banal I can do myself every day, I don’t need to read about it.   This is also why I detest TV soaps like Coro and Neighbours, I think.

[ps1l0v3y0u @ps1l0v3y0u]

<p style=”text-align: left;”>@dentarthurdent</p>
Yes. I should probably read Fleming. What am I saying? I really haven’t the stomach for it.

The best of  ‘The Schoolboy’ leads from Le Carre research into the state of Indo China in 1975. He was apparently so horrified that he abandoned his publisher’s wishes for a longer Tinker Tailor arc. Hence the hurried and almost comic book account of the newly arisen Circus under Smiley.

Westerby’s travails are easier to read. And for him to write perhaps, even before we get to the story of Liz Worthington. Perhaps the secret of producing THS would be to tell it from the pov of Mrs Hibbert, or her daughter, or Connie Sachs, Mrs Pelling, or Lizzie, or the Orphan, Val Lacon, Molly Meakin, even Anne Smiley herself. And that’s just the Caucasian girls.

Then get the geezers ponce about like the big bankers they are!

Are you going to move on to Fleming from there?

 

[Dentarthurdent @dentarthurdent]

Well I just watched Funeral in Berlin (1966) with Michael Caine. Produced by Harry Saltzmann of James Bond fame, incidentally. I found it more watchable than Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. A fairly complicated plot which, however, I managed to follow for once. With a neat twist (or a double-cross) which was, in hindsight, entirely predictable. Actually there were a number of double-crosses, but one stood out. It seems odd to realise that this movie was almost contemporaneous with early Doctor Who.

[ps1l0v3y0u @ps1l0v3y0u]

@dentarthurdent

Film adpaptions…

I have two theories about The Hogwarts Express:

1. The GWR actually sent 2 Castles to be tested against Gresley’s A3’s but the magical world liked them so much they snaffled one, obliviated everyone and painted it red.

2. It’s supposed to be a rebuilt Royal Scot. Kings Cross… St Pancras…

In any case, the closest Warner Bros could get was a Hall class.

However, I admit no one has yet come up with an explanation of what the rev Awdry’s ‘James the Completely Unrealistic Engine’ is supposed to be.

[Dentarthurdent @dentarthurdent]

@ps1l0v3y0u [geek mode ON] The Midland did actually run into Kings Cross (via Bedford and Hitchin) until St Pancras was completed c. 1868. However, in those days MR engines were green. Midland Red wasn’t used until 1884. So, I doubt whether any red engines were ever seen at Kings Cross. I’m not sure any Halls were ever seen at Kings Cross either, would they be ‘out of gauge’? (I don’t know this, I do know GWR engines tended to be the widest of the companies).

I haven’t seen the movie, but I doubt rebuilt Scots – fine-looking engines btw – had copper-capped chimneys and domeless boilers with brass safety valve covers 🙂

I don’t know the story but there is a photo of the West Country 34027 Taw Valley in LMS red with Hogwarts Express nameplates. As a Southern fan I feel obliged to protest (even if a sneaky part of me thinks it looks freakin’ magnificent, though not, of course, nearly as good as it does in green). I seem to recall reading that Warner’s thought it looked ‘too modern’ so they went for something a bit more old-fashioned, but that could be a sneaky story invented by a Southern partisan. I think the red Hall just looks bizarre.

As for Awdry’s engine ‘James’, here you are – scroll down to ‘technical details’
https://ttte.fandom.com/wiki/James_(RWS)
In short, a L&YR Class 28 with a front pony truck added.
(You can find anything on the internet) (even, so help me, Rule 34)

[/geek mode]

[ps1l0v3y0u @ps1l0v3y0u]

@dentarthurdent

Apparently Taw Valley was used to promote the books, but Christopher Columbus thought it looked too ‘modern’

You can paint a Hall red. The newly inaugurated British Rail painted a ‘King’ blue!

Tom Anderson: “ain’t you the kids who painted my King blue?”

Butthead: “no no no…”

Beavis: “we made you sell your house and then rented it out!”

