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Well, I’m finally up to the finale, The Timeless Children. The previous episode was build-up, lots and lots of build-up. Maybe too much, we have the riddle of the Irish guy, the Cyberpursuit of the last few humans, plus the reveal of the ruins of Gallifrey, and the Master – all of which seem quite unrelated to each other. Oh, and the music gets really intrusive at times.

I’m a bit – disappointed in the Master. As Missy, he really did seem to be trying to learn some wisdom. Destroying Gallifrey was definitely OTT. I can see how anyone who is more picky about canon than me might get upset about that. Sasha Dhawan’s Master is good and believable, I have to admit, but I don’t really see any of Missy in him (but then I don’t see any of Capaldi Doc in the current one either).

Graham’s idea of using the cybersuits (and discarding the original occupants) is exactly like an incident in Battlestar Galactica when one of the humans removed the insides of a Cylon attack craft and flew it home. Incidentally, I do like Ravio, wonder if she and Graham will get a thing going.

I’m not sure Chibbers has earned the right to make such fundamental changes in Gallifreyan history as he’s doing here. And – isn’t it the Daleks who have earned the right to destroy Gallifrey? Is this some sort of Cyber-retcon? And what’s the idea of destroying all organic life? Isn’t that more a Dalek thing? I thought the Cybermen just wished to upgrade all humanoids.

Ryan still comes across as a bit of a prat, even though his dyspraxia has miraculously been replaced by an ability to break the Olympic throwing record.

And the (non-Gallifreyan) child being the Doctor – just jumped the shark, IMO. (I thought it was going to be the Master, btw). That makes no sense, if the Doctor was the Child, capable of unlimited regeneration, then why was the Doctor limited to twelve and why were the Timelords able to ‘grant’ the Doctor further regenerations?

And I’m starting to have trouble believing the Master as the episode goes on, what’s driving him?

And the idea that the Doctor was some sort of secret sleeper agent for a Timelord CIA called the Division – Chibbers is really running wild here isn’t he? And CyberTimelords…

Um, where are all the Cybermen while the humans are planting bombs all over their ship? And how did they so easily get off the ship at a few seconds’ notice before it blew up?

How convenient, to find a working Tardis just sitting there. Though I suppose, this is Gallifrey, so I’ll concede that one.

And the Doctor wimps out of pushing the big red button – and Ko Sharmus conveniently appears to do it for her. Question – why hadn’t the Tardis crew already gone, what were they trying to do, wait and get annihilated? And what was the Master’s CyberTimelords doing all this time, did none of them think to take a look around?

Okay, so the crew had indeed gone, and the Doctor took a different Tardis (had to read the synopsis to click to this, it wasn’t entirely apparent from the screenplay) – which disguised itself as a tree – to get back to Sexy. And the crew’s Tardis chameleon circuit made a small house – which is good canon.

Um. Way better than the previous season ender. It needed the double episode to give room for the story to happen. Still, there was almost too much in it. The Irish setup last ep was all just for a brief payoff with The Division which signified – what? That was just a throwaway element, nothing resulted from it. And how did the Master destroy Gallifrey? And is the Master really vaporised? I sense a certain lack of attention to detail all through this ep. Lots of radical concepts, but not a lot made of them.

I would have liked to see Graham go off with Ravio at the end, but that’s just me.

Now to read everybody else’s take on this ep…

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Well, things have been pretty quiet around here, haven’t they?

I just – finally – watched the S12 finale, Timeless Children.   A vast improvement on the previous season ender (though that wasn’t a very high bar).   I can see why some people were upset about the canon.   It seemed to me that Chibbers was determined to shake up as many concepts as possible, some of them with very little pay-off (the Division, what was that about?)

But anyway, I’ll post my impressions as-I-watched-it in the forum for that ep.

cr

 

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@janetteb    Your comment on English literature teaching rings a bell.   As I recall, in the sixties sci fi wasn’t even mentioned at school.   We got Dickens (which prejudiced me horribly against him), Shakespeare (which was a relief after Dickens, at least in Julius Caesar stuff happened), the nearest to a sci fi author was H G Wells but we didn’t even do War of the Worlds or The Time Machine, a random braincell just popped up with The History of Mr Polly.   (Where the hell did that come from, I haven’t thought about that book in over 50 years, what was that utterly insignificant factoid doing lurking in the bottom of my memory banks?   I dread to think what else might be down there).   Conan Doyle was far too lowbrow, as was Orwell.   The nearest to a modern novel was a dreadful depressing thing by Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory, I’ve detested Greene ever since.

Fortunately for me I was addicted to reading so I discovered Thomas Hardy, Orwell and Conan Doyle for myself, and also of course Arthur C Clarke and John Wyndham.   And also of course, no-one was making me read them.

I’m inclined to think sci-fi was suspect because Hollywood had made some (mostly fairly dire) B movies – I think the same applied to horror (Frankenstein), detective fiction, or in fact any popular fiction of the time – not real ‘literature’.

cr

 

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Hi Declan

Well you’ve probably got the right forum if you want to talk, the mods here very rarely ban anybody for talking too much, so long as you don’t post spam or insult people they’re cool.   Only thing is, this isn’t a very active site (but you know that).   So you may not get many replies.   So if talking helps, fine, but you can’t expect too much, I’m not sure if anyone has the magic words that will fix everything.   I’m afraid I certainly don’t, I have the people skills of Arnold Rimmer   🙂

cr

 

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Just went back & rewatched Can You Hear Me (which I think I only watched once, first time through, a couple of weeks ago). I probably posted a couple of comments On the Sofa (cos I didn’t post them here). But anyway – quite a good episode.

Chibbers (or the director) seems to have a thing for goofy headgear – IMO it always makes people look silly. This time Graham gets to wear it, not only the Doctor. The Tardis’s telepathic interface, like the rest of the interior, has not improved with this iteration.

However, the interior of the alien ship / control centre / monitor platform, whatever it’s called, is impressive. Very clean and uncluttered and looks appropriately high-tech. The imprisoned immortal, dark skin and white hair, reminds me visually of Storm from X-Men. Very striking looks.

Really a very simple plot that took up the 40 minutes quite adequately. (I don’t count the last ten minutes of public service announcement as part of the plot 🙂 My interest abruptly faded with Ryan’s mate’s discussion group, not that I discount the seriousness of depression, but important messages don’t always make good television (e.g. pollution in the previous episode).
Credit to Yaz that her segment revived my interest. I like Yaz in this, and the scene on the moorland road was beautifully staged and very effective. The scene with Graham and the Doctor, was I thought excellently written. I’m frequently irritated by the Doc’s gabbiness, but on this occasion I thought her reaction was perfectly captured. Maybe because I would act and feel exactly the same way, though I might not put it in words. I never know quite what to say on such occasions and all the conventional phrases sound hackneyed to me. This wasn’t the Doc being alien, this was the Doc being human. (I’m absolutely not suggesting this is the best way to handle such situations. Anybody who is fortunate enough to know exactly what to say on such occasions, I envy you).

 

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@janetteb   If the Thermians – who could not comprehend a lie and therefore took TV fiction as real – if they’d seen Doctor Who they would have been horribly confused trying to replicate the Tardis, wouldn’t they?   Never mind the ‘bigger on the inside’, that would be only the start, what would they have made of ‘The Doctor’s Wife’?

