Forum Replies Created
-
AuthorPosts
-
30 June 2021 at 16:02 #71833
Well 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 🙂
8 June 2021 at 14:00 #71731Let’s Kill Hitler Wow, another ep full of goodies. Together with A Good Man Goes to War, there’s enough ideas here for an entire season of most Sci-fi series. Amy’s daughter/childhood best friend Mels (who we never saw before – is there a plot hole there? – don’t know, don’t care) – as a teen, she was perfectly cast – the sort of girl you know is trouble but you want to hang out with her anyway, what the hell. Arriving in a crop circle in a stolen red Corvette, perfect. I was slightly saddened when she regenerated into River Song.
The Tesselecta – brilliant concept! Quirky, sinister and kind of humorous all at the same time, when it ‘matches’ to another individual. Quite why it’s patrolled by deadly ‘antibodies’ is not apparent but does anyone doubt them? Maybe they’re there to guard against an accidental hostile takeover of the Tesselecta. Have to love their dialogue – “Please remain calm while your life is terminated… Please cooperate in your officially sanctioned termination. It is normal to experience fear during your incineration.” Part of the Tesselecta concept is an echo of Mystique (X-Men) and the T-1000, but the concept of a miniaturised crew is one I haven’t seen before, and brilliantly done.
After all that, the idea of the Tardis accidentally saving Hitler’s life is just icing on the cake. The Hitler actor is a lot better match than the Churchill one was. But he got locked in a cupboard, the episode wasn’t really about him. (Reading through other comments, I can’t believe that some people got so irate about the casual treatment of Hitler. ‘Time machine – let’s kill Hitler’ is a common sci-fi trope. Not every sci-fi episode that uses 30’s Germany as a backdrop has to conduct a serious sociological study of the period, any more than the ones set in the London Blitz do, or at any other dramatic period of history. If they object to that, they should get positively incandescent over Dad’s Army, Hogan’s Heroes or ‘Allo ‘Allo).
We don’t really see what happened to the Tesselecta after Amy released the Antibodies and the crew beamed up out of there (to, presumably, a mothership in near orbit). Interesting that the Tardis could subject itself to the compression field in order to materialise inside the Tesselecta and rescue Amy and Rory. [Spoilers]: I know the Doctor used the Tesselecta in The Wedding of River Song, in cooperation with its crew, so presumably its owners managed to deactivate the Antibodies and retrieve their robot.
8 June 2021 at 13:55 #71730A Good Man Goes to War. If the last ep was a two-parter, this one is two parts worth crammed into one. [The real] Amy having a kid. Rory giving ultimatums to the Cybermen. A new monster, the Headless Monks. An old ‘monster’, a Silurian – Madame Vastra, apparently doing her part for Victorian law and order by eating Jack the Ripper. (Which would explain why he disappeared without trace). But not constrained by Victorian gender stereotypes vis-a-vis Jenny, apparently. A Sontaran nurse. I’m sure the Moff had fun writing all this! And all this in the first 10 minutes.
Just too much action to describe in a short post. But the Doctor has been busy. Dorium Maldovar. Lorna from the Gamma Forests. More Silurians. Judoon? I didn’t expect them. Strax the Sontaran. (Though I wish they’d left out those sappy space-going Spitfires. And the pirate crew from Black Spot, though at least they have a starship, so they’re a little bit more credible. But sometimes, ‘everything’ is too much).
I certainly didn’t see the implication when Madame Kovarian bragged about fooling the Doctor twice, the same way… not till baby Melody turned to ‘flesh’ mush. Fooled me twice, too.
‘The only water in the forest is the River’. How long have we been waiting to find the meaning of that? Only three episodes, apparently. It seems longer. Frankly, I wouldn’t put it past the Moff to have this planned since he named River Song, back in Season 4.
And all these are great characters – Madame Vastra and Jenny, Lorna from the Gamma Forests (sad that she died), Strax the Sontaran, even Dorium the blue.
8 June 2021 at 13:18 #71729Rose was the first Doctor Who episode I’d watched for three decades. I seem to recall grumbles at the time, about casting a teen pop singer, but IMO Billie Piper is a good actress and the camera just loves her. I think Eccleston and Piper share the credit for the revived ‘Who’ taking off (along with competent scripts and adequate special effects).
I also remember grumbles about the close personal relationship between the Doc and companion which apparently was a deviation from ‘classic Who’, but having watched the last three stories of Seven and Ace, there’s definitely chemistry between Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred, so even classic Who was heading that way.
IMO, of course.
