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27 July 2021 at 07:11 #71900
@nerys Well, first impressions definitely matter. In my case, having seen Asylum, I was definitely well-disposed towards Clara (and Clara lookalikes), though the loss of Amy was a shock. (All right, and Rory too, originally he was a bit of a dork but he improved as time went along. Liked him better than Danny Pink, anyways).
If you’d seen the loss of Rose then maybe you would have shared my doubts about Donna. Or not, I can’t say how you ‘ought to’ feel! But Rose was, at that point, *the* companion (in NuWho terms), an impossible act to follow. I think Martha was fortunate in that Donna intervened for one episode, so by the time Martha appeared the pain of losing Rose had subsided a little.
But if you only found Who again with Silence in the Library, you missed a huge chunk of Who – some of Rose, all of Martha, and some of Donna. This is why I prefer to do my watching off DVD, no longer a slave to the TV programmers.
I recall when Blakes 7 was on (in re-runs) in the 80’s, I used to dash home from work (they put it on at 5-30, for the ‘kiddies’, then had to reschedule the final episode because it wasn’t suitable for the kids what with everyone getting shot 🙂 – but anyway, my boss used to notice me rocketing out the door at 4-30 on Thursdays and I’m sure it didn’t help his opinion of me. He never actually said anything, so I didn’t have the opportunity to point out that I usually worked a few minutes later on all other days (and besides, admitting that I was dashing off to watch a kids sci-fi programme? Uh, no).
Umm, Midnight. That was a mini-classic. And they never did find out the stewardess’s name. Probably RTD’s best episode.
Good Omens, I got the DVDs. I got them because I like Pratchett and Gaiman, liked the book. The TV show had a lot of new things in it, but (seen on DVD without ads) didn’t seem at all frenetic to me. One thing I enjoyed having the luxury of DVD – when the witchfinder sticks a pin in the map to show the cottage – that’s a real OS map. And I found the location – they changed the name on the map in the episode, but by freeze-framing I recognised the general area and the actual spot on the map is named Colstrope Farm. And here’s the thing – Googling tells me the actual cottage they used for filming *was* Colstrope (just north of Hambledon, near Henley-on-Thames). Nice touch! It really didn’t matter for the series, any map would have done, not even the nit-pickiest map-obsessed geek would have complained if the map was arbitrary, I guess it qualifies as a well-hidden ‘Easter egg’. Really DVD with its sharp freeze-frame is a gift to geeks of all varieties.
Oh, and I just ordered the DVD of Staged (both series).
26 July 2021 at 10:32 #71897@janetteb I’ll be very interested to see your Red Dwarf podcast.
@nerys I basically agree with all of that. Oswin was such a dazzling character, and so tragic. And The Snowmen was not one of the best Christmas specials (in my opinion). So though The Bells of St John was a good episode, with some witty interaction between the Doctor and Clara, it does suffer a bit by comparison with Asylum. It (Bells) has some of the feel of Rose’s introduction in ‘Rose’. The Rings of Akhaten was also a so-so episode (IMO). Its ‘alien planet’ reminded me of a Farscape scenario for some reason. ‘Hide’ I liked, and ‘Journey to the Centre of the Tardis’, but none of those Clara + Smith episodes were outstanding until DotD.
And yes, the sudden loss of Amy and Rory in ‘Angels Take Manhatten’, just when we thought the peril was over, was shocking. I know the feeling. I could never really warm up to Donna after her first appearance at the end of Doomsday when the Doctor was grieving the loss of Rose and Donna literally burst on the scene.
Day of the Doctor was possibly the best Who episode ever (at least in my personal list). Even though it didn’t feature my favourite Doctor (Capaldi), Smith + Tennant + John Hurt made up for it. Clara was great in it, as was Rose (aka the Interface) – it was great to see her again. And it had Osgood too, another intriguing character. Generally, more is not better (as in Journey’s End – too many people), but in the case of DotD it all worked well.
I’ll see if I can get ‘Staged’ on DVD.
26 July 2021 at 09:39 #71896@janetteb I agree with that, specifically Rose’s costume (I know nothing of the history of fashion, but Rose’s costume in Unquiet Dead would surely have started a riot. Although, IIRC, I think I personally liked the look of it). And generally, that some things we can accept and ohers not. I think in the case of Unquiet Dead, the essential difference is, that spirits in the pipes is sci-fi (wherein we know anything is possible) while Rose’s attire is mundane reality and so is judged by different standards of credibility.
This is why McGyver always jarred on me. I’m an (ex) engineer by profession and an amateur mechanic (in the sense that I always fix my own car) so I have a strong sense of what works mechanically and nothing McGyver did would ever have worked.
25 July 2021 at 15:56 #71890@nerys Well, Asylum of the Daleks is obviously one of my favourites too. Whether I’ll find the ‘impossible girl’ debut of Clara disappointing on second viewing, I’ll know in a few days since I’m re-watching in episode order. Certainly liked her the first time round.
I don’t know Staged (but yes it’s certainly OK to discuss other shows in this forum, I think). Looks as if it’s worth a watch. Michael Sheen and David Tennant – last seen in Good Omens, I think? That was a pretty good mini-series.
25 July 2021 at 15:44 #71889Oh, and yes, the cyborg in Mercy does look remarkably like Kryten. But I don’t count that as a negative.
I think it probably also resembles Yul Brynner’s android in Westworld, but I must admit I haven’t seen that movie.
Incidentally, the concept of a droid-populated environment (as in Westworld) was also borrowed by Red Dwarf in (Googles) ‘Meltdown’. Red Dwarf covered a huge gamut of fascinating sci-fi concepts, it was far more inventive than it’s usually given credit for, I suspect it’s under-estimated because it was also a comedy.
