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@thane16

in the social messaging of Chibbers I thought it was overtly political – except I understand that’s both essential (plays & stories were always this) & part of Who’s rich history but something about the execution of their messages was clunky or unsubtle….

Well, you said in three lines what I took a page to do.   The ‘social messaging’ was more noticeable because it was more clumsily done.

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@ps1l0v3y0u   Chibz’ ‘history’ eps made me cringe because of the inaccuracies in the ones I do know a little about, which leads me to doubt his accuracy on those I don’t know about. (I stole that from somebody). I have to admit I didn’t watch Rosa because I was sure it was going to be a depressingly simplistic stereotype of white men bad, black woman good. (And this from a guy who wanted to see Kamala Harris win). Demons of the Punjab – it was hard to pick sides, except to say killing people is bad. It was maybe a bit of a change to find that the Demons were benign, though it did look suspiciously like the idea was stolen from Testimony.
Tesla was, historically, rubbish, Edison’s adversary in the ‘battle of the currents’ was George Westinghouse, who didn’t get a mention. Villa Deodati felt quite good, or would have been if it hadn’t been derailed by the Cyberman thing, I think a better play could have been written without the Doctor in it at all. But then it wouldn’t have been in Doctor Who.
The Crimean War thing was absurd, it was just so predictable that the officers would be complete idiots. No explanation for how history does not record that the enemy was short aliens. I get acutely uneasy when actual historical figures (like Mary Seacole) get re-imagined i.e. misrepresented. And they blew up the formidable Sontaran ships with – gunpowder, was it? I just tried reading a synopsis on Tardis.fandom.com but I gave up, cast of thousands and I couldn’t follow the plot.
Witchfinder was full of it. Gave the impression that witch trials were commonplace in England and always fatal (about 500 people were executed for witchraft in 150 years, from 2000 trials, because judges and juries tended to be sceptical), that James 1 was entirely responsible (more executions took place in Elizabeth 1’s last decade than in James’s 22 years); oh, and witches weren’t burned, they were hanged. A fifth of those were down to the thoroughly evil ‘Witchfinder General’ Mathew Hopkins, by the way. So I would guess that most people then thought, as I do, that they were a disgusting and horrible travesty of justice.

I’m a leftie environmentalist but Praxeus thoroughly put me off by the clumsiness of its message. And there’s the thing about Chibz – even things I would normally agree with, I instinctively disagree when Chibz says them because they’re so clumsy and obviously agenda-driven. Arachnids – I found the ugly American just too over the top to be credible (though in light of the last year or two I suppose I might have to reassess that). Orphan 55, again, wielded the environmental message like a sledge hammer.

Can’t help wondering whether Chibz was pandering to his perceived audience. Wasn’t he the guy who previously gave us Dinosaurs on a Spaceship with Queen Nefertiti (would have liked to see her as a Companion, by the way) meekly going off with obnoxiously super-macho Great White Hunter? (Because why? Presumably she Needed a Man? /s )

Finding any -isms in Moffs episodes is much more of a stretch. The scary old people in Amy’s Choice were inhabited by aliens. Nixon was fairly neutral I thought i.e. neither a villain nor a hero (in the episode). Thin Ice took a swipe at the bigoted aristocrat but other than him, nobody took much notice of Bill’s colour. Extremis used the Catholic Church as a background but neither particularly promoted nor attacked it, so far as I could see. Somehow I found Oxygen, savage as its anti-predatory-capitalism message was, was far less blatant than Kerblam! (And the way the owners of Kerblam had an epiphany and turned into humanitarian benefactors in the last couple of minutes was just – so simplistic as to be ridiculous).

Oh yeah, Spyfall. Started off really well, ended up doing violence to history and to real historic people (Noor Inayat Khan). Notice that in Let’s Kill Hitler Moff covered his tracks – he didn’t actually kill Hitler and one can reasonably assume that Adolf wouldn’t be too keen to publicise that somebody had punched him and shut him in a cupboard. That’s how it’s done.

Okay, I think that’s enough of me.

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@thane16 Um yes, that Edit function does seem a bit – erratic. I try not to use it. If I have to, and I’m feeling cautious, I just copy the whole post into a text editor first, that way if something goes wrong I’ve got a copy on my system.
And long comments, I do use a text editor and just paste the whole thing into the edit box.
I think the ?imaginary? monster in Listen was probably the scariest of the lot. Made my hair stand on end. How do you fight something that may not exist? (As an aside, I used to work on sewage pumping stations, big empty underground rooms with pumps humming away, and walking down the steps into one of those always made me nervous for no valid reason whatsoever. I think it’s a natural reaction. Of course I could never admit it.)
Followed by the Weeping Angels and the Silents. In the case of the Angels, it was precisely because they only move when you’re not looking. What you can’t see…
The Silents with their memory wipe were an ingenious variation on that, almost the inverse in fact. You could see them but instantly forgot as soon as you looked away. As a concept for generating interesting situations I think it was the best of any monster. And, as you noted, quite economical on the FX budget.

Love interests – I can take it or leave it. (I seem to recall an outcry from Old Whovians when Rose was first attracted to the Doctor). So long as it arises naturally and isn’t ‘tacked on’, I’m okay with it. It would be quite unusual if anyone had a whole string of female companions without mutual interest with any of them. I do recall Moff having a bit of fun with this on a couple of occasions when Companions asked the Tardis to show them a list of previous Companions. And of course there was a slight age difference – I seem to recall the Doctor was a few million years old after Heaven Sent – or I guess maybe not, if the clone machinery generated an exact replica each time of the Doctor who first entered, I guess he only aged a few hours in that episode?

@ps1l0v3y0u The Companions of nuWho – they all survived after a fashion. Rose is in the alternative reality with Doctor clone. Martha left the Doctor (and then, as you noted, ended up with Rose’s cast-off Mickey. Why? It made no sense at all. I have no idea why RTD did it, other than some impulse to ‘tie up loose ends’. She also ended up in UNIT. Both things made me unhappy). Donna survived, sorta, and even got her memory back. Lady Christina de Souza flew off to her own adventures (I wish she’d become a Companion, woulda been brilliant. Maybe a Clara before Clara arrived).
Amy (and Rory) ended up alive but back in time. Clara ended up roaming the universe with Ashildr in a stolen Tardis. And Bill ended up doing the same with her pet puddle Heather.
I don’t count any Companions post-Moff. 🙂
Like you, I can’t be bothered to devote the mental energy to reviewing Chibz’ episodes.
Incidentally, woud a female Doctor have worked for Moffat? I’m pretty sure it would. Moff (in my view) was good at constructing good female characters – Amy, Clara, Bill, Missy, Irene Adler (to stray into a different genre). He would have made it work.

I agree Time of the Doctor was a bit incoherent, but mostly harmless. But I really can’t explain Kill The Moon other than to suppose Moff just didn’t have time to rescue anything from the wreckage of that disaster of an episode. Every single scene was an affront to physics, reality and common sense, and it was utterly out of character for the Doctor to leave the fate of the world to chance (unless he was lurking with a self-destruct-inhibit button on his screwdriver, but even that would be entirely out of character), the appalling Courtney was a walking liability with all the charisma and intelligence of a cowpat – I cannot believe that the person who crafted Blink with such logical coherency and appealing characters could have had anything to do with such a debacle. Um, if you want your science fiction to be coherent or credible, then one or two deviations from everyday reality are permissible (e.g. time travel, monsters), but not every single scene. It’s fine to get metaphysical in episodes like The Doctor’s Wife, but it’s a shocking clash in episodes that rely on such physically-real entities as the Space Shuttle and space suits. (I’m ranting again). Brilliant as he is, I think asking Moff to write half the episodes himself while also being responsible for all the others was just too much.

