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Great to see Anita again! I like the return of the Time Hotel.

Okay, so it was Omega – as theorised in various posts on this site, I think.

Why is the Doctor wearing a skirt?

All this Unit personnel starting off to save the world with the stirring music is a bit – bombastic. Can’t say I like it. RTD has a tendency to go OTT on these things.
It was really nice to see Rose (2) and Ruby again, pity they’re just bit players in this episode. Rose just had a walk-on part. Just too many people.

The Doctor says he has the only Tardis in existence. Has he forgotten the American Diner? Or does he have no memory of that?

Time Ring. Is that new? Couldn’t the Rani have used a vortex manipulator?

So all this exchange between the Rani and the Doctor in the Unit control room – just lost me. I understand it, mostly, but I just can’t muster up any enthusiasm. RTD has jumped the shark. “Open the parallax cannons. Fire!” “Galvanic beams at maximum. Fire!” This is the sort of gobbledegook Doug Adams took the piss out of in Hitchhiker.

That ‘Zero Room’ looks remarkably like the Pandorica. And I’ve just realised why I find it hard to muster a lot of feeling for Belinda – in the last couple of series we’ve had Rose (2), Ruby, Belinda and Anita – and it takes longer than that to build up an attachment to a Companion.

Quite why the control room is shaking and bits of ceiling falling down, I don’t know, since the Bone Beasts haven’t reached it yet. And exactly what function the Rani’s Seekers are supposed to perform, other than looking weird and chanting ‘Omega’, I don’t know. Or why there needs to be four (?) of them.

Of course Omega’s double heartbeat is very reminiscent of the Master’s dah-dah-dah-dah from The Sound of Drums. I have to say Omega is one singularly ugly – corpse.

Jeez, give the symphony orchestra a rest, will ya. It’s just over the top.

Well, I have mixed feelings about this episode. Don’t hate it, but it’s all a bit Star Wars Disney for my tastes. Of the double episode, the first third of Instalment 1 was (I think) the best.

And it was nice to see Rose (1) again at the end.   Be fun to see where that’s going.

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@ps1l0v3y0u   Was that Lunkwill or Fook?    (Weird the random bits of information lurking under the piles of debris and broken typewriter bits in my memory).     – and (looks it up)  it was actually Vroomfondel.   Bugger!

@translatorcircuit   Who is actually going to ‘remove’ the rights to Doctor Who from the BBC?   It’s not like some magical licensing authority decides who gets rights to what.  The Beeb would have to sell them and they wouldn’t come cheap.

Also, it’s a matter of copyright law and who-owns-what.   There’s an interesting article at

The Strange Copyright of Doctor Who

 

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@ps1l0v3y0u    Thanks for that.   That clarifies it a little for me.

I actually liked the first half of the episode better than the second half.   I don’t usually go for those ‘everyday’ eps, but the hints of something odd make it more interesting.   Of course the biggest oddity is that the Doc and Belinda are married.   But still, I found the Truman Show touches, like the yellow coffee mugs, were intriguing.   RTD could have gone on for a lot longer in that vein before he blew it wide open with the giant dino skeletons.   (They were never explained, by the way, but I suppose we could put that down to a quirk of Conrad’s consciousness).

I did notice RTD was being terribly ‘woke’ (dreadful word) with the attitude to women and the disability thing.   But he did make use of it with the plot device that nobody could ‘see’ disabled people  (a ‘somebody else’s problem’ field?).   Or, actually, accounted for by Conrad’s consciousness being totally ‘ableist’.   But in that case, why did the disabled people even exist?

On the other hand, Conrad wasn’t the least bit racist (which seems out of character for him) since brown people did exist.

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@translatorcircuit    The only Doctor Who book I’ve read is  The Day of the Doctor, which reflects all the events of the TV episode but also (I think) has a bit of extra content in it.

I tend not to read book versions of TV/movies.   In general, I usually don’t find ‘the book of the film’ very satisfying.   Because film is primarily a visual medium, and the skill of the actors in conveying emotions and expressions is hard to capture in print.

But in general, books have a far more complicated plot than TV / movies.   A movie screenplay would often shrink down to the size of a short story, so a lot more plot needs to be added in, to make a decent-length novel.   (And here I’m talking 200 pages, not a 800-page blockbuster).    As a result, books are often very different in tone and style than the movie of the same title.

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These are my reactions bit by bit on first watching. Well, I can see where the Disney $$ went, and this ep looks great.

The Rani – obviously there’s a lot of background that I could know, but whether the lack of it is a major impediment depends on how RTD? wrote the episode.

Seventh son of a seventh son of a seventh son – that multiplies to 343. Can’t think of any significance in that (but my brain won’t stop doing that sort of stuff 🙂

Um, Belinda and the Doctor – in bed together and apparently a steady couple. Well this is new. Also unexpected, there wasn’t much hint of romance before. Took Rose and Ten two full seasons. What goes on? Oh, and they’ve got a daughter? That was quick! And the TV forecaster promises fine weather all over Great Britain (which is pushing credibility a bit) and New Zealand (now I know this is some alternate reality!)

And the announcer is reading Doctor Who. This is meta turned up to eleven.

What’s with the whole cupboard full of yellow mugs. And – Ruby?? What the ???

“I have someone expressing doubt”. This is going all Truman Show, except I suspect the ‘producers’ will be a lot more ruthless than Truman’s were.

Mel has a bin full of broken yellow mugs. This is getting surreal. I kinda like it. And immediately we have gigantic dinosaur skeletons walking around. OK, RTD isn’t going to build up the suspicions slowly, is he?

Doctor Who’s workplace instantly reminds me of the Ministry of Information in ‘Brazil’, Terry Gilliam’s black comedy, though Who’s ‘world’ is a lot less run-down and gloomy than Gilliam’s. That in turn had elements of ‘1984’. I’ve just realised – ‘Mr Smith’? Winston Smith! And Conrad posters with Big Brother-ish slogans on the walls. RTD acknowledging his inspiration, I think.

Back to Belinda and family, and we’re right back in Truman Show territory. She can’t remember the birth of her daughter. And another yellow coffee mug smashes. “That was quite a slip”. Probably why the rubbish bins have ‘Slip’ written on them.

I’m liking this.

I’ll make a prediction now (before I watch any further) – Belinda and the Doctor are in some kind of illusion ‘world’. The other characters aren’t real.

And now, the Rani. Her, um, bone palace is off the clock. Wall to wall insanity and Disney $$. A vague resemblance to a James Bond villain’s control room. The sensordroids (I call them that) are sensing very strong doubts, which pleases the Rani, I would have thought it should do the opposite.

And this is where it gets positively surreal. Conrad (the rat from three episodes back) is apparently running the Earth for the Rani (or something like that). And the Rani is relying on the Doctor’s doubts reaching some critical figure.

I like the way the test for doubts (I suppose) is coffee mugs smashing. Oh, it’s things falling through tables.

And then Doctor Smith and Belinda are arrested by the Thought Police, all very 1984. Notice that the crown on the door of the police car is a totalitarian-looking design – nice touch, that. The Monks in The Lie of the Land had a very similarly angular symbol.

Umm, then it gets even more surreal. So far as I can understand it – the entire ‘world’ has been generated by Conrad in order to trick the Doctor. So now the Rani is using the Doctor’s doubts in order to break reality so she can somehow find Omega. And she’s dispensing with the world as no longer needed. (Which means the entire population was fictitious, so that takes away the impact it would otherwise have had.) Still, all this is getting a bit too Chibs-like and Flux-like for my liking.

Umm. Well, it started off really promisingly. Then the last third, I think it jumped the shark. Or maybe I’m just not fond of universe-shaking epics.

Just have to see what the next episode brings.

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@ps1l0v3y0u   Panache.   I like that.   Yes this did feel more entertaining than a typical Chibs episode, even though I can’t put my finger on it, maybe ‘panache’ will have to do.

The glitter gun, I thought the Doc was going to sail through the doors of the Tardis.   And before that, I thought the Tardis was going to materialise around him, I’m sure it’s done that before.