25 July 2021 at 15:24 #71887I agree about Dinosaurs. Okay to watch but not high on my list.
Haven’t rewatched A Town Called Mercy yet (haven’t had time) but it’s next on my list. I don’t hate all Westerns – they’re a very mixed bag. There was an awful lot of rubbish produced, with a few really good ones; but you could say the same of sci-fi. At the moment some TV channel is re-running all 15,000 episodes of Bonanza, which Mrs D watches while I try to bury my head in my laptop. But I do have a liking for Sergio Leone’s ultimate Spaghetti Western, Once Upon a Time in the West, (the European version with the longer running time), not least because of Ennio Morricone’s amazing score, and Leone knows how to build up tension. Incidentally, it was shot in the same area of Spain as A Town Called Mercy.
It feels like just about every long-running sci-fi and fantasy series has done a Western episode at some time or other – Farscape, Red Dwarf, Who. Not sure if Firefly did one specifically but then that whole series was a ‘space western’. And Blakes 7 similarly. Oh and of course The Prisoner, with ‘Living in Harmony’ – a good episode IIRC.
But anyway, from memory of my first watching, I really like ‘Mercy’. As I recall Amy gets really irate with the Doctor and threatens to shoot him – Amy on the warpath is truly impressive.
The Power of Three (which I’ll watch after Mercy) – I loved the concept of the cubes. They lent themselves to some really quirky and entertaining moments. And in their studying us while we studied them, that’s reminiscent of (I won’t say ‘copied from’) the mice in Hitchhiker, where Arthur Dent tells Slartibartfast he’s got it back to front, we study the mice and Slarty replies ‘ingenious, aren’t they’ (or words to that effect). So, anyway, so far so good for the cubes. But that build-up really needed a better payoff, just looking to kill us with electric shocks to effect an invasion – why would that take a year of study by the cubes to arrive at? A technology that could create the cubes could defeat us in two weeks flat. So, I found the build-up great but the payoff disappointing. But I’ll see on re-watch.
24 July 2021 at 10:15 #71884@janetteb In NuWho days human life is sometimes pretty cheap too, specially when Daleks are around… I don’t think Darla is ‘recoverable’ either.
And Tasha Lem died, as the Dalek said, ‘Several times’. (The Moff can really make a couple of words chilling). (Incidentally my latest Thinkpad is named ‘Tasha’ – when I install a new operating system I have to give it an arbitrary name so they’re all named after sci-fi characters)
I’ll note Dalek Invasion of Earth for future, but I think I’ll continue my trek through NuWho for now. I just watched Dinosaurs on a Spaceship, which isn’t bad, but suffers a little from the comparison with Asylum and A Town Called Mercy. Talking of cheap human(oid) life, Solomon murdering all the Silurians was pretty nasty, I didn’t mind at all that the Doctor sent him off for missile target practice. I liked Nefertiti, I just couldn’t figure her getting stuck with Mr White Hunter. Might have worked if he had more charisma and less ego. She would have made a good Companion if the position wasn’t already occupied by the Ponds and booked for Clara.
24 July 2021 at 06:45 #71882Those earlier instances, did the dalekised humans fully retain their original human shape? Or were they humans trapped inside a Dalek ‘tank’?
23 July 2021 at 12:48 #71880Incidentally, thinking back to Asylum, was Darla the first occurrence of a Dalek ‘skin job’? (Not sure what the correct terminology is, I borrowed that from Battlestar Galactica). I think the next occurrence was Tasha Lem in ‘Time of the Doctor’?
20 July 2021 at 05:28 #71879@winston Now you put it that way, it is in fact the classic fairy story. But quite the most entertaining one I have ever seen. And yes, I think it’s my favourite Dalek episode too.
I think I half-guessed that there was something not quite right about Oswin (dare I say ‘impossible’?) but my emotional self just didn’t want to know. Much of this was due to how well Oswin was written and how well Jenna Coleman carried it off – perfect casting, I wanted Oswin to be real. I think the gradual reveal (like, the Moff was throwing hints at us the entire episode) actually added to the emotional impact because we were sort of primed for it – if it had come out of the blue it would have been more of a shock but maybe less deeply felt.
19 July 2021 at 15:10 #71877@janetteb Oh yes, I noticed that. Clever Doctor. For an alien who’s sometimes socially – odd, he can also be remarkably perceptive.
In many series, the Amy – Rory rift would take an entire episode of angst all to itself. Here, it was just a subplot. There’s just so much happening in this episode.
Cheers
19 July 2021 at 13:45 #71875Absolutely agree about it being one of the great episodes. And I think having a novel situation (like the Doctor being required to save the Daleks from their own insane casualties) is conducive to entertaining dialogue.
There was a nice exchange just after Rory’s comment that you noted –
DOCTOR: You’re going to fire me at a planet? That’s your plan? I get fired at a planet and expected to fix it.
RORY: In fairness, that is slightly your M. O.
DOCTOR: Don’t be fair to the Daleks when they’re firing me at a planet.But there’s far too much to quote. “Where d’you get the milk” is one of those apparently irrelevant asides that turns out to be highly significant – just as the Doctor insists. I get the impression that the Moff is enjoying himself, waving tantalising details at us which we are most definitely going to ignore.
18 July 2021 at 02:47 #71873@bluesqueakpip I think you’re probably right about the Lancaster. Lancasters are ‘iconic’ and there are probably quite a number of them around; less so, Wellingtons (although more were actually made, throughout the war). Wikipedia says, just two exist (and one of those was fished out of Loch Ness!)
My ‘favourite’ ‘wrong’ artefact (which still niggles me) was the train in Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, about a 1910 London – Paris air race. They went to great lengths to build authentic-to-the-period flying replicas (and in 1965 this was a big expenditure for a movie. There was a book about it – the replicas, not the expenditure). The villain, after crossing the Channel, crash-lands on top of a French train (and then a tunnel comes along…) Except the that train was being pulled by the very distinctive, historic, well-known and un-French looking Highland Railway (of Scotland) Jones Goods 4-6-0.
17 July 2021 at 13:19 #71871Asylum of the Daleks. Truly fascinating from start to finish, with a plethora of understated yet chilling lines.
