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1 February 2017 at 17:01 #55357
Delighted to see so much love both for Billy Bragg, my hero, and Frank Turner, my son’s hero.
31 December 2016 at 09:59 #54965@ichabod I assumed the mum thought it was Father Xmas, thus he was ‘expected’, though I agree it wasn’t followed up!
@thane15 Good to have you back! Looking forward to your thoughts on the Special when the jet lag has passed.
25 December 2016 at 21:08 #54914Well, as is traditional with watching the Christmas special on Christmas Day, we had to contend with interruptions and distractions (the cat wanted to come in. and then out. and then in. Drinks needed replenishing, Grandma had the occasional random intervention to do with watchstraps). So I am certain I missed many of the finer points, but what I saw and heard I liked a great deal.
We watched the last 3 Xmas specials last night, and so the references back to Husbands of RS were very much in our minds, and we picked up on the first reference to 24 years, whereas we mightn’t have done otherwise.
We love superheroes, so that plot line was very enjoyable, with the whole trope of people not recognising the alter ego (and the Doctor thinking he was the first to spot that Clark Kent was Superman – ‘look, I’ve drawn specs on Superman!’), and the ‘You’re all wet’. ‘I prefer mild-mannered’.
Clearly the zip faced guys will be back… As will Matt Lucas, and whilst I dislike most of his output, especially Little Britain which I loathed, I like Nardole and feel a bit the same as I did about Catherine Tate, who I really didn’t care for at all in her sketch shows etc, but who I grew to love as Donna (and the end of her arc is something one can’t really speak about without choking up a bit).
We noted the subtle echo from Time of the Doctor to Last Christmas (Clara helps old Matt Smith Doctor to pull the cracker, the Doctor helps old Clara to pull the cracker) and from Last Christmas to Husbands (Danny to Clara – ‘Do you know why people get together at Christmas? Because every time they do, it might be the last time. Every Christmas is last Christmas, and this is ours.’ The Doctor to River – ‘Every night is the last night for something. Every Christmas is the last Christmas’). And in this one there were not only the references to Husbands but the theme of endings. The Doctor to Clara in Time of the Doctor: ‘Everyone gets stuck somewhere eventually, Clara. Everything ends.’ And in Hide, Clara says she’s just realised something she didn’t want to, ‘That everything ends.’ In this one, the Doctor says ‘“Everything ends and it’s always sad. But everything begins again and it’s always happy. Be happy.”
I’m sure there will be more thoughts when I get to rewatch and catch the bits I missed whilst letting cats in (and out) and mending watchstraps. But for now, it’s bloody marvellous to have him back, and it was a real cracker (festive pun entirely intended).
Merry Christmas one and all!
11 November 2016 at 11:10 #54679@pedant Thank you for posting this. Very apt, and very poignant.
7 November 2016 at 09:27 #54597@thane15 @whisht Billy Bragg is a great favourite of mine – was lucky enough to see him live at Sheffield’s Tramlines festival in 2015. Very powerful, emotional performance but also with lots of humour. I was reduced to tears of my own when he did ‘Levi Stubbs’, and also ‘Between the Wars’ which always gets to me. He also wrote a very interesting book about patriotism and national identity, The Progressive Patriot.
5 November 2016 at 13:59 #54571@missrori Re your last point, ‘why was he stuck in the dial so long?’ – I assumed that the time that passed for the Doctor in the dial was quite separate to the time that was passing for others outside it, so to all intents and purposes he might have just popped out for a moment, even whilst for him all of those millennia were passing. I don’t know if this was addressed, or whether, having been raised on Narnia, I just took it for granted….
1 November 2016 at 20:56 #54502We rather liked the Sheffield references. After all, Sheffield includes one of the wealthiest political constituencies in the UK, as well as some of the most economically deprived – so no lack of realism in a Sheffield person being proper posh. However we took umbrage at ” ‘It was paradise’. ‘So, not Sheffield then’.”
1 November 2016 at 20:52 #54501Plenty of nods to Buffy – not least the sad fate of the headmaster who is eaten, just like Principal Flutie (eaten by the Pack – high school kids possessed by hyena spirits) and Principal Snyder (eaten by the Mayor in the form of a giant snake).
Overall, lots to like, some creaks and clunkiness but nothing that can’t be sorted.
