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@janetteb   Hey, typos happen, no worries   🙂  as they say.   One might very well consider that anything that usurps my silly bet-with-myself would be a good and fortunate circumstance, just I didn’t think you would phrase it that way   🙂

If lizards intrigue you, you should try living in Rarotonga for a while.   They have geckos, which like to live in houses and walk about on the ceiling.   Big ones may reach up to six inches in length.   But what I find amazing – what gives me, as an engineer, acute cognitive discomfort because I can’t imagine how it’s done – is how they hang on to the ceiling with their little padded toes.   Ceilings are typically plasterboard painted flat white – it isn’t glassy smooth (so their feet surely can’t function as suction cups, and even if they did, I don’t think atmospheric pressure of 15psi would be enough to support their weight) and it isn’t rough like sawn timber so little velcro-like hooks are out – how do they do it?   And not just hang on but run across the ceiling upside down.

My thoughts on Season 11 – I may not post very much on that.   Put it this way – I don’t want too inject to much negativity into this forum, or spoil it for people who do like it.   If I watch a fantastic episode like Day of the Doctor or Hell Bent  I want to talk about it! – I want to share my enthusiasm.   An episode that doesn’t do much for me, I don’t feel the need to share my indifference at length.   So I may keep my comments on Season 11 fairly brief.  Maybe it will seem better on second viewing.   Season 12, now, I haven’t seen yet.

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@janetteb   I hope there was a ‘not’ intended in there somewhere?   🙂

@janetteb  @winston   In fact our weather is still being delightful – cool nights, but warms up nicely during the day, fine and calm, lovely.   As for swimming, it was warm enough to be quite pleasant up till a week ago.   Since then it’s cooled off slightly (I’m chicken when it comes to cold water), but I’ve been going down the beach for a walk, observed that the water is nice and calm, dipping my toes in (and it always feels warmer to ones toes than ones tummy) and saying ‘what the hell’ and going in, followed two minutes later by ‘that’s enough’ and coming out again   🙂   All things being equal, it would not make me swim right now, but it’s become a sort of a challenge – can I last it out as long as the weather does? – this is waaay past normal autumn.   Which just proves I’m an idiot.

Anyway, having had my little token dip, I walked round the corner and there was a sealion sunning himself on the boat ramp.   According to a spectator he’d been there for an hour.    We couldn’t make out if he was hurt or just getting a suntan – how can you tell if a sealion is hurt?   He wasn’t moving much but he seemed to be just zoning out.   I think it was a sealion not a seal (don’t know how you tell the difference).   First time I’ve seen one in the harbour, but apparently they have occasionally been seen.

Garden-wise, Mrs D and her niece finally cut down the dahlias – leaving it a bit late, their flowers were over weeks ago and looking scruffy.   But they’ll be back again in a few months.   I find them a very satisfying plant.

We don’t have Morning Glory (thank goodness) but we do have Madeira vine and moth plant and they are menaces – they go up trees like a rocket and if not caught, just smother everything.   I periodically conduct campaigns of extermination against them on our trees and our neighbour’s (we share boundaries so our creepers are his creepers and vice versa).   It pays to catch them early before they get too far up the trees (I’m not good at heights).   Unfortunately they don’t stay exterminated long.

We also have ivy and privet – but they’re slow growing and easy to control – and wandering jew, which also goes like a rocket but stays on the ground, so not much worry.    (I always think ‘wandering jew’ sounds a bit politically incorrect, google tells me some people call it ‘wandering willy’ instead, but that sounds equally suspect to my deplorable mind   🙂

Okay, time to start on Season 11 I guess.

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@janetteb    Eleventh Hour was where I started my current re-watch (the one that’s just reached Twice Upon a Time).   Those stories never get old.

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Well, I watched the last 12th Doctor episode – Twice Upon a Time – a week ago. Not a bad episode, but it doesn’t affect me nearly as much as World Enough & Time / The Doctor Falls. I did like it that Testimony gave the Doctor his memories of Clara back – though he only had a few minutes to enjoy them before he regenerated.

Favourite line: “It’s not an evil plot. I don’t know what to do when it isn’t an evil plot.”

I did get a bit emotional over the last few minutes – last sight of the Doctor and Bill, and that magnificent Tardis.

I’ve left it a while to settle before embarking on the spinoff. I’ve got the Season 12 DVD set unopened, I guess I’ll work my way through a repeat of Season 11 first. Meanwhile I’ve started watching New Tricks from Season 1 (the DVDs have been sitting on my shelf for a year or so, this will be the first time I’ve watched it through in sequence), and with Danger Man I’ve just started Season 2, the 50-minute episodes which have time to be usefully more complex and subtle than Season 1.

And, continuing what I said a week ago, our summer is still going on, just, some beautiful calm pleasantly warm days, and I had probably my last quick dip in the sea today because the water has – finally – cooled off over the last three days. I have no complaints about our last summer. Hopefully our Northern friends are into spring by now.

 

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@winston   I heartily agree with your thoughts.   You said pretty much what I said, just more concisely   🙂

If I was a scriptwriter (would never happen) the cutting room floor would be carpeted with my contributions  🙂

 

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@janetteb    Hi Janette,   I read the article.   I disagree with most of it   🙂

‘Search for the missing Tardis’ could be a thing, but surely the Doc hitch-hiking around the galaxy would involve a variety of other ships – so a lot of sets would be required.   With the Tardis they only need one set, and it’s a marvellous device for changing ‘worlds’ each week.

I think ‘Doctor of the week’ would seriously dilute viewer loyalty.   We get used to a particular Doctor and set of companions, it needs a few episodes to stabilise that.

Setting it in the recent past – noooo!   (I must admit my personal prejudices come in here).   The Beeb does period dramas very well, I’m told, but Downton Abbey / Upstairs Downstairs etc ad infinitum just don’t appeal to me and Who would just get submerged in that genre.   IMO.

Aiming at 12-year-olds – well, obviously wouldn’t suit me.   But ‘a young doctor with teenage companions’ – no!   When I was a kid (IIRC) I wanted to watch ‘proper’ adventures with proper grown-ups, not kidstuff.   The Lone Ranger, Doctor Who (season 1), Maverick, William Tell (and I was exactly 12 when that aired), Danger Man – don’t remember any young teens in the cast of those!   Why is it assumed that programmes *for* kids have to be *about* kids?    I’m a geriatric old fart now, doesn’t mean I want to watch programmes about geriatric old farts.   (Back in the day when steam trains were rare on TV, I used to scream at the screen when ‘Great Railway Journeys’ wasted precious screen time talking to railway enthusiasts about their hobby instead of showing the train – train nuts are interested in TRAINS, duh, not the private life of other train nuts.   [/rant]   (Please excuse the digression, I got carried away.  ))

(Note, I’m not objecting to kids when the story naturally calls for it, like ‘The Empty Child’ – just not every week).

Okay, so that was a bit of a rant, and absolutely my opinion, and I’d welcome some other opinions.

That said, I don’t have any recipe for success – I can nitpick what’s wrong but I think I must lack the vision to emulate RTD or the Moff.

 

In other news, I’m still swimming, as of yesterday.   This is ridiculous.   The water is just warm enough, it just doesn’t seem to want to cool down.   Well, I can keep it up as long as it can.

