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28 May 2015 at 23:42 #40405
I thought that Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell really caught fire in Episode Two. That’s not to say that Episode One was bad; it wasn’t. It introduced the characters; it had a creepy moment with the stone figures in York Cathedral and we met The Gentleman. Childermass was younger than I’d imagined, but Enzo Cilenti was so good in the role, it didn’t really matter.
But Episode One has the same problem Part One of the Book has – Mr Norrell is, to be honest, a little bit dull. Even when played by Eddie Marsan. And basing your episode around a shy, retiring, miserly man who can make even the most exciting of magic sound boring was always going to be problematic.
On the bright side, Jonathan Strange is also like the book. As soon as Jonathan Strange comes into his magic, the book becomes magical. As soon as TV Jonathan Strange (Bertie Cavell) comes into his magic, the series becomes magical.I thought the pair of scenes in Episode Two where they display that difference were brilliant. In the first, Mr Norrell performs a great feat of magic, setting a magical ward around Portsmouth Harbour. He does it by standing on the shore, scrunching his face in concentration, and finally, reluctantly, waving his arms in a slightly embarrassed fashion. Absolutely nothing appears to have happened; it’s left to Jonathan Strange to explain that something has happened.
The next day, Strange is called to the harbour because a ship has run aground (possibly on the magical ward…). He then proceeds to rescue the ship by the most spectacular means possible; creating horses out of the sand the ship’s aground on to both remove the sand and right the ship. It’s the kind of thing CGI was made for.
Two scenes; the difference between the two magicians.
Episode Two also saw us in Lost Hope for the first time. I’m not quite sure where they’re going with The Gentleman (Marc Warren) – they seem to be going for flat out evil rather than the book’s utterly self-centred and amoral character. However, it’s possible that they wanted to firmly establish The Gentleman as an antagonist in the face of a popular conception of ‘faery=good’, and that they may develop him a bit in later episodes.
The dance at Last Hope was certainly a dance out of nightmare – the thing that distracted me slightly was that the fairies were much too obviously professional dancers – but possibly they’ve decided that fairies who’ve been dancing for millennia will effectively be pros. 😉
If anyone on this forum has given up on Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell after Episode One, I’d very strongly encourage them to try Episode Two (it’s on iPlayer). Personally, I’m looking forward to the Peninsula War next week. 🙂
27 May 2015 at 14:55 #40388This is a very sad day for football.
::pause::
Does a happy dance, then runs round the room waving arms and chanting ‘USA! USA!’
😉22 May 2015 at 00:08 #40260@purofilion – think of it like a music recording. The music score may be by the composer Mozart (and was never copyright) – but the Vienna Phil is damn well going to insist that they hold the copyright to their 1991 performance. 🙂
21 May 2015 at 16:59 #40256@purofilion – popping in briefly to answer your query: modern contracts have a ‘continuity’ clause. Producers are allowed to incorporate any part of an actor’s performance into more than one episode without further consent provided that reuse is a) no more than two minutes long b) is for Continuity, Recap or a Flashback/forward.
They do have to pay, but the payment and right-to-reuse-short-clips is agreed at the time of the original contract. They only don’t pay when the clip is the ‘Previously on’ segment of the next episode.
Who goes back far enough that some of the original actors had to negotiate the right to reuse – the BBC weren’t expecting to be reusing previous performances beyond maybe one repeat, and had a time limit in the contract. And while copyright of a character is with the writer, copyright of an individual performance is with the performer. That copyright is licensed to the BBC (hence the time limit of the original licences), not surrendered.
5 May 2015 at 10:00 #39878who couldn’t even be bothered to remember his name.
No, that’s a long standing trait of the Doctor (dating back to William Hartnell having a problem remembering William Russell’s screen name). If he doesn’t like you, he’ll get your name wrong. If he doesn’t really care about you, he probably won’t remember it in the first place. Capaldi’s taken that and run with it.
Given what we know about Time Lords, getting someone’s chosen name wrong (and Danny chose ‘Danny’) must be horribly insulting. Bad Capaldi Doctor! 😉
4 May 2015 at 21:42 #39842From In The Forest of The Night:
DANNY: I just want to know the truth. I don’t care what it is. I just want to know it. Like Maebh said. Like the forest. Fear a little bit less, trust a bit more.
CLARA: Okay. Well
DANNY: No, not now. Go home and do your marking. Think about it, then tell me. I saved you from a tiger today. I deserve at least that.
CLARA: Yes, you did. And yes, you do.The next scene we see with Clara and Danny together is her phoning to tell him the truth. It just happens to be at the start of the following episode.
4 May 2015 at 21:28 #39841@ichabod – yes, they let him keep the accent. 😉
Dunoon is in the Scottish Highlands (just) – it’s in Argyll, on the Highlands side of the Firth of Clyde. They hold the Cowal Games there.
4 May 2015 at 18:05 #39834it was hell for Missy to pull back because she wanted to take it all the way and shag him there and then.
Ignoring our sockpuppet friend, I’d go with that one; it’s pretty much a progression from the Simm Master. Not only was in-marriage rape with Lucy strongly implied, his relationship with the Doctor brought the long-standing subtext for ‘sexually attracted’ up to pretty much ‘just below the surface of a kid’s paddling pool’. 😉
Missy is the Doctor’s stalker. Looking at his/her past history, the only thing saving the Doctor from outright rape is the real-life point that there are children watching. In-story, it’s probably Missy’s sense that that would be something the Doctor could never forgive; though she is completely bananas, so probably better to rely on real-life considerations.
I think Clara’s metaphorical status as ‘daughter’ to Missy and the Doctor is probably as far as they’re going to go in that direction. Missy gave her the phone number, the Doctor took her on-board, together they’re responsible for Clara ever existing in the first place.
Space Dad and Wicked Stepmother.
4 May 2015 at 17:26 #398324 May 2015 at 17:23 #39831Yes, quite. That’s why I used the Eccleston Doctor as an example. As soon as I say ‘I don’t like him’, people will pop up and say ‘but he was brilliant! One of the great Doctors!’
Which, in fact, he may well have been. The fact that I, personally, don’t like the Eccleston Doctor doesn’t change his incredible achievement – in transforming Doctor Who from a ‘one series as a last chance’ into ‘hit series’. He lost me; he gained an awful lot of others. 🙂
4 May 2015 at 16:08 #39826I seem to have offended you by having an opinion you didn’t like, and then having the temerity to explain that opinion.
And I seem to have had the temerity to explain why I disagreed with you. Life, eh? 😀
Okay, let’s explain further: this is what you said.