Incidentally, on another tack, I was just watching an episode of New Tricks series 8 (which I’m also working my way through) and one of the guest characters was a bent copper who had rather rugged looks, but oddly attractive and charismatic.   I knew I’d seen him in something, but didn’t recognise him till I read the credits – it was Paul McGann.   Some actors have just got “it” whatever they’re in, it was a pity we never got to see more of the Eighth Doctor.

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@janetteb    Yes, I recall Lexx as a bit rough around the edges.   For some reason Farscape always reminded me of it, though a slightly more polished production.  (Only slightly, they had their moments).

I like Galaxy Quest, though not as much as Princess Bride.   There’s one sequence in Galaxy Quest that I only ‘got’ in retrospect – when they were racing to get to the self-destruct mechanism and failed to reach it – and it stopped on One anyway.   I was like “huh?”.   I can’t recall if it was explained in the dialogue, but Of Course, the aliens had built the ship to behave exactly like the TV series they had been watching, and on TV self-destructs *always* stop on One.

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Speaking of DVD’s, I just watched Ascension of the Cybermen for the first time.   I was pleasantly surprised, it’s not bad.   (This season is an enormous improvement on Chibbers’ first season).   Plenty of action, enough questions to keep me guessing (and, I trust, give a headache to everyone who complained that the Moff’s episodes were ‘too complicated’    🙂

 

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Impressions on a first viewing –

I’m not overly fond of Cybermen – actually they scare me. But definitely an improvement on the naff monsters that Chibbers conjured up in his first season.

Brendan’s is a delightful rural story – so obviously something bad is going to happen to him (a pity, but this is Who, Brendan is obviously there for a reason).

The Cybermen ships look quite similar to the Cylon raiders from BSG (2004).

And the Doctor arrives laden with technogadgetry. This is a bit of a departure from his/her normal MO, isn’t it? (I said ‘his/her’ because I’m referring to all recent generations of the Doctor, not sure what the proper definite article is but I’m pretty sure it isn’t “its” 🙂
Not that the technogadgetry works. Why do cyberdrones look like Cybermen heads? Or, in fact, a little bit like the Mantrid drones from Lexx (now that was a seriously weird series).

The Lone Cyberman seems to be a particularly garrulous individual, doesn’t he? Maybe he caught it off the Doctor (this iteration of the Doctor, I mean). “Tell them, be afraid.” (I was mentally completing that, Be Very Afraid).

The Gravraft, trying to reach the Boundary and jump where the Cybermen can’t follow – definitely reminiscent of “33”, the first episode of BSG, where the fleet tried to jump through hyperspace to somewhere the Cylons couldn’t follow them. I was a little maliciously amused when the Doctor was taken aback by Ethan’s superior Cybership piloting skill.

I did like Ravio – “If anyone’s got any heartfelt end-of-life speeches, now is probably the moment” Yaz: “Well, er..” Ravio: “Oh god, you’re not actually going to do that, are you?” I love a cynic.

The wrecked ship did look a bit like the remains of a BSG Battlestar, too. Oh, and Graham says “Don’t panic.” Srsly, were the writers trying to cram in as many scifi references as they could?

Umm, the way that venting air caused the craft to go spinning, then straighten up in exactly the right orientation to fit in the Cybercruiser’s docking bay, was a little wrong, technically. And if the cybercruiser was meant for Cybermen, why would it have air on board? Do Cybermen need air? Maybe they do, if they have any human bits remaining. Why were there no Cybermen left on the cruiser, if it’s still functional, what chased them away?  But these are minor nitpicks, not remotely near KTM territory.   (“Never give up” says Graham. He’s doing it again – Never give up, never surrender – Galaxy Quest). Graham and Ravio seem to be quite compatible, are they going to get a thing going?

Oh, it seems the cruiser is full of Cybermen – in stasis. (But why no crew?). And why is the Lone Cyberman blasting a just-woken one?

And what *is* going on with Brendan. Who, it seems, can age but cannot die. Unlike his adopted father who didn’t age at all. Obviously cyber-connected, but how…?

And so we have Yaz, Graham and 3 humans on a cybercruiser now full of Cybermen. And the portal at Ko Sharma’s place now leads to Gallifrey – and the Master pops out through it.

Chibs certainly put *everything* into this episode. Buildup, lots and lots of buildup. (I stole that, can’t remember where from). Altogether, not a bad ep, it certainly kept moving from start to finish and it has more unanswered questions than a Moffatt puzzle.

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@winston    Your library is very up-to-date with its DVDs!    I love libraries, though I must admit I haven’t visited ours nearly so often since we got broadband and Youtube.   But if I’m away from home, I find a good library extremely useful as a source of information – not everything is convenient to do on a smartphone!    It sounds as if your local library is a good one – lucky you.   🙂

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@rewvian    Absolutely no ‘commitment’ required.   I’ve felt impelled to post my impressions of some episodes when I watched them, other episodes I haven’t bothered.   It’s totally informal.   Sometimes others here have responded with their views on my comments, or their own views on that particular episode, sometimes nobody has.

There aren’t really any rules except, I think, ‘be nice’.   (If you read the page on ‘Etiquette’, there’s a whole page that boils down to pretty much that.   Oh, and no spoilers).   Which I interpret to mean, don’t moan too much (that rant I did about Kill the Moon is as negative as I ever let myself get, and I don’t do that often).   But the moderators are very relaxed.

As you said, just comment if you feel like it, nobody’s keeping track.

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@rewvian     Enjoy your re-watch and don’t be intimidated by the size of it.   It’s not like a giant cake you have to eat all at once.   Just take a bite-size nibble from time to time as you feel like it, there’s no set schedule.

When you do watch an ep, if you feel like it, post your impressions here – I think I can speak for everyone else (most of whom have been ere a lot longer than me!) when I say we’re always happy to geek out discussing an episode.   🙂

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@rewvian     I think it might have been Sonic Screwdriver time   🙂

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@janetteb   I remember David Warner – very good actor.   It’s quite disconcerting when people who feel like contemporaries pass away.   I tend to imagine actors as being ‘the age they were when I last saw them in an episode’.

I feel your pain (re the laptop).   At the moment I’m a very happy (and relieved) chappy.   Two days ago I tried installing a different flavour of Linux on one of the drives in my server and somehow, while installing the bootloader (that’s the thing that takes control at startup and then starts the operating system – or whichever OS you choose if there is more than one) – somehow I managed to munge the partition table on one of the other drives.  That whole drive just showed up as ‘unallocated’ – which means the operating system can’t read it so assumes it’s unused.   And this included the partition with all my data on it – bank records, photos, personal documents of all sorts.   *Some* of it was backed up on another drive…   8-((

I was very lucky, it was salvageable, yesterday I downloaded a brilliant program called ‘testdisk’ which managed to reconstruct the partition table and write it back to the drive and all my stuff magically reappeared, just like that.   Whew!    I promise to make proper backups in future…

I’ve given up tearing my hair over these things, I don’t have much to spare and certainly not enough to get a good satisfying grip on.   Maybe I should pay more attention to a tagline I once saw – “If it works, don’t f*** around with it!”    But where’s the fun in that?

