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Working through Series 10, bit by bit…

Oxygen – starts with a shock – two dead people spinning through space. I have to say the exterior space station shots are visually excellent, very convincing. And the fact that there is no sound in space is used to shocking effect as Ivan can’t hear Ellie being killed by the space-suited zombies right behind him. Jamie Mathieson unleashed a real corker here.

And the banter is fully up to Moff standards –
NARDOLE: Do you know what this is? Fluid link K57. Removed it from the Tardis the other night after your lecture.
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 takes off)

“Oxygen is available for personal use only, at competitive prices. Any unlicensed oxygen will be automatically expelled to protect market value.” Jamie has really got the core values of the free market economy down pat here, hasn’t he? Puts The Rebel Flesh in the shade. And it sets up a heck of a good hazard to drive the plot.

“At current levels of exertion, you have two and a half thousand breaths available.” Oh yes, nothing like putting a counter on your breathing to ratchet the tension up another notch. 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.

Then Bill’s suit asks “Would you like to give feedback on your experience so far?” That is just so – typical.

Nardole is great in this one too. From his “Some of my best friends are bluish” to “It [killing everyone]’s how I’d do it” to where the Doctor says “Maybe get tired of carrying pesky humans around? Know the feeling?” and Nardole nods, he’s showing a talent for collecting dirty looks from everyone. But he is starting to become a serious character, not just comic relief.

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. Your life is in our hands.” Classic corporate-speak. This episode has me looking suspiciously at my laptop. Almost prefer the Daleks, at least they’re honest about ‘exterminate’.

So then Bill’s helmet malfunctions and she’s got to ‘breathe’ vacuum. It’s about this point I start to wonder if the writers have something against Bill, considering the perils she’s been exposed to. But thinking back, this seems to be about par for the course with Companions.

The nightmare space-walk is dealt with quite briefly. When Bill comes to, the deadly zombies are just a few yards away but not advancing – because the intervening section is new and not in the virtual maps yet, so the suits don’t know it’s there. That is an absolutely terrific detail. This episode has been so well crafted and put together, it is absolutely everything that Kill the Moon wasn’t.

And the Doctor’s best ever short speech:
“I’m the Doctor. I will do everything in my power to save all your lives. And when I do, you will spend the rest of them wondering who I was and why I helped you. If anyone’s offering a better deal, be my guest.”

Then Bill’s suit jams again, and the rest can’t pick her up to take her with them because the suit won’t let them because ‘Health & Safety’ forbids it. “Please do not interfere with the operation of this suit. Fines may be incurred.” Jamie’s really got the number of modern corporate culture, hasn’t he? (Now I’m mentally comparing this with ‘Kerblam’, Chibbers’ attack on commercialism, and this is like a surgical operation compared with a pub brawl).

And the Doctor has figured out that the lethal ‘malfunction’ is just the station control system ‘replacing’ the old inefficient crew with a new one. So he fixes it: “Hello, suits. Our deaths will be brave and brilliant and unafraid. But above all, suits, our deaths will be – expensive!” And the suits stop in their tracks. (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 the amount of damage he’s caused results in the pursuit budget being exceeded so it breaks off).

This episode gets even better on re-watching, when I can appreciate the precision of the plotting. Excellent cast, excellent drama. 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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@ps1l0v3y0u Interesting theory, but, with respect, I think it’s needlessly complicated. Much simpler if there are just two tardises. (And we know the Time Lords had a fleet of them. In fact, Type 40 suggests they had a very considerable number. So, plenty of Tardises to steal). Why would Clara and Ashildr/Me go back to Gallifrey? OK, if Clara got tired of immortal undeath, so the Timelords could put her back in Trap Street, but then where would that leave Ashildr/Me? I think she’d be more likely to just drop Clara off and vamoose pdq, given the history of the Time Lords treatment of other species. And the Tardis the original Doctor stole didn’t appear to look like a police box or a diner, so its chameleon circuit must have been unstuck or switched off at that point.

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@vickymallard Just responding to a few of your comments. The Master – I though he became a lot more interesting when Moffatt wrote him (as compared to Russell T Davies). Especially in one of his other incarnations and I won’t spoil by saying which one 🙂

I did like the green spiky people, specially the sarcastic female one. Sinead Keenan – sarcastic Irishwomen are great.

And the Timelords were impressive. Specially Rassilon (Timothy Dalton). I’m probably not spoiling too much if I say that Gallifrey was (as you surmise) locked away in a bubble of its own. (I’ve just remembered that – in Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – that the xenocidal inhabitants of the planet Krikkit and their lethal robots were locked away in a Slo-time envelope until the end of the Universe. Nothing is ever new, every idea in sci-fi has been thought of by someone else earlier).

The Doctor crashing through the ceiling was one of those awkward ‘reality’ moments where my skepticism peaked – how did the Doc aim so accurately, and howcome he wasn’t splatted like a pancake when he hit that hard stone floor? (And if the Vinvocci dropped Wilf off somewhere nearby howcome they didn’t do the same for the Doc?) That bothered me more than the bus in Planet of the Dead. Dramatic license, I guess.

There seemed to be some sort of link between The Master and Rassilon, sustained by the Gate. I don’t quite follow how it all worked.

I did groan when the Doctor, having survived all this, was undone by Wilf. I found the last 20 minutes a bit of an anticlimax, actually, though I can see why it was there, RTD saying au revoir to all his characters. But I could have done without Martha ending up with Mickey. I would have liked to see Jenny, the Doctor’s daughter, again though.

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@vickymallard Viewer’s varying tolerance for ‘errors’ always fascinates me. I will happily accept a time-travelling Tardis that can materialise anywhere it wants, but I get highly tetchy if the Space Shuttle lands on the Moon because (1) it was never designed to go beyond Earth orbit and (2) it’s actually a glider (if a rather brick-like one), that’s how it lands, and there’s no air on the Moon. (Don’t get me started on the rest of Kill the Moon :). I tend to give a free pass to anything that’s ‘alien tech’ (i.e. ‘magic’) but very little to physical impossibilities in mundane reality.

Other people obviously have their own limits on what they will accept and what ‘errors’ really bug them. For some people, it’s what is ‘in character’ or ‘out of character’ that matters most, never mind the nuts and bolts.

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@ps1l0v3y0u I think you’re complicating it. I think there were only ever two tardises involved – the Doctor’s Tardis (Sexy/Idris) that he stole originally and that stayed with him right through all the twists and turns of the series.
And the second Tardis that the Doctor stole in Hell Bent which was taken over by Clara and Me. I don’t know if it got stuck as an American Diner or they just hadn’t needed to change the exterior before the final shot of Hell Bent.

