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29 October 2025 at 03:54 #78263
@camdudetenger2018 Yeah, see the link in Translatorcircuit’s post.
@translatorcircuit @ps1l0v3y0u @whohar
“However, Kate Phillips, chief content officer at the BBC, previously said the show will continue on the BBC “with or without” Disney. She said at this year’s Edinburgh TV Festival: “Any Whovians out there, rest assured – Doctor Who is going nowhere.”
‘Going nowhere’ – what a curiously ambiguous turn of phrase 🙂
29 October 2025 at 03:47 #78262@ps1l0v3y0u I know Chris Boucher mainly from Blakes 7. I remember that series mainly for quarries, sets that were reasonably convincing, weapons that weren’t, and some delightful dialogue, often featuring Avon. But the line I best remember is down to Servalan: “And, I want a gun.” Avon: “We only have one gun.” Servalan (patiently): “I only *want* one.”
27 October 2025 at 10:56 #78245@ps1l0v3y0u Still a bizarre selection of venues. Shrewsbury, Dorking, Crawley and Winchester. (I had to look up where Crawley was, I had an idea it was somewhere near Woking 🙂 Maybe it’s where theatres can be hired at a reasonable price.
Umm, Crawley. Name rings a bell. He was the demon in Neil Gaiman’s ‘Good Omens’, played on TV by none other than – David Tennant. Coincidences keep happening…
25 October 2025 at 14:49 #78240Well, I just rewatched it. Didn’t make notes this time, just enjoyed the episode.
The ship was absolutely beautiful (I know I said that before, but it still is awesome, even on repeat viewing). CGI well done, and very convincing. Nice contrast with the rusty old robot. Don’t know why it had to reconfigure, maybe to maximise the self-destruct effect, but it looked amazing so I’m not quibbling.
And the walking through corridors was genuinely scary. Maybe not quite as scary as the moonbase in ‘Listen’, but I could still feel the hairs rising on the back of my neck.
And a good puzzle to go along with it. I couldn’t tell who was who at times.
Those – things – remind me of the creatures from the Dungeon Dimensions in Discworld, half-formed shapeless things trying to claw their way into this reality.
The highlight of recent seasons, as far as I’m concerned, up there with Boom and Dot and Bubble.
24 October 2025 at 05:16 #78238Yes I did wonder about the Daily Star. Would it be unkind to compare it to those well-known organs the Weekly World News and the Onion?
I did wonder a bit about performing a ‘radio play’ on stage, maybe it was some sort of misquote and the play is about three actors voicing a radio play? And I also wondered about the slightly bizarre selection of venues. Dorking? Seriously?
Anyway, I quoted it because it mentions two Doctors. I note that Radio Times’ version of the same article doesn’t mention them. I’m guessing that some freelance journalist (or maybe Peter Purves) conducted a longer interview and then sold it to as many outlets as he could, or is that not how journalism works? (I really don’t know).
23 October 2025 at 14:15 #78235@janetteb @whohar @ps1l0v3y0u Just what is the relevance of Peter Purves? (Aside from being a ‘Doctor Who legend’ according to the article). The world is full of guys who worked on [something] x decades ago, who would love to cash in on their past association. Here’s the link Radio Times gave, by the way:
https://www.dailystar.co.uk/showbiz/doctor-who-legend-doesnt-like-36085688
The world is also full of journalists who want to make a sensation out of anything. As janetteb said, clickbait.
“When Doctor Who started it was a children’s programme, we had a weekly cliffhanger and it was simple.” Well yes, and if it had stayed that way I doubt if any of us would be here. The world is also full of people – including fans – who want the next series to be ‘just like the last one, but new’.
(I wonder if I could ring up some journalist on some dull news day and get a headline “Dentarthurdent doesn’t like Star Trek”?)
According to the Daily Star (is that a real paper? I’ve never heard of it) “Peter is teaming up with fellow Doctor Who legends Colin Baker and Tom Baker for his next project. The trio are starring together in a production of A Christmas Carol. It’s a radio play that sees Peter play Charles Dickens while Colin is Ebenezer Scrooge and Tom is Jacob Marley. They’re touring the country from November 7 with shows in Shrewsbury, Dorking, Crawley and Winchester.”
The article ends with ‘And he is even up for returning to Doctor Who for a cameo if he’s asked. He said: “I would love a cameo. But it won’t happen.”’ I think he might be right about that, now.
[/rant]
18 October 2025 at 14:31 #78227Oh well, here I am, back again in the age of RTD2.
And here we go, retconning Donna. I guess if we can retcon Rose, we can retcon Donna. Way back when I watched ‘Xena’, it was a standing joke that nobody ever stayed dead in that series. I guess modern Who is pretty much the same. I don’t mind.
I guess Donna was never actually dead, just lost her memory.
You know, I’m surprised but it was almost a relief to be watching David Tennant again, and not subconsciously ‘making allowances’ for the Doctor. To be fair, for a long while I disliked Donna, based entirely on her first appearance (who says first impressions don’t matter?) when she berated a grieving Doctor who had just lost Rose. But now I don’t mind her at all. Oh, and directed by Rachel Talalay. The old firm’s back. 🙂
And this is quite an ingenious tweak, the Doctor recognises Donna (but Donna of course doesn’t know him) and the name ‘Rose’ stuns him but of course it’s a different Rose.
The rocket (and the monsters) look really comic-book. Was this RTD gently taking a poke at the ‘Disney’ connection (or at the fans who feared it?) I do have to say Henson’s Creature Shop produced rather more convincing aliens for Farscape. Still, the Meep is rather insufferably cute. So it was a nice moment when it turned into a savage villain. Farscape would have approved.
I’m going to be politically incorrect here and say that UNIT’s scientific advisor – in a wheelchair in a disaster zone – really strains credulity. It drops me out of the story. Only slightly mitigated when her wheelchair turns out to be armed. But it would have been more convincing if they’d given it a bit more bulk to hide the weapons.
The aliens speak English. Was this a side-effect of the Tardis being parked nearby?
I very much like the way the Sonic Screwdriver creates a virtual flat touchscreen for the Doctor to view. Oh, and it’s a proper techy gadget now, not a thing that looks like a crudely made sex toy. It can also generate a bulletproof portable blast screen. Handy gadget.
Howcome the UNIT troops never seem to notice the Doctor? Does he come with his own ‘somebody else’s problem’ field?
‘Brandish the gravity stanchions’. Ouch!
I have to say all those burning cracks radiating out from the steelworks were way OTT. That was a case where less would have been more – credible. (A steelworks? In London? Where?)
Oh dear, and Donna and the Doctor in the spaceship are now gabbling more technobabble than Whitdoc ever produced in her lifetime. Aaargh! All credit to Tennant and Tate for not bursting out laughing in the middle of this nonsense. And then all the cracks close up. Seriously?
And oh dear, Rose is technobabbling a little too. Pity, I liked Rose.