2 June 2021 at 08:08 #71727This is a lot longer than I expected…
The Rebel Flesh: This was a really creepy episode. Never mind the inherent creepiness of replicant doppelgangers, there was a real sense of menace in the opening scenes. The foreman Miranda looked as if she might order the Doctor and companions all executed if they made a wrong move. Plus people-melting acid leaking everywhere. Then it becomes apparent that the Gangers have ‘escaped’ – or in fact, been animated exactly like Frankenstein’s monster, lightning flashes and all – and it becomes impossible to tell which is human and which is their Ganger…
(Actually, for some reason this feels like it could have been an episode of Farscape)
Then the Tardis gets swallowed by a pool of acid, cutting off their escape…
And Rory (isn’t he an Auton, or did I miss something?) is comforting plastic-replica-Jeniffer, gotta love the irony.
And there’s a lot of running down corridors, except now we’re not sure who’s doing the running. Even having watched the ep before, I’m not too sure which is original and which is replicant at this point.
(And just as happened in the orphanage, and the Curse of the Black Spot, black-eyepatch-lady takes a look at Amy through a hatch)
And the Doctor almost gets the two groups reconciled, until bloody human-Miranda turns it into a war, which replica-Miranda comments sarcastically is ‘just like me’. So the humans (minus Rory and real-Jennifer, who are trapped outside) plus the Doctor, barricade themselves in the chapel, together with – replicant-Doctor. End of episode, and what a cliffhanger it is.
I hadn’t meant to write so much, but this ep is full of goodies.The Almost People: I have to say, seeing the Doctors stroking each other’s ego is amusing. And Amy is torn between wanting to accept the replicant Doctor and preferring the ‘real’ one – the irony (on several levels) of this will become apparent much later.
Ganger-Jennifer has turned all vicious and vindictive, while ganger-Miranda has become weary of the battle. I like Miranda the ganger much better than Miranda the human at this point.
Replicant-Doctor** convinces replicant-Jimmy to release the humans from a trap. In the course of which real-Jimmy gets killed so replicant-Jimmy has to take his place. For his family. Awwww.
**Or was it really replicant-Doctor? – the Doctor (well, one of them) reveals to Amy that they swapped shoes. And then actual replicant-Doctor and replicant-Miranda sacrifice themselves to liquefy the savage replicant-Jenny along with themselves.
Which neatly leaves one of each character (except Jenny) alive… and the Tardis stabilises the two surviving replicants and the doctor even cures Miranda’s cranial blood clot. Happy endings… even though I’m suspicious of neat happy endings, I quite like this one.… or is it? The Doctor orders Rory to stand away as he liquefies replicant-Amy(!!) This is shocking. I never saw that coming. This explains why the Tardis kept registering Amy as pregnant/not, and I guess explains Eyepatch Lady keeping tabs on the replicant Amy. I guess Amy was replaced by a replicant in the childrens home in Day of the Moon, or was it some time before that? But wow! To Be Continued indeed.
Not a bad ep, though completely overshadowed by the events of its last two minutes. In retrospect, the irony of Amy (the unaware replicant) favouring the ‘real’ (but actually the replicant) Doctor is extraordinary.
1 June 2021 at 10:44 #71725@blenkinsopthebrave I agree, that episode (from memory – it’s still 7 eps away in my re-watch) had an unnerving premise. But I really didn’t like David Walliams’ character. Curiously, the character who first came to mind was the undertaker in Before the Flood, who, it turns out, was a different actor – but also from the planet Tivoli (the character, not the actor…) A planet whose inhabitants wanted to be invaded should be quaint and quirky, but somehow ended up just being obnoxious and making me want [someone] to hit them.
31 May 2021 at 08:52 #71723@winston As it happens, we had our first covid shots today. About a month ago I got a text on my old cellphone giving an appointment for Mrs D, with a link to a website to confirm it – but my cellphone is NOT a smartphone and when I typed the link into my laptop it didn’t work. So I rang the helpline number – “You are currently #128 in the queue” (!) – they must have had a lot of staff on their phones because I was answered after just ten minutes. And the person advised me, though I hadn’t had an ‘invite’, to ask at the centre when I took Mrs D in, as they might ‘fit me in’ as well if they could. Which is what happened.
Dahlias – no, Mrs D never lifts the bulbs unless she’s giving some to some cousin or transplanting them. Here in Auckland we have ‘cold’ days but it never quite freezes, we get frosts maybe four or five times a year. So the dahlias seem to survive OK.
This year has been extraordinary, it really feels like full winter now – and there’s heavy snow all over the South Island – yet exactly 30 days ago I was having my last swim at Piha because the water was just starting to cool down – the summer temperatures just kept on going right through April. I’m used to summer being late, but this year was exceptionally late. I’m not complaining 🙂
30 May 2021 at 09:42 #71721@janetteb I don’t think any state can be ‘blamed’ for covid outbreaks unless their government was negligent or reckless in their precautions. In fact it seems to me that the state boundaries are really just an arbitrary border to try and draw a line around an outbreak, at least as far as SA/Vic/NSW/Queensland go. I guess Northern Territory, West Australia and Tasmania have natural barriers, as does NZ. But anyway, I’m pleased this one has missed you (so far). What is this ‘writer’s festival’ of which you speak?