 

[Dentarthurdent @dentarthurdent]

@ps1l0v3y0u I think blue suits a GW engine better than red does. They tried it on some Southern Bulleid Pacifics too, I believe, and I think it suited them too. Not sure why they rejected blue in favour of dark BR green.

To bring this back to some semblance of Dr Who, has Who ever used a British train? There was the interior of a railway carriage (probably a DMU) in The Woman Who Fell to Earth. There was the Orient Express in space but that was French. And there was a train in the scrambled timeline of The Wedding of River Song but the locomotive on that was definitely French for some reason.

[ps1l0v3y0u @ps1l0v3y0u]

Black Orchid… 5 matierialised the Tardis at an actual railway station. Can’t remember a train. I could check on I-player but, well, that was Black Orchid.

George Stephenson made an appearance in Mark of the Rani but without Locomotion or Rocket I’m sure.

Dimension robbed by The Boneless, a itsy bitsy teeny Tardis nearly got pranged by some Bristolian suburban stock in Flatline.

 

[ps1l0v3y0u @ps1l0v3y0u]

@dentarthurdent

Black Orchid… I checked! Well the first 2 minutes anyway. The Tardis materialises at The Buckinghamshire Railway Centre. We get a brief glimpse of a 2 cylinder GW tank. I think it must be a guest loco or this was a composite shot because their current 7200 class is not yet fully restored and only left Barry Island in 1981.

Maybe there’s more footage later in the story, but checking involves risking exposure to Davison’s “I can’t be a murderer because I’m actually a time travelling alien. You see?” ploy which might result in irreversible brain damage.

[Dentarthurdent @dentarthurdent]

@ps1l0v3y0u I’d completely overlooked Flatline! How could I overlook Flatline? It was a brilliant episode. And the train-related aspects of it were – adequately done. At least there was nothing there that made me squirm.

[ps1l0v3y0u @ps1l0v3y0u]

@dentarthurden

Flatline was… as good as you could get in 45 minutes. I fully expected the return of The Boneless, once they’d mastered the dimension of time. The only issue was their motive.

I always admired Asimov’s ‘The Gods Themselves’; the problem of communicating with the truly alien when, as Wittgenstein kinda said, ‘if a lion could speak, you wouldn’t understand him.’

One of the worst aspects of the reign of Chris (and maybe not his doing) was Mathieson was cast out into the cold: The Mummy, Flatine, The Girl, Oxygen… some would say, as sci-fi, all four were better than half of Moffat’s output.

[Dentarthurdent @dentarthurdent]

@ps1l0v3y0u The Boneless always reminded me of the formless things from the Dungeon Dimensions in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, always trying to break through. So maybe that was their motive – they wanted to become ‘real’.

The Girl Who Waited was a classic. Tragic, but the enemy was – time itself. And it pitted Old Amy against Young Amy. Whose side would you take? (That was a rhetorical question, I don’t think there’s a right answer). And the Doctor lied like a bastard but – what else could he do?

(For some reason it reminded me of a short story, ‘All the Time in the World’ by – Asimov? No. Heinlein? No. Sheckley? No. Arthur C Clarke – I should have bloody known! About an art thief who was given a bracelet by an alien from the future, that would stop time, with instructions to use it to steal a list of specified art treasures. Which he did. And after his commission was discharged, the alien explained that they were rescuing artefacts from human civilisation, which had just ceased to exist because the planet was exploding. But he could keep the bracelet, it would last the rest of his life – however long he chose that to be. Clarke had an uncanny knack for disconcerting twists at the end of his stories.)

But anyway, I have no idea why Chibnall didn’t use any writers of previous Who episodes. Except, of course, himself. He didn’t use any previous directors either (at least, not in his first season, I checked). It’s almost as if he was determined to prove that he could make a season of Doctor Who ‘all his own work’ owing nothing to previous showrunners.

[ps1l0v3y0u @ps1l0v3y0u]

@dentarthurdent

I meant ‘The Girl who Died’; ‘The Girl who Waited’ was Tom MacRae; that was very good, ‘The God Complex’ too, a strong return after ‘Let’s Kill Hitler’ aka the day the Third Reich disappeared.

I always wondered if ‘Midnight’ was a steal from AC Clarke’s A Fall of Moondust… just a bus full of tourists versus an incredibly hostile environment tho, no  synchro talking spooky monsters.