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@winston    To me, DVD is far the best way to view anything.    Via the TV or via laptop.   (I can let Mrs D watch TV while I watch Who or whatever on my laptop with headphones.   This was extremely useful a short while back where the vagaries of the Youtube algorithm had led our TV, via funerals,  to a string of peoples’ ‘birthing’ home movies – why would any sane person record their most embarrassingly intimate and unattractive moments and put them on the Internet for total strangers to view?   Fortunately for my equanimity, the Algorithm has now led to a series of young southeast-Asian women (Vietnamese, Thai, I wouldn’t know) living ‘off-grid’, building their own houses out of bamboo.   Surprisingly peaceful, no commentary, just natural sounds, just saw one of them replacing the bearings on her self-contained hydro-generator set herself, which impressed me.   Don’t know how genuine they are, could be as phony as Bear Grylls, but with zero hype or melodramatics, delightfully bucolic and peaceful to watch.   But I digress…)

Anyway, I do love the physical sensation of having a DVD set in a nice plastic case, ideally with a colourful cover with table of episodes and list of extras…   if the DVDs themselves have nicely-designed artwork with list of contents, it adds to the experience.

Our library branches only have a fairly small selection of DVDs.   If your library has a good selection, use it! – since I would guess they allocate resources according to demand.

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There have been spinoffs.   Torchwood, which started okay, but then got very dark and a bit too grim for my tastes  (personally, I like ‘dark’, but not that dark).    And the Sarah Jane Adventures, which was aimed at a younger audience (and I never watched).   Just personally, I think one show – Who – is enough.

I rather dread the influence of any American megacorp intent on ‘maximising the returns from their intellectual property’ or however they choose to describe corporate greed.

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@rewvian Not to detract from Eccleston, because he certainly made a perfectly-judged performance as the Doctor, but I think we have to credit Billie Piper equally with the revival. And Russell Davies of course. I think, in New Who, the companion has almost always been just as important as the Doctor himself in the story (and probably in old Who too). (I know the Companion is traditionally presumed to represent the viewer, bringing a familiar viewpoint to view the Doctor’s alien weirdness from, but that strikes me as a very strange concept – I don’t feel like the Companion at all, I feel like an outside observer).

Rumour had it that Eccleston left Who with some bad feelings – this has variously been denied (others here may remember better) – which is why he never returned. This is why he never appeared in the lineup at the end of Day of the Doctor. But anyway, if true, he certainly didn’t let it affect his performance.

Anyway, technically my ‘first Doctor’ would have to be Hartnell, though I preferred Patrick Troughton. My watching in those days was a bit patchy, only caught a few episodes, and after Pertwee I lost touch with the show. (Yeah that’s how geriatric I am. I’ll grow up one of these days). My only other acquaintance with Old Who is the last three series of McCoy and Ace, which I recently bought on DVD. First time I saw a pic of McCoy I thought ‘what a silly old clown, no wonder the show folded’. But having watched him perform, and in The Five(ish) Doctors, and few appearances at cons (there’s a lot on Youtube!), he’s actually pretty sharp and witty, and there’s definitely chemistry between him and Sophie Aldred (Ace) – who I had also wrongly dismissed on the strength of her costume. A great pity they didn’t get the chance to carry their story further on TV.

I really don’t agree with your criticism of Capaldi’s first series. Didn’t the Doctor always go to ‘a different place every week’? And I don’t think Moff’s plots were ‘messy’ – complicated, but carefully thought out, IMO. Some of them worked on several layers, like a mystery story. I often found that re-watching an episode, straight after the first watch, but when I had some foreknowledge of where things were going, I could appreciate better the hidden meanings in dialogue. Either you like that sort of thing or not, I guess. But I’m a sucker for cunning dialogue, black humour and irony. The classic example, when you get to it, is Hell Bent – it soon becomes apparent (so I’m not spoiling anything by sating this) that in the conversation between the Doctor and Clara, one (at least) has no memory of the other, and one (at least) does remember and is hiding it – and maybe carefully probing how much the other recalls. Probably. Maybe. But we have no idea which until the end. But it also works beautifully if you just relax, look at the pictures (it’s visually lovely), and don’t try to guess where things are going.

But anyway, hopefully, when you re-watch, knowing roughly where it’s going, you’ll like it a bit better? (Give Kill the Moon a miss, though 🙂

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Hi @rewvian

Well, that first series, I thought ‘Listen’ was a fantastically good one, also ‘Flatline’. Deep Breath, Into the Dalek, Mummy on the Orient Express, Dark Water / Death in Heaven – all good I thought. Robot of Sherwood and Time Heist were okay ‘adventure yarns’, the only trouble I had with Sherwood was the golden arrow at the end – nobody could hit an ascending rocket with an arrow (maximum range, I dunno, 200 yards?) and how could an arrow sticking in a ship magically be processed and incorporated into its propulsion system in seconds? But other than that… (I’m an ex-engineer, so to me, everyday reality has to work – the nearer something is to ordinary the more it needs to be ‘real’. Teleports, time travel, bigger on the inside, alien stuff – I’m fine with all that, it’s sci fi, Time Lord tech, i.e. ‘magic’.   But sans magic, normal physics rules  🙂

Kill the Moon, OTOH, the one 100% stinker in modern Who. Everything in it was wrong, from the first scene (space shuttle landing on the moon) to the last (moon lays an egg) and every single thing in between. The Space Shuttle is a glider, there’s no air on the moon, it would crash like a meteorite. The Moon – and they made much point of it increasing in mass, where did the extra mass come from? – lays an egg of equal size to itself – ever heard of the Law of Conservation of Matter? Without which, not one natural process on earth would work. And then it flies off with huge wings that would only work if there was air in space. And I doubt 100 H-bombs would ever break up the Moon, hardly make a dent in it. And as for getting a coherent signal from Earth by having the whole population turning their lights out in the space of a few minutes – never, ever has any society been that organised. And in character terms, the Doctor swans off and leaves Clara, space woman and the idiot kid to decide whether to commit nuclear suicide without any clear indication of whether it would do good or bad? – was this temporary insanity? The one believable scene was at the end where Clara, incandescent with rage, tore strips off the Doctor – that felt real. [/rant]

I prefer to think that episode didn’t happen.

Both the Davies and the Moffatt era DVDs had a pretty good selection of extras. I made myself a spreadsheet so I could watch the episodes, specials, ‘webisodes’, prequels etc in the right order. Which was not quite the same order as Tardis.fandom.com has them listed in. My favourite extra has to be The Night of the Doctor, the mini-episode with McGann that preceded Day of the Doctor. But some of the interviews with writers, and the commentaries, were interesting and informative.

@winston

My theory for the decline in features of the recent DVD sets is, in the Davies/Moffatt era DVD sales were a big thing. Movies would come out in cinemas and then multi-disc DVD sets would come out and sales were massive. Now everybody ‘streams’ so DVDs are almost a thing of the past, sadly, so they don’t bother. I used to love browsing DVD rental stores, there used to be a particularly good one near where I worked (Newmarket, Auckland NZ) – a Blockbuster, quite small, but it specialised in ‘cult TV’ series, it had all of Who, Star Trek, Blakes 7, Battlestar Galactica, Farscape, Stargate, you name it (not that I watched all of those). I was quite distressed when their lease ended and they closed.

