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@winston Good to hear you’re slowly recovering, though it must seem too slow. Hopefully you’ll be able to enjoy summer when it arrives. DON’T apologise for posting, I’m sure we don’t mind as long as Craig tolerates us all (and he’s usually remarkably tolerant 🙂

Our weather, since you mention it, has been poor for the last week. I had a swim a couple of weeks ago, water was just okay, that might have been my last for the season: since then the weather’s been poor, the tides have been useless and I’ve had gout. So a fine day might tempt me out to see if the water’s still okay, or it might not.

I’m about to fish out my Season 11(?) DVDs – that’s the first season of Whitdoc I think – and view a few selected episodes. See if they’ve improved in the interim. Also, old episodes of Danger Man, they got quite good towards the end of Season 2.

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@nerys Resuming the James Bond theme, I just watched Skyfall and Spectre. Skyfall was quite good (I gather it’s highly regarded amongst the Bond genre), though I do have to question his wisdom in taking M to a deserted house in the highlands without stocking up from Q’s gadget collection first. And I thought the new Moneypenny (Naomie Harris) was quite delightful, but I do have a slight continuity problem in that she’s suddenly brown. I can rationalise the changing M’s and Q’s in that they’re a position, not a person, but Moneypenny is very much a person, dammit. (But then, Bond…)

Spectre tried to outdo Skyfall and failed. It’s actually quite a good film, though I had a couple of problems – one was when Bond was chasing the Land Rovers down the mountain using a Britten-Norman Islander (where did he get that from) – 40 knot stall speed so IF the Land Rovers were going flat out on snow (but why would they?) he could stick behind them, but then he knocked the wings off, how could he ever control the direction to intercept them down slope? Never mind. And the other one was, escaping from the desert lair, he fires one shot at a gas tank and the entire building complex explodes. In fact that whole escape was just far too easy, one exploding wristwatch and he walks out of it with Madeleine. ‘With one bound, he was free’. It should have been far more difficult than that.

The other thing that intrigued me in retrospect, when I watched No Time to Die, (and I’d long since forgotten ‘Spectre’), the opening ‘home alone’ scene with young Madeleine Swann seemed quite un-Bond-movie like, and so the switch to adult Madeleine with Bond was an abrupt transition, but it was evident that she was the same girl, grown up, and had ‘somehow’ hooked up with Bond. Imagine my fascination then, when I saw Madeleine describing that whole scene with precision in ‘Spectre’, and realised No Time to Die was an exact follow-on from the end of Spectre. Continuity? In a Bond movie?

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@winston Well it’s great to hear your surgery was a success. But I’m sorry to hear that you’re still in pain. I had assumed they could give painkillers for it but I was forgetting that that seems to be an area where medical science isn’t yet perfect, no such thing as a 100% effective yet completely harmless painkiller. Hopefully the pain will diminish over the next few days.

I’m afraid I’m not very good at expressing sympathy. (Just like the 13th Doctor, come to think of it.) I’ll just wish you the best for your recovery.

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@winston I’ll just wish you the very best with your operation, and your six weeks’ enforced bed rest.

I have no idea if this will help, but when I had a heart valve repair about 15 years ago, I almost enjoyed the ‘holiday’. NOT the operation itself (which of course I have no recollection of whatever), but the week I spent in hospital afterwards. It was such a novel experience to be lying in bed, doing absolutely nothing, (which would normally make me feel quite guilty because I should be doing something constructive), with an absolutely cast-iron excuse to just relax and be totally lazy for once. I don’t know if you can lull yourself into that frame of mind but it might help.

One other thing, I took books and portable CD player and headphones – I found I never read the books, took too much mental effort, but the CD player I used almost full time. If one is trying to rest, and getting into the most comfortable position, sometimes listening to music is the most relaxing thing. I guess the current equivalent would be a MP3 player.

But anyway, best of luck with the operation.

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@ps1l0v3y0u That ‘browser history’ has been a running joke ever since The Eleventh Hour, when the Doc advised the helpful Jeff to delete his Internet history. I have to say, I know the feeling.

Twice Upon a Time was a big lightening-up from The Doctor Falls. In fact, as the Doctor said, “It isn’t an evil plan. I don’t know what to do when it isn’t an evil plan.” And the Doctor’s sole achievement was in rescuing the Brigadier and the unknown Toby Whithouse German from their fatal predicament. But I think that was just as well, trying to top The Doctor Falls would have been difficult and possibly too grim for a Christmas special. Anyway, I class it as a ‘B’ episode – good but not quite A-list. Which is okay.

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@ps1l0v3y0u From memory, I think Twelve rather hastily cut in before Bill could, err, bring One up to date with the 21st century…

Actually, checking the transcript, I was wrong, that was some time before Bill appeared. But there were several moments where I thought Bill was going to read the riot act to One. Evidently One’s travels had omitted to include visiting Earth in the late 20th century.

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@nerys Yes, the Doctor’s companion looks okay from the teaser. Can’t really tell until we see her in an episode. However, RTD is quite good a writing companions, so hopefully she’ll be good. I’m only up the The Power of the Doctor on DVD’s, I should see if my public library has later ones.

@winston @janetteb Yes Twelve’s victorian library look is my favourite too. But I don’t really see it as Victorian, the staircases and gallery give it a roomy, comfortable, timeless quality. Okay, maybe reminiscent of some of the better Victorian architecture, sans the cast-iron filigrees.
The new control room looks a bit too bare for my liking. (Though Nine’s coral/organic look was too cluttered, sorry Winston 🙂 I guess Twelve’s was the happy medium.

@ps1l0v3y0u Yes I loved the actual library from Journey to the Heart of the Tardis, I would have liked to see more of that.

I’m about to embark on Thirteen (a few selected episodes only). I said that a week ago and haven’t got to it yet. It comes to mind only because that control room makes me cringe. I think it looks like some weird alien sex toy for some bizarre giant alien species. 🙂

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@nerys @winston Well the Tardis interior certainly looks a lot better than 13’s era. Not as good as Twelve’s by a long shot (IMO!) but orders of magnitude better than the Crystal Grotto of Doom that 13 inhabited.