21 October 2016 at 20:15 #54295I think it was this forum where we were talking about Aberfan earlier? Apols if not, but if you want to read about it, you won’t do better than this from one of my favourite bloggers:
https://gerryco23.wordpress.com/2016/10/21/aberfan-the-sorrow-and-anger-of-fifty-years/
21 October 2016 at 15:11 #54291My thought’s??? Jeez, and I’m usually the apostrophe police… My thoughts.
21 October 2016 at 15:10 #54290https://cathannabel.wordpress.com/2016/10/21/tears-of-rage/ If anyone’s interested, my thought’s on Bob Dylan and the Nobel Prize for Literature…
15 October 2016 at 13:24 #54216@puroandson Re BTL comments on Hillsborough, things have improved markedly since the Review and the inquests. For many years virtually every comment would be blaming ‘drunken, ticketless, late arriving Scousers’ for the disaster. What I noticed since the inquests was some bright sparks who haven’t bothered reading the coverage of the findings saying ‘of course the fact that lots of fans turned up late, drunk without tickets MUST have been part of the cause’ when that has been completely debunked. I did respond to one of those recently – in a fairly measured way – and noted that I got a lot of support. But you’re right about BTL in general – rapid onset of rage, followed by what is even worse, despair…
Yes the lager/beer distinction is of deep import to me and many Brits. There is a huge variety of beers out there, with really distinctive flavours (if not killed by over-chilling), and one can be just as much a connoisseur as with wine! Lager to me is a thirst quencher on a hot day rather than a drink I would savour, and I can’t tell one from another.
14 October 2016 at 21:49 #54200@puroandson Started the blog over four years ago – it’s somehow turned out to be a lot more political than I envisaged originally! I blame Events. Anyways, thanks all for kind comments, @jimthefish et al.
It’s so brilliant that Son is getting so much out of this Forum, above and beyond the Who content. The notion that, thanks to discussions here, he is now informed and informing others re Hillsborough and Joss Whedon and all sorts of stuff, well it inspires me.
Have to back @mudlark up re ‘warm beer’. Lager and suchlike need to be served cold but as they have no real flavour anyway, there’s no loss. Proper beer should be at cellar temperature, to allow one to truly appreciate the subtlety of the flavour. Personally I like it up to room temperature (my father in law used to warm his beer up on the hob, which even as a teenager I thought was pretty weird).
Re Aberfan, like Hillsborough, a single name that conjures up a whole world of horror. I was 9 when it happened, and I do remember the news reports. Now, as an adult and a parent, the impact of it is so much more intense. There are parallels with Hillsborough – the fact that the disaster was eminently foreseeable, that those in authority tried from the outset to wriggle out of their responsibility for it, the callousness displayed towards the bereaved (can you credit that Charity Commission staff considered whether to insist that before any payment from the relief fund was made to bereaved parents, each case should be reviewed to ascertain if the parents had been close to their children and were thus likely to be suffering mentally?). But the one thing that is different of course is that no one attempted to claim that the Aberfan victims had themselves caused the disaster – something that commentators below the line are saying to this day about Hillsborough, despite the clear outcomes of every inquiry since Taylor.
12 October 2016 at 08:51 #54189@blenkinsopthebrave Just spotted a typo that entirely changes the gist of what I wrote above (#54185) – what I actually meant to say was ‘having more time to read and write stuff is a joy‘! Can’t even blame auto-correct…
10 October 2016 at 11:23 #54185@blenkinsopthebrave Thank you so much! Re retirement, I’m still working out in many ways how to do it. I had to be so fearsomely, fanatically organised all my working life to do the stuff I did, that I didn’t want to carry that over into retirement, but I do now need to plan my time a bit more, so I’m trying to find the right balance. Having said that, I haven’t regretted it for a nano-second, and having more time to read and write stuff is a job. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on retirement – I started drafting a blog piece about it ages ago but realised it was too early in the process so I might revisit that at some point.
8 October 2016 at 10:33 #54167@puroandson Many thanks for your kind words and support. And a wave to Son!
More than happy to share the blog with anyone who might be interested! This is the link:
https://cathannabel.wordpress.com/
Must catch up on all the discussions on the site – haven’t yet visited the new pub yet!
3 October 2016 at 11:44 #54095@ichabod Yes The Returned was wonderful. And v v French as you say! I loved the second series too – it didn’t provide neat explanations or resolutions (which made some viewers rather cross), and the ending left us with mysteries and ambiguities, as well as an acknowledgement of the circularity of the process of life, death, birth and rebirth. I hope there won’t be a series 3 – it doesn’t need one, and perhaps French tv is slightly less prone than British or American to carrying on beyond the point when the ideas have run out .
2 October 2016 at 16:11 #54084@ichabod @janetteb @puroandson
I get what you say about zombies not being inherently interesting – they have no motivation, no malevolent intent, they just exist and eat. The terror lies in their insensate inexorability, rather than in any notion of evil.
For me TWD is less a zombie drama than a post-apocalyptic drama. The focus is on what happens when some catastrophe overtakes us and all of the structures and protections that society has put in place collapse, and how individuals then form groups and attempt to build structures and protections for this new world, and how moral and political beliefs adapt (or not) to it. The zombies are the context rather than the content I would say.
