[Arbutus @replies]

@indigomoose    This is cool. We’ve rambled a lot in the past about DW as mythology, stories, fables, and related things. If the Tardis is the one telling us the stories, it could explain a lot about the Doctor as we are shown him: sometimes a hero, sometimes a buffoon, sometimes mad man in a box, depending on how the Tardis is feeling about him at the time!  🙂

[Arbutus @replies]

@indigomoose     Welcome to the Forum. Love both your username and your bonkers theory. I also thank you for my laugh of the day at the phrase “head cannon”, which, spelt that way, brought an inevitable picture to my mind.  🙂

[Arbutus @replies]

@janetteb   @mudlark     I’m puzzled about the Anzacs. Are they a kind of cookie? Because a flapjack is more of a pancake, and I don’t think you could sell them in packages. But anything with oatmeal in it is tops in my book. (Must be my Scottish heritage!)

@blenkinsopthebrave      So Canada owes its gain to a packaged biscuit? Nice.  🙂

 

[Arbutus @replies]

@janetteb, @purofilion

Ah. We do have those gambling machines here. But, at least in BC, they are not allowed outside of casinos. I’m not sure of the rules in other provinces; I think in some places, you are allowed to have them in pubs, but as far as I understand it, nowhere that minors are allowed. Every so often I read a news story about the problems of casinos and gambling addiction, and it all sounds very depressing.

@mudlark

Some years ago, an English family spent part of a year on sabbatical here, staying at the end of our lane. At the time, my son had several school friends living on the block, and they used to play various games in the back lane. The sons of the English family used to join in, and puzzled our boys exceedingly when, early in the evening, they would have to “go home for tea”! I didn’t know this at the time, it was only later that my son told me of his confusion, and I explained that they actually meant supper! A couple of years later, while reading the Harry Potter books, we encountered the same problem over the word “pudding”. Arbutus Jr. envisioned tables filled with literally different flavours of pudding: chocolate, butterscotch, lemon, etc. Here, of course, we call the sweet course dessert, and pudding is a very specific subset (usually premade these days, or at best, mixed up from a package. My mom used to mix up big bowls of Jello chocolate pudding when I was a kid… Also, Puro, we used to drink chocolate-flavoured Quick all the time, as it was cheaper than chocolate milk in cartons.

I have never tasted Bovril, but my granny, who hailed from New England and was very British in her upbringing, used to have it in her cupboard.

[Arbutus @replies]

@whisht     Howlin Wolf, beautiful. Well done. How about this for a tea song (with a callout to @thekrynoidman)?

[Arbutus @replies]

@mudlark @Rose2112 @purofilion @janetteb

Two years ago, my mother, who is not much of a traveller, fulfilled a dream and visited Britain. One of the things she did in London was  afternoon tea at a swanky hotel, where she discovered clotted cream for the first time, and learned about the distinction between afternoon and high tea. It bugs her to no end that even the fanciest establishments over here fail to make the distinction properly!

Janette, my grandmother lived to the age of 98, and never stopped calling her two sons “the boys”. They didn’t seem to mind.

But do tell me, what sort of frightening Aussie thing is “pokie”????

[Arbutus @replies]

@mudlark    I think you misunderstood. I used “pot” in the North American sense of “saucepan”, which I don’t like to use for tea. I definitely use a teapot, because I never stop at just one cup! 🙂 The trifle sounds fabulous! You rarely get really good trifle here. I rarely make my own sweets, except for pie and cookies. Not counting Christmas time.

@purofilion We have that cream in a can here as well. I never touch the stuff! My son did his home ec course two years ago, and struggled mightily with an insanely perfectionist and contradictory teacher. The only bit that he absolutely aced was the unit on pizza, because we cook pizza all the time, and he knew absolutely how it ought to look when it was done, and stared her down when she tried to make him take it out too soon. Apparently everyone else lost marks for lack of “doneness”, but she never admitted that he was right!

Oh, Puro, the shop where I get my coffee beans does in-house donuts, and they are fantastic! Everything fresh, never too sweet, filled with flavoured cream or seasonal fruits. The lemon old fashioned is my favourite, very lemony icing, and they also have a blueberry filled one right now that is great. Mr. Arbutus and I go every Sunday morning for breakfast and coffee. I will no longer touch any other donuts, not even the ultra-Canadian Tim Hortons (which aren’t actually bad, but pale in comparison).