Cheers

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@winston   I know exactly how you feel, right down to ‘needing a certain mood’.   I don’t think I’ve ever actually cried over an episode (maybe got a bit damp) but this one was the closest ever.   Oh, and Riggsy painting flowers on the abandoned Tardis at the end of Face the Raven.

I actually find the (very well-written) moments of comic relief in World Enough & Time and this episode, help to make it watchable.   For me, they don’t detract from the sadness and horror of the ‘serious’ passages (in fact they even heighten those by contrast), but without those moments the story would just be too dark for me (and I usually like dark).

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– and the things one finds out reading this forum.   In the WE&T thread, pedant said  (24/6/17)  “For a moment, when they were walking through the “town” I thought I caught s glimpse of Heather in a window.”     Well, well.   I missed that (it was at 31:50).    I saw a face at the window but didn’t recognise it as Heather.   That’s excellent foreshadowing, Moff!

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Incidentally, I’d always thought the (original) Mondassian Cybermen were the very naff-est of old Who monsters, only too painfully obviously extras in suits, and it would never be possible to make them look any good.   And now, I regard them as the most effective and horrific Cybermen, precisely because there is, visibly, the remains of a human inside there.

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Missy:     Your sentiments of five years ago (22 Dec 17) are exactly how I feel about it.

Anyway, my brief impressions of this episode (though I was – as Nardole said about the Doctor in World Enough & Time, having an emotion for much of it, too absorbed to type)

Opens on a green and pleasant land – with slightly disturbing living cyber scarecrows.

Clever Doctor – to reprogram the cybermen to think that Timelords need ‘conversion’ too. Missy really doesn’t know whether to be good or bad. Though Nardole’s sudden appearance with a handy shuttle craft was a little bit convenient.

The scenes with Bill in the barn, slowly realising she was a cyberman, were heartwrenching.

When they rediscover the lifts, and Missy suggests escaping back to Floor 1, the Doctor points out that they would take a long time to get there and the Cybermen on Floor 1056 would have had ‘thousands of years’ (slight exaggeration) to work out how to stop them. Which sort of nullifies my theory about the sonic screwdriver being able to magic the lift into time travel.

And the Doctor will never, ever know that Missy was going to take his side at the end. Just another irony. (But – since the Master knows he shot Missy – howcome Missy doesn’t know that too? Presumably because their combined presence has screwed up the timelines and wiped the Master’s memory.

I felt so sorry for Bill, slowly resigning herself to the fact that there was no way out for her. And Nardole’s goodbye to the Doctor and Bill was touching. For a character who began as the comic relief, Nardole became a worthy companion.

I remember being surprised and delighted, first time I watched, when Heather appeared to rescue Bill and the Doctor. And (unlike Nardole’s sudden appearance with a convenient shuttle craft), this was entirely legit. Remember Heather’s attraction to Bill way back in Episode 1? Of course I do, just that I’d completely forgotten about it. And why wouldn’t Heather come to the rescue right now? I love it when the plot does that to me.

I found this a very moving episode, and not just because it was goodbye to so many characters.

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Well, here’s my random impressions of World Enough & Time.

It starts out quite light-hearted and slightly camp, with Missy’s usual black humour –
(In passing, top marks for the excellent special effects for the giant ship and the control room.)
MISSY: Hello. I’m Doctor Who. And these are my plucky assistants, Thing One and the Other One.
BILL: Yeah, we’re not, we’re not assistants.
MISSY: Okay, right, so, so what does he call you? Companions? Pets? Snacks?

And Missy teases Bill (us?) with the Doctor’s ‘real’ name

– and the banter continues – until the blue alien idiot shoots a hole in Bill. (That stunned me, when I first saw it. About as much as the ending of Easy Rider. This is not going to be a fun Butch-Cassidy-in-Space romp at all, is it?)

The Doctor’s obsession with the Master/Missy is beautifully described in the scene in the kitchen with Bill and Nardole. But the whole episode is so well-written, with really tight dialogue, if I quoted one line I’d have to quote hundreds. (But I do love Missy’s ‘Because if somebody kills you and it’s not me, we’ll both be disappointed.’)

And even after the horrors of the post-op ward (with its patients silently screaming), the Moff can still make me burst out laughing –
RAZOR: You were sick, very sick. Broken. Heart broken. New heart. Good, is it?
BILL: I haven’t dared look yet.
RAZOR: Is good. Is very good. Shiny. You can carry it off. Not everybody can. For some people, it all goes a bit, you know –
BILL: What?
RAZOR: Vending machine.

Oh, and I can’t help myself:
MISSY: Hello, ordinary person. Please maintain a minimum separation of three feet. I’m really trying not to kill anyone today, but it would be tremendously helpful if your major arteries were out of reach.

But the final scene – where we get the reveal of the Mondassian cybermen, and the Master, and – most shocking of all, that Bill is now a cyberman (all those things were hinted at, but maybe I didn’t want to admit the possibility) – that was like a punch in the stomach. I was sure Bill would be rescued, somehow. I can’t recall any other episode that toyed with my emotions so, not even Face the Raven.

And in the midst of it all were genuinely clever lines that had me chuckling.

Incidentally, after initially doubting the mechanics of the time shift, I now realise it was all correct in physics terms. Even the motion of the lifts was in accordance with the way time dilation would operate. (The lift that the Doctor sonicked to go to the rescue was maybe an exception, but he is a Time Lord after all).

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So anyway, I’ve put my impressions of those two eps in their respective slots. I might go on to read what you-all thought of them five years ago 🙂

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Well, I’m up to World Enough and Time. I’m curiously reluctant to put the DVD in the player (the same way as, when a kind friend from England sent me the last Xena double episode, 2 decades ago, I left it several days before I finally sat down to watch. There was a kind of bittersweet sadness knowing this would be the last of the regular VHS tapes in my mailbox). Because it’s the end of the line. The last regular Doctor Who episode. (Twice Upon a Time was a special, without the regular companions. And after that there was only a spinoff with the same name but different flavour).

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@janetteb    Oh, agreed, I don’t consider it any criticism of Bill that she was, shall we say, selected by circumstances, to decide for all the population of Earth.    She didn’t ask to be in that position.    But she made what she thought was the best choice in the circumstances.   And (in the Dr Who universe) probably the correct one.

If I may quibble over words, I don’t think the Monks ‘chose’ her (and so it wasn’t a ‘random’ selection either).   They accepted the opportunity that offered.    I notice they didn’t ask Bill if she ‘had power’, maybe they considered that, as personal assistant to the Pres. of Earth, that was near enough.

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@winston Thanks!

Well, if I drive the 20 miles to Piha on the west coast, I can swim at any state of tide (though high tide is best). But our ‘local’ beach at Blockhouse Bay is in the Manukau Harbour, which is full of mudflats with a few tiny sandy beaches in little coves. (I suspect the sand came in on Council trucks). Swimming is only any good near high spring tides, with a few feet of water over a firm mud bottom, further out (i.e. at lower water) you end up treading on rocks or oozy mud filled with oysters. As for walking, there are a few short tracks through the bush on the cliffs, but walking along the narrow strip of beach below the cliffs is only possible at half tide or below.   So I’ve learned to check the tide tables.   In fact I’ve only ‘discovered’ swimming there this year,

That said, I went down there for a short stroll today, the water didn’t seem too cold, so I tried it and, to my surprise, the water was okay again! I think it’s toying with me, either that or my sense of temperature is wonky. Well, I can keep it up as long as it can. But this is already the longest summer I can recall, so no complaints on that score.