Thus, as I said to @puroandson, I have no problem with the biggest threat in TWD coming not from the zombie hordes but from other groups of survivors who have left any principle other than survival for their own group far behind. In Rick’s group there is debate and discussion – if they encounter someone new, how do they ascertain whether this is someone who could join them or someone who is purely a threat? when and how can it be justifiable to kill another person? what is leadership? etc etc. In Negan’s group, not so much…
The repetitive nature of the plot is an inherent problem with post-apocalyptic drama, where the threat is ongoing rather than a one-off disaster from which society can rebuild. But rather than it making it less interesting as a premise, for me it just means that it should be on a limited lifespan and not go on forever like the walking dead themselves… There have been other flaws in the most recent series in particular that they need to address, even if they do draw things to a close of some kind at the end of the next.
1 October 2016 at 14:03 #54062@puroandson
Re TWD, I think the fundamental problem is that it’s hard to see a long-term arc. We’ve established that not only those who get chomped on but anyone who dies joins the ever-growing ranks of the undead, so it’s hard to see how any future series can do anything other than go round the same loops. Unless there’s some really creaky phlebotinum (sp? as it’s a made up Whedon word, only he can adjudicate I guess)/deus ex machina to be invoked. We’re pretty sure by now that there is no group of scientists stashed away in a bunker somewhere working on a cure, and whilst I guess it might be the case that Judith and other children conceived after the outbreak might be immune, we have no reason to think that, nor could that be a major plot development unless we jump forward a fair number of years.
SPOILER ALERT – if you haven’t seen all of S6 look away now…
It’s fine that the focus is not on the actual dead but on the survivors (and there’s always that ambiguity as to which lot are in fact the WD), and the threat from groups who take advantage of the absence of infrastructure to make their own rules to their own benefit. There’s a lot of potential interest in that, which has been explored over past series, in terms of the ways in which different groups attempt to structure themselves and deal with threats (Terminus, Woodbury, Alexandria, Hilltop, etc).
But Negan’s lot have been imbued with almost supernatural strength and knowledge, and simultaneously Rick’s lot have undergone a sudden tendency both to hubris (did it not occur to anyone that the base they attacked might not actually contain the entire Saviour crew?) and to recklessness (let Alexandria’s only doctor off on an unnecessary reccy – sure, what could possibly go wrong? All the group’s big hitters go wandering off in search of Carol or in search of the first lot who went in search of Carol, leaving Gabriel in charge – sure, what could possibly go wrong?). The problem with this is that we’ve previously seen Rick’s group as having what it takes to survive, in contrast to the Alexandrians, and yet now they seem to walk into the most obvious traps. Characters who have previously been shown as sensible and cautious now behave like idiots, for no reason other than to ensure that the entire cast (more or less) can be in mortal jeopardy at season’s end.
And the other thing is the reluctance to allow core cast members to be killed off (of course who knows if that is about to change…). This not only stretches credulity beyond snapping point, but cheapens the emotional charge of the drama – why weep for Glenn when odds are he will be back? There’s always been an element of this, as with all long-running dramas (the old Star Trek red uniform signalling that a character is cannon fodder, whilst we know the main guys are safe and will dodge death repeatedly and improbably).
At its best, there is real depth of character development – Carol and Daryl in particular, though the latter in particular has been wasted this last season. And it’s not been afraid to subvert the narrative structure to explore a bit of back story or whatever. There have been stand-out episodes that I will never forget – the one in the prison where Herschel is desperately trying to treat those who’ve got the fever, the one where Carol tells Lizzie to look at the flowers, and so on.
I cannot imagine stopping watching it as long as it is being broadcast, so I hope that there is good stuff still to come – and I’d be ok with losing even some of my favourite characters in the interests of getting out of some of the ruts it has got into.
Long-term it is not really sustainable I think. I’d favour calling it a day after this series – resolving some of the character arcs and leaving the survivors on the road once again, heading for who knows what – but networks don’t tend to like those open, ambiguous endings. So series either tend to be cut off in their prime (Firefly RIP) or go on and on and on long past the point when they have anything to say.
Still, I’ll be on the sofa, breath bated and so forth, for the season opener…
1 October 2016 at 10:16 #54060@puroandson Re TWD, yes I have lots of thoughts! I had a lot of problems with the last series, although nothing on this earth would stop me watching the next one… I’m attempting to gather those thoughts and write something moderately coherent, so (assuming I can still get in to the site – it’s a bit hit and miss even via VPN!) will post later. But I agree the circularity is a problem and I’m not sure how they will get out of it – was having just that conversation with my son recently on one of our walks – along with the increasing tendency for members of Rick’s group to behave with utter stupidity and recklessness, quite out of character, which has us all shouting at the screen in frustration. Anyways, more later, I hope!