The Eccleston Doctor is a terrible character. He’s poorly constructed, uninteresting and shallow, inconsistent and essentially a roving plot device. This Doctor is not anchored or rounded in the way that the Pertwee Doctor, the Baker I Doctor or even the McCoy Doctor were. There’s no real sense of him having a place in life, a point of view, any meaningful identity. In place of that, we simply get tropes. The Doctor needs something to do, we’ll make him an angsty ex-soldier. He’ll need a girlfriend, we’ll make Rose.
He’s essentially the Doctor Who version of the Simpson’s character ‘Poochy.’ … The problem was that Poochy was merely a soulless cynical marketing effort. He was dramatically worthless, unfunny and dragged the show down.
The Eccleston Doctor in a nutshell. Every character in Doctor Who has to expound on how wonderful he is. Rose moons over him to the point that she instantly overlooks his betrayal of his own people, an idiotic plot point, she endorses his outrageous whims. Every episodes revolve around him. His trivial moods are treated as portents from Olympus. He is consistently presented as perfect, brilliant, witty, insightful, amazing, gracious, compassionate…. yadda yadda yadda. All that’s fine, but its not interesting and its not good storytelling.
Back in the 1970′s, there was a market for angsty heroes, making their way in the modern world: Callan, Gangsters, The Sandbaggers. It’s all very nice. I’m sure there’s a market for the New Doctor Who Show. I’m just not interested. In Doctor Who terms, he’s the modern Colin Baker Doctor.
Okay, you didn’t quite say that. But basically, all I had to swap were the names of the character, the example TV series, the example disliked Companion to disliked Doctor – and change ‘betrayal of the Doctor’ to ‘betrayal of his own people’.
As I tried (and clearly failed) to explain, you gave a terrible deconstruction of a character. That’s the reason I can treat it as a piece of [insert name here] boilerplate. There is very little specific (scene, lines, actions) discussion of that character – and what discussion there is basically complains that the Doctor shouldn’t have forgiven Clara.
If you dislike Clara and want to wait for the next Companion, that’s fine. I disliked the Eccleston Doctor (that’s why I picked him for boilerplate replacement) and ended up bailing on Doctor Who, only coming back to see what the new guy was like. Equally, by Episode 7 of Series 8, I was wondering whether I’d be doing the same thing with the Capaldi Doctor. Fortunately, things picked up with Mummy on the Orient Express.
But if my boilerplate replacement had been a genuine post about Eccleston, I would expect people to disagree with those statements.
At length. 😀
3 May 2015 at 21:44 #39782Well, I was hoping you’d say ‘It’s a personal thing’. I’m an optimist. 🙂
More seriously – Clara Oswald is a terrible character. She’s poorly constructed, uninteresting and shallow, inconsistent and essentially a roving plot device. Clara is not anchored or rounded in the way that Dona Noble, of Rose or even the Ponds were. There’s no real sense of her having a place in life, a point of view, any meaningful identity. In place of that, we simply get tropes. Clara needs something to do, we’ll make her a school teacher. She’ll need a boyfriend, we’ll make Danny
Okay. This is a terrible deconstruction of a character, because you don’t point to anything specific about Clara (scenes or actions); you just list a collection of negative adjectives. Later, you just list a number of positive adjectives, and claim that’s how she’s ‘consistently presented’, without giving any scenes, lines or actions that show Clara behaving that way. Additionally, a number of the not-very-specific points you do give are wrong.
Inconsistent: In S7 we see Clara in her first job. She’s a children’s nanny. In S7 we also see that Clara has a degree. By the 50th Anniversary Special we see that degree + experience working with children has developed into ‘teacher’. During S8 we see her at work. As a teacher. That’s a fairly consistent piece of character development.
It’s far more than ‘we’ll give her something to do.’ She often reacts to the Doctor as if he were a super-intelligent child; in fact, she often behaves towards everyone as ‘the grown-up in the room’. Rose, Donna and Amy were defined by their relationships. Now, look at the common factor in their lives.
Rose was working in a shop and thought (correctly) that she could do better.
Donna was temping.
Amy had a variety of jobs. She dabbled.They are anchored by their family (in Amy’s case, anchored by Rory) because their family is their only constant. They all have crap or temporary jobs. They don’t have a job that’s also a calling. The only person who does is Rory; look how many times Rory reacts as a nurse, a carer, somebody who looks after the injured.
Clara consistently, even through her Claricles, looks after children. She nannies them, she educates them, she chases the Doctor when he’s shattered Courtney’s self-image… dump a school-age child within 100 metres of Clara and she will promptly a) make sure they’re okay and b) try and help them if they aren’t. What anchors Clara isn’t her family (though they’ve turned up a heck of a lot more than Amy’s parents). What anchors Clara is her job.
@ichabod has critiqued the ‘every character has to expound how wonderful Clara is’, so I won’t add any more counter-examples. But I will comment on ‘she needs a boyfriend, we’ll make Danny.’ How else is a writer going to provide a boyfriend for one character apart from by creating another character?
In S7, the ‘boyfriend’ slot is filled by the Smith Doctor; playing the boyfriend without being genuinely Clara’s boyfriend. In S8 the Capaldi Doctor makes it clear he knows he should never have done that.
And stepping into real life for a moment: have you seen how film-star beautiful Jenna Coleman can be? Clara would have a boyfriend. Clara, in fact, would be beating off potential boyfriends with a club. One of the most realistic things about the start of the relationship with Danny is the way Clara makes it obvious to him that he’s in with a chance; a girl that pretty is going to be very used to a guy she fancies thinking that they haven’t a hope. Incidentally, it also explains why she’s so (relatively) off-hand when the Smith Doctor offers her a ride in his time-machine. She’s used to being the one chased. He’s keen on her. He’ll turn up next Wednesday. 😉
Ichabod’s also pointed out that S8 was essentially a two-hander; quite different from the more ensemble S1 to S4 and the ‘three hander’ S5 to S7. And then there’s real life (again); if you hire an actor in his 50’s, rather than one in his 20’s, they will need a slightly less strenuous schedule. Which means you’ll see a lot more of their co-star, especially if there’s only one co-star this series. They’ll have to be much more of a co-star.
Not just ‘the asking questions one’. The ‘asking questions one’ was the role of the Companion back in the 1970’s; see Jo, in The Daemons, which we’ve just been watching. She really was the plucky girl heroine.
3 May 2015 at 16:20 #39770Any particular reason you don’t like Clara Oswald, or is it just a personal thing?
3 May 2015 at 09:16 #39767I’m hoping there’s more to it, to be revealed in S9 of course.
I’d say that’s almost, almost certain. When all the rumours were swirling about Jenna Coleman having decided to leave, been persuaded to stay a bit longer, decided to leave and finally being persuaded to stay for S9 …
… I was saying ‘no way. Companions aren’t that hard to replace.’ And then it turned out that the rumours were true; those two final scripts were written in such a way that she could delay the actual decision right up to filming the Christmas Special.