[Arbutus @replies]

@whisht     Ha. Builder’s tea is definitely the opposite of how I drink my tea. I’m more in line with @mudlark’s approach. I also confess to a liking for loose leaf tea (of many kinds), spices in jars (because I buy them in little bags), and locally roasted whole espresso beans (from the excellent coffee house down the street). But it’s really because I like the taste, honest! We buy wine with screwcaps! And cider in cans!

I have to admit that when I have had reason to make tea in a pot, it never seems to taste right to me. But I think that the real reason is not the pot, but the water, because I never do it at home. Here, our tap water is so soft (mainly rainwater) that tea made from any other water just doesn’t taste the same. I’m not sure that I could get the tea strong enough to dissolve a wooden stir stick with the water we have!

[Arbutus @replies]

@purofilion          Not sure where you are now with the Farscape watch, but I wanted to share my impressions of Season Two. I really enjoyed this season, I think the characterizations have gotten very strong. I liked the fact that the different story arcs were never allowed to take over, but slowly built to a finale where they all tied together. I found the emphasis on psychological threats and storylines, rather than lots of laser blasts and shouting (although there were those as well!), refreshing. The penultimate three-parter was a roller coaster and really well done, I thought, and the finale left us on one hell of a cliffhanger!

I’m just moving on to season three and hoping that the quality continues.

[Arbutus @replies]

@Rose2112      @lisa

Yes, we have those pumpkin patch things as well. I remember my son having a great time when he was small, and I remember being equally relieved when he was old enough not to want to go anymore! They were always awfully mucky in this part of the world.

Rose, green tea with mint, like the Moroccans drink it, is a favourite in our house. Mr. Arbutus especially loves it.

@janetteb    Wow, year 12 (or 12th grade as we would call it here). I hope it all goes smoothly! I agree that high school seems to be much more stressful the second time through, or maybe it’s just that my son prioritizes his life much differently than I did. He will be starting Grade 11 in a few weeks and I think graduation is already starting to loom ahead of him in a rather frightening way, a sort of large wall that he can’t see past. But it’s amazing how much emotional energy his education takes out of me! I don’t think it was that way for my mom, but times have changed and so have we, I guess.

[Arbutus @replies]

@pedant      Of course it did!    🙂

[Arbutus @replies]

@janetteb         I was going to say that I find Caves very similar in the way that it plays to Davison’s strengths, even more so than here, in fact. I agree that the ending of Earthshock stunned me, years ago, and I couldn’t quite believe that they weren’t going to retro-engineer it, in some manner. Of course, I thought that the first time I encountered regeneration as well, at the end of the Tom Baker era. Wrong on both counts!  🙂

[Arbutus @replies]

@thekrynoidman    @craig was updating the site and some posts were lost in the process:

http://www.thedoctorwhoforum.com/forums/topic/website-comments-2/page/4/#post-41511

@jimthefish    Yes, I had posted something similar before the massacre. Davison really shone in this. I liked him best when he was quietly intense, taking verbal shots at his enemies and being a man of action. Being surrounded by the squabbling Team Tardis definitely did not bring out the best in him!

I love your idea for Cyber-Adric. Fan fiction, anyone?

[Arbutus @replies]

I’ve been preoccupied for a few days, dealing with Life (I don’t say Real Life, as I like to think that all of you here are part of my Real Life!), and I come back to find I’ve been missing all kinds of interesting conversation… you are talking about food!

@Rose2112    Welcome to the Forum! Yes, I am fond of Rush, although I wouldn’t call myself a massive fan. But they were omnipresent during my teenage years, and being Canadian, I like that I can be prouder of them than, say, Nickelback or Justin Bieber!  🙂  And I really do think that Geddy Lee is fantastic.

@purofilion   So sorry about the cricket! It’s always tough to see the home team go down in such an unfortunate manner. Been there, done that, too many times to count, especially with our local hockey team! I loved Boy Illion’s comment about wankers. That is a term that Arbutus Jr. learned recently from a British youtuber (along with nob, which he really likes!).

We have a concrete slab out back at our place, but as I’ve surrounded it with Mediterranean plants and put a fountain on it, I like to think of it as a terrazza! I  bought my very first dishwasher only last year, and as it is somewhat small, I always have to choose which things to put in it and which to handwash, so there is never a problem keeping potentially touchy things out of it. I’m lucky to get all the plates and mugs into it, and even the cheap wine glasses are too tall. But after many years without one, I love it nonetheless.

I confess to many small appliances, including the espresso machine (Mr. Arbutus’s baby) and the Kitchen Aid (mine). I make bread and cookie dough in it, so much easier than doing it by hand, and I have a pasta attachment now that I am learning to use as well. Rose, I’m sure the lemon squares were delicious… as some people around here already know, I am a fiend for anything lemon!