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Hi Rewvian I can’t speak for everybody but I think most would agree that each Doctor’s later seasons were an improvement on their first. I know I was a little dismayed by how dithery Eleven (Smith) was at the start, but he soon grew into his role.
I was fine with Capaldi, right from the start, but I’d say his second season – with Missy, Clara, Osgood making appearances – was the best yet. (That’s my personal opinion of course). And his third was pretty good too, I think it depends muchly whether you prefer Clara or Bill as a companion (I liked them both). Some people say that Clara was too ambitious – if so, it were a grievous fault, and grievously she answered it. I think I can say the combination of Moffatt and Capaldi have certainly produced some fireworks. But since you mention it, In the Forest of the Night was not one of their better episodes (and I say that as a dedicated tree-hugger 🙂

Whittaker, um, I’m not an enthusiast for, but I would say (and I think her fans would agree) that the writing improved a lot in her second season. Her third season I haven’t seen yet, I’m most of the way through her second on DVD. (I usually prefer DVDs to streaming, in Moffett’s day the DVD sets had a lot of worthwhile extras, for some reason the Chibnall/Whittaker era DVD’s have hardly anything on them – which seems odd given that the production budget has obviously been quite generous, the locations and special effects have been high standard.)

 

 

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And I just watched Haunting of Villa Deodati for the first time.   Not bad.   (I stuck my impressions in the Villa Deodati thread).    As a sc-fi loosely based on the story of Mary Shelley and Frankenstein, it worked fairly well.   Though it couldn’t help but detract a bit from the literary credit due to Mary Shelley – that was probably inherent in the setup and unavoidable.

The device of the perception filter / security system doing ‘scene-changing’ was good, and seemed original to me (I gather there may have been similarities with an old Who episode, but then nothing is ever really new).

I’ll watch it again.

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Well, a nice ominous atmosphere has been set up at the start, but really, the intrusion of Doctor and crew can’t but help but be anticlimactic. Only the benefit of creepy upward lighting saves them from perfect bathos. Can’t help feeling that Capaldi or Missy or even Tennant would have had the required sinister looks. This Doctor is more suited to be the Person from Porlock, whatever made her think she could crash the party without ruining the mood? “How about writing the most gruesome ghost story of all time?” Ugh!

And while I’m whining, I’m always a bit niggled when the Doc explains to us exactly who each historic figure is, as if her gang (and the audience) are too ignorant to know and can’t use Wikipedia. At least in this ep they diffused that a bit and had the Byron menage retail their own domestic complications.

Okay, and the setup where Graham flashback/repeats on his walk and the girl appears in the room etc, is starting to look promising.

That – thing – that one-finger exercise that Ryan is playing – is incitement to mayhem, as far as I’m concerned. When I was a teen we had a neighbour whose talentless kid could only play that, repeatedly, so I’m horribly biassed. I don’t believe a Victorian lady would bring herself to compliment such incompetence, unless she was being patronising, or that Grace would teach Ryan anything so limited. It says nothing for Ryan’s self-awareness that he would try to impress a lady by doing something he’s incompetent at. I’m also finding it a bit demeaning to Mary Shelley that it’s suggested she should have needed artistic encouragement from someone who can’t play Chopsticks.

Back to the plot – when space starts getting sliced such that locations suddenly change, that’s a promising development. Perception filter – that’s quite original. Generated by a security system – OK. But I’m a bit disappointed when the Cyberman turns up. And distinctly peeved when it turns out to be Mary Shelley’s inspiration for the monster. Let her keep credit for her own imagination! So the Cyberman recharges with lightning – just like Frankenstein’s monster. This is starting to look like pre-emptive retro-plagiarism. But Shelley controlling the perception filter / security system – that’s good. But did the security system include short-range teleport, or was that all the perception filter – I’m not clear on that. And what was with the skeletal hand? And the ghosts?

Then the Doctor has to make a decision whether to let the Cyberman kill Shelley. Pity she’s so talkative about it. And Ryan – since when was Ryan the hard man who could take tough decisions? It doesn’t make him look strong, just unlikeable. Okay, it was, I must admit, in character for the Doctor to decide in favour of letting Shelley live, and find a Time Lord trick to accomplish it.

Yaz, I think, is gradually getting better treatment from the writers – showing more initiative. Ryan isn’t, he remains a bit of a klutz.

So overall, not a bad episode, had a lot of good bits. If the aim was to weave a sci-fi story loosely based on Frankenstein, it succeeded fairly well; if it was intended to celebrate Mary Shelley’s literary talent, I think it backfired.

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@janetteb I share your sentiments. Looking at the news, I find it hard to believe the temperatures being reported in England at the moment. And forest fires in Europe, I’m accustomed to those being in Oz (no offence intended) or southern California. Meanwhile the record floods that NSW had seem to have migrated over here to NZ. The climate seems to have gone a bit psychotic.

A few years back we had a week of 30 degrees in Auckland (when it stayed near that all night, also we always have high humidity) and at the end of the week I coincidentally got a brief mild case of food poisoning – it didn’t last long but I thought I was going to die from exhaustion, and I put that down to the effect of a week of heat. I can hardly imagine 40 degrees in the shade.

@winston I’d hate to be paying for air con – we’re lucky not to need it (that 30-degree week notwithstanding). Fans and open windows are enough in summer, and in winter we just use a small electric heater (and I’ve insulated most of the house floor and ceiling). So we just heat the lounge – our power bills are still hefty enough. In hot weather we also have the garden, with plenty of trees for shade, and sit outside in the porch – we’re lucky enough to be of a generation when a house with a fifth-acre section was the norm, I’d hate to live in an apartment. Buying the house was the best thing we ever did.

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Hmm, have just read some of the comments on the Can You Hear Me thread. I didn’t find the Doctor’s apparent lack of empathy with Graham at all disconcerting, I thought it rang true. (Personally, I never know what to say in such situations). Also, maybe I have rather low expectations of Jodiedoc’s emotional range, she talks too much (blame Chibbers?) so, to me, her words don’t carry a lot of weight. The previous doc was notoriously unskilful at human expressions, hence the ‘cheat cards’ that Clara made for him (“I’m very sorry for your loss. I’ll do all I can to solve the death of your friend / family member / pet.”) I do have to say, though, that IMO the Moff was far more skilful at slipping in little ‘alien’ touches than Chibbers, who has to nail them in with a sledgehammer.

The other theme I notice in the comments (and which I agree with) is Too Many Companions. Though they got a bit more time in this episode, it was mainly due to the main plot being quite simple and leaving spare running time. Still, the relation between previous nuWho Doctors and their one companion was, almost automatically, far stronger than between this Doc and three companions could ever be.

Still and all, I did quite like this episode, this series (12) so far has been an improvement on the previous one, though none of the stories or characters have grabbed me like previous Doctors or companions often did.

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Just watched Can You Hear Me for the first time. Quite good, I quite liked it. A very simple story, compared with last week’s. The idea of the immortals playing with human nightmares for their amusement is very Terry Pratchett. I liked Rakaya (Clare-Hope Ashitey), pity she was evil. Very striking looks, dark-skinned with ash-blonde hair does that (cf Storm in X-Men).
Trapping the two immortals for ever with the materialised nightmare creature was, I thought, pretty dark for this incarnation of the Doctor.

If I had to nit-pick, I’d say the resolution – defeating the two super-powerful immortals with a wave of the sonic screwdriver – was too quick and easy. And the music – busy wittering away – was quite annoying at times (same last week). Also, there’s this weird obsession with silly-looking headgear, usually on the Doctor, but what was all that junk suck on Graham’s head? Previously, the Tardis’ telepathic circuits just needed the victim to stick their fingers in the console.