Was the American Diner in The Impossible Astronaut actually a Tardis? I thought it was just a bit of the local landscape.

@winston I agree, the tardis is a character in itself and could have its own show.

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@vickymallard Sorry, forgot to include you in my note to ps1l0v3y0u. It’s spoilery but I gave my account of what I understand of the Tardis in the Hell Bent thread.

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@ps1l0v3y0u Since you asked, this is what I know of stolen Tardises.
In the beginning, the Doctor stole his Type 40 Tardis. He was about to steal a different one when Clara (appearing from his timestream) told him “Don’t steal that one, steal this one. The navigation system’s knackered, but you’ll have much more fun” (The Name of the Doctor). It also had a faulty chameleon circuit. Now in The Doctor’s Wife the Tardis says:
IDRIS: And then you stole me. And I stole you.
DOCTOR: I borrowed you.
IDRIS: Borrowing implies the intention to return the thing that was taken. What makes you think I would ever give you back?
I thought that implied that the Tardis had ‘chosen’ the Doctor, but I don’t think it actually says that anywhere. Even if the Tardis did, I would just reinterpret that as influencing Clara-in-Doctor’s-timeline to steer the Doctor in that direction.
Thereafter the Doctor had just the one Tardis.

Now at the end of Face the Raven, the Doctor was teleported into his Confession Dial and the Tardis was abandoned. After the events of Heaven Sent, in Hell Bent, the Doctor ‘rescued’ Clara and they stole *another* tardis, which became the American Diner tardis later operated by Clara and Me. After the Doctor lost his memory Clara went back to collect the Doctor’s abandoned Tardis from London and transported it (either in the Diner, or Me flew the Diner and Clara flew the Doctor’s Tardis) to the desert for the Doctor to find at the end of the episode.

That’s as I see it, anyway.

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@ps1l0v3y0u This is spoiler territory so – if you don’t mind – I’ll answer this (as far as I can) in the ‘Hell Bent’ thread where it fits best.

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@vickymallard I really liked this one. And I too, liked that the giant fly aliens were not the enemy (and in fact, acted very honourably. I felt quite sorry for them).

Lady Christina was great (in my view). A sort of female James Bond (or Emma Peel?) I would have liked to see a lot more of her. Maybe not workable as a Companion, simply because she would have upstaged the Doctor without even trying, they would have had to have dumbed her down a lot and that would have upset me. But a recurrent ally/adversary, like River Song or Captain Jack, would have been fine. In a way it’s her bad luck that she appeared right at the end of RTD’s stint, because successive showrunners tend to not have used previous associates much.

As for how she appeared next door to the museum instead of on the roof when the alarm went off – this bit is essentially a ‘heist’ movie, they often play a bit loose with the nuts-and-bolts stuff. I’m often a bit obsessive about the practicality of things but this bit didn’t worry me unduly. Nor the fact that the bus didn’t pull over – heist movie 🙂

The Swarm absolutely gave me the creeps. Vicious little things.

The Doctor stole the Tardis? Yes, was that a ‘new’ fact in this episode? That was elaborated on considerably by Moffat with the 11th Doctor episodes. (Another take is that the Tardis ‘chose’ (influenced) the Doctor to steal it). I won’t say more because spoilers. But see The Name of the Doctor (“Don’t steal that one, steal this one. The navigation system’s knackered, but you’ll have much more fun”) and The Doctor’s Wife for more.
It appears that Tardises were controlled by Gallifrey authorities (maybe a bit like ‘company cars’) and presumably Timelords required authorisation to take one out. He stole another, much much later. I think it likely that the Doctor’s Tardis was under maintenance when he nicked it – hence the faults of the stuck Chameleon circuit, and its notoriously erratic navigation.

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@winston Bees I’m cautious about, though I do like lovely big hairy bumble bees. I like spiders (and in NZ there aren’t any really poisonous ones), we used to have lovely big ‘Avondale spiders’ (an immigrant Australian Huntsman) a couple of inches across, in our garden, sadly I haven’t seen one for decades. And I also like moths, the bigger the better. Hate wasps, that’s not a phobia, they’re just nasty things in every way. But I like praying mantises, savage killers that they are.

Toads and frogs are quaint and cute (we don’t have the poisonous Aussie cane toads here, just as well). I’d be fine with snakes, though a bit cautious of ones that might be poisonous, but we have no snakes at all in NZ. Probably just as well since I like walking barefoot everywhere. Oh, and I like mice.

And I quite agree most of these likes/phobias are arbitary. I have a mild phobia for giant wetas, which look like enormous grasshoppers – in theory I should love them, but I just find them somewhat gross and creepy.

Quite by coincidence David Attenborough’s Planet Earth III is on right now and some of those deep-sea creatures look – just *wrong*. Like the creatures trying to break through from the Dungeon Dimensions in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld. Or as if the Creator was off his face on magic mushrooms, acid *and* angel dust the day he knocked those out.

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@ps1l0v3y0u Yes, I would have loved to see more of McGann. I thought John Hurt did a great job as the War Doctor, but if things like (presumably) availability had worked out differently, I think McGann could have taken that part with the most minimal of adjustments and he would have been equally good. And yes I would have loved to see McGann and The Moment (Billie Piper) acting together.

Billie Piper is one of those actors that the camera loves. Even just leaning against a wall in the background, you can’t miss her. And as always, Moffat has some written delightful dialogue between them. “The Interface is hot!” “Well, I do my best.”

Withnail & I – I’ve never seen. But I think I’ll get it on DVD, it looks promising. McGann and Richard E Grant. I know I’ve seen Richard E Grant in something, probably Who? He was never the Master, was he? No, the Great Intelligence. See, I haven’t got Alzheimers, yet. 🙂

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@juniperfish Good one! Though I can’t help noticing Tom Lamont confuses Heaven Sent with Heaven’s Gate – which became famous as a disaster of a movie. And then there was the American cult that ended with them all committing mass suicide. What a mistake-a to make-a.

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@rewvian Somehow your comments (which have just appeared in my email) are dated 22 October 2022 in this thread. So about 6 or 8 posts up. Not sure what’s going on.
The Night of the Doctor (the complete 6-minute special) is on Youtube, see if this link works:

I think it was probably also on the Day of the Doctor DVD set (checks spreadsheet) – yes.

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@winston I love old slightly-run-down buildings. Some of the pleasantest nights I’ve had away from home have been in old run-down country pubs that I’ve booked into at the last minute when I ran out of time and daylight. Like the Tavistock Hotel in Waipukurau, one stormy Easter – ‘We do have a room but it’s above the bar and it’s disco night tonight’ ‘Never mind, it’ll do’. And their idea of ‘disco’ was Dire Straits and Pink Floyd – I was in heaven 🙂 Or old student flats like the one you describe – it’s a tribute to the residual strength of timber and nails that they never collapsed under the weight of wall-to-wall drunk students.