@thane16 Puro I know you asked ps1l0v3y0u but I hope you don’t mind me interjecting – things I didn’t like about Chibz’ seasons? First, it ‘felt’ wrong, the Doctor didn’t feel like the Doctor (in many ways other than just gender). Dropping occasional culty references into the dialogue didn’t mitigate that. Second, the ‘fam’ (ugh) were too – diffuse – to work as a companion. Third, the Crystal Cave Tardis. Fourth, I’m not a fan of Universe-destroying threats. Fifth, Chibz’ writing just felt clumsy.

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@thane16    I do hope you didn’t have to retype the entire post.   I should have offered to fish it out of my inbox and send it to you.   I just didn’t think of it.

I’ll comment on your points tomorrow.   It’s 3-34 a.m. and Mrs D reminded me it’s about bedtime.   (I’m retired so don’t have to worry about getting up in the morning.   Mrs D is worse than me, some days she gets up after midday).

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@thane16  syzygy    I see a long post from you in my mailbox (addressed to demtarthurdent) and I see your one-line correction just above my last comment, but i can’t see your long post in this forum.   Not sure what happened there.

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@ps1l0v3y0u   I think what you call ‘bloke adjuncts’ is simply within the normal range of reactions of one human towards another human(oid).   The premise of the show is that the Doctor is the Main Character (and happened to be a bloke).   The Companion was, like all hero’s companions, a supporting character – except that, from ‘Rose’ onwards (and possibly from earlier than that) the Companion’s status de facto increased to rival the Doctor.   A trend I welcomed.

And I think the writing arose naturally from that.   It never felt forced to me.

That scene in Listen – was it this one:

(Clara leaves the restaurant, and Danny bangs his head on the table. The Doctor and Clara step out of the Tardis.)
CLARA: Is that what I look like from the back?
DOCTOR: It’s fine.
CLARA: I was thinking it was good.
DOCTOR: Really?
(Clara walks to the restaurant.)

Um, I can’t see anything particularly unusual about that.   I mean, guys certainly appreciate girls’ figures, but I imagine a girl, given the occasion, might be a teeny bit vain about their own appearance?   But I’m guessing there.

Incidentally, this is not the first time that sort of thing has happened, in New Earth, Cassandra the flat, in Rose’s body, admired her new-found curves

CASS-ROSE: Look at me. From class to brass. Although, oh, curves. Oh, baby, it’s like living inside a bouncy castle!

and of the Doctor (in Rose’s mind)   ‘nice rear bumper.’

@whohar    The Doctor and the Companion are, functionally, a couple, so far as the structure of the story works.   And by a ‘couple’ I mean anything from a pair of colleagues, to friends, to romantically involved.   Either way they care for each other (the story would fall apart if they didn’t).   They will certainly loom large in each other’s consciousness.   So the writing naturally reflects that.

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@syzygy @thane16 Um.

I think @ps1l0v3y0u meant that women could sometimes be written as “another bloke” as opposed to a well thought out female character. If I’m wrong please chip in.

I’m not sure what that means. Well, if they got drunk with the other – girls, cracked juvenile bad-taste jokes, and went out on the pull on Saturday night, I guess that would be bloke-ish. 🙂

But I don’t see that in Moff’s companions.

I’m not sure whether one could write a specifically female character (or a male one) without being accused of perpetrating stereotypes. I think they are written more as *people*, which is fine with me. Though I will admit that a certain degree of femininity – which probably comes more from the fact they’re female actors than from the writing – adds a little interest to the characters.

Now they do exhibit unusual strength of character (because they have to, being fantasy hero(ine)s, natch), and that is often wrongly associated with male aggressiveness. Which I think is a wrong stereotype, and not a desirable one. I don’t want my heroes to be mindless killers, I want them to be thoughtful killers who agonise about it afterwards (as I think Doug Adams said somewhere).

And in any case, all hero(ine)s, regardless of sex, have to be a little bit braver and stronger than the average bloke or blokess in the street, otherwise their adventures wouldn’t be interesting. I can get quite enough boredom in my own life (which is comfortable, predictable and boring*) without wanting to watch more on screen.

* Boring to anyone watching me, that is. I like it that way, and find it interesting enough.

To cut it short, I can’t see anything wrong with Moff’s heroines, but then I’m not a woman, maybe I’m missing something.

About the mouse – after it bit me, I had the brilliant thought of using a plastic ice cream container – worked even better than I expected, the mouse immediately dived in and hid in it. So I just had to put the lid on. Could have saved myself a bite if I’d thought ahead. Cockroaches I give ’em a squirt of toxic chemicals then wait till they’re dead before I carry them out on a piece of paper. I don’t really like to touch them. Ditto flies, though I know all I have to do is wash my hands afterwards. Beetles I carefully pick up and toss outside, praying mantises I let them climb on my finger and relocate them onto a plant. I like mantises, savage killers that they are. Centipedes creep me out (in the book Doctor No, someone put a giant centipede in Bond’s bed, made my hair stand on end just reading it. In the movie they changed it into a tarantula – massive anticlimax I thought).

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@ps1l0v3y0u

Some people were annoyed that Moff’s companions were obvious bloke adjuncts. They have a point. I’ sure Bill ‘molested by a puddle’ also had some people frothing. 

Not sure what ‘bloke adjuncts’ means.   They were normal heterosexual people (like, the 90%) who naturally had boyfriends (or, in the case of Bill, girl-puddle-friends  🙂   Amy had Rory and Clara had Danny.   And guess who was the dominant character in those relationships.   I think the blokes were the adjuncts, not the other way round.

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@whohar   I was aware that in devoting a couple of column inches to the Bechtel test I was maybe giving it far more significance than it (IMO) merited.   But that’s one of those can’t-win things.

I do like strong female characters who don’t just stand on a chair and scream when they see a mouse.   (Though I did have a female acquaintance last year who had a mouse in their washing machine and wanted me to get it out.   Bloody thing bit me.   True story).   Where was I – oh yes, strong female characters.   Ripley, Sarah Connor, Aeon Flux… (by the way, I think that movie was under-rated – probably because, so I hear, it diverged too much from the cartoon so the fans hated it.   I wasn’t a cartoon fan so I liked it.   Also had Liz 10 in it.)   And Amy, Clara and so on.

By the way, when considering female heroes, it sometimes crosses my mind that these are fantasy characters and real women wouldn’t be able to do that.   But then, it’s just occurred to me that not every guy is Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Doctor or James Bond.   So my slight misgivings about female heroes just got neutralised.   Which is good.

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@ps1l0v3y0u The Bechdel Test sounds like barely relevant hokum to me. ‘At least two named women characters who talk to each other about something other than a man’?

Well, ‘Alien’ would fail that and the hero was a woman, ffs! So would ‘Hell Bent’ (I don’t think Clara and Ashildr talked to each other about anything other than the Doctor, although Clara was (IMO) the main character). Very obviously ‘Heaven Sent’ would fail it. ‘Wild Blue Yonder’ would fail it. I think ‘The Pilot’ probably fails because Moira is a sentient puddle. ‘World Enough and Time’ – fail (even though it’s almost all about Bill).

