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@winston   I wrote a short comment but it seems to have disappeared.  I think I edited something – it seems to happen when I edit a comment.

Anyway, to keep this short, I think Day of the Doctor is the best ‘special’ by far, it’s brilliant.    For more, see my long comment about five up in this list, I’ll spare Craig the bandwith of posting similar remarks again   🙂

 

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@winston    So  The Star Beast / Wild Blue Yonder / The Giggle  were supposed to be the 60th anniversary special.   Didn’t feel much like a special to me, even though I rate WBY highly as an episode.

The finale double-ep of the following season,  The Legend of Ruby Sunday / Empire of Death, had more of that ‘special’ feel to them, mostly in bringing back old characters, but for me, more – things – does not always have more impact.   The whole thing fell a little bit flat.   Too many people with not much for each one to do.

@janetteb   I so agree with you about the 50th,  Day of the Doctor.   It had the feeling that each character present (including all three Doctors) was necessary to the plot.   It’s certainly the top special in my list  (unless there’s one I’ve forgotten about, but I don’t think so).

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@nerys    Wild Blue Yonder was the peak of the Tennant revival for me.   The episodes before and after were a bit too Disney for my liking.   But WBY I would add into my list of top episodes from any season.

I have been known to rant that CGI and special effects are no substitute for good characters or plot, but I have to admit the CGI in WBY was so good, it substantially contributes to my liking of the ep.

I wish RTD had left the Flux out of it though.   I was doing my best to forget it.

But I won’t repeat (again) all my comments that I made in the posts above.   I’m pleased you liked it.

 

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@ps1l0v3y0u    I think Trump has a very simplistic view of the world.   He sees every transaction as a zero-sum game – for one party to win, the other has to lose.   (The concept of ‘win-win’ is beyond him, if he ever heard of it he probably dismissed it as woke nonsense).   I think this explains why he is so gratuitously obnoxious – the more he offends or annoys people, the more he wins.    It also explains his perversity – if there are two candidates for a job, one of which is eminently qualified and an obvious (and uncontroversial) pick, and the other is blatantly unsuitable and has no qualifications whatever, he will obviously pick Candidate B because (a) it will outrage everybody and (b) because he can.    The idea that Candidate A will be good for the general welfare doesn’t enter his thoughts for a moment.

I really think he is that shallow.

@nerys   That beach looks lovely in the photos.   Pity the water isn’t a more welcoming temperature.

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@winston   @nerys    The way I see it, tRump’s proposed invasions of Canada, Greenland and Panama are just diversions to distract from his less-than-stellar appointments to senior government positions.    It’s not like they’re policies that anybody else wants, so in a few weeks he can quietly forget about them and nobody will object or scream about ‘broken promises’ (and if anybody does bring it up, he can always blame Denmark, Canadian lib’ruls and Latino criminals and his MAGA base will lap it up).

Tax returns – I’ve heard about that.   The only other country that does that is Eritrea or Ethiopia or somewhere in that region IIRC.   The relevant law/regulation is called FATCA.   It imposes reporting obligations on any bank which has a victim, I mean American citizen, as a customer, which is why many financial institutions simply refuse to accept Americans as clients.

I used to find doing tax returns a real pain, but since I’m retired I literally never think about it.   Our Inland Revenue seems to take the approach that paying taxes should be as painless and trouble-free as possible, which is why we generally don’t see the tax man as the enemy.   I have two income sources, NZ universal superannuation and interest into my Kiwisaver account.   Both taxable, but the super is taxed by an estimated amount before it ever gets into my bank account, and Kiwisaver ‘earnings’ are taxed at source.   So once a year the IRD sends me a one-page tax notice which lists my annual earnings, tax payable on the total, tax already deducted, and the outstanding balance which is usually a few dollars which they duly write off.   I usually look at the last line which says ‘Balance due:  $0.00’ and file it away.

@nerys

I just Googled Crows Neck Beach, it certainly looks like a remote countryside, even the Googlebot (aka Streetview) hasn’t been there. You’re not far from the Bay of Fundy with its famous tides.