And I do hope spring comes for you soon.

CR

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@janetteb     I notice (from the DVD extras) that Rona Munro’s last writing credit was Survival, the last episode of OldWho.   I have that on DVD too.   I do like Seven and Ace, pity about the cat people.   That is, they’re supposed to be savage warriors, but they look like cuddly pussycats.    Apparently Rona Munro was disappointed with their appearance too.   Probably the biggest improvement in NuWho over OldWho has been in the standard of the monsters.   Not just NuWho originals (Weeping Angels, Silents) but  new versions of originals (Silurians, Zygons, Mondassian Cybermen) are much more convincing.   I haven’t seen Sea Devils, old or new, but I gather they’re much improved?

Cheers,   cr

(P.S.  Incidentally, I think our summer is finally just about over.   Last Wednesday the sea was still pleasantly warm, Friday and Saturday it was distinctly cool such that I hopped out again promptly, today I tried again and while it was just warm enough that I floated around for a few minutes, I wasn’t tempted to stay in long.   So that’s about it for our summer down here.   Can’t complain, it’s been a long swimming season.   To all our friends in the top half of the map, your spring should be well on the way by now, hope you have a good summer.   The Weather Gods permitting, though they seem to be getting increasingly capricious these days.)

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@janetteb     Speaking of discussions, I notice that the discussion of Extremis ranged all over the place, going into the nature of faith and various quasi-theological matters.   🙂     Admittedly some parts of the three-parter could have been tightened up plot-wise, all three episodes (though very different in tone from each other) were absorbing to watch.

I didn’t post any comments on Pyramid at the End of the World, had I done so I would have noted that Bill took it on herself to speak for the whole of the population of Earth in accepting the Monks’ domination.    Who elected her?    Well, I guess someone had to do it, and she was there on the spot, so I don’t blame her for making a decision.   And, she’s only human.

(And it was infinitely better than the cringe-makingly bad farce that passed for ‘voting’ in Kill the Moon.   That episode did Clara and the Doctor no favours at all.)

 

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Well, I’ve worked my way through the Monks trilogy (I stuck my comments in the ‘Extremis’ and ‘Lie of the Land’ slots – excellent episodes in my view). Empress of Mars – well there’s one ep like that in every series. Best two things about it were the Colonel shooting the Captain dead; and the neat bouncy cubes that people turned into when the Ice Warriors shot them.

So then I just watched Eaters of Light. Much more enjoyable. Thoroughly atmospheric, the monster didn’t make a lot of sense but it was really more about the people involved. I almost believed that the Doctor was prepared to spend eternity in a cave fighting monsters (we know he won’t ‘cos we need him for next week but he was quite convincing). For a monster that just killed and ate a Roman legion, it wasn’t terribly big and was surprisingly easy to control with a few prisms. But the CGI was very good. Oh, and apparently there really was a Ninth Legion that reached Scotland and then disappeared from the pages of history. So there’s a mystery there (always good when Doctor Who solves a mystery).

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The Lie of the Land starts in a most disconcerting way, with the Doctor spreading Monk propaganda. “Relax and do as you’re told, the future is taken care of” – and what a horrific cheesy grin Capaldi has.

And all this (as we’re reminded) was Bill’s ‘fault’. But she has to conjure up a memory of her Mum to try and counter the Monks’ ‘Truth’ propaganda. Mercifully we’re spared too much of the depressing ‘police state’ atmosphere we last saw in ‘Turn Left’, and this turns into an adventure yarn – rescue the Doctor. ‘Mum’ is an excellent recipient of an info-dump which saves a lot of actual screen time.

But the Doctor doesn’t seem pleased to see Bill and Nardole and calls his guards, and gives the obligatory speech about how humanity is making a mess of things and needs order, discipline and the Master Race and the Feuhrer – oops, sorry, wrong page. But it seems the Doctor really is siding with the Monks, which makes Bill so desperate she grabs a gun from one of the soldiers and shoots the Doctor, who starts to regenerate. This was incredibly dramatic stuff and I believed it implicitly – until the Doctor stands up and all the guards start laughing. And the reason for the whole charade was, they had to be sure Bill wasn’t under Monk control (which I guess makes sense, since she was last seen in the pyramid selling out to the Monks…) My mind was almost dizzy from making flipflops at this point.

And at last we get to meet Missy again! And I do like the brainstorming session where Missy and the Doctor work out that the Monks rule through a link with one human mind, with the signal boosted through the Monk statues, so, as Missy says, just kill the link. Which of course the Doctor is never ever going to do.

So they break into Pyramid Central with the aim of the Doctor hacking/hijacking the Monks’ fake-news channel, but the Monk transmitting is too strong for him. So Bill takes over, and thinks of her mother, and [the actress who plays Bill’s mum] finally gets a speaking part – one line (well, one word) – “Bill.”

And the Monks have lost their credibility and run for it. This says something about the nature of political power, I think.

I did like the extra who the Doctor accosted, asked about the ruins of a Monk statue – “Er, we thought they were just like filming something here or something?” That was just such a natural delivery it carried conviction.

So basically it was mind control, via the statues, and Bill’s mind was necessary to translate? encrypt? the signals. Thus allowing a tiny number of Monks to control the whole of humanity. Assisted by deception that made the Monks appear far more numerous and powerful than they really were. OK, I can buy that. (But what about their ability to fix the Doctor’s eyesight, and to teleport a nuclear submarine? That should surely guarantee them supremacy. I guess, being so few in number, they considered it – safer – to cut their losses and pick on an easier target.)

I liked this three-parter – Extremis probably the most, for its unusual premise (and also, Missy!) It’s not at the top of my list but probably in the top quarter.

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My impressions of Extremis:

This is really two episodes intercut into one. Missy, the Veritas; plus a subthread of Bill’s attempts at a romantic involvement. And the Veritas thread is quite hard to follow – until the truth is revealed.

I love the neat little reversals in the intro. The planet dedicated to executing people is delightfully grim. Who thinks it’s the Doctor who is under sentence of death, until Missy is brought out?

I had to laugh when Bill’s foster mother relaxed when she found out Bill’s guest was a girl – how little she knows! And then the Pope walks out of her bedroom. This is hilarious (though I can fully understand Bill’s frustration).

The Moff does have an excellent grasp of psychology –
NARDOLE: Okay, so you’re blind and you don’t want your enemies to know. I get it. But why does it have to be a secret from Bill?
DOCTOR: Because I don’t like being worried about. Around me, people should be worried about themselves.
NARDOLE: Yeah, shall I tell you the real reason?
DOCTOR: No.
NARDOLE: Because the moment you tell Bill, it becomes real. And then you might actually have to deal with it.
DOCTOR: Good point, well made. Definitely not telling her now.
– and that just feels so true.

Pope Benedict – the Doctor’s mediaeval ‘friend’ – was certainly a fine looking woman. And maybe that is not so impossible as one might think, there were apparently legends or rumours of female Popes.

The Veritas thread is engagingly spooky – what could be so terrifying that everyone who learns it, kills themselves?

Then we have the white room, with doors on the Pentagon, the Vatican, CERN – this is fascinating. The CERN staff all appear to be remarkably upbeat about their impending mass suicide. Stranger and stranger.