In other news, Mrs D’s dahlias have started flowering again. They did their thing in a big way in January-February, died back in March and got cut back, and now they’re at it again. I have no idea if they’re supposed to do that.
I honestly can’t understand anyone not loving The Doctor’s Wife. (I don’t say that to be argumentative, I absolutely don’t mean to imply that you ‘ought to’ like it!) It just seems so enjoyable – to me. But then there are many things that other people rave about and I can’t see anything in it, and I guess my tastes are just as quirky as anybody’s.
@winston Yes, I noticed when writing my comments, Doctor’s Wife has just so much in it (I see you said that). I could have written a page and not exhausted it all. The acting was also perfect. Auntie and Uncle had been repaired and rebuilt so many times they were like androids, doing House’s orders with no feelings and no morals – not evil, just neutral. You couldn’t hate them. House, on the other hand – I had an unholy feeling of retributory glee when the Doctor set Sexy on him.
27 May 2021 at 14:54 #71715@janetteb – I hope you’re safely clear of the Victorian covid outbreak.
I’m still working my way through S6 – The Curse of the Black Spot. Not a bad episode as such, just a pirate story such as everybody and his dog has done. So, pretty forgettable. It would be a perfectly good episode in some other TV series, but here it’s just outshone by almost every other ep.
Including, notably, the next episode, The Doctor’s Wife. I loved it. The backchat between Idris and the Doctor was beautiful. “You didn’t always take me where I wanted to go”. “No, but I always took you where you needed to go.”
The nice idea that the Tardis has ‘archived’ all the old control rooms – including ones that haven’t been created ‘yet’. Idris has such an all-inclusive view of time.
The revelation that Idris chose the Doctor (rather than the other way around). Neatly turning conventional Doctor lore on its head, yet without doing any violence to the canon.There was one scene (that Neil Gaiman mentions in his commentary, but it got cut) that I would have liked to see – when the Doctor was building a Tardis, he couldn’t find any scrap Tardis parts, until Idris pointed out they all had chameleon circuits still running and turned them off. Would’ve been cool to watch but not essential to the plot, though.
Lovely episode.
22 May 2021 at 12:34 #71704Day of the Moon (warning – massive SPOILERS!)
What a ripper of a way to start the second half of a two-parter. As usual with a Moff two-parter, the second half starts with an apparently totally different tone from where the first left off. Amy is running down a dirt road in the Valley of the Gods (yes it is, I checked, and it’s been Streetviewed), pursued by Canton Everett Delaware who – shoots her? And there are strange tick markings all over her arms.
Then we have the Doctor, imprisoned in a warehouse in ‘Area 51’, surrounded by ‘Do Not Interact With The Prisoner’ signs, and having a prison cell built round him. Then a New York skyscraper, where River (bearing similar markings) is threatened by Silents, and by Canton and his FBI goons, and she falls off the building. Then Glen Canyon Dam (location confirmed) where Rory is also shot by Canton… who delivers two body bags to the Doctor, just as the cell is completed. And – he’s been working with the Doctor all the while. And – shock – the Tardis (in invisible mode) is in the cell with them. So they all fly it to New York just in time for River to dive into the famous swimming pool.
(So, for the second time, River has fallen out of something just in time for the Tardis to collect her. The notorious Tardis temporal unreliability never seems to manifest when River’s involved. One could almost imagine the Tardis is playing favourites).
But anyway, *all this happens* before the credits. Talk about starting with a bang! I loved the reveal of the invisible Tardis in the cell.
So, it appears Amy, Rory and River had been trying to gauge how many Silents there were, and found them everywhere. Or, as the Doctor said, “As long as there’s been something in the corner of your eye, or creaking in your house, or breathing under your bed, or voices through a wall.” Now that is really chilling. I’ve got Silents in my house, have had as long as I can remember. The Moff really knows how to make everyday life scary, doesn’t he?
And – there’s one in the Tardis. Luckily, just a hologram, but that passage where Canton sees it and then can’t remember it is, again, truly creepy.
And the sequence in the abandoned childrens’ home with the ‘Get out’ warnings daubed on the walls, and the tally marks that suddenly appear on Amy’s hands, keeps up the scare factor.Couldn’t help but laugh when the Doctor got President Nixon to bail him out of NASA custody. And I loved the little cameo where the Doctor orders Nixon to tape everything in his office.