30 September 2016 at 17:26 #54052Thank you @pedant for the suggestion re using a VPN, it worked straight away. I was getting worried that I might be shut out from this lovely place for ever…
30 September 2016 at 15:36 #54051I’ve been making the most of my membership at the local arthouse cinema in recent weeks, and have had an excellent run of movies:
Two quite dark films:
Childhood of a Leader – (see also comments on the Music thread) – really interesting and powerful but loses its way (IMO) in the final act. It’s a debut for the director, so will watch future films with interest.
Anthropoid – about the Czech resistance, the attack on Heydrich and its aftermath. Grim, but v well done.
Two rather delightful films:
Captain Fantastic – not, as one of my friends assumed, part of the Marvel cinematic universe, but a very funny and touching study in parenting, starring Viggo Mortensen. A lovely film, some elements of the plot perhaps a bit too easy to foresee, but beautifully played and life-affirming.
Hunt for the Wilderpeople – directed by the guy who did the mock-doc What we do in the shadows. This is a delight, v funny and again life affirming, everyone came out of the cinema grinning from ear to ear. However, the slogan ‘No child left behind’ will never sound quite right to you again.
And one exceedingly French film:
Things to come – stars Isabelle Huppert as a philosophy professor reevaluating her life. I would suggest a drinking game relating to any references to philosophers or philosophy texts, but I fear anyone attempting it would be comatose within half an hour or less. However, I do like enigmatic, intellectual French films where v little actually happens, so if you do too, this could be for you.
Enjoy!
30 September 2016 at 15:21 #54050Thanks @puroandson for the nudge! I’m back… had a few problems logging in but some helpful soul on the Website comments forum put me right.
Music – seeing the pic of Scott Walker reminded me that he did the soundtrack to a film I saw recently – Childhood of a Leader
Doesn’t feature his voice but I really really liked the soundtrack – the film was very good, missed being truly outstanding by a bit of a margin, but certainly interesting and powerful with music to match.
Superpowers – I have none (like Puro I cannot roll my ‘r’s – praps why I chose to study French rather than Spanish or Italian, I can’t curl my tongue or burp on cue) but if asked why I chose my husband, the answer is that he could raise his eyebrows independently of one another, AND could play a bunch of Bowie songs on guitar.
5 July 2016 at 16:21 #53106This is quite a strange mix – perhaps because it’s the Christmas special. But how dark a version of Christmas can you get – with malevolent murderous Santas and a Xmas tree transformed into a weapon. And then to top it all, the ultimate cliche of Xmas-set family drama, ‘quick, come outside, it’s snowing!’, which is always used to create a sense of seasonal magic actually invokes something horror as it turns out it is not snow but ash. I was reminded of the film Lore, where as WWII comes to an end, ash from burned incriminating Nazi documents falls like snow on the heroine (evoking, darker still, the stories told by people living in towns near concentration camps about the human ash from the ovens falling from the sky).
I felt Harriet Smith was dealt with rather too summarily. I’d have liked her as PM to be developed over a longer period, rather than to be despatched so brutally by the Doc. Her rationale for going for the Torchwood option (is this the first reference to Torchwood? I can’t remember…) is convincing enough, but I was still somewhat dissatisfied – I remember being really pleased to see her again and then dismayed when she took that final decision.
The Doc is either comatose in this or pretty full-on – but that works fine. We need that period of the new incumbent establishing his personality, mannerisms, etc. What I’d forgotten, and which did set something of the tone for Ten’s tenure, was how often his sexiness is mentioned. OK, he is very lovely, but it seems a bit heavy handed, in retrospect, as if it was already determined that his relationships with companions would be complicated by attraction in a way that they hadn’t previously, and from which Eleven and Twelve have had to backtrack.
Oh, and BTW, when he says, ‘Did you miss me?’, anyone else think of Moriarty?
27 April 2016 at 18:01 #51940Watching live coverage of the Hillsborough vigil now. I half meant to go to that match (as a Forest supporter), but instead I was in my kitchen, just across the valley from Hillsborough, wondering what was going on, and why the football had stopped and weeping and weeping as the death toll climbed through the rest of that day. I have never understood how those lies could have been believed, so widely, and proved so persistent in the face of the evidence – testament to the prejudice against football fans, against scousers, against working class people, and the shameless determination of the powers that be to cover their own backsides at all costs. The lies are nailed now, and the 96 and survivors and families are finally vindicated, and it should never have taken 27 years. I met a couple of the family members a few years back, just after the Independent Panel had completed their deliberations, and I shook their hands and embarassingly burst into tears as I tried to explain how I admired their dignity and courage, their refusal to settle for anything less than truth and justice. Tears again now as the families come out onto the steps of St Georges Hall.