As it happens I like woodlice, I think they’re cute. Non-slimy, non-spiky, non-bitey, non-stingy and non-smelly. And fascinating the way they roll up into balls. But I admit rationality has nothing to do with our feelings towards creepy-crawlies, for example I like millipedes, don’t mind spiders, but centipedes give me the screaming hab-dabs. You know the scene in Dr No where someone puts a tarantula in James Bond’s bed? Well in the book that was a giant centipede, I don’t know why they changed it for the movie, that would really have freaked me out.

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Incidentally, the tiny house they were first shown into really exists – its 91a (you can actually read the number in the episode) Fairwater Grove West, Llandaff, Cardiff (you can see it in Streetview) and it’s a few houses down from Terry Nation’s birthplace at No 113, as mentioned in the commentary to the episode. (The commentary obviously didn’t give the addresses but – Google…)

The second house next to the cement factory (or is it a gasworks) I don’t know, I’m not that obsessive.

Just for completeness, the big house (Wester Drumlins from ‘Blink’) is Fields House in Fields Park Avenue, Newport.

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Bill using the Tardis for a removal van? That just feels a little bit wrong.

The Doctor is really weird in this one, I felt a little embarrassed for Bill. It’s like going out to dinner with a relative who turns out to be socially tone deaf.

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.

Doesn’t David Suchet do mild-but-sinister well? I half expected the contract to be signed in blood 🙂 He is extraordinarily good as the Landlord. An amiable benevolent-looking old gentleman who is unsettlingly creepy under his benign exterior. And then he goes all Evil Villain bwahaha. And then, quite incredibly, he becomes a tragic if misguided character that we actually feel sorry for. Until he decides to carry on with his nefarious tenant-consuming scheme.

I keep wanting to call the house ‘Wester Drumlins’ for no good reason.
But it’s a lovely old house, I *love* old slightly dilapidated buildings, preferably wooden. (When I’m travelling, I much prefer downmarket pensions or hikers’ ‘refuges’ in little out-of-the-way villages. Though huge rooms in grand hotels, let at stupidly cheap off-season rates just to keep the place running, have their appeal too. I’m rambling.)
The standard haunted-house stuff is really very well done – creaks and bangs and slamming doors.

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 is creepy but one of the less successful ‘creatures’ in the series, visually. Her restoring all the flatmates to life was a nice touch, though a bit hard to credit the mechanics of it. 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)

So this was actually a pretty good episode. Nothing spectacular but well put together.

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@vickymallard @ps1l0v3y0u Well I was – slightly disappointed by The Next Doctor (which turned out not to be the next Doctor after all). Cybermen child labour in Victorian London just seemed a bit like the old Dickens/Christmas theme, Oliver Twist and all that. I thought Christmas Carol (okay that was openly Dickens-derived) was a better ‘take’ on that theme.

They teased us with a string of ‘not future companions’ in those post-Season 4 specials. I thought Rosita from Next Doctor would have made a fine Companion. And Lady Christina de Souza (Planet of the Dead), though she might have been almost too good, a veritable Emma Peel. She would have put the Doctor in the shade. That said, I would have absolutely loved to see her reappear from time to time, the way Captain Jack did.

Back to The Next Doctor. Rosita seemed to be devoted to Jackson Lake, though he seemed to be oblivious / take it for granted. Was that due to ongoing grief over missing his wife? There’s a very strong parallel situation to Martha and Ten, there!

The CyberKing – how could that not be recorded in the history books? Same way all the other alien incursions manage to get missed/forgotten, I guess. I do have strong reservations about the ‘Tardis’ balloon. Not so much the chances of getting shot by a Cyberman, except at really close quarters, flying objects are notoriously difficult to hit (unless the Cybermen have super-good aim) and a bullet hit on a balloon just tends to go straight through with minimal immediate results. But balloons are totally unsuited to attacking anything, they go where the wind blows and a miss by a hundred yards is as bad as a miss by a mile. They’re fine for escaping, possibly okay for infiltrating a country so long as there’s no requirement for a precise landing site, but for a precision attack? – forget it. Quite impractical.

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@ps1l0v3y0u You’re geeking me out now. 🙂 Which episode was it started by Anthony Stevens and finished by Eric Saward? Writers can certainly ‘riff on their favourite obsessions’ so long as the result is entertaining for a general audience (obviously) and fits in with the ambiance of the series, I think.

I can assure you KTM was far worse than anything in the Flux, so far as science is concerned. That is to say, Flux was all sci-fi and probably physically impossible, but I can readily accept that, just as I accept that the Tardis can time travel. The more fantastic (i.e. removed from everyday physics) something is, the more readily I can accept it. The Flux’s main drawback (from my point of view) was that I found the plot confusing and galactic disasters tend to be far less satisfying than more focussed stories.

However, when an episode focuses on ‘real’ physics and mechanics as KTM did – the Space Shuttle, the Moon causing tides and so on – then it had better get those things right, or ‘explain’ why they differ from normal reality. KTM seemed to go out of its way to get everything gratuitously wrong.

Forest of the Night was maybe a bit more mystical so – although the outrageously fast plant growth and the bit of woo about the spirit of the Earth or whatever it was, caused me to raise an eyebrow, it didn’t raise my hackles like KTM did. Besides, the traffic lights in a forest were kinda cute 🙂

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What was dishonest about Thin Ice? If you’re going to go to the past at all, then you’re either going to have to ‘take it as it comes’ and treat it just as background, because you can’t turn every past ep into an in-depth social documentary.

Well, Kill the Moon was the absolute worst of NuWho (IMO). Worse than anything of Chibnall’s. With Forest of the Night a pale second for the season.

