Not a bad episode at all and possibly Gatiss’s best, certainly his best since The Unquiet Dead. I agree with @arbutus et al that it very much had a BG feel — you can get much more BG than a tunnel-based romp with lumbering monsters and a factional dispute. Even the set design for much of the stories this year seems to be deliberately retro,…[Read more]

@whisht

I’ve just got back from the NE and was surprised by the number of spoiler thread comments myself. I’ll be back to post some thoughts on the last couple of episodes tomorrow, but I’m currently laughing at the notion that Theresa May may have just ‘won’ a hung Parliament. Delightful (but being realistic, unlikely).

Anyways, a while back…[Read more]

@Arbutus – ha ha don’t worry, you asked in a good natured way and I was into my cups and went on and on and on.
But hopefully I was non-rabid!
;¬)

If your son is interested in football but not partisan (always a good thing), then a look at the economics, Board structures etc especially compared to other sectors, are possibly a nice seam of…[Read more]

@pedant – nice. Was PennyRed on Question Time a few months back?

Anyway, @Arbutus you (via your son) asked if I was Wenger in or out.

Naughty naughty Arbutus!!

;¬)

So, as I mentioned only recently to another close friend of the show, I saw a parallel between the whole “Wenger/ Moffat out!” “you ruined my franchise!” brigade.
Lots of ‘fans’…[Read more]

@pedant  My first thought on seeing the monk, walking towards the Doctor bak-lit by the portal was “Buddhist” and they have monks too.

Me, too.  It was the one bare arm extended out to the side when we saw him in silhouette.   Many of the Buddhist monks I saw in Thailand kept one arm bared, for doing stuff with, while the other was hidden by the…[Read more]

@arbutus  @thane15 Timey-wimey?  Perhaps….

Sim-Doctor said that using the special device only would grant him eyesight for a little while and come at the cost of later regenerations — at worst he might not able to regenerate ever again.  So assuming real-Doctor has a similar device, he doesn’t intend to use it unless a really really big pro…[Read more]

@arbutus
It is currently available for free on the CBC website. I was just watching it.

@pedant and @arbutus     The show was really good and as pedant says the opening credits are beautiful.The rest of the scenery is stunning and it is perfectly cast. We watched it all and enjoyed every bit of it.  In the books and show  curmudgeons are Anne’s specialty.

@Arbutus Thank you for that beautiful comparison between storytelling and music. I hope I, at least I tried, to make it clear that I really enjoyed the episode, thought it was a lot of great story telling, but I was just a bit concerned when Bobby Ewing walked out of the shower, so to speak.

Having thought about it, I still think it is slight but…[Read more]

@Arbutus

I know. I’m still in shock.

Not sure how my reputation as a curmudgeon with low fuckwit tolerance is going to survive.

@arbutus @winston (and anyone else in the Canada contingent)

A sentence that:

a) I never thought I would write;

and

b) That I doubt anyone else here would ever expect me to write either.

But the new CBC/ Netflix adaptation of Anne of Green Gables is an absolute corker.

The open credits alone are a work of art.

Well, I loved this.  A real change of mood, and lots to ponder on.  Trouble with not having watched till Tuesday night is that you’ve all been bonkerising like mad and I can’t keep up with all your brilliant ideas, so forgive me if I fail to credit anyone with their particular contribution…  The other difficulty is that we are currently en…[Read more]

@arbutus

The CERN scientist, when asked what they were doing, said, “Saving the world”. That suggests that it wasn’t escape, but foiling the plans of the simulators, that was the goal. Presumably also true for the clerics, as that goal might be viewed of being worth going to hell for, and a president who thought he was helping his people.

I don’t…[Read more]

@arbutus

‘Perhaps the computer simulation couldn’t predict Trump. No one else did!’

@arbutus  That’s how I feel too.

Hey, we were all right about the vault, it was the most OBVIOUS answer all along.  Was fun to bonkerize in the meantime.

@kharis  So, enjoy my latest craziest “person in the vault playing Fur Elise” theory and please come up theories even more insane then this one.

Trying, really trying, but — love it just the way you put it!  Ah, there we are — Alan Moore!

@arbutus  . . . villains who aren’t really villains. I confess it’s a theme that resonates with me.

M…[Read more]

ah – thanks @thane15 for that ragtime version!
It made me think of this version of Flight of the Bumblebees by Jools Holland.
I saw this many many many years ago when it was first on TV and luckily rammed a video into the recorder and taped most of the show. It was brilliant and also this part was the first time I’d heard of Professor Longhair…[Read more]

@arbutus   Am I imagining things, or did Roger Delgado’s master once play the organ?

I don’t recall the Master ever playing the organ, but the Doctor has at least a couple of times, perhaps more. The occasions I can remember are in The Lazarus Experiment and the 6th Doctor story Attack of the Cybermen, in which the Doctor actually fixed the cha…[Read more]

@kharis

Also, all this talk about how the Doctor would be mad at Missy, cause he now knows about her involvement in Clara, or any of that kind of theorising about the Doctor remembering things about Clara has a fundamental flaw – before that kind of theorising takes place we would have to establish he consiously remembers her in the first p…

[Read more]

@arbutus and @mudlark

Re:TARDIS
In the 50th Anniversary season, we saw the Doctor and Susan escaping into a TARDIS on Gallifrey. So, it is a question, isn’t it? Why an acronym name that only works in English for a Gallifreyan time machine?

Possibilities:

• Susan was human, kidnapped by the Time Lords for some nefarious reason. She named TARDIS…

[Read more]