Back in childrens’ home, a window opens in a door and woman-with-eyepatch observes Amy, then the window disappears. This is getting surreal. And in the cell there are photos including Amy-with-baby. Then the girl in the astronaut suit walks in, flanked by Silents… When Clayton has summoned the Doctor and comes to her rescue, Amy has disappeared. Where is she?
Meanwhile Clayton records one of the Silents on Amy’s cellphone, saying ‘You should kill us on sight’. This will be important later.
Amy has been abducted to the alien ‘Lodger’ ship – I’d wondered what happened to that. And the Tardis materialises, carrying the Doctor, Rory, and River with her gun, to the rescue. And Clayton puts the track of the Silent commanding ‘Kill us all on sight’ on worldwide TV.
So Nixon asks the Doctor if he’ll be remembered and the Doc assures him he’ll never be forgotten. And River kisses the Doctor who is taken aback but says there’s always a first time for anything – to which River sadly replies ‘and a last’ and I’ve only just realised the significance of this in their back-to-front relationship.
And just when we thought the episode was over… the Doctor uses the Tardis scanner on Amy and it reveals she’s pregnant/not pregnant. And six months later in New York, the little girl starts to regenerate…
And all that was just the highlights of the episode. What an episode, just crammed full of goodies. There is, as I recall, more meat in any ten minutes of this ep than in the whole of Curse of the Black Spot. But it still leaves huge questions – the (future) doctor is still dead, who was in the astronaut suit when it shot him, what is Amy’s pregnancy status, where did the little girl come from? And the Silents, though presumably much reduced, were still around in 2011 when the Doctor was shot.
I love this stuff.
21 May 2021 at 11:43 #71703And on to The Impossible Astronaut
The co-ordinates in the invitation are accurate (of course everyone who saw the ep immediately got on Googlemaps and checked it!) – Monument Valley, just inside the Utah border, exactly where they filmed the bus. But Hamilton / Jefferson / Adams, I couldn’t locate.
Ten minutes into the new season and the Doctor’s dead. I did not see that coming. And it turns out he invited his younger self to his death. But why?
Love the scene with the Tardis in the White House. The doctor, relaxing in Nixon’s chair – “Fellows, the guns, really. Do you think you can just shoot me?” River (bursting out of the Tardis) – “They’re Americans!” The doctor (suddenly not relaxed) – “Don’t shoot!”
And the uptight FBI agent – “Do not compliment the intruder!”Amy’s a cool character – takes a photo of the Silent on her phone. I was a little slow when the FBI agent asked Amy ‘what’s that?’ and she said ‘My phone’, I was expecting him to say ‘no phones allowed’ and try to confiscate it. Instead, he looked baffled – it wasn’t till later that the penny dropped and I realised that ‘phones’ that would also take photos were unknown in 1969. Not really a plot point, just an anachronism avoided.
River’s first sight of the Silents (in the tunnel beneath the warehouse) is really a shock, even more scary than Amy’s encounter. They are possibly the most scary monsters ever in Doctor Who. The fact that she (and Rory, later) can turn round and instantly report ‘nothing there’ just adds to the scare.
And in the tunnel is the lost ship from ‘The Lodger’. What’s that doing here? It seems to be better behaved with River than in The Lodger, though. But then the Silents close in on Rory, there are flashes of light and River looks round in alarm…
In the warehouse, Amy finally finds time to tell the Doctor she’s pregnant, then the astronaut suit walks in and Amy shoots it before realising there’s a little girl in it…
Masses of set-up. This is going to take some sorting out.
I like this ep, visually great, lots of humour (particularly in the bickering between the Doctor and River Song).
19 May 2021 at 16:04 #71702Okay, I just watched the next episode (after Big Bang), which I was expecting to be The Impossible Astronaut, and I was slightly chagrined when I realised there was A Christmas Carol to wade through first. Up to this point I hadn’t rated Christmas specials very highly, they just tended to get in the way of the ongoing storyline.
However, I couldn’t help but like Christmas Carol. It barely hung together as sci-fi, but was a charming and touching fantasy. Michael Gambon was excellent as Kazran Sardick, who comes across as the most heartless villain ever. Not actually evil, but he just doesn’t care. His redemption as a human being was very nicely played. It was easy to imagine how the knowledge that thawing his girlfriend out would use up her last runtime, would eat away at him. As he said, how do you decide which day? It was more akin to a fairy story than regular sci-fi, but then maybe a Christmas special should be.
19 May 2021 at 05:53 #71700@janetteb As you say, the Moff is probably the only writer in NuWho who uses time travel to its full potential. Of course you can’t do that too much or too often or the hero could avoid every crisis by nipping back in time and subverting it. It does require very careful ‘book-keeping’ of who did what and when, and who knew about it, and careful plotting to make sure the audience can follow it. Maybe other writers just find that too hard and prefer to tell a linear story.
