@ps1l0v3y0u      I thought I had the timeline of Blink! straight in my mind, but now I’m not so sure.   I’m pretty sure the Doctor went to Wester Drumlins because it was dangerous and because he’s the Doctor.    Where he and Martha got zapped by an Angel, and the cops discovered the Tardis and towed it away.   (Maybe they thought it was one of…[Read more]

Well, I just re-watched this episode again, a year later.   I wrote down my lengthy comments on it, but reading this page, they’re almost exactly like what I said a year ago, so I won’t post them.   Just a couple of points that I didn’t mention before.

The Qurunx is new, and quite cool.  But *of course* the Doctor knows exactly what it is, as w…[Read more]

@ps1l0v3y0u    Oops!  For ‘Laura’ read ‘Sarah’.   Dunno where I got that from.

I’m not querying the Doctor’s presence at Wester Drumlins, he may have been in pursuit of the Angels.   Just, how he knew to write ‘Duck’ on the wall – and then paper over it, unless some subsequent tenant did it? – and that Sally would uncover it just in time to save…[Read more]

@thane16  syzygy   I’d agree, soaps are likely very difficult to write well.   Not least because they come out every night (some of ’em, at least).  How can anyone keep coming up with fresh original dialogue on that schedule?

And then, each of the half-dozen storylines gets cut up into 5-minute chunks which get screened intercut with the other…[Read more]

@ps1l0v3y0u   Well I’m perfectly happy at the prospect of a Billie Doc.   And, as you say, she’s older – which is a good thing in my estimation.   A bit of maturity helps to enhance the Doctor’s credibility, as far as I’m concerned.  20-something Billie was great as Rose.   I think she would have been much too young to be the Doctor at that age…[Read more]

@whohar    I don’t think it matters in the slightest that we don’t know who the ‘current’ Doctor is.   He’s a time traveller, can there even be said to be a ‘current’ Doctor?   As you said, the non-TV material is free to use any incarnation they wish.

Obviously, my viewpoint is totally different to yours.   But then, I was always an asynchro…[Read more]

@pa1l0v3y0u   I agree that some Who eps are plotted with perfect logic.   (I’ve never tried to analyse it episode by episode, I hope there would be a large number that do hold up).   As an example of excellence, Blink – in spite of its complications – fitted exactly.   (Well,  I’ve only found one loose end – when Sally Sparrow uncovers the Doct…[Read more]

@whohar   @janetteb   I don’t find the doctor’s revival as a Rose lookalike creepy at all.   It might possibly be so if the Doctor had deliberately chosen that appearance.  But do we know how the regeneration process decides on the look of the next iteration?  Does it randomly fish something out of the subject’s subconscious?   The Moment ch…[Read more]

@ps1l0v3y0u     All those are valid points.   I have to admit I was unconvinced by the rapid romance between Sarah and weirdo can’t-ever-keep-a-girlfriend Nick.   I just didn’t poke at it too much.   Like a lot of things in this episode, it all starts to unravel if you start pulling at dangling threads.   (Same could be said of many episodes, o…[Read more]

@ps1l0v3y0u     Re Moff:

I like clever writers, whether book or script.   No such thing as ‘too clever’, in my view.

(I’ll qualify that:   I don’t like writers who show off their ‘cleverness’ by deliberately using incomprehensible words or phrases, that’s just egocentrism in my view.   But that’s more likely to happen in text than in a script).…[Read more]

@nerys    I think the Doctor babbled very little in this episode, compared with previous Chibz episodes.   But I came to it after watching RTD/Gatwa’s seasons, so probably the technobabble was more noticeable.

I know there was previous technobabble in Who, but usually it was restrained, used only when necessary for the furtherance of the plot…[Read more]

[A year later:]

Legend of the Sea Devils

Starts off really well. Very atmospheric, very sinister, very Xena. Madam Ching really has some presence. I really like the actress, by the way.

The mood is kinda spoilt by Dan wearing the cartoon comedy pirate clobber. And Mr Carnival-mask Sea Devil. Looks a bit like a dyspeptic mutant Chihuahua with a…[Read more]

@whohar Well, if the 12th Doctor had been Whittaker, it would have been interesting to see how well she did with, errm, better direction. 🙂 Though by the nature of it, we wouldn’t then have seen her actual Chibz-directed performance so we would never be able to make comparisons. (But that’s a hypothetical, to my mind Capaldi + Moff = the Best Doc…[Read more]

Well I finally got my re-watch started, at Eve of the Daleks.

The idea of an ever-shortening time loop is quite a good plot device. In one way it faintly resembles CapaldiDoc’s repeated death in Heaven Sent, though the details are of course very different and this only lasts 50 minutes, not billions of years.

I’m not too sure *why* it resets on…[Read more]

@janetteb   I wouldn’t worry about ‘not keeping up.’    I used to comment on episodes as I got them then and then found that the previous comments I was ‘replying’ to were made two years before…   One of the hazards of ‘catching up’ with DVD’s.

But I don’t recall anyone ever being put out about it.

Having watched the movie recently, I can se…[Read more]

@winston     Rose was an excellent way to (re)start a series.   I think by then, production values (and special FX) had got ‘good enough’ (without the rather charitable allowances we have to make even for the last of OldWho).  Even Mickey’s sticky encounter with the bin was – okay.

I would say the Companion has been as prominent and as import…[Read more]

@craig     Thank you, Emperor.   🙂

@craig  –   just to let you know, some pest calling itself Dylan joined a few days ago and immediately spammed half a dozen forums with links to  ??American baseball jerseys???  (together with some bland AI-generated ‘ ‘nice post’ comments)

@winston  @ps1l0v3y0u   The Moment is definitely and memorably in the cell in the Tower, in the TV episode.  I remember the phrase ‘different case, same software’ and probably said by her.

BUT in the book, that was an internal thought of the Doctor (probably 11) – “The case was new, but the drives and software were the same as the old boy…[Read more]

@ps1l0v3y0u    I should be able to answer your ‘little nit picks’, having just read the book.   But I can’t, quite.   So now I’m just going to *have* to watch the episode again**.   As for the witch/well discussion, as I recall  (dashes off to get the book – damn Moff’s non-sequential chapter numbering…)   Elizabeth ordered them to be taken to…[Read more]