And I did notice that first Kate, now the Doctor, are getting more unforgiving.   Is there a reason? – maybe the next episode will give a clue.

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@translatorcircuit    P.S.   I know about Schweizerdeutsch (have I got that right?)

Oh, and Honeychile Ryder was an interesting case. In the book, she was a half-caste Jamaican. Having read the book, I thought Ursula Andress was shockingly miscast, she certainly didn’t look Jamaican  – though I guess most audiences didn’t notice. She was OK in the role. Interestingly, she was ‘re-voiced’ for the movie by Nikki van der Zyl (also German) because of her strong accent. Also different – she walked out of the sea wearing the famous bikini. In the book, she wasn’t. Wearing anything, that is. I would have loved to see that!

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@translatorcircuit   There were quite a lot of Bond books written after Ian Fleming died, I don’t regard them as canon and haven’t read many of them.

Of course the movies are quite different from the books – Dr No was quite close to the original but they soon diverged and many of the later ones are entirely different from any of Fleming’s books.

Bear in mind that the movies were made for British and American audiences, I think that explains why so many characters – even the villains – spoke English.   Of course this is always a problem for movie makers making a movie for a specific audience – they really have to stick to English (or French, or German, or whatever audience they’re targeting) – the audience needs to understand what all the characters are saying.   Subtitles are a very clumsy way to ‘solve’ this.

Danger Man (pre-Bond, pre-Who) solved this quite cleverly – many of the foreign characters spoke their own language but you could tell from the context what they were saying.   You didn’t need to speak e.g. Spanish to understand that the boss villain said (in Spanish) “Cover him!   Get his gun.   If he moves, shoot him”  or that sort of thing.

At the time of the early Bond books, the USSR was the main enemy, and this was reflected in Casino Royale and  From Russia With Love.   But as the Cold War thawed, Bond’s enemy became international crime syndicates like Spectre, and the villains came from anywhere – Italy, Germany, Spain, USA, and Britain itself.   Why so many German actors?   I think because when they speak English their accents sound a bit foreign (not necessarily German).   Bond’s most famous villain, Enrst Stavro Blofeld, was German-Polish-Greek, and became a Polish national.  Played by seven actors of various nationalities, three of them British.   Goldfinger was American (I think).

I find it curious that you find it easier to understand Dr Who when read aloud, rather than reading it yourself.  For me it’s quite the opposite, I can read French fairly well (just have to look up the occasional word), but spoken French – I just can’t keep up with.   And this is because, spoken French I have to first interpret the sounds I hear into French text I understand, then translate that into English, all the while listening to the next bit of French.   When reading, I can read at my own speed.

But good translation is extremely difficult to do.   I think, the better the writer, the harder it is for a translation to do it justice.   Because words have many shades of meaning, and a good writer like Moffett can write dialogue with many levels of meaning – the same words directly translated into e.g. German will have different alternative meanings, so much of the flavour is lost.   And, there is cultural background which is different.   It is said that Germans don’t ‘get’ British humour – but that’s nothing, Americans  often don’t ‘get’ British humour either, even though they share 95% of the same language.

I didn’t mean to write so much about it.

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@translatorcircuit   I flatly disagree with you about James Bond, amongst many other things.   Of course it was unrealistic, that’s the genre, you reckon “The Man from Uncle” or “The A team” were any more realistic?   I’m buggered if I can see where the Bond movies were isolationist, since they were located all over the world, with characters from many countries.   I honestly can’t see where Bond was any more anglocentric than Dr Who.   And since Bond worked for a variety of British Intelligence, OF COURSE his enemies were foreign.   Beside, if he’d been confined to hunting down spies in London or Birmingham or Newcastle, it wouldn’t have had the same appeal to British audiences anyway, a large part of the attraction of Bond movies is that they travelled to exotic overseas places.   So of course his enemies were foreign, as were quite a lot of his friends.

I’m surprised you can stand to watch Dr Who, which is also very British in places.

Incidentally, not that it matters, but I think Brexit was one monumental cock-up, though it pales into insignificance compared with electing Trump.

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As the Doctor gets sucked into space he is yelling. Can I raise the most common and most commonly ignored quibble – “In space no-one can hear you scream”.

I still can’t reconcile myself to this ‘mavity’ business. Still strongly suggests we’re somehow in an alternate reality.

The frozen people – space is neither hot nor cold. A vacuum has no temperature. (Just consider a vacuum (Thermos) flask). Brain damage starts to occur after 4 minutes without oxygen, longer if extremely cold (a technique used to assist, I’m told, in e.g. heart operations). So I’m pretty sure all those people would have died from oxygen deprivation long before their temperatures dropped by evaporative/radiative cooling to cryogenic survival temperatures. Never mind, this is one I’ll overlook, even though it clashes with ‘Oxygen’.

But the theme of the Evil Corporation is still extant, I see.

The Sonic Screwdriver is turning into quite a weapon.

I don’t think I’ve seen the Doctor so bloodthirsty before, as when he keeps zapping Kid. Not that Kid didn’t deserve it.

The ‘revival booth’ idea is kind of impractical, how long would it take to drag in and revive 100,000 people. Say a minute each, that’s 1600 hours or 67 days, non-stop. Still, it gives us an excuse to see a few interesting aliens. Oh, I see they’re batch processing them. Okay.

I think I would have liked to see some sort of revenge on The Corporation for its predatory behaviour. Not sure what, maybe a DNA mutation transmitted by TV signal that could turn every ounce of Poppy Honey mildly toxic? Thus destroying the Corporation. (See, I can think of wacky ideas, too).

So, speculation (some of it) confirmed, Mrs Flood IS the Rani. Though I gather from various comments in this site, the Rani was considered a pretty naff villain. I never saw her myself (down boy, Translatorcircuit).

Okay, an interesting episode. Not a great one, but diverting enough, even if only a case of sit back and goggle at the monsters. By the way, I guessed Cora was a Hellion. Something about the hairstyle, though that would have concealed far more substantial horns than the stumps that she had.

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@translatorcircuit “I’m afraid people aren’t saying you shouldn’t watch Star Trek TOS, or early James Bond films, so that’s not fair!”

Well no, the two things are not equivalent. Doctor No and Doctor Who were nearly contemporary (in passing, I wonder if Who was a pun on No?) but there was a vast difference in production values. Dr No was a polished, big-budget motion picture in the well-established secret agent genre, based on a best-seller series of novels and shot on location – and it showed. Dr Who was made on a shoestring – and that too, showed. I don’t think fairness comes into it, it is what it is.
Even Blakes 7, made 16 years later, suffered from barely adequate props and FX and I only watched it because the characters and the dialogue were excellent.

So, between Dr No and No Time to Die, there is not a huge yawning gap in production values. If you liked No Time To Die you’d probably also like Dr No.
Whereas, in Who, between Doctors 1 and 15, or even 1 and 9, there is. By the way, I don’t mind black & white. I don’t think colourising it helps much.
Danger Man pre-dated Who by a couple of years, but – being a Secret Agent series – it didn’t need much in the way of special effects so doesn’t suffer nearly as much.

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@janetteb Even ‘older fans like us’ have grown accustomed to a vastly higher level of production values than we found acceptable in the early days. And even as late as Seven, there was a big (and visible) difference between Seven’s last eps and Rose.

@ps1l0v3y0u Ooh, lists. I must admit I can’t (or won’t) comment on docs 1-6. For 7, The Curse of Fenric had some fairly unconvincing monsters, The Greatest Show on Earth looked very like a ‘bottle’ ep and the ‘gods’ were only too obviously carved polystyrene shooting ‘little yellow points of light’. Even ‘Survival’ with the cat people, they looked more cuddly than menacing. As I recall, only Ghostlight really held up well, primarily because it was mostly ‘haunted house’ and no rubber monsters. But I have to admit I only watched those eps once each, about a year ago, I should probably re-watch.

For 8, The Night of the Doctor was very good for such a short episode. Written by Moff of course. The Doctor Who movie was – interesting, but didn’t really feel like Who.

