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@janetteb @oochillyo

There are some interesting points in this conversation you’re having.

@janetteb I thought Mickey was a bit of a drip, though he did improve a bit as time went on. But the companion’s boyfriend never had an easy ride in Nu Who – Mickey, Rory, Danny Pink. Hint to guys – if your girlfriend starts travelling with the doctor, just find another girl, it’ll save you a lot of grief in the long run.

I’m always *very* reticent about watching a TV show with anyone who isn’t a fan, I’m nervous they’re not going to like it and that does destroy the enjoyment for me. And I don’t like reading bad reviews for the same reason, though I don’t mind arguing with other fans because, I suppose, they’ve also made the implicit commitment to follow the series so they’re not going to laugh at me for liking Who (or whatever).

I do like Army of Ghosts / Doomsday, even though it’s tragic and marks the loss of Rose, who is one of my favourite companions. Because I’m okay with sad, if it’s well done. And I think this is the first episode where a voice-over was used – that can be very effective, if used sparingly. It certainly was effective here – Rose (Voice over:) “But then came the army of ghosts. Then came Torchwood and the War. And that’s when it all ended. This is the story of how I died.” That really makes you sit up and pay attention. And I loved the pissing contest between the Cybermen and the Daleks – “Daleks, be warned. You have declared war upon the Cybermen.” “This is not war. This is pest control.”
The last few seconds of Doomsday, I’m afraid, permanently prejudiced me against Donna. I know it was just a teaser for Runaway Bride, but I wish they hadn’t done it. The Doctor has just farewelled Rose and just faded before he could say ‘I love you’ and he’s grieving – and then this strident angry woman shatters the mood. First impressions sometimes count for a lot and unfortunately, in Donna’s case, they’re appalling – a Dalek would not have been more unwelcome.

Season 2 was OK for me – a mix of weak and strong episodes. The Girl in the Fireplace (another sad but excellent ep), The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit, where Rose saved the day at the last moment, Army of Ghosts / Doomsday – all strong episodes. The Idiot’s Lantern, Love & Monsters, Fear Her aren’t up to much (IMO), though I found Love & Monsters reasonably entertaining and not nearly as bad as its reputation. And the first four eps – Christmas Invasion through to School Reunion – were fairly good. It was in School Reunion that the Doctor said the memorable phrase, “You get one warning. That was it.” The full quote is, “I’m so old now. I used to have so much mercy. You get one warning. That was it.” I love the understated menace in that.
(I thought it was in Christmas Invasion but Grepping** tells me it was actually in School Reunion. I just use the command “grep ‘You get one’ * ” in my transcripts directory. It searches through all the files in the directory for the phrase “You get one” and prints the filename and the line of text. ‘grep’ stands for ‘get regular expression’, an old Unix/Linux utility, I think you can get it for Windows too. I’ve got all the transcripts from Chatokeya.net which is a marvellous site saved on my hard drive, it makes finding a quote very quick and easy).

 

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So far as I can tell, this is the most appropriate forum to discuss episodes. (Though people seem to ramble all over the place, and I’m as guilty as anyone).

Flesh and Stone – I’m continuing my trip through Season 5. A Time of Angels was a cracking episode, and this second half keeps it up. First time I saw it I was a little confused about the storyline, but this time round I could follow it OK. The Moff was really piling on the hazards here – Angels, being trapped in the corridor, having to kill the lights, Amy’s count-down, having to keep her eyes shut, the crack in the universe… the sequence where Amy had to walk blind through the Angels and they were starting to realise she couldn’t see them was genuinely scary.
The Angels falling into the crack as the ship’s gravity failed was convenient but quite a legitimate plot point – that was well set up ahead of time but it caught me by surprise just like it did the Angels. Because they could move so fast in the dark one tended to forget they were subject to gravity too.
It’s being established there’s something odd about Amy – she can’t remember earlier Earth events, but when the troopers fall into the crack – which causes their mates to forget they ever existed – Amy still does remember.
Also notable for Amy coming on to the Doctor at the end (and in the short ‘Meanwhile in the Tardis’). I don’t find this odd – she’s just barely survived a terrifying experience, she’s getting married in the morning which is an alarmingly ordinary prospect (particularly since Rory probably talked her into it), not entirely surprising she wants a final fling with the madman with a magic box who saved her life. What’s funny is Amy’s determination and the Doctor’s bashful refusal to understand what she’s aiming at. I don’t think I’d have the Doctor’s strength of resistance.

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@winston I agree about Holmes and Watson should be British males. But I’m not ‘protective’ of the Doctor in that sense that I require him(/her) to be a certain character. Since the Doctor regenerates into a whole new person there’s nothing to protect. What I do want is that the new Doctor be an interesting strong character (and, I guess, not break continuity with any previous incarnation, which should be fairly easy to not do, but I think Chibnall failed to not do it). But I’m afraid Jodie Whittaker just doesn’t ‘work’ for me.

Incidentally, I tend to like Bond movies better when they’ve got a strong female lead to match Bond – such as Die Another Day (Halle Berry) and Tomorrow Never Dies (Michelle Yeoh) – both kick-ass (as well as eye candy). Having a strong female co-lead actually adds a lot of interest to the story, for me.

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@janetteb Well, as to James Bond, I guess you’re right and continuity of the main character is a lost cause (though Mrs D still refers to Sean Connery as ‘James Bond’). Talking of actors who didn’t ‘fit’, (I know you were talking about the Doctor but I’m applying it here), Sean Connery fitted perfectly, George Lazenby (who only did one) for some reason didn’t fit very well, and Roger Moore didn’t fit at all, he was far too debonair and lightweight and the series degenerated from a slick spy thriller into a camp comedy caper. Later on, when Moore got a bit older and acquired a few lines on his face, he improved markedly, just before he was replaced.

Though of course The Avengers did replace their female lead with Emma Peel (Diana Rigg). (Oh, I just did a quick Google and had to revise that! John Steed’s first notable partner was Cathy Gale (Honor Blackman) who started the whole leather-clad action thing. Then, well into the run, she was replaced by Emma Peel, who continued in the same style. And later on, Emma Peel was replaced by Tara King (Linda Thorson). Though I think, for most people, Emma Peel will always be the classic Avengers girl.
But anyway, Avengers did explain those changes in the plot, so continuity was preserved.

Back to the Doctor – I’ve never seen Sacha Dhawan so can’t comment, I’m sure you’re right 🙂 Of course they managed to work around Peter Capaldi’s previous appearance, but that was quite a long time gap (6 years, or 2000, according to how you count it) and they did put in a little reference to explain it, not that it mattered much. Didn’t it also happen to Martha Jones (Freema Agyeman)? But transmuting from The Master might be a bit too hard to explain. For the exact same reason Michelle Gomez could not have become the Doctor. (And of course Sophie Okonedo would have needed some explaining too, but probably manageable).

It’s just occurred to me (though it must have become painfully obvious to casting directors) that a long-running TV series like Dr Who has such a vast appetite for ‘secondary’ characters that the pool of ‘unused’ actors becomes seriously depleted. It certainly happened here in NZ where I guess the number of actors is much less, over the course of a series like Hercules/Xena some extras racked up half-a-dozen different roles (I think the record was ten). That’s speaking parts, crowd scenes didn’t count.

