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21 December 2018 at 18:41 #66866
I loved this one. It helped that it referenced in so many ways (starting with the title) The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, which was a huge part of my childhood. I do also recall having a lengthy and fractious discussion on The Other Place about whether the narrative was attributing a mystical power to maternity, or whether ( as I argued) that in this particular case, with these particular aliens, maternity was a source of power. Yes, the ending is cheesy, if you want to be cynical, but it was Christmas Day and who the heck wants to be cynical on Christmas Day?
12 December 2018 at 08:28 #66548@mudlark True, the Theseus myth is specifically Mediterranean but I like to think that most of these things have a universal element, and that aspects of that story found their way into this new Norse myth. OK, I agree Ribbons is more Gollum than Minotaur, and the svart alfar/troll king reference is definitely relevant. But I do think there’s a labyrinth, or maybe more than one in this ep (labyrinths may be manmade or naturally occurring – probably the latter inspired the former – and the key thing is that they are disorienting spaces where there’s a real danger of not finding the way out or back). And there’s certainly an Ariadne’s thread! Anyway, bonkers or not, I like the connection if only because I’ve been obsessed with labyrinth imagery for a very long time…
Oh, and more generally @pedant @thane16 et al, I think I have finally stumbled upon the connection that I was looking for with the scenes in a white room with the Doctor finding the frog. Angel, Season 5, various episodes: the White Room, in which they find a Conduit to the powers that be, a conduit which can take different forms, most memorably a panther. OK, not even remotely a frog, but it was something about the blank bright space and its unexpected & incongruous inhabitant that I was thinking of, I suspect.
11 December 2018 at 17:45 #66498@kevinwho Ahhh – do I envy you that dream? The joy, yes, but the waking up….
11 December 2018 at 17:11 #66494@idiotsavon YES to the Ariadne’s thread motif (both in the Antizone and in our world). The Antizone certainly shared some characteristics with the labyrinth, and Ribbons perhaps the Minotaur – although I think it echoed many 20th/21st century retellings of that story by making the Minotaur rather less terrifying, and locating the threat elsewhere. In Andre Gide’s version the danger is that within the labyrinth there are fumes which sedate/seduce those who enter, sapping their will to leave – so perhaps the Solitract too is a kind of labyrinth, which traps people through creating the illusion of their loved ones.
You say, you hope you’re not finding connections where there are none, but that’s where so much of the fun is, seeing these connections whether to popular culture or myth or whatever. And after all, who can say whether or not there was a connection subliminally in the mind of the writers? Frankly, even if they were to say there wasn’t, I’d just quote D H Lawrence: Trust the tale and not the teller!
Oh, and YES to this:
Chibnall will honour the simple, inevitable and painfully real truth of death: It Takes You Away.
We accept in fantasy that not all deaths are permanent, but some need to be, and as in the Buffy episode The Body and its sequel Forever sometimes that reality needs to be addressed without the false comfort of a reversal. Just as Buffy and Dawn turned back from the possibility of bringing their mother back from the dead, Graham has to turn back from the possibility of life with ‘Grace’, in both cases because they know, deep deep down, that the person they loved is truly gone. On a more personal note, over the 23 years since I lost my mum, I occasionally dream that she’s still here. I’ve never found those dreams comforting, they’re just troubling, because there’s always a sense that this isn’t quite right – rather as Graham sensed something not quite right with Grace, even before she gave away her true nature by being indifferent to Ryan’s fate.
And a great call as to the real import of the episode title.
7 December 2018 at 13:30 #66257@pedant – we were gutted to hear of Pete Shelley’s death. Only 63 – we expect to be losing some of the old guard (as sad as we have been to see some of them go) but that’s far, far too young. When punk arrived, I was initially utterly loyal to prog. I couldn’t see why people should want to embrace what seemed to me so often to be ugliness, in terms of image at least – all that sneering, let alone the gobbing. The Buzzcocks were what persuaded me, because they were clearly punk in ethos and style but they took on board the best bits of early-mid 60s pop – the Kinks for example – and did something new and exciting with them, and their songs had real heart. I haven’t followed what Shelley et al have done since the Buzzcocks’ heyday, but that body of work stands and will stand, with some of the finest 3 minute pop songs ever crafted. And some of the most memorable lyrics. Pete Shelley, RIP.