I think we also share the view that Big Bang didn’t have the force of the Pandorica episode, but of course that’s a hazard that writers always face. You have most of an episode to build up the situation, and only a few minutes to make it go away. So often the resolution doesn’t match the build-up.
(Also, you can’t make it too easy (‘with one bound, he was free’) or the audience will be annoyed that they put so much emotional investment into a phony predicament; and you can’t make it too hard, or tedious, or with too many losses, because that’s a bit negative and nobody watches escapist entertainment to be depressed. Now you *can* do either of those things, very rarely, and the rarity gives it shock value; but not too often.)
18 May 2021 at 13:17 #71698And, back to Doctor Who – The Big Bang – or is it back to The Eleventh Hour (seriously resisting an urge to cue up that episode and look for subtle changes). But the change comes soon enough – no stars. What *is* going on? Everything is slightly different. Fossilised Daleks in the museum. And young Amelia’s touch opens the museum Pandorica to reveal – Amy Pond. “Okay kid – this is where it gets complicated”. Moffat, I love you! Can’t say you didn’t give us fair warning 🙂
So then the Doctor (from the future) appears to Rory in 102 AD and gets Rory to release him from the Pandorica (you can do this stuff if you’re a time traveller). And puts Amy in it to keep her on ice for 2000 years. While Rory settles down to guard it.
So, back in the museum, we have happy reunions while the Doctor uses a vortex manipulator to dash all over the place setting things up. (Whatever happened to not crossing your own timeline? Or is that suspended now we’re in, presumably, an alternate universe? A virtual one? I dunno.
But then the Doctor virtually says as much. The universe is collpasing and reality is being rewritten. But how did the Doctor rescue River from the Tardis?
So then the Doctor flies the Pandorica into the exploding Tardis and re-seeds the Universe (or goes back in time to the Eleventh Hour, apparently the process looks the same). And then the Doctor disappears through the crack as it’s closing, the stars return, and now Amy has a mum and dad. I have to say her mum appears a lot more amiable than just about every other companion’s mum to date.
So then we have the long-delayed wedding. And Amy remembers the Doctor back into existence. That old rhyme about something old, new, borrowed and blue – of course that describes the Tardis! And Amy is very definitely in charge at her wedding.
Well, a very entertaining episode, it wasn’t quite as bullet-proof logical as Pandorica Opens. But given a bit of latitude (this si scifi, after all) I think it hangs together OK. But does this mean the universe now has been recreated entirely from ‘DNA’ traces of the old one left in the Pandorica plus Amy’s memory?
18 May 2021 at 13:12 #71697@janetteb @winston Well, none of my books are family heirlooms. All collected by me. I have a vague idea that I was a reluctant reader at first, but when I found how it was done and it was actually quite easy I became a compulsive reader. I read everything I could see, instruction manuals, the backs of corn flakes packets, everything. It was the equivalent of the Youtube rabbit hole. I eventually made a policy decision that I was *not* going to read some thing ‘just because it was there’. But the public library was like heaven for me, I visited at least once a week for years.
Oh, I do have just one of my father’s books – Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Fitzgerald’s slightly cynical/romantic view of life chimed with me – one of the few things I agreed with my father on. And I did like Thomas Hardy, though more for his countryside than his characters (this probably had a lot to do with the fact that we moved to NZ when I was about 14 and I was nostalgic for the ‘Wessex’ New Forest countryside).
17 May 2021 at 23:59 #71694@janetteb I’m like you, I collect books and have great trouble parting with them. I have an estimated 1500 books, some of which I treasure, most of which I will never read again. I am now very wary of buying books, I love browsing second-hand book shops but often come away empty because – unless a book *really* grabs me – I’ve got nowhere to put it.
Actually there’s a few hundred I could dispose of, but how? – I can’t bring myself to throw them away. Charity shops I guess. But trying to sort them out is doomed to failure, to quote one of the most apposite taglines I ever read, “No-one who can read is ever successful in cleaning out an attic”.
17 May 2021 at 14:13 #71692Okay, so this is going to be a long one…
I’m on to the Season 5 finale, and boy is this going to go with a bang (pun intended). The Pandorica Opens. I love these timey-wimey Moffatt puzzle-box episodes. AND episode-long arcs. And this one opens on full throttle – Vincent, Churchill, River Song in Stormcage, Liz 10 (yay! I *love* Sophie Okonedo), Maldovar, prehistory, Romans and Cleopatra (aka River Song) – and that’s just the pre-title sequence. Way to grab everyone’s attention!
So that’s quite a chain for the message to follow. As always, it becomes clearer on second watching. River Song is either the worst graffiti vandal in the Universe – because the cliff was unmarked before she graffitied it – or not a vandal at all, because after all it was just another cliff with no distinguishing features and was utterly without significance before she wrote a message on it.