My conclusion is that – for some reason – Jenna Coleman is hard to replace. The likeliest explanation is that Steven Moffat’s ‘Clara’ storyline hasn’t finished yet.
As for the desire for more backstory for Danny Pink: I wonder if that was something about Samuel Anderson, to be honest. Maybe his Danny was played as a bit too lovely, and not quite enough PTSD? We knew as little about Arthur Darville’s Rory (his Dad didn’t turn up until his final series, though we did see his Stag Night), but it never really worried the audience. Arthur Darville played Rory as utterly wrapped up in Amy, so it was perfectly understandable that mates and family took a very distant (and practically invisible) second.
A slightly more Clara-obsessed, slightly more PTSD Danny might have had the same effect.The lines were there for that: the acting wasn’t. Why, I don’t know. Last minute tone change? Decision that Clara would never have stayed with PTSD Danny? Dunno.
21 April 2015 at 23:21 #39668Farage wants to stop the BBC from producing programmes such as Doctor Who
So – we should expect a Dalek eyestalk to come out of his forehead at any moment?
Right, so that’s Eric Pickles from Raxacoricofallapatorius, Farage is a Dalek zombie and David Cameron and Nick Clegg are the Autons. I reckon there’s a fair chance John Prescott is a Sontaran in disguise, but in the interests of balance (we’ve had all the other UK-wide party leaders), can anyone suggest which alien Ed Miliband is?
🙂
20 April 2015 at 18:12 #39652If you are a UK citizen and have not yet registered to vote, or updated your details, Christopher Eccleston would like to remind you that you’ve got until midnight tonight (20th April) to register online.
Otherwise the rest of us will blame you for the farting aliens in Number 10. Okay? 😉
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This reply was modified 11 years, 7 months ago by
Craig. Reason: Fixed link. Because everyone should register to vote
19 April 2015 at 23:40 #39644Okay, nice start. After a long, peaceful (boring) existence, the Time Lords are facing the most dangerous crisis in their history. Which, gentle viewer, is not Russell T. Davies. Yet. 😉
Memo to future Head Writers and Producers. If you are trying to convince your star that he can’t carry the show all by his little self, do not give the script assignment where the Doctor flies solo to your best writer. 😈
The retcon by Steven Moffat in Listen goes some way to explaining why the Citadel Guards are so bloomin’ dense. The army consists of people-too-dumb-to-get-into-the-Academy. Possibly the Citadel Guards are the people-too-dumb-to-get-into-the-army. 😈 George Pravda certainly plays the Castellan with the weary air of someone who spends his life doing remedial lessons for law enforcement personnel. Favourite dialogue:
…you allow him to escape and conceal himself in a building a mere 53 stories high. A clever stratagem, Hildred. You’re trying to confuse him, I think?
In terms of actors, this is like a Doctor Who reunion party. George Pravda, Erik Chitty and now Bernard Horsfell. Even Hugh Walters, playing a Gallifreyan Richard Dimbleby, is on his second story.
Some pointers: the robes are here stated as being for ceremony, not normal wear. That either kind of went by the wayside in later stories, or the costumes were kept in stock so they simply kept reusing them. Equally, the colour coding gets largely ignored later on, with the Arcadians (supposed to be green) all in maroon. In fact, pretty well everyone goes into maroon; presumably it’s the equivalent of our ‘dark business suit’ or ‘blue jeans’ or something.
Hints that Time Lords are terrible snobs: the Castellan is told his job involves dealing with more ‘plebian’ classes (Co-Ordinator Egin was lucky he wasn’t trying to get a bike through a pedestrian gate). Runcible refers to his camera tech as a ‘yoik’ (possibly ‘oik’ wasn’t Gallifreyan enough).
The ceremonial silver or gold eyeshadow and lipstick also seems to have been rated ‘epic fail’. I don’t think we ever see it again on Gallifrey. 😉
Hurray! It’s Crispy Fried Master! (Peter Pratt). The Master is back (if a bit deep fried), with yet another incredibly complex and evil plan that naturally involves dragging the Doctor all the way back to Gallifrey. Because he can’t have an incredibly complex and evil plan without the Doctor. What, you thought he was just doing this for the Evulz? Naah, he’s doing it for the Doctor. What are friends for?
And there’s another member of the Doctor Who reunion party, Michael Bilton, playing one of the elderly Time Lords.
Llewellyn Rees isn’t a member of the reunion party – and indeed, while his one dialogue scene is well played, his walk down the stairs has the air of an actor convinced the bloody costume is going to kill him. The only question is whether he’s going to trip over the stupid shoes or the long robe. Actually surviving to be shot was probably a relief. 😀
And one of the great, really great cliffhangers. The Doctor has just assassinated the President of Gallifrey. Oops. 😕
19 April 2015 at 20:00 #39643the sister returned in place of the hydrangea shrub? did anybody else think that strange?
That did give me, personally, a very definite ‘returned from the dead’ vibe, yeah. But I hadn’t connected Missy’s comment about a ‘surprise’ with the sister – and you’re right, it works very well indeed.
19 April 2015 at 18:32 #39634@ichabod – I’d go for the same explanation as Forest of the Dead – enough information was collected by Missy’s Nethersphere to record people’s souls and reconstruct the boy’s body. And as long as your body can be reconstructed and your ‘soul’ has been recorded, you are ‘saved’, not ‘dead’. An electronic version of suspended animation.
And what are the ethics of sending a possible downloaded clone-y copy of a dead boy back to his family some years after the real boy died? Or keeping him, for that matter?
In the Whoniverse, he is the real boy. They’re pretty specific on that. For the ‘some years after he died’ thing, two solutions occur to me.
The simplest is ‘I know a bloke with a time machine’. 😉
However, given that this was in the middle of the Doctor/Clara break-up, it may have been the second simplest: given that the Whoniverse has clearly accepted the existence of aliens, Clara asks UNIT to return the boy with a suitable ‘abducted by aliens’ explanation. Which is, in fact, true…
19 April 2015 at 11:51 #39630Yes, it suggests that Missy may possibly have been successfully zapped by the Brig – but it won’t do a darn bit of good, because she was simply able to reconstruct her self- including body – using Gallifreyan matrix technology.
Basically, her ability to travel between the Nethersphere and the real world is a form of teleportation, only with the reconstruction part delayed in the same way the people in the Library had their reconstruction delayed.