I don’t think the writers were entirely Chibnall’s choice… remember Gatiss’ and Whithouse’s farewell turns in Twice Upon a Time? The structure of the corporation changed after 2016… no more channel controllers, more goal oriented execs; not making a point other than they were trying to create change. As Savil and Bashir and the salary row unraveled, it was needed. But did WHO suffer? Mainly from Chibnall’s own writing really.

The problem comes from the nature of the show. Is it sci fi, fantasy, contemporary commentary, kids show? We’ve been round the houses on this before. No wonder execs thought ‘soapy family drama? Good pitch!’

[nerys @nerys]

@ps1l0v3y0u “Midnight” remains one of my all-time favorite Doctor Who episodes. I would love to watch it again … except I can’t, since it’s no longer on Crave. Maybe I can get it on loan from the library. *sigh*

[ps1l0v3y0u @ps1l0v3y0u]

@nerys

Midnight: bbc iplayer has an embarrassment of riches on this side of the pond. Hope it’s there for a while!

that whole series was quite excellent; RTD must work like an auxiliary script editor beating everything into shape.

Shame about the barking mad season ender – great one liners though…

’it’s YOU!’

’Oh yes!’

’Your naked…’

’Oh yes…’

[Oochillyo @oochillyo]

hey everyone 🙂 🙂 how are you all 🙂 🙂

I just watched this video – I’ve Spent Ten Years Building A Fantasy World — How Worldbuilding Changed My Life | Talking Tumiun (youtube.com)

I know not everyone is writing or thinking about these things but I watched the whole video and new to this Youtuber I think – Rick seems like a really humble and honest person who has amazing art work and ideas soo much effort in this and was really sweet ending / final message so I thought it was important and nice to share this with you all and check it out if you like 🙂

Take care everyone stay positive love health happiness and hugs 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂

Regards – Declan Sargent

[nerys @nerys]

@ps1l0v3y0u Midnight: bbc iplayer has an embarrassment of riches on this side of the pond. Hope it’s there for a while!

Sadly, I don’t think I can access it unless I pull some shenanigans. I’m sure I can access the DVDs via our public library system, so I’ll go that route.

[Anonymous @]

Hey guys! I just saw a very curious video that brought up a hypothesis that seems very true… How did River Song made the name Doctor? Could she have gone back to the doctor’s childhood and influenced his choice of name? What do you think? Another thing, would Castiel be a mourning angel? Take a look at the video, there are some reflections that make a lot of sense! Link: https://youtu.be/bOraxk9WkxM?si=iWjWEgfgeVDYretq

[nerys @nerys]

Does anyone here watch True Detective on HBO? (It’s quite violent, so might not be everyone’s cuppa tea.) It launched its fourth season on Jan. 14. I was a little underwhelmed by the first episode. Too much tell, not enough show. But I get that they had a lot of characters to introduce and ideas to get across.

With that behind us, the second episode was much better. And, to my surprise, whose name did I see in the opening credits? None other than Chris Eccleston! So far his character is not very likable. But then again, few characters are in this series. Good to see him again!

[Dentarthurdent @dentarthurdent]

Time I checked out getting the four (?) recent Ten(nant) episodes, I guess. Meanwhile I’m slowly idling through Twelve’s last series. Just re-watched Oxygen (and posted some random thoughts in that echo), like a good vintage wine it gets better every time I watch it.
(Do wines do that? I’m not a oenophile)

[winston @winston]

@dentarthurdent I haven’t had a chance to watch them either but there are many episodes that need a re watch especially the CapDocs era. My trusty old PC has died on me so I am using my tiny tablet until I get a new one.I turned it off before bed and it died in it’s sleep. No response at all and not worth repairing. Thank goodness I keep most stuff on external drives but still a pain all around. Typing on this silly thing is close to torture so I will go back to just reading.

 

Stay safe

[janetteB @janetteb]

@winston I feel your pain. I had to get my tech support, (otherwise referred to as the S/O) to re install Windows on my aging laptop in the hope that it might actually work. It had started corrupting files. It has taken the better part of two week, copying everything off the hard-drive and then reinstalling it all and setting up slide shows etc. Not sure the Laptop is working any better.