So somehow Donna was saved by sharing the power overload with her daughter. This is the lamest retcon ever. I’ll kind of overlook it because I like the characters – even Donna. And even Sylvia now looks favourably on the Doctor – this is probably the wildest retcon in the episode… And then Donna and Rose can just choose to let all that power go, just like that – howcome Donna couldn’t have done that all by herself decades ago? (With a bit of snark about the Doc being thick ‘cos he’s a man – I can see why that annoyed some people).
I still reckon it was mean of Donna to go off with the Doctor and not even let Rose see the Tardis. So then Donna gets to see the new Tardis interior but Rose doesn’t? Incidentally, it’s a thousand times better than Whitdoc’s Crystal Grotto of Schlock. Though (IMO) not as good as Capaldi’s. But a lot bigger (the budget has gone up). Another minor quibble – howcome the Doctor is seeing it for the first time? Did it wait until he was out in London before redecorating?
And the moment the Doctor finds the coffee machine we KNOW what Donna is going to do.
Well, that was reasonably entertaining. I suspect it had as many faults as a Chibz episode, and even more technobabble. It will never make my top 20 episodes (maybe not my top 100) but it was okay in a sort of Aliens of London way. And I did like Rose.
16 October 2025 at 12:58 #78221Looking at the next ep – Power of the Doctor – the Daleks were going to flood the Earth with lava, and even more improbable scenario. They had a big drill in a volcano and were going to let the lava out 🙂 Of course, if they *had* managed to cause a few massive volcanic eruptions, it’s possible the dust clouds in the atmosphere might have wiped out all life on Earth by freezing, that would be a much more credible doomsday scenario.
But anyway, they were defeated by Ace and her baseball bat (and also her Nitro-9)
16 October 2025 at 12:53 #78220@whohar World Enough and Time was a genius move from Moff as far as Cybermen went. As far as I was concerned , the earliest Cybermen (way back in old Who) were the lamest most unconvincing monsters ever – all too painfully obviously just extras in suits. It took Moff’s genius to turn that liability into a horrific ‘reality’ – that the earliest Cybermen *were* in fact just slightly modified people in suits. Like, I guess that was implicit all along, but whether it was the build-up that Moff gave us, or whether the costumes in World Enough were subtly but significantly better, or a bit of both, I’m not sure.
There was a BBC comedy special which included Jonathan Pryce (as the Master) and Rowan Atkinson and Joanna Lumley (the first female Doctor?) that riffed on that going-back-and-change-things, as each one went back further than the other to ‘fix’ things. Except that something went wrong for the Master each time and he had to come back the ‘long way round’. Or something like that, I’m a bit hazy on the details.
I am absolutely sure, in NewWho, there was one occasion when the Doctor timed his arrival to within minutes if not seconds. Presumably on that occasion the Tardis concurred. But I can’t bring it to mind, not even which Doctor it was.
16 October 2025 at 05:52 #78217@whohar @janetteb Acutely observed, Whohar. Usually the Tardis has just been transport to where (or when!) the story is going to happen. It’s a lot simpler to write that way. (More conventional stories occasionally have ‘flashbacks’ to show us what happened previously, but of course the characters in ‘then’ have no foreknowledge of what is going to happen ‘now’).
There is a fundamental incompatibility between possessing a time machine and linear storytelling. Which is, if the hero walks into an ambush ‘now’, WHY doesn’t he just hop into his time machine and go back to yesterday and warn himself. Of course this introduces a massive problem to do with causation and the nature of reality, which is why most writers tend to rule it out with ‘not crossing the timelines’ or such. Only Moff has cared to tackle that head-on, sometimes by sweeping the paradox under the carpet. I think he managed to adroitly avoid the paradox in Blink.
And he addressed the phenomenon of time dilation in a strong gravitational field head-on, in World Enough and Time. I was baffled by the timeline at first, only on subsequent viewings did I realise it was accurate. For that, I can almost forgive him the sight of Cybermen crashing through steel floors.
15 October 2025 at 11:50 #78212@ps1l0v3y0u Just noticed your comment in the ‘Sea Devils’ thread, re Larry and Sally. I think their relationship was handled very well and subtly. It was obvious they got on well together, there was a good chance they were a couple, but that’s all it needed. I can quite happily imagine a romantic attraction there without needing it to be spelled out in words of one syllable.
15 October 2025 at 11:43 #78211@ps1l0v3y0u Well, the story has so many plot holes it would sink faster than a rowing boat in a hurricane. (And yes I’d picked up on the magnetic poles thing. The Earth has had the poles flip within recent (geological) times, and I don’t think there’s any geological evidence of the entire Earth being flooded. Why am I more tolerant of this than Kill the Moon? Probably because this is nearer to fantasy (pirates and seamonsters) while KTM tried to pretend to be based on hard science and technology (in every respect except the egg of course) and failed hideously at ever turn. Also, because the characters (in Sea Devils) were likeable, in distinct contrast to Lundvik and the appalling Courtney. And Doctor 12’s totally out-of-character behaviour.) Actually, I’m not sure there would be any way to ‘flood the Earth’ other than reducing all the land to a perfectly round sphere. Which I don’t think has happened in all of geological history.
So, back to the episode. I suppose I could rate it (in quality) roughly equal to Curse of the Black Spot. With the difference that this was one of Chibz’ better episodes and Black Spot was one of Moff’s poorer ones.
I think Sea Devils was rescued by the director and the cast – the very atmospheric opening scene for example, and the cast were easy to like.
15 October 2025 at 11:08 #78210@ps1l0v3y0u Of course! Billy got her phone number when he was young and cheeky. Calling her ‘Gorgeous girl’ evidently worked. As he said, “It was raining when I met you” and she said “It’s the same rain.” (And she was quite literally correct).
For some reason I always choke up when I hear that line.
14 October 2025 at 14:49 #78206@nerys You’re probably right about the Doctor saving Caecilius. My memory of that episode isn’t precise. It was not a terribly convincing reason, but I suppose Moff needed something to explain why Capaldi reappeared.
I don’t think Karen Gillan’s reappearance was ever ‘explained’, though.
Freema Agyeman’s cousin was in UNIT (?) in ?Doomsday, if I recall correctly.
Are there any other minor characters who later took prominent roles and had to be ‘explained’ away?
14 October 2025 at 14:39 #78205@ps1l0v3y0u I thought I had the timeline of Blink! straight in my mind, but now I’m not so sure. I’m pretty sure the Doctor went to Wester Drumlins because it was dangerous and because he’s the Doctor. Where he and Martha got zapped by an Angel, and the cops discovered the Tardis and towed it away. (Maybe they thought it was one of theirs that had been stolen).
How did Sally know to go and see old Billy in hospital? I’m sure it was covered but I can’t remember how.
13 October 2025 at 15:12 #78196Well, I just re-watched this episode again, a year later. I wrote down my lengthy comments on it, but reading this page, they’re almost exactly like what I said a year ago, so I won’t post them. Just a couple of points that I didn’t mention before.
The Qurunx is new, and quite cool. But *of course* the Doctor knows exactly what it is, as with every new monster.
