@blenkinsopthebrave    You disappoint me. On first glance, I had a vivid picture in my mind of Blenkinsop huddled in a cocoon of snow as the early morning sun lit the Ontario landscape!

When I was ten or eleven, we used to watch old episodes of Star Trek as a family. We saw the one with the shape-shifting salt-sucking monster, and I was terrified. I walked out half way through and refused to have anything further to do with Star Trek for quite a while. It kept me awake nights for a long time. And yet my sister, three years…[Read more]

@puroandson     Well, where would we be if we couldn’t laugh? I’m laughing right now at @TardisBlue‘s typo about “a gentile hug”. 🙂 I guess mine would be a gentile hug as well! But bonus points for the hybrid reference.

I don’t LOL but I do OMG occasionally. And I definitely watch every episode twice, once to suck it in a kind of joyful haz…[Read more]

@puroandson             Longest month of my life.

Welcome, Ilion! As Puro has often shared your thoughts about the show, I don’t feel as if you are a “new” member at all. I am “Arbutus” after the lovely trees that grow along the shoreline here in southwestern British Columbia. Hope you are soon over the cold, we have all been fighting them off in…[Read more]

My very dear Puro,

Your presence on the Forum has helped make it a better, kinder place. You have brought to all the discussions an energy, warmth, and emotional honesty that helped move it beyond the level of any other forum I have visited. Your kindness in welcoming new posters, your enthusiastic reception of people’s theories, and your g…[Read more]

@purofilion  @catladymeow  @lisa  @soundworld

Because Puro went off topic and I am resolutely staying there, I have moved this to the sofa, so as not to be modded!

Puro said:    He still remains my favourite Doctor although I’m beginning to think the word favourite just doesn’t work with this show at all.    You’re absolutely right. Back be…[Read more]

@janetteB    I also like the Paris peace symbol. The desire to express solidarity is very integral, isn’t it? My son wore his Paris-St. Germain jersey to soccer practice tonight!

@DrBen    I’d rather they take risks and occasionally fail than never take risks at all.   This, absolutely.  @Bluesqueakpip says it perfectly: the risky episodes, even when they fail all or in part, are what lead us to the unexpectedly wonderful ones!

@Starla   Rasmussen might have been better off just embedding the eye dust inducing signal in…[Read more]

@Mudlark    I stand, instead, with the human race, in all its complexity and confusion.

Now there’s a statement that is one hundred percent Doctor!   🙂

@Miapatrick   Yes, for a teacher, and educated person generally, I would have thought she would assume that most people would know the genesis of “Morpheus”. But as @steve-thorp points out, she also didn’t recognize the Shakespeare quote. Hm. Have to say, the Clara as hybrid theory seems increasingly certain. And as others have pointed out, the D…[Read more]

@craig      I’m with @blenkinsopthebrave, I like the message on the homepage. Coming from a country made up almost entirely of immigrants, I tend to view a flag as representative of the “people in a place” rather than something race-specific. I’ve spent some time in Paris over the years, and it’s one of my favourite cities; most recently, we stay…[Read more]

Well, this was different, and I enjoy different.  🙂  The previous pair took on racism and terrorism, this week we get the dangers of the corporate agenda, science, and too much TV! A fun, creepy, arc-light episode that made a great breather after the socio-political drama of the last couple of weeks, and the ongoing foreshadowing of Clara’s end…[Read more]

I can’t say often enough how fabulous I think Capaldi’s Doctor has become. And I loved him from the start, but he just gets better and better. He encapsulates the double-sidedness of the Doctor’s personality to perfection, going from the light and goofy– “You can use mine. They’re sonic” and “poncing around in big planes”- to all the intensity of…[Read more]

After rewatching both halves back to back, there are a few things that stood out for me.

At the very beginning, in the video made by the Osgoods, they describe the Zygons as a peace-loving race who embed themselves in other cultures and live out their lives peacefully. I had missed the implications of this the first time around, but of course, we…[Read more]

@Miapatrick    I like your point that the treaty was negotiated by people who couldn’t remember which side they were on. This should actually make it a pretty good treaty, inasmuch as both sides are able to see things from two points of view, something that would be nice to have in real life!

@Bluesqueakpip’s comments about guilt and forg…[Read more]

@Miapatrick   It’s a good point about Bonnie’s insistence that she was Bonnie. She was so determined to be seen as Zygon rather than human, that she introduced herself to Clara in that exact way upon replication, which struck me as very odd at the time. It’s a moving irony that in the end, she chooses to become the hybrid after all.

@Juniperfish    a complexity at the heart of multiculturalism.    Yes. But not an irreconcilable one. We haven’t really been shown anything (I don’t think) about Zygon culture, but some core values at least must be similar to ours as many Zygons seem to have assimilated happily into Earth society. But we are not always great at remembering that…[Read more]

@PhaseShift and others      Yes, I meant to add that Coleman was fantastic. There really were two completely different characters in the room, and she completely sold me as the Zygon rebel. I actually thought for a moment that the Doctor was not going to win her over, she had that perfect look of someone being offered a helping hand off the clif…[Read more]

Five rounds rapid!!!!!!    🙂   Best of the series for me, without doubt. I was riveted start to finish.

I felt this cemented a return to the Doctor as a master of rhetoric. His scene with Bonnie was enthralling. “Oh, it’s not fair. Well, my TARDIS doesn’t work properly.” And his description of his own experience in the Time War brought tears to…[Read more]

I like @jphamlore‘s notion that it was the death of the Osgood “sister” that triggered the problems with the Zygons. This would also support the idea that it was Zygon Osgood that died. It seems likely that Zygons can recognize other Zygons more readily than humans can. I also like the idea that the surviving Osgood might have gone “undercover”…[Read more]