Yes, watch Jimmy McGovern’s drama. At the time people said it was too polemical, it was overstating things, it was biased. Everything in it has been vindicated since. I honestly didn’t think we would ever get to this point, I thought the prejudice was too entrenched, the vested interests too strong. But here we are.
15 February 2016 at 12:08 #50981Oh, The Walking Dead – I love it. When I started watching it I didn’t have high expectations – zombies aren’t per se all that interesting, after all. But of course it’s not really about the walkers, its about the survivors, about community, loyalty, what one might have to do to survive and the point at which that becomes too much, loss and love and everything that makes us human. At its best it is about the most intense hour of telly imaginable. There isn’t the scope for the kind of theorising we do here about Who, and it’s a world away from the other undead show that I love, Les Revenants, which explores the boundaries between life and death in a much more nuanced, philosophical (and very French) way. But it’s blisteringly good drama, and I am so invested in those people that the mid-season break feels like cruel and unusual punishment indeed… The waiting is over now though.
11 January 2016 at 13:21 #50075Been listening to Bowie since we got up this morning. Cried so much my face was wet. No other musician has been as much part of my life, for over 40 years, and still doing new and great stuff (we listened to Black Star on Saturday night and it was brilliant). Managed to gather my thoughts enough to write something:
https://cathannabel.wordpress.com/2016/01/11/loving-the-alien/
25 December 2015 at 20:32 #49661We’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 them were quite sexy too.
That’s probably as much as I can articulate at this stage, after hours and hours of food prep, a considerable amount of food consumption, plus a certain amount of wine and sherry, and allowing for the fact that I watched with a very large cat (a Maine Coon to be precise) sitting more or less on my head and purring almost loudly enough to wake mother-in-law from her slumbers.
It was really very lovely. Merry Christmas all.
19 December 2015 at 19:31 #49526@pedant Ha! Guilty as charged. Will gird up my loins (if I can locate them) and woman up and all that.
19 December 2015 at 14:41 #49522Hello 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 articulate any halfway intelligent/intelligible thoughts. I have been reading and enjoying everyone’s wonderful contributions, of course (and a warm welcome to our very own Hybrid, @puroandson). The lead-up to my retirement has been partly to blame (and the fact that it’s coincided with the lead-up to Christmas) – my head has been full to bursting and my thoughts have been careening around all over the place incoherently, interrupting my sleep with sudden random anxiety attacks…. However, I am now on holiday, as a precursor to being an actual retired person as of 1 January, and so I see some prospect of being able to follow a train of thought for long enough for it to get somewhere. If so, then some time between Christmas and New Year there might – might, I say, not wishing to jinx it or commit myself too rashly – be a Who blog. In the meantime, carry on chaps, you’re doing a splendid job.
15 November 2015 at 18:21 #47008The 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 two boxes, a horn and ivory box full of dreams, of the same colours, to signify good and bad. Coincidence, the episode after the Osgood boxes? Well, possibly but who knows…
14 November 2015 at 19:09 #46925Ah, yes. What a pertinent and poignant song for today.
26 October 2015 at 07:36 #45537@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 Ashildr’s immortality – does she age at all? If not, she’d have to keep moving on, since even a few years’ sojourn with mere mortals would get people wondering, and in which case she can’t realistically (OK, silly word to use in context but it still needs to make some sense, even if of a bonkers variety) have been part of Clara and her Dad’s normal life for as many years as we see (let alone the years before that Clara has evidence of). I’m assuming she doesn’t age, because otherwise the mechanisms by which she would revert to the age at which we see her would be complicated (and likely to have been referenced in the episode, e.g. in the diaries). I think Ashildr is saying look, I’m here now, looking very directly at the camera, but also I was there, I saw, I know – what, though? What does she know? Obviously something about Clara (I can’t recall the dialogue when she was asking about/commenting on Clara). Damn, I clearly need to watch each ep more than once – roll on retirement! (@purofilion yes indeedy I am happy and excited about it!)
Oh, and @pedant, thanks for that link. A fine piece – and indeed you, and @kharis are not alone: https://cathannabel.wordpress.com/2014/02/06/time-to-talk/
25 October 2015 at 21:09 #4547925 October 2015 at 21:06 #45477<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 bugger off and take your non-agenda with you, there’s a good chap’.
Anyway, back to Who – @kharis, I hadn’t spotted that, but if so, then I entirely agree, it’s no coincidence. A bit of googling is called for, I think.
25 October 2015 at 18:31 #45463A 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 retrofitted into the Who history, and that opens up lots of very very juicy possibilities, ripe for exploration by the great minds on this Forum. Given how strong that theme is, and the interlinked one of Clara’s future, I’m ready to forgive the writer for the lion chap and his rather ineffectual space invaders.
