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Let’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.

 

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A 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.

 

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Rose 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.

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This 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.

 

 

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@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.

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@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   🙂

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@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.

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@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.

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Day 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.

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And 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).

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Okay, 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.

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@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.)

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And, 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?

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@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).

 

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@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”.

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Okay, 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.

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@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.

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The 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…

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@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’  🙂

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Back 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!

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@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.

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@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.

 

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Well, 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.

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@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.

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@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).

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@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.

 

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@janetteb    To be fair to docnerd, it was me who first mentioned that some of us are ‘pretty old’.   (Bearing in mind that I think docnerd is quite young, and to a teenager, thirty is ‘old’).   As Macca rightly said, age doesn’t matter when we’re discussing Doctor Who.   But I think it may just affect our style of communication.

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Well Mrs D and I had our flu jabs on Tuesday (covid jabs might be a month or two away).   And it’s near the end of summer, yesterday instead of driving out to Piha for a swim, I just went for a walk along below the Manukau harbour cliffs – only possible at half tide or below, but it’s my usual winter walk on fine days.   And today Mrs D and I suddenly came down with a severe case of what is probably flu – I went for a covid test and currently awaiting the result, but I’d put money on it being negative.   So at the moment we’re sniffing and suffering.   Not watching a lot of Doctor Who, I bought a ‘new(er)’ second-hand Thinkpad a couple of weeks ago and installed Linux on it, and it’s a slightly unusual combination of hardware and software that struck a couple of hiccups, so I’ve been re-learning all sorts of interesting things about how the setup works.   Which it finally successfully does, so I can revert to watching Who DVD’s.

We (NZ) have a slightly fragile quarantine-free ‘travel bubble’ with Australia, subject to suspension if there’s an outbreak (in fact it’s currently paused for 48 hours due to a couple of cases in NSW).   And also about to have a ‘travel bubble’ with the Cook Islands, which will massively help their economy.

In other news, our PM Jacinda just announced an approximate wedding date ‘some time next summer’.   Mild surprise, I’d sort of vaguely assumed she was probably married, but for some reason I’m amused by the fact that our PM for the last few years has been an unmarried mum.   I do like the fact that nobody cares.

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Put it this way, I saw the first episode of Doctor Who when it screened.   And I don’t mean ‘Rose’, I mean the original with Hartnell.   Though I didn’t really have much interest at the time, I watched intermittently, through Troughton to the start of the Pertwee years, and then just stopped.   (In those days there was no Internet to keep in touch, and not even VHS tapes, it was a matter of catch-the-episode-when-it-screened or never.   Home video (“VHS”)  in 1980 was a revolution in that you could *record a program off TV and keep it forever*, and you could rent or buy movies on VHS.    So you could watch whenever you wanted.   All the format changes since have just been improvements on the same).

But I didn’t really start watching Who seriously until ‘Rose’ aired, a while later.

I don’t recall a lot about the early Hartnell eps, other than that – at one point –  the ‘future’ troops were brandishing World-War-1 vintage Broomhandle Mausers complete with their clip-on wooden stocks, which someone in the art department obviously thought looked futuristic enough in 1960.

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@docnerd223 If you want an ongoing real-time chat, I don’t think this forum is like that. We tend to let some time elapse between posts, not least because we’re in different time zones. I think most of us have other hobbies and do many other things. And many of us are pretty old. So if you’re looking for a high-energy busy group to belong to, this probably isn’t it. It isn’t really a matter of anyone ‘accepting’ you, as much as, if you post something (preferably Who-related, though we all stray from that at times) which interests people enough to reply to or comment on. But don’t hold your breath waiting for an answer 🙂

Nobody’s going to tell you you don’t ‘belong’, or criticise your Doctor Who knowledge 🙂 I was a newbie a few months back too. Whether this is the forum you’re looking for is for you to decide.

I hope I’ve summed it up fairly, don’tknow if anyone else wants to comment?

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@docnerd223   Day’s going okay, didn’t get a lot done, it’s almost time for the 6 o’clock news.   I’m in New Zealand, it’s about the end of a remarkably long summer (the water was warm enough to swim up until May Day, which is extraordinary).   And we’re one lucky place in the world that’s almost Covid-free, I guess you could class us as relieved but nervous.