I hope you are able to either get the computer fixed or find a replacement soon. The internal hard-drive should probably be fine. It is probably either motherboard or power supply that has failed.

@dentarthurdent. Really should rewatch Oxygen. For no reason at all it is not an episode that we tend to re watch. I will have a look at your review. I suspect I have a lot of posts to catch up on.

Cheers

Janette

[Dentarthurdent @dentarthurdent]

@winston You have my sympathy. Losing a PC is always a bit traumatic (even though I usually have a spare laptop lying around). My desktop lives in a big ancient tower case with half a dozen drive slots of which four are currently occupied so I can easily swap drives with a screwdriver (drives are – relatively – cheap) but it’s always a bit of a hassle. As Janetteb says, hopefully the drive with your data will be okay, and certainly the external drives should be.

@janetteb As I said to Winston, reinstalls are always a bit of a pain. One handy dodge you might consider is to format your drive into several partitions, one or two of maybe 20GB each (get S/O to check the necessary size for a good O/S install) and the rest in one or more partitions for data. Then keep all your data stashed in one of the ‘data’ partitions. Then if your operating system goes down you can do a fresh install in a ‘OS’ partition without hazarding your data.

(That’s how I do updates too, I have automatic updates turned off, once a year or so I install the latest version of my OS into the spare ‘OS’ partition and set it to boot from that one. If for some reason the install is bad, I just revert to booting the old version. Either way, my data is safe where it is. Not sure if that strategy is practical in Windows though, your Second Officer can advise).

For some reason I tend to overlook Oxygen too. As I said in my comments, it grows on me – it’s precisely plotted, no sloppy bits. It’s often the case, in any episode with a complex plot, that I appreciate it more second time around when I have a rough outline of the events sketched in my brain.

Jamie Mathieson rated it his second best, after Mummy on the Orient Express, before Flatline and The Girl Who Died.

[janetteB @janetteb]

@dentarthurdent I would agree with Jamie Mathieson with that ranking. Mummy on th Orient Express is a fantastic episode and Flatline is also flawless in terns of plotting and scripting. Girl who Died was by far and away the weakest but I suspect he was writing to specification rather than his own concept.

Cheers

Janette

[ps1l0v3y0u @ps1l0v3y0u]

@janetteb @dentarthurdent

The Girl Who Died was co-written with Moffat. I love the hints of what I see as an abandoned story arc – unless it’s yet to ‘mature.’ Not many people agree and I doubt anything will come from it. But I haven’t quite given up yet…

The Girl Who Died… Katarina died and so did Sara (in the same series!) AU uberLiz got roasted with ze entire AU Reich. Peri was terminally mind wiped… and then she wasn’t. Hi Brian! Turn it down, mate.

Jenny died and regenerated. Bye!

Amy lived by finally going to a place where The Doctor can’t get at her. That sounded a bit weird.

Clara and Bill have treats in store!

So, is TGWD just a random story? Two parter… a story-arc ending in The Doc getting mind wiped?? Is this about the lethality of the Doctor or the objectification of his (many) companions? Moff has kinda planted his flag in this territory… without really wanting to. But yeah… it’s a recurring theme.

So, The Doctor intervenes and Ashildr survives. After that she becomes as big a problem as getting Tegan to Heathrow.

As a random story, even serving something like a whole series, can you really say that works?

Then you have the eels. And the Benny Hill Theme. And baby talk! One of these things has to be lazy writing. Nevermind a fake Odin turning up when it really didn’t matter… that is if it really was just The Girl Who Died.

It still beat any one of Chib’s output into a cocked hat.

Mummy, Flatline & Oxygen were certainly all way better. Jamieson is great writer tho…

[Dentarthurdent @dentarthurdent]

@janetteb @ps1l0v3y0u
I agree with you both (and Jamie Mathieson) that The Girl Who Died was far the weakest of the four. The top three I’m ambivalent about the ranking of – I have a distinct fondness for Flatline but Mummy is also excellent. Oxygen is grimmer and grittier and carries more ‘punch’ than either. So I’d say all three very good.

