We’re going to need a bigger flowchart!  And a special nod to our very own @jimthefish…  or I suppose to his slightly mysterious fictional counterpart.

And that was really very lovely.  River’s speech about loving the Doctor made me cry.  Lots of other bits made me laugh.  And River, as always, was splendid and the dynamics between the two of t…[Read more]

@pedant Ha!   Guilty as charged.  Will gird up my loins (if I can locate them) and woman up and all that.

Hello all.  Long long silence from me, which is emphatically is not because I’ve lost interest in Who or the Forum, or because this series in particular has failed to pique my interest.  Almost the opposite – I’ve found it in some ways the deepest, darkest and most fascinating series for a while, too much to take in, let alone process and a…[Read more]

The cables snakily pulling Clara in – a bit reminiscent of the scene with Davros and the Doctor perhaps, at the point where the tables (apparently) turned?

And yes, there she is again.  In a Dalek, in a Zygon pod, in the Morpheus pod – there’s got to be serious significance in all that.

I note that Morpheus is depicted by Philostratus as having…[Read more]

Ah, yes.  What a pertinent and poignant song for today.

@kharis and various – I’m not inclining to the view that Ashildr is Clara’s mum.  The clothes she’s wearing in the photobomb are clearly meant to be a message, but not necessarily that message.  Deliberate photobombing has been described as ‘a narrative of surreptitious sabotage’ (according to Wikipedia)… One thing I’m not sure we know about A…[Read more]

@craig got to it before I could do any investigating.  Bloody hell!  @kharis kudos for being the first to spot that.

<span class=”useratname”>@ramzeppelin</span>  Oh, thank heavens!  Finally I can stop pretending that I love this show.  You have set me free. Right, now I’ll bobby off and join a forum devoted to discussing a show that I despise, so that I can pass on the enlightenment to other benighted fools.

Or, as @ichabod so splendidly put it, ‘do kindly bu…[Read more]

A funny old mix in this one – some really rather daft and unsatisfying elements to the specific story, but some really fascinating, profound and moving elements relating to the arc(s).  What part will Ashildr play – what part has she already played?  Assuming that up to this point she has been earth-bound there’s still so many ways she could be r…[Read more]

@purofilion Indeed, all is well, just events, you know. Plus a touch of writers/bloggers/theorisers block. But things are about to change – I’ll be officially retiring as of 1 Jan 2016! So loads of time to watch Who – I might even get to see episodes more than once. Loads of time to write, read, listen to music, go for walks, travel, do my PhD,…[Read more]

@ichabod  There are certainly others – there’s a YA novel, Deep Secret,  by Berlie Doherty about the drowning of Ashopton and Derwent, for one.  And NB the imminent appearance on our screens of series 2 of The Returned!  French spookiness of a very high quality indeed and featuring a drowned valley…

THis is getting rather exciting.  Arthurian references are one of my favourite things ever.  It is no coincidence that my children are named Arthur and Vivien.  I read Morte d’Arthur as a kid, and any number of reinventions/interpretations of the stories since then, from Rosemary Sutcliffe to Marion Zimmer Bradley.

But then there’s the pa…[Read more]

<span class=”useratname”>Wow.  Fabulous stuff.  Still mulling, so no bonkers theories to offer at this stage.  Questions though.  Why did the Doc tell Davros that Gallifrey had survived?  at the time, we thought that he thought that Davros was about to expire and thus couldn’t use the info, but turns out he knew all along about Davros’s plan and…[Read more]

@PhaseShift Just caught the first ep of Fear the Walking Dead last night – much better than I was expecting, I’d heard some negative feedback that it was too slow but I didn’t find it so at all.  I’ve always been fascinated in apocalypse dramas by the phase just before the tipping point, and The Walking Dead parachutes you in after that, using…[Read more]

@janetteb  You’re right.  I’m reading Dickens’ letters at the moment and the presence of the departed sister-in-law is very striking and (to our 21st century sensibilities) more than a little disturbing (I couldn’t help wondering how Mrs Dickens who was NOT idealised by her husband, having had the misfortune to get old and worn out with all t…[Read more]

@bluesqueakpip @arbutus Agreed.  I think the problem for me with Esther is that if Dickens has a weakness it is in writing virtuous women.  His male characters are allowed to be complicated and flawed, e.g. Copperfield/Pip, but the women are more either/or.  THat’s where Dickens’ female contemporaries win – the Brontes, Mrs Gaskell, George El…[Read more]

@arbutus Yes, now you mention it  that transition is particularly dodgy if one fancies Ten and then wants to mother Eleven…  Hmmmm.   Thank heavens for Twelve!

I think Rose partly gets stick for being a fairly realistically drawn teenager – over on the Buffy blogs it was noted I think that Dawn was utterly loathed by many fans of the ser…[Read more]

Just to chip in to the convo re Dickens – I’m a huge fan.  I started reading him while I was still at junior school and have read and re-read everything over the (many) years since.  I love the sheer exuberance of his writing – his revelling in language and the power of words, his larger than life characters who yet somehow have a core of r…[Read more]

A stonking finale.  Most of the things I might have said have been (I’m late to this party, by about a year and a half, having just acquired the box sets of series 1-3 and rewatching for the first time since they were broadcast).

Captain Cheesy’s regen/resurrection – now, was he immortal before this, or did Rose/Bad Wolf’s channelling of the…[Read more]