There are quite a few Canadians on this site, at least one Aussie, not sure where everyone else is from.

To return to Doctor Who, my favourite doctor is Capaldi.   Tennant was good, though he got a bit emotional towards the end.   Matt Smith struck me initially as too young and confused, I thought he’d never replace Tennant, but I soon got used to him.   And probably my favourite episode is the Day of the Doctor, with the two of them (and John Hurt, and Rose aka The Moment).

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@docnerd223     Hi docnerd    ‘On the sofa’ is, in theory, for general chat about Doctor Who.   ‘The kebab and calculator’ is for general chat about everything else.    That’s as I understand it.   In practice, discussions stray all over the place, I’ve never seen anyone admonished for going Off Topic.    There are also forums for specific episodes, listed on the main page.

This isn’t a very busy site, sometimes days go by with no posts.    So if you want to post something, I’m sure it would be welcomed.

 

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@janetteb    Two months – that’s serious. I’d start getting restive after a couple of weeks.

I was in a one-bed ward (i.e. private room). I could have had the operation for free on the NHS, I ‘went private’ because (a) I had my own health insurance which would pay $35k of the $42k total cost, the remaining $7k was just affordable for me, (b) I didn’t have to join a waiting list, I could schedule the op for when I wanted (I chose August, so I’d be recovered by the spring), and (c) it freed up a place for someone else on the list. So win-win. And (d), my one ‘luxury’, I paid $1k extra for a single room, rather than a twin room. I was actually more apprehensive about sharing a room with someone who might be a rugby fanatic or a devotee of soaps or sitcoms or (shudder) ‘reality TV’, than I was about the operation. (Just to clear up one point, the standard of care was not a consideration, heart ops here are done by the same specialist surgeons whether in public or private hospital).

I can absolutely share your feelings about being stuck in a ward of old people, specially in those early hours of the morning when you can’t get to sleep and the night seems to last forever.

And public televisions – I dislike them too. Usually they’re just loud enough to be a nuisance, without being audible. They’re very rarely showing anything I want to watch (Sturgeon’s Law applies – 95% of anything is rubbish) and if it *is* a program I want to watch there are far too many interruptions in a public setting. Muzak, on the other hand, I’m more tolerant of, since I can usually mentally tune it out and it occasionally reminds me of a good old song that I can then track down on Youtube and rip to a mp3 for my player.

Unlike you, I did grow up with TV (two channels) and it was kind of magical, at least for a while. But I soon got picky about it, I spent more time reading books (books are the ultimate in pickiness, I never have to read a book I don’t like). The trip through your grandmother’s garden sounds magical to me, I used to love ‘jungles’ when I was a kid in England. Anyway, now I really only watch the news and The Chase on TV, Mrs D watches indiscriminately while I jam on headphones and watch DVD’s or Youtube on my laptop. Interesting how the 60’s vision of the whole family gathered round the TV set soon degenerated into a battle over the remote, from which we have now been rescued by personal electronic devices. And the bane of public transport in the 60’s, loud transistor radios, has been mercifully silenced by headphones and earpods. Sometimes technology does cure its own ills.

 

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@janetteb You summed up the Covid situation well, for us in NZ too. In normal times, the couple of lockdowns we’ve had would count as exceptional circumstances, but compared with the rest of the world they’re trivial. So long as our quarantine holds…     Mrs D and I, being old like, will probably be due for vaccination in a month or so, apparently.

I don’t know about you in Oz, but here in NZ our summer has lasted absurdly long. Now it’s getting a bit cold at night, air’s cool but the sun is warm, on Saturday – May Day – I went to the beach and had probably my last swim of the year. I usually start swimming just before Christmas, the water doesn’t get really warm until February, and usually lasts till about Easter. Well this year it was warm until last week, which is ridiculous.   On Saturday it had finally dropped back to about what it was at Christmas. Which is extraordinary.