Secret passages under Stonehenge (where else?), containing ancient magical boxes – Doctor Who outdoes Indiana Jones. And, I have to say, does it very well.
And I absolutely *love* the way the dialogue has the completely opposite sense, once you know the hidden meaning. “A nameless terrible thing, soaked in the blood of a billion galaxies, the most feared being in all the cosmos. And nothing could stop it or hold it or reason with it. One day it would just drop out of the sky and tear down your world”. Now I wonder who that could be? The Moff is teasing us!
And I burst out laughing at River’s “I hate good wizards in fairy tales, they always turn out to be him”. (Not this time, as it happens, but – spoilers).
Not sure how effective the Romans would be, but I do like the way River Song uses her gun, not to threaten the Romans, but to convince Caesar that she’s from a way more advanced culture and someone he should help. That’s seriously good.
AND daleks and cybermen. And it even gives us a new Cyberman horror trick – carnivorous Cyberheads that want to replace their used-up human brains with new ones, specifically Amy’s. And then, having failed, it shoots her with a Cyberdart – we haven’t seen the result of that yet.
And then we have the return of Rory, which the Doctor is initially too preoccupied even to notice is – odd. Rory isn’t a favourite of mine, but I like him here, notably his air of slightly sarcastic detachment while waiting for the penny to drop. I really feel for him when it becomes apparent Amy doesn’t remember him.
And the Tardis takes River Song to Amy’s house where she finds that all the Romans came out of Amy’s picture book. This is getting seriously weird. I do like the little touch that, while the Doc is talking to River, the Romans in the background are hefting the Cyber weapons. And then they turn into Autons. The whole scenario was a trap to attract the Doctor. And AutonRory can’t stop himself shooting Amy.
And – what a reversal – the Pandorica does not contain a deadly menace – yet. Every enemy race in the Universe has united to put the Doctor in it. Because – this is where the two stories come together – they have worked out that the Tardis will destroy the Universe and they think nullifying the Doctor will prevent that. Which it won’t, because River, but that’s not their fault.
And the Tardis explodes.
What an episode! As complicated as it could possibly get, this episode has everything. But unlike previous episodes that have everything and sadly demonstrate that ‘everything’ just diffuses the tension, this one uses all the elements and does it well. And it all hangs together, even the bits in the story that I had to back up and re-watch to get clear. If there are any big inconsistencies, they certainly weren’t apparent on a normal watch-through, which is all I require of an episode.
Now let’s see how The Big Bang resolves it.
15 May 2021 at 12:05 #71688@missrori Thanks for that! Still, sounds like it would be worth my while to pick up a copy of Twice Upon a Time to read for myself.
15 May 2021 at 10:11 #71686The Lodger.
Okay, I liked the touch that, at the end of the ep, the Doctor and Amy were setting up the scenario for the start of the episode. I wonder how often in his career the Doctor has had to do that? It’s just occurred to me that that would be an extremely useful ability in all sorts of occasions, say you’re – being chased by an assassin and you conveniently find a gun (never mind Thirteen’s odd phobia about the things) which you must remember to go back later and plant there for yourself to find at the crucial moment…
The Doctor was entertainingly awkward which verged into intensely annoying at times, I was expecting Craig to whack him one sooner or later. It was as if the Doc was trying to destroy Craig’s romance, or show him up in front of all his friends. People who pay their rent in advance with bagfuls of notes are entitled to a certain degree of slack, but there are limits. Actually, Craig’s inability to tell his girlfriend he loved her was extremely well written, and rather touching.
The idea of the ship patiently working its way through the entire human population, one by one, until it found a suitable ‘pilot’, is chilling but breath-takingly audacious. The idea that Craig’s disinclination to leave makes the ship give up and shut down is kind of absurd, and why would it release the Doctor for Craig? Unless having two candidates just confused it. Still, top marks to the actors and director for ‘selling’ it so well. This must be the first ship whose self-destruct didn’t vaporise everything for a thousand miles.
So, quite a pleasant interlude. Next, things get serious…
13 May 2021 at 00:38 #71682@nerys Thanks. That’s encouraging news.
I just got a booking for Mrs D, 31st of May. (The link they sent by text, spectacularly didn’t work, so I rang the booking helpline last night – “There are … 40 calls … ahead of you”. Ugh. Rang this morning, “99 calls”. Hung up. Tried a bit later, “125 calls” so I gritted my teeth, put the phone on speakerphone and got on with stuff, actually it only took about 20 minutes before I got through, they must have a lot of people on the phones, it isn’t just three guys in a call centre somewhere in Asia like the usual ‘helpline’ 🙂
12 May 2021 at 12:27 #71680Back to Who watching – Vincent and the Doctor
The Doctor is giving Amy the Grand Tour, and Amy can’t figure why. “These places you’re taking me, I think it’s suspicious”. “There’s nothing to be suspicious about”. “Okay, I was joking. Why aren’t you?” Amy’s pretty quick.