I liked the little bit of Yaz’s family life, and the scene of Yaz on the road. This series is certainly visually pleasing, for scenery and sets (the space platform in particular).

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@janetteb   I was never much of a Mupper fan either.   However, any idea that the creatures in Farscape might therefore be cuddly and family-friendly would be – misleading.   🙂     (There was one cute critter – I think somebody shot it   🙂    At some points it turns into a contest to see who can double-cross who the fastest.

The Premiere episode starts off way too gung-ho Right Stuff but have patience, it quickly goes downhill from there   🙂

I’d never heard of the BSG board game.    I’m not sure how I’ll find BSG on re-watching, it’s serious sci-fi and might be rather heavy going without the mystery of ‘who’s a Cylon’ to sustain it.    Or maybe not, it was very well made technically and dramatically.

But anyway, you’ll either like them or not.   I’ve absolutely given up  on predicting whether anyone is going to like a specific episode, tastes are so personal and stories so complex.

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I just realised that a lot of the questions I just posed about Praxeus are answered if the bacteria is intelligent and telepathic – as the script said: “it’s smart, it’s relentless, and it knows you’re onto it.” Kind of hard to take that as a metaphor. But – I couldn’t really credit it literally. It’s a matter of consistency. The episode starts out as a realistic story (disease, microplastics, menacing birds) – very John Wyndham (Day of the Triffids). An intelligent alien bacteria planning a takeover is a way-out-there science fantasy concept, the sort of thing Red Dwarf would do (and probably has done). It needed more build-up than just a one-liner. My ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ is very context-dependent.

 

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OK, Praxeus – setting aside my previous irritation with the Message, it’s still not as good as Judoon was.   Yaz got to do a bit of adventuring by herself, good.  Gabriella going off with the newly-reconciled couple at the end – kinda awkward, I think the writers just didn’t know what to do with her.

The stuff about enzymes, virus and bacteria sounded a bit shaky but I’m not enough microbiologist to know.   The alien bacteria causing bodies to explode was definitely – well, let’s say fantasy.   As was the bacteria making a plastic pressure dome at the bottom of the ocean.    And the bacteria not being human-transmissible but only from birds – weird.   And why were the birds attacking people anyway?   And why was the hospital in Peru and the street in Hong Kong completely deserted? – it gave an ominous ambience (which I guess was the reason) but was never explained.

So it had a lot of good things about it – production values were good – but just too many story elements competing for attention.

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@janetteb I’m more of a sci-fi fan than a Western fan, and in either case Sturgeon’s Law applies (95% of anything is crap). I’m trying to think what attracts me to (some) westerns and among their good points is, there’s usually some good dramatic tension as the action comes to a climax, also the scenery is often great (whether Monument Valley or Andalusia, I love those arid deserts with rocky outcrops and cliffs). Certainly beats the setting of most detective dramas.

Firefly was never much of a favourite of mine, I couldn’t really warm to any of the characters. I became rather fond of Farscape, with it’s bizarre Henson creatures and its subversive Aussie-inspired touches of slightly vulgar humour. Speaking of which, Red Dwarf, if there was an off-colour joke to be made they were right on it. (Favourite quote: “No way are these my boxer shorts, these bend!”) Although many of Red Dwarf’s plot lines were seriously interesting sci-fi concepts dressed up as comedy. And I liked Blakes 7, particularly Avon’s cynical one-liners – the Seven were very much anti-heroes. Killing off the entire cast in the finale – that was bold.

And Battlestar Galactica (the re-imagined series, I never watched the first one) – I must re-watch some time. Much of the interest first time through was guessing who was a Cylon ‘skin job’, be interesting to see if it’s still as interesting now I know most of them. Though actually I found the Cylon ‘skin jobs’ more interesting than the humans.

 

I actually love the digital/internet age. (I just deleted a wall of text, but it included maps, travel bookings, digital photos, music on Youtube, how-to videos on car/computer repairs… )

Doctor Who mention? – about to re-watch Praxeus. Now I’ve got my gripes about the Message off my chest, I may quite like it.

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@winston I agree, many old Westerns (and in fact many of our old favourite TV series) seem cringeworthy now. I was a little relieved to find that High Chaparral wasn’t. I know as a young teen I was dismayed when Westerns started going all Little House on the Prairie, because what is a Western without gunfights? (I should emphasise that that was young teenage me, I’m not a gun lover and very relieved to live in a country where I have never even seen a handgun in public). I like a couple of Eastwood’s spaghetti westerns, though the ultimate one of those, Once Upon a Time in the West, wasn’t Eastwood but Charles Bronson who filled the role of the man with no name as if it was written for him. (Interestingly, the full-length movie is way better than the shortened Hollywood version, which is maybe why it was a cult hit in Europe but flopped in US cinemas. And it had a haunting music soundtrack by Ennio Morricone. Sergio Leone understood that the way to build up tension is to take your time, as soon as someone starts shooting the tension is broken. More guns and more firepower does not always equal more drama).

(Eastwood actually picked up on that, the scariest movie I have ever seen was ‘Play Misty for Me’ where he played a DJ who was being stalked by a psychopathic ex-girlfriend who had already (unknown to him) stabbed to death the detective assigned to protect him, and who was waiting somewhere in his house. The camera just followed Eastwood as he wandered from room to room – every time he casually walked through a door I wanted to scream at the screen “Look Out!”)

I did like Who’s foray into the Western genre, A Town Called Mercy. Many series have ‘done’ a Western at some point. The Prisoner did (Living in Harmony), Farscape did (less successfully IMO – Home on the Remains), Red Dwarf (Gunmen of the Apocalypse), apparently Star Trek did. Blakes 7 I don’t think had an officially ‘western’ episode but the whole series was not far off a western. And of course Firefly was almost explicitly a space Western, with horses yet.

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Apropos of nothing very much, anybody here watch Westerns back in the day?

Somewhat to my relief, our ‘oldies’ TV channel that resurrects old TV series (most of which have been mercifully forgotten for good reason) seems to have run out of the 13,573 episodes of the Western sitcom ‘Bonanza’ that they were screening (and which Mrs D, bless her, used to watch – her tastes are, I hate to say it, indiscriminate, but I love her anyway. But not for her taste in TV 🙂 – and replaced it with High Chaparral, which I remember as a far superior series. Which is to say, actually watchable. And I’m pleased to say I actually still find it so. The characters are much better written (IMO) and more serious, I specially like Manolito who acts the affable Mexican in-law with a deadly edge to him. (In Bonanza he would inevitably be just be a comedy character).

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@blenkinsopthebrave    Ah, okay.   I wouldn’t put anything past them, cunning little buggers.   Beware of squirrels carrying chainsaws…

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@winston     Ah, thermos flasks.   They’re the practical answer to the question that catches out most people, “Is space cold?”   Or, “If your space suit failed, wouldn’t you instantly freeze?”   (I’m thinking of the episode ‘Oxygen’ there).     And the answer is, space is technically extremely cold, but it’s also a vacuum and a near-perfect insulator, the only way you’d lose heat is by radiation.   (So you would take a long time to cool down).    And in case anyone doubts that, I’d just refer them to a Thermos flask.

Anyway, I might re-watch Praxeus too, I think I’ve talked out my cringe at the Message and, discounting that, the rest of the ep was quite good.

