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@winston   @janetteb   Thanks.   Unless the storm has an unexpected sting in the tail, it looks as if it’s missed us, all we got was a lot of rain (though not in torrential amounts).   Storms seem to keep causing chaos to the north of us, to the east and south-east, but the last one that hit us here was three years ago.   So we’re either well overdue for another, or we’re somehow less susceptible to getting hit.   Not sure which is true, but I favour the latter.   (Optimist!)

It’s just occurred to me that we have 35 gallons in our hot water cylinder.  Now when the mains pressure is off, we can’t get anything out of the hot taps (since it relies on fresh cold water going in the bottom to displace hot water out of the top) but last time the pressure reducing valve failed, I installed a tap on the cylinder drain, which would make it very easy to ‘tap’ it (no pun intended) for water.

Fresh snow looks great.   Such a pity it doesn’t stay that way, at least not in urban areas.   It turns to slush, which is never nice.

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@janetteb    Update on our cyclone:   No wind yesterday, rain started falling gently about 6pm, steady rain by midnight, had stopped by 9a.m. this morning, no wind, now we’ve got steady (but not heavy) rain and light gusts of wind.   According to the forecast we should be having a severe southwesterly gale right about now, maybe we live in a sheltered spot.  Fingers crossed.

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@janetteb  Thanks.   Apparently it’s a very dramatic one.   The last few that came this way caused devastation to the north of us and the south-east of us and managed to miss Auckland.   Hopefully this one will too (miss us, I mean, not cause devastation elsewhere  🙂    We’ll know if we’re OK tomorrow morning.

The last few days have been lovely fine weather, even while the weather man was pointing to dramatic multicoloured patches on his map and forecasting doom.   I had a couple of nice swims in very calm weather down the beach.   Nice to hear about your river, if we didn’t live near the beach I would at least want to live near running water.

@winston   I’m pleased to hear you survived your ice storm.

I just saw in the news that our supermarkets are completely out of bottled water.   We never buy bottled water (we have things known as ‘taps’) but we do buy industrial quantities of cola.   So a quick search and a raid on the recycle bin produced a dozen empty bottles and we now have 20 litres of water.   Should be more than enough.

I particularly like mature pine forests for walking in, the clear space under the pines is always calm, sheltered on windy days, shaded on hot days, with a carpet of pine needles but open views under the high ‘roof’.   Almost no undergrowth.   Ecofanatics grump about lack of ‘biodiversity’ but as a walker, I’d much rather the bio diversifies somewhere else and not wrapped round my ankles.

 

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@janetteb   I actually have all my DVD’s indexed and numbered, so I can find them.   But of course if I see a DVD in an opp shop, and it’s a movie I might like, I can’t remember if I’ve got it already.   So two bucks is a reasonable price to secure it, even if (as often happens) I find I have it already and just end up donating the DVD back.   Though this does lead to the disconcerting conclusion that I may have bought the exact same DVD several times over the years…   🙂    I have about 200 movie DVD’s, not including series like Doctor Who or Sherlock.

In other news, I’ve just booked for us to fly down to Christchurch and see our daughter who we haven’t seen in several years.  She assures me it’s still fairly warm down there, so I can go for walks in Bottle Lake Forest  (pine plantations).  Here in Auckland the tattered remains of summer are still hanging on, went for a swim yesterday and the water seemed to have warmed up very slightly.   Air temp is 20 to 23 C most afternoons.

@nerys   I’m quite unused to snow.   When I lived in the South of England I would be all excited if we got a few days’ snow at Christmas, but that only rarely happened.  Here in North Island NZ, the only place to reliably encounter snow on the road is up Mt Ruapehu in winter.   It does often snow down to lower levels in one place or another, but not predictably.   Anyway, fascinating though snow is, I think one could very quickly get tired of it.    I used to like driving at night, but now my night vision is just adequate, so (like you) I try to avoid long night drives.

@winston  I’m like you in that I like to have my own DVD’s and hard drive files.   I’m not sure I could survive eight days with no power, though I do have about 1500 books so I’d never run out of reading matter.   One huge change from a few decades ago – LED lights are so efficient these days that a carton of AA batteries would get me through 8 days of blackout quite easily.   Also, it makes it worthwhile to carry a little pocket torch when out walking in the bush with the knowledge that it will last for hours in an emergency.   (I haven’t ever needed it for that, but I once drove five miles on a pitch-black night on a winding gravel hill road with a ‘flat’ car battery that could only just power the ignition – no lights – by the light of a little 3-cell LED torch held out of the drivers’ window.   I just followed the edge of the road.  Far enough to reach a main road and cellphone coverage.   The sort of thing which is far more satisfying in retrospect than it was at the time…   in fact most of my fondest memories are of disasters narrowly averted.)

 

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@janetteb   I like to have control of media I have paid for.  If I buy a book, it’s mine.  The publisher can’t break down my door and take it back.   I can sell it again.   Same with DVD’s.   In fact there’s something physically satisfying about a DVD.   (Of course I can’t (legally) copy the DVD and sell it, same with a book, I can’t copy the entire book and sell it, that’s simple copyright).   Most of my DVD’s came from op shops.    (Sometimes I buy one then find I’ve already got it.   For a couple of dollars, that doesn’t hurt, I just consider it a donation).

Same with computers (all my laptops are Thinkpads, because Lenovo publish complete repair manuals as free downloads from their website; and they all run Linux because I control when (or if) it updates).   And all my files are on hard drives on my server, not ‘the cloud’ whatever that is.

I don’t have a Kindle, I’ve read that Amazon can ‘withdraw’ a book from circulation.   It’s paper copies for me, or a PDF that I can keep on my hard drive.   (‘Kindle’ – doesn’t that sound reminiscent of Fahrenheit 451?)

 

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@janetteb   As with the possums, so also with rabbits.   And deer in South Island I believe, and goats.  (There are deer in North Island but they live on farms surrounded by high fences).   Fortunately for us, nobody thought of cane toads   🙂   And, I noticed that everything had gone quiet too.

Currently Summer is still hanging on – late summer seems to have the most stable weather.  Eventually, some time after Easter, it falls off a cliff.   But today was beautiful, warm, sunny, and calm, the water in the bay was – just warm enough to venture in.   I’ll see how long it lasts.

I do agree that UNIT was far more intriguing when it lived in secret headquarters under the Tower of London, (actually, a bit reminiscent of early  Torchwood) than its high-tech tower which reminds me a bit of Big Brother or some other fascist regime.

@ps1l0v3y0u   I’m not a big fan of John Barrowman, he’s fine in small doses.   However, Torchwood was much more of an ensemble series I think.   Darker than Doctor Who in the first three series, and it went depressingly dark in the last two.   I usually like ‘dark’ (to quote Xena), but it has to be leavened with a good dose of humour – black humour will do fine.   Moff knows this.   Not sure RTD does, and Chibs is officially a humour black hole.   Similarly, I’m not a fan of shallow everything-is-fine wisecracking comedies.   I guess a nice mix of the two is optimum for me.