4 December 2018 at 15:47 #66166@pedant Ashamed to say Ghibli is unknown territory to me. I know. I must address that! Still mystified by the connection that’s niggling away in my head.
4 December 2018 at 10:59 #66156@thane16 – def not Rectify as I haven’t seen that!
4 December 2018 at 09:51 #66152The frog at the end is really bugging me. Not because I didn’t like it, I read it as fairy tale and was fine with the image. But it reminds me of something, I think in a film, so strongly that I can’t dismiss it, but not so strongly that I can actually figure out what it is!
2 December 2018 at 21:55 #66112I loved it. Proper bonkers. Sheep, moths and frogs. And again with this series’ key trope, the big bad isn’t exactly a big bad after all. The monster in the woods is a fake, the creepy little dude in the tunnels gets eaten by moths because he can’t resist going after the sonic, and the alternate universe is kind of a lonely consciousness trying to make and keep friends. I really liked that Grace was Grace but somehow clearly not, even before the huge give-away of her not reacting to the idea that Ryan was in danger. Bits of Doctory back story being thrown out there, just for fun. Twisty turny, subverting expectations, and then a full-on assault on the tear ducts. Well, mine, anyway.
2 December 2018 at 21:42 #66111Thought people here might enjoy this – Sheff Uni making the most of the Who connection!
1 December 2018 at 15:48 #66081Everyone already knows that Heaven 17 and Human League are SHEFFIELD, yeah? People’s Republic of South Yorkshire, from the days when the buses were subsidised and you could go for miles and miles for about 10p, and when Sheffield music ruled. There were loads of other less well known bands (Cabaret Voltaire, In the Nursery, Clock DVA, Comsat Angels, just off the top of my head) and there was a Sheffield sound, industrial/electronic or whatever. And later of course ABC, Pulp, Arctic Monkeys, Richard Hawley…. Really must give some thought to a specifically Sheff soundtrack to this season of Who!
30 November 2018 at 08:54 #66060@pedant You have indeed blogged and splendidly. I will I hope have a moment to comment properly but probably not till the weekend. Suffice it for now to say ‘hear hear’ and that I may have choked up a little bit whilst reading your conclusion and clicking on that link…. Thank you.
28 November 2018 at 21:16 #66016@thane16 (17) Happy birthday!
28 November 2018 at 18:40 #66011<div class=”wrap tiptrigger”>
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<div id=”commentbody-3840″>Ah, the old ‘don’t feed the trolls’ dilemma. I can see the argument, but decided some time ago that it was a dangerous tactic. Some years back I wrote something on my blog about it, responding to the vilification and threats that Caroline Criado Perez was getting for arguing for the new £10 note to feature a woman (OMG! The horror!)
This was one of the comments I got:
You say that the trolls want to “shut you up”, so by shouting at them you deny them. However, the trolls win in that case, because they’re distracting you from what you were saying before they came along. In CCP’s case, the commendable bank note campaign got lost in the noise of CCP’s angry responses to the trolls. So they won. They shut her up about the bank note campaign, because CCP chose to react publicly to them instead.
I replied:
This is not, as I’ve said, about trolls. I thought I’d made that distinction quite clearly. The flood of vile threats against CCP (and others) was not a distraction, it was a huge and horrifying assault on her peace of mind and her sense of personal safety, and her response, as she has said, was not a strategic or tactical one but an emotional response to attack. When I’m talking about shouting back, that’s what the rest of us should be doing, to defend those who are subjected to this horror. We should be shouting back at them not at their targets. And whilst the bank note campaign was important and a valuable victory, the campaign about how women who speak out on the internet are treated is in itself important.