Then the CERN scientist explains they’re in a simulation – using the same ‘choose a number’ routine that the Doctor used in Last Christmas. And CERN – exploded their own simulation.

And the Doctor subverted Missy’s execution for his own – conscience?

And then it turns out, the ‘main plot’ with Veritas, was just a digression, a virtual occurrence in a simulation, the details of which get emailed to the Doctor outside Missy’s vault door.

I can understand (though I don’t agree with) fans who complain that the Moff’s plots are ‘too complicated’. To me, they work fine on two levels – one, the braindead approach, just sit back and enjoy the surprise twists and witty dialogue without trying to understand it. Or two, the geeky approach, concentrate enough to understand what’s going on, sometimes on a re-watch. And it’s the multi-level plotting that makes a re-watch so rewarding.

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@johnnybear     I got a message from her too.   Technically not a troll, more like spam or phishing.   Though I haven’t seen her photo yet, she might be a troll.   Probably is, if she’s desperate enough to want to have ‘passionate true love’ with me   🙂

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Almost certainly a bathroom.   The Tardis creates rooms as necessary, after all.

If you want an explicit text reference, there’s  ‘Clara and the Tardis’, a bonus ‘minisode’ on the Season 8(?) DVD box set:

Clara:  I know what just happened. I went to the bathroom…thank you for the hologram leopard, by the way, an unexpected pleasure…and my bedroom was completely missing!

 

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Continuing my re-watch (hope I’m not subverting the forum too much by posting my impressions here rather than the dedicated episode files) – brief impressions of Knock Knock:

Doesn’t David Suchet do mild-but-sinister well? I half expected the contract to be signed in blood 🙂
But it’s a lovely old house, I *love* old slightly dilapidated buildings. (When I’m travelling, I much prefer downmarket pensions or hikers’ ‘refuges’ in little out-of-the-way villages. Though huge rooms in five-star hotels, let at stupidly cheap off-season rates just to keep the place running, have their appeal too. I’m rambling.)

Bill using the Tardis for a removal van? That just feels a little bit wrong. I keep wanting to call the house ‘Wester Drumlins’ for no good reason.

The creepy noises in the kitchen turn out to be – the Doctor. Looking a bit like Boris Karloff in some lights. And there is no way I’d use an oil heater in an old timber building like that. And then the landlord mysteriously appears – almost as creepy as the Doctor.

I like the relief in Paul’s voice when Bill tells him she prefers girls – “Oh. Oh, right! I was never in with a chance. Awesome!” That is just so true to life. He can relax and stop trying it on and doesn’t feel he’s missing a chance.

Eliza restoring all the flatmates to life was a nice touch, though a bit hard to credit. But then they were alien woodlice with weird powers so I guess I can manage to believe it. But the ending came incredibly abruptly.

And the little coda with Nardole and the vault was sufficiently weird and intriguing to force me to watch the next episode! (I was going to anyway, of course)

AND then we get to Oxygen and we’re really on the hard stuff:

Suitably horrific intro, with the space zombies.

I *love* the banter between the Doc and Nardole.
BILL: What’s a fluid link?
NARDOLE: No idea. But the Tardis can’t go anywhere without it.
DOCTOR: Who told you that?
NARDOLE: You did.
DOCTOR: Exactly. (Tardis starts up)

The ‘abandoned’ space station is convincingly creepy. And conducive to black humour – Nardole’s surprisingly good at it.
Doc: Crew of forty. I’ve got thirty six records of life signs terminated. Last log entry, Station declared non-profitable.
NARDOLE: Yeah, your workers all dying’ll do that for you.

Surely the absolute nastiest thing about the station is that the crew have to buy their oxygen. And the station dumps excess oxygen to preserve the market price. The ‘free market’ taken to its toxic extreme. Makes The Rebel Flesh look like utopia.

COMPUTER: Welcome to the Ganymede Systems Series Twelve SmartSuit. Oxygen field engaged. At current levels of exertion, you have two and a half thousand breaths available. – this is really turning the screws up to ten. I know we’ve seen this general scenario before in innumerable eps like 42 and Rebel Flesh and Under the Lake, now it’s Bill’s turn and this is far the most effective one.

And *of course* if you endow a space suit with a computer it will ask inane questions at inappropriate moments like “Would you like to give feedback on your experience so far.” Doug Adams was truly prophetic with the talking doors in the Heart of Gold.
And “Please remain calm while your central nervous system is deactivated.” Almost prefer the Daleks, at least they’re honest about ‘exterminate’.

This episode is full of ingenious but logical quirks, like the zombies being unable to reach the companions because they’re in a new area that hasn’t been mapped yet. I loved that.

Then Bill’s suit jams again and they can’t carry her because it locks her to the floor for ‘health & safety’ – only too realistic. And the Doctor suddenly realises that the killer suits aren’t a malfunction, they’re merely terminating redundant employees. Nice! So he simply reprograms the power reactor to blow if the survivors’ life signs cease – at which point they become too expensive to kill and the zombie suits promptly switch to keeping them alive. (Reminds me of the pursuit in George Lucas’ old movie THX 1138, where the hero is fleeing from the pursuing cops, he is just about to be captured by an android cop when it gets the message ‘pursuit budget exceeded’ so it breaks off).

And it leaves the Doctor blind. This is a real dynamite episode. As a condemnation of the excesses of capitalism it leaves ‘Arachnids in the UK’ and ‘Kerblam’ feebly wallowing in its wake.

And Nardole rants about the contents of the Vault. Is there anyone left by this point who doesn’t think it’s Missy? And (if confirmation were needed) the ‘Next time’ trailer concludes with a half-second shot of Missy. Not technically a spoiler since the next ep actually begins with a cameo of her.

 

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@janetteb We’re having nice autumn weather too. Here in Auckland this season is often the most settled weather, and still pleasantly warm – 24 deg today (75F), and summer seems to hang on and on (until it will quite suddenly fall off into winter). Mrs D’s dahlia’s, optimistic as always, have put out another scattered crop of flowers. The water’s still warm enough for chicken me to swim. Today I went down to our local beach at Blockhouse Bay, it has a little strip of yellow sand (some of which came, I suspect, from a council truck) which at low tide gives onto acres of mostly firm mudflats, at highest spring tide they have four or five feet of water over them. High tide varies from 3.1 to 4.3 metres, anything over 4 metres is okay. So swimming there is wholly dependent on where in the tidal cycle we are, the time of high tide, and of course the weather. Today was lovely and calm, I drifted around at midday enjoying the peace and quiet in the little bay. Making the most of it while it lasts.

 

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@missy I agree it’s not good to over-analyze things. But my quibble with Sutcliffe owning a steel mill is merely the sort of nerdy geeky thing that (I think) denizens of this forum like to indulge in. It’s part of the fun, for me, and doesn’t detract from my enjoyment of the story. I hope my comments don’t detract from anyone else’s. And I reckon, minor loose ends that I don’t notice until after the story’s over, don’t matter. If it’s an inconsistency that strikes me immediately, or prevents me following the logic of the story, then that’s not so good.

For example, the size of the monster in the Thames (as indicated on the Tardis view screen) was an immediate question for me, since the size of the monster is an essential part of the story, and this thing was miles long. I managed to overlook it, though (as a retired engineer) I can’t help instinctively judging sizes, speeds and distances. On the other hand, time travel and ‘bigger on the inside’ cause me no worries at all.