 

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@pezwf

Okay, I’ll pick that one up, cautiously.

First, I like every Doctor from McCoy through to Capaldi. (I thought McCoy looked silly in still photos, but after seeing him in The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot I watched his last three stories and I thought he was good. Great chemistry with Sophie Aldred. And I thought Matt Smith looked too foolish initially, but he rapidly grew on me).

I don’t think the Doctor “needs” to be female, or black, or white male for that matter. In fact I distrust people who say someone else “needs” to do something, I think they’re just projecting their feelz as an imperative onto everybody else.

Roles like, say, the next James Bond should – I think – continue to be white and male for simple continuity reasons. (For strict continuity he should still be played by Sean Connery, of course). Changing his colour/gender is just too much of a jump. Invent a new spy if that’s required. Halle Berry or Michelle Yeoh could play them.

But the Doctor and his regenerations is, almost uniquely, the one case where the ‘continuity’ consideration does not apply. So a black/female Doctor can fit perfectly well in my opinion. I do think there’s a certain amount of ‘wokeness’ (ugh) operating, in that the Doctor’s been white male for so long, there’s a feeling it’s about time blacks/females got their turn, which is fair enough. I’d be annoyed if there was one obviously best choice who happened to be a white male and who was bypassed for an inferior choice just for that reason, but I can’t suggest anyone who ‘owns’ the role so I can’t cavil.

That said, I just do not like Chibnall’s writing or Whittaker’s interpretation of the Doctor. It seems to be the case that Chibnall wanted to do everything differently and Whittaker never watched any previous Doctor Who, and it shows. No presence, no underlying depth of character, no menace. (Disclaimer: That’s based on Season 11, haven’t watched 12 yet).

If I had to suggest an actor off the top of my head, I’d say how about Sophie Okonedo (Liz 10 from The Beast Below). She looks like she absolutely could kick ass. But I’m sure there are dozens of actors of any colour/gender who could do a perfectly good job given decent writing and direction.

 

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@janetteb The Piano was at Karekare, which is the next significant beach south of Piha. Hercules and Xena and most other productions use Bethells Beach, 5 miles north of Piha. Piha tends to not be used so much because it’s the busiest settlement, however I have come across filming activity at The Gap and also at the far north end of Piha Beach. In between these beaches are a lot of tiny bays under the cliffs, some with a little sand, some of them only accessible by boat. South of Karekare though, the beach extends in one sweep 5 miles to Whatipu, it has built out a mile from the cliffs with swamps behind it. I haven’t seen The Piano but those sweeping beach shots you mention were probably of this long beach. I’ve only walked this stretch of beach once (both ways, there and back), and I met – no-one. Not a soul, it was utterly deserted.

I’d guess the beaches west of you suffer from being too sheltered for good wave action. Most of the beaches around Auckland (except for the west coast) are the same, they tend to be muddy rather than sandy, either being in harbours or sheltered by the Hauraki Gulf islands. It takes a good amount of wave action to keep a beach clear of mud, I think.

As it happens, today was fine (after two days of rain), so a beautiful fine calm day at the beach, and the water is still warm. I’m not sure how long this is going to last but I’m making the most of it.

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Hi @janetteb

The black sand at Piha is a mixture of iron-rich black sand (titanomagnetite), and ordinary yellow-brown sand. The black sand apparently comes all the way up the coast from Mt Taranaki (Mt Egmont), 200 miles away, by wave action (okay, so I had to Google that). The yellow sand is probably of local origin, and that would be volcanic, since the coast line locally is mostly volcanic comglomerate from ash showers, with occasional lava intrusions. The sand can vary from almost yellow to purple-black, depending how the washing effect of the tide has sorted the grains. It’s extremely fine, and gets very hot in the sun since the black iron absorbs a lot of heat (due to its colour), has a high heat capacity and a high conductivity. On a sunny afternoon it’s a painful challenge to race across the beach in bare feet to the cooler sand below high tide mark.

I don’t know for sure, but I’d guess its darkness might have caused headaches in the grading for Directors of Photography on innumerable productions, not just Hercules and Xena, but a number of movies, most notably The Piano, shot on the west coast. It’s okay (visually) in the sun, but when a cloud hits it – of which we have a plentiful supply – it can look really dark. One time I was walking at Piha and I came upon an American production being shot at The Gap. Nobody would tell me its name, but the crew were very pleasant and gave me a coffee and a snack from the refreshment tent. The security guards for these productions are invariably pleasant and polite about keeping bystanders out of shot, it’s a public beach so I don’t think their filming permit gives them any legal authority to chase people away. But there are so few people on the beach outside summer holiday weekends, their job isn’t too difficult. I wonder how that compares with e.g. Doctor Who filming on the beach in Time of Angels.

@winston Good to hear about your forthcoming vaccine. Vaccination has started here in NZ, I’m not sure where we are on the list, not for a while yet, but it’s not so urgent for us.

 

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Not sure whether this should be in Doctor Who memories (where I put my comments on Victory of the Daleks) or On The Sofa. I’ll stick it here (On The Sofa). I’ve got up to A Time of Angels.

A Time of Angels – now that’s cooking with gas (as they used to say). Right out of the blocks, it’s cool, slick and cheeky. Hallucinogenic lipstick, indeed. River, summoning the Doctor across 12,000 years of space-time to rescue her when she blows herself into space. And she can drive the Tardis better than the Doctor – cue the inverse of woman driver cliches. Is this River’s first appearance since Silence in the Library? Love the way she and Doctor compare notes.
The first sight of the Angel, the blurry monochrome TV picture, reminds me strongly of ‘Alien’ – Ridley Scott’s classic scifi horror. Apparently the ‘alien ship’ set looked so phony when seen in close-up, that he had the genius idea of showing it all through a grainy old TV set which served as a monitor for the crew’s helmet cameras. Then when Amy returns to look at the monitor and the angel has moved – that’s genuinely a shock. Especially since the video is supposed to be on a repeating loop. And then Amy’s nightmare begins…
The whole sequence of the soldiers looking through the catacombs with torches in the dark is reminiscent of ‘Alien’ (or was it ‘Aliens’?). Very scary though. And then the realisation that, if the extinct Atlans all had two heads, why do all the statues only have one?
This was a cracking episode.

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@winston I thought you might Google it (it’s what I instantly do for any reference).
I usually swim at the South beach (south of Lion Rock), but my favourite spot for watching the surf is The Gap. If you zoom in on Satellite View, at the south end is Taitomo Island – which is only just technically an island, the water only just fills a shallow channel across the beach inside the island at the top of the tide – and at the south end of the island is The Gap (which is marked on Google as The Blue Pool – I have never heard it called that, and it usually isn’t blue). There is a small deep pool there (usually, sometimes it gets bigger, but I’ve known it to disappear completely once – the sand on the beach moves around a LOT from year to year). But anyway, there’s a natural rock wall, I think a lava dyke, that runs north-south across the inlet that makes it so magic – waves come thundering in through the Gap, hit the rock wall just below the surface, and surge over it, but that breaks most of their force, so you can swim in the pool inside in comparative safety even when the approaching waves are spectacular.

The other interesting phenomenon is that the incoming waves bring in a lot more water over the ‘wall’ than can drain back out after the wave has subsided, so a ‘river’ flows northwards across the sand and disappears through the Taitomo cave (which Google has named ‘the Keyhole’).