I have a liking for deserted beaches too. Actually, the north shore of the Manukau Harbour between Hillsborough and Titirangi (about a six-mile stretch) is bordered by roughly hundred-foot cliffs, interrupted at intervals by tiny bays, with the suburbs of Auckland sitting on top of the cliffs. But because it’s generally only walkable at low tide, in between the occasional bays there is, often, nobody at all, and the big city on top of the cliffs is invisible. So you can be on a deserted rocky beach without a person in sight and not a hint that there are houses a hundred yards above you. I kinda like the incongruity of it.

But, for properly empty beaches, I just head to the west coast. From Karekare (just south of my old swimming spot at Piha) down to the Manukau Harbour entrance at Whatipu is five miles of deserted ocean beach. Whatipu is at the end of a little-used winding gravel road with a small car park for fishermen and beachgoers, usually near-deserted except summer weekends. There’s a walking track from Whatipu over the cliff tops, then it joins the beach for the last mile to Karekare. Just once I parked at Whatipu, walked over the track to Karekare, then back down the beach and for the entire distance on the beach I saw – no-one. No footsteps, no sign of life, nothing but sand. I got horribly sunburned ankles, for a curious reason – I always use sunscreen on my arms, but my knees and ankles have never (previously) got burned. And I worked out that this is because normally I’m walking in the ‘bush’ or scrub and there’s usually plenty of shade for my lower half – but not on the beach. But the sheer isolation of an empty beach is a strange but not unpleasant feeling. I wanted to swim but, not knowing the conditions, I waited till I got to Whatipu where there’s a bay in the harbour entrance sheltered from the open surf so probably safer from potential undertow, I guess.

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@winston   Actually we’ve had pretty much a perfect week.   The high tides have been the right times (late morning to mid-afternoon), the right height (near the top of their range), and the wind has been from south-west so the beach (Blockhouse Bay) has been sheltered behind a ridge.   Next week – not so good with the times or the depths.   Unless I trek 20+ miles to Piha on the west coast.   But since Mrs D is banned from driving I try to keep the occasions when I leave her stuck in the house for the day to a minimum.

@nerys   I had a brief swim in the Atlantic in July, in Cornwall.  When I say ‘brief’ I mean about two minutes.   There’s supposed to be this thing called the Gulf Stream, bringing lots of warm water to keep Britain from freezing, well all I can say is, it wasn’t working that day.   🙂   And the water looked so tempting too…     But regardless of that, beaches are always the most interesting scenery, in calm or stormy weather.

Thinking back, all my life (except for six months or so) I’ve lived within a couple of miles of a beach.   I can’t imagine living out of easy reach of one.   I guess I’ve been fortunate that way.

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@nerys    A new beach?    Always an exciting experience, I think.   Though I imagine, in your half of the planet, you wouldn’t be swimming this time of year.   🙂

I wish you luck with the Who DVD’s.    It may well be a licensing thing to do with the change of franchise, it’s always frustrating when I try e.g. a Youtube video and get ‘The uploader has not made this available in your area.’    And of course I get the same with BBC iPlayer, I haven’t bothered to try and cheat it by getting a VPN, I would if I really wanted something and couldn’t get it some other way.   I guess just laziness and inertia stops me.

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Well a Happy New Year to all.

Last night we watched on a Youtube channel the fireworks lanched from the Sky Tower in Auckland. Then a couple of hours later the display from Sydney, which made ours look like a damp squib. It always does, Sydney Harbour is the perfect site for a spectacular fireworks display and they never disappoint.

Today (New Years) it was mostly sunny here in Auckland, with a good high tide, so I went down to Blockhouse Bay for a swim. There was a Japanese-looking gent sitting on a camp chair on the little patch of grass by the car park, with a large telescope pointing at the sun and a monitor on a folding table beside it. He explained that he was waiting to catch the ISS (International Space Station) crossing the Sun, and the location is quite critical – a quarter mile either way off the line and he’d miss it. The transit would only take a second or so but he hoped to catch it on high-speed video. I think the occasional clouds cleared away for him, I hope so.
Not far away was a young guy pumping up an inflatable paddle board – like a giant surf board, ten feet long and a couple of feet wide, I’ve seen paddleboards before but I never knew inflatable roll-up-into-a-backpack ones existed. It was his first attempt with it, as became apparent when he launched it. He had been recommended to try the bay as it was sheltered – good advice. The swell in the main harbour was a foot high, in the bay – which is almost perfectly sheltered from the prevailing stiff southwest breeze by a steep-sided narrow ridge – it was calm.   So he was okay when he fell off, as he did – several times.
And then there was the gentleman who regularly brings a guitar and portable amplifier and sets up in a sheltered alcove to practise, and sends music by Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin wafting across the water – fortunately he’s good enough to sustain it.