So I disagree. I note also that your comments elsewhere about CCP accuse her of ‘hysteria’ which in itself is a pretty classic way of shutting women up and invalidating their responses…</div>
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I think the arguments there can be applied more broadly. We do have to challenge the kind of crap that has recently been appearing on the Forum in response to the new series, but the question is, how do we do that without amplifying their voices. Some of them do pop up, demand that everyone involved in current Who is fired because they didn’t care for the episode, and then vanish again (hoorah!) but others linger like a rather bad smell and keep on injecting their particular brand of bigotry into the conversation.I share @jimthefish‘s weariness, and I’d far rather not have to deal with the crap but I am not prepared to advocate either summary blocking just for being twats, so we will have to respond ad hoc with mockery, demolition, distraction or whatever tactics seem appropriate, and then get on with what we really want to do which is to talk about Who.
24 November 2018 at 11:15 #65891@tardisprototype94 This is a parody, right?
17 November 2018 at 19:25 #65703@pedant Dammit you just made me cry.
16 November 2018 at 17:57 #65684I had a vague memory of a (relatively) obscure literary reference and have just tracked it down to this episode:
We’re going to lure them in here with the promise of food, then deal with the spider mother in the ballroom. Oh, that sounds like the best novel Edith Wharton never wrote.
Bit of an odd one!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_Wharton – not entirely obvious why Wharton sprang to mind. Still, I do like the occasional obscure literary reference.
16 November 2018 at 08:51 #65681My other half (who is not given to bonkers theorising about Who but has watched it since pretty much the beginning and loves it almost as much as I do) has commented on how many times WhittDoc says ‘Sorry’. I hadn’t picked up on that consciously but its interesting – apologising (in the sense of acknowledging fault or of expressing regret) is seen as more of a female trait, but I’d hope it’s more subtle than that. As others have mentioned, we’re seeing a different response, a less interventionist response from the Doc, which may be a reaction to some of the actions of her predecessor(s) but also something that’s causing her internal conflict. That might be the arc for this Doctor perhaps. But it also goes along, possibly, with the fact that whilst she walks away because she believes she has to from situations where intervention would be wrong, despite the consequences and the conflict with her assertion that these people are protected, she stays in solidarity with the people who are hurt and grieving. I’ll keep an eye on this in the remaining eps!
16 November 2018 at 08:41 #65680@mudlark That is rotten luck. Hope it gets sorted completely and quickly.
15 November 2018 at 20:03 #65663I got a private message from the same ‘person’. I’ve just deleted it.
15 November 2018 at 15:54 #65651@ichabod @thane16 @janetteb I loved what little we saw of Budapest (we had a coach tour and then a short guided walk by which time it was dark) and very much want to go back and explore without the constraints of a guide or an elderly parent! I also was very taken with Bratislava. Salzburg was lovely but for some reason it didn’t leave me with a strong desire to return – I’d go back to Vienna though as there was so much we didn’t get time to see. I think the former Iron Curtain cities for me had a particular fascination in the juxtaposition of brutalist concrete slabs from the Communist era with lovely old buildings, ornate churches and so on. Plus as a history nerd my period is definitely WWII and its aftermath. And Prague is now top of my list to visit for architecture and history as well as literary connections (my PhD thesis involves studying W G Sebald’s Austerlitz which has a long section set in Prague). Will raise a glass to @thane16 Puro when I do!
13 November 2018 at 09:39 #65617I’m back, and catching up (have watched the Conundrum ep but not the Punjab yet – tonight for sure). The Danube was amazing, and the company we travelled with (Riviera Travel) were superb. It wasn’t the kind of holiday I’d envisaged for myself but it was my father’s holiday really, and I was there as eyes and ears but obviously enjoying the places we visited (and the life of luxury) as much as possible, and I’ve now got a short list of cities I definitely want to go back and explore properly. Travelling with my father was challenging. I found myself yelling ‘Dad! Dad!’ so often that some of the staff on board took to calling him Dad too… And I must have told him a dozen times each day ‘Don’t wander off’ with about as much effect as it had when various Doctors gave that instruction to various companions (he did wander off in the middle of Salzburg, following a random group of total strangers, and was only intercepted as he was about to cross the road with them and disappear into the throng)! However, we both survived….