Your listing of the War Doctor (Day of the Doctor) was a bit confusing, in Who’s timeline he came between 8 and 9, but in screening of course he was well into 11. Still one of the best eps of those seasons.

For 9, I’d pretty well go along with your list.

For 10, you do like Love & Monsters don’t you? I find it kind of cute, even though the monster is naff. But I’d go – Girl in the Fireplace, Human Nature/Family of Blood, Blink (of course!), Midnight,Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead, The Day of the Doctor (already mentioned)

For 11, I agree, it’s hard to choose just 5. I’d go with Vincent, Hide, Doctor’s Wife, The Girl Who Waited, Asylum of the Daleks, A Town Called Mercy, The Bells of St John – and a few more

12, even more so. Listen, Dark Water/Death in Heaven, Last Christmas, Magician’s Apprentice/Witch’s Familiar, Zygon Invasion/Inversion, Hell Bent (rather than Heaven Sent, which was a tour de force but not nearly so much fun), Oxygen, Extremis, World Enough/Doctor Falls. I miserably failed to keep that down to 5, didn’t I?

13 is easier, for all the wrong reasons. It Takes You Away, Fugitive of the Judoon, Eve of the Daleks. I’d be scratching to nominate any more. But then I’ve only watched each ep once, so some I can’t really remember the plot.

14/15: Wild Blue Yonder, Boom, Dot & Bubble, The Well, The Story & The Engine – oh, we agree exactly on those 🙂

 

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@translatorcircuit     The problem of changing the lead actor is one faced by all long-running series.   Only Doctor Who came up with a perfectly logical (in the context of the story) explanation.   And I think it was a huge advantage, stopped the series from getting stale.

Generally they just re-cast and hope the viewers will accept it.    Batman, for example.   And quite a number of Bond villains, I think Ernst Stavro Blofeld was at least two different actors.

The Bond series actually broke the fourth wall and addressed it directly when a girl turned down the second Bond (George Lazenby) and he said “This never happened to the other fellow.”     Obviously the number 007 can be reassigned, I don’t think they ever suggested that Bond’s name could be reassigned.   Though, if it was just a cover name, that would perfectly explain the change of actor.   BUT the problem with that is that James Bond has the same personal backstory in all episodes – so, unless that was a deep-cover illusion, that’s a problem.   (And why would they create such an illusion, there’s no reason for it).

I don’t think they promote isolationism, where did you get that from?   You’re missing some good ones.

I’m not a trekkie, at all.  The original series just failed to grab me, the only character I found interesting was Spock.   The sequels are, if anything, less interesting.

WARNING:   Blakes 7 spoilers below

Definitely an addict of Blakes 7 (even though it suffered from the same low-budget sets and FX as early Who) – I loved the sarcastic dialogue.   You claimed ‘The Well’ was copying some Trek episode where only one crewmember survives – well, how about B7’s final episode ‘Blake’ where none of the crew survive?   What a way to end a series.   But then, it’s not a new trope in Sci fi, remind me how many of the crew survived in Alien, or Aliens, or Alien 3?

Firefly was, I think, very much a Western set in space.    Didn’t really grab me.

Battlestar Galactica (the reboot) was absorbing, but mainly over the ongoing mystery of who was a Cylon ‘skin job.’    So I’m not sure that a re-watch would be as good.   But I did like that not all the humans were good, and not all the Cylons were bad.   Added some depth to it.

Farscape I was a keen viewer of, it had some insane plot twists and turns, double- and triple-crosses, some wild scenarios that I think only Red Dwarf ever matched, of course it had real ‘aliens’ thanks to the Creature Shop  –  who would have thought Muppets could ever be so sinister.   And some very Aussie black humour.    It occasionally overdid the ‘right stuff’ US jingoism but only in a very few episodes.   Also, it tended to overdo deathbed scenes when a main character died.   But on the whole, great stuff.

So my top four would be nuWho, Red Dwarf, Farscape and Blakes 7.

Oh, and The Prisoner, which was a groundbreaker and gave rise to so many memes.

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@janetteb   Thanks for that.

That Red Dwarf podcast, sounds like you were all having fun   (I assume you were the janette mentioned?)

FWIW, I think they at their best around Seasons 3-5.    I just watched Back to Reality, which is as meta as you can get – the crew find that they’ve been in a total immersion video game for the last four years, they’ve just returned to Earth, then it turns out the returning to Earth was the illusion, induced by the Despair Squid.

But, of the early eps, probably my favourite is Kryten, with the three dead female crew – only Red Dwarf could make that funny.   “They’re dead.”   “Are you sure.”   “They’re all dead.”   “But I was only away for two minutes.”   Red Dwarf could never be accused of being tasteful.

Anyway, this is kind of Off Topic, not that anyone ever seems to worry too much.

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@ps1l0v3y0u If Doctor Who had been reduced to a ‘nice safe soap’ I don’t think any of us would be here. I find soaps as interesting as – soap.
I like having a nice safe boring life, I find it interestingq2, but if I filmed it and stuck it on Youtube nobody would waste time watching (deservedly). So neither do I wish to watch anyone else’s banal existence, I can get that at home. Even worse is half a dozen people’s, chopped up into 5-minute chunks. In fact I hate that about soaps, the way they flip from one subplot to another every few minutes, that’s the way to kill any dramatic momentum or suspense. [/rant]

I do like it when a story goes meta, so long as it doesn’t do it too often. But as you say, it needs a strong storyline to attach itself to. The format of Who, with time travel, I guess is very conducive to meta.

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@translatorcircuit    That’s the first time I’ve been called disgusting today!    I really, deeply, don’t care.   And if you’re trying to tell me which episodes to watch that makes me almost determined not to.   Sorry ’bout that, I can be a perverse bastard when I want to be.   (That was ‘perverse’, not ‘perverted’.   No, wait….)

For example I’m sufficiently perverse not to like Tolkien much, either.

But as far as nuWho is concerned, I don’t think it’s necessary to be familiar with the old episodes to judge the quality of the writing or the standards of the production of new ones.  Continuity is a different matter, but the timeline is so long and convoluted by now that early Who has faded into the mists of time.   I’m not saying continuity can be disregarded, just that errors of continuity from last week or last year is a lot more obtrusive and significant than errors from oldWho.   IMNSHO.

As to which are the good and bad episodes, my opinions are almost the exact opposite of yours.   And so far as I can tell, there are more people here who share my views on that, than share yours.   If you’re not being deliberately contrary, it just shows that tastes can vary wildly.

Now I’m off to watch Red Dwarf.

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@ps1l0v3y0u     Um, I googled –  Welsh and German are not agglutinative but  fusional.   (I.e. tacking many words together, is how I interpret it).   Agglutinative languages ‘have a clear one-to-one correspondence between morphemes and grammatical functions.   Each affix added to a root word clearly indicates a specific grammatical feature (e.g., tense, number, gender).’   Well that’s as clear as mud.   My head hurts.</span>

I’ll take a look at that discussion in On The Sofa.

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@winston   Well, this one, as well as Midnight, reflected the fact that a hidden monster is often scarier than one you can see.   ‘Listen’ also used this technique (and in fact, was there even a monster there)?   Still, the noises on the moonbase when there should be no life anywhere, really made my hair stand on end.   Literally.    Alien (the first one) also used this, where you never saw the alien until the last couple of scenes.   Though in that movie, the alien monster was entirely as scary as anything one could imagine.

But I think the scariest one I’ve watched was an old movie ‘Play Misty for Me’, in which Clint Eastwood as a swingin’ DJ was being stalked by a past, um, jealous girlfriend who was completely insane and who had just stabbed a detective to death, unknown to him.   He returned to his house and the camera followed him as he walked casually from room to room completely oblivious to what we knew was going to happen – but we didn’t know when.   The tension built up to the almost unbearable.

I entirely agree with you about this episode (and Midnight) – two of RTD’s best, IMO.   I think it’s the general consensus too.

 

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@winston   Yes, it did have a fairytale feel (or whatever is the African equivalent of fairytale).