 

 

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@janetteb   I agree with all of that.   And that World Enough and Time / The Doctor Falls are the darkest episodes.    (Heaven Sent was possibly even darker but it had a triumphant ending).   I got the exact same feeling from the episodes, of trapped helplessness.   That’s why I prefer Hell Bent as my favourite finale, even though Clara was dead, the tone was much lighter.

Except, my personal experience of hospital was the opposite of yours.   I’ve only been in once, for a week, for a heart operation a decade ago (which was completely successful, I’m still here and still functioning).   And it was a pleasant experience.   No I’m not some weird masochist, in fact I used to be terrified of visiting the dentist.   But I only have one vague memory of discomfort, when I momentarily half-woke up thirsty in the middle of the night of the operation with tubes stick down my throat.    For the rest, I just had a week of lying on my back in bed, in a warm bright room, mostly listening to CD’s – I had books to read if I wanted but I never roused the energy, and a TV which I never switched on.   And the great thing was, for possibly the only time in my working life, I could just lie there without any guilty feeling that I should be doing something productive.  Doubtless the paracetamol helped me to relax.   So this was really a very pleasant interlude – obviously I was lucky.

I do get occasional nightmares about being trapped in various weird situations – but not hospitals.

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Hi Declan @oochillyo   World Enough and Time / The Doctor Falls

Well I’m pleased you liked those eps. It’s about six months since I watched them but I can still remember them pretty well. So all this is from memory.

Right at the start I thought it was going to be a really fun episode, with Missy at her best – right up to the moment Bill got a hole blown in her. That was a hell of a shock. Then it went very dark. Good, but dark. Especially when it became gradually more apparent that Bill was not going to be magically fixed 100%. I think I suspected she was going to be turned into a Cyberman but it was still a shocking moment when that was confirmed – I was still desperately hoping she would somehow be rescued in the nick of time like in every single adventure drama ever. I think that was, quite possibly, the darkest moment in all of Dr Who.

Now, the Mondasian Cybermen – when I saw stills from the original OldWho ep, I thought they had to be the lamest, most unconvincing ‘monsters’ ever, they were only too obviously human actors in cloth helmets. But World Enough and Time turned them into the most convincing, most frightening ‘monsters’ of all, precisely *because* they were made-over humans. All kudos to Moffatt and the costume department for the transformation. And it was all done with the very best of intentions.

In The Doctor Falls, it was tragic how Bill still saw herself as Bill and everyone else just saw the Cyberman. And even though they accepted that CyberBill was on their side, they were still creeped out by her.

Missy and the Master – I must admit I was pleased when Missy finally decided to side with the Doctor, and shocked when the Master shot her (okay, he was provoked) – Missy, you really should be more careful! I found it tragic that the Doctor would never know what Missy decided or how she died.

And this was the Doctor, almost out of options, with the Tardis out of reach, in a hopeless situation, where he couldn’t pull off some incredibly clever move to save the day for all. All he could do was buy a little time for a few people. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the Doctor so powerless.

And – then the Doctor died, far from his Tardis. And it looked like really the end for 12. And then a miracle happened – Heather! I was shocked (again!), surprised and delighted at this. I absolutely love it when the writers set something up, they tell us pretty explicitly what they’re going to do, and then, several episodes later, when everyone’s completely forgotten about it – they do it! Or in this case, Heather’s obsession with following Bill across the universe was well explored in The Pilot – does anyone doubt that Heather was keeping tabs on Bill and saw this as a final chance to rescue her?

By the way, I don’t see Testimony (in Twice Upon a Time, having acquired all Bill’s memories) as invalidating this. Any more than their possession of Clara’s memories – which they restored to the Doctor – invalidates Clara’s saga with Me in their Tardis, heading back to Gallifrey by the scenic route. In either case, Testimony could have extracted their memories, either milliseconds before they were intercepted by the Time Lords and Heather respectively, or after, when the Time Lords finally returned Clara and the Bill-Heather hybrid finally expired of some unknown cause.

 

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@oochillyo   Nothing secret about it, it’s not a matter of what I’m ‘allowed’ to say, and you can certainly ask.

