@BadWulf

Really interesting,  take it you’re a River fan too, or did that surprise you too.

@BadWulf

I am sure I am not the only one who would love to see it, so why not send it to our wonderful emperor, @Craig, who I am sure can work his IT magic on it to make it appear.

@BadWulf I thought so too. Rigsy was well done; written and executed. I loved the way he said goodbye, so in awe of Clara and hardly even noticing the Doctor. For most, it’s the Doctor with his companions, for him it was Clara, and that bloke in the box.

@BadWulf Sympathies on having to watch alone. I find it infinitely preferable to watching with SO, who thinks cracking jokes throughout about Daleks not being able to climb stairs is still funny! (I tried it once, it’s better this way!)  Hope you can persuade Mrs BW back to the fold tho.  I agree – I thought of the Time Meddler too, that scene m…[Read more]

@purofilion    @soundworld   Well said, regarding the Doctor’s character and what this episode displayed of it.

@ScaryB   Yes, I have also said before that I would certainly prefer Clara to sort out her issues on her own, rather than having the Doctor or Danny doing it for her!

@BadWulf    Oh, thanks. I am pretty fond of Pyramids of Mars, but t…[Read more]

@BadWulf

I think, therefore, the Mummy is still acting as a soldier, rather than as a doctor.

A soldier would take out the leaders first; they wouldn’t go for the 100 year old biddy and the cook, and the professor with panic attacks or the guy with a lung replacement, or the officer who’s already shown himself as less than competent. A predator…[Read more]

@BadWulf Still, it does seem like a very odd sort of triage, to actually eliminate the weakest, even if they weren’t in immediate danger of death.

But the remark was that something had gone wrong with the mummy’s tech. It’s original mission may have been to save. But something got corrupted over time.

Whoa! Maybe the definition of “save” got r…[Read more]

Not so mello after all, what a shame …

Anyway, I have my bucket of exclamtion/question marks at the ready so hear we go.

Despite the later showing we got to watch this one live! What a fun episode. We had the lights off and my 10y/o was clinging on to me from the start 🙂 It was almost Scooby Doo!

@Oblique: “Mummy on the Orient Express, the…

[Read more]

Really enjoyed this one. Makes up for the dubious handwavey technobabble of last week. As Arthur C Clarke said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, so if you want the science to appear far in advance of what we have today then it should be presented as magic. Attempting to explain the trick (midichlorians,…[Read more]

@BadWulf and @geoffers

I think the monster wasn’t a monster at all and was a mirror of the Dr.

Trapped as a mummy driven by programming to harvest energy the honorable soldier took those who were sick or suffering around the “flag/banner” no good choices only bad against worsererer choices

When released from this eternal cycle by the Dr the…[Read more]

@BadWulf – One thing I think I missed in this episode was *why* it was going after the weakest. The Mummy was clearly powerful enough to kill anyone it chose, so why go after the weakest?

great question! not very honourable behaviour for a soldier, right? perhaps the malfunctioning tech is responsible… or, the mummy was being used by missy…[Read more]

@BadWulf

Your description of the Moon Dragon options as respectively good and bad is only valid from either the omniscient viewpoint, or the perspective of hindsight.

No, sorry. Your description of the Moon Dragon options is the one arguing from the omniscient viewpoint, because you’re taking a consequentialist view. That is, you are viewing…[Read more]

@BadWulf– re Clara staying because Danny said he was fine with it. I thought that was odd, because she wasn’t leaving because Danny didn’t like it. She was leaving because she was pissed off with him, that was her ‘wobble’. That whole scene seemed wrong to me. hopefully, almost certainly, deliberate?

@ScaryB  Lol re the Doctor’s telephone number 🙂

@Bluesqueakpip I’d have to agree with @BadWulf that the Kill the Moon choice was presented to Clara and Courtney as between potentially mass deaths on earth due to flooding (hello climate change reference) and killing an innocent baby creature – no good choice there (from their perspective)…[Read more]

@BadWulf –

Well, it looks as if the Doctor’s outlook has moved from idealistic in the previous episode to utilitarian in this one.

Different moral situations. Last week had a good choice (let the baby Moon Dragon live) versus a bad choice (kill the baby Moon Dragon because you fear it). This week has a choice between bad and worse.

The D…[Read more]

@badwulf I’m developing an addiction to TV tropes now, by the way 🙂

@fatmaninabox

It totally spoils the story if you can’t just *believe* in the fatman. 🙂
Ooh, I like it. Can I adopt that as my motto? 😀

(Tea through nose moment.)

x

@badwulf

The Doctor’s actions could therefore only be seen as responsible to Courtney if he already had knowledge that the detonation was aborted somehow.

There is another option, I think. When Lundvik asks “how do we kill it?” the Doctor says they can kill the creature with nukes “if they still work”. That’s a pretty big if – and Lundvik d…[Read more]

@BadWulf

I definitely agree that it was a suicide mission, which explains the astronaut’s grim and fatalistic demeanour (which I think was one of the very strongest points of the episode).

Lundvik explicitly said that she never expected to survive.

Everything about the set up showed it to be a suicidal and almost quixotic mission.

@BadWulf

we humans apparently are in some sense “hard wired” to avoid actively doing something where we have culpability

And a good thing too. Otherwise our trains would be permanently delayed due to fat men on the line. “Well, he was just standing there. It’s a lot easier than changing the points.”
😈

@BadWulf

It shows he had complete confidence  that Clara would make the right decision. She’s already shown him her moral strength in Day of the Doctor, and he’d pretty much spelt it out to her in this episode what the right decision was. His faith in her is 100%. But he didn’t explain all that in detail to her, so she felt the pressure, and s…[Read more]