DARLA: My memories are only reactivated if they are required to facilitate cover or disguise.
DOCTOR: You had a daughter.
DARLA: I know. I’ve read my file.HARVEY: I died outside, and the cold preserved my body. I forgot about dying.
Even the Daleks get some good lines:
DOCTOR: I thought you’d run out of ways to make me sick. Hello again. You think hatred is beautiful.
DALEK PM: Perhaps that is why we have never been able to kill you.AMY: (on being Dalek-ised) What comes first? How does it start?
DOCTOR: With your mind. Your feelings, your memories, and I’m sorry but it’s started already.
AMY: How do you know?
DOCTOR: Because we’ve had this conversation four times.And the neatest reason ever for Amy and Rory being dragged into the action – “It is known the Doctor required companions.”
Oswin Oswald – a brilliant character. But in retrospect, there are clues stacked up ceiling high that she cannot be ‘real’ any more. Keeping Daleks out with a couple of planks. Hacking the Dalek computer systems (‘very easy to hack’. Doctor: No it isn’t). Or the fact that Oswin can see the Doctor, Amy and Rory but they can’t see her – the script even lampshades it. But she is such a dazzling character that my mind just didn’t want to entertain the idea that she might be a Dalek, even with the example of Darla and Harvey right in front of me.
It was a master bit of plotting when Oswin saved the Doctor by simply deleting him from the Dalek database. And then, one of the most tragic moments in all of Doctor Who, as Oswin’s excited jubilation at being rescued is contrasted with the fact that she is now a Dalek and beyond help. First time I watched it, this completely broke me up, I was so sure they were going to rescue her.
So then Oswin takes the security system down so the Dalek fleet can destroy the asylum (and her), and the Doctor and friends can escape by teleport to the Dalek command ship where – the Daleks don’t know who he is. “Doctor – Who?” indeed.
17 July 2021 at 07:25 #71870Carrying on with the ‘weather’ theme – a couple of weeks ago the east coast of South Island had unprecedented flooding around Ashburton, now it’s the north-west end from Nelson to Westport getting record floods, and the south end of the North Island also flooding. Also wind warnings.
I’m more complacent about wind these days – there used to be a huge acacia growing right beside the house, which could have caused major damage if it fell in the wrong direction. I bit the bullet and had it cut down a couple of years ago (it hurt, because I love trees) but I’m no longer quite so paranoid if severe wind warnings are issued. We still have plenty of smaller trees but they’re unlikely to do much more than wreck the guttering.
17 July 2021 at 03:24 #71869They “used what they could and hoped nobody would notice?” With respect, that is the most forlorn hope since, umm, Eddie the Eagle. The intersection of the sets of [Who geeks] vs [WW2 geeks] vs [Aviation geeks] is surely very large. They could easily have fixed it by dating the telegram ‘1943’ instead of ‘1940’ though whether that would have fitted with them evacuating from London, I’m not sure.
Possibly no-one on the production team who would know the rough timeline of WW2 aircraft (and I’m sure there must have been some), noticed the date on the telegram. But anyway, it didn’t spoil the ep for me, since the type of bomber Reg was flying was not critical to the story.
Hope SA manages to evade the virus. I would imagine our (NZ) authorities are feeling quite nervous as so many Oz states that we have (limited) air travel with, fall over. Wellington seems to have managed to contain its little blip recently (makes a change from it being Auckland). I guess we’ll all have to get used to the situation changing repeatedly as little outbreaks occur here and there.
16 July 2021 at 14:08 #71867Well I just re-started Doctor Who watching, next up was The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe. Which I tend to rate quite low among the Christmas specials, but I think that’s more a tribute to the quality of the other specials, or maybe the adjoining episodes, than any great deficiency in this ep. It was well cast, Madge was a sympthetic character, and I really liked Lily – intelligent and determined. Enjoyed the comic relief – “Okay, we’ve put our guns down, can we interrogate you now?” Their craft bore a strong resemblance to an Imperial Walker but with an extra leg; but when Madge started piloting it that was inevitably reminiscent of Ripley driving the loader in Alien.
Just one major anachronism – Reg got lost over the Channel in his bomber in December 1940 – that was credible, in 1940 raids on Channel ports were about the limit of the RAF’s capabilities, and in 1940 Reg would most probably have been flying a Vickers Wellington. Only, by some miracle of time travel, the plane he’s flying is an Avro Lancaster, which didn’t come into service until c. 1943… (Chrissie’s marvellous transcripts site, Chatokeya.net, was similarly puzzled, and hazarded that it might be a Stirling, based on the date – OK, not bad for an educated guess, the Stirling had four engines and pre-dated the Lanc – except that it didn’t come into use until early 1941, so still doesn’t fit, and Reg’s plane is absolutely, unmistakeably a Lancaster.) Sorry, Doctor Who – that’s a huge anachronism and nothing can save it.
The only other thing I can nerdily date, the etching of a GWR Castle carrying a ‘Bristolian’ headboard on the bedroom window, is fine since they started pre-war. Oh, and the model Spitfires on the wall are OK date-wise too. And so is the Morris 8 Series 1 tourer.
[/geek mode]Next, Asylum of the Daleks. I’m so looking forward to that 🙂
16 July 2021 at 09:42 #71866Hi @janetteb Hope you’re OK, I heard there was a covid surge in Victoria (which of course is not that far from you).
I think just about everyone is taking note of what the climate is doing, other than a few head-in-sand reactionaries on Planet Trump.South Auckland had a tornado a couple of weeks ago that destroyed a number of houses. Apparently tornadoes are quite common in this region but they very rarely cause anything more than minor damage, so people don’t notice them much. So that’s new, and disconcerting.