I’m not sorry I skipped Legend of Ruby Sunday this time round, I seem to remember it as a bit of a shambles.   On to the last season.    Which, incidentally, still doesn’t seem to be out on DVD.   At least, nothing on Ebay.   Only on Blu-Ray.    I bought a Chinese copy (probably a legitimate copy for the Chinese market?), but then my laptop couldn’t play it – it has trouble with the really nasty encryption built into Blu-rays, I think.   I eventually managed to rip the episodes and burn them to a DVD.   This was a lot of hassle but I just want to watch the episodes that I paid for on my laptop.

 

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@janetteb   Possums – we have ’em here in NZ, but they’re regarded unfavourably as they eat our native bush.   A couple of decades ago we had one in our garden, I was always cautious about approaching it because I’d heard they   have sharp claws and, when alarmed, a possum will climb the nearest tall object and if that happens to be you, ouch!   I don’t know if that’s true.

Doctor Who – watched Rogue a few weeks back, started The Legend of Ruby Sunday last night, got 5 minutes into it and abandoned.   I’m not a fan of UNIT, less so now it seems to be a sort of old folks home / dumping ground for erstwhile companions.  Rose(2), who I like, was in the first scene, but – to me – it seems like her character (and the others) is just being added in to try and ‘pep up’ UNIT.   The inverse of Osgood, who started as a UNIT staffer but became a character in her own right.

So instead I watched Joy to the World, which I found entirely watchable  (also, I recall being confused by the timeline first time around, this time I could understand it.)

Waiting hopefully to see if Rose (1) is the next Doctor – I’d love that! – if and when it eventuates.

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This is basically a fresh review, since it’s long enough since I watched that I’ve forgotten much of the ep.

‘Orient Express, Italy, 1962’ See my previous post for 5 ways this is technically incorrect. 🙂
The book the girl is reading, though, does look like an authentic Penguin paperback.
And I don’t think the mountain in ‘Everest Base Camp 1953’ is actually Everest. I’d like to ID it, it isn’t the Matterhorn or K2, I suppose I could try a reverse image search but my geek streak doesn’t stretch that far.

The dialogue in the Time Hotel is interesting and witty – who wrote this? Oh, Moff. What a surprise.

“Make yourself comfortable. And don’t attract attention. You should be dead quite shortly.” Yep, definitely Moff.

I really like Anita as the harassed manager of a modest hotel.

That countdown on the briefcase – FutureDoc bursts in with the code, then ducks back into the Time Hotel with Joy and leaves NowDoc in the Sandringham Hotel to go the long way round. Moff absolutely loves these ‘long way round’ scenarios, any immortal can expect to encounter at least one in their ‘lifetime.’ In fact this one was the inverse of The Day of the Doctor where the 3 Docs were in a dungeon and the Screwdriver needed 400 years to work out the molecuar structure of the door – which the newest iteraion of the Screwdriver had just completed (and then Clara walked in because the door wasn’t locked).

The relationship developing between the Doctor and Anita is rather charming. Love the sink-plunger joke – ‘Is this armed?’ And Anita’s Satnav now takes her where she *needs* to go, and her car is now blue.
And the little row of Tardises – “Where d’you get them?” “Online, mostly. For some reason there’s loads of them.” Nice little nod to the fans, I think.
And I had a tear in my eye when the Doctor left Anita to close the time loop.

But I still can’t figure out where he got the code for the briefcase, maybe I missed it.

And *of course* the villains are Vilengard.

Geek mode on again – when he lassoes the track behind the train, causing the rope to pull the door in the chamnber open – why do the train wheels emit sparks? – they’re not transmitting any brake force.

I have to admit the last few minutes were a bit too mystical for me; how did Joy acquire the ability to fly and take the starseed with her into deep space?

Never mind, for a feelgood Christmas episode it was entirely wachable.

 

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@winston     Congratulations.   I’m sure we could all use a little bit of sunshine.    I wish the best for his future.

 

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@winston Fortunately, the bottom (in the harbour) is only muddy, not weedy – that would add an extra level of creepiness. Also, whether in ‘the bush’ or the sea, we have very little in the way of bitey stingy things. We do have a few sharks offshore (though nothing like Oz gets) and they usually only – rarely – attack surfers who are out in the deeper water, not edge-waders like me. Though last week, standing on the sea wall, there was an enormous splash in the water a few feet away – I thought someone had fallen in. Then it happened again. Neither nearby passers-by nor I could see what did it, but it must have been big. Complete mystery, my only guess was a lost sea-lion (we get them very occasionally, last year there was one sunning itself on the nearby boat ramp). Later a friend suggested it was probably a kingfish, which can reach 3 or 4 feet long and apparently will come into shallower water. So I hope that was it 🙂

@thane16 Your brother sounds very capable. I have no objection to acquiring new skills, but I prefer to make my mistakes somewhere out of sight and less conspicuous than my father-in-law’s gravestone 🙂
If you can do handstands then you’re a lot more athletic (or maybe just braver) than I am! I have ‘lost’ my car on occasion, now I (usually) remember to take careful note where I left it.

 

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@syzygy The Doctor is not so much ‘impersonating’ humans, as that Gallifreyans happen to look identical with humans. And the Doctor does conveniently have a soft spot for Earth.

There have been many, many alien races in Scifi that happen to look conveniently humanoid, or at least like a human in a rubber monster suit 🙂

‘Farscape’ actually made a plot point out of it – Crichton* who was ‘lost in space’ was constantly speculating why his nemesis, the Peacekeepers who were of the Sebacean race, looked exactly like humans. This became almost an obsession with him as he tried to find his way back to Earth. (Eventually, according to Farscape.fandom.com, it emerged that the Sebaceans had been abducted from Earth 27,000 cycles ago and genetically modified. I’d missed that bit).

[*No relation to Kryten from Red Dwarf]

Galaxy Quest – There was one plot point I loved, that the enemy had activated the self-destruct and the heroes had to run the gauntlet of the ship to reach the timer, only to be a few seconds too late – but the timer had stopped on One. Because the friendly aliens who built the ship had modelled it on Earth TV sci-fi series and of course, on TV, it *always* stops on 1. Makes absolute sense.

@winston Yes, we’re fine. Though New Zealand has been having un-summery weather, torrential rain and disastrous flooding and slips all over the place, but somehow it’s missed Auckland.

On an unrelated note, have you ever been an accomplice at a slow-motion disaster, that you could neither avert nor walk away from? I was ‘volunteered’ by Mrs D to help her brother smarten up their father’s grave. I thought it might involve a bit of scrubbing and weeding, no worries. No such luck, the brother had the idea to cover the concrete plinth with tiling, to which end he had bought a stack of glazed bathroom tiles, grout, a tile cutter gadget, and watched a Youtube video (which made him exactly one Youtube video more experienced than me). The plinth was on a sloping base and his plan of attack was to lay the ‘easy’ tiles first and work out the rest as he went along. This predictably did not go well, but I couldn’t exactly walk away. I did at least manage to persuade him not to grout between the tiles as they were mostly off-white and the grout he had bought was black – which would make any irregularity in applying hideously obvious. So now he has gone back to Aussie and I have been left to finish off the last few tiles and – hopefully – grout between them with white grout. How did I get myself into this? I do hope father-in-law won’t haunt me forever for desecrating his grave. Please forgive me for ranting, I just needed to share my frustration with someone. If the worst thing I can report is, I’m going to have to spend an afternoon fiddling with tiling, I guess I’m not too badly off.