I like to sit on a comfortable natural rock seat on the rocks at the south side of the gap and watch big swells come thundering in and sometimes make massive showers of spray. I can do that for an hour.

This picture http://cr01.info/misc/Piha-TheGap/p1230045.jpg shows it at just above low tide, you can see the ‘rock wall’ with a wave just managing to spill over it.
And here’s a couple at high tide with good waves, which is when I like it best, the ‘rock wall’ is submerged but doing good work at bouncing most of the wave energy back seawards
http://cr01.info/misc/Piha-TheGap/P1060830.JPG
http://cr01.info/misc/Piha-TheGap/P1060835.JPG
(I do hope the website software doesn’t imbed those pics, I don’t want to use up all Craig’s data storage)

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I saw that one.   One ref to Peter Davison and four paragraphs on Advice When Visiting Your Doctor, presumably stolen from somewhere.   Makes me wonder if it’s some sort of bot that can’t tell the Doctor from a doctor.

I can’t find it now, maybe Craig got to it.

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Thanks @ winston
Here’s hoping your emergency lockdown works and you’re released in time for your summer.

It’s just occurred to me how extraordinarily lucky I am. First, I’m retired, there’s just me and Mrs D in the house, so we have space, even in a lockdown, to not get on each other’s nerves (and after 30+ years we’ve learned how to get along). I imagine families in inner city flats, or people having relationship problems, must really suffer.
And the other thing, our first Covid lockdown was March last year, pretty much when the summer weather broke (it’s hanging on later this year), so not-going-to-the-beach was something that would have happened anyway. Though on a nice winter day (happens occasionally) I have been known to go there for a walk (not during lockdown though, too far). I do love walking on the beach and, if the sea is rough, watching the waves surging and crashing in The Gap, I can sit there for an hour and just watch the sea.

And even in Level 4 we were allowed out to the nearest park, which was the busiest it had ever been, with people walking around in intricate dynamically changing patterns keeping at least 2 metres from each other. So I was still able to do my 45 minutes daily walk without which I will turn into a blob.

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Nothing wrong with jigsaw puzzles.   🙂    There’s something very satisfying about completing a good 1500 piece puzzle.   Mind you, I do ‘cheat’ by making sure the puzzle  I choose has plenty of detail and no big areas of low-contrast visually ‘samey’ extent.   Then I make little piles of e.g. sky, sea, building, etc, and I usually do the edges first.   I suspect that’s how the Doctor would do it (unless of course he wrote a computer program to exactly match the shapes of the edges of the pieces).

Has the Doctor or anyone else in Who ever done a jigsaw puzzle?

Anyway, plot holes (and physical impossibilities).   I’ll allow pretty big ones for an episode I like.  I’ll happily accept time travel, anti-gravity and teleports (because it’s sci-fi).   But things like the golden arrow in Robot of Sherwood bother me because an arrow is a common everyday item with no supernatural properties, and the Doctor didn’t ‘magick’ it.   The more ‘current technology’ a thing is, the more it bothers me when it does something physically impossible *unless there’s alien tech involved*.

Kill The Moon went well over the physical-impossibility border in so many ways, it was as if it was trying to stretch my credulity.   Victory of the Daleks has this huge time jump in the middle (unless I missed something) where the antigrav-equipped Spitfires suddenly appear.   I can accept the antigrav and gloss over how the pilots could breathe, and even their chances of destroying the mothership with 20mm Hispano cannon, but the time element baffles me.   If the Doctor had managed to time-lock the Dalek mothership for a couple of months I would not have been so puzzled.

I think I’m revealing my inner nerd   🙂

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So I just watched Victory of the Daleks, because it was next in sequence.
Churchill was not particularly good, though not atrociously bad either. A bit too fat and the accent not quite right.
Stukas over London? I didn’t think they had the range. But Googling shows the occasional one did drop a bomb on London, though not a dozen of them in daylight. So we can count that as semi-accurate.
Curious that Amy doesn’t remember the Daleks – a first hint that her world is not the same one.
There is a HUGE continuity problem with the Spitfires in space. It would take weeks to fit the antigrav units, develop a pressurised cockpit (so the pilots could exist), and make three aircraft. It would take many hours (even with antigrav) for them to take off and reach the Dalek mothership. In the episode it takes 5 minutes.
One Dalek could shoot down a dozen Stukas – howcome the Dalek mothership couldn’t get three Spitfires? And how much damage would a pair of 20mm Hispano cannon do to a Dalek mothership? What were the Spitfire engines running on? How did they manouvre with no air?
Why do I get the urge to nitpick this? Because WW2 aircraft are among my interests, I guess. The more you know about a topic, the less likely to be able to accept inaccuracies around it. But I think that continuity gap over the time for the Spitfires to reach the mothership would bother me even if I cared nothing about aircraft.
Never mind, Time of Angels next.

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The Caretaker.   If that’s what the Doctor calls ‘undercover’ – Worst.  Disguise.  Ever.

I seem to recall that Danny and the Doctor weren’t too impressed with each other (to put it mildly).   And this was where Clara’s efforts to lead a normal life and indulge in adventures with the Doctor came unstuck.   In fact I wasn’t too impressed with Danny.   He seemed too controlling.   But this was probably because I regarded Clara’s arrangements with the Doctor as normal (for a companion), how did the newcomer Danny have any business dictating to Clara how she lived her life?    Of course I was biassed.

As for Courtney – no.   Just no.   Impossible brat.

It got worse with Kill The Moon (though the clash between Clara and the Doctor at the end was impressive).   But that had plot holes and physical impossibilities that made anything in The Caretaker or Robot of Sherwood look like pinpricks.   Got a lot better with Mummy on the Orient Express and Flatline – those are two I would go to for ‘feel-good’ episodes.   I loved the mini-Tardis in Flatline.

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@winston I guess in Canada you should be getting into spring by now?

Easter is usually when the weather breaks down here, but our summer (NZ) seems to be hanging on extraordinarily well. We had a batch of rain before Easter, so I hadn’t been out to Piha beach for a week and a half, went out today, the beach was near deserted, the waves were big, but, to my surprise, the water is still warm. As warm as it was at Christmas! Absolutely great. The only other people swimming were a family of four from Brazil, and there were three Japanese tourists on the beach taking selfies in front of the surf. Since anyone from most countries has to stay two weeks in quarantine on arrival, and places and permission are strictly limited, I wonder what their stories are. Have they been stuck here ever since Covid started? Who knows.

 

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@winston   That’s happy news.   I guess he’ll have a story to tell his kids in future years if he remembers (or if his parents document it for him).   Kids are surprisingly resilient.   I’m not surprised he made a kilometer, even young kids can move at quite surprising speeds on occasion.   (I’ve just realised I’ve been saying ‘surprising’ a lot, too lazy to reword it, sorry  🙂

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Well, I just watched The Beast Below (carrying on from The Eleventh Hour). Almost didn’t bother, but I did because it had Sophie Okonedo in it. And – it was very good indeed. There was a lot more in it than I remembered. The dialogue between the Doctor and Amy was engaging. The little girl (Mandy) was a very appealing character. The plot point about voters choosing ‘Protest’ or ‘Forget’ was well worked out. Sophie Okonedo as Liz 10 was magnificent, I would have loved to see her as the 13th Doctor for example. When she said “*I* am the highest authority”, that was convincingly regal. And the plot twist that she herself had perpetuated the regime she was now investigating (and had chosen to Forget) was brilliant. The Star Whale was a rather absurd concept, but I could easily overlook that because, as always, it was the character interactions that made the story.