As to tea, I have a stove top kettle with a really loud whistle (it sounds like a steam engine, and almost as loud). This is because I have a nasty habit of putting the kettle on and then leaving the room, and ending up poking around in closets or out in the garden. I drink loads of tea, all kinds. I like a bit of espresso but can’t really drink too much coffee, so I have adopted tea as both my wake up and settle down. But I drink black tea weak compared to the British style, and without anything in it. Love green tea, red bush tea, and flavoured teas of all kinds!

Puro, chai is also the name for a lovely Indian tea, brewed in a saucepan with milk and spices, and sweetened. It’s quite lovely in its proper form, but it has also been adopted as “chai latte” by coffee shops in North America as an alternative to coffee. I get that when I need a hot drink at a rainy soccer game. Soy milk is almost always offered as a dairy alternative in any kind of latte-type drink around here, although I don’t drink it myself.

Yes, honeycrisp! I love those.

[Arbutus @replies]

@fowl

[Arbutus @replies]

Reposting my earlier replies that were lost in the cloud (although without most of whatever deep views might have been attached).

@fowl   Thanks for the Rush! I hold Geddy Lee in some esteem. Here is my pong to your ping:

@thekrynoidman  @whisht   I had lots of love for your tunes and comments regarding Cilla Black, but can’t remember exactly what I said. Here is my musical response. (I did remark that I remember a French version being around the airwaves a bit, back in the day.)

[Arbutus @replies]

For @purofilion          In regard to tagging people (or atting them as I call it), @craig told us that he had solved the @pedant problem, which I see is no longer solved, making my lyrics even more relevant!

How do you solve a problem like @pedant?
How do you catch a cloud and keep its shade?
How do you find a word that means @pedant?
A thunderbolt! A laser beam! A blade!

Many a thing he will not fail to tell you.
Many a thing he makes you understand.
But how do you make him quit
the flow of biting wit?
How do you keep a tsunami from the sand?

Oh, how do you solve a problem like @pedant?
How do you hold the lightning in your hand?

[Arbutus @replies]

Apparently there’s big band music, and then there’s Big Band music.

 

[Arbutus @replies]

@blenkinsopthebrave     Perhaps Mrs. Blenkinsop thought you were suggesting minty mojitos before dinner?  🙂

Bowls of limes are all very well, and pricey, as @purofilion points out. I, however, I am dedicated to lemons. In fact, putting them out in bowls is not impressive enough for me. I have a whole tree, in a pot so that it can be moved out of the way of occasional freeze-ups, and given some extra light in the winter when are days are fairly short. I have averaged about two viable lemons per year so far. I usually use them to make limoncello, which is possibly the most fabulous after-dinner drink in the universe. No one can say I am not dedicated to creating my own Mediterranean false reality right here in Canada!

Puro, do you have a lot of lawyers in Brisbane? Or does everyone just watch Suits a lot? Because really, I don’t think if I would have remembered unaided that that word had a meaning other than a culinary one. And give me butter creme over low fat yogurt any day!

[Arbutus @replies]

Happy Birthday, @purofilion!

[Arbutus @replies]

@purofilion

Okay, I’m half a dozen in to the second season of Farscape and enjoying this even more! I’m enjoying the move away from the constant threat of Peacekeepers: there are other dangers out there! I love that so often the threats are psychological rather than just physical (although still seeming defeated with lots of weapons fire!).

On that note I should say that the Crackers episode was absolutely awesome! I loved how it went darker and darker, peaking at genuinely disturbing, and then suddenly, I started to realize that Ben Browder must have been having a ton of fun performing that script. And from the moment of his insane proclamation “Crackers don’t matter!”, we descended into madness for the climax, which was really full-on hilarious. And just as suddenly, the epilogue returned to sobriety with the understanding that the crew wouldn’t just be able to pretend all the terrible words and actions had never happened. Really, really well done.

[Arbutus @replies]

@phaseshift    I am intending to watch Strange and Norrell, but I picked up the book for summer reading as I usually prefer to read things first and then view them. But I also appreciate @janetteb calling my attention to it, as I hadn’t really known anything about the book previously. I’m enjoying it as far as I have gotten.

[Arbutus @replies]

@purofilion     Well, yes, I am really enjoying Farscape now. You didn’t really include any spoilers, but I am about to for Season 1 as well as the first ep of Season 2… mild SPOILERS AHEAD if anyone cares.