And of course we’re generally warm. I usually manage to get in a swim most days. I always used to swim at Piha on the west coast, but it’s a 50-minute drive each way, and Mrs D has arthritis and is not very mobile, so I can’t often get there. Instead I swim at Blockhouse Bay 3 miles away which, being a harbour bay, has a bit of sand on the beach (arrived on a Council truck), then firm mud which gets oozier further out, so only swimmable at high tide. Hence I am a slave to the tide tables. The good thing is that it’s a very enclosed little bay, with a high ridge on the southwest side, and since the prevailing wind is south-west it’s almost always very calm in the bay even when there’s a gale going on out round the point, making it a very nice little spot.

Stay warm and safe.

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[Tap, tap. Is this thing on? Is there anybody out there? (My inbox has gone really quiet this week)]

So, after a long hiatus from Dot & Bubble, I just re-watched ‘Rogue’. I found it a little better this time – first time around I was so disconcerted by the bird people I could hardly follow the plot.

This time I was more used to them but – why were they five totally different species? Or is there that much genetic variation in the Chuldur? Would still have preferred if they looked a bit more similar. But still, humanoids with bird heads looked kinda ridiculous.

Next thing, I’m so not a fan of Victorian period drama. That the plot managed to hold my interest is, I guess, a credit to the writing.

And third, isn’t the concept of aliens impersonating humans a bit hackneyed by now? We had the Slitheen, the Zygons, the Dalek ‘skin jobs’ of Moff’s series (was there ever a name for them?). I’m probably being picky, the general concept is so often used in sci-fi, it’s a bit like complaining about the prevalence of ‘outlaws rob bank, get chased by a posse’ in Westerns.

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@nerys   @whohar

@ps1l0v3y0u Avon was definitely a criminal, and a computer genius – I believe he hacked the Federation banking system of millions of credits. They were all criminals except Blake, who was a dissident.

The Liberator was absolutely *not* a problem. It was a product of advanced alien tech. How many of the spaceships on Doctor Who are completely alien tech? Almost all of them, in fact. I wouldn’t describe Avon as sleazy or unpleasant. Calculating, cunning, the smiling assassin type, but never needlessly offensive. And Servalan was imperious, haughty, I’d never say a ‘stuffed shirt’.

Your impressions are almost the antithesis of mine.

By the way – Zen, the computer that controlled Liberator. Similar to HAL in 2001, though IIRC Zen never went mad.
Orac – the genius supercomputer in a plastic box.
Slave – the cringingly obsequious computer that controlled Scorpio, the ship they acquired after losing Liberator.

@janetteb They couldn’t ‘find’ the Liberator, it disintegrated with Servalan on board. After running through a clump of integralactic fungus that ate it. Incidentally, that was one big plot booboo – there was fungus and rust popping out of all the joints in the wall cladding and neither Avon’s crew nor Servalan noticed it. However, I guess Liberator had sister ships that a reboot could acquire, I agree it was too awesome a ship to dispense with. But any remake would absolutely have to have an Avon. Blake or his replacement Tarrant (ever notice how similar they were? – compared to Avon’s suave ruthlessness) were, I think, less integral to the series. Incidentally, how many of the original ‘seven’ made it all the way through every episode? I think, only Avon and Vila. I used to be able to name them all, and roughly when they arrived and departed. Gan was the first casualty. Then Cally the telepath I think. Then Jenna the pirate and Blake. Then Tarrant arrived, then Dayna the hunter, then Soolin the assassin. Anyone I missed?

I never watched Babylon 5, didn’t know it was partly inspired by B7. Another one I think probably owed something to B7 was Farscape – a crew of fugitives, being hunted by a military power, in a huge alien ship (Moya), having adventures along the way. I suspect though, that trope is quite common in sci-fi. It does lend itself to changing cast members on occasion as actors drop out or join. Farscape, by the way, was notable for wild plot twists, as some of their fiercest enemies in the Peacekeepers were deposed and sought refuge on Moya. (‘Peacekeepers’ – what a lovely name for a ruthless militaristic mercenary culture. Some cynic dreamed that up. A bit like the Colt .45 ‘Peacemaker’ – all very peaceful when you’ve killed all the opposition. I won’t even get started on the FIFA/Nobel Peace Prize… 🙂

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@ps1l0v3y0u Which ‘rubbish’ computer do you mean? Zen, Orac or Slave? Probably the most interesting one was Orac, with the sarcastic temperament. Zen (shades of Hal from 2001) was taciturn. Slave was painfully obsequious.

@whohar @janetteb As for a reboot, I do hope it is a ‘re-imagining’ along the lines of Battlestar Galactica 2. (Which apparently old fans hated, calling it GINO – Galactica in Name Only. I never watched the old series, so I didn’t care). I think the original Blakes 7 was much constrained – even in its plotting – by budget and effects.

The relationship between Avon and Sevalan could certainly be – more developed. Back when B7 was made, just like with Who, any hint of s*x or strong romantic attraction was considered suspect. I’m absolutely not saying the ‘new’ series should have Avon explicitly leaping into bed with Servalan, an implication would be enough, or just a suggestion of mutual attraction; it was there in the original, I think, but buried so deep you’d need a metal detector to find it. It could, I think, be rather more along the lines of the relation between Holmes and Irene Adler in ‘Sherlock’.

As for who played Servalan, she would need to be a strong character, with considerable screen presence and sophistication and a hint of humour. After all, she did rise to the top of the (unseen) power struggle in the Federation. And mature enough to be convincing. Like Missie (no, I’m not necessarily suggesting Michelle Gomez for the role). Come to think of it, Lara Pulver (Irene Adler) could do it.

As for Avon – can’t reincarnate Paul Darrow? 🙂 Not sure who to nominate there. Blake would be easier, any action star would do. Interchangeable with Tarrant, I think.

I do agree with Janetteb that models probably hold up better than early CGI. Still, some of the early FX were a little painful – I’m thinking of the neutron blasters in B7, or the energy bolts from the Gods of Ragnarok in Greatest Show in the Galaxy. In the way of weapons, B7 was probably the worst off, they had some singularly unconvincing guns (surely it would have been easy and cheap to manufacture better, just take an existing real gun and stick a few extra bits on it); Dr Who (or so I think from a very tiny sample) tended to use real guns which stood up much better, I recall one ep where the enemy were using broomhandle Mausers with stocks fitted which looked quite futuristic in their original form. As for creatures and costumes, K9 was always painful, and the Cybermats were all too obviously little props being pulled along on bits of fishing line. I was going to include the early Cybermen in the painfully unconvincing category, all too obviously extras in silver overalls with boxes stuck on and humans inside, I would have thought that nothing could salvage them until the Moff’s genius made that very fact horrifyingly convincing (World Enough and Time).

 

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@ps1l0v3y0u @whohar (Delurking suddenly) I’m on the fence about a reboot of Blakes 7. And I say that as a past addict. I used to get dirty looks from my boss when I shot out the door at 4-30, I couldn’t muster the courage to point out it was only on Thursdays and it was so I could get home in time to catch a B7 re-run (first time for me) at 5.30. (This was before VCR’s became universal). Incidentally, the final episode was screened several weeks late and in a late timeslot, apparently killing a few people or having them go missing was okay but (spoilers!) killing them all was too much.