What made KTM so bad? Well, just about everything. Let me count the ways – and this is pure elementary physics –
the Space Shuttle could only reach low Earth orbit, it was never Moon-capable
the cargo hold on the Shuttle was never pressurised and was structurally incapable of that
there would be NO gravity inside it before it crashed into the Moon because –
it’s just a dirty great glider, it needs air to land – if it tried landing on the Moon, there would be a brand new crater
the Moon was allegedly increasing in mass, that’s straight violation of the law of conservation of matter
you could never have ‘high tide everywhere at once’ – more violation of conservation of matter
the Mexicans ‘didn’t find any minerals on the Moon’? Rock is *made* of minerals! That includes Moon rock
no way could the spiders be a ‘unicellular’ life form! Did the writers get carried away with their ‘bacteria’ analogy and a science dictionary?
when it hatched, the dragon flew away using wings – there’s no air in space
and its tail was ‘wagging’ with an acceleration of about 170,000 G – what’s it supposed to be made of?
the dragon left a same-sized egg in its place – law of conservation of matter violated *again* – how can a freshly-hatched ‘thing’ lay an egg as big as itself?
50 (?) h-bombs could never disintegrate the moon
And if they did, the bits would just continue in the same orbit, there would be NO relief to Earth. But if some pieces were slowed enough to spiral in to Earth then the damage previously caused by the wild tides would be as nothing to the devastation that resulted from the impact
And aside from that –
The Doctor, who feels protective towards Earth, just buggers off and leaves Clara and Courtney the menace to decide Earth’s fate and potentially commit suicide (suicide bombing?) Really? Is this in character? This is the Doctor who went through billions of years in Heaven Sent just to rescue Clara?
Clara decides to take a ‘vote’ of Earth – how would that work? (The side opposite the Moon doesn’t get to vote anyway). But we know exactly what would result from such a message – total shambles and confusion. Which didn’t matter anyway since Clara then completely ignored the result. (Where have we seen that recently?)
And just as the icing on the cake, there’s this nod-and-a-wink at the abortion ‘debate’.
And most trivial point, Courtney the Menace could never be President of the US because she wasn’t born in the USA.

I may have missed a couple of minor points there.
The one half-way okay thing about it was Clara’s incandescent rage with the Doctor at the end.
‘The Moon is an egg’ probably sounded like an intriguing concept, but it should have been dropped like a hot potato when the difficulties became apparent.

Forest of the Night was moderately bad but pales into insignificance beside KTM.

Thin Ice – I didn’t see any misrepresentation (so far as I know). Sutcliffe was a caricature and I’d aver – given what we know of the status of the very few black people in society around that time – that most gentry would have been at least polite to Bill. But I’ll certainly accept that many might have been prejudiced. BUT I am absolutely fairly ignorant of social matters in that period. (I don’t understand your Millwall reference btw, since my full extent of knowledge of soccer is that ‘Manchester United’ is probably a fair bet to answer any trivia questions with).

Shakespear Code I liked. Fires of Pompeii was okay. Vincent and the Doctor also, and I did like Bill Nighy’s cameo as the Curator. In fact it was an online comment about that the re-ignited my interest in NuWho. Eaters of Light was great though the monster was a slight let-down (always better when you can’t see them).

Let’s Kill Hitler was just fun. I didn’t have any qualms about that, and anyway, hasn’t the Third Reich been ‘done’ a thousand times by now? (And when I say a thousand I’m not exaggerating). I loved the Tesselecta though its premise seems a bit morally dubious, but also somewhat inadequate, wouldn’t it be better to go back and zap the baddies before they do their evil deeds? (Yes I know, time paradox).

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@winston By rights I should have probably reported it to Health & Safety, since the noise could interfere with communication, and the possibility of banging your head on the handrail when exiting the shaft and falling back down it was a definite hazard, noise or not. They would probably just have made it compulsory to wear a hard hat though, which was always a pain. So I didn’t.

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@mudlark Thanks! That’s quite a good rationalisation and I always like it if a loose end can be neatly tied up. That also takes care of the minor issue of where they got them (i.e. did they rent them? steal them? buy them?) and when did Bill learn to use a diving suit (I don’t think they’re just ‘put on and hop in the water’). Obviously Tardis suits would be quite user-friendly and wouldn’t need the hoses, lifelines and air compressor ‘up top’ and all the other clutter.

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@ps1l0v3y0u Okay. I don’t think we disagree on the circumstances of this one. Except you found the social background more of a distraction to the story than I did. I usually don’t want Who to get into contentious or ‘heavy’ moral questions.

For example, ‘Extremis’ – excellent episode IMO. I’m quite willing to debate the Vatican’s long history for good and bad on other forums, but preferably not on Who – and Extremis didn’t raise it, it just used it as background for sci-fi, which suits me fine. I could probably also mention Let’s Kill Hitler – how could it *not* deal with the entire theme of Nazism in the late 30’s? Well, it didn’t. It just used it as a backdrop, as thousands of other dramas have done. (I loved the Tesselact, by the way).

I actually don’t want Who to get heavily into difficult questions. I’m a rampant Greenie but the heavy-handed environmentalism in ‘Praxeus’ turns me right off what could otherwise have been a decent story.

The Ice Warriors – good in Cold War (which, again, just used the entire Cold War as background); but I always thought Ice Warriors were pretty lame and that Empress of Mars was one of the weakest episodes. Too Indiana Jones for my liking. I’m afraid we’ll just have to disagree on that one.

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@ps1l0v3y0u This was 1814, right? A year before Waterloo. The slave trade was banned in the British Empire in 1807. And slavery was never a legal thing in England. So – within the limits of the story – Bill was never in much danger in London simply because of her colour. That’s as far as I can tell from a quick Google, I’m open to correction on that.

I’m not sure what ‘important history’ you’re referring to. Climate change? (I’ve got no problem with the monster causing the freezes – for the purposes of science fiction). Industrial revolution? Slavery? Colour prejudice? They’re all historically important things but why should Doctor Who be obliged to deal with them in a 45-minute episode? Chibnall’s episodes tried dealing with socially relevant themes (me: groan) and look where that got him.

I know I ranted on about Sutcliffe’s steel mill but that was just me being trivially uber-geek. It didn’t spoil the story for me the way physics pulverises Kill the Moon. I think stories should fit the facts reasonably well, for their own credibility, but that doesn’t mean they have to go into a detailed examination of all the circumstances.

Um, the monster being in chains was another little glitch – how did Sutcliff’s predecessors ever chain it up? And the diving suit exploit was – improbable (I’d guess impossible), without a support crew on the surface. So the story was a bit loose in places. I just didn’t take it too seriously.

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Just re-watched Thin Ice.
This is what I wrote first time around (but don’t seem to have posted in this thread):
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.

[And this is my comments from my recent re-watching. Still banging on about the size of the monster, I see]

Minor geographical quibble. When the Tardis first materialises on the ice, with St Pauls in the background, that must be near Blackfriars Bridge. The Doctor moves it to a safer parking spot, presumably on the bridge. And the monster’s head is located directly underneath the Tardis. But the map in the Tardis shows its head as being located midway between Lambeth Bridge and Vauxhall Bridge, over a mile upstream. This is – troubling.

Um, and the adjacent ‘Freezeland Street.’ There is a Freezeland Way in Uxbridge, but the nearest Freezeland Street is in Bilston, near Birmingham. This is not good for my geeky soul.

I do like the street urchins. And the chitchat between the Doctor and Bill.

Bill and the Doctor appear to be remarkably lucky not to be eaten by the monster. And how did they surface again? Never mind, I’ll let that one pass.