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I found with Hercules and Xena that the pleasant, often impressive, scenery helped a lot to make me more accepting of impossibilities.   Though about 50% of the episodes are still forgettable and better forgotten.   It was an open secret even the producers acknowledged that the quality varied wildly.   The other thing they had going for them was Joe loDuca’s magnificent musical score, I rate him consistently better than Murray Gold (though it’s not a competition, that’s just my personal opinion, and Murray Gold did good work in many eps).

Joxer, now, was one of those characters that people either loved or found intensely annoying.   I thought that intensity of opinion was unique to Xena fandom but I’ve since seen it in others including Doctor Who.

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@janetteb   A number of Christmas eps aren’t very Christmassy (not that I care because I never watch eps on their TV release date).   The End of Time is one of those.   But quite a powerful ep.   A good voice-over always adds weight, especially when it’s voiced by someone like Timothy Dalton.   Some people just have voices that ring with authority.   I quite liked the John Sim version of the Master in this one, now that he was vulnerable and not the main enemy; and I liked Lucy’s revenge.   And the Vinvocci (did anyone recognise Sinead Keenan as the werewolf from Being Human?) were great comedy.   It’s hard to look exasperated when you’re green and covered in spikes but she managed it.    I did have a credibility failure when the Doctor crashed straight through the glass dome and survived.  Much liked the firefight between the Master and Rassilon.   Wilf getting himself stuck in the control room was annoying and a bit of a downer since it killed the Doctor.   It also seemed rather contrived.

Speaking of Specials, other than Christmas, the previous one, Planet of the Dead, was good.   The horde of metallic scavengers was frightening.   The fly creatures were surprisingly sympathetic, pity they got killed off.   And Christina (Michelle Ryan) was a great intrepid character, I was convinced she was going to become a companion.   And she might have done, if Ten wasn’t reaching his use-by date.   I think there could have been some good clashes between her and the Doctor.   Or maybe she might have been a recurring character like River Song.

@winston   As it happens, I’ve restarted watching with Matt Smith and Amy’s first ep, The Eleventh Hour  (yes the very next ep after The End of Time).   Although I wasn’t alone in the house last night, I still half-closed my eyes for the jump-scare when the hideous Prisoner Zero appears behind Amy.   This time round I could follow the sequence of the Doctor’s appearances to Amelia Pond rather better.   And I’ve grown more used to Matt Smith, first time round I found his youthful food faddery quite annoying after the far more serious Tennant.   Not sure if I’ll carry on with The Beast Below or skip it, I might take it in for the sight of Sophie Okonedo as Liz 10.

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@winston   It was probably just as well that my knowledge of ancient history was…. sketchy.   If I’d known much I would probably have been continually dismayed by Xena’s wildly erratic treatment of history and chronology   🙂

But what am I talking about.   Greek female warrior princess – about as likely as a Tardis, I guess.   It’s a thesis of mine that ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ is very inconsistent and what really bugs me will pass unnoticed by someone else – and vice versa.

Just for starters everyone in the ancient (Xena/Hercules) world spoke the same language (which conveniently happened to be English) without the benefit of a Tardis translation circuit.   Ah well, pretty much like every other historical drama in that respect.   Translator microbes and Babel fish hadn’t been invented yet.

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@janetteb You forgot Last Christmas! The best ‘happy’ of them all, in my opinion. Where else could you have a sarcastic Father Christmas and sarcastic elves drawing attention to the unlikeliness of their own existence – and all strictly explained in sci-fi (and not magic or fantasy) terms? (You could in Pratchett’s Discworld, but that functioned explicitly under the influence of a pervasive magical field so it doesn’t count). But quite aside from that, it was hilarious.

Anyway, that’s my number one. I do like Twice Upon a Time, I don’t know why you didn’t think it was ‘happy’. The Doctor gets to see Bill again, Testimony restores his memories of Clara. And Testimony turns out to be benign – “It isn’t an evil plan. I don’t know what to do when it isn’t an evil plan.” Priceless.

A Christmas Carol was much sadder. Lovely, but very sad. I did like that Kazran hadn’t frozen Abigail out of spite, but because he didn’t want to lose her. But many of the Christmas specials weren’t ‘happy’ ones. Voyage of the Damned – which I quite liked – okay, Mr Copper was lucky, but Astrid died.

You also forgot The End of Time (two-parter) with the Master and the Time Lords. That was a cracker. Timothy Dalton as Lord President was formidable. But also not a ‘happy’ episode.

And The Time of the Doctor wasn’t a ‘happy’ episode either. Actually a good episode, sad in parts (where the Doctor was growing old). Actually I always mix it up with The Name of the Doctor, both very good episodes but they get overshadowed by the dazzling Day of the Doctor sandwiched in between them.

I love Blink and Listen of course, even though they’re both scary. Which just shows that my favourite episodes aren’t always the ones that relax me. I like a good comedy, or a good tragedy. You’re absolutely right about Moffat’s ability to mix scary with humour. (Why I used to like Xena – the writers – sometimes – could come up with marvellously ironical black humour).

And I see you just gave top billing to Day of the Doctor. Right on! (Technically not a Christmas special but I never attach much importance to the date of screening – since I never saw them on TV, but on DVD, my chronology is a bit different from many fans.)

Makes me want to go and watch some of those right now, too. Think I’ll restart with Eleventh Hour, I like to try and keep in sequence, I might omit a couple of eps that don’t do much for me (but that’s surprisingly few). That’ll keep me busy for the next few months…

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@missy   Well, last night while Mrs D was out babysitting, I was watching TV and there was an Unexplained Thud in the kitchen.   Or maybe it was an Unexplained Clonk.   And a definite whirring noise.   Quite unnerving.   I can only imagine that it was the fridge, starting up.   The Noise had gone when I went to investigate, half an hour later   🙂

We used to get occasional scrapes and thuds in the ceiling, but I think that was just possums that had got in.

I do avoid watching anything too scary late at night.   Such as ‘Listen’   🙂

 

 

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@missy @janetteb Face the Raven is absolutely one of my favourites. Well written and tragic. How can I like an episode that killed my favourite companion due to a miscalculation? Because that’s the essence of tragedy. Clara died while courageously saving a life. Okay she thought she’d be safe, but it still takes courage to run the risk of something going wrong – as it did. The Doctor barely controlling his anger with Me was impressive. And the image of Rigsy decorating the abandoned Tardis at the end was deeply moving – illogically (but not unusually), that scene had me nearer to tears than anything else in the episode.