Anyway, if there is a reboot, I rather hope it’s completely different from the original, rather than just recycling old stories with better FX. Though frankly, the ‘better FX’ wouldn’t be difficult, I think B7 had the most painfully unconvincing guns of anything on television. And its model spaceships were fairly obviously just that, I think even Red Dwarf had better FX; what a difference a decade makes!

I have a theorem that up to a certain point, better FX really do help the story; beyond that point, they tend to take over and weaken it. B7 was definitely on the left-hand side of the bell curve in that respect.

I watched mainly for Kerr Avon, okay he was as ‘stagey’ as all hell, but Paul Darrow could carry it off. And there was some killer dialogue, I’m a sucker for sarcasm, irony and black humour. (I was also quite intrigued by the irony that, most of the time, there weren’t seven of them, and for half the run Blake wasn’t in them either. One could argue they weren’t even really Blake’s after the first few episodes, the rivalry with Avon lent a certain ‘edge’ to the saga.) It was a shade darker than contemporary Doctor Who, I think.

I’d forgotten it was invented by Terry Nation! The name I remember most in connection with B7 is Chris Boucher. (Um, the reboot is being proposed by a Matthew Bouch. Odd coincidence).

I’d say it will be interesting to see the results, if they get it done while I’m still around to see it. 🙂

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@thane16  @winston   Dark Side of the Moon is still my favourite album of all, musically.   And also, the cover is perfect – a simple strikingly individual design undiluted by any text  (which I thought showed supreme confidence).

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@nerys   I was joking about the VHS.   I can’t see it ever coming back into fashion, for several reasons:   Compared with DVD’s, or other electronic storage, it’s much lower quality, much bulkier, VHS players are mechanically  highly complicated, the tape wears with each playing, jumping to a specific place on a track requires the whole tape to be rewound, so is very slow; and DVD’s can offer many extra tracks such as ‘commentaries’ and language options.     Our local charity shops won’t accept VHS any more because nobody buys them.   Though some are for sale on Trademe (our Ebay equivalent) so I might advertise mine for a couple of bucks in case ‘somebody’ wants them still.

Hopefully your VHS’s were sufficiently long ago that people did buy them.

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@nerys That happy circumstance happened to me just once. Decades ago I had a turntable and a couple of dozen LP’s. When cassette tapes came along, they were so much more handy (even though of doubtful sound quality) that I never listened to records any more. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of my LPs in their artistic sleeves. Then CD’s came along, as convenient as cassettes and as good quality as LP’s (better, in fact, because they were immune to dust and scratches).

So several decades later I finally bit the bullet and found, to my surprise, that ‘vinyl’ is now ‘collectable.’ Sold them all, except for Dark Side of the Moon, which I kept for its iconic** cover.

(**Badly overused word, but in this case it fits so I use it, reluctantly.)

And my turntable, which was a nice belt-drive Yamaha (yes, that old) in a nice wooden enclosure (yes, that old) – well, it was too nice to throw away even though it took up a lot of space and its belt was slipping badly, but I found that I could actually get a new belt for it. Which I did. And then I found that it too was collectible, got $400 for it.

Now I’m waiting for VHS to come back into fashion 😉

 

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@janetteb If I don’t have my camera on me, I also use a cellphone. They have become remarkably good for what they are. My 150-dollar Android phone will take perfactly good photos and videos in a good light. But I think dedicated cameras will always be a step ahead, for simple reasons of physics – there are only so many photons per square centimetre per second, so a big lens will always be better, particularly for short exposures and/or in a dim light. That’s something phones can’t do anything about, it is physically impossible to fit a large lens into the thickness of a cellphone.

I just Googled and Panasonic don’t own Leica. That was a guess on my part from the prevalence of Leica lenses on Panasonic cameras. Pleased to hear your father’s Leicas were ‘collectable’, it’s nice when that happens.

 

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@nerys      f/2.8   Wow.   That’s pretty nice.    The TZ80 is f/3.3 to 6.4.    I’m – almost – tempted to consider and FZ, but the same argument applies as did to my Konica (though obviously less cogently) – I can’t take photos if my camera isn’t on me, and the TZ is small and light enough to just carry as a matter of habit.   TZ has a Leica lens too, I assume Panasonic probably bought them at some time.

@ps1l0v3y0u    That’s true about the droplets, so maybe that is the actual heavier-than-air weight.   Of course if the latent heat of condensation is enough to produce strong enough updraughts (thunderstorm) to keep the droplets aloft long enough to coalesce into ice – they become hailstones and really not very gentle at all.   🙂

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@thane16 syzygy And a merry Christmas to you, thankyou. So a cloud weighs 500 tons (or tonnes – pretty much the same thing). Does that include the weight of the air in it, or is that the additional weight of the water vapour? (Is water vapour heavier than air?) That would imply 500 cubic metres of liquid water. But (Googles) water vapour is lighter than air – of course, which is why steam rises. So it must just be the weight of the cloud, air included, I guess.
Sorry for being such a geek. As you could guess, Kill the Moon caused me acute distress.

I do love quirky ‘fun facts’. I’m a fan of the Monty Hall problem, which seems incredibly simple yet so deceptive that professors of mathematics have gone into print with the wrong answer.

 

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@nerys Your FZ’s are a step above mine, in lens size certainly. I did love the light-gathering capability of my Konica film cameras with great big hunks of glass, but when I went digital I wanted something more portable. I also wanted a wide angle – 35mm or even 28mm, it was surprising how difficult that was to find in those early compact digitals. My first decent digital was a Panasonic TZ2 and I’ve stuck with TZs ever since, currently a TZ80. Which is just a ‘pocket camera’ size if your pockets are large. I guess at 24-720mm it’s a ‘superzoom’, though maximum zoom is only useable because it’s got OIS (Optical Image Stabilisation) which really does make a difference, essential on a small light camera. The steadying influence of a great big 200mm f3.5 lens on a 35mm SLR was something you only really appreciate when you don’t have it 🙂 In dim light it can’t quite match a full-size SLR, but almost, and it’s way ahead of anything I’ve had on a phone, as one would expect. As always with anything digital, it’s got 57 modes of which I’ve only ever used three or four.

I don’t use ‘the cloud’ for backups, like you I prefer to have my stuff in my possession. Except maybe texts on my phone.

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@nerys    As you say, extra shots in digital cost virtually nothing.   Great, compared with 50c-a-shot film, but it can be a problem.   I don’t weed out nearly as many as I should.   Ones that are out of focus or accidental shots of my feet are obvious candidates for deletion.   Deciding which of several similar okay shots is the best is just too time-consuming so I tend to keep them all.   I don’t get completely swamped, only because terabyte hard drives are affordable these days, and I have four in my computer downstairs.   (I do backups by copying everything to a different hard drive).

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@janetteb I’m not sure if the word is ‘dedication’ or ‘geeky obsession’. When I first went digital, c.2004, I saved the results on DVD’s, which naturally prompted me to put an index on each DVD. My first digital camera was a dreadful little thing, best forgotten, in 2005 I upgraded to a Fuji which gave adequate images. Then my first ‘good’ digital, a Panasonic TZ2, in 2007.
Up until that time, I used a film camera – a Konica T3 and a TC, with an impressive selection of lenses, the digitals were just for convenient carrying when I didn’t want to lug around a big camera bag. But the TZ2 made my nice Konicas obsolete overnight. Sad, in a way, they were beautiful pieces of tech.