*********

It took awhile to get going for me, but the characters are really taking shape and coming into their own. At first, I found most of them vaguely annoying: Crichton the all-American hero, D’Argo the dollar-store Worf, Rigel the muppet comic relief. But over the course of the first season, they have been allowed to develop a little depth, some back story that has given them more interest. Even the rebellious teen that they picked up, whom I really didn’t like for awhile, grew on me in the last couple of episodes. A real pain in the eema!  🙂

I liked the rather delicate approach to the relationship of John and Eryn throughout the season, which resisted the temptation to go too far too fast– this actually applied to all the relationships, where people were slow to trust one another. Some TV makes the mistake of setting up conflicted or disparate characters and then allowing them to come to complete harmony far too quickly! I also liked what they did with Crais, I really didn’t see it coming.

The humour sometimes felt forced early on, but it improved. To the point in the season finale with John and D’Argo in the shuttle, on their possibly deadly mission, and John asks, “How you doin’?” D’Argo replies, “I have to pee.” I lost it there!

I may have to start asking other drivers what the yotz they think they are doing.

[Arbutus @replies]

I am losing the ability to keep track of this discussion, there are so many different threads in it! I am almost certainly not tagging everyone I ought to, so apologies in advance.

@proxy said: Even without a gender-swap regeneration, we’ve seen fairly severe personality changes. I much prefer Jenny’s attitude. When Clara asked her what if the person you liked changed, her response was, “I don’t like her, ma’am. I love her.” No asterisk. Granted Jenny wasn’t talking about a Time Lord, but still valid. Then again, the Doctor was afraid Clara might not like him anymore after regenerating.

That’s the thing, isn’t it? We mate for life (in theory, anyway), and we do change. My husband and I married as young(ish) people, and are now middle aged, with all the changes in appearance and attitudes that go with that. Eventually we will be elderly, and even more changed. But we still love each other, as Jenny says.

But what happens with regeneration seems to me altogether different. If my husband suddenly came back to me shorter, dark eyed, disliking baroque music and Italian food, and suddenly feeling an overwhelming need for an impeccably tidy house, that would present challenges. But possibly Time Lord lifestyles are less domestic? Maybe Time Lord marriages are more along the line of the dynastic unions of the old aristocracy, where husband and wife often led relatively independent lives? Or, as I have always thought, they just weren’t assumed to be life-long. Time and regeneration make fools of us all (or something like that.

As to Time Lord gender and sexuality, well, no reason to assume that they have any fewer parking spots along the spectrum than human society, and we have lots. But presumably, male plus female are still required for reproductive purposes. I am assuming that since I don’t think we have been shown any place where that is not the case. But as to raising the children, that is something else. I took away a bit of an impression from Listen that the Doctor spent some at least of his youth in some kind of group home. I was reminded a bit of LeGuin’s anarchist society in The Dispossessed, where at a certain age, the children went off to be raised by the collective, as parental attitudes were deemed selfishly antisocial.

@lisa @purofilion   Neat ideas about governesses, mistresses, and Missy. Not sure what it really means but I like the connections!

[Arbutus @replies]

For what it’s worth, I have never been overly engaged by the Daleks. I often find them a less engaging enemy than one with more interesting motivations, and they do a lot of shouting but often without a lot of threat. Ditto Cybermen. Matt Smith as the Cyberplanner was more interesting, as was Davros (initially, at least). But I will grant that the AG show has made some effort to do new things with the Daleks.

And the “Is the Doctor a good Dalek?” question is actually a pretty universal question to ask of anyone who has taken on the battle against evil. We ask questions like in real life all the time: What is acceptable in the fight against evil? Do we hate the sin and love the sinner, so to speak? Who is the enemy and are they redeemable? And so on. I’m not expressing this in the best way, but it makes sense to me to ask if the Doctor, in his absolute hatred of the Daleks, risks becoming like them.

[Arbutus @replies]

Okay, my son just sent my this, culled from the hours he wastes spends browsing imgur. I laughed myself sick.

Trick friends into thinking you have your shit together

[Arbutus @replies]

@purofilion

Okay, just finished Farscape Season 1. How the hell (or should that be frell?) have you managed not to watch on after that cliffhanger? Or have you done so by now? Anyway, I’m now going right on to Season 2, Episode 1 to find out what happens next. (Well, it’s raining here today anyway… desperately needed but it removes any need for me to work in the garden, or do laundry since I can hang it out.)

After that, I will be back with lots of spoilery commentary about the first season.