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@ps1l0v3y0u Well Jenny – that is, Georgia Moffett – was already in real life a Doctor’s daughter, just not Ten’s. (I think it was Five). I can’t see why her becoming a Doctor’s wife in real life should make a difference. Incidentally, no relation to Steven Moffat. Although she was also the daughter of Sandra Dickinson, Five’s real-life wife, who played Trillian in the TV version of Doug Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. A conspiracy theorist could have a high old time with this, I guess.

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@ps1l0v3y0u I think maybe it was just the writer and/or showrunner leaving an opening for future development that never actually materialised.

A bit like The Doctor’s Daughter (Jenny). That was just begging for a semi-regular part for Jenny. She’s still out there (along with Clara, Me, Bill and Heather)

I guess sometimes these threads just don’t work out or no story crops up that suits them.

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@ps1l0v3y0u I’ve tried that before and it didn’t seem to work. Maybe it will this time. I’ll know when I hit Submit.

I had my own theory about Danny/Orson, but I’ve long forgotten what it was.

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@janetteb I think it was Slartibartfast (what a name!) who called Arthur Dent Dentarthurdent. It was of course Doug Adams’ satirical take on Bond, James Bond.

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@janetteb The only way to get ps1l0v3y0u right is to copy & paste. Some of those characters in his name aren’t even on a terrestrial keyboard, at least they never work when I type them, I suspect he’s an alien. 🙂

Danny, Orson and that toy soldier caused me much headscratching trying to explain it. But I could never make it fit. I’d love to see a coherent theory of it.

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@ps1l0v3y0u I’d hate to misquote Moff, so I stuck the DVD in again and in the extra on Disc 5, ‘The Finale Falls’, at 0:41, Moff says “I thought oh my god those are cheap rubbish ones, I hope they never bring those ones back”. Or more fully, at 3:24, “I remember getting the very first Doctor Who magazine of any kind I’ve ever seen, and it had a picture of the original Mondassian cybermen, and I was horrified by them, I thought they just looked like balaclava men. I thought oh my god those are cheap rubbish ones, these are offensive to me, I hope they never bring those ones back.”
Peter Capaldi: “I’d always expressed an interest in seeing the Mondassian cybermen come back.”

Moff (I’m paraphrasing here): “Is there a way to make the Mondassian cybermen work for Peter Capaldi’s last stand … I was nervous of it but I’m really pleased with how it came out.”

I know you weren’t casting doubt on my comment, I checked back for my own benefit as much as anything, I have been known to recollect wrongly.

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@ps1l0v3y0u @janetteb I had the impression that Moff liked the original Mondassian Cybermen. I was wrong, according to a comment by him on the DVD extras for The Doctor Falls, he thought they were pretty naff. Apparently Peter Capaldi loved cybermen, which is why the Moff humoured him by incorporating cybermen (and not Daleks or Weeping Angels) in his final story. Needless to say Moff changed his view of them, as did I, when their origin from reconstructed humans was explored. Supremely creepy.

I recall the volcano scene from Dark Water, and a very powerful scene it was. And with a neat reversal when it turned out the Doc had seen it coming. But I don’t recall any scene like that in Last Christmas?

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@janetteb Entirely concur. The betrayal was more figurative than actual – by which I mean that it was not deliberate on the Doctor’s part, just a rash promise – which he did his utmost to keep in rescuing Bill. If he’d said “I can’t guarantee that” would Bill have gone with him anyway? – almost certainly. That doesn’t change Bill’s feeling, waiting years for him to rescue her.

I just watched Twice Upon a Time, by the way, and while that had – nostalgia on my part – for Twelve and Bill the avatar, it didn’t have nearly the same impact. Epilogue, as I said.

Well that’s it. Now I’m on to Chib’s reign (selected episodes only).

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@dwnerdfrommars That brief scene was a visual nod to the ‘butterfly effect’ – the concept that (originally) a butterfly flapping its wings could lead to a tornado some time later. This was coined by Edward Lorenz, a meteorologist who was trying to model the weather mathematically and found that, for some determinate systems, a minute change in initial conditions (butterfly) could lead to a wildly divergent result. (I find this fascinating but bizarre, mathematically).
This idea then morphed into the meme that stepping on a butterfly in the Jurassic could change the whole of history. It’s a sort of modern equivalent of the old fable ‘for want of a nail a kingdom was lost’. And for a practical example, suppose the assassin who killed Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914 thereby triggering World War 1 had missed? – the entire history of the 20th century would have been different.

It has absolutely nothing to do with quantum indeterminacy or quantum weirdness, by the way, it’s absolutely deterministic.

Incidentally, the inverse of it is the trope that reality is pretty resilient, disturb it and it works around the disturbance and fixes itself so things go on pretty much as before. I wish I could remember where I’ve seen that expressed. Something by Doug Adams? Doctor Who? Terry Pratchett even? Bugger, my memory’s shot. Anyway the expression of that trope is that, even if the assassin had missed Archduke Ferdinand, World War 1 would have started shortly thereafter anyway on some other pretext.

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I’ve just re-watched it. I don’t think I can add anything to what I said last time.

This time round, though, I can follow the plot precisely, and the way the time difference is handled now makes complete sense to me. I even get the precise timing of how Missy was able to kill the Master and he was able to kill her, almost simultaneously but moments and decades after. I do miss Missy.

Bill was a tragic figure, realising she was a Cyberman and nothing could be done to fix it. I think of all the companions she had the most tragic – and heroic – fate. I was so relieved, surprised and delighted when Heather reappeared to revive her. I know that possibility was always there, right from episode 1, I do love it when the storyteller tells us exactly what’s going to happen – and then with the passage of Time, we forget it until it happens. After the sadness of the episode, the sequence in the Tardis was just so pleasant.

As a final episode for the season, and for Moffat and Capaldi’s era, this was a masterpiece.

(I regard Twice Upon a Time as more of an epilogue).

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Hey, I like it!