I’m still enamoured of my theory that it’s an allegory for the Beeb and the Doctor Who series.   A vehicle (or an entity) entirely powered by stories, constantly demanding fresh stories, sucking them out of writers and showrunners and demanding more to keep the enterprise going.   🙂     I wonder if RTD or Moff ever felt like that.

But I’m going to have to watch it again to get the story clear in my mind.   And sometimes it helps to have watched it already to keep the characters straight in my mind.    (The same way I tend to only remember people’s names on the second or third meeting – when first introduced, unless they’re very striking in appearance, I don’t have a mental image to hang the name on, so I promptly forget it.   By about the third meeting I’ve built up a mental image and can put a name on it).

 

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@ps1l0v3y0u   Yes, I’ve heard that about German (didn’t say I knew any German, just to clarify).    I’d guess Welsh is an agglutinative language too? – I was thinking of Llanfair P G and its famous station sign.

My lack of knowledge of oldWho is showing, I’ve never seen those old eps with Richard Briers.    From what I’ve seen of him, I don’t think he really fits the role of (presumably) a massive power behind the scenes.    His menacing turn in New Tricks worked entirely because he looked like an affable, fussy but slightly creepy old gent.     In other words, like Richard Briers.

Is there any particular significance to October 5th?

Boom, and Dot and Bubble, are I think the two outstanding eps from the previous season.

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@ps1l0v3y0u    And your last bid wins.

Richard Briers – was he ever in Who?    Best known, probably, for acting with Felicity Kendal in The Good Life.   Though I much preferred him as the obsessive Martin in Ever Decreasing Circles.   (Lovely title by the way).

I do remember him from an episode of New Tricks as the serial poisoner (now that’s topical isn’t it?) who attempted to kill the detective Brian (also an obsessive, what is it with British TV and obsessive characters) by poisoning him with Vitamin D.   That was definitely a dark role.   I thought he was quite effective in that, mainly because he did come across as affable and rather creepy.

But anyway, by the ‘central 5’ I take it you mean from Lux to Interstellar Song Contest?   Lux I thought was OK (and original for Who), The Well was very good (and dramatic), Lucky Day I thought was a bit weak (but then I’m not a great fan of Unit but I don’t like it when the public turn on the Doctor or Unit, maybe because it’s uncomfortably credible), The Story and the Engine was very different and very good, not least because the actors were excellent.   Interstellar Song Contest I haven’t watched yet, coming up next.

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Is the always-hungry-for-stories ‘It’ an allegory for the BBC and the show, I wonder?

The barbershop is evidently some sort of ship, powered by stories. Analogous to a Tardis? Oh, and it could be a metaphor for the Doctor Who series itself.

The Doctor opens the door and yes, it is a Tardis. So, who is the Barber? Oh, it isn’t a Tardis, it’s a hut on top of a giant intergalactic mechanical spider.

The Barber looks like a Bond villain. Excellent casting there, good-looking but with a menacing presence. I keep expecting him to address the Doctor as Mr Bond. 🙂

And – this Doctor was Ruth? (Oh yes, I think we knew that. Still, it’s a shock and a pleasant surprise to see her here, if only momentarily).

Well, that was – different. Not your usual Who story, or even SF. But I thoroughly enjoyed it.

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@ps1l0v3y0u   Oh, righteous glee definitely exists.

Justified Poetic Appreciation – well, that might be more accurate, trouble is, it’s lost the maleficent element of schadenfreude   🙂

‘schadenkarmafreude’  ??   Clunkier words have existed, it might make sense in German but just too long for English.

It is entirely possible the word I’m looking for does not exist in English.   I believe there is (apparently), in some African language, a word that means ‘two people looking at each other knowing that some thing absolutely needs to be done, and each hoping the other will volunteer first.’   I think we’ve all been in that situation and there is no English word for it, so far as I know.

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@ps1l0v3y0u   @janetteb    Definitely my favourite episode since, um, Boom or Wild Blue Yonder.

I’ve just noticed another similarity to Aliens in the plot, in the ‘dropping down to scout a base which has been massacred by some unknown enemy’.  Though I guess it’s a common enough scenario.

Quite aside from ‘let’s take off and nuke the site from orbit’.

These troops don’t give me the queasies in the same way that the Unit troops did in Lucky Day, probably because they’re on a different planet.

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@ps1l0v3y0u   ‘Righteous glee’.   Um, it fits more or less.   I’d be reluctant to adopt it though, because ‘righteous’ implies some sort of moral judgement and I can’t stand righteous people.    And it’s more ‘satisfaction’ than actual joyous glee.

Sorry for nitpicking.   🙂

A couple of other things that occurred to me –  RTD was taking dead set against the shambles that is Internet ‘influencers’ and conspiracy theorists.   With which I thoroughly agree.   (Of course one man’s truth is another man’s conspiracy).   I’m less enthusiastic about knocking demonstrators, who can be on the right or wrong side of history, but I think more often right than wrong.

The other thing that makes me – queasy, is the sight of Unit troops going into action.   Yes I know that in-story they’re in the right, but I never like the sight of armed troops anywhere but a battlefield.   I’m even more queasy now we’ve seen video of armed unidentified masked Gestapo thugs [I typed “ICE agents” but autocorrect sneaked in] snatching people off the street for the crime of looking like ‘immigrants’.   That was the sort of thing that was alleged to happen in Iron Curtain countries during the Cold War.   [/politics]

 

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Ruby’s back. I can’t remember the circumstances of her leaving, it was lost in the apocalyptic mish-mash of the last season ender. Still, good to see her, but I’m afraid the position of Companion is taken.

Definitely spooky in the warehouse – what are those things, Autons? Is the thing that flashes across the screen the Thing from the Well?

Apparently not. It’s a thing called the Shreek.   (Not Shrek).

And this is turning into a boy-meets-girl romance story. With a notable absence of the Doctor. And also, Belinda.

Is Ruby working for UNIT now (or would that be still?) This story is a throwback, apparently.

That was a hell of a jump scare when the Shreek pops up to face Kate.

And OF COURSE Conrad didn’t take the antidote and brought the Shreeks down on the village because that’s what boyfriends do, right? So Ruby goes out hunting them armed with a poker. Great.

I’m going to be politically incorrect now and say that UNIT going hunting Shreeks with a wheelchair-bound person in tow stretches credibility.

And then Conrad turns out to be a total rat and the Shreeks are guys in monster suits. They were lucky they didn’t get shot. So much for the romance.

Oh, there’s that Vlinx again. I still can’t figure him out, still looks like a leftover from a Disney movie.

I have to say I rather enjoyed seeing Conrad get what he worked so hard for – an encounter with the Shreek. Schadenfreude*. Or maybe karma*. That close-up of Conrad face to face with the Shreek came straight out of Aliens.

Well, it was nice to see Ruby again. The rest of the episode was okay, but I’m not an enthusiast for UNIT.

(* I’m looking for a word that means, the satisfaction you get from watching someone get their just desserts. Schadenfreude apparently just means enjoyment from watching someone else’s misfortune, but that could be someone completely innocent. Karma basically means you get what you deserve, but that could equally be good as bad. So the word I want maybe doesn’t exist).

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Hmmm.   Only 19 posts before mine.   The Intertoobz should have been erupting over this one.   With enthusiasm, I mean.   Yes, I think it was that good an episode.

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Whew!

How does the Doctor know what clothes to wear 500,000 years in the future, before he even looks outside? When Earth fashions change completely in 50 years. And are the same clothes worn all over the Universe at that time? (Incidentally, 500,000 seems a bit – excessive, wouldn’t 5,000 have done?)

I would have jumped – straight back into the Tardis. It’s starting look like that would have been the safe thing to do.

That airlock is remarkably roomy if it only takes six.

‘Nuke this site from orbit’. Yay!! Ripley cheers in the background.

Quite why they need signing when they apparently can understand spoken English, I can’t quite fathom. Still, it doesn’t derail the plot so I don’t mind. Oh, and it seems Aliss is just deaf and lipreadding, OK that explains it.