(I’ve just found out that there was a second woman in Alien, the navigator. I’d forgotten that. They had a row about whether to let the crew back in. Who were male. So it still fails the test.)

[Snarky mode ON]: If I ever write a screenplay I’ll make sure it passes the ‘test’, I’ll just have two extras in some unrelated scene who just say “Hi Jane, nice day, isn’t it?” “Hi Sarah, yes it is” just before a Dalek shoots them. Test passed. [/snark] Okay, sarcasm aside, I think it’s a patently spurious ‘test’ based on spurious criteria and one which utterly fails to measure what it purports to measure. And, it makes no allowance for degrees of meaning. So it passes what it shouldn’t pass and fails what it shouldn’t fail.

Just to make my position clear, I detest ‘macho’, I like almost all women Companions as characters (irrespective of their gender) and often find them more interesting than the Doctor. I was – disappointed – to see many of them turned into UNIT operatives, as RTD had a habit of doing.

@syzygy I agree about the steadily increasing capability of the Doc’s Companions, at least under RTD (1) and Moff. On another tack, as it happens the Eurovision episode (I assume that’s Interstellar Song Contest) is next on my list, so I’ll see how it strikes me.

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@syzygy I do agree about UNIT’s new mega-HQ. Makes MI6’s Ziggurat look like a garden shed. It also has (in my opinion) a really dominating and intimidating appearance, more like CyberHQ than UNIT.    (As an aside, do Cybermen drive Cybertrucks?)

And I, like you, was also disappointed in the companions, or rather the treatement of them. I really liked Rose(2) and we only really ever saw her in one episode. As for the other old Companions who came back, I had the distinct feeling they were just there as ‘fan service’ and their roles had just been tacked on to the story.

I also agree about FX. It can be great, used properly in the right context (the beautiful alien ship in Wild Blue Yonder) but it can be a distraction and is no substitute for good writing and acting. (Wild Blue Yonder only had two actors and four characters in it, which really helped to focus the narrative and tension, so the FX only helped, not distracted). But I’ve rabbited on about this enough before. 🙂

As a complete aside, Spain just won the World Cup! I was really hoping they would. (Nothing to do with any British-Argy feud, everything to do with the fact that the World Cup boss’s boss, that well-known football expert and FIFA Peace Prize winner President Donald J Trump, will have absolutely hated having to present the trophy to those ‘hopeless bad people’. Sometimes karma gets it right 🙂

 

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Rather more interesting (because more exclusively Who-related) and briefer than that one I linked to before,  Youtube just served me up an episode of the Whoniverse show  (which seems to be a little bit less kitsch than the fan show they used to add in as extras on Moff-era DVDs).    But anyway, it is the Moff, answering some reasonably interesting questions.

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@ps1l0v3y0u    I agree Small Gods was satire.   I usually like that.  I just found Vorbis too close to reality for comfort.

All the other books are satire too, of course.   And I’m certainly not saying Small Gods was bad, I’d sooner read it than, say, anything by a less talented writer  (which is most of them).

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@ps1l0v3y0u

You don’t need patience, or any commitment, to read the Discworld books.   Any more than you need a commitment to watch an isolated episode of Doctor Who.   The ‘recommended reading lists’ give the impression, possibly inadvertently, that each ‘series’ is one continuing story.  This is just not the case.   Although many of the characters are continued in each successive book, each book is essentially a self-contained episode, and it loses very little in the absence of ‘back-knowledge’.   The same way, for example, you could watch ‘Asylum of the Daleks’ without ever having seen the Doctor or a Dalek before, and still be entertained by it.   So you only need to ‘commit’ to one book, though there is always the risk of becoming addicted.

My choice (from many) would be ‘Hogfather’ which in fact was the first of the ‘Death’ series I read, and it didn’t suffer from not being the first.   In fact I later read the earlier ones as ‘back-story’ and it worked that way too.

But there are many others.   All of them feature Pratchett’s wry humour, original turn of phrase, and his entertaining allegory with the human world.

Actually Colour of Magic was the first of all, and I think he got steadily better over the next dozen books.   Small Gods I liked the least, because I found the character of Vorbis frightened me in his rigid and righteous and tyrannical intolerance.

So if you found those worthwhile, I think you’d like most of his others.

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• This reply was modified 2 weeks, 1 day ago by  Dentarthurdent. Reason: posted it twice

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@janetteb I’m currently reading Lords and Ladies, which is of course a ‘witches’ one. Though my preference is for Nanny Ogg, which probably says something about my moral character 🙂

I’ve got the Hogfather movie on DVD, on my ‘rewatch soon’ pile. I’m a little surprised a lot more Discworld movies weren’t made. I guess with the wide cast of mythical creatures (not to mention the Librarian) it would have been difficult or costly to make 20 years ago; these days AI-guided CGI could I think do it quite effectively, *if* properly written and edited by an intelligent human. And using AI for the graphics only, *not* for the dialogue.

Frequently difficulties (as with the Clara-light episodes) can result in excellent episodes. Blink being the most celebrated one, Heaven Sent of course, and I think Listen was another. When you’re trying to economise on time, cast numbers, or sets, the writers just have to be inventive and try harder.
That approach is also infinitely better than some serials (mostly sitcoms) used to resort to, which was to have the cast sitting around a table saying ‘do you remember when?’ and recycling indigestible chunks of old episodes. That just looked lazy cheap and boring, and I’d refuse to watch. I don’t think Doctor Who ever sunk that low.

In the realm of inventiveness, I’m thinking of the original Alien movie, where the crashed alien ship was just painfully obviously fake (according to Ridley Scott), so they just showed it through the crew’s ‘suit cameras’ played back through an old TV with a lot of ‘interference.’ It worked. So did the fact that the ‘alien’ was only seen in its entirety for a few seconds at the end, must have saved a lot of cost, and the fear of the unseen is almost always greater than the seen. (ref ‘Listen’. Also Eaters of Light, where I found the monster anticlimactic when we finally saw it).

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@ps1l0v3y0u   I guess Clara the Dalek only required Jenna’s presence when she was actually visible inside the Dalek.   The rest of the scene would have used a stand-in Dalek.   So with that, and one other Clara-lite episode which Moff mentioned but i don’t recall, I guess that amounted to one Clara episode saved.

And it appears the Dalek system translates any word it doesn’t understand as ‘Exterminate’  🙂

Reminds me of a censor program they installed at work when we were first (reluctantly) allowed to use the Internet – for work purposes only.   It would spit out messages like:  “Your attempt to access to http://www.recycledconcrete.com.nz  has been blocked.   Reason:  Pornography.   Your attempt to access this site has been recorded.”    All very 1984.   I eventually figured out that anything not on its ‘whitelist’ was ‘pornography.’   I used to screenshot these threats and print them out, I acquired a stack an inch thick.  For self-defence, in case some troll in IT looked at the records and said “Dentarthurdent has been looking for pornsites on his work computer.”   If that program was made physical, it would have been a Dalek.