“Have you any idea what’s going on in outer space in 1916 right now?” The Doctor seems to have no idea how self-contradictory that is. When you have a time machine, ‘right now’ is meaningless.
Umm, so the Daleks are going to drill a hole under a Bolivian volcano and ‘flood the world with lava’? That’s almost Kill-the-Moon bad. I mean, scientifically bad. One small hole isn’t going to do a thing. The Deccan Traps (largest lava flow I can think of) took a million years to form. And, trying to stop a volcano erupting by solidifying its lava outpouring is how you get Krakatoa.
As I noted before, it’s just like the most cringily unconvincing scene from Journey’s End, how to fly the Tardis by committee. Aka ‘give everybody a turn’. Why, when Yaz was recently managing to fly it by herself? And in the very next scene, Yaz is again flying it by herself.
So there we are, that’s a few nits. And there were a lot of nits to pick. There were also quite a collection of good bits, though some of them seemed more chosen for effect than narrative necessities. The Winter Palace in 1916 – why??
There was probably enough there for several episodes. If someone had edited Chibz’ script – hard – probably two or three quite good episodes might have emerged.
Oh, and somebody please whack Chibz over the knuckles with a ruler every time he starts to type the word ‘Cyber…’
13 October 2025 at 14:55 #78195@ps1l0v3y0u Oops! For ‘Laura’ read ‘Sarah’. Dunno where I got that from.
I’m not querying the Doctor’s presence at Wester Drumlins, he may have been in pursuit of the Angels. Just, how he knew to write ‘Duck’ on the wall – and then paper over it, unless some subsequent tenant did it? – and that Sally would uncover it just in time to save herself. That may have been one of the few instances of Moff sacrificing causality for dramatic effect.
It didn’t even occur to me that Sally might have thought Larry was Kathy’s boyfriend. That might have been a reasonable inference, but I think it became apparent quite quickly he was her brother? Anyway, all guys are likely to wander around naked if they have to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and there’s no strangers in the house, don’t they? So not particularly weird. Whereas Nick was truly strange.
Yes Blink was genius level.
I don’t think Sally was ever a rejected Companion, I don’t think she was ever a candidate. She only met him the once, right at the end of the episode. Having got zapped back to ?? by the Angels, without their Tardis, all the Doctor (and Martha) could do was give Billy a message to put on DVD’s (like a message in a bottle) in the hope that someone would find the Tardis and send it back to them. Which Sally and Larry did.
The Ravagers – were they two of the Flux villains?, I forget. If they’re the pair I’m thinking of, and the Shakri was the Power of Three villain, then yes they do feel similar in my mind.
The Silurian two parter was very slow, could indeed have been better as one ep. I kept waiting for some consequence of the Doctor and Amy watching themselves from a distance, but I’m not sure it was ever referred to again? But yes, the Silurians were much better modelled than the Sea Devils. And Dinosaurs – what peeved me most was Nefertiti meekly going off with Great White Hunter in the end (and I’m probably as close to Male Chauvinist Pig as I am to ‘woke’, but that got up my nose).
13 October 2025 at 14:29 #78193@thane16 syzygy I’d agree, soaps are likely very difficult to write well. Not least because they come out every night (some of ’em, at least). How can anyone keep coming up with fresh original dialogue on that schedule?
And then, each of the half-dozen storylines gets cut up into 5-minute chunks which get screened intercut with the other 5-minute storyline chunks, once per episode. How can any viewer become engrossed in the story under those conditions?
And the format then inescapably leads to the story becoming, either melodramatic, or banal. Since there isn’t time to develop any real ‘atmosphere’ around each 5-minute chunk of story.
That’s my 10c anyway. I could be all wrong about soaps since I ‘never’ watch them.
13 October 2025 at 14:18 #78192@ps1l0v3y0u Well I’m perfectly happy at the prospect of a Billie Doc. And, as you say, she’s older – which is a good thing in my estimation. A bit of maturity helps to enhance the Doctor’s credibility, as far as I’m concerned. 20-something Billie was great as Rose. I think she would have been much too young to be the Doctor at that age.
But we shall see.
13 October 2025 at 07:11 #78188@whohar I don’t think it matters in the slightest that we don’t know who the ‘current’ Doctor is. He’s a time traveller, can there even be said to be a ‘current’ Doctor? As you said, the non-TV material is free to use any incarnation they wish.
Obviously, my viewpoint is totally different to yours. But then, I was always an asynchronous Who fan, by which I mean I was watching the stories months or even years behind the current latest. Doesn’t matter. It might matter if they’re out of sequence, but Who was never a current-events show.
13 October 2025 at 07:02 #78187@pa1l0v3y0u I agree that some Who eps are plotted with perfect logic. (I’ve never tried to analyse it episode by episode, I hope there would be a large number that do hold up). As an example of excellence, Blink – in spite of its complications – fitted exactly. (Well, I’ve only found one loose end – when Sally Sparrow uncovers the Doctor’s message ‘Duck’ under the wallpaper. How could the Doctor predict the timing of that?) But in all other respects, by the third time I watched it and got things straight in my mind, everything in the jigsaw fitted perfectly. But I would still have been very tolerant of loose ends, it just felt good.
As for the romantic couple, Sally Sparrow was immediately appealing (all credit to Carey Mulligan), and Larry is quite passable (notwithstanding that the first time we encounter him he has no trousers). Quite credible that Sally and Larry might take over the DVD shop. In contrast, Laura was okay, nothing remarkable (except, living a rather sad existence), but Nick was truly weird. Living in a storage unit with mementos of past short-term girlfriends (but which of the one-night stands bequeathed him a roomful of stuffed animals?). The only thing Laura and Nick had in common was, they seemed to have no life. (Oh, and how was Laura’s business surviving if Nick was her only customer?). Hope she had good insurance on the building that wasn’t nullified by Nick storing dangerous goods in it.
42 was – passable, nothing really exceptional. Running through corridors against a deadline. The sentient sun thing was a bit of nonsense though.
Power of Three had a really good premise – mysterious cubes appearing everywhere which did weird things. Good comedy material. (Remember the Doug Adams trope about the mice being the projection in our dimension of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings, and Dentarthurdent protesting that mice were just animals that scientists made run through mazes and so. And Slartibartfast (IIRC) saying ‘one has to admire the ingenuity’).
Well, I thought the enigmatic cubes were there to experiment on human psychology and reactions to facilitate an alien takeover. But no, they were just there to kill humans – not all humans, just a third of them. I found that ridiculous. Given the technological power needed to create the impervious-to-all-attack cubes, surely the villain could have killed the requisite number of humans with a far simpler method, a few nukes would do it, or a series of neutron bombs if he wanted to leave infrastructure intact. And if the cubes were just killer devices, why did they have to ‘do stuff’?, why did they need to be anything more than cute paperweights? Also, the villain was naff, and the resolution was absurdly simplistic. Even extending to everyone who had just died coming back to life. Heart attacks don’t work like that.