Thin Ice is okay, but Victorian episodes aren’t really a favourite of mine. (By the way, why does the Doctor never encounter steam trains? The Orient Express in space doesn’t count. Many, many historical dramas chuck in a steam train – because they can. Preserved railways are only too eager to offer their premises and many have a few old locos which, if not going back to Victorian times, at least go back to early 1900’s (and can pass for Victorian to anyone except railway nuts like me, and I’m willing to forgive mild anachronisms if they’re not too blatant 🙂 )

Back to Doctor Who – unlike @winston, I don’t feel comfortable in the past. It always feels dangerous and foreign to me – probably because most of history is about things which went horribly and fatally wrong, and the Doctor (or at least his companions) is out of their time, and I’m always afraid they’ll be found out. And historical events then tend to dominate the story. I feel most comfortable in the present, when the story can unfold uncomplicated, or the future, where the writers can indulge in interesting ‘world-building’. Oddly enough, I never got that uneasy feeling watching ‘Xena’, who notoriously strayed all over ancient history. I can only put that down to the fact that it was ‘her home period’ (even though that date was, to put it charitably, chronologically ill-defined) and she didn’t officially time-travel, so she wasn’t at risk of being stranded ‘out of her time’.

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@janetteb   I was just thinking of you.   Hope you’re all right where you are.   We’ve been seeing the newsreel footage of catastrophic floods in Oz, though I think that’s mostly to the east of you?    We normally get the weather after you’ve finished with it, but it seems there’s this ‘blocking high’ in the Tasman that’s caused all the weather to pile up over Sydney.   Meanwhile we’ve had three weeks of fine weather and the water at Piha’s still warm, forcing me to swim every day  🙂   Makes me feel a bit guilty, actually.    But it seems (according to today’s forecast) that the weather has finally forced its way through so our turn is on the way.

Robot of Sherwood is okay, watchable, but there was one discordant note – when the Sheriff stabbed the old man in the village, in cold blood.   I thought that was a bit too grimly explicit for an otherwise ‘light’ episode.    And there was one implausibility, shooting the golden arrow at the ship.   I like the concept, that the arrow would save the day; but to reach a spaceship on launch with an arrow you’d need to shoot it out of a high-velocity anti-tank rifle at the very least; and by what mechanism could an arrow hitting the ship be converted into fuel for its engines?    (Why does that niggle me when robots and Robin Hood and a Tardis don’t?   I *think* because shooting an arrow is very much conventional Earth kinematics, not sci-fi.   We all have our own limits of credibility, different for each of us, I think.   And I think we’re more sensitive about things we know most about.   In my case it’s mechanical things, which is why McGyver always offended me with every ridiculous physically impossible trick that McGyver pulled.   Every single one.)

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@oochillyo   @blenkinsopthebrave

Empress of Mars doesn’t really do it for me.   It seems kind of predictable, Indiana Jones crossed with Edgar Rice Burroughs  (I think, I’ve never actually read Burroughs).   Sort of like Blenkinsopthebrave mentioned.   Ah well, tastes vary in an unpredictable way, a while ago I picked up a copy of Red Sonja for a dollar, it’s a sort of early Schwarzenegger  Xena-before-Xena-was-a-thing sword & sandals, and I wasn’t expecting to like it but I found it not bad.

Eaters of Light, now, that was definitely one I’ll watch again.   It had atmosphere.   I think there were plot holes a mile wide but (unlike Kill the Moon) I didn’t mind, I found I could gloss over them.

I don’t think S10 has a three-part final, unless you count the Christmas episode Twice Upon a Time, but that’s really quite unrelated to the actual final.   World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls  is a very strong 2-part final, also a highly emotional one.   You may love it, you may hate it, maybe both,  but I don’t think you’ll be able to say it wasn’t a strong one.  I won’t say more, spoilers.

Quite OT, but here in NZ we’re having the end of summer.   Weather is fine for days on end, the sea is *warm*, lovely time to go to the beach.   And the best thing, the life guards have knocked off for the season so I can swim where I like (with due caution for my own safety) without being harassed to swim in a tiny crowd in their apparently randomly-selected ‘safe’ spot.   This settled weather usually lasts till about Easter, after which everything falls off towards winter.

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@winston    Oh yes, those happy-face robots in ‘Smile’ were scary.   Not least because of the idea that your own fears would cause them to kill you.    Be happy or you die.   By the way, wasn’t the architecture in that episode fantastic?   I’m NOT a fan of most modern architecture but I am of Calatrava, since I arrived at Lisbon Oriente station on a train and was struck by how amazing the place looked.   (Yes I had to look him up, never heard of him before that.   He did the City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia where Smile was filmed).

Also in the way of well-intentioned white bots who will kill you, the robots in ‘The Girl Who Waited’.   ‘This is a kindness’ indeed. With an absolutely tragic ending and a magnificent performance by Karen Gillan.   That episode, along with Midnight and Blink, is right up there on my list of low-budget one-off episodes that prove that sometimes, less is more.

@missy   I have to admit, if I’m alone in the house at night, I used to be nervous of the dark.  Not really terrified, it was more like being apprehensive *in case* I started to panic.   Which is weird.   For some reason, recently, I’ve got a bit more fatalistic about it, there’s probably nothing there and if there is, there’s nothing I can do about it anyway.   But I still feel much more relaxed if there’s someone else in the house, which is also quite irrational.   I’d still avoid watching ‘Listen’ late at night and alone, though.

 

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@winston Yes, statues are everywhere. To adapt the saying about Vashta Nerada, “it’s not every shadow, but any shadow could be”. Same goes for statues and Angels.
@baines @missy Yes, the monster in Midnight was one of the most classic. Even though the human mob mentality was at least as dangerous to a rational being like the Doctor. The stewardess redeemed herself at the end, and then nobody even knew her name. That was a masterly touch of – [I can’t think of the word. Pathos? ]
The clockwork repair droids of Girl in the Fireplace, though scary, weren’t intentionally malevolent. Just misprogrammed. They just wanted Madame de Pompadour as a spare part to fix their ship – nice twist in the tail. But the ending of that episode was tragic, in the way that loss always is – the Doctor just missed Reinette by a few hours.

The Silents also qualify as an ‘invisible’ monster, I think. They look hideously scary when you see them (remind me of Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream’), but of course you forget the moment you look away. So – if you can’t see a Silent right now – that doesn’t mean there isn’t one, standing right behind your chair. That is spooky! That not only plays into the invisibility factor, but also our fears of amnesia. If you can’t trust your memory, what grip do you have on reality? And then you see all the count marks you made on your hands, and you realise you’ve had many, many encounters with them you can’t remember and they’re probably all around you right now.

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[reposted cos the website lost my first post?]

@baines

I’d rate the Weeping Angels as the best Doctor Who monster ever. The most frightening. The fact that they didn’t have to move (on camera) was a big asset – many frightening-looking monsters became a little bit silly when they actually had to move and do stuff. The Angels didn’t risk that.

I think they were so beautifully handled in Blink, that their subsequent appearances couldn’t quite live up to their first appearance – but that’s like giving them a 9 1/2 out of 10 rather than 10/10. Still way more impressive than most monsters.

Moffatt understands very well that what you can’t see is often much more frightening than what you can. The Vashta Nerada. Whatever was banging on the capsule door in ‘Listen’. The creature under the blanket in that same episode. The Silents, that you forget are there the moment you look away. So the Angels make use of that – you can’t see them when they’re moving, you just see the frightening result.