If you look at Kaylee402’s only post, she is advertising and linking to a site where nursing students can pay to get someone else to write their assignments for them.   I believe this is considered cheating (by the students).   But anyway, nothing to do with Doctor Who.

If you click on her profile, she became a registered member and instantly posted that.    Hence my conclusion.

Cheers

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@craig  – another spambot for you, Kaylee402 on General Open Thread – TV shows

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Well, I just watched The Hungry Earth
Very intriguing moment with future Amy&Rory waving from the distance. Did that ever pay off? – I think it just got forgotten. That isn’t really an inconsistency – they had plenty of time between episodes to have wandered past there some time in the future – but it would have been interesting to see when it cropped up.
Rory is really being a bit of a drag at the start of the ep.
The drill at 21km is – improbable. The Kola borehole reached its practical limit at 12km due to heat and pressure.
The earth swallowing things up is marvellously spooky, it was a bit of an anticlimax that it was just people (well Silurians) doing it.
I like Nasreen (though I thought her sudden enthusiasm for travelling with the Doctor showed a remarkable intuition, but was a bit unexpected in the middle of a crisis). Her question after the Tardis fell to the Silurian tunnels – ‘why aren’t we burning alive?’ – is (finally) an acknowledgement of geotechnical physics.
I didn’t like Alaya and certainly didn’t like Ambrose. And what’s with this obsession humans and Silurians have with dissecting each other, other than low-budget horror?

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@oochillyo

Okay, provisionally.   (I have to say ‘provisionally’ because our young nephew is staying with us, he might want to go to the beach – insanely, the water is *still* beautifully warm, latest in the season I’ve ever known before it drops off towards winter.   Or Mrs D might want me to drive them somewhere.   However, I should be able to find a couple of hours somewhere in the day to watch a couple of episodes – I think you were talking about the Hungry Earth 2-parter?   (Next on my rewatch list).

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@macca   Well, speaking as one whose favourite Doctor is Capaldi, if I had to make a list of the best Capaldi episodes – for me – it would be pretty much the list you gave to Declan  (with the exception of Empress of Mars which doesn’t really float my boat).   Though I might add Listen, Flatline, and the Monks trilogy.

But I’ve found – starting my re-watch at Season 5 – that even the episodes that don’t really stand out (and that I’d skip instantly if someone ‘rationed’ me to the best 20 or even best 50) – are really quite watchable.   There are very few, of any season, that I can’t be bothered to watch.   I think it was the Moff who said “You’ve got to keep giving the viewers something to keep them interested every five minutes” (or something of the sort) – and he does.

(The reason I re-started at Eleventh Hour and not Rose is that I’ve watched Seasons 1-4 many times.   There used to be a video store – a Blockbuster Video franchise in Newmarket, Auckland near where I worked – that specialised in ‘cult’ TV series, particularly sci-fi – Who, Farscape, Trek (of course), Battlestar Galactica (old and Gino), Firefly, Red Dwarf, Blakes 7, The Prisoner etc etc.   But eventually, tragically, it closed, somewhere about the end of Tennant.    So I’d only seen a  couple of Fifth season eps on TV and then I lost track of it.   It was only a couple of years ago that a post online drew my attention to it again – it was actually a clip of Bill Nighy as curator in Vincent and the Doctor – and I decided to buy the DVD series and catch up.   Which I did to the end of Series 11.   Not sure if I’ll bother with Series 12.)

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@oochillyo   I’m sorry, I think I missed that.   Was that your 8-37am or pm?   (12.17 pm here)

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@oochillyo   Correct, but at the moment (due to Summer Time or somesuch) we’re just 11 hours ahead, i.e. our 8pm is your 9am.   I could do  6pm till 3am (NZ time) – that is, 7am to 4pm UK time.   I could also do midday till 6pm (11pm to 7am  UK time) if I’m not out of the house.

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@oochillyo   Fine but – please excuse my ignorance – how do you mean ‘watch some Doctor Who with you’?    I had imagined that we would just post our impressions of the episode here and comment on each other’s but there may be other ways to do it.   Also, I’m in New Zealand so there’s probably a time difference (I can’t recall where you are?)