8 July 2021 at 14:37 #71861@janetteb The trouble with bears (from my point of view, not that I’ve ever met one) is that they’re bigger than me, they can run faster than I can, and they can climb trees better than me. There aren’t many other animals with that disconcerting combination of abilities – leopards, maybe? 🙂
7 July 2021 at 08:34 #71858@winston You must be truly rural if you get otters, I think.
Otters are cute. It’s odd – slinky little animals (like, say, rats) are anything but cute (usually). But make them a little bigger, put big tails on them, and they become cute (though I doubt if their food would agree 🙂 Make them even bigger and you get capybaras, which look dumb, dorky and benign. Okay, I’ve just realised otters aren’t rodents, they’re mustelids. My mistake.
Not too sure about the bears. One of the great things about New Zealand is being able to walk in the bush, barefoot even, and the worst thing that’s ever likely to attack you is a yellow wasp. There are reputed to be wild pigs in the more remote parts of the country. And of course cows, but not in the bush. The biggest hazard in the bush is just getting lost or falling off a cliff, or, I suppose, tripping and breaking your ankle.
The weather, being Auckland, is all over the map. Today’s forecast was for really heavy rain, clearing late in the day. Well it was all over by 9a.m., which was just as well for the guys from the power company who came to trim our trees (under their 110kV lines). Sunshine, even, by mid-day. That’s typical Auckland weather for you.
Just got a text to book for Mrs D’s second Covid jab, which I reserved online for September 7th. I expect they’ll ‘fit me in’ at the same time, as they did with the first jab. Actually this carries a lot less emotional weight here, mostly protected by our quarantine wall, than it does in most countries. It’s more a ‘nice to have’ than a desperately needed shot. Our vaccine distribution is quite a slow process since NZ’s place in the vaccine queue is fairly low, for good reasons.
5 July 2021 at 14:00 #71856@janetteb Well, I can’t say I’ve noticed it being ‘unnaturally warm’. Though my memory tends to be short-term, like the last couple of weeks only.
I wonder how they average out these things? Certainly summer seemed to last a very long time – I was swimming until May Day, which is getting on for a month later than I typically do – before it fell off abruptly into winter. So depending when they calculate the seasons from, the tail end of summer might be pushing up the average. The seasons seem to run late, here, but this year summer ran even later than usual.
5 July 2021 at 07:26 #71854@winston Meanwhile, here on the opposite side of the earth, we’re getting unusually cold weather. It is winter, but in the last couple of weeks we’ve had it a few degrees colder than usual and a lot more snow in the southern half of the country.
Maybe nature is ‘compensating’***, but I think we’d all rather it compromised than counteracted. 🙂
(***I have no knowledge of any physical mechanism by which this might happen)
4 July 2021 at 15:49 #71847@eja1985 Hi EJA This forum is as good as any (On The Sofa is the other one) Generally its pretty relaxed about where posts go. On The Sofa is (I think) supposed to be about general TV viewing, it also attracts comments about episodes, Kebab is for ‘other stuff’, but topics tend to drift and nobody seems too worried.
Anyway, welcome (I’ve been here for about 6 months). It’s not a very busy site, but most folks are fairly friendly. For some reason it reminds me of the little social group in Love & Monsters.
3 July 2021 at 11:43 #71843@janetteb It may well be that English lit has progressed a bit in the six decades since my schooldays. In those days the texts we had to read were such as Shakespear (which I liked, the dude was at least reasonably concise with his plots and there was plenty of action); Dickens, who I found rather depressing and his style of writing was insufferably overblown, particularly when he was trying to be funny. H G Wells (the only sci-fi writer as I recall), who was similarly hampered by a Victorian style. The most ‘modern’ writer was Graham Greene, specifically ‘The Power and The Glory’, which I found the most tedious, dreary, depressing dirge I had ever read, and his heavy religious overtones really offended me. What I read for enjoyment was Conan Doyle, Arthur C Clarke, John Wyndham, Leslie Charteris (whose style is probably as dated now as Dickens’ was then 🙂 – but they were all far too modern to make it into English Lit. Also, they were probably deficient in Character Development. And innumerable non-fiction books on railways, mountaineering, aviation and motor racing.
Coming back to text analysis – I’m not sure what’s involved. Though I do know when the audience is being manipulated (but isn’t that the job of a film-maker?) I just hate that when alleged ‘based on real events’ so-called docu-dramas do it. Don’t care when it’s 100% fiction.
But I don’t do that on my first viewing of an episode. I decide whether I like the ep just based on how it strikes me. Frequently (particularly if it’s a Moffat episode) I re-watch a second time, when the plot/timeline is easier to follow and the knowledge of it provides a bit of background that lets me appreciate the events more. Like, say, Hell Bent. *If* I liked the ep, I then do quite like to discuss it (not sure if that’s ‘analysing’ it?) with others, such as in this forum.
And I would very strongly argue that sci-fi and fantasy is a very significant part of literature (I know you agree on that :), and allows writers to explore theoretical situations, make allegories to human institutions, and explore moral dilemmas, all without the baggage that would accompany a novel set in actual ‘reality’. And as such, it is very often much more enjoyable to read. Terry Pratchett’s ‘Discworld’ novels are a classic case of that (plus he has a fantastic way with words. I’m a complete sucker for clever, inventive phraseology. In fact, many popular writers (such as Arthur Hailey, Robert Ludlum) leave me cold, because their prose is so – prosaic, I can’t get through more than a few pages. Really. I started reading The Bourne Identity because the movie was so good, and couldn’t get through the first chapter. Maybe I was expecting too much.)
1 July 2021 at 15:40 #71839@missy I think I agree with you. I’d rather enjoy a story than analyse it (is there an official way to ‘analyse’ a story? I don’t know).
Although (as an engineer) there’s a part of my brain that keeps tabs on continuity and physical credibility, that’s not what decides whether I like an episode. If it’s well-written, with original dialogue and engaging characters, I tend to give it considerable leeway. It takes a very large inconsistency to throw me out of the story (like Kill The Moon for example).
If I start noticing minor plot points, that usually means the characters have failed to ‘grab’ me.