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@whohar

I think ‘Fifth Elephant’ may well have been derived from ‘5th Element’. It’s very common in literature and drama, I think it’s perfectly legitimate and a nice nod to the original work.
There are plenty of examples in Doctor Who. ‘Spyfall’ obviously comes from ‘Skyfall’ (James Bond). ‘Empress of Mars’ is very obviously a tribute to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ ‘Princess of Mars’ and similar titles. ‘World Enough and Time’ is from a poem by Andrew Marvell (quite hard to find the reference as Google is swamped by links to the Who episode). Robot of Sherwoood, Mummy on the Orient Express, Journey to the Centre of the Tardis, A Christmas Carol was a straight ‘steal’, there are many more. It’s an amusing pastime to go looking for them.

But then Terry Pratchett’s books are chock-full of literary references to innumerable fantasy and legendary themes. Far too many to even list. They add a little spice to the narrative. Same goes for Doug Adams’ Hithchiker quintet. In fact I’ve just realised why the two series seem so similar in tone to me, they’re both parodies or allegories of aspects of human society.

That ‘Discworld reading order’ you linked looks quite valid to me, when I started I found a similar list. ‘Jingo’ leads me to think you’re following the ‘Watch’ list. Good choice. Lord Vetinari, by the way, is one of my favourite characters. The list I would personally choose as a ‘do not miss’ would be the Death series (though he crops up in cameos in most of the books).

I think I’ve got all the Discworld books in paperback, picked up from time to time as used copies became available reasonably cheaply. As always, I was a late arrival to the genre, so I had a lot of ‘back catalogue’ to work my way through. I’m re-reading them in order of publication. This is very easy to keep track of since all the books have all their predecessors listed on the flyleaf in exact order of publication (something many series fail at).

@ps1l0v3y0u I always thought Doug Adams’ particular talent was the ‘man from Mars’ approach – looking at human habits as an alien might. For example (paraphrasing), ‘much of humanity’s problems revolved around the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.’ Or Ford Prefect, who chose his name in order to be inconspicuous. Adams had a talent for the absurd.

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@janetteb Pleased to see you’re a Pratchett fan too. For some reason, to me the other work that most resembled the Discworld is Doug Adams Hitch-hiker quintet. Notwithstanding that Discworld is explicitly fantasy and Hitchhiker is explicitly Science Fiction. But there’s just something about the situations and characters that make them ‘feel’ remarkably similar, to me at least.
And of course Doug Adams wrote for Doctor Who, so I suppose it’s not surprising that Moffat shows a similarity to Pratchett.
If you’re up to Jingo, I assume you just read Hogfather, which I reckon one of his best. And of course it’s got Death in it, which is always a bonus. I think that middle period was Pratchett at his best (not that he was ever anything less than good). Did you ever see the movie of Hogfather? Certainly worth a watch.

Talking of Moffat, I’ve just watched the full interview with Moffat, it’s on a podcast called Half the Picture. About half of it relates to Doctor Who. One intriguing snippet is that Blink happened almost by accident, he was (according to Moff) down to write a Dalek two-parter but he realised he didn’t have the time. So, as compensation to Russell for ‘jerking him around’, he offered to do the Doctor-lite, the episode nobody likes. ‘Russell has rarely responded to an email so quickly.’
And Heaven Sent arose because Jenna Coleman could only do 9 episodes, which they allowed for by completely leaving her out of The Woman Who Lived, putting her inside a Dalek for most of The Witch’s Familiar, and Moff wrote a solo for the Doctor so nobody would notice Clara’s absence.   Which, he said, mostly worked.
And I can’t help mentioning that Moff’s estimation of Rose is the same as mine – re Empty Child, ‘He’s great, she’s great too and my God you can’t stop looking at her’. There are some people the camera loves, and Rose is one of them.

Also on Half the Picture is a full interview with Peter Capaldi, which I will leave until tomorrow.

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@whohar
I’m reading through Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, in order. This is a long-term project. I do love an author with a good turn of phrase, and Pratchett certainly has that. So does Steven Moffat (of which more in a moment).
In between that I’m reading [geek mode ON] Hamilton Ellis’s British Railway History, Part 1. Which is what it says. Hamilton Ellis is a good writer and the shenanigans and manouvrings, alliances and rivalries of British railway companies in the 19th Century is a bit like following the convoluted history of Dr Who. [/geek mode].

As for what I’m watching, far too much Youboob. I still have the last 3 eps ever of Dr Who to re-watch. And a mixed bag of movies.
I’d single out the last James Bond movie, No Time To Die, in which he does (spoilers) exactly that. I think it’s quite a good movie.
Incidentally, the producers had teased that 007 was now going to be a black woman. Which caused the predictable commotion. And she was, but – thankfully for continuity – the number 007 had been reassigned to a new 00 operator on Bond’s retirement, Bond was still Daniel Craig. I’m quite okay with that, it respects continuity.
This raises the point of continuity in a series. Doctor Who, almost fortuitously, and I think uniquely, found the answer to that with regeneration. The Bond series didn’t have that luxury, so I had contextual problems with each successive Bond, though I gradually got used to it. I still couldn’t have accepted Bond as a black woman though, that would have been much too incongruous. It’s an identity thing, not a colour/gender thing, for me. Again, Doctor Who could get away with that thanks to regeneration.

Just watched The Fifth Element, Luc Besson’s sci-fi fantasy from 1997, with Bruce Willis and Mila Jovovich. Mainly because it’s fun. And Gary Oldman was excellent as the villain Zorg – incredibly rich, with absolutely no conscience – that’s starting to sound depressingly familiar today. For anyone familiar with the movie, Ruby Rod was a shock at first appearance, extremely annoying, though he became slightly redeemed as the movie went on. These days, he’d be an ‘influencer’ and his outrageous in-your-face persona now feels more credible, unfortunately. And maybe the current insane state of the world has toned him down by comparison.
Also Once Upon a Time in the West, Sergio Leone’s ultimate spaghetti western, with Charles Bronson in what was obviously intended to be the Clint Eastwood role, he’s subtly different from what Eastwood would have brought to it but, in my view, actually even better. Leone certainly knows how to build up tension, it’s a movie that needs time to watch, it’s no use watching in a hurry. And this time through, I found I could follow the entire plot, there were events I couldn’t follow on previous viewings. I found the same effect with ‘Blink’ and ‘Joy to the World’ for example.

Talking of which, right at this moment I’m going to spend the next hour and a half watching Steven Moffat’s interview on Youtube    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T-wYCvusZ4     Thanks @whohar drawing attention to it.

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@whohar   Thanks for that.   That article is actually excerpts from a video interview with Stephen Moffet, it very helpfully  gives a link to the interview, which is on Youtube here:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T-wYCvusZ4

I know what I’ll be watching for the next hour and a half.    Moffat is always interesting to listen to.

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@whohar   Care to give us a link to that interview?   Thanks.

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@translatorcircuit Unfortunately, what you think ‘should’ happen to the rights carries little weight with those who actually have custody of them. In particular, if the BBC were wound up, it would probably be the duty of the receivers (or whatever their title was) to maximise the financial return.