‘The creature’s head is almost a mile away. I assume we’re at the other end.’ Well yes, a mile long would be a little more credible than the map in the Tardis which showed the creature to be nine miles long!

I see Lord Sutcliffe is a villain in the James Bond tradition – tell the hero all the details of your nefarious operation.

Altogether, not a bad episode. Not a great one, but entertaining enough.

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@mudlark @winston I had a slightly alarming subterranean experience. I visited a little old sewage pumping station, built in the 1920’s. Auckland City had done things properly, with a little control building at ground level, and little underground pump room maybe 20 feet below it. So as I entered the control building and switched all the lights on, I could see it was a nice little room with all mod cons – a flush toilet in one corner, a desk and chair, a handbasin, it even had hot water thanks to a Zip heater (a thing a bit like a whistling kettle, but cylindrical and fixed to the wall). You could live in there. In another corner was the shaft down to the pump room, about two feet square. So I clambered down this shaft, into a little room with two small eletric-motor-driven pumps, one of which was whirring away contentedly. As I took notes, I heard a faint moaning sound, which very slowly increased to a definite howl – impossible to tell where it was coming from, in such echoing surroundings it was everywhere at once. All I could think of was maybe one of the pump bearings was starting to sieze, which – conceivably – could lead to the pump shaft seal being destroyed and sewage squirting everywhere, not an attractive prospect. By now the howl was quite scarily loud. So I started back up the ladder as fast as I could, with the howl rising to a scream, banged my head on the handrail at the top but just managed not to fall back down the shaft, at which point the howl rapidly died down as the Zip heater (which I had inadvertently switched on along with the lights) switched itself off thermostatically.

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@mudlark I share your nervousness at dark spooky places. (I’m not as bad as I was). But movie directors know, it’s not what you *can* see that’s frightening, it’s what you can’t. The noises in the future base at the end of time in ‘Listen’ for example, scare the daylights out of me.

As a University student I had a holiday job with the Ministry of Works. The Newmarket Viaduct (a long box-girder motorway viaduct) had developed cracks and they had installed strain gauges across a crack in a middle span, and once a week someone had to go and read them – guess who got the job? Each span was a concrete box 5 feet high, eight feet wide and 50 feet long, with a bulkhead (wall) across the end with an access hole about 21″ wide and 15″ high at the base of the wall, into the next box. So from under one end of the viaduct, I had to climb a ladder into the bottom of a box, then make my way crouching through seven or eight boxes and crawling through the access holes by the light of my torch to reach the strain gauges. Spooky?? (These days ‘Elf & Safety would have a field day, suppose I’d been taken ill or banged my head?)

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@ps1l0v3y0u I was forbidden by my parents to watch Quatermass (the TV series). Too scary. As I recall, there were all these ‘dead’ alien things hanging on racks in a warehouse. Then one of them flopped off. That’s all I know.

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@ps1l0v3y0u The Boneless always reminded me of the formless things from the Dungeon Dimensions in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, always trying to break through. So maybe that was their motive – they wanted to become ‘real’.

The Girl Who Waited was a classic. Tragic, but the enemy was – time itself. And it pitted Old Amy against Young Amy. Whose side would you take? (That was a rhetorical question, I don’t think there’s a right answer). And the Doctor lied like a bastard but – what else could he do?

(For some reason it reminded me of a short story, ‘All the Time in the World’ by – Asimov? No. Heinlein? No. Sheckley? No. Arthur C Clarke – I should have bloody known! About an art thief who was given a bracelet by an alien from the future, that would stop time, with instructions to use it to steal a list of specified art treasures. Which he did. And after his commission was discharged, the alien explained that they were rescuing artefacts from human civilisation, which had just ceased to exist because the planet was exploding. But he could keep the bracelet, it would last the rest of his life – however long he chose that to be. Clarke had an uncanny knack for disconcerting twists at the end of his stories.)

But anyway, I have no idea why Chibnall didn’t use any writers of previous Who episodes. Except, of course, himself. He didn’t use any previous directors either (at least, not in his first season, I checked). It’s almost as if he was determined to prove that he could make a season of Doctor Who ‘all his own work’ owing nothing to previous showrunners.

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@vickymallard Thanks, obviously I stole my user name from Doug Adams. I was looking for something vaguely Who-related but not an actual Who character, so Doug Adams (who was a script editor in oldWho days) seemed to fit the bill.
I take it you’ve seen DT in Neil Gaiman’s ‘Good Omens’ – I thought the first series (which was close to the book) was very good, I haven’t seen the second series yet.
I haven’t seen any of David Tennant as 14 yet, I must check the availability of DVD’s.

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@nerys Everyone says Jodie Whittaker is a fine actor. I’ve only ever seen her as the Doctor so I find that hard to credit. Intellectually, I recognise ‘everyone’ is probably right, just that I haven’t seen it myself. Part of that is the scripts, I don’t think Matt Smith or Capaldi could have done much with them either. And part of it is Whittaker’s interpretation of the character, which is just so ‘off.’ She’s just so ‘Yorkshire lass’, it’s off-putting. And that has to be down to the direction / showrunner. For some reason this didn’t happen with Ecclestone’s Lancashire (‘Lots of planets have a north!’) or Capaldi’s Scottishness – I’m not sure why, I think just because they were better written *as the slightly alien Doctor* so their nationality came second. Same with Missy’s Scottish accent – I could totally have accepted her as a Doctor.

While each new Doctor brings their own flavour to it, they have to be recognisable as the same ongoing character underneath, and Whittaker just wasn’t. Telling her (reputedly) not to bother watching previous episodes, and using directors who had never directed a previous episode of Who, virtually guaranteed that. Plus changing all the companions and remodelling the Tardis and even the sonic screwdriver made the discontinuity complete.

I thoroughly agree about Eve of the Daleks, if I had to choose one of Whittaker’s episodes, that would be far and away the best. Perhaps not coincidentally, it had a relatively limited focus and not some galaxy-spanning mind-numbing catastrophe.

As an aside on a completely different topic, I just re-watched ‘Layer Cake’ (I often do that with a ‘new’ movie or episode after a couple of weeks) and I liked it better, I could follow the slightly complex plot and distinguish the characters much more easily this time round. (I think it was you I was discussing Layer Cake with? – apologies if I got that mixed up).

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@ps1l0v3y0u I’d completely overlooked Flatline! How could I overlook Flatline? It was a brilliant episode. And the train-related aspects of it were – adequately done. At least there was nothing there that made me squirm.

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@ps1l0v3y0u I think blue suits a GW engine better than red does. They tried it on some Southern Bulleid Pacifics too, I believe, and I think it suited them too. Not sure why they rejected blue in favour of dark BR green.