McGyver, for example, I could never stand, because it seemed as if the writers had deliberately made every ‘clever’ trick McGyver came up with, as absurd and impractical as possible – I was actually offended by the gratuitous absurdity of it. James Bond gadgets, on the other hand, I could usually go along with, partly because they were more ‘science fiction’-y – the more a gadget is ‘high-tech’ or removed from everyday reality, the more likely I am to ‘suspend disbelief’ for the sake of the story.
Anyway, back to analysing stories – as I recall, at school, great emphasis used to be placed on ‘character development’. But then there was an implication (this was the 60’s, I’m ooold) that most sci-fi probably wasn’t literature. Except possibly H G Wells, who was sufficiently antiquated to qualify. I couldn’t give a toss about ‘character development’ – either the characters were interesting (in which case development might happen or not) or there was some other good reason to like the story, like for example a really clever plot (as in Heinlein’s ‘By His Bootstraps’ – time travel) or an intriguing twist in the tail (Arthur Clark’s ‘History Lesson’) or interesting situation (‘The Sentinel’). Besides, short stories didn’t give much room for character development. In fact I’d say my love of reading came in spite of, rather than because of, English Literature.
1 July 2021 at 14:42 #71838@janetteb @missy I do like it when the writer tells you what s/he’s going to do, then at the end of the episode (when you’ve completely forgotten about it) s/he saves the day by doing exactly that. For some reason this makes some people very cross, but I love it. I love the audacity of it. And there’s a certain neatness to it.
I wish I could think of some examples (I know there are, just can’t bring them to mind).
30 June 2021 at 16:02 #71833Well the last Who I watched was The Wedding of River Song.
What a way to start an ep. All of time happening at once in a chaotic jumble (and also, great fun to watch the anachronisms).
“There are no rats in the transept”. “Good.” “The skulls eat them.” I burst out laughing at that. And then the skulls ate Gantok…
“And they want me dead.” “No, not really. They just don’t want you to remain alive.”
A lovely convoluted jigsaw of an episode which will all make sense in the end – we hope.
The Soothsayer (Doctor) telling Churchill the story while Silents lurk and black score marks appear on his arm (you really do need to have seen the whole story-so-far to appreciate this).
So then River (in the astronaut suit) drained the weapons system so it didn’t shoot the Doctor and that disrupted the Fixed Point in Time such that all time happens at once.
“Don’t panic. In small numbers they’re not too difficult” – and his arm is covered in score marks. An extraordinarily disturbing thing, to discover you’ve just been fighting off scores of the things and they’re probably still around and *you can’t remember*. And then Amy walks in and shoots him.
Then it gets really complicated…
Lots of lovely moments. Amy putting Madame Kovarian’s deadly eyepatch back in place, “River Song didn’t get it all from you, sweetie.”
And it did all make sense in the end. Even the subterfuge of using the Tesselecta as, effectively, armour, so River could shoot him (thus getting the Silents off his track) with non-fatal results.
As so often, it repays two watchings. One to get the general drift, and the second time through, you can see where it’s going and fit the scenes into a mental framework. And it’s good writing, I think, NOT to tediously explain every aspect for some non-regular viewer who just tuned in five minutes ago.
30 June 2021 at 15:52 #71832Well, I just watched the 1997 ‘The Fifth Element’ with Bruce Willis and Mila Jovovich, and I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed it. It doesn’t always make a hell of a lot of sense, but it’s always colourful, quite inventive, and both Willis and Jovovich are engaging characters. I can understand why people are said to either love it or hate it, it’s idiosyncratic enough that it could easily ‘miss’. There are a couple of unconventional touches I rather like – the hero and the villain never get to meet face to face; and the villain is ultimately blown up by one of the subsidiary goons, almost by accident. That’s the way it goes. But – entirely conventionally – the day is finally saved when Willis’s character declares his love for Leeloo (Jovovich) – that would totally fit with a Doctor Who theme.
30 June 2021 at 07:20 #71831@blenkinsopthebrave My family lived in Perth, W.A., from when I was three till six, when we went back to UK. For several years other kids in Hampshire thought I was an Aussie. But I lost that accent and reacquired an English one, which apparently I still have (though I’ve been in NZ since I was 14). I can’t tell, but occasionally, every few years, someone says to me ‘Are you English?’
My few memories of Perth (we lived in Scarborough at one point, also Victoria Park, but when and in which order I can’t remember, they’re just names floating in my memory) are that it was very hot at times. Often in late afternoon there would be a welcome sea breeze. But the worst heat I ever recall was on the trip back to England on the SS Moreton Bay, it stopped in Ceylon, and we went to see a tea plantation, I thought I was going to die from the heat.
29 June 2021 at 07:38 #71825@janetteb Thanks, but (as usual) Auckland just gets the tail of the weather, after it’s expended most of its energy over South Island and Wellington. We got some heavy rain last night, and stiff winds today, but nothing exceptional.
28 June 2021 at 16:02 #71821@janetteb Listen is one of my favourites. Capaldi at his best and the Doctor at his most ‘alien’. And a couple of really hair-raising moments – who would have thought that the old kid-under-a-blanket routine could be so scary? And of course the classic noises-in-an-empty-place where no-one could possibly be…
But also, funny and entertaining, as Moffatt usually is.
It’s right up there with Blink and Midnight in my episode rankings.
Time Heist is okay, quite watchable, but not in the same class as Listen. IMO, of course.
27 June 2021 at 12:12 #71816@janetteb Something I find interesting is that our levels of ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ i.e. what we find credible, is not uniform, it’s highly idiosyncratic. It’s NOT like the boundary of what I can accept is a smooth curve through the space of all possible phenomena, and someone else who may be ‘less credulous’ has a boundary 20 percent short of mine in all directions. More like our boundaries weave around like the coastline of Britain.