So anyway – yes, Time of Angels / Flesh and Stone, and Angels Take Manhattan, were all excellent episodes. The surprise disappearance of Arthur at the end of Manhattan, and Amy’s deliberate choice to follow him, were shocking and tragic and very moving. We don’t know what the Doctor did to the angel that took them, but I hope it was something suitably drastic and final, possibly finishing with a small pile of sand, or better, dust.

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@deathbycocktails   Well, I suppose if the Doctor can regenerate into a female, he can just as likely regenerate into a Scotsman?

(It’s the Scottish Mafia in operation…   Seven, Ten, Twelve, Amy, and the showrunner for series 5-10…)

 

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Companions – yes, I agree with @janetteb, I like Martha a lot. Very intelligent, able to stand up for herself, and – when she realised she was falling for the Doctor (which is not something we can control) but he was never going to get over Rose – she had the sense and strength of character to leave him. That is not easy to do. Without recriminations, an amicable separation. In fact I think she was the only NuWho principal Companion (up to Capaldi’s era, not counting since then) who had a non-traumatic ending to the relationship.

I did like Rose though, can one blame her for being swept off her feet by the Doctor? And I think Billie Piper was an excellent casting choice to reboot the series, she’s one of those fortunate people who the camera is drawn to, did anyone notice how she could photobomb the scene (as The Interface) in The Day of the Doctor just by leaning against a wall in the background? And it made her little cameos in episodes late in Season 4 stand out. Though Rose did treat poor Mickey very badly, far worse than Clara treated Danny. But her journey really grabbed me. (I recall grumbles from OldWho fans about the Doctor getting emotionally involved with the Companion – but wasn’t oldWho heading that way with Seven and Ace? Of which more later).

My favourite companion has to be Clara. When she was ‘up’ she shone, dazzlingly. I’ve always found the companion as important, story-wise, as the Doctor so the gripes of fans who think she (or any other companion) was eclipsing the Doctor fall on deaf ears for me. Yes she eventually got too confident, for which she paid a dreadful price. Pride comes before a fall, and all that – the plot of many tragedies since Shakespear’s time. I found her clashes with the Doctor around the time of Kill The Moon (the only good thing in that regrettable ep) were riveting.

Bill was okay, I quite liked her, but she suffered from following Clara (in my own ranking, I quite accept others may rank them differently). Her fate in World Enough and Time was tragic.

I never really warmed up to Donna, because of first impressions – at the end of Doomsday, Ten (and we) were in shock and grieving for the sudden shocking loss of Rose, when Donna comes bursting in aggressively and accusatively to destroy the mood. That takes a lot of getting over, and I never quite did.

Amy was great. Okay, she too treated her boyfriend badly at first (there seems to be some sort of theme there), but overall I’d rate her up with Rose and Clara as my favourite Companions. And possibly she had the most striking and tragic episode – The Girl Who Waited – with a stunning performance by Karen Gillan.

Old Who companions? – I don’t really know. The only oldWho eps I’ve watched this century are Ghost Light, Curse of Fenric, and Survival. And I have to say I’m now a fan of Seven and Ace. The limited special effects of last century’s BBC productions do detract a bit from the story, but you can see the chemistry between McCoy and Sophie Aldred (it comes through in the video clips of cons on Youtube too). I would have liked to see them continue with 2005-quality production values, though I guess Sophie might have been a bit too old to play a teenager by then (Seven of course is ageless). And as I mentioned, maybe that chemistry was a pointer to the developments with Ten and Rose two decades later.

 

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@janetteb    Thanks, yes, I made it to Chch.    I flew down to Wellington on Monday and caught the ferry and train to Christchurch on Tuesday.   (This is NOT the most sensible way to go, I could have flown all the way for about the same air fare, but I enjoy the journey).

We’re heading back to Auckland in about two weeks so hopefully this lockdown will be just over by then.   Auckland is Level 3, rest of NZ is Level 2.    In any case, at Level 2 travel between regions is OK, the Cook Strait ferry will operate, and since we live in Auckland we’d be allowed back into the Auckland Level 3 area to go home**.   And at Level 2 here, I can still go to the beach.    So at the moment, I’ve just managed to dodge the lockdowns (by luck, not design, all suspicions that I am the evil mastermind conspiring with the Illuminati and the New World Order to manipulate Covid for my convenience are hereby denied and anyone propagating such calumnies can expect a knock on their door at midnight).

**Provided I can supply proof of address.  Answering this message prompted me to check the regulations.   I binned some old papers in the car yesterday, how unwise, and now they’re at the bottom of the recycling bin…  rather than go dumpster diving, I just downloaded a bank statement and I can get it printed out for 20 cents at the local library.   So thank you for that, you may have saved me an impasse with ‘border control’ in a couple of weeks’ time!

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@janetteb    The second-last ep with Bill was ‘World Enough and Time’ – marvellous title.   The original quote was the first line from a love poem by Andrew Marvell,  ‘Had we but world enough, and time’.    The title fits well with the episode, after all, time (or the time distortion caused by the black hole) is the root of all their problems.

But the original poem was a love poem, along the lines of ‘sieze the day, for tomorrow we may be dead’.   Doesn’t really suit the episode, since the Doctor and Bill didn’t have any romantic relationship (would have suited Ten and Rose better);  however, it would certainly have fitted the following episode, with Heather coming to rescue Bill.

My Christmas special has to be ‘Last Christmas’, with runner-up A Christmas Carol, which I particularly like when it becomes apparent that Sardick wasn’t being a complete bastard when he froze Abigail, just trying to stretch out the short run-time she had left.   (I’ve just realised that’s the same theme that Moffatt used for Clara’s end, and Bill’s.   It’s always a tragic theme.   That’s no criticism of Moffatt, he managed to vary the story such that that’s only just now occurred to me.   If it works, use it!    Might as well criticise ‘bigger on the inside’)

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@janetteb
I found the freedom of travelling in Europe in the last decade, marvellous. I was used to arriving back in NZ from the Cook Islands and going through our tedious antiquated bureaucratic border controls – laboriously filling in Arrival Cards and Customs Declaration (penalty for incorrect statements), queueing for Immigration, queueing for Customs…
So when I first arrived in Paris in 2013 (from NZ via Abu Dhabi), I suddenly realised with a gulp that I hadn’t filled in my arrival card and customs declaration – but that was because they hadn’t been handed out. The French didn’t bother with them. I collected my bag, wandered through a door marked ‘Sortie’ past a bored-looking agent wearing ‘Douane’, expecting to find myself in the Customs hall, and found myself – outside. I just could not believe one could enter a country so easily. It was quite disconcerting, I half expected a gendarme to pop out of nowhere and detain me for having evaded some procedure. 🙂
And later on, on the Col de Montgenevre, the Mont Cenis, the Little St Bernard, and Ribellasca/Camedo on the Centovalli road, there were these big imposing Customs buildings – all closed and shuttered. Nothing is so delightful as the sight of a disused customs post 🙂 I *love* Schengen! I’d just never heard of it till that trip.
Will Covid put a damper on that, long term? I do hope not. I very much hope the vaccines all work. But it’ll take a couple of years at least for things to recover.

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@devilishrobby

Considering that Gordon Ramsay is the only other TV personality whose vocabulary approached Malcolm Tucker, I found that entirely credible.    🙂

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@janetteb    Snow.   I love snow too, in the right context.   Fresh snow is lovely.   Old snow turns to slush, which is no fun at all.