I’ll be reaching Chibs’ term shortly in my progression through Who, I think I’ll just watch a selected few, it will be interesting to see if I can find any that rate up with The Girl Who Died. I’m unsure about that, maybe his last Dalek one in the warehouse (Eve of the Daleks was it?). Won’t know till I re-watch.

The Girl Who Died – I can’t help wondering which came first, the script or the casting. “We’ve got the girl from Game of Thrones, now what do we do with her?”

The electric eels – I don’t think they’re found in British waters. And anyway I doubt they could generate the current to power an electromagnet that powerful. But every writer does that (which strictly speaking is no excuse, but if that’s the episode’s worst problem I can overlook it. OTOH I could give Kill The Moon one for free, and it would still grind my gears like a bad learner’s first lesson on a crash box).

The Benny Hill theme was actually relevant – ‘Yakity yak’ sounds like exactly the music track you’d put on a video clip to make the victim look ridiculous. And talking ‘Baby’ – that’s used in several other episodes, usually as a humorous device, so I can’t see anything much wrong with that.

Re the mistreatment (by the writers) of Companions, I think it’s inevitable. It’s a drama series, it needs deadly perils, we all know the Doctor’s not going to die (though Moff did try his best to shake that up), so guess who’s standing next in line? (I’m reminded of the old Xena series and how Gabfans used to predictably blame Xena when anything happened to her little friend Gabrielle *even when it was Gabby’s own silly fault*. Well, you hang around action heroes, you can expect a bit of collateral damage). Though I have to say, RTD and the Moff (and their various writers) did remarkably well in imbuing the Collateral Damage (sorry, Companion) with personality, to the point where I was sometimes more invested in the Companion’s fate than the Doctor’s.

[ps1l0v3y0u @ps1l0v3y0u]

@dentarthurdent @janetteb

Mummy was Mathieson’s favourite? I really like it. Almost Blink standard. Maybe the questions of why Gus suddenly releases the girls or who it was/represented nag a bit. And the business of not seeing the Doctor rescue everybody at the end. In an AU that’s the season ender and Missy was actually manipulating the Foretold while she shoves stiffs into the Gallifreyan data slice.

hmmm. That could have worked…

Is there really an issue with Flatline? So much to admire, from the ‘hard’ speculative sci fi to the characters and dialogue. What motivates the Boneless tho? It’s horror, stoopid! Very good too!

 

Someone mentioned crime dramas… I think these two are on a two year production run, but did anyone catch:

the ‘darkness’ series… the remake? Scandi noir but limited misogynistic horror (after the first one) and the female lead is believable and presented sympathetically.

Top notch psychological drama. I highlighted the first one but it’s a peerless examination of the mind set. As chilling as ‘Oxygen’ in its own way.

Also the ‘paris 1900’ series… the end of series 1 was slightly daft, but not completely ridiculous; there must be at least one more in the pipeline. Love background of why France imploded in the C20th

[Dentarthurdent @dentarthurdent]

@ps1l0v3y0u @janetteb
Jamie Mathieson and ‘Bill’ did a commentary on the ‘Oxygen’ DVD and I’m fairly sure that’s where I heard him ranking his four.

His site Jamiemathieson.com https://www.jamiemathieson.com/doctor-who has a lot of material on his Who episodes, like first drafts, ‘Steven made me do it’ moments, it’s a rabbit-hole of fascinating titbits. I strongly recommend a visit.

Like the Tiny Tardis: “The mad thing was that no-one had done it before. In hindsight it seems obvious. The exterior has always been smaller on the outside. In this episode, we just keep going. The next part of the puzzle came from Steven. I’m sure I would have figured it out given time, but he’s just so damn quick. ‘I’ll go you one better.’ he said. ‘Clara carries the Tardis around in her bag for the whole episode.’ My smile froze. Of course she does Steven. And every time anyone compliments me on the idea I will have to hold my tongue and grind my teeth knowing you came up with the cherry on the cake. Damn your Bafta winning eyes.”