For example, I’ll happily accept time travel and ‘bigger on the inside’ – the two biggest physical impossibilities in all of Who. But I’m an engineer, I have a close acquaintance with mechanics, so my tolerance there is limited. This is probably why ‘Kill the Moon’ dropped me out of credibility right from the start – a Space Shuttle (which is a big glider) landing on the Moon (which has no air)? And the Moon’s mass is essentially fixed, how could the total mass change even if it was an egg hatching? (Note the improbability of a 2000-mile bird doesn’t worry me at all. Conservation of mass does). Now when it flies away (how? Birds need air for their wings to work on. Also, how does it breathe, but that’s very much secondary for me) and magically produces an egg the same size – just doubling the total mass from nowhere – oh dear oh dear. That just broke everything.
Now somebody else might notice nothing wrong with all that and be far more concerned with the Doctor’s treatment of Clara and the annoying kid.
Another one that gives me pause is the scene at the end of Journey’s End with about 10 old companions working the Tardis. Never mind that the Tardis is sometimes picky about who controls her, and can usually be flown by one, how on earth do 10 people usefully co-ordinate their actions? It’d be like three people trying to drive a car at once. It’s not physically impossible, it just doesn’t ‘work’ for me.
I also, for example, have quibbles about the Cybermen in The Doctor Falls apparently punching their way up through decks in the giant ship. Those decks must be massively strong, any Cyberman that tried would just end up as a metallic squish on the ceiling of the floor below. A bit like your problem with the dwarfs in the goblin caves. But I can manage to overlook the Cybermen for the sake of the story.
“CGI works best when used for background, landscape and fantasy elements” Absolutely. Also, I guess, if it’s being used for fantasy elements, we have no experience of the ‘real thing’ to tell our senses that the CGI is not quite right. And backgrounds are usually okay because we’re not really looking hard at them.
I do agree that LOTR has far too much CGI.
27 June 2021 at 09:32 #71813@janetteb Well yes. I just watched ‘Closing Time’ (before Wedding of River Song), which features a Cybermat – real vicious-looking little critter. But in the ‘behind the scenes’ clip they have a shot of the original Cybermat and – oh dear oh dear. A cuddly plush toy with frilly felt ‘teeth’, it really does look like it belongs in a cot with a 2-year-old.
One of my other enthusiasms was Blakes 7, and you can be sure that wasn’t because of the special effects either, or the model shots 🙂 Though model shots can be very good (Red Dwarf, Star Wars) – I don’t know if model-making has had any huge advances in technology in the last few decades or it’s just better budget.
Modern CGI has gone too far the other way – perspectives are too exaggerated, parallax motion too accelerated. For quite a long time the James Bond movies were an honourable exception, they did all their (quite often really dangerous) stunts ‘for real’, and you could tell. But they eventually fell off the wagon, there was some really terribly fake CGI in Die Another Day (which is in other ways a movie I enjoy). I don’t mean the ‘invisible car’, we know that’s sci-fi so I’ll accept an unreal CGI shot, but e.g. Bond’s jet-ice-racer dangling off a cliff – its motion is so unnatural. In fact getting motion right is probably the most difficult challenge in CGI.
27 June 2021 at 02:34 #71810@winston River Song would drive you crazy, then. It did me.
But I must admit, I was doing it wrong. (I just posted in On The Sofa why). If I regard the Doctor’s timeline as a straight line (like, say, a train journey from Lisbon to Madrid, Barcelona, Nice, Venice and so on… ) – which is what it seems like to him – and his encounters with River as being at stops along the way, then River is sitting off somewhere (Stormcage, most of the time) and randomly teleporting in to encounter the Doctor at various stopovers. And obviously, with a time machine (or vortex manipulator, whatever) River can choose to ‘meet’ the Doctor in any arbitrary random order.
River’s travels are not in any way ‘tied’ to the Doctor’s – until after they’ve encountered each other at a particular point, that’s probably then a ‘fixed point’ which can’t be altered.
Don’t know if that helps… 🙂
27 June 2021 at 02:12 #71809@devilishrobby I should probably acquire a few more episodes of Seven. I effectively stopped watching Who partway through Jon Pertwee’s stint (following TV series in those days required real dedication, since asynchronous viewing was not possible). So the only Sevens I’ve seen are the last three, Ghost Light, Fenric and Survival. I think a good comedy actor ‘going dark’ can be very effective indeed. To do comedy well, they need above all a good sense of tone and timing, and that works well when being sinister. And from what I’ve seen of Sylvester McCoy at cons (on Youtube, thank you bootleggers) he’s pretty quick-witted.
By the way, since last night I’ve suddenly acquired a far greater tolerance for the quaint costumes and ‘effects’ that oldWho was encumbered with. They were doing their best with the very limited technology and budget that they had.
(What happened? Last night I randomly stumbled across a Youtube video of ‘Birdemic’, which must have the worst ‘special FX’ ever perpetrated. And I don’t say that lightly. Now the makers had the benefit of modern technology so their CGI ‘birds’ are rendered in crisp sharp detail – which just makes the utter laziness and total incompetence of the film makers even more glaringly obvious. (Just Google it, or see for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLNBp22sahk at 4:50 or 6:15 – I defy anyone not to burst out laughing at the sheer absurdity of it. )
So in the light of that, I can be far more accommodating of the Old One (?) in Fenric, or the cat people in Survival, while still wishing they’d had more modern tech (say nuWho level) when making it.
27 June 2021 at 01:41 #71808I was lying in bed last night musing on River Song (as one does), and I suddenly realised that a major problem I have conceptualising her travels is groundless, misguided and WORNG. I had assumed that River was living life ‘backwards’, but that was not only impossible but factually incorrect and leads to total confusion. e.g. the Doctor’s last meeting with her (Darillium) should by that logic have been River’s first meeting with him. And how could she coexist and interact with ‘normal’ people for an hour?
No. River lives life forwards, just like everyone else (except when she’s actually time-jumping). It’s only her random meetings with the Doctor that appear in a different order to each of them.