Carbon-46?? Carbon normally has an atomic weight of 12, with isotopes of 13 and 14. The element with atomic mass of 46 is titanium. Just what the heck carbon-46 could be, I can’t imagine. Maybe the episode will tell us.

Anyway, this episode is seriously gripping me so far. As tense as Oxygen. Or, did someone mention Midnight? Alice is maybe starting to sound a little like Sky Silvestri.

… and this planet is quite definitely Midnight. Xtonic radiation and all. Oh, the Doctor says so. And Shaya says Carbon 46 is diamond – I absolutely cannot make sense of that. Can anyone explain?

All that mercury – which is presumably giving off mercury vapour – is probably not good for anybody’s health. However, it’s a very slow poison, main hazard is it’s cumulative, so not immediately toxic. More immediate, there are six of them, plus Aliss, how are they going to fit in an airlock with a limit of six?

So only four of them got in. Plus the Thing, on Belinda. And then Shaya shoots through Belinda very accurately so as not to kill her, and does what the stewardess did in Midnight, only this time she lets herself fall backwards down the Well. This is a remarkably similar shot to Ripley falling into the furnace in Alien 3. R.I.P. Shaya.

Um, shooting Belinda so accurately she survives is very reminiscent of Mary Watson shooting Holmes accurately and non-fatally in Sherlock. I wonder if Moff noticed the borrowing.

And it ends, as all such episodes must, with Val seeing – nothing – behind Mo’s back.

This was a cracker of an episode. Really, one of RTD’s best.

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@whohar   Yes.   Call that a double retcon.   I was delighted with the ‘fan’ sequence – the fans telling the Doc they were real and he was the fiction – which is true in reality but falsifies the story; then RTD retcons that to the ‘fans’ being fictional and part of the story.   (And I found the way in which they were willing to sacrifice their existence for the Doctor’s benefit, quite touching).

Then in the credits sequence, he retcons it *again* and the fans are, to their surprise,  still there.   This is impossible in the story logic, though it gave me the warm feels.   I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be an ‘official’ part of the story or just a sentimental postscript not to be taken too seriously.   I can’t see how it can be logically accounted for, maybe RTD will explain it in a future episode.

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@blenkinsopthebrave Oh yes, those fans in ‘Sherlock’ theorising over the Reichenbach fall were a hoot. (Just double-checked it was RTD who wrote this episode, I do hope Moff was suitably grateful for the ‘Blink’ reference)

@winston If you like live action / cartoons, have you seen ‘Cool World’ from 1992? It’s my favourite of the genre.

@devilishrobby I think you’re correct about the limited number of films a cinema would have on loan from the distributors. Film duplication would be a very slow, expensive process so only a limited number would be made. As they got old and got broken a few times and rejoined, the copies in circulation became increasingly dilapidated, so I guess less favoured cinemas out in the country would get the tatty copies after more remunerative cinemas had finished with them. Nitrate film stock was replaced with acetate ‘safety film’ about 1952, which means there’s a minor time anomaly with Rock Hudson, who only became a star in 1954. Also, though nitrate film stock was extremely inflammable, I’m not sure it was ever explosive. The most it would do was produce explosive gases – which I guess could then ignite.

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On first impression, this reminds me of Cool World, a cartoon/live action from the 90’s in which a cartoon character was trying to break through into reality.

The people trapped in a photograph (or a frame of a film) rings a distant bell. Sapphire and Steel, maybe?

When they break out of the TV screen into the fans’ living room. Well that’s new. I think the fourth wall is not just broken, it’s shattered. This is surely the ultimate meta. Hey, I admire the fans’ taste – Blink is their favourite adventure. … and – RTD retcons this, the fans were an illusion, reality is restored. I have to say he got me, I love it when that happens.

Quite how the 15 missing people got restored, I can’t follow.

This was certainly – different.

Now to read the comments…

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@ps1l0v3y0u   Yes, Chrissie’s transcripts site is a great site.   And I am impressed by the amount of work that goes into transcribing an episode.   I once transcribed an episode (not of Who) and it took me hours, going back and forward over each piece of dialogue to make sure I’d heard it correctly.

@nerys  Oh yes, I recall now.  Those nanobots put Bond in a diabolical no-win position.   I’m not sure whether such a customisable DNA-linked disease would be possible, even in theory.   I think the most one could do would be to target a particular genetic sequence, but likely only a large group of people rather than an individual.   But as a dramatic device, they certainly worked.

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@winston  @nerys   @blenkinsopthebrave   A belated but warm wish for a happy Canada Day.   From another Commonwealth country on the other side of the world.   To address the elephant in the room – hope your circumstances don’t suffer too much from the antics of the Orange Idiot  (and that’s as political as I want to get in this forum).

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@blenkinsopthebrave ‘Planet of the Incels’ – I like that, though there was only one Incel in evidence and he was running the show.
I agree with your comment on the tone of the episode. The storyline was pretty heavy in places but somehow the deaths didn’t really register with full weight.

@ps1l0v3y0u @whohar It’s quite definitely Eiffel Tower, it has two intermediate stages and Blackpool Tower doesn’t.

@juniperfish Interesting comparison between Anita in Joy to the World, and Sasha 55 in this ep. In both episodes they had many months to get to know the Doctor, yet in Joy to the World that was fully developed over several minutes of TV time, in this one it was just a single remark by the Doctor after she was killed. I felt Sasha 55 was shortchanged by that. (Um, Sasha 55. Orphan 55. What’s with the ’55’? Could just be coincidence).

On a wider level, the last few eps I’ve watched (up to this one) have lacked a long-term fully-developed Companion. Earlier seasons had companions like Rose, Amy, Clara and Bill, whose stories became just as important as the Doctor’s. Yaz, but she was diluted by the rest of the gang (and by appearing in less-than-stellar seasons, no fault of hers). Ruby Sunday was hardly there for long enough for me to become fully engaged in her story. Might get a little better on my first re-watch of that season.

Overall, Robot Revolution was – a bit of a melange, reasonably watchable without really making any top ten lists (best or worst).

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First Impressions –

That Star Certificate – now where have I seen that before? I’m not a betting man but I’l lay a couple of quid that the Robots in this ep want Belinda to be their leader/totem. I’d hate to accuse RTD of pinching ideas but does the SS Madame de Pompadour sound familiar? 🙂

OK, 5 minutes in and I just won a couple of quid. That was quick 🙂

The robots with their smiley-face-screens remind me of Valencia, I mean ‘Smile’.

That space ship looks totally Dan Dare. Or should I say Buck Rogers? That vintage, anyway.

I was going to say the little Roomba robot was a bit too Disneycute, then I remembered K-9. But then, K-9 made me cringe a little, too.

Al looks remarkably like that half-Cyberman in Chib’s episodes.

The ending all seemed a little too easy, like the robots promising peace and cooperation at the end, but then if their entire hostile behaviour was dictated by the Al Generator, I guess it was quite credible for them to have a complete change of mind when it stopped.

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@ps1l0v3y0u @whohar Re the Landwasser Viaduct, it is quite famous and very distinctive – a high stone viaduct on a sharp curve into a tunnel in a sheer cliff. I did check Google Images (plenty of pics of it) to confirm that it was the exact same viaduct. I don’t think I can claim ubergeek status on that, just medium geekery 🙂

While I’m at it, I don’t think the mountain in the background of ‘Everest Base Camp’ was actually Everest, but I can’t be certain. Its pointiness led me to suspect K2 or the Matterhorn, but I think they’re a bit too pointy. But I couldn’t find a mountain that matched, on a brief search (which leaves out most of the Earth..)

ps1l0v3y0u – I share your reservations on popular science. Which is why Kill the Moon is my absolute worst episode. “What if the Moon were an Egg?” probably sounded good as a story idea, but some ideas become untenable when you try to work them out.

Re Empty Child / Doctor Dances / Boom Town, I never noticed / don’t remember so many double entendres, but maybe I wasn’t looking for them. Where did you get your dialogue from? I get mine from chakoteya.net (Chrissie’s transcripts site), which I think comes from transcripts of the actual broadcast episodes. So far as I can see, the two are identical, at least the ones I looked at.