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@missy        Yes, nice one!     Best one I can recall was one of those cutesy animal cards with a cartoon of a jolly hippo wearing a pink bow on the front and  “Hi.   I’m all yours”    Inside it said  “You’ll have to pay to get me towed away”

@janetteb    I wish Mrs D and I were sufficiently well organised that we could use that stratagem.    However, I’m afraid she would probably regard it as cheating.

@blenkinsopthebrave    What exactly do the squirrels do to the oaks?     July already – time is flying.   Down here in upside-down land of course it’s midwinter, I haven’t yet adjusted to the idea that the days are really short (like it gets dark just after 5pm) and already they’re starting to get longer again.   But we live up the warmer end of the country, so we never quite get snow or ice, just a few morning frosts.

 

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@winston    Congratulations.    It’s nice that you have a granddaughter you can be proud of.     I envy you your optimism about the younger generation, I hope it’s justified.

Your son is fortunate to have a mother who’s so easy to buy gifts for.   🙂    ( Mrs D and I are hopeless, to the extent of having to ask each other what we want for Christmas – and it doesn’t help  (“Oh, nothing really”).   So I get her a box of chocolates and she gets me socks.   🙂

Enjoy your Doctor Who reading.

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@winston    I heartily agree that ‘single-using’ plastic is generally a mistake and an environmental crime.   ‘Single-use’ plastic supermarket bags are now banned here (NZ), to my chagrin.   I reckon in terms of useful payload per pound of wasted plastic they were probably the most efficient form of packaging ever; also for me they were never single-use, they were free packaging, went in a basket for re-use and could be scrunched up into a tiny ball to fit in your pocket in case you ever needed to wrap something while out wandering, and re-used until they fell apart.   And also, plastic that thin will be the quickest to UV degrade and crumble to dust.

Bottled water is another bugbear of mine.   The energy cost of encasing tons of water in plastic and shipping it all over the world is an environmental crime, whatever happens to the bottles afterwards.    If the tap water is safe to drink (which it is for 90% of the developed world) why would any sane person spend money and effort lugging home tiny bottles of overpriced – tap water?   Sadly, people do.   (I do drink a lot of water,  I use a couple of old Pepsi bottles, and a bottle of ‘Volcan’ water that I bought in the Bois de Vincennes (Paris) in 2017 (all refilled with ordinary tap water, of course).   I’m curious to see how long it lasts in daily use – I think my bottles have repaid their energy cost).

It’s very hard to cut down on incoming plastic because it’s often the most convenient packaging.   Which is not to say it’s not frequently over-used.

‘Stay safe and plant a tree’ – I like that!

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@janetteb     I agree with all that.    In fact if I disagree with the message, it annoys me, but if I agree with the message it’s actually worse because it embarrasses me.   I start to think ”this is propaganda, why would anybody agree with this?”    There are far more effective and subtler ways to get the message across.

(I’d make a terrible politician – in the middle of stating some ‘fact’ I can’t help thinking “is this right?   Am I sure?”)

I think the entire storyline of Praxeus is actually fine, even including the aliens looking for a place full of plastic to carry out their experiments.    I quite like the absence of a villain and ‘sh*t happens’ storylines.  If only the writers had a bit lighter touch.   We could draw the moral for ourselves.

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@winston   Re-reading that, I realise it sounded a bit like a rant, for which I do apologise.  It’s an interesting topic, but complex – not as black-and-white as ‘Praxeus’ implied.   (Except for the ‘litter is bad’ bit, with which I agree 100%).

 

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@winston     Thing is, plastic is an invaluable material – and there are so many different ‘plastics’ that lumping them all together is almost meaningless.    Part of the problem is just litter – take that away and much of the pollution would disappear.   Remember how broken glass used to be a hazard – as someone who habitually walks barefoot along the shore, I say thank god for plastic bottles!  Although seeing plastic litter makes me almost as annoyed as broken glass.

And if one just magically vanished all plastics, every electrical or digital appliance – virtually every machine – would instantly stop working, catch fire or explode (just as they would if one magically vanished all metal).   I know of no practical alternative to plastic insulation.   So bemoaning the pervasiveness of plastic is a bit like bemoaning the spread of modern standards of living.

As to microplastics getting everywhere – remember most plastics are biologically inert (which is why they hang around so long).   I’m sure silicates (dust particles) are everywhere too.   So, probably, is paint dust (which is likely detected as ‘plastic’).   So I’m genuinely unsure whether these discoveries of microplastics amount to any more than that a percentage of ‘dust’ is now plastic rather than just silicates (rock) or decaying vegetable matter – is it biologically significant?   I don’t know.   It can be quite hard to tell (and I must admit I’ve never looked into it).    Or is it merely like the discovery that we are being bombarded with electromagnetic radiation (we always were, just nobody looked).

All of this is really peripheral to my feelings towards Praxeus though – if its message had been ‘Plant more trees’ (a thing dear to my heart) and had been equally heavy-handed, I would still have cringed.

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And now I’ve read some of the other comments – most of which I agreed with –

Yes good to see Yaz actually doing stuff.

The Doctor talks too much, or rather, lectures people. Somehow Capaldi could get away with that. Whittaker can’t.

The married couple seemed quite natural (samesex – what of it?).

I thought Gabriella got over her friends’ death remarkably quickly and her going off with the married couple at the end was awkward and incongruous.

The birds did of course remind me of Hitchcock.

Howcome the bacteria couldn’t transmit from one person to another? If that was explained I missed it. But then, it was apparently an intelligent bacteria according to Suki – ” it’s smart, it’s relentless, and it knows you’re onto it.” The first two – smart and relentless – could just be figurative, but ‘knows you’re on to it’? That implies consciousness and is definitely pure sci-fi. Intelligent bacteria that can ‘know’ things are definitely not a real possibility.

 

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Well now, I see the most recent posts here liked Praxeus.   I wish I could say the same – I liked the first half, till the heavy environmental message kicked in.   But here’s my impressions as I watched it.

Well this is certainly – different. Apparently unrelated things happening in widely different parts of the globe.

Yeah well, ignoring ‘Quarantina’ signs and then touching the corpse is really, really clever, isn’t it? Covid would love ya, baby.

The zombies in the suits are incredibly bad shots. (I guess the fact they were half-dead from the virus retrospectively explains that). The Doctor is certainly busy buzzing from scene to scene in the Tardis. Has Tardis navigation improved by orders of magnitude since Tennant/Smith’s era?

So now we have the Yaz and Gabriella Expeditionary Force. May I say I find this an encouraging development (Yaz finally getting to *do* something the way Rose, Martha, Amy and Clara did after approximately one episode each) even if it’s also an incredibly unwise thing Y&G are doing… (By the way, I like Gabriella). But teleporting after the alien zombie – even unwiser…

Um, Ryan and Graham don’t know what a pathogen is? Srsly? Of course, a bacteria that produces the worst, fastest skin rash ever then causes the victim to explode is kinda new.

This episode has lots and lots of setup. It’s going to need a pretty good payoff.

It’s probably just me, but Jake psychoanalysing himself to Graham is boring. This Doctor’s tenure has always suffered from the too much talk syndrome, and I don’t have a great interest in the interpersonal relationships of random characters. I prefer ‘show, not tell’.