The way I conceptualise it is this – say the Doctor is on a (‘linear’) train journey from Lisbon via Madrid, Barcelona, Nice, Venice, Vienna, Warsaw, and Minsk to Moscow. (Helps to visualise if the towns are more or less in a line). As he stops over in Nice he encounters River for her first time (that’d be Demons Run). He finally gets off the ‘Nizza’ in Kievsky station in Moscow and meets River for (his) last time (the Kremlin Gardens aren’t exactly the Singing Towers of Darillium but they’ll have to do). In between, River sits in Edinburgh (Stormcage), periodically teleporting off to encounter the Doctor at random stops along his route. Her last trip is to the Doctor’s initial location in Lisbon, where she falls off the Castelo dos Mouros and dies the ‘first’ time she meets him.
(You may prefer to substitute any other linear journey like Quebec – Montreal – Ottawa – Winnipeg – Calgary – Vancouver, or Townsville – Brisbane – Sydney – Melbourne – Adelaide, anything familiar to you). Thing is, the Doctor’s timeline appears *to him* to be a linear progression. Just as River’s does *to her*.)
26 June 2021 at 01:14 #71804@janetteb I loved the Five-ish Doctors. Good comedy, aside from the hook of trying-to-recognise-every-character.
It was actually on the strength of that, that I acquired McCoy’s last three stories in oldWho. I’d always dismissed him (based solely on that silly ‘???’ jumper and ‘?’ brolly), as a lightweight, but actually, he’s funny, quick-witted, and can be cunning/sinister at the same time (a bit like the Moff). And I immediately liked Ace. It’s evident from con footage that Sophie and McCoy are really comfortable with each other, there’s a nice vibe between them. It would have been interesting to see where they were going after the last episode screened (preferably, with the aid of time travel, with some decent modern effects).
I’ve just finished S6, Wedding of River Song, I’ll do a short paragraph on it separately.
24 June 2021 at 06:36 #71790@craig Also, Quatermass and the Pit Part 1 – the last post is a big spam. Hope us users aren’t nagging you too much 🙂
24 June 2021 at 06:27 #71789@janetteb @craig … and he’s spammed garbage and links all over the site. On the Sofa, for starters, but a whole lot of others too. Craig, please can you nuke him from orbit, terminate him with extreme prejudice, yadda yadda. I don’t know if you have an easy way to track every post he’s made, if not I’ll volunteer to trawl the site and list every forum he’s dumped in for your convenience, just say the word.
22 June 2021 at 10:11 #71774Just watched The God Complex. Interesting premise, a self-reconfiguring hotel. (I seem to recall Emma Peel of the Avengers was once trapped in such a building. And of course the castle in Heaven Sent). The old monster, feeding on faith. Interesting, but a bit shaky in its development – the conclusion that Amy’s faith in the Doctor made her a target was believable, but not really the ease with which he destroyed her faith. It’s not that easy. Would have been more credible spread over a longer period of time, but more painful, so I’m glad they didn’t. But after the events of the Girl Who Waited, if Amy still has faith in the Doctor it must be pretty unshakeable by now.
I really did like the character of Rita. Smart, very quick on the uptake, and courageous. I was disappointed when she died. She would have made an excellent companion (but the job was already taken). So then we were left with the ferrety alien – ugh. I was waiting for someone to hit him.
22 June 2021 at 09:44 #71773The Teselecta is very similar in visual appearance to Mystique, the shape-shifter in X-Men, I think (except it uses tiles and Mystique had ??scales??). Probably used a similar visual programming technique in production. Also Mystique usually transformed quicker. But it’s always a fascinating concept, great to watch, and highly productive of interesting plot developments.
But the concept of it being an incredibly complex robot with a miniaturised crew – I think that was all new, and it was conducive to some entertaining dialogue. And the Antibodies – I’m not quite sure why it needed them. Were Teselectas vulnerable to takeover by hostile intruders? Whatever, they looked really cool and their bland corporate utterances – ‘You may experience some discomfort as you are terminated’ were funny and terrifying at the same time.
17 June 2021 at 13:12 #71765Well, Night Terrors I skipped because, well, it’s kinda skippable. And I wanted to wacth The Girl Who Waited. That really blows my socks off, even on repeat watching. It’s right up there with Blink.
I wrote half a page and posted it on the forum for that episode, but I’ll just hit the highlights here.
Right from the start – the beautiful, stark, dead white sets just grab you. And then within couple of minutes Amy is trapped in a separate timestream – this episode starts with a rush.And, Apalapuchia is under planet-wide quarantine (now where have I heard that recently? This seems to be a particularly appropriate time to be watching this episode). The garden is really beautiful.
But the shock of Arthur running into a 60-year-old Amy is – shocking. Excellent make-up and acting, by the way.
Though nothing compared with the shock of the Doctor shutting the Tardis door in Old Amy’s face after the trio fight their way past the bots. And Old Amy tells Rory not to let her in and asks the Interface to show her Earth as she turns to meet the robots. I know how this ends but my glasses were still misted up at this point.
Probably the best ever performance from Karen Gillan (and the best opportunities).
Amongst a trio of fairly average and forgettable episodes, this one stands out like a supernova.
17 June 2021 at 13:02 #71764(Well, well, I posted about this ep 8 months ago. But I wrote this so I’ll post it…)
Well, Night Terrors I skipped because, well, it’s kinda skippable.
But The Girl Who Waited really blows my socks off. It’s right up there with Blink.
Right from the start – the beautiful, stark, dead white sets just grab you. And then within couple of minutes Amy is trapped in a separate timestream – this episode starts with a rush.And, Apalapuchia is under planet-wide quarantine (now where have I heard that recently? This seems to be a particularly appropriate time to be watching this episode).
“This is a kindness” and the robots really mean it, they don’t know their vaccine will kill Amy. But they are remarkably persistent. Of course the quarantine facility is benign by intent, which is why their attempts to hunt Amy down are not very organised, and why the Interface is mostly helpful, even before Amy reprograms it. And the garden is truly beautiful.
But the shock of Arthur running into a 60-year-old Amy is – shocking. Excellent make-up and acting, by the way.