Brilliant to see the new series and the new Doc are getting lots of viewers and lots of love.
2 November 2018 at 18:44 #65368Just to say, I will be AWOL for the next two Sundays, as I’m sailing up the Danube on one of them big river cruisers with my 90 year old Dad. Will have to catch up rapidly when I get back to Sheffield (Sonic City) – I will stay clear of this site till then, however, and hope that I can avoid spoilers on Twitter and Facebook! Have fun and don’t feed the trolls…
1 November 2018 at 17:39 #65332@mudlark We had Mischievous Night in Nottinghamshire in the early 70s – I’m pretty sure it was on 31 October rather than 4 November? No dressing up, just ringing people’s doorbells and running away, that sort of thing. Or at least that was as much as we ever got up to – I dare say others were bolder/less scared of getting caught! We never did anything for Halloween that I can recall – I’m not sure when that started to be a thing over here – certainly by the time my children were growing up (20 years ago) it was a pretty big deal.
1 November 2018 at 14:51 #65326@thane16 You’re not wrong, this is a bloody brilliant place. Love it.
31 October 2018 at 13:31 #65286Re Brexit. I hesitate to chip in, not because I don’t have strong views about it, but because the very word fills me with such weariness and foreboding. There are two parts to this – the first is obviously the simple binary vote (in or out) that took place over two years ago, and which went (fairly narrowly) against what I believe is in the interests of this country and our neighbours. I would have lived with that, however reluctantly, but the second element is the dishonesty, arrogance and incompetence of those who have been entrusted with delivering ‘the will of the people’. It was clear that they did not expect the outcome to be Leave, but that doesn’t let them off the hook – any sensible, responsible government would have got some of its best minds together before the Ref to discuss how they would go about things if the vote went that way. Failing that, immediately after the outcome was known. But it seems that even now, with very little time remaining before our departure date, they are bumbling along without ever sounding remotely competent or as if they even understand the issues. No wonder the EU are pushing us – if they weren’t, I doubt that anything at all would be happening. What the consequences of this dereliction of duty will be, we don’t know. A hugely messy ‘no deal’ or a bad deal? What will it mean for trade, for NI, for migration, for staffing in the NHS and other major employers, for EU citizens whose homes are here, and for British citizens whose homes are in Europe? The will of the people who voted was narrowly to leave, I accept that. But it didn’t specify what that meant, and who knows what those individuals actually thought it meant. Many appear to have thought it meant that all foreigners would forthwith disappear from the UK to whence they came. Some appear to think we can have an Empire again now we are free from the shackles of the EU. Of course many took a much more nuanced and informed view and voted Leave for reasons other than xenophobia or nostalgia – but it’s very hard to find clear, concrete examples of how we will benefit, as most of the claims made pre-Ref have either been shown to be false or those claiming them have rowed back vigorously. It’s all still incredibly vague, to say it’s supposed to be happening so soon. Even if Leave was the right result, even if I’d voted for it, I’d be furious about the arrogance, ignorance and incompetence, and I wouldn’t trust the powers that be to deliver anything resembling the promised land. I am, as I said, incredibly weary of this, and fearful of the future – more for my children and their children than for anything that will immediately affect us. It’s more than the fear of another economic crash – it’s about the kind of country we will be living in after we leave. Because if it’s the country that Farage and Johnson and Rees-Mogg want us to be living in, I’d rather be very much elsewhere…
28 October 2018 at 21:22 #65081@juniperfish I’m almost sure the t-shirt started off blue, was red for a bit, then back to blue. Would have to rewatch to be sure…
Plot-wise I felt it left a bit too much dangling, as it were. The mummy spider was dead, and the other hotel spiders were in Not Donald Trump’s panic room, but what about all the others? There was the one that killed the Uni admin person who worked on the spider project, there was one at Graham’s place, and the implication that there were or could be more…
But I agree that the heart of the narrative was the homecoming – shortlived as it turned out – of Team Tardis. Graham made me tear up, again. That I did not expect when I saw that Bradley Walsh was in the cast.