An example of a significant glitch in a movie that actually confused me – I just watched ‘Ice Station Zebra’ (the 1968 movie) with Patrick McGoohan in impressive form. The first half of the movie – in a nuclear submarine – was extremely realistic (the US Navy lent them a real nuclear sub). The second half, on a floating ice research station near the North Pole, was good enough except: the Russians sent over a flight of aircraft, long before the Americans could get an aircraft there (this was mentioned in the plot). So five Mig 21’s duly appear on screen (I’m not sure a Mig 21 would have the range, but that’s a minor quibble). But then four F4 Phantoms appear – where did they come from? – the story didn’t say! I now *think* the Phantoms were supposed to be doubling for the MiGs – which is an incredible continuity error, if so – and actually made me lose the plot.

Okay, for me Clara was always the most entertaining companion, with a bright personality. I can certainly understand where she got too cocky (though I don’t think she ever used the Tardis as a removal van like Bill) – but then she paid the price for that.

Like you, I can’t wait to see the new Doctor Who. Though (at my age) there’s always a statistical chance I may not – but I prefer to optimistically assume that I’ll ‘always’ be here. 🙂

 

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So I watched Thin Ice  (one surprising flaw with the series 10 DVD’s, nowhere does it say which episodes are on which DVD.   They’re in order of course, but which DVD is Thin Ice on?   Don’t know, just have to try a DVD in the player and find out.  (It’s 2, as it happens).   Never seen that before.)

Brief impressions –

I have a slight problem with the scale of the monster (as shown on the Tardis map screen). It’s just too big to ‘hide’ in the Thames (how deep is the Thames at low tide anyway?) How could it ever turn round? Also (to anticipate developments later in the episode), how could a few humans per year be enough to sustain it, or furnish sufficient, um, fuel production? Problems of scale persisted right through the episode.

I’m quite liking Bill, this time round. The first time, I was suffering from Clara Withdrawal Syndrome, and no new companion could overcome that 🙂 But it’s an injustice to any companions to compare them, and invidious, I think.

The Doctor’s interrogation of the foreman at the yard is full of double entendres. But I particularly like the idea that the fortunes of Lord Sutcliff are founded on sh*t.

Um, if this is 1814, Sutcliff would have to own an ironworks, not a steel mill. (In 1814, steel was a limited-production specialty item, used only for swords and the like. Cast iron or wrought iron was the prime engineering metal. Railways did not really get going until 1825 or 1830, with iron (not steel) rails and locomotives. Large-scale mild steel production did not really get going until the Bessemer process c.1860. What held it back was not any lack of heat, but knowledge of the right chemical processes). So Sutcliff’s super (and super cheap) fuel would have helped cheap production of cast iron and wrought iron, but not steel. I think. [/Geek mode]

So, best watched for the backchat between the Doc and Bill, and don’t look too closely at the world-building.

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@mudlark I’m an engineer, but I’d come to the same conclusions as you about Time Team (though in my case it was guesswork, rather than actual knowledge). Which is why I generally prefer well-written fiction to ‘reality’ TV, at least the fiction is honest about being non-factual. The most blatant ‘reality’ example is those absurd ‘survival’-type shows (‘alone in the wild’ – so who’s taking the pictures?). Admittedly Time Team is the extreme opposite (better) end of the credibility spectrum from those.

But I think archaeology is especially vulnerable to the problem of deadlines imposed by the producers. If something gets skipped or short-cutted in some other field, you can always go back and re-do the work, but (as you said) you can’t re-do the excavation.

I don’t know if Time Team suffers from the dumbing-down-for-the-thickest-viewer which most TV is subject to? I’m a car nut and a railway enthusiast and I generally cringe at the casual misrepresentation of anything remotely technical on TV. Maybe archaeology is sufficiently removed from popular ‘culture’ to be less affected by that. Or (Stonehenge, Druids, King Arthur) maybe not. Your Indiana Jones is my Thomas the Tank Engine.

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@missy     Oh yes, Hugh Laurie would make a great Doctor.   Shades of Capaldi, maybe, and also of early Doctors – but he could certainly carry it off.    Kris Marshall – yes, him too.   I only know him from Death in Paradise.  He’d be fine if he toned down the absent-mindedness a little (but that was really a function of the writing).

@janetteb    I would have been intrigued to see Joanna Lumley as the new Doctor  (of course she’s already done a sci-fi lead, as Saphhire), but – at the risk of sounding ageist – while she could certainly have the gravitas, I’m not sure she would want to do the dashing-down-corridors bits.

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@janetteb We keep seeing news of the disastrous floods on the east coast of Australia. I know you’re halfway across the continent from there, but I hope the capricious weather gods continue to ignore you. And I do hope the floods abate soon.

Here, we haven’t had any strikingly hot days, but it’s been uniformly warm – it’s 25 degrees right now at 10p.m. – and the water has been consistently warm since the end of November. It’s lost maybe a degree in the last couple of weeks, but still warm enough to swim. (For the first four decades we lived here, I completely ignored our nearest beach (Blockouse Bay) as being mudflats. I’ve recently discovered that it’s just swimmable at high tide, and for the upper half of the high-tide range only (the peak varies by about a metre over a two-week period). That gives three to five feet over the mud flats. And at low tide (only) one can walk along the shore below the cliffs, it’s almost completely deserted because mudflats.
So, one can always find interesting places near home. And my day is now influenced by the tide tables.

Your garden’s got Morning Glory, we’ve got moth plant and madeira weed.

@winston Our government (NZ) is also considering dropping mask mandates and vax ‘passports’. I wish they wouldn’t (even though Mrs D and I have both just had Omicron and – probably because we’re fully vaxxed – it was pretty mild). I can understand why the reasons are now less cogent – omicron is now widespread, a lot less lethal than Delta, and 90% of people are fully vaxxed. But it feels like they’re accommodating the anti-vax ‘freedumb’ nutters. And I also sympathise with those few who, for genuine medical reasons, can’t be vaccinated, and are being put at increased risk by the idiots who could but won’t.

P.S. While I like Russia, I hope Ukraine wins its war, and the sooner Putin is gone the better it will be for Russia and the rest of the world. However it goes, this won’t end well.

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I think Hugh Grant would be good.    I don’t think Comic Relief really counts for setting precedents (others may disagree)

Also, Capaldi played a character before he became Doctor,  Martha played a character before she became a Companion, didn’t Amy also (in Fires of Pompeii, sane ep as Capaldi?) – any others?

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@missy       Fancy me forgetting that!    My only excuse is, so much happened in that scene.   But I’m slightly embarrassed at not remembering that moment.      And I described that scene as ‘one of the best in Doctor Who’, didn’t I?    (Way back 7 weeks ago, but the Internet never forgets   🙂      I still think so, by the way.

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Um,  @missy,  I’m sorry but I don’t recall that scene.   Can you enlighten me?

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Um, when I said ‘best wishes to everyone here’ I meant, of course, everyone ‘here’ in this forum.   (I didn’t mean ‘everyone here in NZ’ which would be incredibly selfish.   Not that I don’t wish the rest of NZ well, of course).   Sometimes things don’t sound the way I meant them to sound.   I hate it when that happens.