Always a pleasure to watch Bill Nighy at work, he just is the character. His encomiums of Vincent sound as if he really had been studying Van Gogh all his working life, rather than reading off a script a few days ago. (I wouldn’t have used a word like ‘encomium’ with any other actor 🙂
Of course, like with Shakespeare and Dickens, and Agatha Christie, the Doctor can’t resist dropping in as many references to Van Gogh’s work as he can fit in. Just personally, Van Gogh isn’t my favourite artist, I prefer my impressionists either more detailed like Monet or Turner, or the weird stylised geometric jungles of Henri Rousseau. (But then I much prefer Dali to Picasso, which just shows how much I know about art).
The monster is kind of naff. Though its apparent lack of effectiveness (for such a fearsome creature) is perfectly explained by the realisation that it’s blind. So that’s a potential plot hole neatly explained. I realised this better on a second viewing, in fact many episodes run smoother when re-viewed as the storyline becomes more familiar. (Didn’t help Cold Blood though).
So this doesn’t stick in my memory as a great episode, but a pleasant one to watch.
And – World Enough and Time. I’ve suddenly realised that one thing I thought was a bit shaky in World Enough and Time wasn’t an inconsistency at all, and was quite rational. I’d assumed that Moffat was playing fast-and-loose with the gravitational time dilation and the time it took for the ‘rescuers’ to arrive on the bridge, and besides, how could the bridge know they were coming if time on the bridge was running so slow?
But of course, electronic signals travel at the speed of light, 186,000 miles a second, many times faster than the fastest conceivable express lift. Suppose the ship is 200 miles long, and the fastest express lift takes 24 minutes (in normal gravity) to arrive. In normal gravity, the lift indicator at Floor 1 will show the lift leaving Floor 1056, 1.2 milliseconds after it actually does.
In the episode, allowing for the fact that things ‘below’ Floor 1 are moving proportionately faster (from Floor 1’s viewpoint), the lift itself may only take a few ‘Floor 1 minutes’ – but it doesn’t matter. The lift signal will still only have taken milliseconds – instantaneous for practical purposes.
In fact the lift indicator on Floor 1 will show the lift’s initial progress from Floor 1056 as virtually instantaneous (in Floor 1 time), but as the lift moves up it will appear to slow down until, by the time it approaches Floor 1, it’s doing normal express lift speed. From the point of view of the lift’s inhabitants, it will have taken exactly the standard 24 minutes. By the time they get back ‘home’, 50 (subjective) minutes later, maybe 20 years will have elapsed on Floor 1056.
If the bridge had CCTV on Floor 1056, they would see the inhabitants moving at super-speed, about 180,000 times normal.
So it all hangs together, NO timey-wimey fudging required!12 May 2021 at 08:27 #71679@winston I absolutely concur with all your comments to Blenkinsopthebrave. I hate needles too, since a painful experience when I was 5. I’ve got better over the years, and needles have got thinner. Here in NZ, vaccines for oldies has just started (border workers all done), the Health Department has left it to the district health boards to organise and some of them have made a right hash of it (that’s just bookings, no vaccines have been wasted). I believe the Health Dept is going to step in and set up a single system.
Anyway, Mrs D just got a text, “Book here: ” with a link that turned into a link-chasing farce. I’ll phone the booking help line tomorrow. Hopefully they get their system sorted out soon.
12 May 2021 at 05:45 #71678@missrori Hi, thanks for that. While I don’t usually bother with the books (the exception being The Day of the Doctor), I have to say I do like that story. It fits in with what I’d surmised and doesn’t do any violence to the TV storyline. It hadn’t occurred to me – but it’s obvious now you mentioned it – that if Bill was ‘collected’ after her life with Heather she’d have a huge lot of experiences unknown to the Doctor. Was there any information in respect to Clara’s voyaging with Me? – I assume (parallel with Bill) that they would have ‘collected’ her when the Time Lords eventually put her back in Raven Lane. I suppose though that Testimony would have edited her avatar too, back to the American Diner.
I might try looking for a few more of the books. I haven’t previously because I’ve usually found ‘the book of the film’ to be a disappointment, which is a natural statistical consequence of Sturgeon’s Law (95% of everything is junk). Since a film and a book are almost totally unrelated works, with usually only a theme and characters in common. Which means, if a film is exceptionally good (i.e. part of the top 5%), it has to be just a big coincidence if the book is also exceptionally good. And vice versa, great book, it’s unlikely the movie will be as good. BUT, Who could be an exception there. Worth a try.