12 October 2025 at 07:56 #78183@whohar @janetteb I don’t find the doctor’s revival as a Rose lookalike creepy at all. It might possibly be so if the Doctor had deliberately chosen that appearance. But do we know how the regeneration process decides on the look of the next iteration? Does it randomly fish something out of the subject’s subconscious? The Moment chose a character from the Doctor’s timeline (got it back to front, of course). Twelve came out looking like a significant figure from his past that he had failed to save. Fourteen came out looking like Ten. And of course the Zygons were impersonating other people wholesale.
I’m sure there have been other occasions in sci-fi/fantasy where some entity has chosen to manifest itself in a form that was ‘pleasing’ to the protagonist, though I can’t put my finger on any specific cases off the top of my head.
And I don’t think it muddies the waters in the broader Whoniverse, whatever that means. I regard the TV series as canon, all the rest is derivative or symbiotic entities.
12 October 2025 at 07:30 #78182@ps1l0v3y0u All those are valid points. I have to admit I was unconvinced by the rapid romance between Sarah and weirdo can’t-ever-keep-a-girlfriend Nick. I just didn’t poke at it too much. Like a lot of things in this episode, it all starts to unravel if you start pulling at dangling threads. (Same could be said of many episodes, of course). As @nerys said, enjoyable enough if one doesn’t scrutinise the details too closely.
I rather think Legend of the Sea Devils would fall apart even quicker, given that treatment.
I must admit to being influenced by ‘feelz’. If the characters don’t appeal to me, I’m that much more likely to notice inconsistencies or anomalies. If I like the characters (which may just hinge on a casting decision) then I’m more likely to give the plot logic a bit of slack. Nowhere was that more evident than Asylum of the Daleks, where I subconsciously wanted to believe in Souffle Girl (because she was so well written and Jenna Coleman conveyed the character so well) even while Moff was figuratively waving red flags in front of our eyes. (Where did she get the milk?). My brain just did not want to consider the possibility that she might be a Dalek, even though her ‘mother’ Darla had just turned out to be one. Nice work, Moff! Now in that case, of course, the anomalies were deliberate.
Also, maybe I’m more tolerant of Eve of the Daleks (and Legend of the Sea Devils) because of low expectations, stemming from some of Chibz’ previous episodes.
11 October 2025 at 09:28 #78177@ps1l0v3y0u Re Moff:
I like clever writers, whether book or script. No such thing as ‘too clever’, in my view.
(I’ll qualify that: I don’t like writers who show off their ‘cleverness’ by deliberately using incomprehensible words or phrases, that’s just egocentrism in my view. But that’s more likely to happen in text than in a script).
I do like original dialogue, and I love irony. One of my favourite scenes is the American Diner in Hell Bent, with the Doctor and Clara, where it becomes apparent that one of them can’t remember the other, but we don’t know which one until the end. And this is the really clever bit: The dialogue works equally well both ways. It’s also sad, and sweet, and poignant.
Probably the best example of clever, witty dialogue anywhere is Yes, Prime Minister – all of it. It takes a lot of talent to keep that up for a whole series.
I’ll stick my neck way out and contend that Moff was writing for all genders, women as well as men. Of course I’m going way beyond my limits there, since I ain’t a woman. But to me, the Companion was just as important in Who as the Doctor, right from Rose onwards, and of course the companion was always a woman. Oh, I’ve just realised, you don’t mean ‘writing episodes to appeal to women’, you mean ‘writing women characters’. Well (adopts Strax voice), they all seemed perfectly normal to me.
Except maybe River Song, who was more a villain than a woman.
Candidates for a female Doctor 12? Well, Missy springs to mind (there would have to be some complicated mindswap/regeneration thing going on there of course, but who says Moff couldn’t pull it off? Michelle Gomez certainly could have).
Since you mention Martha – maybe. A little young for the Doctor, possibly? (Yes, I know, Rose is now the Doctor (probably) but this is ten years later). Tasha Lem – oh yes, absolutely. (I thought of her in this connection previously). My other pick was Liz 10 (Sophie Okonedo) but she was probably (I’m speculating) too busy to want to be tied down to several seasons of Who. Would’ve been interesting to watch the reactions from – some quarters.
(Afterthought – I think I was mistaken, there wouldn’t have been any complications with Michelle Gomez, since Missy first appeared after the 12th Doctor did.)
11 October 2025 at 08:48 #78176@nerys I think the Doctor babbled very little in this episode, compared with previous Chibz episodes. But I came to it after watching RTD/Gatwa’s seasons, so probably the technobabble was more noticeable.
I know there was previous technobabble in Who, but usually it was restrained, used only when necessary for the furtherance of the plot. With Chibz’ Doctor, one got the impression it was there simply to make it ‘sound sciencey’ or maybe make up for something that should have been better plotted.
I did think it was Chibz’ best episode. Probably still is, though I’ve acquired a quite unreasonable fondness for Legend of the Sea Devils. I was also quite fond of Love & Monsters. I don’t know if that proves something.
As for being committed, you’ll notice that I started my re-watch with this ep, i.e. three episodes from the end of Chibz’ tenure. I’m only mildly committed, I’m not fanatical 🙂
10 October 2025 at 14:24 #78173[A year later:]
Legend of the Sea Devils
Starts off really well. Very atmospheric, very sinister, very Xena. Madam Ching really has some presence. I really like the actress, by the way.
The mood is kinda spoilt by Dan wearing the cartoon comedy pirate clobber. And Mr Carnival-mask Sea Devil. Looks a bit like a dyspeptic mutant Chihuahua with a beak. I really want to like this episode if the costume department would let me.
Oh gods, and the Doctor *immediately* knows who Madame Ching is. She does that all the time. Does anyone find that a bit – odd?
Then Dan goes off with the Chinese guy for no apparent reason at all. His credibility seems to have declined since the last ep. And they [somehow] get on board Madam Ching’s ship (come to that, how did she get there – I didn’t see a rowing boat). And she [somehow] ties both of them up, single-handed. Never mind.
“No ship, Sherlock.” Ohhhhhh. That’s one of those lines where you groan then can’t stop yourself laughing.
Really nice of Chihuahua Boy to show the Doctor and Yaz his setup and explain everything. A bit like the habit of James Bond villains who famously could not resist telling an enemy agent all their most secret plans. “Do not make the mistake of thinking I wish to keep you alive.” Oh that’s a nice menacing Bond-villain line. Incidentally, parts of this are very James Bond, like the secret underwater dock.
Again, not quite sure how they got Ji-Hun out of his stasis cage and escaped the attentions of the Sea Devils to jump onto Madame Ching’s ship. Or how they manage to leap back onto the Sea Devil ship. Never mind, logistics is not the strength of this episode.
“Dan, I need you to supervise Ji-Hun and Madame Ching.” Like that’s gonna happen.
I have to say, the – relationship – between the Doctor and Yaz is quite well and sensitively handled in this episode. Actually the Doctor is quite tolerable, when she isn’t spouting technobabble (which of course is a Chibz problem not a Whittaker one).
Hey! I actually liked this episode. (And I could follow the events much more easily second time round, which is often the case). And I found the characters – at least the ones I was supposed to like – actually likeable, which is not always the case.