For a water treatment laboratory on the beach, Suki’s lab is unbelievably quick in producing results. I think genetically engineering a virus to prey on the alien bacteria is just maybe on the extreme edge of what is possible (I don’t know enough microbiology to be sure) but I think it would take months, not hours. Like the Covid vaccine for example. Nevermind, it’s scifi (but howcome Tardis tech can’t do it?).

Oh gawd, and now we get the environmental Message about the evils of microplastics. I’m a leftwing-ish greenie but please, please, can we try not to go sledgehammering The Message into every frickin’ scifi plot? 32 minutes in is where it all turns to merde. Pity, I was liking the episode up till now. And wouldn’t you know, the birds’ natural enzymes (‘natural’ = good, of course) are going to save the world. And I’m not too sure you can splice enzymes to make a virus (in fact I’d be willing to bet you can’t). Those two things are not alike. Is this going to be the Kill The Moon of Series 12?

Well now, the over-equipped lab was actually a plot point. Have to give the writers full marks for that at least.

But then we get more Message about the evils of plastic – oh, and the music is really intrusive. And then some more Message about reckless scientists doing experiments – yep, right up there with Kill the Moon on my shitlist. And the Doctor talks too much. After which Suki the reckless alien-looks-just-like-a-human scientist explodes.

And, in more minor cringes, the scene with the Fam plus friends configuring the alien spaceship (how are they suddenly expert space pilots?) is risible. And – I saw this coming – Jake sacrifices himself by flying the ship (it was either going to be Adam or Jake, and seeing as how Jake always saw himself as the lesser of the two, it was for sure and 100% certain to be Jake). (Jake doesn’t know what the stratosphere is?) After which, materialising the Tardis around Jake was kinda hokey (though I had wondered why they didn’t all Tardis themselves on board earlier).

Oh dear. The first half of this episode was quite promising. The second half could have worked given a lighter touch but it was just swamped with Message.

A big comedown from Judoon.

 

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@devilishrobby    Yes I think Survival was probably made with the assumption that the story would continue, I don’t know if they adjusted the ending at the last minute to leave it open-ended.   But then, other than the three last McCoy episodes, I’m not familiar with any of Old Who past Jon Pertwee’s time.

More recent developments, I watched Fugitive of the Judoon a week ago and I was pleasantly surprised – quite impressed, in fact.   (I stuck a post in the relevant page to say so).   I definitely liked Ruth-doctor.   Unfortunately I’ve just watched Praxeus for the first time and – the first half was promising but then got completely smothered by overpowering environmental message.   Natuire = good, artificial = bad.   Not to mention the evils of reckless scientists.   I’m a left-of-centre treehugging greenie but I don’t want to be preached at.   I’d rate this as the 13th Doctor’s Kill the Moon.

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@janetteb    @devilishrobby

I’d certainly watch a retrospective ‘fill in the gaps’ episode(s) with McGann in it.

While we’re messing with time, if I had a (real) time machine, it would be nice to go back and get McCoy and Ace for a couple of episodes (maybe written by the Moff? and with modern production values).   They had a good vibe going by the end of Survival.

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@janetteb   Yes I think I had U571 in the back of my mind (was that the one where they captured the Enigma cipher machine / code books?)

 

@devilishrobby    I haven’t seen the 2000 movie, but I have seen McGann in the short special episode written by Moffatt (I forget its title – was it The Night of the Doctor) and I thought he was very good in it.    I should probably try and pick up the movie at some point.

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I just put that Kate Stewart line down to a bit of snark about the way certain famous wartime exploits had changed nationalities in a transatlantic, westerly direction by the time they made it to the screen.   🙂

Anyway, I just watched Fugitive of the Judoon and I quite liked it.   I had a few minor quibbles but nothing serious.   (I stuck my comments in the forum for the episode, as usual).    Leaves me wondering where Ruthdoc fits in the sequence, doubtless all will be revealed later.

So, I guess Spyfall and Fugitive are the first two Chibnall era episodes I’ve unreservedly liked.

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Fugitive of the Judoon

Hey, not bad. I actually quite liked this ep! (And unlike Tesla’s Night of Terror, it doesn’t pretend to be remotely historical with all concerned smugly congratulating themselves with doing justice to Tesla’s largely mythical achievements, so it doesn’t offend my sense of accuracy).

Ruth’s identity was a genuinely intriguing mystery, and the buried Tardis caught me completely by surprise. (Okay, I knew that Ruth was the Doctor at some point from spoiler leakage, but I found I could nudge that to the back of my mind watching the ep). So Ruthdoc was using the same device as Tennatdoc used in Human Nature.

The repartee between Ruthdoc and Jodiedoc one-upping each other was adequately amusing (though I have to say I think the Moff would have done it even better, cf Day of the Doctor. In fact the situation was begging for what I call, for lack of a better phrase, ‘loaded lines’. Since Jodiedoc knew what a Tardis was and Ruthdoc didn’t know she knew, there was a massive potential for unintentional irony on Ruth’s part, or deliberate double entendres by the Doctor).
The bit where they both said exactly the same thing at the same moment because ‘same mind’ was nonsense, we already know that different iterations of the Doctor have quite distinct personalities.

Of course this raises the big question of where Ruth fits in the Doctor chronology. And if Ruth was pre-Hartnell (as has been suggested), then why does her Tardis look like a police box? Because it was a plain undisguised cylinder when the Doctor stole it. So she must be a future Doctor, I guess…

I’m not sure what Captain Jack was doing in this ep, maybe it will be revealed in the future. Or pure fanwank?
The Judoon always remind me of Vogons. And Gat, a bit of Servalan. I liked Gat as a character, wouldn’t mind if she rematerialises some time.
Also, Cybermen are not a species, they’re a technological development. Though I’m probably being too pedantic there, ‘species’ will do as a working description.
All those Judoon tramping around Gloucester, knocking off the occasional human – and in sight of everybody with a cellphone – isn’t somebody going to notice? (I’m sure this question has been asked about many previous episodes). Douglas Adams had a solution, the ‘Somebody Else’s Problem’ Field. Maybe it still operates.

I notice the technobabble continues unabated, and the Doctor instantly knows it all (“That’s a Voltarian Level Seven containment field, if I energise this Moldavian Quaternary Impulse Generator with a multi-frequency Doppler ray from my sonic screwdriver in reverse phase to the polar wavelength it should weaken it for long enough for us to get through”)

And I liked Ruthdoc way better than blabbermouth Doctor, who just won’t shut up and nearly got herself and Ruthdoc killed. I saw the sabotaged blaster-gun coming from way off, but it was still quite satisfying when Gat blew herself up.   Ruthdoc looks like she means business.

It is definitely one I’ll watch again.

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Apparently that movie wasn’t the first.   It followed ‘Doctor Who and the Daleks’, which was based on the original TV serial ‘The Daleks’.   And was apparently no better than the second movie.   So why they made an unsuccessful sequel to the unsuccessful first attempt I don’t know.    I wasn’t aware there were two movies, though, and I must admit I haven’t seen either (or the original popular TV episodes).

(Currently working my way through ‘Danger Man’, the Patrick McGoohan series that slightly pre-dated Doctor Who.   It has a distinct advantage over Who in not needing any sci-fi special effects.   It could almost be a modern series, until one suddenly realises the changes the digital age has made.   In Danger Man there are no cellphones, no digital cameras or CCTV.   I just watched an episode ‘The Battle of the Cameras’ where both sides are snapping each other with hidden cameras – except it takes place in a sort of slow motion, the film has to be retrieved and developed and couriered off to be identified…   the same episode could be made now, but all the action would take place in an afternoon.