Anyway (he says, reluctantly dragging himself back out of the rabbit-hole), I didn’t see any ‘issue with Flatline’. I had a very minor quibble that railway tunnels don’t usually have hidden side tunnels, but the Channel Tunnel does, and the London Underground is full of them, so that quibble sorta falls flat. The other very minor quibble is, the train probably wouldn’t stop so quick, or get up speed quite so quickly, but that’s – again – so trivial I wouldn’t even mention it if you hadn’t mentioned ‘issues’.

When I say I’m ambivalent about ranking Jamie’s top three, I don’t mean that I doubt their quality, they’re all good, I just mean that I can’t really decide which is best.

I wouldn’t quite rate Mummy up with Blink, though. Simply because Blink not only has the most effective monsters ever (in terms of scariness vs effort required to film them), but also the perfect time-travel-paradox plot. And a rather sweet little romance. I think it’s an almost impossible ‘standard’ for any other episode to match.

[ps1l0v3y0u @ps1l0v3y0u]

@dentarthurdent

cheers. I need to look at that!

Blink territory? Absolutely! I stress ‘almost!’ Blink is the gold standard, from the casting of Cary Mulligan to the gorgeous subplot with the detective, and the scene in the backroom of the video shop.

A shame the Angel’s mystique then became a bit tarnished.

Those Moffat stories from NuWho 1-4 were all incredible.

[Dentarthurdent @dentarthurdent]

@ps1l0v3y0u I absolutely agree 100% with everything you just said about ‘Blink’. 🙂

Do I have schizophrenia and I haven’t noticed, and you are just my alter ego posting and not telling me? (Hey, that could make the basis of a good sci-fi plot. Guy notices on-line posts from someone who shares opinions remarkably closely, tracks them down, and finds – it’s him. Probably the sort of psychological thriller the Beeb might have done in the sixties. If the Internet had existed then, of course).

[janetteB @janetteb]

Our youngest member of ‘cult Tv Club, (9yrs old) is currently watching through AGWho essentially for the first time and was awed by Blink. I think she was both terrified and loving it. We did a podcast on what we all watched last year and she talked about Dr Who which was great, it it wasn’t me for a change. It was generally agreed that Moffat’s early episodes were his best though others in the group are not such fans of his work as show-runner. I loved his complex twisty plotting but other prefer the simpler narrative style of RTD. Either way I think we are all hoping that he will write some scripts for RTD. I hope that Matheison also comes back to the Who camp.

@dentarthurdent. Yes that sounds like something that Nigel Kneale would write.

Cheers

Janette

 

[winston @winston]

@dentarthurdent and @janetteb  The PC nightmare continues and I am still using my tiny tablet. I ordered and got a new tower but after I set it up it flatlined! It has been sent back already and I have a headache. First order from Amazon and it was a lemon. They did take it back so I was happy about that.

There was nothing of importance on it as I store everything on the external drive and it wasn’t connected at the time. I did love my old PC.  I did not understand any of dentarthurdents computer advice as I am totally computer illiterate.I just turn it on and hope it works..

I win watch Oxygen again although I remember it was really grim.Maybe it won’t be as dark on a second watch. I doubt it though.

Stay safe

 

 

[Dentarthurdent @dentarthurdent]

@winston OK, I’ll keep it simple – carry on keeping your stuff on an external drive if you can. Or backing up to an external drive. It’s extremely unlikely that your PC will damage files on an external drive even if it (the PC) crashes with the drive connected. But if possible just make sure you have two copies of anything important in two separate places.
I’m sure you knew that 🙂

[winston @winston]

@dentarthurdent   Thanks for the help. I have seen so many people lose stuff on lost or broken phones and computers that I have always kept paper, disc and copies on external drives. I haven’t decided what kind of PC I’ll get but I am shopping on Monday. Wish me luck. I miss it a lot especially a normal keyboard and my mouse and of course my nice big monitor. This tablet is a great e-reader but a bad way to watch Doctor Who.

 

Stay safe

[Dentarthurdent @dentarthurdent]

@winston Good luck! I’m not sure I can offer any advice, other than, list your requirements and intended usage as clearly as you can, (e.g. I guess you need plenty of ports to connect external drives etc to), and try to find a salesperson who seems to know what they’re talking about. And, I think the latest high-performance PC’s probably cost a premium, and a slightly slower model with ‘last year’s CPU’ will probably do everything you need for a lot less $$$. (Unless you’re heavily into gaming or video editing).