(I think there were probably as many physical-technical impossibilities in this as in Kill The Moon, which I loathe. Why the difference? – I think because this ep is fantasy, where the ‘rules’ can be quite relaxed, whereas KTM felt like hard sci-fi where things should follow logically. It’s a matter of tone.)
[And the last four posts are by – me. Ouch. I see I said this time – well, pretty much the same as I said last time. Is that because that commentary was lurking in my subconscious, or just because certain things resonate with my psyche? I don’t know. It would be interesting to give me a memory wipe – like Kryten (thanks Janetteb for the reference) and then see how my comments changed. Or not.]
Judging by the small number of posts and the lukewarm comments, I think this episode is actually under-rated.
10 October 2025 at 07:48 #78168@whohar Well, if the 12th Doctor had been Whittaker, it would have been interesting to see how well she did with, errm, better direction. 🙂 Though by the nature of it, we wouldn’t then have seen her actual Chibz-directed performance so we would never be able to make comparisons. (But that’s a hypothetical, to my mind Capaldi + Moff = the Best Doc Ever, so I would hate to have missed that (though again, we’d never have known).
As for “Moff can’t write women”, I’d like to see which Who writers could claim to write women better. I thought his female characters, most notably Amy, Clara and Bill, were very well-written. (Disclaimer: I don’t claim to be an expert on women 🙂
@winston @janetteb Yes, I’d love to see Billie Piper as the Doctor. And, considering the role she played in re-launching the series, I can’t think of anyone who deserves the chance better. (Also, she’s now 20 years older (doesn’t time fly?!) and more mature, which I think suits the Doctor better. (I took a while to get used to Matt Smith because he looked too young. Similarly I could never quite credit Roger Moore as James Bond until his last couple of films).
Winston, you’re heading into winter (I think), we’re heading out of it. Our seasons run late, normally I don’t swim before Christmas, or the start of December at the earliest ever. And thereby hangs an odd tale – two weeks ago I went down to the beach for a walk. It was half tide and two kids were sitting in the water, so I tried it, and the edge was warm (from the sun). So I went in, by the time I’d gone 100 yards and in two feet of water (very flat beach) it was cool but not freezing, so I sat down and chilled (!) for five minutes. I’ve known it colder in December! (Northern Hemisphereans think: June 🙂 I must try again and see if that was just a freak event.
By the way, I just watched Eve of the Daleks (comments in that forum). I did find the timeline easier to follow on a re-watch, as often happens. That particularly applies to time-travel episodes like Blink. It might even apply to the Flux, but I’m not going to try that this time round.
9 October 2025 at 14:59 #78164Well I finally got my re-watch started, at Eve of the Daleks.
The idea of an ever-shortening time loop is quite a good plot device. In one way it faintly resembles CapaldiDoc’s repeated death in Heaven Sent, though the details are of course very different and this only lasts 50 minutes, not billions of years.
I’m not too sure *why* it resets on the death of the Doctor and companions. No, wait: maybe I have it backwards. Maybe it resets automatically when the ‘countdown’ ends at midnight, regardless of the status of the Doctor et al. So that when they are killed, they stay dead until midnight when it resets to a time when they were still alive. So from their point of view, their death is immediately followed by their revival the the start of the time loop. I think that kinda makes sense. Somehow.
Yaz and Dan are fine as companions in this episode. And they carry their weight in the action stakes.
And Graham and Ryan are at their least annoying.
[Interjection:] Graham and Ryan aren’t IN this episode!
[Me:] Precisely!The Doctor still talks too much, though maybe not as badly as in earlier seasons. In fact as the episode progresses there’s an awful lot of Rah! Rah! Rah! pep talk from the Doctor, I’d be a bit like Marvin the paranoid android: “Are you trying to motivate me? Because it’s a waste of time.” Obviously my babble-tolerance is way lower than Nerys’s (ref. her last comment).
What the heck, the other characters carry the story.
There are a few loose ends – though the Daleks have been upgraded with rotary cannon Miniguns, they seem to be remarkably bad shots, spraying energy bolts around the place and only hitting a human when it suits the plot. Also, though these bolts appear to be quite easily stopped by lift doors and similar furniture, they can apparently penetrate Dalek armour and shred the steel gas cylinders which Nick has conveniently stored in the basement. And would the collapsing building kill the Daleks? Never mind, worse anomalies happen all the time in Who. But these anomalies are overlookable for the sake of the story
When the Tardis excruciatingly remodelled itelf, I was hoping for a cleaner interior, but no such luck, it still had those weird nodding columns that looked like some bizarre sex toy. (Or does that say something regrettable about my mind?)
In my memory, this looked like the best episode Chibnall wrote. On a re-watch, I’m not so sure whether that was the case, or whether it was just a relief to encounter a finite story after the apocalyptic Universe-destroying Flux.
9 October 2025 at 05:01 #78163@janetteb I wouldn’t worry about ‘not keeping up.’ I used to comment on episodes as I got them then and then found that the previous comments I was ‘replying’ to were made two years before… One of the hazards of ‘catching up’ with DVD’s.
But I don’t recall anyone ever being put out about it.
Having watched the movie recently, I can see why you weren’t optimistic for a revival. McGann was great, the film was OK but it felt somehow American (Canadian?), it just didn’t really feel like Who (old or new).
7 October 2025 at 06:48 #78156@winston Rose was an excellent way to (re)start a series. I think by then, production values (and special FX) had got ‘good enough’ (without the rather charitable allowances we have to make even for the last of OldWho). Even Mickey’s sticky encounter with the bin was – okay.
I would say the Companion has been as prominent and as important as the Doctor, ever since (I don’t know if this was the case in OldWho).
I do recall at the time there was some criticism of casting a pop singer as Companion, and with the development of a romantic interest with the Doctor, which I think had never been allowed to happen in oldWho. But I think it was absolutely successful. It certainly rekindled my four-decades-dormant interest in Who.
I don’t know if it was established in oldWho, to make gentle fun of the Doctor’s physical characteristics (I’m sure there was a joke about Ecclestone’s ears, and his accent “Lots of planets have a North”), but anyway, that has continued ever since.
Please keep posting as you progress. I have yet to re-start my (much more limited) watch-through, starting at the end of Chib’s era.
(How can you watch Who and chop tomatoes without cutting your fingers?)
26 September 2025 at 09:29 #78139@craig Thank you, Emperor. 🙂
25 September 2025 at 16:00 #78128@craig – just to let you know, some pest calling itself Dylan joined a few days ago and immediately spammed half a dozen forums with links to ??American baseball jerseys??? (together with some bland AI-generated ‘ ‘nice post’ comments)
3 September 2025 at 10:09 #78104@winston @ps1l0v3y0u The Moment is definitely and memorably in the cell in the Tower, in the TV episode. I remember the phrase ‘different case, same software’ and probably said by her.