(I trust the little Disney+ logo won’t be stuck in the corner of the screen the whole time)

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I see the last post on this was – me. But my brief comments below are slightly different this time so I’ll post them anyway.

A unique mixture of horror and comedy. The exchanges between the Doctor, Missy, Bill and Nardole are genuinely funny.
In fact the episode is shaping up to be a comedy classic right up to the point where Bill suddenly has a big hole where her heart used to be.

The scenes in the ward are best described as slow creeping horror, as we gradually realise what the medical procedures imply. I can’t remember the point at which I suspected the Cybermen, maybe not until the final reveal. Even though Razor used the magic word ‘upgraded’.

I do recall, having seen a photo of the original Mondassian cybermen in the past, thinking that was the lamest ‘monster’ suit ever, painfully obviously just extras in overalls. I couldn’t understand the Moff’s high regard for them. But now, having seen their development in this episode from ordinary surgical procedures, they are frighteningly convincing, absolutely logical, and the scariest Cybermen of all.

I didn’t suspect Razor of being the Master until his reveal, either. He was quite a sympathetic, if quirky, character – until he wasn’t.

I think the Moff has got the mechanics of black hole gravitational time dilation absolutely right, by the way. Though it took me quite a bit of reflection after first watching the episode to get it straight in my mind. It’s General Relativity, not Special, by the way. Or at least I think so. I assume the ship has powerful anti-grav shields that stop it being torn apart by tidal forces. Can’t help thinking shields would screw with the time dilation too, or maybe not, my brain boggles at this point, but it’s sci fi, what the hell.

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Me too! Might make it worth my while to catch up to date with Who… 🙂

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@nerys I actually like it better than Casino Royale. Possibly because I’m not a card player so the casino sequences in that didn’t really engage me. Possibly because Bond’s nice new Aston Martin didn’t do anything much except run off the road and roll. The opera sequence was good, by the way – loved the ingenious way Bond got the various Quantum conspirators to blow their cover.

I just read the Wikipedia page on QoS and it summarised the reviews which were – all over the shop. Which probably reflects the split between the acting/characters – who were good – and the editing – which was choppy. Sadly, there’s no commentary track, which could have clarified a lot. For example the first half of the opening car-chase scene was (I’m certain) one of the north Italian lakes between Garda and Maggiore (so now, in full compulsive-Geek mode, I’m condemned to driving round them all in Googlemaps Streetview to confirm it 🙂 The immediately-following downhill chase down the hairpins from the quarry was probably in the nearby Lombardy mountains, but topographically impossible (unless they elided a lengthy uphill chase in between). This did confuse me at the time.

I also geekily notice they skipped the invariable ‘gunbarrel’ shot after the titles – they put it in the end credits. Little director’s joke?

[Edit:] I was wrong, the quarries were almost certainly the Carrara marble quarries, which are 100 miles from the lakes and Siena is 70 miles further. Now I don’t mind them cutting from one location to another in reality, but ‘in-universe’ I’m disconcerted because they got from a lakeside to a mountaintop with just 18 seconds of car chase in between.

[Further edit:] Easy as pie really. Very first shot, north end of Lake Garda, looking southwest from Torbole, that cliff and mountain around Pregasina is unmistakeable. (I’ve driven down that road in a real car. SS45bis. Positively identified. It’s a narrow road for busy traffic, full of tunnels and galleries. And the road ‘to the quarry’ (not in reality) that Bond swerves onto is SP238 north of Campione. Interestingly, they removed the road signs at the junction (why would they do that?) They missed the most interesting bit, the knife-edge slot gorge/cave that the road shares with the stream that cut it – probably too narrow and tight to make interesting filming). That north Italian hill scenery is insane. Forgive me for geeking out, I’m a happy fulfilled geek for the moment.

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@nerys I just watched Quantum of Solace and wow! It’s bloody good! The action sequences were a bit disjointed but the character drama was top-notch. As you found, it gets better on subsequent viewings, particularly with the events of Casino Royale fresh in mind. It had some intriguing nuances – the ‘Bond girl’ hanging around the villain, the CIA in bed with the villain. Felix Leiter (as in Casino Royale) is a quite different actor from the loud gum-chewing Yank of Goldeneye.
I really liked Mathis, was sad that he got killed – and it was indirectly Bond’s fault for persuading him to go along. I think Camille was a great action heroine (and notably, a Bond girl that James Bond didn’t get to romance). Curious casting counterpoint to Goldeneye – Natalya Simonova (Russian, and one of my favourites) was played by an Italian (Isabella Scorupco), while Camille Montes (Hispanic) was played by Olga Kurylenko (Russian/Ukrainian, living in France).

I think I may have under-rated QoS previously since I was still not used to Daniel Craig as Bond. Now I am, and maybe appreciate it better.

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@ps1l0v3y0u Well I assumed the Mondassians were humanoid enough to be interchangeable. A bit like humans and Sebaceans in Farscape. As for Timeless Children, I’m afraid I’m unfamiliar with that. I’m afraid most of Chibs’ reign has failed to register on my consciousness, or been forgotten, at least partly involuntarily.

The President’s wife – I assumed the Moon in question wasn’t Earth’s moon, so any space bat nonsense would be irrelevant to that. (and I’m doing my best to let Kill the Moon episode mercifully fade from my consciousness too 🙂

I don’t think Moff had planned to stay on later than the end of S10 (from all accounts he was exhausted by then**) but if he had, I think it quite likely that Bill would have helped to rehabilitate Missy. Could a getting-rehabilitated Missy have lasted two seasons? Well yep. Intercut with other stories of course.

I was postulating that Bill’s Mum was the High Council timelady in Day of the Doctor. Is it conceivable that she was the President’s wife that the Doctor later stole? (Cheeky sod). Though I can barely recall her from the ep, so there may be reasons why that’s silly.

(**I’d still rather have an exhausted Moff than a gung-ho ZChib though).