Anyway, aside from all my digital photos, next job is to scan the prints of all 450 films I took with the Konica and index them. 🙂 I did say I was obsessive, didn’t I? They do all have details written on the back.

You were much more adventurous in your Trans Siberian trip than me – I did it in 2017, when Russia was quite tame. Coincidentally, my camera developed a random fault – I think the optical image stabilisation lens came loose – which meant about half the photos were distorted round the edges. Cropping them on my computer helped. I’ve also once lost a whole batch – in 2008 I followed the Silver Fern (car) Rally round South Island and I lost a SD card. Ouch! More recently, last year in France, when I put my rental car on its roof, I got the paramedic to snap a couple of photos on my phone, which then got pickpocketed in Paris. Luckily all my other photos were on my camera. When I got home, at a friend’s suggestion, I wrote an email to the local Chief of Police asking if they had any photos they could kindly share with me, and by return I got a most courteous reply from the Brigadier (?) with four good photos.

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@nerys Sorry if it looks like I’m bragging. But its just so nice to be able to go and swim every day (and this year Summer seems to have arrived early, at least up this end of the country). What I also love about summer are the long evenings, it doesn’t get dark until 10pm or so (of course anyone in the mid-latitudes can say the same). It always catches me by surprise how suddenly the long evenings arrive, and also how rapidly they decay at the other end of the year. Guess I’m just slow on the uptake.

But anyway, I’d feel I was somehow selling my good fortune (in living here) short if I didn’t at least mention it.

Minuses – well, the biggest minus is, we’re 1200 miles from anywhere (‘anywhere’ being Sydney, Australia). I do so envy Poms (i.e. ‘Brits’) who can just pop across to France or Spain or Norway for the weekend. By car, ship or train if they don’t want the hassle of flying. From here, it involves a 20-hour-plus flight with all the accompanying complications so it’s something we can only afford to do – in terms of cost and time – every few years at best.

Cataloguing photos – it’s taken months, on and off, since I re-started. I was more-or-less up to date until 2017, when I did my big trip via the Trans-Siberian to Europe (Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Switzerland, UK) and came back with about 20,000 photos. Admittedly only about 10% were worth keeping. But whenever I drove somewhere obscure – like English country lanes which I prefer to main roads – I took a snap of the signs at road junctions so I could later retrace my route on the map or Streetview (I’m also obsessive about maps and knowing exactly where I am, or was). Much quicker than noting it at the time. I have no photos labelled ‘somewhere in Cornwall’, they’re all ‘Tolcarne village heading west’ or something like that. Maybe I’m weird. I just note them all down in order in a large plain text file, I can just do a word search in any editor to locate the ones of interest.

After 2017, I let it all lapse until a couple of months ago when I decided I really had to break the logjam and catalogue that trip. So now I’ve broken free of that and just have a few evening’s worth left. But it’s quite pleasant ‘work’, and every now and then I come across a photo that’s good enough (at least in my optimistic imagination) to make it worth the effort.

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@janetteb @nerys @whohar

Merry Christmas / New Year / solstice.

I’ve been absent [minded] for a while, time always sneaks past when I’m not looking. Been swimming every day, here (water’s warm!) And also indexing all my digital photos, of which I have literally tens of thousands, I tend to binge on shots. A luxury I could never afford with film, but with digital it’s virtually free. The downside is extricating the decent shots from the so-so ones (the really bad shots are easy, make like a Cyberman and Delete). I’m currently up to 2018, not too far to go. But it’s a huge time sink, which is why Who has temporarily taken a back seat. It’s temporarily stalled at ‘Dot and Bubble’. Hope to resume shortly.

 

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@winston   @nerys    I think a lot of the anti-society attitude stems from the myth of the hardy pioneering individual who did everything for himself and was beholden to no man.   So that, reinforced by the successful American Revolution (which was really a rebellion), morphed into the ‘all government is a threat to my freedom’ frame of mind.   (If anyone really, truly  wants to be totally self-sufficient and beholden to nobody, there’s plenty of space in Alaska, the Yukon, or eastern Siberia available).

It also led, I think, to the gun-lovers of America’s favourite argument that the ‘right to bear arms’ was a vital safeguard against a dictatorial government.   So now their great chance to prove it has come.   I’m waiting…

Oh dear I’m getting political.

On a non-political note, AI-generated video is getting alarmingly good.   Youtube is choking with trashy patently fake videos with stunningly good graphics and puerile plots.   Any Who producer of the past would have wept at the quality of the graphics.   They would have wept even harder at the ‘plots’.    (These aren’t political, just clickbait.   Occasionally the AI gets it laughably wrong, like, say, a beautifully rendered giant python – with legs.)     Unfortunately Mrs D watches a lot of them.

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@nerys   Unfortunately  Covid was a breeding ground for  anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists  and  bloody-minded obstinate people of all types who thought their individual rights trumped everyone else’s.   In fact, thought that they weren’t properly exercising their rights unless they trampled on somebody else.   The sort of mentality that thinks the Government must automatically be evil because it makes laws that infringe their ‘freedom’  (except of course when the laws favour them personally).

If there was some thing that needed to be done, which was obviously sensible and the only rational course of action, and would benefit everybody, you can guarantee that there would be at least one individual who sabotaged it out of sheer perversity.

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@nerys    Has Donald Trump sued the CBC for a billion dollars yet?

We know why he hates the BBC.

Given that Trump is the most loathsome excrescence ever to crawl on the face of the earth, with all the appeal of a Dot-and-Bubble slug  [five paragraphs of vitriol omitted], and lies brazenly and continually, any news organisation that reports his doings remotely fairly or factually is automatically his enemy.

I imagine the CBC must inevitably have reported on him in less than glowing obsequious terms, I’d be willing to bet that tRump or his minions are giving support to any ‘Defund the CBC’ movement, in exactly the same way they promote the far Right in Europe and badmouth the NHS.

Elbows up!

(Thais has been a party political broadcast on behalf of sanity and rationality   🙂

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@nerys I know the slugs ignored Lindy because they were working through in alphabetical order.
(As an aside, had the AI read the ‘Hitchiker’s Guide’ quintet, wherein Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged, being immortal and bored, set out to insult every living thing in the Universe *in alphabetical order*?)

But, why do it that way. And why ‘build’ the slugs. I think it might be much more efficient, plot-wise, if the slugs were an existing species. The AI could have just decided to drop the defences and let them into the city. As for the alphabetical order, the AI could have modified the Slugs to obey its commands (much easier than creating a whole new species from scratch) in the same way that Man ‘created’ terriers and Pekinese and Alsatians. Could be that was what the Doc meant by ‘created’? 🙂 This would be consistent with the episode as screened.

An even easier way, though a lot less horrific, would be to just have everyone’s Dots zap them the way one zapped Ricky. Or even have their Bubbles guide them off a tall building.

My most-favoured way (and requiring least effort by the AI) would just be to have their Bubbles guide them into a Slug when their turn came up. Now that might lead to a few getting accidentally munched out of sequence but probably statistically insignicant. It would just require a small change in the script, though.