When I was a kid in southern England, I used to be disappointed that we hardly ever had a ‘white Christmas’.   Just didn’t get snow there.   Here in Auckland we never get snow either, (it was reported once on the Waitakere Ranges a century ago), we get a few mild frosts but I’ve only once ever seen ice on the puddles.   200 miles south on the Central Plateau it’s another matter, they get plenty, but spasmodically.

I was in France and the Alps in 2014 with a group of friends and we loved snow.   We drove up every Alpine pass we could find, and if there was snow at the top it was obligatory to go for a barefoot walk in it.

I do agree that planning is half the fun, now we have the Internet and everywhere has websites.   In 1990 I took my wife to England and Switzerland, and it took months to make a couple of bookings.   In those days every Swiss town had its own tourist office which published an excellent booklet which listed all the hotels and pensions, with a map and rates, but it still took a long time to set up by snail mail and telephone.   Now we have the Internet and email.   In 2017 I did my ‘big trip’ from Vladivostok to Lisbon by train, then round the Alps by rental, I made bookings with two airlines, two car rentals, RzD (Russian Railways), Deutsche Bundesbahn, SNCF (French),  RENFE (Spanish), and Eurostar, and about 30 hotels/backpackers mostly on Booking.com.    Took me days and days to do (and research my route) but it was interesting.    Also, cheap   🙂   Couldn’t have been done in 1990, not for my budget, travel agents existed but they wouldn’t have known about many of the places I stayed (how could a $25 a night pension afford a percentage cut for a travel agent?) and nor could any travel agent have afforded the time it would have taken.

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@oochillyo  Well, the beach is our current reward for being in the upside-down half of the world.   Six months time, it’ll be the other way round.   So I do rather like to make the people ‘on top’ feel a little jealous when I have the chance   🙂

I think we were lucky with covid, two ways.   First, obviously, we’re an island, so easier to isolate – what is normally a bit of a drag (can’t go anywhere without a 3-hour flight and then the place is full of Aussies,  no offence intended Janetteb  🙂  becomes an asset.

And second, the country was not split politically, and Jacinda Ardern was popular (helped by the opposition party having just had a meltdown, that happens from time to time, but their new leader, Judith ‘Crusher’ Collins, was eager to establish a profile of being appealing and taking the moral high ground).   So there was no big groundswell of discontent or mistrust, and nobody in the opposition could see any mileage in sabotaging Covid measures.   At a different time in history it might have been different.

‘Wild New Zealand’ does of course show the better and more spectacular parts of our country, not the boring flat bits full of houses or cows.   That said, we do have a pretty good supply of scenery.   That’s one reason I like Piha beach, it’s on the west coast, with plenty of cliffs, wild surf, and ‘bush’ (native forest).   I love England but I can’t think of any areas of England that are quite so ‘wild’, other than some fairly bleak uplands.

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@oochillyo

Whew! That’s quite a review. (Also, a wall of print. With respect, it would appear much less intimidating to the reader if you hit Return occasionally to break it up into paragraphs :).

It’s a while since I viewed the Monks trilogy but much of it is coming back to me. It was an absolutely brilliant concept in ‘Extremis’ that the whole ‘world’ was a simulation and the people who apparently ‘suicided’ had just realised they were characters in the simulation and ‘quit’. Turned the whole ‘world’ on its head.

I did like the original pyramid in Tajikistan (?) that just sat there, enigmatically, doing nothing. And I really liked the Doctor’s cunning idea of turning off all the CCTV and then seeing which one the Monks turned back on – that was genius. The concept of Bill’s mum being solely an idea in Bill’s head, so not something the Monks could mess with (?) sort of eluded me the first time around. Too subtle for me, I guess. But she was excellently cast, she looked not only beautiful but warm and welcoming – perfect for an ‘ideal mum’.

As to the Monks being benevolent, (a ‘benevolent dictatorship’?), I can’t really agree with you. I think living a lie and being subservient to the Monks was too much freedom to give up. I’m always suspicious of using the word ‘freedom’ but I think it’s valid in this case.

(I do think ‘freedom’ is a bit of a myth – there is no such thing as absolute ‘freedom’. We are all subject to some laws or other if we live in any society, the only alternative is to live alone on a desert island and that’s no fun while you starve to death. And different countries have widely different ideas of what ‘freedom’ is, it’s easy to find examples but just as easy to start a fight over it 🙂 But, though it’s very hard to define, certainly some places are much freer than others).

I did have one nitpick based on geography – when the Monks’ pyramid set down in London, where exactly was it (I mean its precise location on the street?) and which building(s) did it flatten/dematerialise/bulldoze out of the way to make room for itself? Or was it a small Tardis-sized ship with a massive hologram screen? (I’m an engineer and I tend to get these spasms of logistical nit-pickery. Time travel, fine. Bigger-on-the-inside, fine with me. Finding an unoccupied building site in central London, oops. 🙂

I suspect there were some plot holes in this trilogy – but I don’t care. Some of the questions I’ve seen raised were just carping criticism, like Where did the Monks come from? Don’t know, doesn’t matter, after all nobody knew where the Cybermen came from until RTD and Moffatt invented backstories for them. I like the ‘shiny bits’ like the Pyramid in Tajikistan and the submarine planted in the desert (How did the Monks do that? Unkown alien powers, that’s how, doesn’t matter!) and I’m quite willing to dismiss or invent hypothetical background circumstances for why things happen on-screen. Unless it’s a massive plot-hole for the main thread of the story, I’ll happily ignore it.

I expect I’ll think of more things about the trilogy but I’ll post this now and go to the beach…

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@janetteb     Hoping you have good luck with your booking and don’t get disrupted (again) by a lockdown.

I would be in Christchurch now (as I think I blathered about in the On The Sofa page), but the Sunday evening before I was due to catch the train we had a 3-day Level 3 lockdown…

As it happened, we had about 2 weeks perfect weather before that, to the point where I was getting almost weary of trekking to the beach every day (but what else can ya do?), then the Monday and Tuesday and half the Wednesday (yesterday) were rainy and cold.   And now the Level 3 is over, the weather’s nice again.   So for once Auckland weather co-operated perfectly.

Anyway, all one can do is take it as it comes and make the best of the situation.

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@oochillyo

Yes, I really like Extremis.   I’d have to re-watch it again to remind me of the full plot  (like many of Moffat’s episodes, because things are not what they seem, you miss a lot on the first time through.   When you re-watch it you notice all sorts of details that now have a different meaning that wasn’t apparent to you before.   I love this sort of plotting, aside from the surprise factor, it’s really like getting two episodes for the price of one.   For some reason some people hate it, as though they’re insulted by being ‘fooled’; personally, I love it.  ‘You bastard Moffatt!’ (said with a grin).     And yes, the Pope ruining Bill’s date was classic.

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@janetteb

Well, I’m hoping our lockdown is short.   I’ve re-booked on next Monday’s train, so here’s hoping…

(I have to say Kiwirail’s booking staff were very good.   The lockdown was announced at 6pm Sunday, starting at midnight.   I got text messages from Kiwirail saying ‘train cancelled, please see your email’ and emails giving more details and ‘if you wish to re-book/refund, please just reply to this email indicating your preferences’.   Which I did, but just to make sure I rang the booking office next day to confirm the changes, which the booking clerk cheerfully did, I said ‘you very very prompt with your emails’ to which he said ‘yes, we were up all night sending them’.   That’s customer service!