I pronounce ‘ZCh’ as like the ‘s’ in ‘measure’ by the way. Or the Russian letter Ж

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@ps1l0v3y0u @nerys Interesting point about the High Council lady. Is it possible that Bill is an orphaned Time Lady? And the Doctor ‘stole the President’s wife’. Is the Moff hinting that Bill might be the Doctor’s (other) daughter? (But if so, shouldn’t she have regenerative powers? Maybe not, if they were a technological feature ‘granted’ by the Gallifrey powers, as an orphan she’d miss out on that. I guess…) Though in that case she would not have triggered the Mondassian human-people-detector in World Enough and Time (notice that the only others present were two Timelords, an android, and blue-trigger-happy-idiot. Ah well, it was a lovely theory while it lasted.

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@ps1l0v3y0u Well Bill did have only the one series to develop in. Some might say getting turned into a Cyberman was rather too much ‘development’ 🙂
Although the professor-student relationship can be entertaining when the Moff writes it, in small doses, it isn’t really what Doctor Who is about, at least for me. ‘Who’ is relatively lightweight episodic television.
And, just personally, I found the Missy subplot fascinating and could have used a lot more than the brief glimpses we got. This has as much to do with Michelle Gomez’ delivery and personality as the storyline itself.
As to why the Doctor’s doing this (‘adopting’ Bill), I’d hypothesise that he needs the companionship. Who was it who said the Doctor shouldn’t be alone, it wasn’t good for him. River?

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@nerys I really liked the first one, Goldeneye. Natalya Simonova is one of my favourite Bond heroines, and Robbie Coltrane as the Russian gangster is one of my favourite Bond allies. And the second, Tomorrow Never Dies, as I said, Jonathan Price as Elliot Carver is the best villain (IMO). And Michelle Yeoh was great as an action heroine in that, too. The other two – the World is Not Enough and Die Another Day – they fell off a bit. Die Another Day also suffered from a couple of bits of appallingly bad CGI, one the burning cargo plane coming to pieces, the other (far worse) where Bond’s ice rocket fell off an ice cliff and he magically ended up CGI-para-surfing towards the beach – they were just so bad I cringed.
For Your Eyes Only is one of the Roger Moore ones that I do like – partly because by then Roger Moore was getting old enough to fit the part a bit better, and partly (I know this is silly) because of the title song/sequence featuring Sheena Easton. Oh, and the screenplay was good too.
I recall The Living Daylights as enteraining, reminiscent of From Russia With Love in the plot, I think.
The low point of the Bond series for me was the later Sean Connery / early Roger Moore ones where the Bond suaveness degenerated to self-parody. Nothing wrong with spy comedy, just that it isn’t James Bond.

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@ps1l0v3y0u Well much of that I would agree with (having just watched it) though I found it all a bit Indiana Jones. (Or did I say Edgar Rice Burroughs? One or the other). I much preferred Cold War (and I did like David Warner’s character). I didn’t really notice any dreadful inconsistencies such as in Kill The Moon or even the (much-less-awful) Forest of the Night. It just didn’t really grab me. For me, personally, it was the weakest episode of the season.

So, on to the much more atmospheric Eaters of Light…

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@nerys Silva? Was he the guy with the private island? (Reminds me a bit of Blofeld’s ‘suicide garden’ in You Only Live Twice (the book version). As does Malek’s garden in No Time to Die, of course). He was good, as I recall. But I need to re-watch the arc.
My favourite arch-villain (straying from the Craig arc) is Jonathan Price as Murdoch – oops, I mean Elliot Carver, in Tomorrow Never Dies. He somehow has a flaky quality to him as if he’s on the edge of sanity and might lose it at any moment.

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@nerys I’m going to have to do a mini-rewatch of all the Daniel Craig Bond films, since I’m quite hazy about them (in contrast to the Pierce Brosnan ones that I know quite well). The mention of an arc intrigues me. No Time to Die certainly linked back to Vesper Lynd who was in Casino Royale I think.

I didn’t find Malek particularly chilling, but yes bringing a child into it dramatically increased the threat level. But the villain I thought lacked menace was Blofeld. Just looked too mild. But – as it turned out – that wasn’t hugely significant since Bond promptly killed him. Oops.

(By the way, sorry for the nitpick, there were five Daniel Craig movies, Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace, Skyfall, Spectre and No Time to Die. And I only know that since I just tripped over it while looking up the timeline.)

I just googled ‘Get Out’ on Wikipedia and it certainly does sound – scary. I’m sure I’ve come across that brain-transplant idea somewhere recently but I can’t put my finger on it.

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I’m afraid my infrequent choice of movies is much more lowbrow than nerys’s. One I did just watch for the first time was the last* James Bond movie, <i>No Time to Die</i>. (I did say ‘last’ not ‘latest’, I know that’s ambiguous but they did kill Bond off at the end, so maybe it will be).
I thought it was well-made, one of the better Bonds in fact. The starting scene was quite un-Bond-ish, young girl in the wilderness with a killer after her. Then it switched to familiar Bond territory – they even brought back the classic Aston Martin DB5, with an upgrade to twin Miniguns, natch. The movie ran 23 minutes before the titles, which must be some sort of record. They included many ‘nods’ to classic Bond with such lines as ‘We’ve got all the time in the world’ (OHMSS).

I recall, at the time of its release, reading of some indignation that James Bond was now a black woman – obviously I totally misinterpreted that, James Bond is still Daniel Craig, just his number 007 has been reassigned. I have no problem with that, though Bond did. Didn’t find the new 007 particularly appealing though, a bit haughty. Similarly M and Q have changed, well that’s logically acceptable since those were titles rather than people. Miss Moneypenny has acquired a natural tan, which is odd since that’s a person’s name rather than title. Googling, I find that she actually became Naomie Harris as long ago as Skyfall, which just shows how unobservant I am.
But then, James Bond is the classic example of such changes.
There is of course a parallel / contrast to Doctor Who.

The various ‘Bond girls’, of which there were three not counting Moneypenny (can I call them that when two of them had no romantic relationship with Bond? I guess so, the movie series is known as ‘Bond’ after all) have all acquired serious combat skills in the modern style, most notably Bond’s escort in the casino who brings a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘dressed to kill.’

I found a curious anomaly in the standards of violence. Apparently you can kill as many people as you like so long as they don’t bleed (the film is rated R12). The classic traditional ‘gun-barrel’ opening shot, I noticed that after Bond shoots, the ‘wave of red’ running down the screen was absent. I didn’t think Bond opening up with Miniguns at his pursuers was anything out of the usual, probably some of them got hit but it’s not shown on screen, and it’s a battle anyway. What did shock me was the hit squad in the secret lab deliberately killing (off-screen) all the unarmed captive lab staff.
Even from the villains that makes me cringe.

Oh, and finally, Bond’s predicament at the end was tragic – infected with a targeted virus** linked to his girlfriend’s DNA and hence their daughter’s so if he ever touched them again they would die – that is just so painful. (** I think that’s probably unfeasible, but in sci-fi terms alarmingly credible).

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@nerys I share your feelings about 13. (I’m shortly about to experience them again, I’m almost up to there, only 5 Moffs to go. I’ll just skim the highlights of 13.)

@winston Eve of the Daleks was, in my recollection, far the best of 13.

Ah well, on to Empress of Mars which IMO was the weakest of Season 10, very Edgar Rice Burroughs, could almost have been a Chibnall episode…

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@winston It’s actually a ‘pook’, short for pukeko. Although they’re called ‘swamp hens’, they’re apparently not good eating, very tough (I wouldn’t know, I never tried, nobody does). There’s actually a recipe for cooking Pook – you put the pook in a pot along with a chunk of sandstone rock and boil it. When the rock starts to go soft and crumbly, you throw away the pook and eat the rock. 🙂

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@winston Yes, while the quality of the ‘swimming’ (mud-wading?) at Blockhouse Bay is just acceptable at best, the surroundings do make a big difference. Probably the best feature is the narrow high ridge on the southwest, which shelters it perfectly from the prevailing south-west winds. The second most common winds are north-easters, and it’s sheltered on that side too. And though there are a lot of houses around, the immediate vicinity of the bay is steep slopes covered in ‘bush.’

At least you have a creek, I don’t think I’d want to live anywhere that there wasn’t water nearby in some form. The wildlife we get in the bay is mostly oystercatchers, the inevitable seagulls, ducks, and occasionally pukeko on the grass (but not in the water). Pooks (‘swamp hens’) are a freshwater wading bird, though they’ve adapted to anywhere the ground is swampy or even a bit damp, such as the edges of motorways. I rather like them, they’re quirky-looking birds and quite at home in suburbia.

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@ps1l0v3y0u Well I think Moff is probably non-religious (like me), but I haven’t really seen any strong anti-Catholicism from him, other than maybe mild irreverence. If one was looking to bash the Catholic church one could find dozens of bigger skeletons in their closet than just old legends of ‘Pope Joan’.

If the priests in Bill’s bedroom were intrigued by her laundry basket that would indeed add a lot more point to the ‘You’re all going to Hell’ line. As it is, it still works as a sort of retaliation for them invading her bedroom, but not quite so well.

I seem to recall the reference to Obama was brief and uncontroversial. Yes Harold Saxon was Tony Blair all over, but the name ‘Blair’ was never ever mentioned. Has anybody ever mentioned Trump? Probably best not, if the Beeb doesn’t want death threats from MAGAs… (Though, did somebody say ‘orange’ at some time, and I don’t think it was a ref to William of Orange?)

I’m always a bit uneasy about referencing real historical figures – Hitler and Churchill being the most obvious examples, though maybe the sensitivity of that is decreased by the fact that everybody’s ‘done’ them. Other figures – particularly scientific/technical ones like Tesla and Edison (and howcome they never mentioned George Westinghouse??) bring out all my geeky nitpicking tendencies. If they ever do George Stephenson or I K Brunel they better get it right!

Of course there’s always the logic problem with recent times explaining how everybody doesn’t remember the events of the story – like the starship Titanic almost crashing on London. Moff ‘fixed’ his most recent version of the problem by having the Monks erase themselves from history when they departed – covering their tracks. That was quite neat, I thought. They had the technology.
Traditionally, sci-fi has got around that paradox by setting itself in ‘the future’ – so it hasn’t happened yet. But of course time marches on, and any near-future story that’s famous enough will get itself overtaken by the inexorable date – 1984 being the most notable example.

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@janetteb Well Piha is always swimmable (except for very rare occasions when it’s too rough, but often then one can take a dip at The Gap at the south end of the island). But there are always waves breaking so you have to like battling the waves. It can often be very breezy, too.
Blockhouse Bay is a nice sheltered little micro-beach, but only swimmable at high tides at the upper half of the tidal cycle. I never used to swim there but now I do quite often, since it only takes an hour out of my day (Piha takes at least three) and I’ve got the tide tables printed out and handy. Surprisingly few people swim there, probably because if you just head down to the beach at random the chances of the tide being high enough to swim are about 1 in 10. Inlets in big harbours like the Manukau will always be muddy because there isn’t enough wave action to sweep the mud away. Blockhouse Bay was apparently a muddy mangrove inlet until in the 30’s (?) a local group cleared the mangroves, and at some point the Council trucked in enough sand for a tiny beach. One advantage of the lack of wave action is that the sand stays put.

Blackadder is always good, I have the full set on DVD (of course), must re-watch some time.
The ‘Monks’ trilogy, yes, I too find it better on a second or third watch when the rough outline of the plot is in my mind – like, as you say, many of Moff’s scripts.

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@ps1l0v3y0u

Well that post of mine (immediately above yours) was written two years ago on my first pass through the series.

Extremis is the best of the three episodes, for me. I don’t see it as bashing the Catholic Church by the way, the Pope seemed to be quite a reasonable sincere man. The Doctor’s old ‘friend’ Pope Benedict IX now, was not in historical actuality a woman, but apparently had a fairly turbulent and controversial Popedom, so I don’t think Moff was slandering an Icon of the Church in that respect.