[Arbutus @replies]

@ichabod   I read about Mr. Holmes awhile back and thought it sounded interesting. Thanks for the recommendation, I shall have to try and see it.

Having spent many hours just lately on airplanes, I killed some time watching The Big Lebowski. Hadn’t seen that since it was new. It stands the test of time I’d have to say. My son kept looking across the aisle at me to see what I was giggling about! And it has a fabulous soundtrack.

[Arbutus @replies]

@suzannems  @purofilion  @bluesqueakpip

I don’t hold a strong view either way, but I do recall Nine being pretty flirty with Jack Harkness in the “Are you my Mummy” two-parter. 

And if gender can change with regeneration (and it has now been made specific) I can’t imagine sexual orientation being unchangeable (if TL’s aren’t as you say more malleable than the notion of sexual orientation suggests.)

Personally, though, my own sense is that gender change is not the norm upon regeneration. Immediately after his regeneration, Eleven acknowledged the possibility that he had become a woman, but he did seem taken aback by it.

I’ve always felt that Ten was the Doctor who most wanted to be human, having lost his own people. I like Pip’s idea that his encounters with Sarah Jane and Madame du Pompadour served to remind him of the bitter reality that he could never be human. I was always struck by his response to Rose when they thought they were trapped in one time in “The Impossible Planet”. She was still imagining that they could be together; he realized that they could not.

[Arbutus @replies]

@phaseshift    Given the level of knowledge and perspectives we have on the site, is it worth trying to open up a new forum thread – Say Faith, Philosophy, Myth and Reason in Doctor Who or a Blog?

I think this is a great idea. We have already had loads of discussion at various times on this kind of thing. It’s a pretty broad topic, so that people who are put off by the “faith” discussion (like me, frankly) might be interested in one of the other branches. I always find discussion of mythology in DW interesting, and as you say, there are people here with loads of knowledge. I like the idea of a thread, because they are easier to come back to later on.

[Arbutus @replies]

Just back from two weeks holiday and look at everything I’ve missed. There’s a new trailer! @blenkinsopthebrave is back! @wolfweed is back! Various erudite debates! A brand new shiny troll! (Looking forward to more of those when the new series starts, just for @pedant‘s pithy put-downs. 🙂 )Lots to catch up on. @purofilion, I hadn’t quite made it to that cliffhanger before going away, but I will be getting back on the horse, as it were (or perhaps “climbing into that wormhole” works better!) and finishing the first series this week.

By the way, apparently I am Spock. It seems unlikely to me, but there it is.

[Arbutus @replies]

Just heard this song off my son’s current playlist and of course had to put it up as Eleventh Doctor theme. When I found the video, imagine my surprise to see that in a weird sort of way, it reinforces the DW connection!

[Arbutus @replies]

@purofilion   I recall Russell T. Davies claiming there was “no such thing as they’re simply Welsh.”

It’s hard to know what he meant by this without knowing the context. I believe that modern-day French Bretons are descended from British Celts (hence the name), but I don’t think that the Scots or Irish were. But my studies were long ago and as my specialization eventually settled on a later epoch, I certainly haven’t kept up with whatever might have been learned in the meantime. Perhaps RTD is a bit of a Welsh nationalist (or tribalist)?  🙂

@ichabod    GoT is for the hormonal extremes of raw adolescence, IMO.

I’ve never watched GoT myself, although I often enjoy the pseudo historical. But I got that same sense about it just from seeing the promotional materials, so I’ve never bothered with it. And this:   Much of what many GoT fans love — lovingly detailed jewelry, weaponry, and armor, for example — doesn’t hold my interest.   I couldn’t agree more.

[Arbutus @replies]

@purofilion      I’m interested in your comparisons to Firefly and Whedon. I felt initially that Farscape was simply “of its time”, and then of course did the math and realized that it was being made simultaneously with Buffy. And of course, being a millennial thing, it is actually more like something out of the eighties or early nineties. So backward looking, while Whedon was more cutting edge. (The West Wing was another one like that.) So Farscape will be lacking the snappy, clever dialogue, and the more contemporary portrayal of relationships. I’m not finding myself emotionally engaged, more just enjoying it. I agree that it isn’t laugh-out-loud funny, although I’m starting to be amused by Crichton’s references to Earth culture (“It looks like Louisiana. Or Dagobeh.” “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” And so on.)