@nerys Bond being dead. I’m trying to remember if, at the end of No Time to Die, if Bond was definitively and permanently blown up. Or did he survive by a miracle – I suppose that wouldn’t technically be a retcon. I do rather hope they don’t do a ‘young Bond growing up’ though, that sounds rather too – Disney.

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@whohar    Well, I used Handbrake to just rip each file in sequence.   So then I had files 1 to 9 on my drive, which i set out to assign names to (and, as you suggested, numbers), for which I consulted tardis.fandom.com, which told me there was a special (Joy to the world) before the season started.   I viewed the first file on my drive, it was Robot Revolution.   So then I ordered Joy to the World on DVD.   Then I continued renaming the eps and the very last  one on Disc 2 turned out to be Joy to the World, too late.    I really should have looked more carefully.

I agree with your comments on continuity.   I don’t usually worry too much unless it interferes with my comprehension of a story.   Same goes for factual or historical errors,   I can note historical errors (such as the Battle of the Currents wasn’t really Tesla vs Edison), and minor geographical errors (like the Orient Express crossing the Landwasser Viaduct in ‘Joy’ which caused me to explode in a frenzy of anorakery, just because I could   🙂   without it spoiling the ep for me.   Or the magic arrow in Robot of Sherwood.

@ps1l0v3y0u   I think Dr Who is quite kid-friendly enough.   Kids are a lot less childish than they’re given credit for, just consider how gory many fairy tales are.   Right from the start, Who had people being ruthlessly killed by Daleks, Cybermen and the like.   This was, apparently, OK.   I still recall the reported fuss when Rose had the temerity to fall in love with Ten, something that happens regularly in every soap on TV – but, I gather, never on oldWho.   I doubt any kids were seriously harmed by that storyline.   I’m not a fan of romances as such, but from my point of view, the possibility, and the fact that the Doc can have ‘human’ feelings, adds a bit of depth to the series.

Dot and Bubble was pretty good.   Not merely because you have to lose some occasionally, to make the suspense – and the wins – credible.

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I see @craig‘s point, that it seemed a bit undeveloped. I’m reluctant to call it his ‘worst’ Christmas ep, I’d just say ‘least good’, and that only because his other Christmas eps were all very good (in my recollection). Except The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe. So, second least good 🙂

@winston Yes, I liked the way Anita calmly took everything in her stride. And I thought it was really lovely the way her relationship with the Doctor developed.

I’ve worked out why the Doctor had to wait a year. The Time Hotel linked up to various places/times in history at times when it chose to do so – in the case of Anita’s Sandringham Hotel this was ‘Christmas’ so the Time Hotel only linked once a year. Which is why the Doc had to wait a year for it to come round again.

@ps1l0v3y0u I think Vilengard was developing a weapon (the ultimate nuke) for sale to the highest bidder. They had no intention of vaporising Earth, it was just a convenient incubator for the thing until it was ready to hatch. At which point they would presumably have frozen it in time and said to the buyer ‘Here you are, park it next to your enemy, flip off the timelock and stand well clear’. The successive captive curators were just a way of making sure the last one would have a psychic link through which they could locate and retrieve their weapon – a link the Doctor broke.

I liked the way the device’s Vilengard Q&A activated automatically because Joy asked a question.
Also, “Vilengard respects the collateral sacrifice made by all aprticipating innocent lifeforms, regardless of race, species or belief system”. Doesn’t regret, doesn’t apologise, just ‘respects.’ Moff has got organisation-speak down pat.

Not my most favourite episode, but certainly one I’ll watch again.

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OK, just watched it.   First thoughts –

[Anorak mode ON] Oh dear, at 1 minute in, the Orient Express is shown crossing the Landwasser Viaduct. Only 5 things wrong with that: 1. The caption says Italy and the Landwasser is in Switzerland 2. The Orient Express never went that way. 3. The Orient Express could never go that way because 4: The OE was a standard gauge train and the Albula Bahn (part of Rhaetian Railways) is metre gauge 5. The line was electrified in 1919 Aside from that, not a bad bit of CGI 🙂 [/anorak]

“Should I make my mind blank too sir?”
“It may not be necessary in your case Trev.” ROTFL!

Joy is kind of irritating at first (she improves later).
But I do like the developing friendship between the Doctor and Anita, the receptionist.
Love the joke about the sink plunger, “Is this armed?” And the in-joke about Anita’s satnav that now takes her where she needs to go.
And my eyes got a bit damp when he had to leave her.

“Many things about this are – suboptimal.” Love it!

Incidentally, I’m pretty sure that’s not how stars form. They require an accumulation of billions of tons of – anything, being squished together by the extremely weak force of gravity – but a force with the unusual power that it’s always attractive, until the pressure and temperature at the core is high enough for fusion to start. Or something like that. You can, in theory, have a tiny sand-grain-sized black hole, but I don’t think you can have an atom-sized star. Never mind, the Who way is more poetic. (Maybe someone who actually knows will correct me 🙂

I found all the timey-wimey stuff a little bit confusing, though not enough to spoil my enjoyment. I guess on re-watching I’ll find it all fits, as I often do with Moff stories.

Now to read through the reactions

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@ps1l0v3y0u    The Blurays?   Thanks for the good wishes.   I couldn’t get VLC to recognise the disc, but Handbrake did.   So I ripped them all to my hard drive and now I can view them in VLC.   Expect a spurt of posts from me shortly   🙂

Each file just got numbered 1,2,3 etc so I consulted the episode guide and found there was a special, Joy to the World, before the last season.   I checked the first file and it was The Robot Revolution.   So, cursing the BBC’s stinginess, I ordered a DVD of Joy to the World, meanwhile wondering if I should have waited until they incorporated it in some future issue of the set.   Then I got to renaming the files and of course,  the very last file was – Joy to the World.   I hate it when that happens!

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@janetteb Agreed. Yes, ensuring continuity would be a full-time job (or a nightmare, depending how you look at it) with a long-running series with dozens of writers like Dr Who. I suspect the timeline is so convoluted by now that I’m not sure any writer could be expected to know it all, even absent inconsistencies. (And Chibs’ cavalier attitude to continuity – as evidenced by his advice to Whittaker not to bother watching previous episodes – surely didn’t help.) Battlestar Galactica famously had a ‘Bible’ that outlined where the series was going – but that was a limited series that was all pre-planned. Not possible with Dr Who. I do get disconcerted by big, obtrusive lapses in continuity, especially if they break the timeline – always a risk with a time-travelling series like Who. Like, who knew what when. But I’m more than happy if it all resolves itself, as in ‘Blink’. Even if I have to watch it three times to disentangle it in my mind.

Of course, Who solved the biggest continuity problem with any long-running series – what happens when the main character quits – in brilliant fashion with regeneration. That was sheer genius. I do suffer a certain nagging uneasiness when watching James Bond with each new Bond because it blows a massive and unpatchable hole in continuity. I was particularly unhappy when it was rumoured the new 007 would be a black woman – that was just too big a change (I’d be fine with that for Who). Quite relieved when it turned out that the number ‘007’ had simply been reassigned (was that the producers trolling the fans I wonder?) I didn’t like the new 007 as a personality but I was fine with the continuity there. (Wonder how they’re going to deal with Bond being dead?)

 

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@ps1l0v3y0u Love & Monsters? While I have a sneaking perverse fondness for it – because the little Who club are kind of sweet – I couldn’t rate it among RTD’s best. The Dalek/Cybermen face-off in Doomsday – I love it. “This is not war. This is pest control.”

@nerys Good point on the hostess’s sacrifice in Midnight. She saved the occupants of the bus, but the alien entity could presumably separate itself from Sky and remain as a threat. Hopefully the tour company knew to take safety precautions, I guess it just depends on which period of history it was. Was it one where any failure got investigated in detail by the regulators, or was it an entirely capitalist one where companies could hide “Passengers assume all risks up to and including death, irrespective of any negligence or act by the Company” in a microdot on the ticket and get away with it?