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Hi @janetteb   I noticed the same – dead quiet. I didn’t post because I was waiting for someone else to break the ice, don’t want it to look like I’m monopolising the place. I’ve got covid omicron, but a mild dose, no worse than a medium cold. In fact Mrs D caught it first, I had it (or maybe it was just a cold?) last week but I kept testing negative, still had to ‘isolate at home’ because Mrs D had tested positive. So we spent the week at arms length from each other. Still way better than being hauled off to a hotel to isolate, as would have been the case with Delta. So then, after a week, our isolation period expired – and I promptly tested positive! So now I’m isolating (still) while Mrs D, who I likely caught it off, doesn’t have to isolate because she’s already had it. There is no justice… 🙂

However, with our fairly high vaccination rate, omicron does seem to be something the country can ‘live with’ now (as opposed to the previous strategy of keeping Delta out at all costs). Any future variant that was as deadly as Delta and could spread like Omicron would be a disaster.

As you say, best wishes to everyone here

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@blenkinsopthebrave Just a shout out re Danger Man. I think I’ve got to the good episodes now. Find and Return (#17) I particularly liked. It had enough plot for a full movie crammed into 25 minutes, but more importantly, it wasn’t just ‘us good, them bad’. And the plot twists were handled concisely but sufficiently clearly to follow easily. I’d summarise the plot but it would take paragraphs.
It’s online here: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5accz0

 

 

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@janetteb Thanks. Mrs D is just about recovered. I’m still testing negative, somehow, but I’ve caught a cold! When I told the nice girl from the Ministry that, she burst out laughing. (The Ministry of Health have a bank of young people who ring everyone ‘isolating at home’ daily to check their symptoms, encourage them to maintain their isolation, offer assistance with grocery deliveries etc if necessary. They’re very pleasant and, while they obviously have a checklist, they haven’t been ordered to stick to a script, so their calls aren’t a hassle). So now I’m still isolating from Mrs D because I don’t want to give her my cold 🙂

Though the isolation period has just been reduced from 10 days to 7. I can see things getting more relaxed when the Omicron peak is over (and so long as a more deadly variant doesn’t arise, I guess).

I’ve got plenty of Doctor Who, also the Dirk Gently DVD just arrived, and I’m working my way through Danger Man. From about Episode 17 (Find and Return) the plots started to get interesting, instead of just simple black-and-white good-vs-bad, it’s shades of grey, the ‘good’ side aren’t always good (and don’t always win) and the ‘bad’ side aren’t always bad.   So you don’t know how the episode is going to turn out.

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@winston   I’ve never visited Valencia but I think the City of Arts & Sciences really is that white.   The little white bots match their surroundings quite well.   Reminiscent of the Two Streams facility in The Girl Who Waited (though those were actual sets).   White can certainly be sinister (remember the white Imperial Troopers in Star Wars?)   I’d love to see a ‘making of Smile’ doco and see how they got exclusive access to the ‘city’ to shoot.

Although Omicron is spreading rapidly here, it only seems alarming by contrast with our previous experience, in which we managed successfully to contain covid to a few scattered outbreaks.  So this is our first real epidemic outbreak.   Compared with overseas epidemics we’re getting off lightly (so far).   Also it definitely seems to be a milder variant than Delta, and we have a pretty high vaccination rate.   So Mrs D’s infection hasn’t yet reached the level of a bad flu attack, and I’m still testing negative, which is odd – it seems the vaccination is working as advertised.   Hope so, anyway.

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(Well now, here in omicron-infested Auckland – last week Mrs D was babysitting a cousin’s kids, then they later tested positive. So on the strength of that, on Saturday I collected a free box of RAT test kits, I showed negative – which I reckoned probably meant Mrs D was negative also, since if she had it I would surely get it. But just now, she tried it and came back positive. So I just took it and – still negative. (I jeered at Mrs D and she stuck her tongue out at me). We’re supposed to isolate for 10 days, I just tried ordering groceries from our usual supermarket – all deliveries booked out for a week. I managed a booking for click & collect on Thursday, which means I’ll be breaking isolation rules but I hope only nominally so. The rules do let me out for outdoor ‘exercise’ so collecting from a locker with minimal proximity to anyone else should be no worse than that).

Now, back to Who…  specifically ‘Smile’:

The smiley robots are terrifying. The idea that you will be killed if you show any signs of fear or unhappiness is just so twisted.

Calatrava’s architecture is spectacular. I don’t often notice architecture and I’m definitely not a fan of all architects (cough Gehry cough) but when (in 2017) my overnight train from Irun dropped me in Lisbon Oriente station, I looked around and thought “wow!”. But the City of Arts and Sciences leaves that for dead. Nice work, by the way, integrating it by CGI into the surrounding cornfield.

The fantastic architecture almost distracts attention from the dialogue. Watching twice is indicated.

And the robots, sorry the cute interfaces, speak Emoji. Trust the Moff to turn an Internet icon sinister.

So the two of them are talking past each other, the Doc is deducing how the city works while Bill is deducing how the Doc works (‘two hearts?’)

“You asked me where all the people were, and I theorised that they hadn’t got here yet. Did I sound convincing?” – and if we didn’t already know the truth, those last four words would start an undercurrent of unease. Still shocking when the Doc reveals the contents of the fertiliser store. Gives a new meaning to ‘blood and bone’. People eat plants and plants eat people. Fair enough.

“Do you know what it means when something chases you very slowly?”
“What?”
“It means there’s a reason that they don’t have to run.”

… and the whole city is built of killer nanobots. This is really quite terrifying.

There’s a lot of banter. I thought the Doctor was against banter.
“Why are you Scottish?”
“I’m not Scottish, I’m just cross.”
“Is there a Scotland in space?”
“They’re all over the place, demanding independence from every planet that they land on. ”

Moff, you naughtyperson – “Beautiful. Fleishman Cold Fusion Engine. All I’ve got to do is back the flow into the calorimeter and run. It’s like it wants to get blown up.” I knew something sounded familiar – ‘In 1989, two electrochemists, Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, reported that their apparatus had produced anomalous heat (“excess heat”) of a magnitude they asserted would defy explanation except in terms of nuclear processes.’ aka ‘Cold Fusion’. Caused quite a stir at the time, but proved to be, errm, science fiction (sorry ’bout that, couldn’t help it).

The Doc is still trying to protect his companion, but she’s onto him:
BILL: (takes shot of map) I can come with you.
DOCTOR: Took that long to think of photographing it?
BILL: You’d already memorised it, hadn’t you?
DOCTOR: Yep.
BILL: Stop trying to keep me out of trouble.

Why are these engine control panels always perched on a catwalk over a fearsome drop?

The Doctor for once is spectacularly wrong – the ship is not a pilot ship, it’s the colony ship. The Doctor’s attempt to cause the engine to detonate is oddly easy to reverse – but that’s not a main point of the story. The tricky problem now is –
BILL: So what happens now?
DOCTOR: Now? Now they’re all going to leave this ship, and find their friends and family mulched in the garden. And if they don’t smile about that, it’s going to be the end of the human race.

And this is really rather frightening – the intelligent Vardi robots, misinterpreting human unhappiness as a Bad Thing (but never having been told the Three Laws of Robotics) quite logically decided to increase happiness by – terminating unhappy people.

And of course the humans (50% of whom are below average intelligence) think they can shoot the nanobots. That is going to go well. So the Doc presses the reset button (or as Bill puts it, switches them off then on again). And explains to the stroppy colonists that they can just damn well be nice to the Vardi because it’s their city now and the humans are just guests. I really do love the irony.