24 October 2015 at 09:31 #45362@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, and do charity stuff. So expect me to be showing up here a lot more often, speculating madly about links to obscure French New Wave films or the Mabinogion or whatever, or just enthusing incoherently.
And I do so agree with your point about the depth and complexity of the conversations stimulated by Who, and what that says about the programme. This whole ‘just a kids show’ riles me. It’s not the ‘kids show’, it’s the ‘just’. As if kids don’t deserve complex, nuanced, layered writing, narratives with ambiguity and loose ends – and as if writing like that doesn’t have masses to offer to adult audiences as well. The books I devoured as a kid fuelled my imagination, and still do, and they led me to Greek and Norse myth, British history, science fiction, and the literary classics. They were aimed at kids, not books I took off my parents’ shelves, but their writers never dumbed down, they gave their primary audience fabulous stories, beautifully written, and which could give more to the reader every time they revisited them. Of course, some people use the phrase ‘just a story’ which riles me even more. What could be more important than stories? Stories, as we know, can make us fly.
5 October 2015 at 08:40 #44097@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…
5 October 2015 at 08:21 #44094THis 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 painting which I think I agree must be something to do with the Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the sea serpent wrapped around the ship and what appear to be children on the deck. But isn’t it odd to have a mural from a children’s book (albeit one that many adults remember with great fondness, as perhaps a gateway to all sorts of myths and legends and fantasies) in the canteen of an underground facility with no child occupants? It must, therefore, surely, have some deep significance in the narrative.
Drowned villages are also endlessly fascinating. I live near Ladybower reservoir, beneath which are the remains of the villages of Ashopton and Derwent. And one of my top books ever (and one which relates to my actual research thus justifying me looking up stuff about it on a research day), W G Sebald’s Austerlitz, refers to the drowned village of Llanwddyn, submerged under the Vyrnwy reservoir. In the part of the book relating to Austerlitz’s childhood with foster parents in the area of the lake, he imagines ‘the sub-aquatic existence of the people of Llanwyddin’, ‘ still down in the depths, sitting in their homes and walking along the road, but unable to speak, and with their eyes opened far too wide’.
Clearly it would be rash to speculate about what the significance of all of this might be ahead of the second part. Equally clearly you lot are going to do so and if I can’t actively contribute anything interesting, I will hugely enjoy you doing so…
27 September 2015 at 18:14 #43572<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 had a plan of his own – in which case, did that plan include telling Davros about Gallifrey, and if so, why? Or did he just assume the revolting sewers were about to take care of Davros and all his children for good – which seems unwise given the regularity with which friends/enemies survive certain death…. </span>
<span class=”useratname”>@oodaus I had a funny feeling too about the way the Doc said ‘I’m so sorry’. I thought for a minute that he couldn’t get her out of the Dalek, that Missy had wired her in too well, so she would be harmed by being taken out? I think the fact we didn’t see her get out is not necessarily significant, but what he said and the tone in which he said it… that troubles me a little, even though the subsequent scenes give no indication this is anything other than Clara for real.
</span>8 September 2015 at 06:48 #42438@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 the tried and trusted ‘our hero is in a coma’ trope (see also 28 Days Later/Day of the Triffids), with the world already gone to hell in a handcart. I like the slow build up, the hints and clues and then the confrontation. I suspect things will now move pretty fast (though not as fast as in World War Z, given that the dead walk rather than run in this version). Yes, I’m a zombie bitch too…
7 September 2015 at 06:32 #42422@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 those kids etc, felt about this…. ). And yes I have to admit, not that many well-rounded male characters in the women writers – I always quite liked the chap in Persuasion, whose name eludes me, and George Eliot creates some interesting ones.
6 September 2015 at 21:30 #42410@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 Eliot. Dickens tends to idealise those female characters to a problematic extent and whilst the ‘back story’ for Esther is certainly consistent with her behaviour, there’s a sense that we’re meant to approve her passivity (in relation to her own situation) and obsessive self-deprecation rather than to see it as evidence of damage. I find Fanny Price easier to believe in, even though many critics find her just as irritating, she’s more credible.
5 September 2015 at 16:05 #42385@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 series, whereas I felt she was infuriating in precisely the ways in which real teenagers are infuriating (of which I was probably being reminded fairly frequently during at least some of my re-watches of the series). I’ve seen the same thing on other TV series blogs – the daughter in series 1 of Homeland, for example (Dana? can’t remember for sure). Maybe we don’t like being reminded of what utter Pains in the Posterior we ourselves were at that age…
5 September 2015 at 15:59 #42384Just 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 reality, his passion for justice and fairness when he’s writing about the invisible people in society (Jo, the crossing sweeper in Bleak House, for one). There are aspects that I don’t love, such as the fact that the ‘good’ women are usually tiresome in the extreme (I want to slap Esther Summerson every time I read Bleak House – for god’s sake woman enough with the ‘little me’ crap, and sort yerself out!) and of course the Little Nell sentimentality is cloying to modern tastes (see the Doctor’s lit crit in The Unquiet Dead…). But I can forgive all of his flaws – his greatest books (Bleak House, I’m prepared to argue about which others but BH is the greatest novel in the ENglish language and I will brook no dissent on that topic) have such power and emotional truth that they never fail to move me.
Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with Heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us, every day.
I thought of these words this week, seeing the picture of Aylan Kurdi on the beach. What Dickens could have written about the scenes in Europe this week – he could have moved hearts and minds.
4 September 2015 at 07:46 #42340A 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 vortex do that to him? I can’t remember how it was explained when we met him again in Torchwood. I’m sure someone here will know! And, did all that timey wimey power then cancel out/reverse the Dalek destruction of earth, and the deaths on the station? I had something in my eye for the last part of the episode, and can’t be quite sure.
Rose – magnificent as Bad Wolf. And as an actress Billie Piper was, it has to be said, fantastic. We had extremely low expectations – oh dear, v v minor league pop starlet tries her hand at a spot of acting… but no, she was wonderful. And that’s demonstrated in this episode particularly I think. In the scene in the cafe (where Jackie is once again awesome) – she’s on the one hand entirely understandably and laudably desperate to not be able to save her friends, to have left them dying while she eats coleslaw, and on the other she is entirely understandably (if one has ever been 19 or the parent of someone who is or was once 19) cruelly oblivious to what she’s doing to Jackie and Mickey. The moment when she says that there’s nothing for her here was brutal. Piper inhabits both, and goes on to be equally convincingly a mega powerful cosmic force. Not bad for a v v minor league pop starlet.
I think the Doctor does have a blind spot for Rose. He doesn’t see – maybe doesn’t want to see – the selfishness in her treatment of family/boyfriend, but despite the importance he places on ordinary people and ordinary lives, he doesn’t totally get it. How would he? So what he recognises in Rose is her courage, her adventurous spirit, her empathy (with everyone except Jackie and Mickey perhaps….). And she is all those things, even if she is also a pain in the bum teenager.
Mickey’s finest hour – he gets the punch to the guts that’s ‘there’s nothing for me here’ and rather than going off in a huff, he rises splendidly to the occasion and commits to giving Rose the chance to do what she needs to do. He doesn’t quite manage it, it takes Jackie to bring the power to do the job. But he wants to, at the cost, potentially, of losing her for ever. Mickey the Hero.
So, on to Doctor Dishy (cheers, @phaseshift!). He is, though, isn’t he. Whether that was an entirely good thing, I’m not sure – I don’t necessarily want to fancy the Doctor, but Tennant didn’t give me a choice. Can’t wait to crack open the next box set….
2 September 2015 at 17:26 #42270Not a huge amount of thought stimulated by this episode, TBH. I wasn’t enthusiastic about another Slitheen storyline, to say the least, though they (all credit to Annette Badland, as well as to the writers) did at least make the portrayal a bit more nuanced, even if the sentimentality doesn’t amount to anything resembling morality. I’d completely forgotten that she is turned into an egg. How very bizarre…
Yes the Rose/Mickey denoument is well done. I’m perhaps less hard on Rose than some of you – and he is all over the place here, albeit explicably so, since he’s come running at her command, only to be made to feel extraneous to events in the new Tardis team, so he veers from proposing a hotel room to inventing a relationship with another girl before facing up to the reality and slipping away into the shadows. He gets in a few sharp comments though – because he feels excluded he sees them all through a more cynical lens. He’s so right that Jack is cheesy, for example!
On to the finale…
22 August 2015 at 19:56 #41988I love this. The ’empty child’ is both chilling, genuine shiver down the spine stuff, and heartbreaking. A child’s voice saying ‘Mummy?’ is designed to be impossible to ignore, unless you’ve a heart of stone, and so you really feel the pull to answer it, to go to it and see what it needs, even whilst feeling that chill, knowing that this is really not right. And so the resolution has real emotional resonance. It all comes down to that child and that young woman who’s been living with fear and guilt for much longer than the blitz, and can finally let it go. I know, ok, the entire of humanity is at threat but we’re kind of used to that on Who (as on Buffy, Angel et al), and it always does come down to individual humans rather than humanity en masse.
Re-watching it, the only thing it lost was the power of the reveal. First time, I remember suddenly ‘getting’ the nanogenes thing, a bit of a Sixth Sense ‘Oh!!’ moment, and of course, this time I remembered all along. But that added some poignancy to the Nancy storyline. And the moment of the nanogenes themselves ‘getting’ what human beings were, and how they worked, was visually lovely as well as moving. It kind of reminded me of the transformation scene in Beauty & the Beast, actually, which always chokes me up a bit.