@translatorcircuit Obviously I fundamentally disagree that it’s essential to have watched all of oldWho to appreciate nuWho. I have an idea of what oldWho was like, and I could even name all of the Doctors, in order, if I think for a moment. I certainly don’t think a knowledge of all the continuity errors in oldWho, intriguing though they may be, would help in appreciating any episode of nuWho. Not even the movie. (I thought McGann was great as 8 in The Night of the Doctor, but – watching the movie later, it didn’t throw any more light on the events of Night).

In fact, and I’m not trying to be rude, I find your encyclopaedic knowledge of oldWho, together with your insistence that any fan needs to know it, rather off-putting. It makes it sound like an obligation rather than enjoyment and it’s unikely to inspire me to want to watch them. (Same goes for Lord of the Rings purists). In fact I can be quite remarkably and perversely stubborn about not doing things everybody says I should do 🙂 (This is why it took me about ten years to get around to watching Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which I thought was a popular-science book.) I do like talking about favourite episodes, I try not to show off my (limited) knowledge in discussions. I don’t want to be dismissive about oldWho but… OK, I’ve gone on long enough about that.

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@winston    Our weather is nothing to boast about, best described as ‘extremely variable’.  A couple of days ago we had a storm with high winds and waves coming across the road in some places.   At my house we had the heaviest rain I’ve since since the record-smashing big rains / Cyclone Gabrielle (!) of two and a half years ago.

Your Who garden sounds delightful.   Oddly enough, Mrs D’s dahlias have all sprouted into bushy green plants again and a few of them even have flowers on.   Crazy plants.

I suppose the reason Westinghouse gets omitted is because Tesla is the most ‘interesting’ character and he needs a villain to oppose him, that being, of course, Edison.

My approach to ‘historical’ stories is, ‘could this have happened without clashing with established history’?   If so, it’s OK.   That’s not a rigid rule, but if the writers can make it fit, that helps the credibility for me.

I watch Xena occasionally but Mrs D prefers Hercules.   The Greek gods were fun.   The writers certainly tampered with history quite a lot.   But I did appreciate the way Xena dealt with her enemy Julius Caesar – by subtly persuading Brutus that Caesar was a threat, to Rome and to him personally.  Neatly done!

The Doctor marrying Elizabeth 1 in Day of the Doctor – the wedding appears to be a private ceremony, with the Eleventh Doctor, the War Doctor and Clara Oswald as witnesses.   So when the Tenth Doctor ran off, I guess Elizabeth wouldn’t want to make the story public, and the witnesses were conveniently absent – which is why ‘history’ never mentions the event.   I believe the Doctor later implied that she wasn’t the ‘Virgin Queen’ any longer, but then I’ve always been a little bit – sceptical – of that title.   I would guess (with no evidence) that ‘Virgin Queen’ in this context was more an honorary title and would just mean that she had never been (officially) married, and was reasonably discreet about her male ‘favourites’.

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@nerys I agree with your observations on Midnight. Possibly the best episode RTD wrote, or at least up there with his best.

@ps1l0v3y0u I’d agree that Season 4 was generally pretty good. I wouldn’t rate it the best season, I reckon 6 or 7 would beat it, but not by a lot, and most seasons have a range of quality. How does one rate seasons anyway, by the number of top-notch episodes in them, or by the average quality – would a season with a few brilliant episodes and a few clunkers beat a season with generally good episodes? Even just going by my own rating of episodes (which I’m aware is unlikely to be identical with anyone else’s), I have some difficulty ranking seasons, and I might judge differently tomorrow 🙂

The Well, I see is part of Series 15. I’ve got the Bluray discs which just arrived (couldn’t get DVD’s) so now I just have to brainwash my laptop into recognising my USB Bluray drive and hope DRM doesn’t successfully prevent me watching my discs on my laptop. I hate DRM with a deep-seated hatred. If I can read them I might even try transcoding and compressing them so I can write them to DVD, it’s probably breaking all sorts of copyright laws but I’m not going to resell them so Disney can take a hike. [/rant]

@translatorcircuit The creators of ‘content’ (and that includes the television industry) are not under any obligation to satisfy our requirements on how they make programmes. Or indeed, how their storylines go. To paraphrase some dude about ‘free speech’, I detest ‘Kill the Moon’ but I will defend their right to make it. Even, Chibnall’s several series. (Also my right to say it’s terrible). All we can demand is that they use their best efforts; all we can hope for is that they make content that is entertaining and satisfying to a large number of viewers and – if we’re lucky – suits our tastes… I don’t see their failure to make enough episodes in some years as stealing from the fans. It may be considered a misjudgement, but we don’t own it.

I strongly disagree that it’s essential to watch the first few series. As it happened I did see quite a few episodes of early Doctor Who at the time, but that was so long ago I can hardly remember them. (About the only detail I do remember was some military characters waving broomhandle Mausers, presumably under the impression they looked sufficiently exotic). So for me, ‘Rose’ was the first episode I watched in recent times, and the entire series of nuWho since then has made perfect sense to me. It *doesn’t matter* what Sarah Jane Smith had to do with the Doctor decades ago, in School Reunion she was just a ‘past Companion’ and that’s all I needed to know. There was no plot point that depended crucially on what they did before. It wasn’t necessary, for example, to know what the original Daleks or Cybermen were like to understand or appreciate their modern incarnations. Not even when Moffat resuscitated those painfully-obvious humans-in-suits early Cybermen with rather horrifying consequences in World Enough and Time – having seen the early ones added a few per cent to my appreciation of the episode but not essential.

I have since gone back and watched the movie and the last four stories of Seven. In retrospect, though I do like Seven and Ace, they don’t add much to my appreciation of RTD’s first season.

@whohar @janetteb I think HBO might be a better fit to Who than the Mouse. I’m still (as I noted) trying to decipher the Blurays of the latest season. I can (if I have to) commandeer the Bluray player attached to our TV but I’d sooner watch it on my laptop where I don’t have to negotiate for possession 🙂

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@winston    On the subject of techie-angst, I forgot to mention my absolute nemesis, Kill the Moon.   Right from the start it seems determined to violate every physical law it can and wave that in our faces.   (They materialise in a Space Shuttle.   The Shuttle was only ever designed for low Earth orbit, it could never make it to the Moon.   Its cargo bay was unpressurised, so they couldn’t take their helmets off.   It would have NO gravity unless either the rocket motor was running, or it was gliding (which requires air.   There is no air on the Moon).   It lands as a very high-speed glider – if it hit the Moon (as it would, since it can’t glide there) it would just leave a very large new crater.   Should I go on…   🙂

I could handle that with a lot of effort, but I was already annoyed by Clara insisting that the Doctor be nice to the appalling whiny Courtney.    It went downhill from there, and once you’ve lost the audience’s willingness to ‘suspend disbelief’ in a sci-fi episode you’re pretty much sunk.

Historically, I’m more squeamish about recent history about real people that tends to get misrepresented by writers.   I was fine with Let’s Kill Hitler because they didn’t actually kill him*, and it was the sort of encounter that probably wouldn’t be recorded.  If it does no  violence to known facts, I’m a happy chappie**.   I was a lot less happy (i.e. somewhat unhappy) about the Tesla episode because the ‘battle of the currents’ (AC vs DC) was between Edison and Westinghouse (who ‘won’ it but didn’t get a mention), Tesla was a very minor player.

*Not because I’m opposed to the idea of killing Hitler, but somebody would have noticed if they had.

**The prize for that has to go to a very different series, ‘Hercules’ where Hercules defeated Caesar’s attempted invasion of Ireland (yes I know he never did), as Caesar was sailing away in defeat his scribe said “This was Caesar’s only defeat, but I have a duty to record the truth” and Caesar said “You have been a good and faithful friend, Scribulus (motions to guards) and I shall miss you. (splash offscreen)   Caesar never suffers defeats.”  I thought that was a great retcon.