To bring this back to some semblance of Dr Who, has Who ever used a British train? There was the interior of a railway carriage (probably a DMU) in The Woman Who Fell to Earth. There was the Orient Express in space but that was French. And there was a train in the scrambled timeline of The Wedding of River Song but the locomotive on that was definitely French for some reason.

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@ps1l0v3y0u [geek mode ON] The Midland did actually run into Kings Cross (via Bedford and Hitchin) until St Pancras was completed c. 1868. However, in those days MR engines were green. Midland Red wasn’t used until 1884. So, I doubt whether any red engines were ever seen at Kings Cross. I’m not sure any Halls were ever seen at Kings Cross either, would they be ‘out of gauge’? (I don’t know this, I do know GWR engines tended to be the widest of the companies).

I haven’t seen the movie, but I doubt rebuilt Scots – fine-looking engines btw – had copper-capped chimneys and domeless boilers with brass safety valve covers 🙂

I don’t know the story but there is a photo of the West Country 34027 Taw Valley in LMS red with Hogwarts Express nameplates. As a Southern fan I feel obliged to protest (even if a sneaky part of me thinks it looks freakin’ magnificent, though not, of course, nearly as good as it does in green). I seem to recall reading that Warner’s thought it looked ‘too modern’ so they went for something a bit more old-fashioned, but that could be a sneaky story invented by a Southern partisan. I think the red Hall just looks bizarre.

As for Awdry’s engine ‘James’, here you are – scroll down to ‘technical details’
https://ttte.fandom.com/wiki/James_(RWS)
In short, a L&YR Class 28 with a front pony truck added.
(You can find anything on the internet) (even, so help me, Rule 34)

[/geek mode]

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Well I just watched Funeral in Berlin (1966) with Michael Caine. Produced by Harry Saltzmann of James Bond fame, incidentally. I found it more watchable than Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. A fairly complicated plot which, however, I managed to follow for once. With a neat twist (or a double-cross) which was, in hindsight, entirely predictable. Actually there were a number of double-crosses, but one stood out. It seems odd to realise that this movie was almost contemporaneous with early Doctor Who.

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@<span class=”useratname”>ps1l0v3y0u</span>     I do try to copy-and-paste your handle, sometimes it works, sometimes the editor chokes on it, and I can’t tell till after I hit ‘Submit’.

I was never very much into Le Carre, I found him (and Graham Greene) a bit depressing tbh.   (I’ll probably get shot for lumping them together, for reasons I won’t comprehend  🙂     I preferred Ian Fleming, I can understand why James Bond took off.   Yes I know I was just rabbiting on about ‘reality’ and James Bond bends that quite a lot, more so in the movies.   The fact that they did most of their crazy stunts ‘for real’ probably helps to give them a facade of realism.

Oh, and Victor Canning, I always liked his (widely varied) novels.

I’m trying to analyse my preference for some writers and I think it’s basically down to whether they look at an event as ‘this is exciting/adventurous’ vs ‘this is banal/depressing’.   Banal I can do myself every day, I don’t need to read about it.   This is also why I detest TV soaps like Coro and Neighbours, I think.

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@janetteb    Hi, I was wondering where you’d got to.   Merry (late) Christmas!

I have thousands of things to do, with the result that I never do any because there are too many other things and besides, this site and Youtube are too much of a distraction.   This is not good.

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@p<span class=”useratname”>s1l0v3y0u</span> (why is your username like one of those impossible passwords the security mafia keep nagging us to use?)

I’m fully capable of going all geeky on a film (you should hear me about ‘Hogwarts Express’ sometime, and I haven’t even watched the movie)  but I usually try not to go overboard quite to that extent.   Tinker Taylor may have been a fine film, I just couldn’t ‘get into’ it.   Maybe it was just my mood, I get like that sometimes.   Or maybe (heaven forbid) too much Youtube has reduced my attention span to 5 minutes.

I do think movie adaptations of books (and vice versa) are allowed to deviate a bit from the originals, after all they are quite different mediums and what works in one doesn’t work so well in the other.   The dramatic requirements can be very different.   So I don’t mind if they change things a bit so long as it’s not something that makes a nonsense of the plot.   Oh, and it should fit reality reasonably well, it shouldn’t be blatantly and gratuitously wrong.   If Sherlock Holmes is going to Dartmoor he’d better leave from either Waterloo or Paddington, not Euston or Victoria.   But I’m never going to go “There was no 8-35 from Paddington to Exeter in 1902” or something like that.

And similarly sci-fi should not break reality unnecessarily.   (Kill the Moon I’m looking at you…)

 

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@winston    ‘Rellies’ is a good old Aussie/kiwi slang term.   I hope ‘prezzies’ wasn’t too obscure?

I should clarify that, with Pacific island families, there are vast numbers of more-or-less distant relatives.   I usually assume that anyone from Mrs D’s island is probably some sort of in-law of mine, and this is rarely incorrect.    What is more disconcerting is, I can never remember their names but they all remember me by name.    Mrs D, now, has a memory for people like the Dalek databank.   In fact she will talk about old friends of mine that I’ve forgotten existed and she met just once, years ago.   However, when it comes to places, we’re the opposite, she gets lost while I can drive infallibly to places I’ve only visited once.   Combined, we should be formidable, like the Doctor and Clara, too dangerous to exist.   But in practice, we just argue.   🙂

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@winston   Your Christmas sounds quite satisfying, though I hope the illness that got Boxing Day cancelled wasn’t too serious.   Nice prezzies  by the way!   ‘Chaotic’ is one of those concepts that still sounds attractive but I’m too lazy for, most times.   I used to be  a party animal when I was younger, these days I tend to curl up in some corner of the hubbub with a book or even headphones and my MP3 player.  The rellies, all 500 of them though usually only about a couple of dozen tend to happen at any one time, are all used to that.

And yes, I got to the beach 11am yesterday and midday today.   Thanks!   The significance of those times is, high tide.   If I make the 50-minute trek to Piha on the west coast, that’s an ocean beach with hefty waves and cliffs and stuff, swimmable at any tide.

BUT if I just go to our nearest beach at Blockhouse Bay, 2 miles away, that’s on the Manukau Harbour which is a huge muddy harbour.   The ‘beach’ itself is a tiny crescent of sand that arrived on a  council truck, in an inlet nicely sheltered by a ridge of cliffs from the prevailing south-westerly breeze.   A ‘good’ high tide – that is 3.7 metres or better, there’s a foot of water over the mud at the base of the sand and it gets gradually deeper as you wade out.   Today was 4.0 metres and delightfully calm (and the water was warm) so I just waded out to about 5 feet depth and swam/walked on the bottom across the inlet to the next bay and back.   At anything but high tide though, as the waterline retreats, it’s just mud that gets progressively softer and oozier the further out you go.   So I have a copy of the tide tables on the fridge.   I’m looking forward to another 5 or 6 ‘good’ high tides before they get too late in the evening/decline to sub-3.7 mediocrity (it’s about a two-week tidal cycle).