27 October 2018 at 09:32 #65033@anduril – so possibly just a bit of a laundry mishap?? I rather like the idea that the Tardis might malfunction in those very prosaic ways as well as in its more cosmic functions!
I joined in part-way through the Great Bow-Tie Adventures and am not sure I ever entirely grasped their complexity but it was fun, and a fab introduction to this lovely place.
26 October 2018 at 09:20 #64999@whisht Yay, Steel Pulse! Loved their Handsworth Revolution album. Loads of passionate political pop around at that era, good times. I’d say we need a resurgence of that kind of movement, but the singles charts don’t have the power they had back in the days when a song such as Ghost Town would be in the charts and everyone would know it and have seen the video and be talking about it.
25 October 2018 at 22:09 #64980@msrbahar I am genuinely, very sorry for your loss. And that’s a damn good excuse for grumpiness. Nonetheless, I still cannot read your statement about Segun Akinola’s selection being anything to do with his race as anything other than racist. You didn’t care for his score, fine. But to jump from that to the assumption that he’s been given preferential treatment because he’s black?? I’m not saying you are a racist, but that is an assumption that is racist. IMHO.
25 October 2018 at 18:46 #64963@msrbahar What you call your ‘humble’ opinion is actually staggeringly arrogant. And obviously racist. So I don’t think I’m alone in saying I’d rather you took your opinions elsewhere.
25 October 2018 at 09:43 #64942Just re-watched The Sound of Drums and noted the similarities between the scene where TennDoc, Martha & Cap’n Jack in a random warehouse cannibalise bits of kit to make the perception filters, and the scene here where WhitDoc & her pals in a random warehouse cannibalise bits of kit to make the Sheffield Sonic (as it will hereinafter be known). The lighting and everything was so close – def. an hommage, I think.
25 October 2018 at 09:40 #64941@thane16 Puro – lecture away! I love reading your insights into the music – really revelatory.
25 October 2018 at 09:27 #64940@anduril Yes, I noticed that – maybe the Tardis can replicate her charity shop outfit in different shades? If so I want one, never mind the time travel, just the convenience of clothing cloning. Will have to watch out for any further developments on that front. As for significance – some of the longer-serving members of this Forum will recall the bow tie bonkerising of the SmithDoc era…
24 October 2018 at 14:21 #64906@swordwhale The reference to the green police box was to a very specific green police box which, as Yaz says, is situated by Sheffield Town Hall. Here you go…
23 October 2018 at 19:59 #64854Oh dear God, @texasferrets, where does one even start? And does one even bother? Any young black man in the UK today will have been pulled over by the police far more often than his white counterparts. Of course it doesn’t compare to the ongoing risk of being lynched if you looked at a white woman, but no one pretended an equivalence – merely that racism hasn’t gone away, either in the US or here. Of course not everyone in Alabama was a full-on racist but those who weren’t generally kept quiet – white people who expressed sympathy for blacks or opposition to racism were risking their lives too.
And here in the UK, whilst racism against the Irish was pretty bad, an Irish person could change their accent and pass, not an option for blacks who used to be (legally) discriminated against by landlords and employers in the same time period as this episode is set, and a lot later than that too, as well as being subject to racist violence (which does still happen, and is on the increase). Yaz’s family would have experienced plenty of racism too – ‘Paki-bashing’ was quite the hobby of choice for young thugs in the 1970s.
BTW I’m from Sheffield – is that a city you know well? Well enough to know how people from Sheffield act? Cos they seem pretty Sheffield to me.
It was inevitable that this episode would flush out some pretty unpleasant contributions. Proves it’s doing its job, frankly, and that the education it provides is desperately needed .