It’s like that thing that they never taught us in music history class (or in mine, anyway): that while Monteverdi was writing the first operas and Caccini and others were basically inventing Baroque music, other composers were composing Renaissance polyphony and consort music at the same time. (And later, in fact.) Farscape has the eighties as its touchstone and it is pretty well rooted there; Whedon is part of the next wave, and that wave washed up Steven Moffat’s Doctor Who.

Oh yes, sport. We are blissfully on a break as it is now summer. So no more school sports for two months, and baseball has just wrapped up, so just regular trips down the hall to tell Arbutus Jr. to keep his voice down on his skype calls (and to deliver food).  🙂

 

[Arbutus @replies]

@purofilion      I am now up through seven episodes and I must say that I am enjoying it quite a bit. I’m not sure if we are watching the episodes in the same order, though, as apparently there was the order in which they aired and the order in which they were filmed, or something, and they aren’t always packaged the same way. Netflix Canada has them according to air date, so my most recent ep (no. 7) is the one called I, ET. Is this the same for you?

I saw the premiere, then the episode where the characters were fighting their evil clones, and then the Back to the Future ep. I thought the first two were reasonably interesting, if kind of thin, but I thought the third was pretty lame. Then suddenly, came Ep. 4, where Rygel is kidnapped, and suddenly, it all got better for me. We started having actual ideas, rather than just a series of events. We started to get some interesting bits of character development.

I am liking Rygel better as we get further on; he felt a lot like a stock muppet in the earliest episodes, played entirely for laughs. He has improved. (And he peed flame!!! How epic is that?  🙂 ) Aeryn is also becoming more interesting. I like the way she and John turn gender stereotypes upside down, with John being more emotionally open and Aeryn burying her emotions under her warrior shell. I also really enjoyed her discovery that it could be satisfying using her intellect rather than her fighting skills! I am even starting to warm up to d’Argo, after the Thank God it’s Friday story where he didn’t spend the whole episode growling and shouting.

I agree with you about the whole Star Wars/Muppets in Space approach to scifi, it’s never about the weird aliens for me, either. I’m interested that you are bothered by the accents, because I confess that I barely notice them. PK Tech Girl was the first one that sounded really obviously “Oz” to me.

[Arbutus @replies]

Just popped in to raise a tankard to the success of the Canadian and Australian teams at the Women’s World Cup this weekend. Bring on the quarter finals!  🙂

[Arbutus @replies]

@purofilion   No, I haven’t gotten to Buffy yet. I went through a spell of several months during which there was relatively little opportunity for viewing. But reading the recent conversation here about Farscape and Firefly inspired me to check Netflix for them, and lo and behold, there they both were. I had actually thought that I would try Firefly before Buffy, as a doorway into Whedonworld, because the plot sounds a little more my thing. (I’ve never really engaged with the undead/vampire/supernatural storylines.) I will, however, eventually give Buffy a go, as it is available to me on Netflix and so I should at least try it!

 

[Arbutus @replies]

@janetteb     Sorry to hear about your thyme. I lost a big, gnarly old rosemary bush a couple of years back, due to some longer-than-usual cold snaps and a heavy snowfall. Now I have my rosemary in a container, so it may never get that big again, but I can move it around as the winter dictates. This year, I pulled it up onto the porch, and then we ended up having basically no winter at all– very little frost and no snow. My Genovese basil doesn’t always do that well, it seems to get munched on by something, but at least I get leaves to put on the pasta. The Thai basil does better, it seems to be a little hardier.

Good luck on the paid employment opportunity. I’m sure the proof reading went fine as you were actually looking for mistakes, as opposed to assuming that there wouldn’t be any!

[Arbutus @replies]

Okay, I’m in! I found Farscape on my Netflix and decided based on the conversation here to give it a go (with no need to resort to baked beans). @purofilion, I agree about the subtitles: when I’m watching current DW with iTunes, I often resort to them to make sure I haven’t missed anything of the Doctor and Clara’s Speedy Gonzales dialogue.

I’ve watched the first two and found them good fun, once I adjusted to the Starwarsian feel of the universe. And the opening theme took a lot of forgiveness! There is a very last century feel to the show, definitely from the Star Wars/Star Trek field of sci fi. Relatively little angst so far, and the style of action and humour is very straight up, rather than the faster paced, more stylish, cutting sort of thing we tend to get nowadays. Very retro. I still can’t remember any of the character names beyond Crichton, and I keep thinking of the tough alien with tentacles for hair as Worf.    🙂  And Puro, based on episode two, we do know how they brush their teeth!