Nardole was unexpectedly good, I’m pleased they brought him back in the next series.   In fact my next one to watch in sequence is the Frost Fair one so I’ve got Nardole and cameos by Missy to look forward to.

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@nerys   My email doesn’t do italics, I was just going to say how much I agreed with your first paragraph when I looked on this website and realised it was a quote from me.   🙂

The ending could have gone in several ways.   The DVD is still on my little stack beside the couch in the lounge and I’ll probably watch it again soon, I think it may be easier to follow now I have a rough idea of the plot.   I found that with its successor (by the same director?)  Lock Stock & Two Smoking Barrels.   In fact, any episode with a complex plot, I’m usually better second time around.

I haven’t seen the new specials yet, and probably won’t for some time.   I’m not too worried about spoilers on this site, I think the way new episodes have their own dedicated threads helps that.   I also find that, unless I can put it in context, the occasional isolated factoid doesn’t really register with me.    So until I see it in the episode, it doesn’t mean much.

Besides, being in New Zealand, I’ve learned to live with everyone on the Internet having seen any TV episode before I do.   🙂

But other peoples’ brains may be more retentive than mine, so I can understand the desire to avoid spoilers as much as possible.

Speaking of crime movies, last week at the charity shop I picked up ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’ with a cast of Gary Oldman, John Hurt, Toby Jones, Mark Strong, Benedict Cumberbatch…    should be a cracker, right?   But I stopped watching half way through.    It was just too understated, I just couldn’t get into it.   I can’t fault the acting, and I’m sure it was faithful to the book.   Maybe it was just me.   I’m certainly not into the explosion-a-minute Hollywood actionfests, but this was the opposite extreme.   I also picked up ‘Funeral in Berlin’, I’ll see if Len Deighton and Michael Caine can do for me what John le Carre can’t.

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@winston   We just had Christmas afternoon at Mrs D’s sister’s daughter’s house.  Half the clan there, let’s just say that it’s not my thing but I have learned patience over the years.   One of the kids did a piano recital – if he keeps practicing for a few years he might get good enough for the Portsmouth Sinfonia.   One of the others nervously sang a couple of Christmas carols.   To put it bluntly – they were terrible.   On the whole I would rather have watched The Tsuranga Conundrum.   But they were all well-meaning and Mrs D enjoys it so, you know, I just put my brain in neutral and later on snuck into a corner with a book – Simon Singh’s ‘Big Bang’ – to relax.   I hope your immediate rellies are more – inspiring   🙂

Anyway, it was mostly rainy, so my usual lemming-like urge to head to the beach which is triggered by sunshine was easily suppressed.  I’ll hit the beach tomorrow.

Our immediate family are down in Christchurch and this year – first time for several years – we’re not going down to visit them.   No particular reason, just a change.

“The Christmas Carol” – was that the one with the shark in it?   As I recall, the villain wasn’t as evil as he appeared at first sight – just human.   That was an unexpectedly sweet episode.    I find “The Husbands of River Song” a bit sad, as it’s the next episode after we lose Clara, and it’s the last of River.   But Greg Davies was suitably obnoxious as the late King Hydroflax, and I found Hydroflax’s followers with the tear-open heads quite repulsive.   Were they the same people as cropped up in “Doctor Mysterio”?

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‘Half way out of the dark’ – is that from The Hogfather?   Of course where I am (in upside down land) it’s the opposite, for us these are the good months.    Long evenings and warm weather – lovely.   I’m making the most of them.   But if I do watch a Christmas episode it’ll probably be Last Christmas.   Sarcastic Santa, what’s not to like?

Can I join in thanking Craig for this site.   It’s great to  have somewhere relaxed and friendly to talk about one of my favourite TV shows.

And, Merry Christmas and best wishes to everybody.

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@vickymallard   Welcome to the forum.   Do I gather you are working your way through past seasons?   I did that a couple of years back – catching up on everybody from way behind.   I almost envy you because you’ve got several years worth of episodes still to work through.

I’ve got a standard suggestion I make to anyone catching up on episodes – you can find full transcripts of every episode on chakoteya.net, and a complete listing of all episodes on  tardis.fandom.com  under  TV > Doctor Who > Main Episode List, with links to every episode and plot synopses and cast lists.   Please excuse if you already know this.   I find the transcript very useful sometimes, when I miss a bit of dialogue.

Yes I had a high opinion of Martha.   Probably the smartest of any of the Doctor’s companions until, possibly, Clara.   And she was smart enough to realise that, though she had fallen for the Doctor, he didn’t feel the same way about her – understandably, because he’d just tragically lost Rose.  The only time he ‘fell’ for someone was in Human Nature / Family of Blood, when he’d  completely lost his memory, and then – as Martha sadly noted – “You had to go and fall in love with a human, and it wasn’t me.”    So yes, walking away was the best thing she could have done.

 

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<span class=”useratname”>@ps1l0v3y0u</span>    I have a significant quibble with ‘Tesla’.    For a start, the power generating station at Niagara Falls was built by George Westinghouse’s company for the Niagara Falls Construction Company with technical advice from Tesla.   To cut a long story very short, after Tesla split with Edison some years earlier for uncertain reasons (and the $50,000 dollar bonus offer recounted by ‘Edison’ was more likely an invention of Tesla’s), George Westinghouse’s company licensed, then later bought up, Tesla’s patents for AC motors.   The ‘battle of the currents’ (AC versus DC)  was essentially Westinghouse vs Edison, with Tesla very much on the sidelines, since he had gone off to try and develop radio and wireless power transmission (the Wardenclyffe project).   A ‘battle’ which was conclusively won by Westinghouse.   Yet the episode makes it sounds exclusively Tesla vs Edison, the name Westinghouse appears in the episode – zero times.     Yes I know it’s sci-fi, but it shouldn’t distort known history.       Okay, rant over.   🙂

I had noticed that ‘Demons’ was a repeat of Testimony.   “It isn’t an evil plan.   I don’t know what to do when it isn’t an evil plan.”  – Twelve.

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@robertcaligari Just reading your comment (which I agree with btw), I just have trouble visualising ‘Whittaker had the acting chops to go dark if the script called for it’. I believe you, most people seem to share that opinion, just that I’ve only ever seen her as the Doctor so I can’t imagine her as ‘dark’. Reportedly she was advised not to watch previous episodes, I think that was a huge mistake, if she’s as good an actor as people say she is, I think that would have added a lot of depth to her interpretation.