I still recall, in the sequel series The Prisoner, how high-tech and unsettling it felt to have CCTV cameras watching the inmates of The Village, and the door of Six’s cottage opening by itself.   This was futuristic stuff.   And now, I have, a couple of times, walked into shop doors because they *didn’t* open for me…  )

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Well, I’m intrigued by ‘Nu Rose’.    She must be a different character (this can’t possibly be one of those occasions when they re-cast the same character with a different ‘look alike’ actor, which is rarely ever convincing anyway and – given Billie’s and Yasmin’s looks – they’re obviously not going to do).   Which raises the intriguing question, how and why is RTD doing it?   It must mean something.  It could be total coincidence, of course – no law of physics precludes that – but it would be a massive let-down unless it has some significance to the story.   Even if no more than ‘the Doctor manages to retrieve a ‘Rose’ from the other dimension and gets the wrong one’.

I hope RTD comes up with something satisfying.

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Geek warning: The next three paragraphs contain excessive railway geekery. Skip them if you value your sanity.

The steam loco at 05:24 doesn’t look recognisably British to me, but it doesn’t look American either. The dome is too big a diameter to be a British domestic design. It looks to me a little like a British-built loco for export. Possibly South African (since we know they’ve been there)? (Does a bit of Googling: Bingo!!! It’s a South African 2-foot gauge NG15 2-8-2! (More Googling) Likely No 17 (built by Henschel so not a British export) at Sandstone Estates (though I’m not familiar with that railway). Happy geek dance! I’m not gaga yet! 🙂

I’m afraid it’s very wrong for “full speed, straight to New York” though, and “Night train, right on schedule”. Not only does the loco look quite unlike an American loco of the 1900’s (its lines are too modern), but the train we see is all goods wagons (freight cars in US) not passenger carriages. (Couldn’t they have used some library footage?). And they’re ‘seeing the sights’ in a baggage car? The director made a liar of the writer there.

And oh dear (geek mode cuts in bigtime) the Doctor uncoupling the train is just nonsense. I’m darn sure that by the 1890’s US trains had proper knuckle couplers between cars (not just a loose chain) and continuous Westinghouse brakes – which meant that if part of a train broke away the brake hoses would disconnect and immediately bring both halves to a stop. (Any US-based railgeeks please correct me?)

The floating ball reminds me of the Master’s little friends (Toclafane) in The Sound of Drums. Apparently it isn’t though. It’s yet another alien artefact that the Doctor instantly knows all about. This is getting ridiculous, is there any lifeform or gadget in the entire universe that this Doctor doesn’t know the entire history of?

Um, ammonium nitrate plus zinc plus a ‘bit of green stuff’ would not produce a sustained ring of high flickering flames, it would go off ‘foof’ in a second or so.

The thing that kidnapped Yaz and Tesla looks exactly like the Racnoss from Runaway Bride.

As with the previous ep, I’m a bit leery about messing with historical characters. Except this one was worse. It gave Tesla far too much credit. No way did he ‘invent wi-fi’, nobody ever thought of that for 100 years, the concept would be meaningless before computers. He took out some patents on wireless but Marconi developed a practical system first. Edison (in the episode) made the absolutely valid point that “Anyone can have ideas. I make them happen”. Except that, in respect of AC power, it was not Tesla but George Westinghouse (of Westinghouse air brake fame abovementioned) who built the Niagara power station, built AC power networks and fought the ‘war of the currents’ (AC vs DC) with Edison. Westinghouse started building AC systems in 1885, two years before Tesla started work on an AC induction motor (which patents Westinghouse subsequently bought). Tesla was only a very minor player in the game. Yet Westinghouse never got a mention in this allegedly historical-based episode?

Tesla was also wrong about transmitting power by wireless (still not a thing yet and probably never will be, except in science fiction).
True that Edison ran a virtual patent factory though.

Sorry to rain on the parade, but that’s a risk when messing with history. If the writer had restrained herself a bit it wouldn’t jar with me so much.

That aside, considered as total fiction with no resemblance to reality, the characters all seemed to be treated okay by the writer.

P.S. Just listening to the commentary. Starts with Mandip (Yaz) saying how interesting it is to learn about Tesla. And the writer claiming historical accuracy. I couldn’t stand it afer 15 minutes, I wanted to shout at the screen “That’s wrong!” And that is exactly where my biggest objection to this episode resides. If the writer’s ‘research’ had included the Wikipedia pages on Edison, Westinghouse and Marconi the Doctor might not have hailed Tesla as the inventor of virtually everything. Any more than Leonardo ‘invented’ the helicopter. I would rather have seen a screenplay that gave Tesla due credit but didn’t devalue everybody (Tesla included) by making absurd claims. [/rant]

[Dentarthurdent @replies]

@janetteb

Well, a short while back I re-read the first Dirk Gently book (as I think I mentioned). I think it’s the most convoluted of Adams’ books (but also one of the best). I found it improved on re-reading, I think the first time through gives a rough idea of the lie of the land, the second time through one is better equipped to appreciate all the nuances. A bit like a good Moffat Who episode.

Can’t help noticing that Professor Chronotis’ trick with the salt cellar in the ancient pot, was precisely copied by the Doctor to save the ‘fam’ in the crashing A320 in Spyfall. In fact, given the Doctor’s (and Tardis’s) powers, I’m surprised he doesn’t pull that trick more often – though if he did, it (like the fix-everything sonic screwdriver) would remove a lot of suspense.

I don’t blame Doug Adams for re-using story elements. Of course the most noteworthy re-use has to be the various formats of Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy, which must easily hold the record for the number of different mediums it’s been produced in. (And also, each version was significantly different from its predecessors). But, given his legendary writers’ block, it must have helped him enormously to have a skeleton to start with.

I’ve never watched ‘Shada’, I should probably do do. Maybe after I finish Season 12. Currently just watched Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror. It was watchable, though I have some geeky reservations in relation to the train, and also the story of AC vs DC current which was in reality more a battle between Westinghouse (who bought Tesla’s patents and made AC systems that worked) and Edison. And, with regard to radio, I tend to favour Marconi (I’m naturally biassed since my father was Cornish and Marconi built his first transmitter in Cornwall) over Tesla – Tesla took out some patents before Marconi though neither of them ‘discovered’ radio waves, and I tend to give precedence to whoever actually ‘made it work’ over someone who just jotted down an idea. Else we’d have to credit Leonardo for inventing almost everything. 😉

Similarly, I’m okay with crediting the Wright Brothers as ‘first to fly’ although they certainly didn’t invent the aeroplane, everybody and his dog was trying it, and it’s possible that one or more others may have made slightly longer ‘hops’ before the Wrights’ first recorded ‘flight’. Also the Wrights weren’t particularly nice people. But they were way ahead in making and developing a flying machine that worked.

Sorry for rambling on 🙂

[Dentarthurdent @replies]

@nerys My sympathy on hearing about your mum. It was fortunate that you were able to be with her at the end, I’m sure a great comfort to her, and for you that so many of her friends were at the memorial service.

(When my mother died, decades ago, we were surprised and slightly consoled by the large number of friends she had).

I hope you can take comfort in the memories.

cr

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