As for ‘The Time Machine’ somehow invalidating Doctor Who’s copyright, that’s not how copyright works. ‘Prior Art’ can invalidate a patent, but copyright is a little bit different. There is no copyright in ideas, only in the expression of those ideas. The idea of a time machine, even if it was original with Wells, is not copyrightable. The BBC, or you, or Disney, can make all the stories they like about time machines and not violate anything. It’s the expression of those ideas which is copyright. If Disney or you make your time machine look like a blue police box, that would almost certainly be a breach of copyright. Again, courts take into account how much of the original work was copied. There’s a doctrine known as ‘fair use.’ If your sci-fi included a line-up of model time machines, and one of them happened to be a blue police box, you’d probably be on safe ground, so long as the hero didn’t select it to do his adventuring in.
Also, of course, almost every idea in science fiction (or any other fiction) has been used countless times.
The authors of ‘The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail’ famously sued Dan Brown for using their ideas in ‘The da Vinci Code’ and failed utterly. Firstly, their book claimed to be factual and historical, and there is no copyright in facts. (Kind of an own goal, that, if they’d released their book as fiction they might have stood a better chance). Second, they claimed da Vinci Code copied their ‘theme’, but couldn’t state which unique parts of their ‘theme’ had been copied, other than a few key points which were ‘factual’. There was no word-for-word wholesale copying. So they failed.
Similarly, Doctor Who copied a theme fron A Christmas Carol, but they were on safe ground. The Who story was sufficiently different from the original to be safe from copyright.

And even if the Beeb had been guilty of breach of copyright in elements of The Time Machine, that wouldn’t invalidate the original copyright or mean that anybody else could breach copyright independently. And, the Beeb would still have copyright over all elements of the story that weren’t copied from The Time Machine.

(Disclaimer:  I’m not an expert, if any of what I’ve said is wrong, please somebody weigh in.)

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@janetteb I agree with you about the budget and special effects. First of all, the FX should support the script, not replace or outweigh it. I think there’s a certain quality of FX to properly support the story. Less, and you get things like the embarrassing unconvincing ‘guns’ in Blakes 7, or the gods in The Greatest Show in the Galaxy looking like styrofoam statues firing ‘little points of light.’ Too much, and the plot gets overshadowed. The worst is when the producers think, “We’ve got the most awesome FX, just need a script to tie them together”. No, FX cannot substitute for a good script. Nor can a cast of thousands.
This is probably why the most intense episodes of Who were ones like Blink, Listen, Midnight and so on.
This is not to say that a good FX budget doesn’t help when the story needs it, for example I imagine the CGI budget for the beautiful alien ship in Wild Blue Yonder must have been – generous. But even so, it was subservient to the story, so it worked.
For another example, “Alien”, which was famously filmed on a relatively tight budget, was by far the most intense and suspenseful of its series.

And, I think a ‘feel for the show’ is a big asset, maybe even essential, for producers/writers/directors.

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@winston    Yes, we had noticed rather a lot going on.   The orange Feuhrer in Washington is a busy boy isn’t he?

1867 is quite recent.   Still beats Australia though.

I wish you happy birthday, good luck and elbows up!    🙂

 

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@translatorcircuit      And I had the impression that Doctor Who only existed because of the BBC.   Silly me.

If the Beeb was closed down the rights wouldn’t suddenly disappear.   They would probably be sold off to the highest bidder – who would probably be Disney or Netflix or one of those.   Doctor Who: Jedi Knight  meets Alien.   It would make a mint.

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@janetteb   I wanted to like it (the movie).   Maybe I was being a bit indulgent of it.   I haven’t felt impelled to re-watch it though.   And as I recall, it didn’t really feel like Doctor Who.

Night of the Doctor, now, was an excellent little cameo.  (Is ‘cameo’ the right word?)   Moff’s dialogue was on its best form.   As it was with the only other scene with Ohila on Karn, in the prologue to The Magician’s Apprentice.   (Ohila:  “Why do you always lie?”   Twelve:   “Why do you always assume I’m lying?”   “It saves time.”)       I love interesting and original dialogue, and if it has a dash of irony, even better.   And the ability to imply things rather than having to spell them out in tedious detail, which both flatters the intelligence of the audience and keeps their interest.   Moff was a master of that.

Most of my liking for Blakes Seven came from the script and the dialogue (it certainly wasn’t the sets or the special effects  🙂   First example that comes to mind is when Servalan and Avon found themselves stranded in the desert (IIRC):   Servalan:  And, I want a gun.   Avon:  We only have one gun.   Servalan (sweetly):   I only want one.

I’m not sure that fandom is always a sufficient attribute for a successful series.   RTD and Moff were long-term fans, but then so was (ahem) Chibnell.   A large degree of talent is also required.

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@janetteb    You mentioned the Who movie with Paul McGann.   I think, based on seeing him in The Night of the Doctor, he would have made a fine Doctor.   He had the gravitas, the personal magnetism, the looks.

Most unfortunately, he fell into the Gap.   I’ve seen the movie.   Taken as a random sci-fi movie, there was nothing wrong with it.   Just, it felt like a Hollywood sci-fi movie.   I don’t know what unique quality Doctor Who (the series) has, but whatever it is, it was somehow missing from the movie.

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@nerys   @janetteb   Well that Guardian article was – interesting.   What took me by surprise was the author’s nomination for all-three-in-one   – Peter Capaldi.   Seems a bit startling at first.   But maybe not so far-fetched.   Could he do Bond – I think as an ageing but still deadly Bond he certainly could do it.  Could he do the Doctor – we know he can, and Doctors have come back before (cf TENnant).   Could he make a good PM – well, half the job is to make sensible decisions, and the other half is to convince the voters that he’s made the right one.   I think he could do those, at least as well as many recent PM’s.    There is only one drawback that would apply to anybody filling the slot – doing all three simultaneously would lead to very confused public perception as to which hat he was wearing at any time.

I think my nomination would be Mark Carney, if Canada could be persuaded to lend him.   Or Arnold Schwarzenegger, but maybe he’s getting a bit old.

Anyone else got any wild suggestions?

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@craig    We have spammers!   Two in this forum, and this ‘werryping’ has also spammed in The End of Time and  The Story and the Engine.   You may wish to do something Imperial about them   🙂

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@ps1l0v3y0u    @janetteb   I didn’t know Wells was so personally  interesting.   We had to do some Wells novel in English at school, so of course we were scornful of the old-fashioned language.   It wasn’t The Time Machine or War of the Worlds, and I was never sure if the latter was written by H G or Orson anyway  🙂       In my early sci-fi I preferred John Wyndham or Arthur C Clark, or Conan Doyle.

I always had a bias against  Dickens for similar reasons – it you want kids to dislike an author, make him compulsory study at school.   (Fortunately Conan Doyle was not on the syllabus.   Of course his Holmes stories overshadow the rest, but I found his sci-fi fascinating – I can still name some of them from memory – The Lost World (dinosaurs!), The Horror of the Heights (which probably carried a lot more conviction in days when no balloon had gone higher than a few thousand feet), The Day the Earth Screamed with a deep borehole, for some reason I was expecting ‘The Hungry Earth’ to be similar and I was a little disappointed when it was just Silurians in a cavern).

Oh, and I always found Dickens’ attempts at humour, with his slightly bombastic circumlocutions, to fall flat.   Not to my taste, I far prefer leaner, more economical prose that lets the reader join the dots.   I think the style in which a story is told is probably more important than the story itself.   Speaking of stories, I just rewatched The Story and the Engine and posted a few comments on it.

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After a re-watch of The Story and the Engine –

Hmmm. Last series in this mid-series slot we got Boom!, 73 Yards and Dot and Bubble. (As the incorrect menu on my probably-bootleg? DVD reminds me.) What it links to, though, is The Well (very good), Lucky Day (not so good) and The Story and the Engine. So how will this turn out?