@ps1l0v3y0u (please edit box get it right this time. pretty please?) yes I noticed, watching the last few episodes of Seven, that his witty exterior could well hide a dark streak. How far would he risk Ace to attain his objective? – my impression is, far more than Nine or Ten would risk Rose, for example. I don’t think he ever did, at least in the episodes I’ve seen, but it wouldn’t surprise me.

One of the problems with the ‘fam’ was indeed too-many-cooks. An ensemble cast always diffuses the intensity of relationships and you end up with a Charlie’s Angels scenario (reputedly each of the Angels had a contract guaranteeing equal exposure so they ended up saying lines in turn). Good for comedy but not for drama. If Yaz had had more to do (as in a couple of later episodes, but way too late) it might have helped.

@winston If you’re going to do a completely fresh start (only the name is the same) then you need a strong performance to draw people in. NuWho has had three of those. Nine and Rose (mentioned already). Eleven and Amy – and I must admit I was a bit adrift at losing Rose and Ten, in fact I dropped off watching about three episodes into Season 5. Eleven just seemed too young. When I went back and picked it up later, though, the strength of Amy’s character (and I guess I just got used to Eleven’s youthfulness) drew me in again. And then there was Thirteen and the Fam, ah well, never mind.

Astrid was a great character, enthusiastic and vivacious, and delightfully acted by Kylie Minogue. She would have made a great Companion, and the Doctor was conveniently ‘single’ at the time. Possibly it was felt that another young blonde pop star might be a bit repetitive.

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@ps1l0v3y0u   Um, half my previous comment was responding to you.   For some reason this comment box doesn’t seem to like your name.   See if it works this time.

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@gallifreyanking88     Ranking doesn’t ‘have’ to be  🙂   I usually avoid naming preferences (in case of arguments).   But I’d agree with most of that (even Donna, sorry, Tait fans)

*Except* for your ranking of Rose.   IMO the success of NuWho has got to be down to Rose and Nine/Ten.    Billie Piper had a sort of fresh impulsiveness about her that drew me in.    I wanted to see what happened next.

Martha tends to be overlooked, I liked Martha.   Intelligent enough to realise the Doctor was never going to notice her and walked away.   But – marrying Mickey?   The tin dog?   That was unnecessary.

And Graham did nothing for me.   I like Bradley but his character just didn’t ‘click’ with me.    I found Dan much more interesting, though he was only in it briefly.

<span class=”useratname”>@ps1l0v3y0u  I don’t know much about oldWho companions, except that Seven and Ace certainly seemed to have a degree of ‘chemistry’.   Sophie and McCoy evidently got on well together from the few videos I’ve seen of them at cons.
</span>

I wasn’t aware that Ace was around for Six, was that a misprint or my ignorance?

Amy was a strong character.   Summed up in her comment to Madame Kovarian – ‘River didn’t get it all from you, sweetie.’

I think 13 plus Yaz – only – might have worked better.   But 13 was atrociously written and Whittaker’s acting choices were equally terrible (do we blame her or Chibnall for that?).   She came across as a hearty Yorkshire-lass Girl Guide leader, the sort of person I instinctively avoid.   ‘Fam’ – ugh!   And ‘I’m the Doctor.   Sorting out fair play throughout the Universe.’    Simultaneously bombastic and bathetic.   The sort of line I might write if I were lampooning Who.   The sort of clumsy line a script editor should have cut immediately.   And she delivered it without a hint of irony.   I’m afraid she never did quite climb her way out of the mental pigeonhole that dropped her into.

 

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Well while everyone else is getting (justifiably) excited over new episodes, here am I drifting along oblivious in my own little Who world.   Which is to say I just re-watched ‘Smile’.   I stuck some random thoughts in the forum for that episode.   (My hard drive says I wrote some comments before but if so I don’t know where I put them).

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I just re-watched Smile, herewith some impressions –

Calatrava’s architecture is truly fantastic. It’s in Valencia. Yeah that’s not a set or CGI, it’s real. The cornfields are CGI but the buildings are real. Though I think with some CGI additions, but surprisingly little. I can’t think of any equivalent real-but-fantastic location since Portmeirion in The Prisoner.

Somehow, a world where you have to be happy or die is far more horrific than one where everybody is miserable.

Ooh, the writer likes tantalising us. Only on repeat viewing (ike this) does the Doctor’s words in the plant nursery set off alarm bells – “A skeleton crew.” Literally.

I keep being amazed at the extent of the ‘location’. Incidentally, I had to adjust my monitor dimmer so the backgrounds in the city weren’t faded out, then in the spaceship everything faded into gloom and I had to adjust it right up again.

The ship has a ‘Fleischman cold fusion engine’. That rings a bell – in (Googles – 1988) Pons and Fleischmann of the University of Utah claimed to have achieved Cold Fusion. It caused quite a kerfuffle, exacerbated by the University’s PR department who claimed, shall we say, rather more than was merited, and the whole thing was eventually found to be a chimera.

I did love the way Bill, who was guiding the Doctor by reading a wall map, suddenly realised – “Hang on, I’m being thick. I can come with you.” Doc: “Took that long to think of photographing it?” “You’d already memorised it, hadn’t you?” “Yep.” “Stop trying to keep me out of trouble.” I love the perceptiveness of both characters in that exchange.

And I couldn’t help a reflexive giggle that the first human they encountered, a young teenage boy, asked – “Are we there yet?” The universal question.

The dead old lady lying in state with a animated remembrance book of her life at her feet was nicely conceived. And I loved the concept that her (natural) death started a wave of grief as the Vardies, who were programmed to ensure everyone stayed happy, eliminated anyone who wasn’t happy happy happy. Beware how you program a robot, the results may not be what you expected.

Unfortunately the colonists are stupid enough to think they can shoot all the millions of microbots.

I’m not sure how anything survived the nuclear explosion caused by the Doctor unless that was a metaphorical one, or maybe a possible immediate future that the Doctor averted by resetting the Vardies.

First time through, I was upset that the murderous Vardies got let off so lightly. But of course they weren’t in any way evil, just genuinely misguided.

I thought the episode was great, and the architecture of the Ciutat de les Arts i les Ciències was an outstanding location.

[Dentarthurdent @replies]

Bloody hell.   (Am I allowed to say that?   Well I just did   🙂

Who has gone full Henson with this one!    Reminds me of Labyrinth, though this goblin king is a lot less good-looking than David Bowie.   An upbeat, cheerful, catchy song about – eating babies.   Ironically I guess, it’s pretty much in the Christmas tradition – most fairy tales were quite remarkably gruesome, after all.

It’s certainly – different.

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