Since she’s let the Nethersphere die, she probably knows she can’t use that trick again. 🙂
Steven Moffat doesn’t just reuse monsters; he reuses tech that he’s invented (the nanowotsits, first seen in The Empty Child, keep cropping up a lot).
16 April 2015 at 09:17 #39614@janetteb
There were several jokes on the commentary about Jo and Mike’s amazing hiding skills, with Katy Manning especially saying how beautifully lit she was. 😉14 April 2015 at 15:02 #39589Passed on from Strax:
Sir: I have discovered a strange alien life form. They appear to have the shape of a giant worm. Would you like me to eviscerate them?
😉
14 April 2015 at 14:01 #39588He’s a killer and yet this is not taken as seriously as with just about every other character.
Blame Tom Lenk. I think the original intention was to kill Andrew off, but everyone just plain liked Tom Lenk too much, and he’s so funny, and really good at impro, and why don’t we just keep Andrew. 🙂
It’s rather like the ‘Spike/James Marsters’ effect; (another character they couldn’t bear to kill off) no wonder they had those two end up sort-of-mates.
14 April 2015 at 10:56 #39585And why is Andrew kept about, really?
Because he’s funny (in the real world) and in the Scoobie world because he has no-one to look after him. This time, they’re not making the mistake they made with Faith.
13 April 2015 at 18:15 #39576I don’t think he forgets, I think he compartmentalizes
I think he compartmentalises so well, he can’t even remember that he’s locked those particular memories away.
I think the thing with Matt Smith was that he visibly grew as an actor throughout his tenure. I’m not sure he could have delivered what he did in The Name of The Doctor at the beginning of his run; that was the result of a writing team who didn’t just do exciting heroic adventures but went into pure drama territory.
Well, pure drama with spaceships and big explosions. 😉 But they took the Smith Doctor through an entire life in one regeneration. It’s a tribute to Matt Smith’s talent that he not just delivered, he grew.
13 April 2015 at 00:44 #39560Totally off-topic (if the sofa has an off-topic) but it occurs to me that if the TARDIS can visit Gallifrey’s past, it is simultaneously possible to have stories set on Gallifrey while the Doctor is still searching for it.
Basically, we can have ‘Gallifrey historicals’ just like we can have Earth historicals. Same ‘don’t change the past’ rules. Though whether this is something Steven Moffat wants to do, or whether he’s just leaving the option open for future producers, I dunno.
12 April 2015 at 22:10 #39559This is a lovely piece of work, with some lines that became part of Who legend. Namely the brilliantly underplayed: ‘Chap with the wings, there. Five rounds rapid.’
What’s really funny is thinking of the number of times you hear the anti AG moaners moaning ‘the power of love saves the day again!’ And what saves the day in this classic?
Um… Jo offering her life to save the Doctor, causing Azal to seemingly self-destruct out of sheer perplexity. The power of love, a force from above – never mind keeping the vampire from your door, it’ll kill all known Who villains dead!
I love the Doctor’s ‘scientific’ explanation, which basically (as Miss Hawthorne points out) describes magic exactly – only using the word ‘psychokinetic’ instead of ‘magic’. But psychokinetic sounds sciencey, so that’s all right. 😉 Later Who got much less embarrassed about sticking with ‘magic’, though it would generally go on to hint that magic was a special type of science…
Nice little shout out to the Maypole dance in The Day of the Doctor, when we see a clip of Gallifreyan children playing – by dancing around a maypole. Certainly explains how the Doctor knew the dance. 🙂
The one real ‘how times have changed’ thing for me was everyone being astonished by Bessie moving by herself. Nowadays ‘remote control’ would be the first thing you’d think of, not the last.
The rather doubtful nature of the Doctor’s relationship with the Master (‘you’ll damage Bessie’ indeed) has also been rather pointedly developed into the Doctor reluctantly accepting that he needs to at least try to kill the Master/Missy. Again, it’s a nice shout-out to the BG series that the Cyber-Brig, who had personal experience of the Doctor and the Master, tries to save his old friend from something that’s clearly going to hurt like hell.
12 April 2015 at 20:48 #39558@purofilion – it is definitely Pertwee riding the bike – he was apparently keen on any type of vehicle and would go for motorbike rides round the countryside when they were waiting for the crew to set up. Unbelievably, given that no-one now would dream of letting their leading man do such a dangerous stunt, he does take the tumble off the bike.
Katy Manning also threw herself out of the car in Ep. 3.
I think it’s a sacrificial chicken. Grown up me invariably spots that Azal’s tights are a bit wrinkly (according to the commentary, the hooves were also a nightmare to walk in). But yeah, small me was behind the door in the hallway, never mind the sofa.
One of my favourite bits in The Day of The Doctor was when ‘we’re both reversing the polarity’ turned into: ‘We’re confusing the polarity.’
I think that even though the plot is slight, this story is noticeably free of padding. People may be racing around in circles, but they have a reason to do it. They don’t just get captured, they get captured because the Master wants them captured, or because they foolishly try and rescue a chicken, or they’re zooming to the heat shield because Osgood can’t manage Nobel-winning physics and needs detailed instructions.
The handily placed ladder is, however, a bit embarrassing. Apparently that was because Katy Manning took one look at the height of the roof (with her glasses on) and said ‘you are joking‘. Sensible girl. 😉
12 April 2015 at 16:36 #39555Deadly Assassin was my third choice, wasn’t it?
Personally, I’d rate ‘Genesis’ as a ‘must-see’ for anyone new to Before Gap Who; but I can certainly understand the rest of us going ‘arrggghhhh! I have nothing left to say about Genesis’.
And given that the current plot-line is the 50 year long story of the Doctor trying to find Gallifrey (betcha he doesn’t find it before the 100th), it might be interesting for the newer fan to see what the place looks like when it’s not being blown up by Daleks. 🙂
So if you really, really want to do Assassin – well, myself, I’d say put your Imperial foot down and point out that it is your site. I will happily bow to the wishes of our august Emperor 😀
11 April 2015 at 20:31 #39545Genesis is fine too but I can’t help but feel it’s been done to death.
I was quite surprised to discover that we haven’t done Genesis here – there is sometimes that feeling that every Doctor Who site in the universe (including alternate universes and n-space) has discussed Genesis.
So, do we just go with the flow? Or be brave and add: ‘the only Who site to have never discussed Genesis of the Daleks’ to our tagline? 😈
11 April 2015 at 15:27 #39532Is it possible to say ‘all of the above’?
Well, obviously not. 😀
Logopolis has the disadvantage of including Adric, but the advantage that it’s Tegan’s introduction. Because it’s a regeneration story it has a very dark and gloomy feel to it.