Maybe the Monks didn’t run their simulation past their takeover because they would become part of the simulation – some sort of infinite feedback loop might result.

‘Woke’? (ugh), I detest the word, like most abuses of the English language. What is it supposed to mean? Indeed, what does it mean? Seems to me it’s like, say, ‘left-wing’, it can be stretched to mean anything the speaker wants (a la Humpty Dumpty). I was in favour of half the things now labelled as ‘woke’ long before the term was invented, or even ‘PC’; the other half I find utterly absurd. One thing I absolutely deplore is reading too much into some minor aspect of a work or a comment and treating it as an indicator of the writers’ (or director’s, or actor’s) presumed character failings. That’s equivalent to witch-sniffing or reading chicken entrails. [/rant]

If indeed the original plan of Pyramid at the End of the World was to feature Trump, Corbyn and Kim Jong Il versus the pyramid, that would have been extremely ill-advised. It’s one thing to bring Richard Nixon into The Impossible Astronaut (and I notice they treated him fairly fairly sympathetically, which is fair enough, his sins are all public knowledge now) – but current leaders? No. Besides, what would they have been doing? Kim would have been trying to nuke the pyramid, Trump would have forgotten his esteem for Kim in his haste to surrender (‘negotiate a deal’) to the Monks, and Corbyn I suppose would have been trying ineffectually to mediate between them. Could have made a good episode of Capaldi’s previous show, but not, I think, Doctor Who.

As for the Lady Doctor – well yes, I would love to see a good one. Not Whittaker, miscast, mis-directed, mis-written and mis-costumed, I think that about covers it. I’m rapidly coming up on Chibs’ era and I’ll watch the better episodes and skip the more cringey ones, it’ll be interesting to see if my views on Thirteen have mellowed at the end of it. (I would’ve loved to see Sophie Okonedo (Liz 10) as a female Doctor. Or of course Jo Martin (the Doctor in Fugitive of the Judoon))

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Hi @winston Unlike @janetteb (Hi!) we’ve had a pretty warm summer, and it’s still holding up – generally mid-20’s (70’s in Fahrenheit), and the water is still nicely warm. Typically (when it’s not going bananas) the weather stays settled until Easter at least. These days I generally just go for a swim at our tiny local beach at Blockhouse Bay on the Manukau Harbour, it’s very well sheltered from the prevailing winds but it’s only good at high tide, further out is just soft mud. And even then, high tides vary (in about a two-week cycle) from 3.2 metres to 4.5 metres and it’s only any good at 4.0 metres or above – maybe 3.7 metres as a minimum. Below that, and you’re paddling in a foot of water over oozy mud which is rather disgusting. And of course the tides get an hour later every day, so high tides that happen too early or late in the day are no good either. Which is why I keep a copy of the tide tables handy. Given those limitations, it’s surprising how often I manage to fit in a little dip. Being retired helps hugely, of course. And of course I can always make the 50-minute drive out to Piha on the coast which I used to do ‘all the time’ until I discovered that Blockhouse Bay was, actually, usable.

There are still some roads closed (or ‘Residents Cars Only’) from the two storms last February which caused widespread slips. This summer has been completely unlike that one, fortunately. However, some of South Island is experiencing drought – the east side, Marlborough and Canterbury, on the lee side of the Southern Alps. Christchurch Port Hills just had a big fire. Seems like half the country is always having droughts and the other half is having floods.

Doctor Who – I just watched the Monks trilogy. All very watchable, Extremis was great – and I’ve only just fully comprehended that the entire episode (with the exception of the flashbacks to Missy’s execution) was a simulation and the Doctor, Bill and Nardole were not real. The scenario was quite reminiscent of The Power of Three in that the ‘enemy’ was studying us – but a lot more credible. The Monks needed that information to control us; the enemy in Power of Three just wanted to kill a third of Earth’s population in order to – what? – so why didn’t he just get on with it instead of creating billions of cubes? Back to the Monks – The Lie of The Land was very ‘1984’ with the Memory Police. Reminded me of more recent political developments with, ahem, Alternative Facts (and that’s about as political as I should get). But when they left, everyone just forgot them. I like the student’s explanation for the vacant statue plinth – “Er, we thought they were just like filming something here or something?” Shades of ‘Derren Brown’.

Next, the least impressive (IMO) episode of S10, Doctor Who does Edgar Rice Burroughs.

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@vickymallard @winston @ps1l0v3y0u I found this episode entertaining. The Doctor flirting with Jabe the tree person – (Rose noticed – “You two go and pollinate”) – I really liked her, it was tragic when she died heroically. The theme of the Earth ending made me feel a bit – uneasy. But there were a host of interesting characters to absorb.

Cassandra, now, as the last ‘pure’ human is really unattractive. Not only murderous and conceited but a bigot as well, I was delighetd when Rose gave her an earful.

Hey! – the Moxx says (as an aside) “Indubitably, this is the Bad Wolf scenario.” The very first mention of Bad Wolf. (It will have more significance later…)

Not having seen any Doctors beyond Jon Pertwee, and that decades ago, I thought Ecclestone was really good as Nine.

One of the better episodes in Season One, I reckon.

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@janetteb I think ‘old Who’ worked perfectly well in its time. Just as, say, Blakes 7 did (even though the cast reputedly were a little bit disconcerted when the sets wobbled if they leaned on them). At the time, that was just the standard of special effects and production values we were used to. We used our imaginations to ‘fill in the gaps’ (and a fair bit of imagination was necessary. B7’s assorted ‘guns’ were singularly unconvincing).
It’s only looking back from the vantage of modern production values, that old Who (and B7) suffer by comparison. And they don’t have the visual appeal to grab the attention of your friend’s daughter.

If Doctor Who hadn’t lasted such an incredibly long time, I don’t think we’d be making these comparisons.