BUT in the book, that was an internal thought of the Doctor (probably 11) – “The case was new, but the drives and software were the same as the old boy’s”. (Obviously wasn’t running Windows 🙂 I stand to be corrected (because it’s always a bit distracting working out who’s speaking in the book) but I don’t think the Moment was mentioned in the Tower scene.
I’m not sure when the book was written vs the episode, but I can imagine the Moment’s presence was added in because they had Billie available – so the Moment acquired more personality than it might have done with just another actor.
2 September 2025 at 15:45 #78099@ps1l0v3y0u I should be able to answer your ‘little nit picks’, having just read the book. But I can’t, quite. So now I’m just going to *have* to watch the episode again**. As for the witch/well discussion, as I recall (dashes off to get the book – damn Moff’s non-sequential chapter numbering…) Elizabeth ordered them to be taken to the Tower (in Clara’s hearing) and it was the Doctor (11) who said ‘What’s in a tower. Just another day at the office’ and winked at Clara. ‘The office’ – UNIT HQ?
The Vortex Manipulator code – one of the Doctors scratched it into the wall, and Clara and Kate (and hence Zygon Kate) assumed the Doctor would leave them a message. So Kate (Zygon)’s men were looking for it, one of them texted it through to Kate (Zygon’s) phone attached to the incoming phone dock in the Black Archive, Clara read it and stole the VM.
That’s so far as I can patch it together. No doubt Moff has worked out an absolutely valid chain of causation, he usually does.
**Since it’s near the top of my list of Ten Favourite Episodes, that won’t be too much of a chore. 🙂
2 September 2025 at 15:11 #78098@whohar I think Steven Moffat sums up the Doctor really well. There is something subtly – odd – about the Doctor’s view of life. Moff could do that supremely well. Oh, and your addition (humanlike but otherworldly) – yes I agree.
I think Chibs tried to do the same slight oddness on occasion, but it requires a delicate touch and (maybe I was in a non-appreciative frame of mind) I don’t think he’s got it.
2 September 2025 at 15:00 #78097@ps1l0v3y0u I think Day of the Doctor is the only Who novelisation I’ve read.
Getting a bit further in the book, I’ve notice that the Moment (Rose) doesn’t seem to feature at all in the dungeon in the Tower of London. I distinctly remember, from the TV episode, her leaning against the wall in the background, invisible to the two later Doctors but (in my view) completely changing the dynamic of the scene by her presence. (Something long-haired blondes with dark eyebrows invariably seem to do).
I do have to admire the skill with which Moffat ensures that we can always tell which of the Doctors is speaking, even while the narration switches from one to another, often just by their manner of phrasing. The War Doctor was particularly distinctive in that respect, I can almost hear John Hurt’s voice.
@janetteb I was intending to get ‘Rose’, but – like you – I couldn’t get hold of it.
I’ve just completed watching Red Dwarf as far as the end of Season 8 (IMO, seasons 3-6 were the best, 7 and 8 are fading in quality, to my mind); and all the Daniel Craig Bond movies (and it isn’t often I get to mention those two in the same sentence 🙂
– so now I’m about to start re-watching Who from Eve of the Daleks (or somewhere around there) forwards to the present.
31 August 2025 at 13:10 #78092I’m just re-reading Moffat’s The Day of the Doctor. (That was one of my top TV episodes ever). When I first read the book, I think my experience was somewhat impaired by having recently watched the episode. The written word can never match the ‘personality’ that actors bring to the screen. (Can’t think of a better way to put it). So I missed that. And also, the extra material in the book just seemed like a digression from the story, so I was a little impatient to get back to the bits I knew.
Reading it this time round, I like it a lot better. It can certainly stand on its own as a sci fi tale. Notwithstanding that the chapters are all out of numerical order, which is potentially confusing. Probably my foreknowledge (from having seen the TV episode) helps me there. How easily a reader who comes to it ‘cold’ would follow it, I really can’t judge.Writing and film have entirely different strengths and weaknesses, a good book is no guarantee of a good film, or vice versa. But I think in The Day of the Doctor, Moffat has been very good at both.
30 August 2025 at 15:09 #78091@translatorcircuit @ps1l0v3y0u
Memory can be very misleading. Things get conflated, or attributed to the wrong person. I once attended a party where the host had a huge Union Jack as a bedspread. Years later I met him on a bus and he invited me to his wedding reception in a couple of weeks. I reminded him that last time I saw him he was walking down the road wearing his Union Jack (it was that sort of party). I would have sworn to that on oath. Come the reception, he had dozens of old photos tacked to the walls – including one of ME wearing the Union Jack. I know what my memory did – it remembered ‘Terry’ and ‘Flag’ and linked the two. (A psychologist called Daniel Simons later described this sort of thing but I thought of it first 🙂
Eyewitnesses are famously fallible; psychological studies have been done where phony bank raids have been staged and the unwitting ‘witnesses’ have happily described the shotgun one of the robbers had when *none of them had any sort of gun*. And so on.
Sometimes I get so used to modern developments I forget how sci-fi they seemed in past decades. I remember how strange/spooky The Village looked in The Prisoner, with hidden CCTV cameras and doors that opened by themselves – that really impressed me at the time. Come the present, I recently absent-mindedly walked into a glass sliding door because it *didn’t* open for me. Really. And, I was just reading a thriller set in the 60’s where the subject told his office to phone him back at the hotel desk at exactly 2p.m. with some detail or other, and I thought ‘why don’t they ring him as soon as they find it out?’. Then I realised that nobody had mobile phones.
17 August 2025 at 09:30 #78076I’d like to comment but I’m afraid I’m hopeless about dates. I can remember 1066,1588,1805,1812,1815,1914-18 and 1939-45 and that’s about it. Also 1923 (when the british railways were ‘grouped’ into the ‘big four’) and 1948 when they were all nationalised as BR (‘cos I’m a train nut) – and that’s it.
If you told me an asteroid was going to hit my house at precisely 3pm on September 11th I’d be wandering around at 2-45 pm scratching my head and thinking ‘there’s something I ought to remember. Probably doesn’t matter, I’ll remember it later’. I’m worse than the Doctor when it comes to dates.
Incidentally, there’s an inherent logical flaw in any adventures involving someone with a time machine, which is, why don’t they just go back in time by half an hour and tip themselves off? I guess that’s where the prohibition of crossing the timelines originally came from. Something that subsequent writers have invoked when it suits them, and conveniently ignored when it doesn’t. The Tardis’s notorious inaccuracy in its destinations is also one of those on-again off-again things, I thought the exchange in The Doctor’s Wife handled that beautifully – “You never took me where I wanted to go” “But I always took you where you needed to go.”