The Deadly Assassin allows us to guess why the Doctor ran away – because the Time Lords are a bunch of complete pillocks! Deservedly a classic, especially because of … but that would be a spoiler. 🙂
The Pyramids of Mars: are you my mummy? Another classic – but haven’t we already seen a Gothic Horror Baker with Talons of Weng Chiang?
Horror of Fang Rock – brilliant, but also Gothic Horror.
Brain of Morbius – Gothic Horror IN SPACE! Advantages: Sarah Jane, Philip Madoc, The Sisterhood of Karn.
The Ark in Space – horror, but not gothic. Very bright Seventies sets which makes the horror element all the more chilling. I’d agree that it was probably a big influence on ‘Alien’, even if calling a horror movie that is really offensive. 😉
Genesis of the Daleks – terrific, though there’s a surprising amount of padding as people get captured, recaptured, captured by somebody else…
Okay, so, my vote:
1. Genesis of the Daleks
2. The Brain of Morbius
3. The Deadly Assassin
4. Anything from the above list. They’re all good.11 April 2015 at 14:59 #39531Nobody’s been able to reconcile the “good” God with the suffering of everything but rocks
There is a type of opinion which consists of someone saying with perfect confidence: ‘There is no such thing as global warming because it just snowed heavily in New Hampshire.’
It’s always possible they might be right about Global Warming – but the way they phrase the opinion suggests a lack of knowledge. You’ve done this a few times now, and you’ve just done it again. Lots of people are able to reconcile a good God with suffering: Hinduism can reconcile it, Islam can reconcile it, Christianity can reconcile it… but not to your personal satisfaction, because you start from the point: ‘it’s snowing in New Hampshire and Global Warming means it’s hot and sunny all the time.’
‘The problem of reconciling natural evil with a good God’ hasn’t always been a big debate – basically, the debate in Europe starts with the Enlightenment and the movement away from Christianity towards Deism and atheism (traditionally, it tends to be ‘dated’ to the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755). There are earlier theological explanations, but they’re explanations rather than any big debate thingy. The only biggish debate was the very early debate between gnosticism and mainstream Christianity (gnostic explanation: the creator god is eeeevillll or at the very least a bit incompetent).
The ‘problem of evil’ for many religions is that you can have all the philosophical/theological explanations in the world, but they won’t help you comfort two kids under ten who’ve just lost their mother to cancer. Just as you can know everything there is to know about global warming (or global weirding), but it won’t help you with the practical problem of getting out of a snowdrift in New Hampshire. For that, you need a shovel – not the research paper you published last week.
You have to fix your mess before you can get through you incarnations
Yes, perfectly sensible. 🙂 I dunno if you’ve noticed, but I have tried to avoid any massive critiques of your personal-beliefs-that-I-just-happen-to-disagree-with and have tried to stick with areas where I think you’re showing a lack of knowledge about Christian beliefs.
I don’t know if you’ve considered whether personal suffering could be a necessary part of fixing that mess? That is, before they can start the repayment, they have to fix the lack of empathy and compassion that allowed them to even consider shooting someone in cold blood. So they might self-choose to get reborn into a condition of suffering, to learn what it feels like from the inside.
Beware anyone, *anyone*, who claims to “be spiritual”.
Oh, gawd, yeah. We Christians actually got warned about that one (and I’m pretty sure there’s a similar warning in Deuteronomy). I’m certainly not ‘spiritual’. Too bloody arrogant and self-righteous for that. 😀
9 April 2015 at 02:17 #39485@purofilion
“is it faith alone or is it good works will not save you or it is a combination of both” which leads to the idea “do it because it’s right to and you love people”
Well, given that it’s past two in the morning here I might be somewhat senseless as well – but I’ll give it a go.
The Protestant reformers, starting with Luther, were big on the idea of ‘salvation is by faith alone’. We are saved by faith because it’s simply not possible for human beings to ever be perfect enough for heaven. It’s not that we shouldn’t do good works (we’re commanded to do good works), but they’re never gonna get you into heaven. Nope, only faith will do that – though Luther’s definition of ‘faith’ might be a lot better translated by ‘trust’. You are saved because you trust God’s promises of salvation, God’s promises of salvation are made through pure grace. And even that trust is itself a gift of God.
Now, if you’re a Catholic theologian, you’ll cheerfully agree that good works aren’t sufficient (and that you need God’s grace to receive faith) – but since doing good works is part of a sinner’s redemption, they’re more important in themselves. You do good works both because they are right, and because they will (hopefully) help you to learn to be a better person. If you are a particularly awful sinner, your good works might also help repair some of the damage you’ve done. In a further desperate attempt to stay on topic, I’d say that Angel has that understanding of good works.
But if my understanding of the Catholic theology is right (I’m Anglican), then asking which one is more important (faith or good works) is like asking whether the flour or the water is more important for making bread. Faith without works is dead. But faith without love is also dead.
And good works without love are also dead. If I give away all I have to feed the poor … and have not love, I have nothing. Which might be why Angel’s good works never really worked too well; he kept seeing them as a ‘brownie points’ system to atone for his sin, and not as an act of love.
9 April 2015 at 01:30 #39483@purofilion
you are completing a Masters in theology in the UK? Are you planning to complete a PhD following?
Yes, I’m studying theology right now. I already have a Masters, but in Comparative Religions – and while that’s really useful, it’s not sufficient for what I want to do.
Tell you one thing, I’m beginning to understand why they used to reserve theology for postgraduates. It really is a subject that requires so much background knowledge from so many different academic areas. 😕
9 April 2015 at 00:56 #39480My response to a God giving a fig for people, let alone liking them, is pretty much the same as Stephen Fry’s answer: “Really? Cancer in little kids?” which is sufficient, for me, to stand for the whole problem of evil.
Which problem, of course, has never even occurred to Abrahamic religious people in the three and a half millennia since Judaism got itself organised. We never even noticed that terrible things happen to innocent people. 😈
See the Book of Job for an example of someone struggling with that one about (probably) 2,600 years ago. Or, in a desperate attempt to keep this vaguely on-topic, you could check out The Ark (BBC, currently on iPlayer, dunno when it’s going to be on BBC America), a heartwarming story of a loving God who … sends a flood to kill lots and lots of people. [Actually, it’s very well written and acted, even if rather obviously low on the budget.]