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Hi @oochillyo    Well, actually I am home, home being Auckland.   My wife is at our daughter’s place in Christchurch.   If I lived in Christchurch I could have claimed an exemption to ‘go home’, (and yes I did contemplate lying about where I lived, but decided it might not work), and anyway it would have been academic since the train was cancelled.   Hopefully there will be be no more Covid cases and the lockdown will come off after a few days.

Besides, after a couple of weeks of perfect beach weather, it’s now cold and rainy so quite good weather to *not* be travelling.   🙂

 

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Aargh! The website ate my message! Try again…

@oochillyo

Hi Declan. Portuguese man’o’war (which are not actually jellyfish) are huge and terrifying stingers, found in the Atlantic. The ‘Portuguese’ name was probably given because they like warmer water so British sailors probably first saw them in the Atlantic ocean ‘off Portugal’ (maybe the Azores, I don’t know). Or in the Caribbean and were at war with Portugal at the time. Or something like that. I would not necessarily expect them to concentrate on Portugal itself.

We don’t get them this side of the world, thankfully. What we get are Pacific man’o’war or ‘bluebottles’, very much a mini version. Can sting (though I’ve never been stung) but never fatal. I see lots of small ones, 1-2″ long floats, washed up on the beach. At Piha a couple of days before I got ‘itched’, I saw the biggest I’ve ever seen, a whole 3-4″ long, maybe they were the source of the tiny larvae that got me.

Names are misleading. Even the NZ Herald got it wrong, “Bluebottle jellyfish, also known as Portuguese man o’ war…” which is doubly wrong because bluebottles are neither jellyfish or Pmow’s. “Sea lice” rash is not usually caused by sea lice (which are a parasite on fish), but actually by jellyfish/bluebottle larvae. And in England, bluebottles are big noisy buzzing house flies. And so on…

Valentines Day has been postponed for a week around my household, I should have been on the train to Wellington today (and on to Christchurch tomorrow to join my wife there), instead we have a snap 3-day Level 3 lockdown which means no-one leaves Auckland without an exemption. And anyway they’ve cancelled the train. I have to say Kiwirail were very efficient and prompt at emailing and text-messaging me, and they’ve re-booked me next Monday (on the assumption the lockdown will only last the three days).    So I get to chill out here and watch yet another Youtube season of Robot Wars  🙂

This has nothing to do with Doctor Who, I’m dreadful at straying Off Topic, maybe I should move it to the Kebab and Calculator…

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…and would you believe it, I was booked to catch the train to Wellington tomorrow morning to carry on to Christchurch to meet Mrs D, but 3 people in Auckland just tested positive so we’re in Level 3 lockdown for 3 days which means I wouldn’t be allowed on the train.   Just have to re-book next week and carry on working my way through old Robot Wars on Youtube.   (I’m surprised nobody ever made a Dalek robot though I think it would have got pretty quickly massacred by some of the more destructive ones).

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HI @oochillyou    Nope, the jellyfish stings weren’t painful at the time.   They weren’t adult jellyfish, though I noticed a large number of ‘blue bottles’ (very small Portuguese man’o’war, the biggest we ever get them is 3″ long) swept up on the beach.   I’ve never seen one in the water.   What got me is swarms of very little jellyfish larvae (or something), their stings are too small to be felt, but what they do, their stings are just enough to cause an itch.   So if you get covered in the things and don’t realise to wash them off with a good shower straight after you get out of the water, you get covered in a rash of itchy bumps.  Not painful, just itchy, it’s probably as much an allergic reaction to their tiny stings.   And the itching lasts for days.   It’s just about gone now, however I got stung by a wasp a couple of days ago and now the spot where the wasp got me is itching!

Back to Voyage of the Damned, yes I like that ep.   I know it isn’t very highly rated but I did like Kylie Minogue’s character, and also I was happy for Mr Copper.

Blink of course is an all-time classic, I can see why your friend was upset at the death of Billy Shipton, though really he shouldn’t be, since Billy had a good life.   It’s just that time travel highlights mortality, I guess.   But I must admit that scene (“it’s the same rain”) always makes me go a bit damp.    And yes those weeping angels are uniquely scary.

[Dentarthurdent @replies]

Hi Declan @oochillyo

I’m just sittin here chilling, watching old Robot Wars on Youtube.    It’s raining outside, like yesterday, and a bit cooler.   This is almost a relief after the two weeks of warm weather and sunshine that forced me, lemming-like, to trek out to Piha beach every day.   I got a nice case of all-over itchy hives that the quack reckoned was either an allergy to maybe watermelon  (watermelon?   I didn’t know they could cause allergies) or more likely ‘sea lice’.   Yes sea lice do exist,  they’re parasites on fish, but the ‘sea lice’ that give swimmers itches are actually jellyfish larvae.   Didn’t stop me swimming though…

[Dentarthurdent @replies]

@winston     It was actually JanetteB who first brought up drop bears.

But anyway, you have Sasquatch, and the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus.   (I know the octopus is technically USAnian, originating in Olympic National Park, but it must have reached Vancouver Island by now)

[Dentarthurdent @replies]

@janetteb

I do know that the Discworld featured a vast panoply of mythical creatures.   Just when I thought Sir Pterry had exhausted the entire catalogue of spooks and monsters he would come up with some more.   So it’s very tempting to think that every mythical creature that could be conceived of is lurking in potential Discworld space, just waiting to be discovered or, possibly, brought into existence by the power of belief.   Running haggises included.

(In fact, now I think of it, that’s exactly what happened in ‘The Last Continent’ on the God of Evolution’s island.   If you thought of a creature, bing!, it appeared.   Just when I thought I’d had an original thought, Sir Pterry was there first…)

[Dentarthurdent @replies]

Drop bears (along with many other Ozzie traditions) featured in The Last Continent.

I’m not aware of any Pratchett books that had ambulatory haggises though.

[Dentarthurdent @replies]

@winston    Yes a drop bear is exactly and precisely what you have surmised.   It is said to have a reinforced butt so as to cause the maximum amount of damage to the victim.

It is also a myth, invented to test the credulity of ignorant Poms and other visitors.   It is, sadly, not real (except in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld).

[Dentarthurdent @replies]

@janetteb

True, we don’t have drop bears. But then, we (NZ) have a notable lack of murderous wildlife that hates you and wants to kill you painfully. To the extent that I walk everywhere in the bush barefoot (admittedly sometimes garnering curious remarks from the yuppie generation who can’t imagine setting out without their designer Nikes, but I’ve never suffered worse than a wasp sting yet. Curiously, they seem to think that unmade tracks with mud or rocks are hard on the feet. No. Rocks are fine. Mud is fine. What I hate and loathe is ‘upgraded’ tracks with sharp gravel.)

Among the wildlife we don’t have is alligators, cassowaries, duckbill platypuses (yes they have poisonous spines on their legs. A poisonous mammal? Only in Australia…), snakes, funnelweb spiders, cane toads, sea wasps, cone shells, blue-ringed octopus, stonefish, lionfish… I may have missed a few.

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