[Arbutus @replies]

@fatmaninabox        Excellent news. Keep on volunteering, it will add to your resume, connect you to the right people/places, and most importantly, keep you sane. I have been volunteering at an inner city music school for the past year and enjoying it hugely, and it may well lead to paying work in the future as they often need to look for new instructors. Fun!

@purofilion     Oh dear, some people feel entitled,don’t they? Have a lager. It’s very warm here now (amazingly so for June, not always one of our more reliable months!) I actually have three kinds of basil in my pot this year, a Genovese, a Thai, and a new one called Greek basil which I had never seen before, that is quite dense with very small leaves. It definitely smells like basil though, as opposed to thyme or tarragon!  🙂

[Arbutus @replies]

I had heard of this but never seen it. It was pretty good fun, but it dealt me one great disappointment. I really though that we were going to see a plot in which evil is defeated through the playing of traditional instruments! I was so sad that it was not to be.

[Arbutus @replies]

@scaryb     OMG. Thanks for that. I didn’t just chuckle, I laughed until the tears poured down my face. I kept wondering if the drunk texter was pranking the pranker. And wondering what they thought when they looked at their phone the next day!  🙂

[Arbutus @replies]

Just a brief comment on the off-topic topic: I have fond memories of the Singing Detective. I watched it with my grandmother, who was then in her eighties and found it delightful. My granny was delightful– open-minded and also predisposed to like anything that came out the UK. But when I think of that show, I picture watching it with her, in the little den of the big old house that she had lived in since long before I was born, and which she sold not long afterward.

Back to the on-topic topic, @purofilion, I remember we talked about the prevalence of mythology in the series back during  its run. I suppose this episode could be seen as forward-looking mythology, the balancing of the backward-looking Robin Hood story. This is makes sense in a show that moves forward and backward in time.

[Arbutus @replies]

@ichabod    Maybe Capaldi’s work has such conviction and focus that we just believe he’s found that through-line, so trust him enough to find our own versions of it.       It seems to me that with Capaldi’s and Moffat’s take on the character, we have returned to an older style of Doctor, where we were left with more blanks to fill in regarding his motivations, because he wears his heart less on his sleeve than did Ten and Eleven. Personally, I prefer this! It makes him a little less knowable, more alien.

@jimthefish     I find it slightly odd to be singing the praises of this episode so highly because of all the ones in s8 it’s one that left me the most cold, or at least took me a while to really ‘get’.       Yes, I know what you mean. The extensive “rethinking” going on here, and also what people wrote at the time of airing, has helped me to appreciate this story’s place in the Series 8 arc. But personally, my overall enjoyment of a story isn’t usually arc-related. I have to appreciate a story as a standalone for it to end up on my favourites list, and KtM as a single episode didn’t really amuse or delight me consistently enough. I’m about to start on my first proper, ordered rewatch of Series 8, and then I will have a better sense of which are my favourites, and hopefully, why!

[Arbutus @replies]

bluesqueakpip        I reserve the right to be completely wrong about Baby Moon Dragons if Europa suddenly bursts open and a dragon flies out – but I’m fairly sure the Moon isn’t an egg.

“Fairly sure” represents a nicely open mind that the true scientist ought to appreciate.  🙂

@purofilion    Yay, Meatloaf!!   🙂

Seriously, I’ve been following this conversation with great interest. It’s not a favourite episode of mine either, but unlike @denvaldron, my reasons are less well articulated. Also, unlike DV, I really enjoyed Series 8, for the most part, and pretty much instantly adopted CapaldiDoc as my favourite AG Doctor.

@bluesqueakpip, excellent point tying the issue of decision making to Day of the Doctor, and Clara making the judgement that Gallifrey should not be destroyed. This makes it less a “Twelfth Doctor character” issue, and something that is fundamental to the whole Doctor/Clara relationship. Which is in turn a good reminder that, although Eleven’s arc (and in fact the whole “Doctor as destroyer of his people” arc) is finished, Clara’s is not.

And this:  And it is always wrong (in Moffat’s Whoniverse) to deliberately kill a child. Morally wrong.

Because it seems to me that this relates to something we were told quite clearly at the very start of Moffat’s tenure, with Eleven’s second story, about the Star-Whale. That was a similar moral dilemma, and again, we were show through the Doctor’s attitude what the correct answer ought to be.