I could go into this in a lot more detail (surprise!), but I’ll say a couple of things. Firstly, it’s only really a problem in the Abrahamic religions, because they’re the ones with the concept of one God, who is good. And all powerful. And who takes a personal interest. And who appears to allow suffering. And there’s no reincarnation. Errr…. drat. 😉
If you don’t believe in God, there is no problem, because it’s just the way things are. If you believe in gods and demons who are as powerful as each other, there’s no problem, because evil is the work of evil demons (or evil gods) and the good ones aren’t powerful enough to sort it out. If you believe in one god, but one who just created the universe and then nipped off for a very extended cup of tea and a biccie (leaving us to our own devices) – it’s not a problem, because that god obviously can’t be arsed about us. If you believe in reincarnation, there’s no problem, because suffering is your own fault due to your actions in a previous life.
I’m an atheist because by its actions, the God concept looks monstrous to me. If you have the power to do something about suffering — something that alleviates or removes it — and you don’t — how “good” are you?
Approaching it from the other side: there are all these religious ideas (including atheism) in which the existence of suffering is not a religious problem. There is also a world in which the existence of suffering is obvious to even a moderately intelligent seven year old.
And yet over half the world (at least) follows this ‘monstrous’ concept of a good, involved, powerful God.
So: first question. Do we know enough about the world to know if it’s possible to have a world without suffering? And a subset of that question: can we always know when suffering has been alleviated (it’s really difficult to spot a miracle where someone miraculously doesn’t get cancer in the first place).
Do we know enough to know if suffering can always be alleviated, or if it’s possible to remove all suffering? For example, suppose it was possible to create a world in which no children (and no adults) get cancer – but only by creating a world in which those children (and adults) were never born at all?
Second question. Given that natural and moral evil don’t exactly suggest that the universe is in the control of a good God, where did we get the idea from? It’s about as intuitively obvious as suggesting that the Earth orbits the sun. It makes quantum mechanics look sensible.
But before I find myself tootling on to 5000+ words on ‘Does human suffering disprove the existence of God’ (with bibliography), I’ll just leave it at that. 🙂
8 April 2015 at 23:00 #39478how did ‘pluck’ become offensive
I think when it started to be used in a way that suggests the person concerned isn’t terribly bright. Or, indeed, competent. But they go forth and have a go anyway…. which fits Jo beautifully, in fact. Jo is the Doctor’s plucky young assistant. She’s sort of a female equivalent of Jamie; not over-bright but with tons of courage and determination.
And now I’m thinking of the Tennant Doctor describing Donna as ‘the plucky young girl who helps me out’, and her ‘Oy!’ back. 🙂
7 April 2015 at 01:01 #39456Bluesqueakpip said (correct me if I’m wrong!) that being a time traveler, the Doctor would know who’s gonna get killed by the Daleks at any point in time
Correct
and would be remiss if he didn’t use time travel to go save the victims, all of them
Not quite. What I meant to say was that some people would blame him if he didn’t go save the victims. In a predestined universe, of course, he can’t save them. They’re predestined to be exterminated. As opposed to being predestined to die in bed, or die in a road accident, or die because some idiot squaddie shot up a house without first checking who was in it.
The show wobbles around this quite a lot, but the concept of fixed and not-fixed points implies that some stuff is ‘predestined’ and other stuff is in a state of flux.
Choice in the past is over;
Which is, from the show’s point of view, an awful lot of the problem. Firstly because we’ve visited the future so much, we know there is one (it removes a lot of jeopardy from Kill The Moon if we already know we didn’t destroy the Moon) and secondly because visiting the future means that our present (and much of the future) IS the past.
And then there’s the problem of visiting the actual past and knowing that – say – Agatha Christie doesn’t get murdered by a pissed-off giant wasp. Not only do we know this, the characters in-story know it. So if choice in the past is over, they might as well wander back to the manor for a cup of tea and leave Agatha to fight off the wasp. It’ll make no difference. 😈
If, instead, the future is woven moment by moment by all of our choices at each moment, and all of the choices we’ve each made up til each moment. Which would mean, I think, that there is no “future” there for anyone to know or not know, only ranges of potentiality fanning out ahead from where we are in the present. The future is formed instant after instant by what we choose now, and only becomes fixed when it becomes the past.
Our choices?
What about that undersea earthquake that’s about to erupt and cause a whacking great Tsunami?
What about that comet on a collision course with our planet?
What about that alien on Tau Ceti III who’s just found out how to exceed the speed of light (and therefore, to travel in time)?
Etc.
My maths really isn’t up to the Many Universes Interpretation, or indeed to amorphous masses of probabilities, but I’d quite like to know if there’s any observable evidence for any of them? Or are they in the same state of quantum indeterminacy as predestination? 🙂
From the show’s point of view, their writer-induced flux between ‘fixed points’ and ‘grey areas’ is a pretty good metaphor for the way life (observably) works. There are some things about the future that our choices can change. There are other things that we can’t. Working out which is which is important.
It may be handled in a child-friendly way (everything’s better with big explosions and rubber monsters), but it’s not a bad metaphor.
7 April 2015 at 00:08 #39455do you have to be a Christian before you can become a heretic?
Yes. 🙂 For non Christians, thinking a heresy (or a minority view) represents mainstream Christianity is merely an ‘oops’. 😉
So what categories of action did count for that, for Christians who didn’t believe that faith alone would get you saved?
I honestly don’t think that question is answerable, because you still seem to be working on a ‘brownie points’ assumption. The best I can do is give you the summary of the commandments: ‘love God, and love your neighbour as yourself.’ That encompasses a fairly wide spread of categories of action…
All that’s *observable*, so far as I can see, is that some people are more religious than others, for various reasons that *might* include “grace”, but equally might include being carrot-and-sticked as little kids into exhibiting the accepted signs, in their culture, of being very religious. The pre-birth and post-death foundations of the idea are all inference; only the visible behavior in between is observable, and it’s impossible to know by observation whether even that is authentic, or fake piety assumed for social or situational reasons.
You do realise that theories are inferred from observable evidence, don’t you? To repeat myself (with italics): predestination is a theory that resulted from observed facts. … The observed facts are that some people – even in the Early Modern period – are religious and some aren’t.
Now, in return, you present:
All that’s *observable*, so far as I can see, is that some people are more religious than others,
Which is exactly what I said.
for various reasons that *might* include
… and you now present your theories. [Incidentally, I’m interested to know how your carrot-and-stick theory accounts for adult conversion, or for religious children of non-religious parents? Or, for that matter, for the non-religious children of religious parents?]
Basically, the idea makes no sense to me
I’m presuming that you mean predestination? It makes perfect sense to me, because we (in our present) are the past to someone in the future. And if events in the past are fixed from our present viewpoint, it follows that events in the present (which is the past to that hypothetical future person) are also fixed.