Hmm, ethnic. I hope this doesn’t foreshadow a rash of the PC’s. We shall see. Well the Doctor is getting all folksy. Not a good sign.
Umm, how long has the Doctor been black? I ask only because he seems to have had a substantial history in Nigeria, and it’s only been a few episodes since he changed colour. (And no past Doctors were non-white, the Doctor said as much, and we know the identities of all the preceding ones (I’m ignoring any Chibz-fuelled confusion of the timeline)). So this is a bit disconcerting.

Okay, we have the deserted alley and a cryptic warning sign – this is getting a little better. The Barber certainly has a ‘presence’ – good casting I think. He reminds me of (and I had to google this) Khan from Star Trek. Same mature good looks, same gravitas. Quite a sympathetic villain.

Hey, is that Ruth (Fugitive of the Judoon)? What a pleasant surprise. Not sure where she came in the list of Doctor’s (from the future I guess) so this doesn’t fix the glitch about the current Doctor’s Nigerian past. And is that a golden teleport bracelet (shades of Blakes 7 and, I’m sure, many other sci-fis).

The Doctor’s Belinda story is a little too reminiscent of Nurse-saves-patient’s-life-while-docotors-were-baffled, which can be seen in hundreds – no thousands – of AI-slop look-alike videos on the Internet. A little bit OT, never mind, it didn’t take long. Wish he’d talked about Daleks, though.

This is a little bit like the premise of the Thousand and One Nights, with the Doctor as – who was it? – Scheherazade. But hey, every sci-fi story element is a copy of something else.

And the door that opens different from opposite sides – slightly reminiscent of the hotel room doors in Joy to the World? But the giant mechanical space spider – to quote some Hollywood guy, ‘Who ordered that?’

The Doctor certainly seems to have met a vast array of ancient gods. If this was a Chibz episode I’d say it was a desperate display of name-dropping to give the Doctor some verisimilitude.

And then the Doctor morphs into Ruth, who apologises to Abena for not taking her with her/him. Umm, I thought Doctor Ruth was in this current Doctor’s future (because we know his past timeline and Ruth isn’t in it). Or am I missing something?

Abena was also excellently cast.

“Humans are tied to the gods. Destroying them would harm the very essence of humanity. A world without stories? How would they pass on tradition?” Reminds me of Death and Susan in Hogfather:

“WHAT WOULD HAVE HAPPENED IF YOU HADN’T SAVED HIM?” [The Hogfather]
“Yes! The sun would have risen just the same, yes?”
NO
“Oh, come on. You can’t expect me to believe that. It’s an astronomical fact.”
THE SUN WOULD NOT HAVE RISEN.
…
“Really? Then what would have happened, pray?”
A MERE BALL OF FLAMING GAS WOULD HAVE ILLUMINATED THE WORLD.”

In other words, facts are just facts – we give them meaning.

But mostly I included that because it’s way overdue I re-read some Pratchett. I wish he’d been persuaded to write a Doctor Who story.

So finally, via some metaphysics I still don’t understand, we have a happily-ever-after ending. And oddly enough, I don’t mind one bit. This story (to sound corny) had heart.

So last year we had the excellent Dot and Bubble, with shallow and unlikeable characters asking for their grisly fate. This year we have almost the inverse, where even the villain are engagingly human, but equally good. I wasn’t expecting to enjoy it so much, I was pleasantly surprised.

(By the way, my understanding of the interactions was much helped by the transcript at chakoteya.net, as so often I miss some dialogue and bring up the transcript to clarify. Many thanks Chrissie).

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@janetteb   Well, I think I can recommend The Well and The Story and the Engine.   But of course it’s all a matter of taste.

And I do agree also about UNIT and the series.

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@janetteb   I think I agree with almost everything you said there.   Big universe-threatening episodes always depress me.   How are they going to be overcome by a couple of people, even if one of them has a time machine?   And when they are, the result seems almost trivial.   Makes the previous fearsome threat look like a scuffle outside a pub at closing time.

Incidentally, H G Wells was guilty of almost the same thing – the invincible, destroying Martians were defeated by – bacteria, which found them tasty.   Go bugs!!   But because War of the Worlds was very early science fiction, and his solution was – credible, Wells got away with it.

Anyway, I’m erratically working through the last season, I just posted my comments on Lucky Day, which aren’t very good.   Never mind, The Story and the Engine comes next.

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Lucky Day And Ruby is back. Interesting.
Is this spooky scene in the warehouse a throwback to the Autons? Umm no, the guy just got slimed (like Ghostbusters?)
If the guy can take a snapshot of Ruby from what – ten yards away, and get a good sharp recognisable photo, his phone must be a lot better than mine, I think.
Um, not sure where this is going (though I have a dim recollection it isn’t something good). The Shreek gave me a heck of a jump scare when Kate tapped on the glass of its cell. I kenw it was coming but it still works, they always do.
Those two fake-Shreek were really risking their lives, Unit might have shot them (but I guess that would have made an even better story for their conspiracy theory). But Conrad, what a total slimeball. Not so much for thinking UNIT were doing a cover-up, but for leading Ruby on and then deriding her. Loathsome creature (and I don’t mean the Shreek). Incidentally, how did the fake-Shreeks produce those unearthly howls?
(Maybe it’s just me, but I think all scurrilous Internet ‘influencers’ should be taken out and shot, or at least have their phones permanently disconnected. The trouble they cause is out of proportion to any good they do.)
I’m not a fan of these UNIT episodes, and besides there’s the Vlinx, the most fake-looking Disney robot.
I did cheer when Kate let the Shreek nibble Conrad. She, (or Ruby?) should have let it finish its meal.
And Belinda seems to have been elsewhere for the duration. What’s with that?
I can’t say I really enjoyed this episode. On to the next.

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@janetteb   Um, yes.   I might have found Lux more alarming if he wasn’t so intensely irritating.   Don’t know how you’d find ‘Cool World’, the main character was seductive Holli Wood, voiced by Kim Basinger, so much more appealing (in my view) eben if she was a ruthless femme fatale.   I think sometimes the success of concepts like ‘cartoon comes to life’ depends a lot on how well it’s executed, rather than just the concept.   I’m not sure how the best-known one of these (probably), Who Framed Roger Rabbit, fares – I’ve gt the DVD but haven’t got around to watching it yet.

I’m sure someone could write a savagely scathing episode about McCarthyism, I’m just not sure whether it would be enjoyable to watch.   For the same reason I don’t watch prison movies, I find them depressing.

@ps1l0v3y0u   I won’t venture into the realm of food, since my favourite food is probably a nice burger with cheese, bacon or pineapple and NO tomato sauce.   Now that all the takeaways are run by Asian immigrants the standards of fast food have improved immensely, I can actually reliably get a burger with no sauce, unlike the old days when some bored kiwi guy would reflexively splurt orange slime all over my burger before I could stop him.   🙂      I’m a culinary philistine but picky with it.

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@ps1l0v3y0u     Just noting as I watch The Well –

So, how did Belinda and the Doc know to dress in Stormtrooper uniform? Did the ‘patriots’ win in the 2020’s? Is all the future a militaristic hell?

The exploration of the base is a bit reminiscent of Aliens (or indeed a dozen other sci-fi’s. I guess there’s only a very limited number of ways to explore a dangerous alien planet.)

And hey, there it is. “Nuke this site from orbit.” Don’t know how the actor kept a straight face, but I cheered.

I can’t help wondering if Aliss will turn out to be like Sky in Midnight, a mild-looking person who is incredibly dangerous.