And finally, why bother with the Slugs? To inflict the maximum terror on the population? Okay, I can go with that, except – why hide the Slugs away from the average moron like Lindy in their Bubbles, why not let them know what was going to happen to them? And, even more, if bothering to do it in alphabetical order, WHY hide that from the victims? Wouldn’t it be far more terrifying if they knew their number was coming up?

So, my optimum woud be: the Slugs were a natural secies, the AI let them in, it shielded people in their Bubbles (but let them know their number was coming up so, nameless terror), when the time came their Bubble just guided them into the nearest Slug and dropped at the last moment to let them see what was happening to them.

So why on earth would the AI go that tortuous route in the episode to enact its hideous vengeance? Maybe it was just, like Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolongued, terminally bored.

I still love the ep. And those logical queries only arise on reflection, they don’t slap you repeatedly and continually in the face like, say, Kill the Moon.

@janetteb Agreed, RTD at his best.

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@nerys    I wrote a page, but most of it was just repetitive of my comments almost exactly a year ago.   So I won’t post them again.

I found it a very strong episode, even on repeat viewing.    I still think the Slugs evolved naturally on Finetime (or were already there, in the jungle, in which case of course the boatload of Finetime refugees is totally doomed).    The  Dot/Bubble  AI just co-opted them.   And I think my theory in my post of 18th November 2024 was a good one – that the AI just guided people into the slugs (in alphabetical order) by using their Bubbles.   Very simple, very easy, requires no super-advanced genetic manipulation.   I *know* the Doc says the AI ‘designed’ them, but then that was his deduction, the Doc isn’t infallible.

Oh, but then the Slugs actually ignored Lindy.   Bugger.  Another lovely theory bites the dust.   Okay, modified theory – the Slugs were an existing lifeform that the AI just modified so it had psychic control of them.   All it would need to do would be broadcast some ‘attack/retreat’ signal to specific Slugs that Lindy encountered.

How the slugs got to Homeworld we don’t know.   Maybe a Slug stowed away on one of the shuttles that brought entitled teenagers to Finetime and took 28-year-olds back.   Or we don’t know their life-cycle, maybe they didn’t eat quite all their victims, maybe they just planted an egg in some of them like the Aliens in Alien.   What happened to people who died on Finetime? – there must have been the occasional accident.   Presumably the bodies were shipped back to Homeworld for burial – and hatching.

The Slugs also reminded me a bit of The Day of the Triffids, that early sci-fi classic.    The Triffids were clumsy, slow-moving sentient plants, they could only catch humans because most of the population had been blinded (just like Finetimers in their Bubbles?)

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@nerys It was awful, but relatively brief, and left a lasting impression but no lasting scars. Far worse things have happened.
As a further aside, five years ago next Monday I was walking on a bush track near the beach and I came on a young dead woman hanging from a tree. It was a lovely morning and a beautiful spot, and she had friends who were looking for her, I just couldn’t imagine why anyone in apparently good health would want to do that. I’m ashamed to say I was inclined to the ‘just get over it’ sceptical school of thought about depression.

Well, since my little ‘episode’, I think I can now understand. If that feeling of hopeless, nameless dread that I briefly experienced was to persist, I’m not sure what I might do.  (I assume she was depressed). It is not a rational state of mind – as I said, I had no reason at all to be sad about anything, and I told myself that repeatedly, to no avail.

Didn’t Doctor Who do an episode about that?

@devilishrobby I think the alternate universe (or alternative future) is probably correct. That ‘Tardis perception filter’ idea has some credence, except I think it must have gone wrong and instead of protecting Ruby, it just warned off anybody who got too close to her. Umm, that could work, an over-protective defence mechanism. “You will be protected whether you like it or not.”
So many unknowns in this episode (which is not always a bad thing).

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@nerys    Well yes, Ruby was on the football pitch precisely in order to ‘target’ (or terrify) Roger ap H-bomb.   She actually got too close and had to back away to exactly 73 yards, and she knew her ‘follower’ would do the necessary.   Exactly what her follower could possibly say to get that result, I don’t know.   Possibly it wasn’t just words, maybe it also induced a psychic state akin to a ‘panic attack’.     (I – just once – experienced a panic attack, or maybe a brief intense depression.   It lasted a couple of hours and it was terrifying.   A feeling of being trapped and helpless.   All this, despite the fact that I knew I was in no danger, and the circumstances were all positive – weather was fine, I was staying with our daughter who I get on well with – there was absolutely no reason to feel depressed and that, in a way, made it worse, I was terrified that it might be permanent.   Eventually managed a short sleep and when I woke up the fear was gone and it was a lovely day.)    So maybe Ruby’s ‘follower’ had the power to induce that mental state in people.

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Yowza! That was some episode. I think this time round I could follow the plot better, or at least understand what was going on. But I’m still completely baffled as to why, and how.
Was the 73-yard woman Ruby all along? Or a holographic projection? And what could she possibly have said to make people run in terror, and keep (effectively) running, like Roger ap William?
And was the episode  end just ‘reset button’? Alternative future?

Anyway – cracking good episode. Now I think I’ll read some of the other comments and see if I can get a clue.

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@nerys   @whohar   I’ve quite intentionally never owned a DVD player that wasn’t multi-zone or region-free.   It allows me to buy DVD’s on Ebay without worrying what region they are (Region 1 is US, Region 2 is UK).   We’re Region 4 in Aust/NZ.   But obviously the potential selection is far wider if I’m not limited to Region 4, particularly for more obscure or rarer DVD’s  (though many of those are released as Region 0 i.e. region free).   Multizone players used to be twice the price (here in NZ) but the premium has steadily dropped (as it should, since mechanically they’re identical and I *think* that, firmware-wise, it’s actually just a matter of leaving out the region-checking code.   I could easily be worng about that though).

These days Blu-ray is becoming almost the standard and DVD’s harder to get, which is very annoying since Blu-ray is harder to ‘hack’ my laptop to play, even with a Blu-ray drive fitted.   So I do have one standalone multi-zone Blu-ray player.   I still buy DVD where possible, but the latest Dr Who series was only available in Blu-Ray last time I looked.

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@nerys     It just occurred to me that King Goblin (aka Jabba) was an acute case of ‘fat-shaming’.    🙂

‘Boom’ also had a song (though mercifully no dancing, what with landmines around and all…)

I’m pretty sure Who had songs on occasion before.    There was the Dickensian Christmas one with the shark.   And Rings of Akhaten.    And probably many others that I can’t bring to mind.

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@whohar    Oh, thanks for reminding me of that.   It was of course under RTD’s oversight, but how could I have forgotten?

 

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@nerys   I finally got to it.   And it was as good as I remembered.

Moff was back with a vengeance, no-holds-barred, and taking aim at (in no particular order)  the military-industrial complex, unchecked capitalism, holy wars, blind faith, mealy-mouthed corporate-speak, and making all decisions on a totally commercial basis (there must be a word for that but I can’t recall it).    Even commercial profit-driven healthcare refusing coverage got an implied sideswipe.

I may have missed something.   He did relent slightly at the end when he conceded that faith could have its merits in some situations.