And then Old Amy doesn’t wasnt to be ‘rescued’ 36 years ago if her last 36 years of life cease to exist. This raises interesting philosophic questions about, are we the same person we used to be? But Amy isn’t interested in philosophy. And Arthur is left with the awful choice of which to rescue (if he can). And then (via the viewing glass) he introduces young Amy to Old Amy. And young Amy persuades Old Amy to go along with the rescue for Rory’s sake – Old Amy agrees, so long as she can come too. The Doctor reluctantly agrees it might just be possible (but we didn’t notice Rule 1 slipping by in the background, did we? Or Rule 1 of all sci-fi, which is, two copies of the same character in the same place is unsustainable for more than 1 episode).
So then we have Rory and two Amys making a daring escape and Old Amy ninjas her way through a platoon of bots (who, to be fair to them, are pretty slow and were never designed to encounter opposition). And Rory carries young Amy into the Tardis and old Amy runs joyfully towards the Tardis door… which the Doctor regretfully shuts in her face. I remember the horror I felt the first time I watched this. Because two Amys is too much of a temporal paradox for the Tardis to tolerate and, by the way, the Doctor lied. And then the Doctor leaves it to Rory whether to let Old Amy in or not. And Old Amy tells him not to let her in and asks the Interface to show her Earth as she turns to meet the robots. I know how this ends but my glasses were still misted up at this point.
Probably the best ever performance from Karen Gillan (and the best opportunities).
Amongst a trio of fairly average and forgettable episodes, this one stands out like a supernova.
17 June 2021 at 00:53 #71762@johnnybear I just got a couple of messages from her too. She said she personally chose me, now she’s sending messages to every male on the site, I’m so jealous!
Returning to reality – no, she’s a spammer. I used to get dozens of messages like that in my inbox from ladies just dying to make my acquaintance, now they’ve dwindled to a trickle, my irresistible masculinity must be fading, drat!
15 June 2021 at 17:20 #71758@janetteb Well at the moment we’re getting all the rain that didn’t have time to drop on you 🙂 Though the worst floods were in South Island, absolutely record rainfall, washed away bridges and the like.
Gives me a break from reinstalling a new heater core in my car, which I was halfway through doing when the rain started. To my relief, Mrs D has discovered a soap opera on Youtube, which makes a welcome change from the disgusting diseases, people with bizarre medical conditions, and particularly grisly ‘true-life’ American murders we get on TV channels. It (the soap) happens to be entirely in a south-east Asian dialect of which neither of us know a word, currently on episode 101 (no she didn’t watch from the start), feeding the title into Google Translate tells me it’s in Hmong. The Hmong are a people in south China/Vietnam/Laos, apparently. But anyway, Mrs D follows the action and I can happily ignore the whole thing.
(A few years ago she got addicted to Filipino soaps on DVD, introduced to them by someone at her work. What intrigued me was that some actors would speak English, some Tagalog, and others would switch between the two, often in mid-sentence and apparently at random, but they all got subtitled in English anyway.)
Time to load another episode of Who season 6 into my laptop, methinks.
12 June 2021 at 12:30 #71755@janetteb I’m relieved to see you’re still there and not floating down a river somewhere. Oz does seem to get some extraordinary weather (if you include fires as ‘weather’). Still,you don’t seem to get many earthquakes, which is definitely a plus – the novelty wears off long before the repairs are finished.
9 June 2021 at 05:57 #71739(This started as a discussion on the ‘Rose’ thread, but I wandered off as usual) –
@winston I didn’t watch much BG (Before Gap ?) Doctor Who either. I think I caught the first ever ep, became a minor fan of Patrick Troughton, then sort of lost track. Of course in those days, even home videotape (VHS etc) didn’t exist, so it was a case of catch the episode when screened, or maybe on its repeat a few days later, or miss it ‘forever’. Being a fan of anything was hard work in those days!
I caught just a few eps of Blakes 7 first time round. They re-ran it in the 80’s and I used to dash home from work to tape it on my new home VHS recorder. Got a few dirty looks from the boss when I rocketed out the door at 4.30 every Thursday afternoon (of course he didn’t notice that I wasn’t in such a hurry any other day). I couldn’t possibly explain that it was because I had to catch a sci-fi program.
Kinda hard to imagine now we have DVD’s and Youtube (and of course I now have all B7 on DVD). I’m so glad to have survived until now, when I can access more things I’m interested in than I can possibly watch.
For another example, railways. I love trains, and steam trains above all. I used to catch ‘Great Railway Journeys’ religiously (and scream at the TV when they wasted precious screentime blathering on about ‘human interest’ stuff instead of showing footage of the locomotive or train). And now, there are thousands of hours of steam locos and ‘cabride’ videos on Youtube, more than I could ever watch.
(By the way, why has Who never used a period steam train? I’m sure there are any number of preserved railways who would be falling over themselves to have a visit from Who, just for the publicity).
9 June 2021 at 05:29 #71738@winston I didn’t watch much BG (Before Gap ?) Doctor Who either. I think I caught the first ever ep, became a minor fan of Patrick Troughton, then sort of lost track. When it revived with ‘Rose’, I started watching again, until the gaps at the end of Tennnant’s era broke the continuity. Also, we’d lost Billie Piper. I liked Martha, didn’t like Donna – too strident (nothing against the actress, just the way she was written). I have to say, every time Billie appears in a cameo (such as The Moment) I get a little happy feeling.
(I’m moving the rest of my comment to On The Sofa because it seems to fit better there)
9 June 2021 at 01:40 #71736@dr-nao
Hey, that’s pretty good. Specially the way you’ve rendered the sky – the stars do look as if they’re real.
8 June 2021 at 14:06 #71732Seems there’s a lull in posting. I just watched A Good Man Goes to War and Let’s Kill Hitler – two fantastic episodes (and I mean that in both senses of the word). Highly imaginative and great fun to watch. Rather than fill this forum with my babblings, I posted a comment on each in the right place in the ‘Stephen Moffat Retrospective’ areas, not that anyone seems to be too worried about going Off Topic on this site 🙂
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