Your weather – we rarely get it that hot.   23C is about as warm a it usually gets, maybe 25.   30 would be exceptional.   Probably Auckland’s location on a narrow strip of land between two oceans moderates the temperature a lot (but also results in highly variable weather as rain bands drift across us).

[Dentarthurdent @replies]

@translatorcircuit If you’d care to point out where ‘consulting an episode guide’ would have improved my comment please feel free to.

As it happens I usually consult tardis.fandom.com about anything I’m unsure of, or the transcripts at chakoteya.net. But I can claim familiarity with all of post-gap Who, having watched each ep several times at least (maybe less for Chibs’s tenure). In fact I’ve got it all on DVD, also the last few eps of Seven and the movie. I’m outside the UK so I can’t use iPlayer and I’ve never used a VPN, not going to bother just to watch pre-Gap Who (and I have no other use for a VPN). So my exposure to those episodes is fragmentary. I don’t need an excuse for not having seen them in their entirety, it isn’t a requirement for being a Who fan so far as I’m aware. Anyway, you seem to have confirmed my general impression that those older stories were typically 4-6 episodes long, so I’m not sure how ‘consulting an episode guide’ would have helped.

Re ‘Blink’, I doubt if anyone transported 70 years back in time would react by killing themselves (unless, of course, they were of a suicidal disposition). Most displaced people make the best out of the conditions they find themselves in. Maybe they would try to recreate modern tech (but how? Do you know in detail how a microwave oven works, or even a foodmixer? The overwhelming majority of inventions are dependent on a vast industrial background. Consider even a primitive gadget like tape recorders – they depend on the supply of mylar tape and fine magnetic coating which are highly sophisticated chemically. Also, plastic helps a lot. I suppose an electric guitar might be within the realms of practicality, and of course knowing that something can be done and has will have been done is half the battle). Maybe if they were of that inclination, they might start organising protests against – something, but most people aren’t. But I think 90% of people would just keep their heads down and try to make the best of their new circumstances. It’s interesting to speculate anyway.

(In that connection I’ll revert to an old thesis of mine, that most inventions arise when the technological climate favours them, too early and the necessary infrastructure isn’t there, too late and someone’s already done it. Take aeroplanes, flight was ‘in the air’ in 1901, if the Wrights hadn’t managed it there were a dozen others not far behind. Or the first steam locomotive, if Richard Trevithick hadn’t managed to put one of his high-pressure boilers on wheels, someone else would have. (And I’m not in any way denigrating the Wrights or Trevithick by saying that, they were the people who successfully did it first.) In fact the *only* invention I can think of, that might not have happened otherwise, was Henri Giffard’s steam injector for locomotive boilers – it seems highly counter-intuitive, it was in no way a development of anything existing, and there was no desperate need for it since the piston pumps already in use, worked.)

[Dentarthurdent @replies]

@winston   I think that episode with the Shard was (from memory) quite modest in the amount of CGI it used.   Probably the biggest amount was the zombies with dishes in the backs of their heads.   Similarly the alien ships over Stonehenge (incidentally that caused me a minor techie-angst because I’m sure the ships would have been too high to make out, but I’ll cut the program that much slack).   Either way, the effects were adequate to the episode.

The beach is fine but I haven’t swum since the start of May.   The water finally got a bit too cool.  We’re well into winter now, which means generally low temperatures (‘low’ being 10 – 15 degrees C during the day) with the occasional lovely fine day which is still cool but warm in the sun.   Pity temperatures can’t be posted, if you sent us a little of your excess warmth then we’d both be having really pleasant weather   🙂

[Dentarthurdent @replies]

@translatorcircuit Just shows how radically opinions can differ. You call Midnight crap, I think it was one of RTD’s best, and all the better for being a bottle episode. Being stuck in the ‘bus’ with unknown noises going on where nothing should be alive, really made for tension and suspense. And I loved the irony that the stewardess, who originally seemed a hostile character, was the one who saved them all – and nobody even knew her name. There was a moral and a message in there, one that was built into the screenplay, and nobody needed to stand up and spell it out for us at the end (something I hate).

One that I find broadly similar, both in its scary intensity (and its comparatively low budget) was Moff’s ‘Listen’. Also of course ‘Blink’ which had virtually no CGI other than the usual Tardis dematerialising. But then, as against that, there was Wild Blue Yonder, which was a bottle ep with a huge amount of green screen / CGI appropriately used, it looked beautiful and wouldn’t have been nearly as good without the CGI.

One thing I agree with you about (and also I think with @winston, @nerys, @janetteb and @blenkinsopthebrave please guys tell me if I’m wrong there) is that special effects can’t compensate for deficiencies in the story or the acting. But (I think) a certain minimum level of special effects is essential to avoid the viewer having to make allowances for unconvincing or amateurish effects. I have that problem with many of the effects even in late Doctor 7 (pre-gap) episodes, let alone the earliest Doctors. Maybe back in the day the FX were acceptable by the standards of the time, but we’ve become used to a vastly higher standard of FX. The original Cybermen are just so obviously extras in suits, it’s painful. I found all the nuWho Cybermen to be so much more convincing. It wasn’t until Moff’s genius in World Enough and Time, in showing the process of turning Bill into a proto-Cyberman, that I realised that that was the point, and those early Cybermen changed (in my perception) from embarrassingly unconvincing aliens to humans trapped in a cybersuit – and so, retrospectively, authentic and horrifying.

However I don’t think ‘less FX and more episodes’ is likely to help. Writers have only so many good ideas and it’s far better to give them time to polish their scripts, than to spread them (and the budget) too thinly, else you just end up with alien-of-the-week episodes that all start to seem the same. (As for EastEnders and Casualty, I can’t comment authoritatively because I never watch them, or Coronation Street, but I have the impression they’re mostly just humdrum hardly-differentiated soup.) I’m probably showing my ignorance but those low-budget episodes of Doctors 1 and 2, weren’t they mostly six-part stories? So they equated to just six to eight 3-hour stories per year with (I dimly seem to recall) quite a lot of padding, though it’s so long since I watched one that’s probably a risky assertion for me to make.

[Dentarthurdent @replies]

@janetteb I heartily agree about big-budget overkill. I actually felt that about the UNIT tower in the finale of the previous season (Legend of Ruby Sunday / Empire of Death). In fact UNIT should be a businesslike, unobtrusive, un-ostentatious organisation (in my opinion), not trying to look like some mad dictator’s vanity project.
(I must admit I haven’t seen the latest season, the discs just arrived but my laptop’s drive is only DVD, I do have a Bluray drive but I’ll have to switch laptops – haven’t got round to it yet. So I’d better get on that.)
I’m not arguing in favour of the sometimes-painfully primitive OldWho levels of ‘special effects’ that one has to make allowances for when viewing. I think most of RTD v1.0 and Moff’s seasons had about the right level of production values. Special effects need to be sufficient to support the story, not usurp it. A good and necessary use of CGI was Wild Blue Yonder, which was almost entirely blue screen / CGI, but – because the story was set on a spaceship, and concentrated on the Doctor and Donna – it worked, for me at least. With most stories, that level of CGI would be a distraction.

That’s my 10c, anyway   🙂

[Dentarthurdent @replies]

@pa1l0v3y0u   I got ‘Russ’, it was the ‘Legend and Empire’ that puzzled me.   Notwithstanding that they were the two most recent eps I’ve viewed.   Which kind of demonstrates the impact that RTD’s finale had on me.   🙂

Legend of the Sea Devils was one of Chibs’ last three specials, watchable if you weren’t too critical.   Roughly on a level with Curse of the Black Spot, I think.   Eve of the Daleks was Chibs’ best IMO, and Power of the Doctor was, IIRC, okay I think (can’t remember a lot about it).

Back to RTD’s two-parter – yes, I found the Time Window a bit confusing.   The Vlinx looks like a joke, or maybe a Disneydroid, and I agree, no explanation of where it came from or what it does.   (Or if there was I missed it).   For some reason I don’t like it much, though.

But I have high hopes for the new series.   Or at least, some of it, even if it’s a bit uneven.

 

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