I really like a big monitor and a good keyboard. And a mechanical keyboard is just so much quicker and easier to use than a touchscreen. So I still drag a laptop around with me – not quite as good as my tower PC and its full keyboard, but almost. I did try a tablet for a while, but I found it just not as good, more like an oversized smartphone. (I wonder when, if ever, smartphones will acquire laptop-screen-sized holographic displays, or is that strictly sci-fi?)

[Dentarthurdent @dentarthurdent]

Just watched The Greatest Show in the Galaxy on DVD, with the seventh Doctor and Ace. I found it reasonably diverting, and since it was mostly about a circus the effects were adequate for the story, except for the moment when the Ragnarok gods try to shoot the Doctor with – little yellow pointers of light?

Apropos of nothing very much, I’ve resumed working my way through old episodes of Danger Man (the Patrick McGoohan secret agent series that preceded The Prisoner, roughly contemporaneous with the first Doctor) and some of them were very good. One thing I really liked at the time, and still do, was that foreigners spoke to each other in their native language. No condescending subtitles, no bad-English-with-a-fake-ethnic-accent, they did the viewer the compliment of assuming s/he could fill in the gaps from the context. A nice touch of authenticity, rarely imitated since.

[winston @winston]

@janetteb I am sorry to see the fires burning in parts of your country. I hope you are all well. The world seems to be burning except for where it is flooding. We already have fires burning in Canada and it is still winter but such a dry season I think it will be very bad here this summer.

Otherwise I hope that all is going well with you.

@dentarthurdent  Are you still beaching over there or is it too cold yet? We are waiting patiently for spring to come after a weird non winter that was easy on the heating bills but hard on the environment. The wild creatures probably liked it because it was easy to find food but we are suffering from a drought and needed the snow. I hope your country is enjoying better weather.

I have a new tablet but still haven’t gotten a new PC. I can’t make up my mind. The tablet is nice but I miss my old computer.

Take care

 

[janetteB @janetteb]

@winston thank you the concern. We are thankfully safe from fires here. We have had a relatively cool summer which is odd though I guess we are not getting the cool nights which brings up the average temperature. Weather patterns have changed. It is very dry though. I am getting tired of watering and  I fear we have a long wait for rain.

It sounds as though you have had a very dry winter which does not bode well. Hopefully it will be like our summer, cooler than feared.

We replaced the hard-drive on my laptop and it is working again. This time we bought a ssd which hopefully will less prone to being damaged as there is clearly some problem with the laptop itself. It is so disruptive having to move between machines. it put me behind with so many things.(like posting on here )

Hope everyone is well and enjoying the Spring/Autumn

cheers

Janette

 

 

[Dentarthurdent @dentarthurdent]

Hi @winston Unlike @janetteb (Hi!) we’ve had a pretty warm summer, and it’s still holding up – generally mid-20’s (70’s in Fahrenheit), and the water is still nicely warm. Typically (when it’s not going bananas) the weather stays settled until Easter at least. These days I generally just go for a swim at our tiny local beach at Blockhouse Bay on the Manukau Harbour, it’s very well sheltered from the prevailing winds but it’s only good at high tide, further out is just soft mud. And even then, high tides vary (in about a two-week cycle) from 3.2 metres to 4.5 metres and it’s only any good at 4.0 metres or above – maybe 3.7 metres as a minimum. Below that, and you’re paddling in a foot of water over oozy mud which is rather disgusting. And of course the tides get an hour later every day, so high tides that happen too early or late in the day are no good either. Which is why I keep a copy of the tide tables handy. Given those limitations, it’s surprising how often I manage to fit in a little dip. Being retired helps hugely, of course. And of course I can always make the 50-minute drive out to Piha on the coast which I used to do ‘all the time’ until I discovered that Blockhouse Bay was, actually, usable.