He also invented intelligent, migrating land mines.   A step up from the ‘hand mines’ of – was it Sorcerer’s Apprentice?

Also, he kept piling on the tension as every factor – the mine, Splice’s arrival, Vater’s hologram triggered by Splice, Mundy’s arrival, Canto shooting Ruby – added further complications to his predicament.   Just as he looks to be surmounting one obstacle another appears.

I’ll bet that when RTD invented the Villengard arms factories (in The Doctor Dances) he had no inkling of where the Moff would go with it.

Excellent stuff.

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@nerys    Every long-running series does a song and dance number, just as they all do a Western. Eventually.

So, when Ruby was playing the piano on the rooftop, where did the string accompaniment come from? Inquiring nitpicky little minds want to know.

Maestro didn’t do anything for me, as a villain. Just got no charisma. If the character was supposed to be quite devoid of any interesting qualities, maybe that fitted.    And I found the magic chords a little – unconvincing.   Also, they must often have been invoked, quite by chance.

There was *much* better music than anything featured in this episode, even in 1963. Though, to be fair, not pop music, that didn’t start to get really good for several years, under the influence of the Beatles. (In, of course, my expert opinion). But plenty of catchy light classical or even folk music. Gilbert & Sullivan for instance.

Never mind. Boom is next.

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@nerys @ps1l0v3y0u Space Babies (the title sort of says it all, doesn’t it?) Damn, do I *have* to watch it? Well, maybe I’ll just skip-watch to see if there were any developments in the long-term story.

OK, I liked the little joke about the Butterfly Effect. (Did they have butterflies in the Jurassic? Does it even matter?)

Um, snot monsters and talking babies running a spaceship. I’m outta here. Long-term developments be damned, I can skim Tardis.fandom.com for that.    What’s next – The Lost Chord.    That’ll do.

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@nerys   Whoo!   You’re racing through the DVD’s, aren’t you?  Up to the Sutekh thing already.

I’ve been out of action (and mostly, contact) the last few days, since I munged my main laptop, the one with the DVD drive and my email client configured.   I’m just sorting a newer one (but I still have to configure the email, for now I just have to use my ISP’s webmail so I’m pretty out of touch).   Plus the water here is lovely (which is insane for November!) so I’m kinda busy.   But I did see a comment from you about 73 yards, so I resolved to binge-watch Season 14 and catch up.   But as you’re up to Sutekh, no chance.   Never mind, I can try to follow closely enough to follow your comments.

Yes, the song-and-dance was bizarre and incongruous.   I did find the change in Carla after Ruby disappeared, very disconcerting.   Overall, I didn’t hate the ep, didn’t love it, there was enough to keep me watching.

Herewith my brief comments –

That Christmas tree that lands on Davina reminds me of the berserk one that menaced Rose’s mum in an early nuWho episode. (Wasn’t that the one with the killer Santas?)

And baby getting abducted by goblins – this is straight out of ‘Labyrinth’. And the flying ship was reminiscent of Captain Shakespear’s lightning-catching schooner cutter in Stardust (though with a far less attractive crew).

I found the song a bit ‘off’. Also bizarrely incongruous (if that has any meaning in an episode like this). Of course the goblin song-and-dance is also out of Labyrinth, but nobody here has the charisma of David Bowie.    So then they sing to Jabba and the goblins sing along and they escape on a convenient rope.

Back in the flat – incredibly slow to notice that Ruby has disappeared. This Doctor is not really very sharp, is he? And it seems somehow Ruby has vanished from existence, could the goblins do that?

So the Doctor zaps back in time to rescue baby Ruby, and his gloves give him the weight to pull the goblin ship down? How? All they do is transfer his weight into one (or two) gloves, he said so.  And then after Jabba gets the jab and the ship disintegrates, the Doctor falls at least 50 feet and lands on his feet, without breaking anything. This is Kill the Moon levels of physical absurdity.

Anyway, we get the classic look-inside-then-walk-all-round the Tardis, just like Rose did.   So, happy ending (probably obligatory at Christmas, but I didn’t mind that).

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@janetteb   @ps1l0v3y0u  @whohar    @janetteb     Like Janetteb, I found Chibs’s rewriting of the whole Who timeline too much to take.   ‘Future’ events (by which I mean ones the Doctor’s timeline hasn’t reached yet) can do what they like, but ‘past’ events had better fit into the sequence or they just confuse and annoy me.   Which am I supposed to believe, what I ‘knew’ before or the incompatible version I’ve just been presented with?  I contrast the way Moff eased the War Doctor into the sequence without breaking anything, with Doctor Ruth (Fugitive of the Judoon).  Like, that was an intriguing story (if reminiscent in some ways of The Family of Blood) and I liked Ruth, not least for her ruthlessness (you are permitted to groan), but she should never have happened.

So currently I’m trying to find a rational way to believe that most of Chibz ‘didn’t happen’.    I’ll let you know when I’ve succeeded.   🙂

Whohar – I think the reason Chibz gets a ‘free pass’ from other showrunners is just politeness or ‘professional courtesy’.   You don’t badmouth your fellow workers even if you think they’re crap.

Timeless Child could have been about some other character altogether.  We all know Time Lords are ruthless, as was well established in [the episode with Timothy Dalton] and in Hell Bent.   (In fact, in that one, the Doctor was pretty unforgiving to the – Lord President, was it?   But since the LP had just tried to kill the Doctor as many times as necessary (‘I’ve got all day’) I guess that was understandable).   But anyway, as I said, the Timeless Child didn’t have to be Doctor Who.   Heck, the Doctor could even have gone back and rescued TTC from Tecteun – which would have made a nice anomaly to sort out, but could have been done.    (Apologies if I’ve got any wires crossed there, my usual laptop with its stash of Who data is – unavailable for reference.  Which is to say, I installed a new version of Debian on it and now it won’t boot off the hard drive.   All my data is still there, I can boot off a USB key and see it, so the hard drive’s okay, maybe I screwed something in the BIOS or maybe it’s the zombie ghost of Windows resurrecting itself.   So I’m on a backup laptop and some serious geeky hacking is in the offing.   The Church on Ruby Road will just have to wait.)

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@translatorcircuit    By a ‘small’ episode I mean any that doesn’t have a cast of thousands and where the peril is focussed on the Doctor or a small group, not some universe-ending threat.   Far more credible

What do you mean, “of course Midnight was total crap”?   Where did the ‘of course’ come from?   Your opinion does not constitute a universal truth.   And for my money, the ‘Timeless Child’ storyline was just Chibs crapping all over continuity, it certainly didn’t revitalise Who.   But that’s just my opinion.

By ‘The Wire’ I meant of course The Idiot’s Lantern, which I found very ho-hum.   And of course when I said ‘Moonlight’ I meant ‘Midnight’, I could blame autocorrect except that my laptop doesn’t have it.

It would seem our tastes are fundamentally opposed.

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@nerys   (I’m just coming up to a re-watch of this – after I do The Church on Ruby Road).

The Babies reminded me quite strongly of the goblins in Labyrinth, except not so well done and they didn’t have David Bowie to give it some class.   Or maybe evil Muppets.

Oh, hang on, is this the right episode I’m thinking of?   (Quick frantic google for Tardis.Fandom.com).   Oh, it is The Church on Ruby Road I’m thinking of.   Kinda shows how much impact Space Babies had on my mind.   Sadly.