23 October 2018 at 11:19 #64835The 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 something bigger. @arch I’m also confident that Grace will be a presence throughout the series.
Yes, at some point as the implications of time travel kick in I would be amazed if they don’t revisit that ‘Father’s Day’ conundrum but I think more generally Grace is already permeating the series in terms of her values, her qualities of courage and faith. Grace = Spirit of Rosa – a thread running through WhitDoc’s tenure?
Also @bluesqueakpip excellent point about the ordinary everydayness of this extreme racism. No KKK outfits or burning crosses in sight, but it’s absolutely pervasive – on the streets, on public transport, in the cafes and motels, even down by the river, there’s no escape, and it’s this that’s overwhelming – we don’t need to see the murderous violence directly.
So, no, I don’t think any of this is one-dimensional. A teachy moment at the end where WhitDoc reminds us what the consequences were for Rosa, and how long it took for her to achieve recognition, but that’s OK, for me the drama worked as drama, and worked well. Not sure that I could watch it without being conscious of the ‘racially charged’ setting, @dogboythecat, nor why I would feel the need to.
22 October 2018 at 17:01 #64809From my Twitter feed. ‘Difficult parent/child conversations’? No, just the kind of conversations that parents and children should be having, and brilliant when they’re inspired by great drama on t’telly.
I can’t stop thinking about <span class=”twitter-hashflag-container”><s>#</s><b>DoctorWho</b>
</span>. My sons (7 & 10) and I talked about it for an hour afterwards. They had so many questions. We ended up watching a 1995 interview with Rosa Parks on YouTube. What an inspiring piece of television. Its importance cannot be overstated.22 October 2018 at 16:09 #64804@misterf55 Well, scifi and fantasy have always dealt with reality, obliquely and through analogy. That’s kind of what they’re for, at least the more intelligent and thoughtful examples of the genres. And as numerous contributors have pointed out, Who has always found ways of talking about reality, including racism, sexism, etc etc, throughout its history. Difficult parent/child conversations following Rosa? Excellent. And the Doctor didn’t go back in time to change history but to prevent it being changed, to protect a key moment in history from being subverted. Ah well, probably enough time spent on responding to this – ‘The BBCPC brigade’ is something of a giveaway that this isn’t a genuine, thought out contribution to the discussion.
22 October 2018 at 15:31 #64801I thnk I’d been preconditioned to expect teachy/preachy from one or two comments in the press, and yes, there was an element of both, but in fact, on reflection and as I allowed myself to respond to the drama as it unfolded, it was splendidly done, and very moving. Given its intended audience and time of broadcast, it could not ‘show’ the brutality as graphically as, say, Mississippi Burning, but it conveyed it in a different and subtler way without flinching from the reality.
The expressions on the faces of the white couple of Ryan tries to give them back something the woman has dropped reminded me of John Howard Griffin’s book, Black like me. He was a white journalist who artificially darkened his skin and lived as a black man in the South for a while in 1959 – so just a few years after Rosa Parks made her protest, seeing it as the only way he could really know what it was like to be black. I read this as a teenager (re-reading it recently I was more aware of the problems with the concept but nonetheless it was a dangerous and bold thing to do, and radical even to want to know what it was like not to be white…) and what stayed with me was the experience of the ‘hate stare’ that he noticed from so many white people, whether or not he interacted with them.
I did question why WhitDoc didn’t forewarn them before heading out into the mean streets of Montgomery in 1955. An impetuous young black guy and a young woman of clearly non-white heritage, both of whom having had plenty of experiences of racism, but neither having ever experienced systematic, legal, official racism – they were bound to come a cropper within minutes. But in a way it’s consistent with her approach – she doesn’t really really know these people but she believes in them, in their ability to handle the extraordinary and to be extraordinary.
And as everyone has said, the most devastating moment in a way – because it wasn’t foreseen (well, not by us at any rate) – was Graham’s realisation that he would have to be a part of history, and not the part that Grace would have wanted, or that he could be proud of.