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Okay, I just watched Amy’s Choice.   Don’t have a lot to say.   It sort of proved Amy loves Rory, but since Rory is a bit of a dork that doesn’t really thrill me.   Maybe it was compensating for Amy throwing herself at the Doc in ‘Meanwhile in the Tardis’   (which was a very funny three-minute extra).   The two scenarios – the cold star and the village full of really creepy aliens-inhabiting-old-folks – were really quite good.    But they were both just – the Doc on magic mushrooms?   I’m not usually disconcerted by ‘reset buttons’ but this one made the ep fall flat, for me.

@oochillyo   So, I’m on to The Hungry Earth next.

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@macca Well, my favourite Doctor is 12 (Capaldi), but I like all the previous NuWho doctors back to 9 (and also the War Doctor and Eight – though I’ve only seen him in the ‘The Night of the Doctor’ special). The only oldWho I’ve seen recently was Seven (McCoy), but he’s good too. (I saw a few Hartnells and Troughtons when they first screened, but that was a looong time ago). My favourite companion is Clara, and Rose, though I do like most of the rest back as far as Ace (pity Seven and Ace didn’t get to have more adventures).
So we disagree a little on that. But we agree (unfortunately) on Chibnall. When he started he said he wasn’t going to bring back any old monsters, so instead we got – toothface Tim Shaw, and the p’ting, and a talking frog (okay, the frog was cool in a weird sort of way, but I like frogs). And now I gather for Season 12 (haven’t watched it) he brought a swag of them back – but I’m not sure that’s a good thing unless the writing improves. Which I don’t think he’s capable of.

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@oochillyo   Well, the Dickens story ‘The Signal Man’ is online at the link I mentioned, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1289  (combined with two other Dickens horror stories).

I first read of the Beult viaduct accident of 1865 in ‘Red For Danger’ by L T C Rolt, a classic history of British railway accidents and the development of safety measures like signalling.   It was written in 1955 but still highly readable today (I  have a copy but I can still recall chunks of it from memory).  Rolt’s style is good, not too technical, it explains any technicalities in layman’s terms.   It was a popular book, published in hardback and paperback, if you come across it in a book sale for a few dollars it’d be well worth buying.

Also Wikipedia has a page on the accident –  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staplehurst_rail_crash

If Unquiet Dead was 1869, that would fit better with Dickens’ life.   I believe Dickens died in 1870.   I seem to recall (from when I watched the episode) there was some sort of reference or implication of Dickens being later on in his life.

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@oochillyo

Unquiet Dead – just the third ever NuWho episode. I was amused by the Doc calling Rose ‘Barbarella’ – that was a campy movie, the sci-fi equivalent of a spaghetti Western. But anyway, as Rose, observed, we can never visit the past (the Doctor can).

(As an aside, I was watching a video in which Brian Cox was answering questions about cosmology and someone asked if time travel was possible and he answered with a flat ‘No’ as far as the past is concerned. Not just practically possible, but physically impossible. He isn’t usually so dogmatic. But – going backwards in time would violate causality, which means the physical laws of the Universe would break down (that’s as I understand the point). Same for faster-than-light travel. But never mind, this is science fiction where anything is possible…)

I have to say, my respect for Dickens went up a lot after this episode, purely as a result of the actor playing him. When I was at school I loathed Dickens, simply because we *had* to read him. (Not nearly as much as I detested Graham Greene, though). Shakespear was okay, because – though his English was much more archaic than Dickens – his works being screenplays were much more concise than Dickens’ florid style. But Dickens was a massively popular writer – his stories were serialised in weekly magazines I believe.

Dickens’ short story ‘The Signal Man’ (which the Doctor calls ‘best short story ever written’) was okay, but it could still have done with a good editing. (Available online here: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1289 ) It probably appealed more to me because it was about railways.

(Dickens was actually involved in a train crash – on the South Eastern Railway in 1865. A crew were replacing a rail on the Beult viaduct, a low viaduct near Staplehurst, the foreman had consulted the timetable but had misread the time of the boat train, which ran at irregular times (dictated by the tides). There was a man with a red flag, supposed to be 1000 yards ahead, but he had estimated the distance by counting telegraph poles which were unusually closely spaced at this location and was only 550 yards away – not far enough. The train ran over the side of the viaduct and was wrecked. A number of people were killed, but not Dickens or his mistress or her mother. (His mistress – Dickens you old dog! I would never have guessed.))