Okay, now I’ve got the plot straight in my mind, I’m going to watch it again to appreciate (1) the ‘sets’ -which are real! and (2) the banter.

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Well, not news as such, but I had some comments on the next episode in my watchthrough, Smile.   I was holding off posting them as it seemed a little incongruous to be posting about scifi in the current gloomy climate, but given that we are all aware of the situation and could maybe use some diversion, I’ll post it over on the Sofa.

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@blenkinsopthebrave Well, you don’t really need to ‘defend’ Danger Man from me 🙂 After all I did make the effort to download every episode from dailymotion.com. Maybe ‘pretty naff’ was a bit harsh – after all, every series has its ‘Love & Monsters’ 🙂 (Now I expect I’ll get an angry response from a L&M supporter, isn’t that always the way?) Let me backtrack a bit – those very early eps were adequate, none were so bad as to make me stop watching, they held my interest sufficiently to keep going, while thinking “I remembered DM as better than this”. Hopefully I’m now on to the ‘better’.

In a number of instances, it felt like 25 minutes was too short a time to fully develop the plot – about 22 minutes in, John Drake would be in deep doodoo and we’re wondering how he’s going to get out of it when ‘police rush in’. But I did like the fact that, as the series progressed, it wasn’t always black and white as to who was in the right. It takes some (scriptwriting) nerve to write an episode where, after 50 minutes of intrigue and suspicion, it turns out the whole espionage conspiracy was just some civil servant’s overactive imagination; or where the collateral damage to peoples’ lives greatly exceeds the gains (e.g. That’s Two of us Sorry). (Of course this moral ambiguity and uncertainty reached their peak in The Prisoner, which I will doubtless progress to in due course). And I do like McGoohan’s cynical delivery. None better than in “Ice Station Zebra” where he showed a brilliant ability to deliver a huge chunk of verbiage in an engaging way that, I think, rivalled anything the Moff and Capaldi achieved. “And then the Russians put our camera, made by our German scientists, and your film, made by your German scientists, into their satellite made by their German scientists, and up it went, round and round, whizzing over the United States seven times a day.”

I must get the DVD!
I’ve just remembered one other actor who could manage a similar sardonic delivery – Paul Darrow as Avon, in Blakes 7.

@janetteb I’m not surprised you know many of those names – many of them were at the start of their careers when they appeared as guest stars or minor characters in Danger Man. I expect I’ll encounter many more as I progress through the series.

Just got an email from one of my relatives in Cornwall – he doesn’t mention house damage but he’s going to have to cut up a lot of trees for firewood – presumably they blew down. I’m half Cornish, but born in Hastings. But as a young teen I lived in Hampshire, so got to visit Hastings or Newquay for holidays. So both those places have special memories for me – as does Bournemouth (I wonder how the pines in the chines fared?) and the New Forest. I get a kind of warm feeling when I think of them.

Back to reality – it seems it may not be over yet for NSW and south Queensland. We can only hope the rains aren’t as heavy as feared. And here in Auckland, Covid Omicron is well loose – 16,000 new cases I think. Mrs D and I haven’t caught it yet but I guess we probably will sooner or later – we’re both double vaxed + booster, so there’s that. We try and avoid it, I guess the optimum (for us and the country) is if we can avoid it until after the peak which is predicted to happen in a few weeks time.

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@janetteb   Good luck with the website.

The weather seems to have gone chaotic this year.   The water’s been lovely and warm for swimming, here in Auckland, but what is a good thing for me is I believe very bad for the climate.    So far this year we’ve had record floods in Canterbury, Northland, Wellington, a couple of other places I forget, and most recently on the South Island West Coast (maybe the same storm system that hit Queesnland/NSW), and I happen to be writing a couple of letters to family in Cornwall and I’m having to hope their roofs are still in place after (according to our news) the strongest winds ever recorded in England – 122mph at the Needles (on the western end of the Isle of Wight.   When I was a kid in Hampshire, we could see the Needles across the bay).

Change of topic – amongst other things, I’m slowly working my way through the old ‘Danger Man’ series with Patrick McGoohan. The first few eps were pretty naff, tbh, with painfully simplistic plots, but by Episode 12 (‘The Sisters’) the scripts were getting watchable. And just about everybody was in them, I keep seeing actors even I recognise, so far I’ve noted Ewen Solon (Lucas in Maigret), Donald Pleasance, Lois Maxwell (Moneypenny), Sam Wanamaker, Richard Wattis, Patrick Troughton who I’m sure I’ve seen in something, Patrick Wymark (John Wilder in The Power Game), John le Mesurier, Warren Mitchell (Alf Garnett), Fenella Fielding, Robert Flemyng, Charles Gray (the narrator in Rocky Horror Picture Show, also Ernst Stavro Blofeld), Mai Zetterling and Barbara Murray. And doubtless a few more I’ve forgotten.   And that’s just Episodes 6 to 12.

While, of course, leisurely making my way through Dr Who series 10.   But that’s another post.

 

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I can understand Putin (or any Russian leadership) getting antsy about NATO overtures to Ukraine – just look at the map to see that much of western Russia (which is the most important bit where everyone lives) would be bordered by NATO.    (And if anyone thinks that’s over-sensitive, just contemplate US attitudes to Cuba for the last 60 years).  It also explains his propping-up of that thug in Belarus.

I’d half-expected Putin to launch a limited ‘peacekeeping’ invasion of the Dombas region (in the far east of Ukraine, where the separatists are) to set up a ‘neutral’ government (and apparently this is what most of the Russian leadership expected also).   But he’s definitely gone over the top this time.   If he gets deposed, and the sooner the better, the better it will be for Russia and the rest of the world.

Just to make it clear, I’m on Ukraine’s side in this.   And also on the side of the many Russians who are shocked by this war.   I believe a lot of Russians tolerated him because they didn’t want more instability.   I think maybe he just lost that.

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@nerys  @syzygy   @winston   On a first watch through, of course, we don’t know which of them remembers – it’s obvious one or the other of them doesn’t, possibly both – until the reveal of the memory wipe. (This is why one should always watch a Moff episode twice – the second time, with foreknowledge, every word or expression takes on a different nuance). Second time through, with full hindsight: I think the Doctor guessed who Clara might be (from circumstantial evidence – he’s very bright). And was possibly even slightly frustrated that his memory refused to confirm it. Until the end, of course. Clara, of course, knew exactly who the Doctor was. But I think she wasn’t 100% sure how much he remembered. I think both of them were fishing for information.

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@mudlark    Yes, I think I noticed Clara’s theme in the background of that scene.   Besides, the Doctor knows that theme – he mentions that it’s called ‘Clara’ in the diner in Hell Bent.

Did you ever read Doug Adams’ ‘Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency’ – there’s a Cambridge don called Reg, Professor Chronotis, who has a time machine (in fact his rooms *are* the machine) and is obviously reminiscent of the Doctor.   This is known to have elements of the unfinished Who story ‘Shada’.   I’m sure the Moff has read it.

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(So I’ve been watching Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element (which is great and fantastic fun) and Valerian (which kind of illustrates that more is not always better. Still, I think it outdoes Avatar for gorgeous visuals). And also, from the depths of my hard drive, the old black & white Danger Man, with Patrick McGoohan, pre-Prisoner. The first few eps were pretty ordinary, I think they improved later.)