There are still some roads closed (or ‘Residents Cars Only’) from the two storms last February which caused widespread slips. This summer has been completely unlike that one, fortunately. However, some of South Island is experiencing drought – the east side, Marlborough and Canterbury, on the lee side of the Southern Alps. Christchurch Port Hills just had a big fire. Seems like half the country is always having droughts and the other half is having floods.

Doctor Who – I just watched the Monks trilogy. All very watchable, Extremis was great – and I’ve only just fully comprehended that the entire episode (with the exception of the flashbacks to Missy’s execution) was a simulation and the Doctor, Bill and Nardole were not real. The scenario was quite reminiscent of The Power of Three in that the ‘enemy’ was studying us – but a lot more credible. The Monks needed that information to control us; the enemy in Power of Three just wanted to kill a third of Earth’s population in order to – what? – so why didn’t he just get on with it instead of creating billions of cubes? Back to the Monks – The Lie of The Land was very ‘1984’ with the Memory Police. Reminded me of more recent political developments with, ahem, Alternative Facts (and that’s about as political as I should get). But when they left, everyone just forgot them. I like the student’s explanation for the vacant statue plinth – “Er, we thought they were just like filming something here or something?” Shades of ‘Derren Brown’.

Next, the least impressive (IMO) episode of S10, Doctor Who does Edgar Rice Burroughs.

[janetteB @janetteb]

Hi @dentarthurdent. Your swimming sounds lovely. We are a long drive from any good beaches. Mostly to the west of us is mangroves though I believe there are some ok ones heading up the coast a bit. Nothing compared to the magistic wonder of Piha beach however. I loved the beaches we visited on Eyre Peninsula last winter. Too cold for swimming but I took some nice photos which make me happy.

I have not watched any “Who” for a while. We are currently re watching Blackadder. I have to choose an episode for a podcast and as it has been years since we last watched it I thought some research was required. The “monks’ trilogy is one that improves on re watching I find, often the case with Moffat’s scripts. there is always so much to unpick, so many layers that one doesn’t always appreciate on first viewing.

Cheers

Janette

 

 

[Dentarthurdent @dentarthurdent]

@janetteb Well Piha is always swimmable (except for very rare occasions when it’s too rough, but often then one can take a dip at The Gap at the south end of the island). But there are always waves breaking so you have to like battling the waves. It can often be very breezy, too.
Blockhouse Bay is a nice sheltered little micro-beach, but only swimmable at high tides at the upper half of the tidal cycle. I never used to swim there but now I do quite often, since it only takes an hour out of my day (Piha takes at least three) and I’ve got the tide tables printed out and handy. Surprisingly few people swim there, probably because if you just head down to the beach at random the chances of the tide being high enough to swim are about 1 in 10. Inlets in big harbours like the Manukau will always be muddy because there isn’t enough wave action to sweep the mud away. Blockhouse Bay was apparently a muddy mangrove inlet until in the 30’s (?) a local group cleared the mangroves, and at some point the Council trucked in enough sand for a tiny beach. One advantage of the lack of wave action is that the sand stays put.

Blackadder is always good, I have the full set on DVD (of course), must re-watch some time.
The ‘Monks’ trilogy, yes, I too find it better on a second or third watch when the rough outline of the plot is in my mind – like, as you say, many of Moff’s scripts.

[winston @winston]

@janetteb Blackadder is a family favourite here. My son was quoting from episodes by the time he was 10. He even named his cat Baldric. I must have a look at them again.

We have to go about 18 hours to the east coast to find a beach or 6 days west to swim in the Pacific. Somehow a lake beach is not the same as sitting at the ocean but still nice on a hot day.

@dentarthurdent I looked up Blockhouse Bay and it is a very pretty place to have a swim. To a Canadian it’s very exotic and so different from my area which is a tamed and manicured farming community. We are called the Kawartha Lakes here because we have a lot of lakes and whoever named it had no imagination. Unfortunately the wild beauty is disappearing to be replaced by cottage locked lakes, motor boats and sea-doos. Our creek is still wild and was busy today with geese and swans returning from their winter break down south. After seeing at least 40 tundra swans it’s hard to have a bad day. They are so wonderful.

Hope you have a great day.

Stay safe

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