@bluesqueakpip

Agreed! I can see the exhaustion over the Brexit and I think it would be hugely unfortunate

for CC to bring up the topic now.  Best stick to the historical politics.

@miapatrick

I take your point about the IMF — so much global toxic debt!  Plus we are starting to raise

interest rates and that does not bode well for d…[Read more]

@bluesqueakpip  while Yaz would have experienced socialprejudice in Alabama, the ‘Jim Crow’ laws largely didn’t apply to her.

Thanks for checking that out; Yas’s relative invisibiliy in general, in that setting, seemed odd.

remember how Puro would get pissed off?

This is happening to me now.  Every few posts there’s a person saying “Britain was never segregated” or “even though Alabama back then was easily the most racist place in America,  not everyone felt that way.”

1. Don’t forget Mississippi @texasferrets  (Texas? Mmm)

2. Most people DID feel that way in th…[Read more]

@bluesqueakpip That’s the heart of it. The Doctor didn’t convince Rosa to keep her seat. She did it anyway. They just kept history the same as it was. Which was a very clever writers’ decision and didn’t take any agency from the real Rosa Parks.

@craig

No worries. That was the only one that I thought should go. The others provided useful context for the continuing idiocy of some people and the sheer timeliness and relevance of the story.

@bluesqueakpip

Yeah, I saw that and thought you were dead right about it….

@dogboythecat

Not sure how you can call the characters here remotely one-dimensional. As @bluesqueakpip pointed out, both Rosa and Blake are given depth and nuance, aided by really great performances by the respective actors. In fact, I’d say it’s so far a trait of Chibnall’s era that all the supporting characters have been written really well…[Read more]

The villain here was perhaps one-dimensional, but as @bluesqueakpip says, that’s because he revealed so little of his motivation, apart from that one remark directed at Ryan about his reasons for selecting this point in history.  I strongly suspect he will reappear at some point and we’ll find out more about whether he’s a ‘lone wolf’ or part of…[Read more]

@bluesqueakpip and others suggesting an end-of-season villain pileup — I remember back when Series 8 was ongoing some reviewers were wondering if the Nethersphere scenes with Missy greeting the characters who died was setting up a big confrontation between them and the Doctor in the season finale, but it didn’t work out that way exactly……[Read more]

@Bluesqueakpip “Is there a racism theme developing?”

I’d love that as an underlying theme, because Doctor Who at inception was strongly influenced by post-Nazism. And here we are, 70 years since the last time Europe made the mistake of entertaining fascism, watching it rear its ugly head all over again. It’s the perfect time for Who to tackle…[Read more]

@Bluesqueakpip

Bloody hell, I remember the old days, we had proper trolls back then

Indeed we did, and real rickety-rackety bridges for them to live under 😉

Back in the old days BG I was generally not so keen on the episodes with a historical setting because the errors, however minor, tended to bother me.  Not here, although the narrative…[Read more]

Well, that was great. Instant classic possibly. Certainly going to go down as one of the important episodes of Who. It definitely made me feel quite emotional at points and Vinette Robinson was just amazing. That’s surely one of the great guest performances in the show. However, it didn’t quite manage to completely avoid the preachy aspect and I…[Read more]

Other musings:

“Don’t threaten me”;

Ryan’s second bit of “gun” play. Wonder if that will come back to bite him;

The conversation behind the bin, although a bit spelly-outy for me with a lot of miles on the clock, was probably worth spelling out for younger viewers;

The console’s crystal thingy goes up and down;

The Doctor’s casual “Just want…[Read more]

@shinymcshine<span class=”Apple-converted-space”>    </span>It appears that the franchise considers Dr. Who to be for prepubescents now.  Well, as someone well on in my fifties, I still enjoyed these first two episodes. We’ll see where they lead. In the end though, I’m still willing to fork out for an iTunes subscription, which is not true for any…[Read more]

@arbutus

“@juniperfish I really like your take on all this, especially “a refraction of light in the universe””

Thanks 🙂 The new Doctor’s outfit is always a topic of much conversation, following a regeneration, whether (s)he is male or female embodied, so at least we can say there has been no less scrutiny of previous Doctors’ atti…[Read more]

@bluesqueakpip

But it is a video game. It’s made clear it’s a video game. It’s just that this particular video game has real live people taking part.

Quite.

@pedant The issue with the word ‘authoritative’ is boiling the Pot in my head because it’s a ‘small’ word for an enormous concept, imo. 🙂

On Akinola. I got a call t’other day from old colle…[Read more]

@bluesqueakpip

Um. There’s The Wedding of River Song, where he’s regarded as a crazy Soothsayer and it’s Amy who rescues him.

In an alternate reality where time had stopped working. Kinda undermines a Time Lord, that.

There were several stories in the Moffat era where the Doctor was imprisoned for months – but it always turned out that he had a r…

[Read more]

@cathannabel  Gravitas comes with that male voice.  Even those of us most passionately enthusiastic about the gender switch have some adjusting to do

Indeed.

@bluesqueakpip  . . . convention of calling women by their first names – but that’s because of the historic subordination of women in our society. Women are called by their first names –…[Read more]

Someone suggested that we are seeing a deliberate de-emphasis of character-drawing. I don’t agree. I’m not concerned about the slower flowering of the Companion characters. We have a whole series in which to do that, and all that matters to start out is that they all seem likeable and competent, and have some good potential ba…[Read more]

@ichabod

Some comments I’ve seen have pointed out Jodie throwing bits of the other Doctors into her performance, but I have to admit, I’m not seeing that,

As you say, it has been stated that she deliberately didn’t watch any of her predecessors in the role, but perhaps the writing and direction may have influenced her performance in that res…[Read more]

@mudlark  perhaps my ageing brain has a problem processing  words delivered at machine-gun velocity.

For me, it’s that plus the swallowed consonants — but I had trouble with “Deep Throat” for the same reason, and I’ve been watching with subtitles on ever since.  It helps a lot!

the redesign of the Tardis interior; at first glance it seems vi…[Read more]