And alongside all the emotional stuff there’s the cracking dialogue, the repartee, the innuendo (more than in any previous episode). And the undercutting of the surface stereotypes was delightfully done – Algie who might seem to be straightforwardly straight outta Dambusters turns out to be nothing of the kind, and the pillar of the community turns out to be a pillock of the community, and Captain Jack turns out to be an equal opportunities kind of a flirt, and so forth.
Plus, it gives me an excellent line to use when people hassle me at busy times. ‘I’m trying to resonate concrete!’. They won’t be back again.
And one tiny damp island says no to tyranny. And everybody lives.
Love it.
20 August 2015 at 06:45 #41928Re-watching these, ten years on, is fascinating. At the time what I brought to them was fond memories of classic Who (interwoven with all the stuff I’d watched since, amongst which Buffy was probably the strongest thread), and hope – each week almost with crossed fingers willing it to be good enough to do justice to the legacy and to ensure that it would not again fall into the abyss. Now of course I can see how those early episodes echoed through the series that followed, and the anxiety is not really a feature – it’s established itself all over again and whilst not every episode has been good some, including this one, have been, well, fantastic.
I cried all through it first time round, pretty much. Ten years on – yep, same. Such a powerful idea, bringing into emotional focus all of the time paradoxes that have been giving me a headache since I started watching/reading sci fi and fantasy. Rose’s denial – how could one man’s death or life change anything, he wasn’t important. The Doctor’s assertion that ordinary people are the most important thing of all.
The opening voice over reminded me of Danny Pink’s (first) demise – Clara protesting about how drab and ordinary a day it was, how boring. ‘It was ordinary. People just kept walking with their iPods and their shopping bags. He was alive, then he was dead and it was nothing. Like stepping off a bus’. The ordinariness is important again in the very poignant scene where the doctor asks the bride and groom how they met, how it all came about.
I loved the fact that the place of refuge was the traditional sanctuary of the church, but that this was nothing to do with it being a holy place, protected by any kind of god, but just because it was the oldest place around there, thus the hardest for the Reapers to get into. Who has always had a kind of humanist perspective both because of the value the Doctor places on ordinary people (when he isn’t ranting about stupid apes) and because the Doctor as Saviour is so ungodlike – he gets it wrong frequently, doesn’t know everything even when he thinks he does, and suffers from bouts of arrogance, bitterness and sheer bad temper. This bit reminded me of part of one of the scariest books I ever read – Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising. It’s a kids book, but it’s truly unnerving, and at one point as I recall (and it’s probably 30 years since I read it, if not more) the central characters are in a church, at Christmas,with the forces of evil howling around them. God is no use to them – I can’t actually remember what happens next, just that moment, with the vicar realising he has nothing to offer that’s any use against these forces.
Pete’s final sacrifice was very Sydney Carton. It is a far far better thing, etc. He’s been a bit of a rubbish husband and dad but he’s good enough to know that and to grasp the extraordinary complexities and paradoxes of the situation quicker than anyone except the Doctor.
Jackie, as always, is fab. With HUGE hair.
Best so far, without a doubt, and for me marked out one of the things that was going to be so different about new Who as opposed to classic Who. It was going to make me cry. A lot.
19 August 2015 at 20:19 #41919This is fascinating to re-watch, given some of the more recent encounters with the Daleks. Especially Into the Dalek. The line ‘you would make a good Dalek’ is in both, I think, or something very very similar. And the same polarisation between Clara/Rose wanting to heal and mend and believe in potential goodness and the Doc unrelenting because of all the history and all the loss.
For all the goofiness we see CE as the war doctor here and revisit all of the moments when genocide is/seems to be the only way. I don’t know whether this theme emerged explicitly before TB’s doctor but I remember vividly an episode with him with his finger on the button or the equivalent, hesitating and torturing himself with the decision – and I can’t remember how that played out, just that he was agonised by being faced with such a choice.
Rose doesn’t know any of this. She responds to a creature being tortured, and is angered by the Doctor’s seeming callousness towards it. And it’s her naive reaching out to this creature that defeats it in the end. As throughout this series, the audience is an unknown – but here there is of course a nod to the BG Whovians, in the revelation that this Dalek can manage stairs perfectly well after all…
Von Statton is pretty broadly drawn but the arrogance and greed comes across powerfully. I was reminded of the Jurassic Park/World franchise, having seen its most recent outing a few weeks back. Adam, well, meh, didn’t warm to him, though of course I probably remembered that he turned out to be a wrong ‘un – Rose’s judgement perhaps is poor here, though her tendency is to assume the best of everyone (and she may have been temporarily swayed by him being pretty, as the Doc said).
Not the best ep in this series, but important.
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