11 May 2021 at 06:44 #71673Well, I just watched ‘Cold Blood’ (when I could find time in between cabride videos, Mrs D seems to have developed a taste for them – and *I’m* supposed to be the railway enthusiast 🙂 Usually I can ignore her choice of viewing and watch my laptop screen, but not when the Bernina Line is unfolding on the big screen).
Cold Blood – there was plenty of action, and some nice CGI, but – I don’t normally obsess over plot holes or characterisation, but there were enough to make me go ‘wait, where did that come from?’ repeatedly. I wrote a screed about it, and I could post it in the thread for that episode, but I notice, from the comments on Hungry Earth, that most of you seem to like the double ep and I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade, so I’ll just file it.
Vincent and the Doctor next – featuring a cameo by Bill Nighy which was, via a Youtube clip and comments on a different forum altogether, what got me re-interested in Who a couple of years ago, after I lost touch with the original on TV after Vampires of Venice a decade before.
11 May 2021 at 04:07 #71671@nerys You have my sympathy, I just hope your mini-lockdown works. And your vaccination programme. Here, we might be getting out first jab in a month – NZ has slipped down the list a bit for vaccine deliveries, but that’s okay because our quarantine is holding (so far) and I don’t think we (as a country) want to be seen as grasping.
I’m not surprised there are so many who won’t get the vaccine, there was a worryingly noisy anti-vax movement even before Covid came along. And there was (in the USA particularly) a huge reactionary element who detest authority, won’t do anything authority tells them to do, whether it’s wearing masks, social distancing, lockdowns or vaccination – even if that authority was, tardily, their erstwhile hero Trump. (Not that I’m suggesting in any way that your sister fits that description!)
I have to admit that I used to be a little bit unsure if vaccination was worth it, until the anti-vax movement made me think about it and I swung firmly in favour of vaccination (I guess I’m a bit contrarian too 🙂
I’d be nervous if I were in Indiana – I doubt their percentage of vaccination is high enough yet to break the chain of infection (but I’m no epidemiologist).
I’d love to see Covid under control – I’d like to travel to Europe again before I’m finally too geriatric, and there’s nothing delights me more than driving from one country to another with no formalities, past a closed and deserted Customs post – Schengen is great 🙂 But I don’t think we’ll get that until the whole world is vaccinated – this is definitely a case where ‘enlightened self-interest’ dictates that we help the poorer countries. Unless we want quarantine to be a permanent feature of the world, and nobody wants that.10 May 2021 at 06:31 #71669@winston @janetteb @blenkinsopthebrave Well, I met Mrs D 42 years ago, give or take a year (she’d know the exact date, and could probably reel off the entire guest list – she has a memory like an FBI database when it comes to people. She has been known to remind me of old acquaintances of mine that I’ve forgotten and she met just once, decades ago). We got married five years later, because we seemed to be compatible and couldn’t really see any reason not to, but after we’d bought a house, because the price of houses was going up faster than the price of weddings.
She’s the gardener, she loves dahlias, and so do I, they flower twice a year in the Auckland climate, and (aside from the gorgeous flowers) they have lovely thick bushy foliage. My contribution is ‘staking’ them which sort of appeals to my mechanical/DIY instincts and allows me to feel useful. Things grow like crazy in the Auckland climate. One of my other jobs is hunting down and removing Madeira vine and moth plant which grow like rockets and would smother our trees if left for a few months.
I’m about to watch Cold Blood (I was due to watch last night, but I put on a random Youtube railway ‘cabride’ video on the TV for background relaxation while I did stuff, and Mrs D came in and started watching it while it still had two hours (!) to go. If I wasn’t a railway nut I would find watching the track go by rather slowly, quite mind-numbingly boring, but Mrs D finds interest in all sorts of things, and she loves tunnels. I really couldn’t demand that she stop it, so I had to watch too. (Yes ‘cabride’ videos really are a thing).
9 May 2021 at 11:31 #71664@janetteb Well, our press isn’t marvellous, but it’s certainly better than the worst of the British or US gutter press (i.e. Murdoch). There used to be a paper called ‘NZ Truth’ that was notorious for its sensationalist headlines, but now that anyone can get free Internet porn, there’s no longer any mileage in ‘Gay priest alleged father of stripper’s baby’ or such, and it mercifully folded. Apparently Murdoch owns 15% of the NZ Herald, which makes me nervous but doesn’t seem to be enough for him to have ruined the paper yet.
I got tested and it wasn’t Covid. I got up to ‘The Hungry Earth’ a week ago, so now my ‘new’ Thinkpad is set up to my liking I’ll watch ‘Cold Blood’ on it. So I’m somewhere about the same place (or at least the same dynasty of companions) as you are.
-
AuthorPosts