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@vickymallard Well I was effectively a ‘new viewer’ with Rose, too. That is, I’d seen some episodes of Two and Three when they first aired, but after that I dropped out for many decades. So ‘Rose’ was a fresh start for me. I also had no idea the Nestene Consciousness had a past (until I looked it up a few days ago. I’d highly recommend the wiki at Tardis.fandom.com by the way, for almost any questions regarding episodes or characters).
At the risk of committing sacrilege and being ceremoniously excommunicated from this site, I don’t watch much of Old Who either. By the time ‘Rose’ was made, production values were fully adequate. With Old Who (and this goes for Blakes 7, another favourite of mine), scenes inside the Tardis were okay, scenes outside (usually in a quarry) were okay, but aliens and robots were sometimes painfully obviously just extras in suits.
I’ve watched the last few stories of Seven and while I like Seven (Sylvester McCoy) and Ace, the ‘aliens’ and FX does make it hard for someone used to modern production values to fully engage in the story. There is a certain level (and that includes sets and special effects) below which it’s hard to sustain a convincing belief in the story. At the opposite extreme, spectacular FX can’t save it if the story and characters aren’t interesting, which is a mistake modern scifi/superhero movies often make.

@janetteb I was happy that Who had returned, though (since I’d dropped out decades before) I wasn’t missing it like you were. It was a promising new series to watch.
I couldn’t help noticing that both Martha and Donna’s mothers were the disapproving mother-in-law stereotype. Can’t help wondering if RTD had mother-in-law trouble 🙂
Whereas Jackie, of course, immediately fancied her chances with the Doctor. Camille Coduri was, as you say, excellent in the role. (Though Mickey probably thought she was the mother-in-law from hell).
Martha had a much bigger family, which tends to lessen their involvement. For some reason Yaz’s family, what little we saw of them, reminded me of Martha’s (but with a much less hostile mother).

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Just watched The Greatest Show in the Galaxy on DVD, with the seventh Doctor and Ace. I found it reasonably diverting, and since it was mostly about a circus the effects were adequate for the story, except for the moment when the Ragnarok gods try to shoot the Doctor with – little yellow pointers of light?

Apropos of nothing very much, I’ve resumed working my way through old episodes of Danger Man (the Patrick McGoohan secret agent series that preceded The Prisoner, roughly contemporaneous with the first Doctor) and some of them were very good. One thing I really liked at the time, and still do, was that foreigners spoke to each other in their native language. No condescending subtitles, no bad-English-with-a-fake-ethnic-accent, they did the viewer the compliment of assuming s/he could fill in the gaps from the context. A nice touch of authenticity, rarely imitated since.

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@winston Good luck! I’m not sure I can offer any advice, other than, list your requirements and intended usage as clearly as you can, (e.g. I guess you need plenty of ports to connect external drives etc to), and try to find a salesperson who seems to know what they’re talking about. And, I think the latest high-performance PC’s probably cost a premium, and a slightly slower model with ‘last year’s CPU’ will probably do everything you need for a lot less $$$. (Unless you’re heavily into gaming or video editing).

I really like a big monitor and a good keyboard. And a mechanical keyboard is just so much quicker and easier to use than a touchscreen. So I still drag a laptop around with me – not quite as good as my tower PC and its full keyboard, but almost. I did try a tablet for a while, but I found it just not as good, more like an oversized smartphone. (I wonder when, if ever, smartphones will acquire laptop-screen-sized holographic displays, or is that strictly sci-fi?)

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@vickymallard Finally 🙂 Yes ‘Rose’ is a good place to start. I would rabbit on about that’s where I started but I just said all that to Rewvian in the comment just above yours.

The mannequins were creepy. So was Plastic Mickey. And I agree it was a bit of a stretch that Rose didn’t recognise the strangeness, but I think that underlines the way Rose took Mickey for granted.
Billie Piper was an excellent casting choice, I knew nothing of her before (except I vaguely knew that she was some sort of teenie pop star, not my thing, Pink Floyd are my thing) but she had just the right personality to engage any viewer’s attention. And Mickey’s dullness and unadventurousness, along with Rose’s dull everyday life, were enough (in fantasy Doctor Who land) to explain her running off with the Doctor. It was a little bit rough on Mickey, but I forgave her instantly 🙂

The Doctor – just alien enough. “Are you from the North?” “Lots of planets have a north.”
Was this the first episode where RTD made a joke about Eccleston’s ears? I can’t remember if RTD used to joke about Ten’s appearance, Moffatt certainly used to joke about his Doctors’ features.

The alien – the Nestene Consciousness. Loved polluted environments, and could control or inhabit plastic. Apparently it sent its control signals from a huge antenna disguised as the London Eye.
[Nerd mode ON:] Strictly, that makes not a lot of sense. It shouldn’t need a transmitter that size. Unless the signals were ultra low frequency, but then how could the mannequins pick them up? I could be quite wrong here though, I stand to be corrected by anyone with radio knowledge.
As an aside, the giant Arecibo radio telescope dish in Goldeneye (James Bond) was even more absurd for controlling a satellite, but I love the movie anyway. [/Nerd mode]

In fact the Nestene Consciousness was – complicated. I never realised how complicated till I read its entry in Tardis.fandom.com – here’s the link: https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Nestene_Consciousness
I won’t even try to summarise it, I never realised how much background there was.

I think the episode succeeded, not so much because of the sci-fi element, but because of the human interplay between Rose and the Doctor (and also Jackie, and Mickey).

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@winston OK, I’ll keep it simple – carry on keeping your stuff on an external drive if you can. Or backing up to an external drive. It’s extremely unlikely that your PC will damage files on an external drive even if it (the PC) crashes with the drive connected. But if possible just make sure you have two copies of anything important in two separate places.
I’m sure you knew that 🙂

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@ps1l0v3y0u I absolutely agree 100% with everything you just said about ‘Blink’. 🙂

Do I have schizophrenia and I haven’t noticed, and you are just my alter ego posting and not telling me? (Hey, that could make the basis of a good sci-fi plot. Guy notices on-line posts from someone who shares opinions remarkably closely, tracks them down, and finds – it’s him. Probably the sort of psychological thriller the Beeb might have done in the sixties. If the Internet had existed then, of course).