@ps1l0v3y0u   Um, well after Space Bubbies came The Devil’s Chord which – if my flaky memory is even remotely to be trusted – was another ho-hum episode (or maybe just not to my idiosyncratic tastes).   But then – Boom!   I mean, literally, the episode Boom.   Explosively better.   Could it – just possibly  – be the fact that it was written by Moff have something to do with it?

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@ps1l0v3y0u     The Toymaker’s pseudo-German was really annoying at first.   I think he dropped it later in the episode (thankfully).      What made the Toymaker so hard to combat, I think, was that he didn’t have plans for world domination or any particular motive, he was just having malicious fun.

Mitchell & Webb had some classics, my favourite is ‘Brain Surgeon’, not least because it stands one convention on its head:     In most sketches, much of the humour comes from an unexpected punchline that inverts everything.   In Brain Surgeon, you know exactly what the punchline is going to be, to the point where you’d be really frustrated if it didn’t happen, yet when it does it’s still funny and immensely satisfying.

That gold tooth that was left behind when the Toymaker blinked out of existence – very reminiscent of the Master’s signet ring from Last of the Time Lords.   Which implies that he will be back, some time, somehow.

 

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@janetteb    I thoroughly agree about the ‘small’ episodes being some of the best.   (Blink, Moonlight, Listen, the Van Gogh one, The Doctor’s Wife, Boom, even Fugitive of the Judoon).   There were many ho-hum small episodes too, of course (The Wire, Dinosaurs on a Spaceship).   But I think being small gives more opportunity to make the characters interesting and the story ‘relatable’.    Opening it up to universe-ending threats loses the personal touch and the threat overshadows the story, and when the ‘good guys’ succeed there’s a certain credibility gap – how could the Doctor and a few friends overcome such a massive threat?

Certainly, if there’s a new showrunner, I would like to see RTD writing a few episodes and I’d love to see Moff doing so.

For the future, I do hope Billie Piper has a decent role to play.   With some (most) of the pre-Gap companions who have had cameos, it feels like they’re only there for fan service.   Even Ace, who I hugely like in her old episodes with Seven.   But Billie is still a lot younger so she fits the part better.   (I know I’m being shockingly age-ist there, I think at my age I’m entitled to be  🙂

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@ps1l0v3y0u   Did you get to re-watch this as you threatened?   🙂

I just managed it.   Not a lot of comments.   The Toymaker is so annoying I want to slap him.

The Vlinx is absurd, a Disney creature?   Never satisfactorily explained.

The Toymaker talked of doubling the Doctor again and again.   Reminds me of a Farscape ep where the villain-of-the-week was on an abandoned Leviathan where he kept doubling the crew so he could sustain his supply of brains to eat.   (Anyone who thought Farscape was for kiddies because the aliens were done by Henson of Muppet fame were – sadly misled).   So he doubled the hero Crichton into two individuals who both thought they were the original.   Episode ended with the two Crichtons sitting with their favourite gun on the table between them, grimly playing Rock-Paper-Scissors – and tying, every time.   (Because of course they would).      The Ncuti-doctor and the Tennant-doctor seem to be getting on better than that, but there’s a certain awkwardness and a hint of future clashes in the scene in their Tardis.   So then Ncuti clones the Tardis  (I’d forgotten that).   Nice solution to the problem.

Don’t know if any other Who episode dealt with the issue of cloning.   Oh yes of course, the Zygon episodes.   Particularly, of course, Osgood.   Except that one Osgood was a human and the other a Zygon, and they knew which (though they weren’t telling).   How far Zygon-Osgood became humanoid by a sort of habituation over time, we don’t know.

And of course Bill, who was replicated by the puddle at the end of The Doctor Falls – which the Toymaker mentioned.

And a number of Dalek ‘skin jobs’ (a term I borrow from Battlestar Galactica), such as Darla (Asylum of the Daleks) and Tasha Lem  (The Time of the Doctor).

The final scene is kinda sappy (Disney?!) but kinda nice.   I most certainly did like it that the Doc had been giving Rose (2) the odd trip in the Tardis.    So this Doctor seems to have retired.   Will he die of old age eventually?   Does bigeneration preclude him from future regenerations?   Don’t know.

[Dentarthurdent @replies]

@janetteb When I was six or seven I used to walk a mile to school, half of it on a path across a ‘common’ – a patch of uncultivated land covered in bushes and trees. (I went back last year and it’s all still there). From about ten I used to bike across a different common to the station to catch the school train. Once I rode to Salisbury – about 30 miles each way – through minor roads using an Ordnance Survey 1″ map to find my way.

About 11, I went for a hiking holiday in the Peak District, in a small organised group – which involved my parents putting me on the train at Bournemouth West for Derby. I had to find my own way to the hostel in Derby for the start. And back, from Sheffield. I suppose the locals must have talked with a Whitdoc accent (hey, I just managed to work in a Who reference, didja notice? 🙂 but they seemed normal to me. And the following year, to the Rhine valley.

My parents were okay with all this, they may have had misgivings but they probably thought it was normal – as it was, for the time. In fact they suggested the hiking tours.

I don’t know if it’s different these days, either the world has become a much more dangerous place or (apparently) parents are much more paranoid.

By the way, global warming is definitely a thing around here. Today I went for good a walk on the beach at low tide down by the harbour and the water was almost warm – I eventually managed to find a spot where the mud was not too oozy and went in for five minutes without undue suffering. (I like the water, but not the cold variety). Normal years, I never go in before December at the earliest, often not before Christmas.

[Dentarthurdent @replies]

@ps1l0v3y0u   That Winter Palace / 1916 scenario could have been developed into quite a good episode all on its own.   They certainly spent enough on the impressive and elegant set ( /CGI?)    But as it turned out, it was just a convenient location for the Doctor’s involvement to happen.   None of the (historical) events of 1916 even got a mention.

I did notice the Dalek and the Cyberman exchanging a look.   I know how they felt.

The Qurunx on the dead (?) planet could also have made the foundation for a complete episode.   But I have the feeling Chibs has more ideas than he knows how to deal with.

Well I think I’ve contributed enough column-inches on this (if you look up-thread).

 

[Dentarthurdent @replies]

@translatorcircuit    I tend to agree with you that goblins and babies are better left to fantasy.

But ’73 yards’?   Lighten up.  I assume you’re in the UK (correct me if I’m wrong) but don’t they still use Miles?   I’m in New Zealand, we went metric 40 years ago but I’m still bilingual (or should that be binumeral?).   The US and Canada still use feet and miles, aviation still universally uses altitude in thousands of feet, and knots ffs, what is the point in being deliberately obscurantist about units a substantial part of the world uses?

(The one unit I will not use is that one beloved of TV reporters, ‘football fields’, and its volumetric equivalent ‘Olympic swimming pools’.   So far as I know those have never been properly defined and since I never watch either football (of any sort) or swimming races, they leave me completely clueless as to the unit being referred to.   A ‘cricket pitch’, on the other hand, I know is 22 yards or 66 feet or a chain, so I’m OK with that, but I still feel that’s a bad unit as many people don’t follow cricket.   Just as well they never use cricket grounds).

 

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