Apparently the TARDIS can translate text on-the-fly as well? Because Aliss can read Belinda’s voise-to-text translator?

And the planet was called, aeons ago, Midnight. (Did anyone not see that coming?). And once again RTD uses the scariness of an invisible ‘thing.’ The Moff did the same in the abandoned base in Listen. What you can’t see is always more frightening than what you can. (And also much cheaper in CGI time 🙂

I have to say I was rather pleased when Cassio got slammed. Not a character you could ever come to like. And also, his departure prevented him from clumsily interfering with events thereafter, which must have made the script easier to write.

Now the Thing is finally settled on Shaya, is she going to do what I think she’s going to do? As in, what Ripley did at the end of Alien 3? Well yes.

And then Mrs Flood crops up? What the ??? There’s a long game going on with her.

Right at the end, Val thinks she can see – nothing – behind Mo. Is the nightmare not over? And as we fade to black there’s a whispering noise. Very similar to what happened at the end of Aliens, and similarly disconcerting.

Scifi in general owes a lot to the Alien series. But in saying that, I won’t take anything away from RTD for this episode. It was truly scary. The fact that almost every scene was reminiscent of something we’ve seen before is almost inevitable in sci-fi. The trick is to do it well enough to make it still watchable, and RTD and his co-writer certainly succeeded in that.

@translatorcircuit   If you count up, four of the crew survived – Mo, Aliss, plus the two troopers escorting her, plus of course the Doctor and Belinda.   Not ‘one’, as you claimed.   I never watched Star Trek (I can’t arouse any enthusiasm for the US military), but I do know it went on forever.    If you have a sufficiently large body of work then almost every subsequent story will have similarities, and if you relax your criteria sufficiently then everything is a ‘copy’.   To me, Aliens is far more significant than some nondescript Star Trek story.    I expect Doctor Who, in its long run, has also covered almost every plot known to man or alien.    Does that make everything a copy of Doctor Who?

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@ps1l0v3y0u   I did watch Robot Revolution, and typed a short screed about it.  But when I went to post it, most of the points were very similar to the one I posted a year ago, so I thought I’d spare the bandwidth.

Lux.   Yes, there wasn’t a lot of content in it.   Basically just “all cartoons wish to be people”.   I’m not sure if that’s a common theme, certainly it was the theme of Cool World (which I thought was an under-rated film, I guess people thought cartoons were for kiddies, but it wasn’t really aimed at kids.)

I called the fans a fourth-wall moment, not sure if it technically was – I believe traditionally it refers to occasions when an actor directly addresses the audience (camera).   But I don’t know if there’s a better term for when a fictional hero becomes ‘real’.   I think there’s been an actual fourth-wall moment in nuWho, but I can’t remember what it was.

As regards recent history (i.e. segregation), there was a nod to it, but maybe RTD thought it had been covered already in Chibz’s Rosa Parkes episode.    Not sure if post-gap Doctor Who has covered McCarthyism or Reds-under-the-Bed though.

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Just re-watching –

Not sure why Belinda is so thrilled to go back to the 50’s. I was born in 1947, so I was a teen in the 60’s, so naturally for me the 50’s were the least coolest thing ever, with their lame hairstyles and their frowsy dresses and their banal music and their bourgeois tastes and their puritanical morality and self-imposed censorship. They were the epitome of uncool, the pinnacle of banality. [End of irrelevant rant]

Well the setup is interesting, even if Lux is terminally annoying. This episode has some similarities to Cool World, which I need to watch again (got the DVD).

The breaking the fourth wall (if that’s what it was) with the fans is – weird. And kind of disorienting. Are the fans another illusion? And their favourite episode is Blink. Good choice. Or did the AI Google it? [Later: That was a good guess, that they were AI-generated, even if kind of obvious]. And I think RTD was cracking a wry joke about the popularity of Moff’s episode.

And Lux says it – “Doesn’t every cartoon want to be a man?” That is straight from the plot of Cool World.

Not sure if nitrocellulose film stock is actually explosive when burned. In fact I’m pretty sure it isn’t, unless confined. In fact one essential reason it was used as a propellant (guncotton) is that it wouldn’t detonate. And Belida was just trying to set fire to the place (she said so), to what end I’m not sure, she wasn’t expecting to blow a hole in the wall.

And I’m not sure how blowing up the stock room and evaporating Lux brought back the disappeared people. There’s a lot that doesn’t hang together about this episode, even by the relaxed standards of Doctor Who. Still, it was entertaining enough.

 

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@janetteb   It sounds as if your stay in ICU was a lot less pleasant ( and several times longer) than mine, for which you have my sympathy.   In fact I’d paid extra for a single room rather than a shared one, just to avoid the possibility a roommate might want to watch rugby, or soaps, or something equally annoying on TV.   Only had one visit, but I never felt lonely for some reason.

All I can say is  that mine was, as I said, perfectly innocuous, probably because I felt limited only by my own physical condition and the nurses encouraged me to move around as soon as I felt  comfortable.   I actually have a phobia about being trapped, but it never manifested itself.    It’s all about feeling in control.   I once spent a couple of nights on a hostel in Christchurch in the old Addington jail, repurposed.    I had great trepidation about booking there since the rooms were the old cells, complete with massive doors.   I was apprehensive of my own reaction.   But in fact I felt no worries at all, because of one big thing – I had the key to the massive door in my pocket, and that changed everything..

I was just thinking of the hanta virus ‘suspects’ in quarantine near Perth.   I hope they’re being well treated, which is to say, I hope they have all the creature comforts and room service of a five star hotel.  Partly as compensation for their inconvenience, partly because it’s easier to avoid that feeling of being trapped if the ‘imprisonment’ is comfortable.   I wonder how much the aircrew was paid for going to fetch them (since they were also having to isolate).

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@janetteb   I think the difference with ICU is that, in the latter, the patients are receiving the best care and they have rights.  And also, either fighting for their lives or in a state of relaxed consciousness.  So I think it might be less horrific for them.   (I’ve never been in ICU, other than maybe for 24 hours after my heart operation, but I was certainly confined to a bed for a couple of days and in hospital for seven.   And – side issue – I won’t say I enjoyed it (that would give totally the wrong impression) but it wasn’t unpleasant, and what i did enjoy was the chance to relax and do nothing without the usual guilty feeling of ‘I ought to be doing something’)     I think a better comparison might be a secure institution for psychiatric patients.

@ps1l0v3y0u   Oh yes, I’d forgotten them.  I guess because the ‘speaker’ incident was the first horror.

Moff did also show how such horrors could arise from perfectly commendable motives, carried too far.   The desire to cure ailments and stop people dying.   How far should one go, and at what point should one stop?  Heart operations  – no  (I say, as the beneficiary of one).   Pacemakers – no, they surely are entirely beneficial.   Artificial hearts – I’d say that’s fine, so long as the patient agrees.   But there must be a line somewhere.   Maybe it lies with the patient to agree.   (‘Okay, you can fit me with robotic arms, wheels and half an electronic brain?  Go for it!’)    Or not….

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@whohar   That story is so good it just has to be true.

(And if it isn’t true then it ought to be…)

@ps1l0v3y0u   That moment of turning down the ‘patient’s’ speaker was probably the most horrific of the entire episode.