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@ps1l0v3y0u @janetteb
Jamie Mathieson and ‘Bill’ did a commentary on the ‘Oxygen’ DVD and I’m fairly sure that’s where I heard him ranking his four.

His site Jamiemathieson.com https://www.jamiemathieson.com/doctor-who has a lot of material on his Who episodes, like first drafts, ‘Steven made me do it’ moments, it’s a rabbit-hole of fascinating titbits. I strongly recommend a visit.

Like the Tiny Tardis: “The mad thing was that no-one had done it before. In hindsight it seems obvious. The exterior has always been smaller on the outside. In this episode, we just keep going. The next part of the puzzle came from Steven. I’m sure I would have figured it out given time, but he’s just so damn quick. ‘I’ll go you one better.’ he said. ‘Clara carries the Tardis around in her bag for the whole episode.’ My smile froze. Of course she does Steven. And every time anyone compliments me on the idea I will have to hold my tongue and grind my teeth knowing you came up with the cherry on the cake. Damn your Bafta winning eyes.”

Anyway (he says, reluctantly dragging himself back out of the rabbit-hole), I didn’t see any ‘issue with Flatline’. I had a very minor quibble that railway tunnels don’t usually have hidden side tunnels, but the Channel Tunnel does, and the London Underground is full of them, so that quibble sorta falls flat. The other very minor quibble is, the train probably wouldn’t stop so quick, or get up speed quite so quickly, but that’s – again – so trivial I wouldn’t even mention it if you hadn’t mentioned ‘issues’.

When I say I’m ambivalent about ranking Jamie’s top three, I don’t mean that I doubt their quality, they’re all good, I just mean that I can’t really decide which is best.

I wouldn’t quite rate Mummy up with Blink, though. Simply because Blink not only has the most effective monsters ever (in terms of scariness vs effort required to film them), but also the perfect time-travel-paradox plot. And a rather sweet little romance. I think it’s an almost impossible ‘standard’ for any other episode to match.

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@janetteb @ps1l0v3y0u
I agree with you both (and Jamie Mathieson) that The Girl Who Died was far the weakest of the four. The top three I’m ambivalent about the ranking of – I have a distinct fondness for Flatline but Mummy is also excellent. Oxygen is grimmer and grittier and carries more ‘punch’ than either. So I’d say all three very good.

I’ll be reaching Chibs’ term shortly in my progression through Who, I think I’ll just watch a selected few, it will be interesting to see if I can find any that rate up with The Girl Who Died. I’m unsure about that, maybe his last Dalek one in the warehouse (Eve of the Daleks was it?). Won’t know till I re-watch.

The Girl Who Died – I can’t help wondering which came first, the script or the casting. “We’ve got the girl from Game of Thrones, now what do we do with her?”

The electric eels – I don’t think they’re found in British waters. And anyway I doubt they could generate the current to power an electromagnet that powerful. But every writer does that (which strictly speaking is no excuse, but if that’s the episode’s worst problem I can overlook it. OTOH I could give Kill The Moon one for free, and it would still grind my gears like a bad learner’s first lesson on a crash box).

The Benny Hill theme was actually relevant – ‘Yakity yak’ sounds like exactly the music track you’d put on a video clip to make the victim look ridiculous. And talking ‘Baby’ – that’s used in several other episodes, usually as a humorous device, so I can’t see anything much wrong with that.

Re the mistreatment (by the writers) of Companions, I think it’s inevitable. It’s a drama series, it needs deadly perils, we all know the Doctor’s not going to die (though Moff did try his best to shake that up), so guess who’s standing next in line? (I’m reminded of the old Xena series and how Gabfans used to predictably blame Xena when anything happened to her little friend Gabrielle *even when it was Gabby’s own silly fault*. Well, you hang around action heroes, you can expect a bit of collateral damage). Though I have to say, RTD and the Moff (and their various writers) did remarkably well in imbuing the Collateral Damage (sorry, Companion) with personality, to the point where I was sometimes more invested in the Companion’s fate than the Doctor’s.

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@ps1l0v3y0u That may be why I tend to overlook Oxygen – excellent though it is, it isn’t upbeat (except the ending). It starts with a truly sympathetic character and promptly kills her dead. Whereas Jamie’s other episodes, Mummy, Flatline, even The Girl Who Died are much lighter in tone (even if people are dying). But I did appreciate it much more on this re-watch, probably because I had the general skeleton of the plot in my brain so I had somewhere to place the plot developments, I was able to appreciate the precision of the details. Well that’s the best way I can describe it.

The Monks – I loved the premise of Extremis. But more of that later.

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@winston You have my sympathy. Losing a PC is always a bit traumatic (even though I usually have a spare laptop lying around). My desktop lives in a big ancient tower case with half a dozen drive slots of which four are currently occupied so I can easily swap drives with a screwdriver (drives are – relatively – cheap) but it’s always a bit of a hassle. As Janetteb says, hopefully the drive with your data will be okay, and certainly the external drives should be.

@janetteb As I said to Winston, reinstalls are always a bit of a pain. One handy dodge you might consider is to format your drive into several partitions, one or two of maybe 20GB each (get S/O to check the necessary size for a good O/S install) and the rest in one or more partitions for data. Then keep all your data stashed in one of the ‘data’ partitions. Then if your operating system goes down you can do a fresh install in a ‘OS’ partition without hazarding your data.

(That’s how I do updates too, I have automatic updates turned off, once a year or so I install the latest version of my OS into the spare ‘OS’ partition and set it to boot from that one. If for some reason the install is bad, I just revert to booting the old version. Either way, my data is safe where it is. Not sure if that strategy is practical in Windows though, your Second Officer can advise).

For some reason I tend to overlook Oxygen too. As I said in my comments, it grows on me – it’s precisely plotted, no sloppy bits. It’s often the case, in any episode with a complex plot, that I appreciate it more second time around when I have a rough outline of the events sketched in my brain.

Jamie Mathieson rated it his second best, after Mummy on the Orient Express, before Flatline and The Girl Who Died.

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