@missrori We said ‘evil Cap’n Jack too!!
18 October 2018 at 08:48 #64613@pedant @juniperfish @miapatrick and others commenting on naming. I’m sure I’ve done the Jodie thing but it does jar for me, in conjunction with other Doctors, because I never naturally say Matt/David/Christopher/Peter. I’m trying to either use the numbers (not in itself free of contention but still most of us get who we mean by Nine, Ten etc) or initials (quicker than spelling out the surnames).
I noticed in the second ep that I was struggling to hear the Doctor’s voice as the authoritative one when there was a longer shot with several people talking. When I could see her, I was fine. Interesting… Clearly any feminist credentials I may have don’t stop me from having absorbed the lessons of the patriarchy – authority speaks in a male voice. Gravitas comes with that male voice. Even those of us most passionately enthusiastic about the gender switch have some adjusting to do, but at least we’re willing to do it, and to give it time to work rather than expecting everything to be fixed by episode 2. I’m NOT saying we shouldn’t be critiquing it from every perspective – narrative, character building, writing, AND how they deal with the change of gender – but we can’t shed 50+ years of hearing the Doctor as a male voice without a little bit of conscious adjustment of expectations, and I think we will gradually (if we’re open to the change) start hearing JW’s voice as the Doctor’s voice, regardless of pitch.
16 October 2018 at 18:00 #64570Oh, like @kharis, I do like @bluesqueakpip‘s theories here. I’d be surprised and disappointed if Ryan’s dad was that tired old stereotype of the Afro-Caribbean dead-beat absent father, so this opens up some much more interesting possibilities. Ryan may well think that’s what his dad is but it would be great to have him proved wrong.
16 October 2018 at 09:18 #64552@pedant re the green police box – sorry, yes, I think all of us Sheffield/South Yorkshire Whovians are a bit over-excited at the moment about the local references and prone to miss the joke or the subtext! We’ll settle down in a bit, honest.
15 October 2018 at 17:16 #64520@pedant The one in town IS green!
@geoffers Re the sunglasses, those definitely weren’t 12’s shades (sonic or otherwise), were they… Judging by the style Audrey Hepburn was a more plausible previous owner – but how did they end up in 12’s pockets in that case (same goes for a hung-over Pythagoras!). I think she was just having a laugh, and she actually picked them up in the charity shop when she was buying her outfit. Perhaps.
13 October 2018 at 15:05 #64433@pedant Commiserations on your diagnosis. My other half was diagnosed with Type 2 about 9 years ago and has been stable on Metformin and statins ever since. We made various dietary changes, reducing fat and salt as much as sugar, given that he wasn’t actually overweight (funnily enough he was sent on a Diabetes day course to find out all about diet & medication & so forth, and every single damn person there assumed that I was the diabetic not him, as I am overweight…). There’s none of this that isn’t manageable however, and we keep the associated risks of D2 at bay with diet, taking care of his feet (no wandering around barefoot any more in of a minor injury that he doesn’t feel because of the poor circulation and which therefore turns nasty). He has a repeat blood test every year and a check up with the practice nurse at the GP, and gets his eyes checked for diabetic retinopathy. And the heightened risk of stroke/heart problems – well, he should have stopped smoking but because he’s an idiot, he hasn’t done… So, commiserations but don’t be downhearted, do keep sharing your feelings about it, and any questions and so forth. And yes, the NHS is bloody amazing.
13 October 2018 at 14:14 #64431@bluesqueakpip et al – further to our earlier conversation re the trains!
11 October 2018 at 09:13 #64391@teak @bluesqueakpip The train was located quite precisely – it was between Hathersage and Grindleford, en route to Sheffield, when the Gathering Coil attacked. Presumably the bike riding practice was in or near Hathersage (wherever it was actually filmed) and I agree, the location was chosen due to the low risk of Ryan being spotted by his peers and shamed. I have been stuck on a train in that very spot, many years ago. No alien attack, just a broken down train in midwinter but the lights went out and there was no heating so we were all seriously considering jumping down on to the tracks, health & safety be damned… Locals were very chuffed at the name-check – one of my friends for whom Grindleford is the local station said that ‘previously the most exciting thing to happen there is them NOT serving mushrooms at the station cafe’.