17 August 2025 at 07:46 #78075Hi @janetteb Nice to hear from you. I was planning to re-watch from the three final Chibs ‘specials’ up to current, but I might push my start point back to this episode, and see if the subsequent Fluxisodes make any more sense to me than first time around. But that will be in a couple of weeks time, I’m currently watching Red Dwarf seasons 1-8, up to 7 at the moment, with a brief pause to polish scratches out of a DVD. (I used 2000 grit wet’n’dry sandpaper, followed by a 3000 grit abrasive disc – both from panelbeaters’ supplies – and finishing with Silvo. My laptop with its slimline DVD drive still barely reads it, the the full-size DVD drive in my desktop PC reads it much better, so I just used that to rip it all to a new DVD disk which my laptop can read. Probably breaching all sorts of copyright laws, but if someone tries to persuade me that doing the necessary to view my DVD on my own laptop is naughty they’ll have an uphill battle 🙂
@ps1l0v3y0u I do agree that ‘less is more’ in respect of the Angels, and (obviously) their debut in Blink. Still, I obviously (from my previous comments) found them well -rendered in this episode. Interesting to note the steady increase in their capabilities with each successive appearance. But it happened to the Daleks and it happened to the Cybermen. It’s probably a ‘law’ that applies to most fictional serial adversaries.
12 August 2025 at 14:46 #78069Hi @janetteb Great to hear from you.
Obviously, I agree with you. Of the JW seasons, I think I found the Flux most disconcerting – partly because I lost the plot 🙂 and partly because universe-wide total destruction I always find depressing, rather than scary. I most identify with the characters when the danger is individual and personal, like in Blink or Listen or Midnight.
I only ever watched the Flux through once, and probably won’t again. As I recall the best episode was the Weeping Angel one (Village of the Angels).
The other JW seasons, there were usually a few episodes that were worth a re-watch, and I did that. But when I start my (long-delayed because I’m working through Red Dwarf first) latest re-watch I’ll probably start at the last few, viz. Eve of the Daleks, and work through to the latest Gatwa one. Because I’ve only seen them once so far.
7 August 2025 at 16:49 #78066@ps1l0v3y0u ‘Apple-converted-space’ – does that mean that Apple’s ‘walled garden’ has now expanded to include substantial chunks of the Universe? 😉
I think part of my failure to appreciate the Flux came from impatience – we knew the season was supposed to be a six-parter, so when successive episodes seemed to relate to some completely unrelated theme I was a little impatient to know how these linked up, and the ‘stand-alone’ details in the episodes seemed like a time-wasting digression. So I couldn’t really ‘get into’ the story.
Now I know perfectly well that Moffat did season-long arcs (except they weren’t advertised as such), most notably Series 6, and I was fine with that. (It started with The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon, and ended with Wedding of River Song). So why was I okay with that series – because individual episodes in between were complete in themselves and I wasn’t impatiently waiting to see how they tied in. And this in turn was because the series wasn’t advertised as a continuing story.
I don’t know if that makes sense.
I did find the reduction of the Fam (‘Fam’? Ugh. Remind me again why this Doctor got on my nerves?) definitely helped, though.
7 August 2025 at 12:46 #78064Well now, re-reading *all* the comments, it seems most people found it an improvement on the previous episode. With the occasional fractious nitpicker such as – me (Hi everybody 🙂 who found the plotholes more easily than following the plot. Frequently Chibs is sadly predictable in the PC-ness of his stereotypes – the stupid British general being a case in point, or Mary Seacole turning into an unlikely war hero. (Not that what she actually did wasn’t praiseworthy, and she must have been a very determined woman, but spying on the Sontaran camp? Is Chibz getting her confused with Mata Hari? As I said before, I’m very squeamish about representations of actual historical figures – which tend to be misrepresentations either by omission or commission.)
I would normally have answered some of @ps1l0v3y0u ‘s points, but honestly, I can’t recall enough of the ep to comment intelligently. Maybe if I re-watched I would have an apocrypha… an apocalypse… an epiphany (got it!) and realise how it all made sense, but I’m not sure if I can summon up the mental effort. This is probably why theatre critics get notoriously bitter and twisted. To those who enjoyed this episode, I apologise for my negativity.
(As an aside, what does <span class=”Apple-converted-space”> </span> mean? Is it some quirk of ps1l0v3y0u ‘s system or of the Forum’s editor?)
28 July 2025 at 10:53 #78061@ps1l0v3y0u I wasn’t aware of the attempt to speed up story development of which you speak. Maybe just the 6-ep season which were all ‘chapters’ of the one story passed for that, I don’t know. I tend to be a couple of years adrift of the majority of fans here, right now is as caught-up as I’ve ever been.
27 July 2025 at 15:41 #78059@ps1l0v3y0u
Wow. You really are boldly going where no man who values his sanity has ever gone a second time. (That came out rather clunky, didn’t it?) The Flux.With respect, I do your posts somewhat – gnomic. I have to scratch my head (or the episode list) to catch some of your references. (As an aside, I’m running Debian Linux, and I’ve never appreciated its ability to run six desktops simultaneously, more than when considering your comments, that way I can have your comment on this Forum open in one, the text editor where I’m writing this in another, Tardis.fandom.com’s timeline/episode synopses in a third, and (if necessary) Chrissie’s transcripts page in the fourth. (Now I guess someone’s going to tell me Windows can do that too, whoopee do, about time 🙂
But I found it worth the effort.Back to your comments – the Skirmish of Ranskoor Av Kolos, I wholly agree about. Spyfall I liked part 1, but it fell apart in part 2. Fugitive of the Judoon was probably the best of that bunch.
Revolution of the Daleks was, IIRC, okay, but nothing to write home about. We did lose two-thirds of the Terrible Trio, which was a plus, not least because it gave the remaining third i.e. Yaz, a chance to become an actual character. I find Bradley Walsh much more convincing as MC of The Chase than being the father figure on Who. And as for the awkward relationship between Graham and part-time dyspraxic Ryan, that was – awkward. And yawnsville. I found the little Who fan club in Love & Monsters far more emotionally engaging, and that was just one ep.
Anyways, on to Halloween Apocrypha. It’s still unclear to me why faithful doggie Karvanista started the episode by trying to kill the Doctor, annoying as she could be. I eventually got that the Lupari were obliged to protect their designated humans, in Karvanista’s case Dan, though trying to off another human would seem to be a direct clash with some other designated Lupari. (I guess technically the Doc wasn’t human so didn’t count, but Yaz did). What happened when a human died, could their Lupari go off duty? And what happened when another small human arrived, did another Lupari get assigned? So how did they deal with the human population explosion, did Lupari also reproduce frantically? Dunno.)
I liked Dan much better than Graham, dunno why since he was functionally similar. Maybe better casting, and he wasn’t handicapped with Ryan hanging around his neck.
You were, I think, particularly gnomic about the robots in Dinosaurs on a Spaceship, but I eventually clicked. Mitchell and Webb are much better in their own series.
As soon as I saw Mr Williamson’s strange fetish about tunnels in 1820 Liverpool I thought it must have some connection with the Liverpool & Manchester Railway, who opened their steep tunnel from Edge Hill down to the docks – but that was in 1830. I’m still not sure if that was an abortive draft attempt to tie in with history. When I first saw Willamson I thought it might be a doppelganger for George Stephenson – as someone who admires Stephenson I’m much relieved it wasn’t. The plus’s of being featured in Who are outweighed by the probable mangling of history, George (or his ghost) dodged a bullet there.