Back to Who, and Season 10 – my impressions of The Pilot

I keep getting echoes of Reg, Professor Chronotis (from DNA’s Dirk Gently books) (and so does Chrissie at Chatokeya.net). Example, the Tardis, that is too big to fit through the doors of the Doctor’s study, as Bill observes. The Doctor sooo did not have a window taken out’

The Doc is a fascinating lecturer. But *why* has he chosen to spend decades as a university don?

Good to see Nardole again. I just noticed, he runs in a very peculiar way.

What have the Doc and Nardole got in the vault? And what is in Heather’s puddle?

Bill’s mum is a beautiful woman (to judge by the photos). And then, in the background of one of the photos, is the Doc. (Thanks to Chrissie’s transcript for pointing it out, btw, I’d missed it). (And, reminiscent of Ashildr/Me in a selfie of one of Clara’s pupils?) So the Doc went back in time to ‘fix’ Bill’s lack of any photos of her mum – echoes of Reg and the salt cellar.

And the latest Moff monster is – puddles.

I *love* the reveal of the Tardis in this one! This is truly the best incarnation of the Tardis and it looks glorious in this sequence. Nardole: Human alert. Do you want me to repel her? Nardole is a hoot 🙂
This is probably the longest-delayed “Bigger on the inside!” ever. (I get a flashback to Mels phrase ‘Penny in the air…’ (though that was in a different context). I think the Moff coined a new phrase there; the canonical saying is ‘waiting for the penny to drop’, which originated with coin-operated vending machines and/or public toilets; ‘penny in the air’ is a divergent elaboration on that.

So then Heather has shown that she/it can track Bill across the universe. But she/it lets her go, setting up (though we have no way to know it yet) a surprise for the final episode. I love these deep-buried plotlines.

And the Doctor knows he should memory-wipe Bill, but relents. AND invites her for a further trip in the Tardis, what the hell. What the hell indeed, the Doc is really getting reckless. Having lost Clara and River Song, though was that 50 years ago? – time is really unceratin when it comes to Doctor Who. Doesn’t he know that all his companions come to a sad end?

And we still don’t know what’s in the vault…

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@janetteb I do hope the turbulence is over and your committee returns to an even keel.

“Outsourcing” was also a form of institutional cowardice – it meant the management always had somebody else to blame (sorry, ‘hold accountable’) if anything went wrong. That also permeated our IT department – never mind that I was using an open source free editor, they had to replace it with a commercial one (that cost money and did less) so they could ‘hold the vendor accountable’ if it somehow crashed the network. (The head of IT explicitly told me this). I asked sarcastically if he’d ever read any standard conditions of sale. We did not get on, sad to say.

Yes, Husbands of River Song is fun, and well written. I like the outrageous River Song, but somehow losing her doesn’t have quite the impact of losing Clara. Maybe because she’s died already. (But then so has Clara). The concept of past and present gets a bit – relativistic – when we’re dealing with time travel.

Mysterio – yes, I agree the nanny (Grant) is the hero of that episode (albeit one accidentally created by the Doctor). Incidentally, I think he is better looking with his glasses on, than off. This is probably an exception to most people. And Nardole is an excellent sardonic comic foil to the Doctor’s slightly melodramatic expressiveness.

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So I watched The Husbands of River Song. Didn’t record any comments. It’s a perfectly fine episode, it just suffers from following Hell Bent. As any episode would. Though it does have a sweet ending. But also, it’s a little too ‘comedic’ for my liking. (When I followed ‘Xena’, which notoriously lurched wildly from drama to rather wet Three Stooges comedy, the lines that would make me burst out laughing with appreciation were always in the ‘darker’ episodes).

So then a change of genre, to superheroes – I imediately like The Return of Doctor Mysterio.
Like a true Moff script, there are little gems sprinkled all through it. Such as the way the Doctor takes Superman comics seriously and has spotted that Clark Kent and Superman are the same person.

Grant and Lucy are really appealing characters. I instinctively like them.

The brains are suitably creepy. I notice Doctor Sim (lovely name!) has a diagonal seam across his face exactly like the deranged Hydroflax worshippers in Husbands of River Song.

Nardole keeps cracking me up. A suitable henchman for the Doctor.

Love the Doctor’s little all-guys-together chat with Grant –
DOCTOR (to the sky): Thank you!
GRANT: Who are you thanking?
DOCTOR: The universe. There’s somebody worse at this than me.

And Nardole can drive the Tardis! He is indeed becoming an asset.

So, overall, a fun episode.

[Dentarthurdent @replies]

@catymcinulty

Hi Caty

As Twelveismydoctor and Devilishrobby said, welcome to the site. It’s not very busy, except when new episodes come out, but we’re a mostly friendly bunch and we all like talking about Doctor Who.

If you used your real name, of course it’s perfectly fine to use it. I don’t use mine on public sites because it’s unusual and while I’d be perfectly happy for everyone here to know my real name, Google indexes this site along with all the rest of the web so anyone entering my name into Google could see everything I ever posted, anywhere. Which is a bit unnerving if you Google yourself. Just thought I’d mention that in case you weren’t aware of it.

(However, for the record, my local acquaintances all know me as ‘cr’, from my initials. I’ll happily admit to that because Google just returned 5.5 billion results for ‘cr’, which is enough to preserve my anonymity 🙂

[Dentarthurdent @replies]

@mudlark
‘meeting (n) An organisational aberration in which twelve people take an hour to fail to agree on something which could have been decided by any one of them in five minutes’. I was an engineer all my working life, didn’t want ‘promotion’ for the same reason as you, until they farmed out the design work to consultants and I became perforce a ‘project manager’. As an engineer, I could design a nice sewage pumping station for you and guarantee it will work as advertised. As a ‘project manager’, I felt like an impostor, just doing it by the numbers, ‘fake it till you make it’, perpetually paranoid that something was going to go expensively wrong and I eventually retired with a sense of relief that the penny hadn’t dropped yet. 🙂

Phones – that Nokia sounds remarkably well-made, and obviously you took good care of it. My approach to phones (as with reading glasses) is ‘buy the cheapest, because sooner or later I’m going to lose it/sit on it/drop it’. I bought a second-hand Samsung S2 a decade ago but I just used it as an occasional mini-laptop with apps like French dictionary etc. My ‘working’ phone was, until recently, a little $18 ZTE non-smart-phone. A big plus, it had physical buttons, I could operate it without glasses in bright daylight. And when I stood on it (I really did!), I just bought another. But – similar to your experience – with Covid, and needing to ‘scan in’ everywhere, I had to go to a smartphone, so splashed out $65 on the cheapest Android smartphone I could find. I still do all my on-line orders / banking on my laptop, though. And my phone has a variety of beeps and squawks which I only vaguely know the significance of.

[Dentarthurdent @replies]

@winston Not that it changes the point, but in fact the Doctor wouldn’t tell Clara how long it took. Clara had to browbeat Ohila into telling her. And I think that ‘duty of care’ is something he invoked to make it seem less personal. He had a ‘duty of care’ because he really did care – but he was always reluctant to admit just how much.
But what they said to each other after that – I think it was nicely left to our imaginations as the camera panned over (CGI) Gallifrey.

I am sorry to hear about your dog Newton – if it’s any small consolation, I’m sure your presence was a comfort to him.

 

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