[Arbutus @replies]

The best bit of this for me was inclusion of “Whatever Gets You Through the Night”, a great song that I had forgotten, that I really liked back in the day. The main problem with this is that it doesn’t seem to know what kind of film it wants to be. It purports to be John and Yoko’s story, but at times it really feels more like a checklist of key events in the late sixties and early seventies. I kept thinking, “Okay, now this is going to happen, and now he’s going to go there,” and so on. Some actual exploration of character (even if not always accurate) would have made a more compelling film, but I don’t suppose that would ever happen while any of the key players are still alive. And including Lennon’s death in the story was cheap; they should have ended it sooner.

However, nice to see it as part of Capaldi’s retrospective. His Harrison was nicely done.

[Arbutus @replies]

I loved this film when it first came out, absolutely loved it. The fabulous scenery and the quirky characters, so many absolutely hilarious lines that just don’t translate when you try to repeat out of context– you simply can’t explain why things are funny. And I loved the metamorphosis Mac undergoes as he walks along that lovely shoreline every day.

I’ve read in the past about the placing of the phone box there so as not to disappoint the tourists. I always find it interesting the way people want to rush about the world seeing the spots where things were filmed. It’s a beautiful beach and a lovely village, but I expect there are loads just as nice all over Scotland. I think that when I go to Scotland, I’d rather discover my own!  🙂

Prior to his appearance as Twelve, this is the only work of Capaldi’s that I had seen, so I’m looking forward to working through the rest of the retrospective. Thanks for putting these up, @craig!

[Arbutus @replies]

@purofilion   I’m so sorry! Hang in there, get well, and get home soon.   xo

[Arbutus @replies]

@Burrunjor  The thing is, I don’t remember having much sense that the Doctor cared at all for the Master or his survival, prior to his AG return in the Tennant era. And at that point, it was clearly a case of “Gallifrey is gone and we are the only ones left”. The Doctor wept for the loss of another of his people, not for the Master as such. In the old series, the Doctor frequently thought he had destroyed the Master and never seemed especially distraught about it. And it remains to be seen whether Twelve (who knows now that Gallifrey has survived, somewhere) has the same softened view of the Master, or whether he will return to his more unambiguous, pre Time War views. He did try to kill her, before the Brig showed up to do the job for him.

And I still dispute the idea that Missy/Master is lusting after the Doctor. I don’t believe for one minute that she is. This is just a new kind of intimidation game that she is playing, IMO. Jealousy, yes, I can buy that, but not of a sexual nature, I don’t think. Several people here have talked about the use of sexuality as a weapon, and that is what I think has been happening here.

I agree with much of what you say about regeneration, but I would argue that the various Doctors stand apart more than you suggest. Yes, the BG era Doctors tended to dress on the old-fashioned side and often had long hair (although Seven’s hair was quite short), and there are certain underlying traits that are consistent. A lot has been written about that on this forum. But I think that there are very strong personality differences between many of the incarnations, and we’ve seen that in spades with Capaldi. I don’t feel that either the look or personal style of the Doctor has been consistent between regens. I agree that not everyone could play the Doctor, and for the record, I am not too keen on the idea of a female Doctor myself. But if they chose the right actress, I think it could work. I think Michelle Gomez has done well, although her Master will never be my favourite as I am not on the whole keen on “femme fatale” characters, and I find overly flirtatious behaviour irritating (something that annoyed me in River Song from time to time as well).

I don’t think that anything from the show during Moffat’s or any other era suggests that Time Lords are born gender neutral. All that has been stated is that it is possible for a Time Lord to change gender during regen. I have already written that, in my view, this is probably not something that happens commonly.

As to the Doctor beating Missy simply by refusing her army, I don’t agree. It took something that Missy hadn’t predicted, the unexpected survival of the soul (or whatever) of Danny Pink, to defeat her. Just turning down the army wouldn’t have done it. And Missy attempted to convince the Doctor to accept the army by telling him that he could use it to do good, like defeating the Daleks. A similar trick was used on the Doctor in School Reunion, trying to convince him to accept power by appealing to his desire to help people; I seem to remember that he was almost caught by it that time, and only Sarah Jane’s intervention pulled him back from temptation. (That scene, incidentally, stands out for me as one of Tennant’s best.)

[Arbutus @replies]

Nice tracks from everyone. @lisa, I have to agree with @whisht that the Dave Thomas piece is amazing. I have tried the accordion and simply can’t do it (too opposing actions at once, just couldn’t coordinate it), so the notion of playing accordion and something else simultaneously is mind blowing.

@thekrynoidman   Congratulations, enjoy your summer!

@purofilion    I’ve been following this story for the last day or two: apparently your Queensland cops don’t like our Nickelback? What’s up with that? Somebody doesn’t like Nickeback? Oh, wait…     🙂

[Author]

Posts