However, if we don’t know what those future events are, we can make entirely free choices. IF we don’t know our own futures. 🙂 Just as William Shakespeare wrote Hamlet by himself, despite the Doctor knowing how the whole play would turn out (and helping him on some of the prose bits). 😉
If you know all of universal history from beginning to end, then you are pretty much God, and why would you bother engaging at all, or even paying any further attention to the behavior of anyone or anything? What for?
Because you like people. Even though they may often irritate you, or disgust you, the reason you engage is because you like people.
That’s why the Doctor engages. In Christian belief that’s why God engages – though the normal statement is a bit stronger than ‘like’. 😀
6 April 2015 at 19:13 #39446Ah, they’re the ones with everybody already assigned their rewards at birth or later on by some arbitrary granting of “Grace”? If so, I find that such an absurd notion that I clean forgot about them.
Really? You do surprise me. Firstly predestination is a theory that resulted from observed facts; secondly, predestination is a theory that Doctor Who is perpetually having to sidestep around.
The observed facts are that some people – even in the Early Modern period – are religious and some aren’t.
The point that Doctor Who is continually having to sidestep around is that – if you know the history of the entire universe, past, present and future – then you presumably know who’s going to be exterminated by a Dalek. Equally, if there is a God, presumably they know who’s saved and who’s not.
It’s a short step from there to theorising that this level of foreknowledge implies that everyone’s fate is ultimately ‘predestined’ (aka a ‘deterministic’ universe). Add this to observed facts (some people are religious, some not) and it’s a short step to the idea that this is due to some arbitrary granting of grace. Or, to lead back to Doctor Who, that it’s the Doctor’s fault some poor sod got blown up by a Dalek because the Doctor knew about it and didn’t stop it (didn’t grant ‘grace’).
Anyway, I wasn’t referring to predestination, because the great Protestant reformers didn’t think it that important – their principle was ‘salvation by faith alone’. It was the later Calvinists who picked up the idea of predestination and ran with it.
What I was referring to was:
What @mudlark says about goodness as its own reward adds a lot more spinners, I’m afraid.
Yeah, probably because that’s considerably closer to the mainstream Christian belief? Being good will not, by itself, get you into Heaven. Jesus doesn’t want you to be good to rack up celestial brownie points – he wants you to be good because it’s the right thing to do.
I was thinking more about things like people paying to build cathedrals in order to offset their various murders etc. and still win their way into Heaven by virtue of being good toward God, at least.
That would be the Pelagian heresy. It’s big in pop culture, but is, errmm, y’know – a heresy? Rather than mainstream?
You’re confusing the endowment of churches (and hospitals, and schools, and leper houses) so that people could say prayers for your evil and sin-spotted soul (hopefully doing you some good) with ‘buying your way into Heaven’. Even at the height of medieval salesmanship, I’m pretty sure that the only ‘redemption’ offered was a remission of time in Purgatory, not acceptance into Heaven.
4 April 2015 at 22:25 #39421@Purofilion
Personally, I’m beginning to discover why the Third Doctor was never ‘my’ Doctor – even though he’s the first Doctor I remember. I agree that he does have a ‘nobody insults my friends except me’ attitude, but I’m thinking longingly of a cross-over where he gets five minutes with Amy Pond. Or possibly to go five rounds with Amy Pond. 😈
I think your ‘successful engagement’ distance is for gunfights between two people, not the range at which a pistol can successfully shoot someone/something. Mike Yates is, admittedly, probably hoping for a lucky shot. But 100 meters is quite possible. Well, possible when you haven’t been handed what the cast commentary describes as a ‘starting pistol’ for your prop…
Looking up head injuries, Doctor Reeves is actually being quite sensible. Jo’s had a blow to the head, lost consciousness and is now showing signs of agitation and confusion. He can’t get her to a hospital – so the best thing is indeed mild sedation, to stop her aggravating the concussion. It’s clearly rather mild sedation, because Jo promptly wakes up at the earthquake.
I do like the way the cliffhanger is the Master in danger, rather than the usual Doctor/Companion in danger. The Master always has been something of an Evil Companion, hasn’t he/she?
4 April 2015 at 17:46 #39419For humans, trying to act ethically has been supposed to earn a “reward”
If anyone wants to find the graves of the great Protestant Reformers, they’ll be the ones with the high speed whirring sounds. 😀
28 March 2015 at 21:48 #39276I kind of agree with @janetteb – this one seems like a story stretcher. Having set up that Devil’s End is genuinely dangerous, with a dead archaeologist and an Ice-Doctor, there’s then a lot of getting the gang together. Not to mention a certain amount of plot induced stupidity – I think I’d be happier with Mike Yates if there’d been mention of a platoon following by road.
Possibly they couldn’t afford more than a couple of UNIT extras in the episode. Between the helicopter shots, the three cameras on location so they could make the most of their time, and the exploding van, this episode felt surprisingly expensive.
Minor notes from the commentary. The director noted that he’d directed John Levene very badly when he was rescuing Miss Hawthorne; he goes immediately to the chest she’s tied up in. And this episode was recovered in black and white, then painstakingly re-colourised by a restoration team.
28 March 2015 at 19:10 #39275Happy Birthday – this one just reminded me strongly of – well, all of us.
24 March 2015 at 00:46 #39152@mudlark, @purofilion, @ichabod et al
Funnily enough, I’m spending this week being lectured about worship in the Early Church. 😉 So I might be a bit late in replying.
Anyway, Ehrman. I think the general scholarly feeling is (to paraphrase) ‘overreacting a bit to his background’. He was from a tradition that believed in the complete inerrancy of the Bible, and discovering exactly how many variations there really were seems to have been a bit of a shock. (Thousands. Mostly copyist errors, though.)
That said, I’m not a Greek scholar, so honestly can’t comment on this row; it often relies on whether something must have been changed deliberately or could have been the result of a series of accumulated copyist errors. The proceedings of a 2008 conference on the subject have been published, @mudlark, it’s called ‘The Reliability of the New Testament: Bart D Ehman and Daniel B Wallace in dialogue’
Fortunately, you don’t need to be a Greek scholar to find the variations: just get a decent Bible with footnotes. They’ll say something like ‘other ancient versions have…’
Gospel of Thomas – it’s not a forgery, @purofilion (I was talking about the so-called ‘Gospel of Jesus’ Wife’, which is). However, it is considerably later than thought when first found. When it was first found, it fit the then popular scholarly theory of early collections of the sayings of Jesus, which the later Gospels were based on – so it got dated at 1st Century, possibly very early 1st Century.
At the moment, there’s been a lot of work which suggests it’s Thomas which is familiar with the Synoptics, not vice-versa. That puts its dating around 2nd Century.