I remember at the time, being confused about what was going on and who was who. Exacerbated by jumping from one situation to another apparently at random. Even reading Tardis.fandom.com’s detailed synopsis doesn’t completely cure this. This confusion persisted for the remainder of the Flux season, probably exacerbated by the fact that I couldn’t really muster any enthusiasm for the characters. Moff used to do season-long arcs, but he used to keep his storyline relatively straight. Note to Chibs – disentangling complicated arcs really takes a bit of mental effort, and the viewers need to be really ‘invested’ in the characters, or they won’t bother. (Admission – I wasn’t, so I didn’t).
Never mind, the light at the end of the tunnel is Eve of the Daleks.
I’m due for a rewatch of RTD 2.0, I might go slightly further, back as far as Eve and start from there.
16 July 2025 at 03:10 #78051@ps1l0v3y0u I think the reason for 15’s regeneration was to use some of the regeneration energy to disturb the universe sufficiently to being into existence Poppy, a virtual kid of which he had no memory and only existed in Conrad’s dream world. (Or something like that).
@whohar Jodie Whittaker’s appearance wasn’t cringe, but it did seem a bit like ‘let’s wheel out another old character for the fans’. I thought it was going to be Ten/14, which might have been more fitting given his extensive experience with regeneration…
16 July 2025 at 01:05 #78048@ps1l0v3y0u I pretty much agree with your ranking of RTD Who season enders.
16 July 2025 at 01:02 #78047@whohar Who *was* one of the least macho sci-fi’s, once. The last few eps, the Doc has been getting increasingly macho, shooting things with his enhanced sonic gun – I mean screwdriver, posing with macho orchestral music blaring – kind of the opposite of what RTD said. Maybe Disney got at him – the Star Wars influence.
I did find the sudden transition 10 minutes from the end, from battle to domestic bliss very disconcerting.
15 July 2025 at 16:30 #78041@translatorcircuit If that was a kilt, why didn’t it have tartan on it? And why would this Doctor wear one? I could understand it if 12 (Capaldi) wore one, he was Scottish, as a number of jokes testified. (And number 9 was from ‘the North’. I don’t know if 10 (Tennant) was Scottish too?) Of course we know they weren’t Scottish or northerners or from anywhere except Gallifrey, but it seems individual Doctors could identify as having some ethnic/geographical origin. Quite why all Doctors regenerated as humanoids, rather than e.g. Sontarans, would be an interesting question. I suppose the gallifreyan phenotype was humanoid so they regenerated into something not too physically different.
Your point 1 – the Time Ring. Okay, I didn’t know it had been used before, I withdraw my minor point of criticism of RTD on that score. But does that really matter to my understanding of this episode? It’s obviously a time/teleport device, like the Vortex Manipulator or any teleport bracelet.
2. Again, the background of the Zero Room doesn’t really impact on my understanding of the episode, since it’s described quite well in the dialogue.
In general, any of these references back to old episodes are dealt with in such a way that you don’t have to know the backstory, deliberately for the benefit of new viewers. So I maintain that I don’t need to watch all of oldWho to appreciate nuWho. It’s fine to watch older eps if you want to, but not essential. Can you point me to any factoids from oldWho that are essential to understanding any nuWho plot?
Devon – I’ve been through Devon several times. Probably the most isolated part would be Dartmoor. I’ve been through Brisbane a couple of times as a transit passenger, it’s my favourite Aussie airport for that, the transit lounge has all the architectural merit of a farm shed but it’s *comfortable*, which outranks 90% of the (far more pretentious) airports I’ve been through. Neither place struck me as ‘totally isolated from the known Universe’. Trying to think of a place like that – in NZ, might be the Waitaanga plateau, or parts of the Mackenzie country or even Fiordland. But surely Australia has many parts of the Outback that would fit that description.
I agree the electronic music was more distinctively Who. But I don’t mind the orchestra as such, if it’s used with restraint, just that in this episode there was so much ‘heroic’ music going on it distracted from the story and became bombastic. This would actually have been a (slightly) better episode with a more restrained soundtrack.
15 July 2025 at 15:55 #78039Having just read all the comments –
I agree with @ps1l0v3y0u that the middle of the series was stronger than the start/end. But then, as far as endings go, RTD has a habit of throwing everything but the kitchen sink at it. I don’t think that works particularly well with Doctor Who, it tends to distract us with the minutiae of UNIT which diminishes the human interest of the Doctor and his companions. This was, though, way better than last season’s finale.
As @cathannabel said, I think Anita had totally fallen for the Doctor (that interlude in the Time Hotel was charming), and her boyfriend was very much a consolation prize. And seeing the Doc and Rogue established (for her) that her daydreams about her and the Doc could never have happened.
Just comparing RTD season finales with Moff’s, I’ve noticed that RTD tends to have world-shattering themes – where Moff is much more limited, more personal, and therefore (IMO) much more effective. I’m thinking of Death in Heaven, or Hell Bent, or The Doctor Falls. I know this finale was very personal indeed (the Poppy sequence), except it felt somehow tacked-on, as if the ending had been grafted on when it became known that Ncuti was going to leave the show. I could be wrong about that, of course.
As @jimthe fish noted, Omega was a fairly short-lived disposable (and quickly disposed of) villain, and any big threat would have done.
I agree with @whohar, the regeneration didn’t grab me as much as previous ones have. And this may be because we’ve seen so many regenerations now, or because this Doctor – after just two seasons – just hadn’t impressed himself on my subconscious as much as previous Doctors, not only that but we’ve had four Companions in two seasons – Rose(2), Ruby, Anita and Belinda – so they too feel ‘temporary’ and the effect of the Doctor regenerating on his companions was diluted. I’m not sure I’m putting that very well.
And who is Anita’s boss? Evidently someone with some power, but a complete mystery to me.
The scene where Omega emerges and eats the Rani – I was expecting something more cunning from the Doctor, somehow playing the Rani and Omega off aganist each other. Like, say, the three-way standoff between Ten, the Master and Rassilon in The End of Time. This Doctor has been getting more violent, and his (is-it-still-a-) Screwdriver more and more powerful, as the series goes on.
And I agree with @jimthe fish, that I’d like to see Billie Piper as the Doctor for a good long time – say 3 series at least – (assuming they ever get made) so she can settle in to the part. Rather than just being the temporary title-holder. I have no logical problem at all with Billie (Rose) being the Doctor, after all Capaldi was the Doctor perfectly convincingly even though he’d previously had a significant role in an episode. And Billie had no problems with being the Interface for The Moment. So in the world of Doctor Who, all things are possible.
@miapatrick – I like that idea very much – that Rose looked into the Time Vortex. She is still full of the energy from that. Does that link her to the Tardis? Or does she still loom so large in the Doctor’s memory that, like The Moment choosing her for its Interface, the Tardis picked her as a ‘familiar face’. We know that happened with Capaldi and his earlier appearance in the Pompeii ep, and Rose has a stronger reason for being present in the Doctor’s memory. Whatever the options, that’s a good canon reason for her reappearance.
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