Unquiet Dead was ostensibly set in 1860, which doesn’t quite work – The Signal Man was first published in 1866 (and probably based on the Clayton Tunnel collision of 1861). But Dickens doesn’t query the Doctor’s mention of it. Maybe the Tardis got its dates a few years late, after all it was supposed to be going to Naples, not Cardiff. What intrigues me – in real-world terms – is whether Dickens wrote The Signal Man just before, or just after, his own terrible experience of the Beult viaduct crash. I tend to think he must have written it before, and it wasn’t published until afterward.

Okay, back to Who – I did really like Gwyneth. Interesting that she could read Rose’s mind. And nicely written that her adventurous spirit was clashing with her brainwashed Victorian morality. It’s hard for us to comprehend how limited (in distance) people’s lives were just 100 years before we (oldies) were born – nowhere in England is more than 60 miles from the sea and yet there were people living in the 1860’s who had never, ever seen it. The advent of railways was changing that so fast, not just for the upper-middle-class like Dickens but for the working classes too.

Certainly a very watchable episode for NuWho’s first foray into the past.

Oh, and – Who producers – given Dickens’ penchant for rail travel (at least before 1865), and Queen Victoria’s, and the fact that Britain is peppered with preserved railways only too eager to rent out their trains and lovely old locomotives of whatever period – howcome you’ve never ever shown a vintage train?    (Orient Express in space doesn’t count).

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Speaking of which – Helen McCrory, who played Rosanna Calvierri, has, sadly, just died.   It was on our evening news ten minutes ago (though they didn’t mention her role in Doctor Who).

(Would you believe this – I’m just watching the commentary for Vampires of Venice and one of the commentors mentions how good Helen was.   That is, Helen McCrory.    And then I finally ‘clicked’.   I can notice a fact if you wave it in front of me often enough).

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Hi Declan @oochillyo

First, spoilers – I’m not sure if there’s a website policy on spoilers (other than current episodes). Maybe I should have been declaring ‘Spoilers’ before I talked about past episodes – I haven’t been doing so. Can anyone clarify? (In NZ, I regard everything as a spoiler – for example Xena, even though it was filmed here, at one point there was a 2-year hiatus between seasons screened here, so *everything* online was a spoiler).

But anyway, I don’t think there’s any problem with discussing episodes in this thread, but if you’re not sure just put a spoiler warning.

Face the Raven – I can’t remember where I posted about it, but I’d be very happy to discuss it. One of my favourite episodes, even though tragic. Just go ahead with your comments.

Vampires of Venice – my, you do analyse episodes carefully, don’t you? I hadn’t noticed those plot points. Apparently all the Saturnyn women died escaping the cracks, leaving only the Queen, her son, and all the males. I’m guessing now, but maybe only Francesco’s blood can convert human women into Saturnyn brides. Presumably the Queen’s can’t because she’s female, and all the Saturnyn males can’t because they’re not royal. They could breed with human->Saturnyn women, but not ‘create’ them. (This doesn’t make sense in human terms, but gender and reproduction work very differently in other species – consider bees, or hyenas). So when Amy killed Francesco they couldn’t make any more, and Isabella’s father blew up the ones they had. Why the Queen couldn’t mate with some of the males I don’t know, maybe she’s too old as you said (it happens) – and no, cancel that, I’ve just read the website (tardis.fandom.com – excellent site). It’s simpler than I thought. Because Rosanna’s perception filter was jammed (as a result of Amy kicking it – good shot Amy!) she couldn’t turn it off, so the male Saturnyn’s couldn’t tell who she was, took her for human, and instead of mating they ate her.

As for other branches of the Saturnyn race on other planets, maybe Rosanna had lost touch with them so didn’t know if they had survived, maybe she was exaggerating when she said the Doctor had killed their race. I just see that as a minor inconsistency.

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