23 March 2015 at 00:05 #39111I think there was a greek philosopher that wrote about them.
I think you mean Philo – who was a Hellenistic Jewish philospher who lived in Egypt. 😉
Did they have families? Maybe a lot did and a lot didn’t
Some Essene groups are argued to have families, yeah. We know others definitely didn’t. The point is that you can’t argue that Jesus was married (in the face of no available source saying he was married) or had kids (in the face of absolutely nobody saying he had kids) by using ‘everybody back then got married, and married young’.
Because we know not everybody got married, and even those who did weren’t always young.
Weren’t there some gospels found that said maybe Jesus had a wife too?
You might have seen something like that in the news, yes. It’s a forgery – one of a set of forged papyri. The text is all lifted from the Gospel of Thomas – well, apart from the ‘my wife’ bit. 😀
like the Doctor says in Listen “how do you know”?
Well, if a genuine papyrus turned up showing Jesus was a widower, or married with five kids, I’d certainly be very interested. It also wouldn’t affect my faith in the slightest, because it’s not remotely relevant to the important stuff. It’s just interesting.
And that’s the big problem with the Dan Brown/Baigant style conspiracy theories – they’re bloody stupid. Completely ahistorical. Nobody in the 1st Century Church would have cared if Jesus was married; half the disciples were married – it took centuries for priestly celibacy to take hold. The only people who might have cared were the Romans, who could possibly have been worried about a son of Davidic ancestry inheriting the ‘King of the Jews’ mantle.
And we know that the early Church had no problem with Jesus’ family members holding positions of authority. We know that because the church in Jerusalem was led by a relative.
What you end up with is Occam’s Razor. There’s no evidence that mentions a wife or children because there was no wife or children.
It’s a bit boring; but there it is. 😉
22 March 2015 at 21:36 #39108I’m just working off the norms of pastoralist and small farmer life I’ve come across for Ancient times, plus the Jewish cultural pattern of *everybody* gets married
Unfortunately for that pattern, we know as positively as anything is ever known in Ancient History that there was at least one group of celibate males in 1st Century Jewish culture. Namely, those awkward Essenes.
There’s also evidence that another group of people didn’t always marry until their 30’s – men studying Torah. Plus, there’s quite a bit of evidence in Exodus (e.g. 19:10-15) that it was considered properly holy to abstain from sex if you were in direct contact with God.
[There are quite a few Rabbinic ‘discussions’ about Moses’ poor wife Zipporah, stuck with a husband constantly conversing with God. The assumption is that she wasn’t getting any. 😉 ]
family is gone from the record.
I’m afraid you’ve been reading too much Dan Brown. The point is that the family (siblings, parents) are in the records. There’s even a tradition that two of them were hauled up before Dominitian. Who let them go because they were a couple of Galilean peasants belonging to some weird cult. But the descendants of Jesus’ relatives get mentioned a few times (often as leaders in the early Church) up to about the 3rd Century – by which time it was possibly now too indirect a relationship to bother about.
Nor can we be sure, in the strictest sense, that the NT actually does have all the names of other people right, attendance at various events etc., right, either, isn’t that so?
There is absolutely zero chance (unless someone is a very Conservative Christian indeed) that the NT has all the names etc. right – as I said up this thread, it’s now pretty certain that the Gospel writers were following the patterns of the Graeco-Roman biographical genre. Precise accuracy wasn’t a feature of that genre (because it was impossible back then). They were, however, expected to get the gist right.
It’s well to remember how compromised and comprisable a text the NT was
It’s well to remember how deeply embarrassing much of the NT is. That’s one of the criteria for authenticity. Was a story embarrassing to the early Church? Was it embarrassing to the Rabbis? Yes? We can be pretty sure it’s true. People who are lying generally try to make themselves look good. There’s quite a bit – either in the NT, or in the Rabbinic sources, which is embarrassing to one side or the other. Despite this, it’s still repeated as if everyone knows it to be the case.
Um, do you really want me to go on about this? I have an MA…
22 March 2015 at 09:23 #39071I bet Jesus had some kids
These would be the kids who are never mentioned despite our knowing a lot of Jesus’ other relatives by name?
😀
22 March 2015 at 00:30 #39059People don’t try to deny other peoples culture heritage generally speaking.
Errr… I think most countries could provide you with cultural groups who’d disagree with that statement. Often quite strongly.
21 March 2015 at 23:02 #39054Does “Messiah” mean “healer”?
Nope. ‘Messiah’, or ‘Christos’ in Koine Greek, means ‘Anointed One’, basically ‘Anointed King’. Even with the rather multiple meanings of ‘messiah’ in First Century Judaism, you can’t make it mean healer. Warrior, yes. Somebody who cleanses and/or rebuilds the Temple, yes. The king, fine. But not healer.
First Century (and onwards) Christianity developed a rather different understanding of ‘Messiah’, because by then they were utterly convinced that Jesus was the Messiah. So the term shifted a bit – but it still basically applies to ‘king’, ‘high priest’ and maybe to ushering in the era of the new creation.
‘Messenger’ – you’re thinking ‘malak’ (Hebrew) or ‘angelos’, (Greek). Don’t ask me to go into any more detail – my Greek’s crap. 😉 But I do know that one.
I really don’t see the Doctor as Jesus. RTD certainly tried to map David Tennant’s Doctor onto Jesus, because he has this theory that we create our own Gods (hence the entire ‘Lonely God’ thing). But it always did feel (to me) a bit like it had been forced onto the character rather than something arising naturally. What TV tropes would call a ‘Crystal Dragon Jesus'(IN SPACE!).
I’d say The Doctor’s more a Victorian Scientific Explorer/Adventurer in the Professor Challenger mode, crossed with Odysseus.
21 March 2015 at 17:58 #39038if you can point me in the direction of arguments to the contrary I would be interested to learn more.
Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and his Emissary has a very interesting take on the two hemispheres of the brain. He’d argue that we have two main modes of understanding the world (which is why we have two hemispheres, or possibly vice-versa), one being rational, logical, detailed, quite happy to consider a theoretical system valid if it’s internally consistent and not worried about whether the system ‘works’ in the real world. The other is more holistic, more relational, essentially concerned with dealing with the real world and probably equivalent to the ‘narrative’ mode.
He’d argue that the holistic/narrative mode (the ‘master’) is indeed the more important (though we need both) – because it’s the one that we use to relate to the real world. The ’emissary’ detailed/logical/theoretical mode, however, is the one currently being prioritised by Western culture.
However, it’s another doorstop (WITH SCIENCE!) To be precise, lots of neurobiology. And it’s not an uncontested view. But it is a very interesting read.
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