I think the idea of someone on the team who has already faced a potentially terminal illness and is ‘in remission’, ie not cured, not safe, but well – for now – is dramatically interesting and powerful. That tension of being between the two states (@thane16 Puro I know you know) and how you personally respond to that – live life as if you’re immortal, live life as if you’re made of fine bone china that could shatter at any moment, live life moment to moment somehow holding both/all possibilities together… On a personal level I kind of wish they hadn’t gone there, as my kid brother has recently had a diagnosis of inoperable cancer and I am hoping, really hoping, that if they write Graham out at some point, he gets to go out facing up to some alien terror – living up to Grace – rather than back on the onc. ward. But either way, I hope he gets to have some awesome moments in between.
10 October 2018 at 09:00 #64378<span class=”useratname”>@bluesqueakpip</span> Yeah Sheffieeeeeeld! Re JW, yes, there was the whole regen confusion thing going on which will pass as it has done for all of them, but meantime there was more than enough there to make me hers.
Funny you mention that ‘I’ve got a plan – well, I will have’ as being different cos I thought it echoed things that other Doctors have said (eg Matt Smith ‘Hold tight and pretend it’s a plan’, one of my favourite quotes). It was one of the things that chimed as Doctorly for me anyway.
One thing that struck me was her confidence in the people she was working with to beat Tim Shaw – as if she could see their capabilities and their courage even when they couldn’t. I don’t recall getting quite that feeling in previous New Doc/New Companions (sorry, Friends) encounters.
I did rather like that the monster, whilst being brutal, was a bit crap. They tend to be invincible till suddenly they aren’t – as soon as she’d sussed that he was cheating, because he wasn’t up to the job, he was toast (or possibly a kebab with salad), but it gave him some character (not in the sense that he had any redeeming traits, obvs) – he had strength but nothing else, not even the collective purpose of a Cyberman or Dalek, as he was only out for himself, not his planet, his species or whatever. That was interesting, I thought.
Will have to watch again, to listen more intently so I can comment on the soundtrack!
Once again it’s bloody brilliant to have all you lot back @arbutus @jimthefish @pedant @miapatrick @juniperfish et al…
8 October 2018 at 16:19 #64274Well, my considered evaluation of last night’s episode is:
Yes, oh yes, she is the Doctor. It’ll be reight.
Of course being from Sheffield I loved the setting, the Peaks, the aerial views of the city, including the Sheff United ground. And the people – drunk guy chucking his salad at the nasty iceman was classic. I wasn’t sure about Bradley Walsh having only seen him compering The Chase but there’s some depth hinted at even in the first episode, and some tensions between him and Ryan that could be interesting. Yaz is just grand (I was trying to think where I knew her from and turns out it was Hollyoaks – don’t judge me, my daughter watched it obsessively in her teens and I may have accidentally caught the odd episode. I think the character she played fell victim to one of Hollyoaks many roaming serial killers). Also very taken with the fact that nasty iceman is billed as ‘Tim Shaw’ on IMDb and on the end credits.
‘Get a shift on’ sounds pretty Yorkshire to me. It is basically allons-y.
With all the stuff happening on the home front at the moment, I so needed this. And I so wanted JW to BE the Doctor, from the off. And she is, and she clearly brings the core of Doctorliness to the role but also, as each of her predecessors has done, something different and personal in her style and tone. We’re very happy and very excited for the series.
Also, Whovians Assemble! Lovely to see so many of you back now that we’ve new Doctoring to discuss.
She’s the Doctor, and it’ll be reight.
14 September 2018 at 09:47 #64088Have applied for two tickets – not sure who my plus one will be if I’m lucky, but I’ll post on here if so, in case any of you lovely lot can join me!
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