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@nerys   I just listened to that.   Peter’s part of the broadcast runs from 8 minutes to 43 minutes, if anyone is pressed for time.   (And, somewhat to my surprise, yt-dlp (which is a fork of youtube-dl) successfully downloaded it as an mp3 file – handy if you’re on a data limit and don’t want the other internetty things to nibble away at you data while you’re listening.   Just go to the page, copy the URL from the browser, open a text window and type ‘yt-dlp ‘ and paste the URL and away it goes and downloads the whole thing in ten seconds.)   But anyway, interesting.   Myself, having listened to a little bit of Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of It and being quite impressed by his linguistic abilities, I was quite surprised that he could cool it down for the Doctor.   (I would have even even more surprised had I known that quite a lot of the invective on A Thick of It was apparently Peter’s own invention – he said the writers set up the situation and left him to fill in the blanks.)

@ps1l0v3y0u    You said “the Mondassian Cybermen were Peter’s rec.”   ‘Recommendation’?   (You can be a little cryptic at times  :).    I had thought they were Moff’s, but I could easily have misremembered, or of course they might both have been aficionados of them.   I’ve said before, I used to think the original Cybermen were the most cringingly naff villains in all of Who, painfully obviously just human extras in overalls.   It took Moff’s genius in World Enough and Time to make me realise that was exactly the point and how painfully horrific it could be.

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@winston @nerys  @ps1l0v3y0u    I really started something with oystercatchers, didn’t I?

I’ve been lurking/incommunicado the last few days because we flew down to Christchurch last Tuesday and, among the things I forgot, was my laptop charger.   Since then I’ve been running on battery, just enough to check emails.  I ordered a charger online (which, ironically, came from New Lynn five miles from our house, and has arrived), ordered its mains (power) lead from another supplier and it ain’t here yet.   But today we discovered the plug on the niece’s charger lead fits my charger.   Panic over.

Also, I couldn’t get the Season 2 (new season i.e. with Ncuti)  DVD that I hacked from Bluray to work with my laptop.   But I eventually managed to order Seasons 1 and 2 on DVD, they arrived just before we left Auckland, so (with a portable USB  DVD drive) I should be able to watch them here.    Can’t help wondering if they’re pirated though, the discs and their packaging look absolutely authentic, but I can’r get S1 disk 1 to read  (not a biggie, I’ve got S1 already); and Season 2 Disc 2 has the titles of S1 eps 3-5 (Boom to Dot & Bubble) but when I click them I get the correct S2 eps  (The Well to The Story and the Engine).   But I’m not sending them back for a refund!

 

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@ps1l0v3y0u   As an afterthought, I’ve just thought of a reason for Rose-Doctor – remember when, at the end of Season 1, she looked directly into the Time Vortex and acquired super-energy – which the 9th Doctor absorbed from her and promptly regenerated?   Well, if he didn’t absorb them completely, that would leave Rose with stored energy which, in time, could somehow lead her to turn into the Doctor.  Or maybe better, the energy which Nine absorbed from Rose was ‘flavoured’ with her personality and appearance, which manifested itself decades later as a regeneration into Rose-doc.

 

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@ps1l0v3y0u    If I may split a hair for the sake of discussion, “They can’t make Billie the Doctor, she’s Rose” is not necessarily misogynistic.   (Though I accept it could be (mis)used as a cover for misogynism).

But it runs into the same logical continuity problem (not sure if there’s a word for it) as the fact that Sean Connery ‘was’ James Bond, so all the Bonds since then are logically impossible.   (Which is not say that I didn’t enjoy watching them).

Also brings to mind the same problem with Peter Capaldi who was previously the Roman guy in the Pompeii episode, or Amy who was a priestess in that same ep.   I seem to recall Moff was sufficiently concerned to suggest that Capdoc consciously or unconsciously chose that appearance out of some sort of guilt at not saving him.

Rose’s appearance as the interface of The Moment was explained away by The Moment having picked Rose out of the Doctor’s future memories.   That worked.

I guess Doctor-Rose could be satisfactorily explained by some similar mechanism, and I rather hope it would be.

Another possible (non-mysogynistic) reason for being unhappy about the prospect would be if one felt Rose was the best companion ever and bringing her back as Doc was somehow ‘milking’ it.   A bit like all those old companions who suddenly reappeared us UNIT operatives in a recent episode – much though I like to see them, it just felt too corny to me.

But I’ll say right now, that’s not a misgiving I have, I’d love to see Rose-Doctor.   Partly because, as the Doctor, nobody could complain that she was just being used as set-dressing.   And I think and hope she’d make a much better one than Whittaker did.   She has the advantage of being thoroughly familiar with the Doctor’s persona, after all, which Whittaker notoriously wasn’t.

 

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@nerys    Hi.   I was down on the beach (Blockhouse Bay) on Saturday, thought I’d check out if it was still swimmable.  Lovely high tide, 4.3  (which is among the highest that we get), lovely and sheltered in the bay,  but the water was a little bit too cool for me.  I went in (and I’m glad I did rather than dithering then wondering ‘what if’), but after a minute my fingers and toes were tingling so I came out again.   Water had dropped a couple of degrees since last week, so that’s it for the year.

Anyway, there was good flock of oystercatchers on the little beach, maybe 100 or so.   This ‘beach’ is a patch of sand 70 metres across that arrived on a Council truck some decades ago, and I think they top it up occasionally.   You can get within maybe six feet of them before they walk or run or fly away.   Periodically some young kid will chase them and they all take off in a flock and fly in circles for a bit before landing on the other end of the beach.   There is  patch of rocks, exposed at anything less than high water, that they also favour, or the roof of the Boat Club hut.    Google says they’re  Variable Oystercatchers  (what a delightful name!), a New Zealand species.   I think ‘variable’ refers to them being anything from all black to big white patches on their chests and underbellies.    But still with the absurdly long red beaks.

@ps1l0v3y0u   I did like Billie as  Cassandra-possessing-Rose.   Maybe it was camp (I dunno, what exactly is ‘camp?), but I cracked a grin.  I think Billie was having fun with it, what actor doesn’t relish the chance to play the evil alter ego?

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@ps1l0v3y0u   Let’s say it’s the less bad alternative.

Things would have been very gloomy if Orban had stayed in power.

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@winston   Thank you.   The rest of the country  (well, parts of it) didn’t do as well, major flooding and storm damage in Northland and North Auckland (just to the north of us, duh) and the Coromandel to the southeast.   This has happened several times now.   In fact these things tend to be very ‘regional’ and often quite localised.   Notoriously so around Cook Strait between the North and South Islands, for example in 1968 the 9000-ton ferry Wahine was driven aground at the entrance to Wellington Harbour with much loss of life.   On the same day, people in Paraparaumu, just 30 miles north, were enjoying a sunny day on the beach.

On our local beach at the moment, we get flocks of oystercatchers, which I think look slightly absurd with their long red beaks.   And a couple of pukekos (aka swamp hens, big birds with long legs) have taken to stalking across our garden.  They can fly well enough to get over fences and into low trees but that seems to be their limit.  They have adapted well to ‘civilisation’ and can often be found  in the bushy/swampy strips beside motorways and the like.

In totally different news (and if I may be forgiven for being political for a moment)  I’m raising a glass to the defeat of Viktor Orban, in spite of (or maybe because of) endorsements by those shining beacons of enlightened democracy Donald Trump, J D Vance, Vladimir Putin, Bibi Netenyahu and Elon Musk.   [End politics].   I hope that isn’t too controversial in this forum.

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