So it was just a very pleasant day, with people enjoying themselves doing happy things. I hope everyone here had a similarly pleasant and interesting day.

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@ps1l0v3y0u

Well, I don’t know if there’s any official definition, but fantasy seems to range from Harry Potter to Alice in Wonderland to those curious pseudo-mediaeval novels that start ‘Sir Edric sat pensively on his mighty charger as he surveyed the broad sweep of the Homelands, and pondered when the marauding hordes of the Hilldwellers would come storming over the dread and forbidding ramparts of the Eastern Gate’ – that sort of thing, is there a name for it? Fwiw I adore Alice, also Pratchett; Harry Potter and Sir Edric I give a miss to.

Hard sci-fi? I suppose space travel is hard sci-fi, as are alien civilisations, and I presume future societies like ‘Brave New world’ or ‘1984’ are too? My favourite early authors were John Wyndham (Day of the Triffids) and Arthur C Clarke, who I would have classed as strictly sci-fi but then, Clarke verges into mystical on occasion. (As an aside, I picked up a volume of Clarke short stories “l’Etoile” in Paris, the cover artist clearly hadn’t read them as the cover features a magnificent and scantily clad young lady on an equally magnificent winged horse, weilding a scimitar, which I don’t recall in any Clarke story and certainly not ‘The Star’. I’m delighted by the incongruity. And she is very… photogenic). Oh, and Robert Sheckley.

I agree that hard sci-fi is often more about concepts than characters. Bringing in individuals with their own interests and motives tends to obscure and distort the concept, even if their personal involvement adds more impact to it. For example the deadly profit-driven accounting in Oxygen or Boom.

Who often deviates far from hard sci-fi in that the characters often become the most important feature of the story. This is probably a consequence of the TV visual medium and the same characters recurring in successive episodes, if the actors have any charisma we start to identify with them.

I found most of Lord of the Rings film trilogy unsatisfying (I never read Tolkien btw). I think partly because there were too many characters and what makes a good novel does not necessarily make a good movie, Peter Jackson reportedly stayed fairly faithful to the books and this was probably a mistake. Though he would surely have been roasted by Tolkien fans if he had dared re-write it too much.

Back to Who – I hope RTD reins in the apocalyptic stuff, we already had too much of that with the Flux. Who is at its best on a personal, manageable level – Boom, 73 Yards, Dot and Bubble…

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@winston   No excusing needed.   The more the merrier, I for one am perfectly happy to hear from others in the room.

Sci-fi and fantasy are adjacent genres and frequently blur into each other.   I would have rated the ‘Hitch-hiker’ series as strictly scifi but as ps1l0v3y0u pointed out, it strays into the edge of fantasy on occasion.   I used to be a sci-fi hard-liner, that was before I encountered Terry Pratchett’s ‘Discworld’ and had to admit that fantasy had its merits if well enough written.   I still don’t rate Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings though.

@ps1l0v3y0u   Rose and Donna were perfectly ordinary humans until after they met the Doctor.   Martha was always Ordinary Human I think.   Not sure about Amy.    Clara was very definitely different, right from square one as Souffle Girl.

Akhaten – always made me conceptually uneasy with an atmosphere in space – how did that work?   That episode was, as you put it, pretty ‘squidgy’.   How much fantasy and metaphor I can accept varies with the tone of the story.   The Doctor’s Wife was moderately fantastic and I loved it.   Kill the Moon started out as very much hard sci-fi – the Space Shuttle, nuclear bombs etc – and then went and ostentatiously and gratuitously broke every basic law of mechanics and physics, I think it’s still my most hated episode.

I loved Asylum of the Daleks, and the clues that Moff gave us (‘where does she get the milk?’) which my brain ignored because I so wanted Souffle Girl to be real.   Contrast that with the very first Space Shuttle scene in Kill the Moon where the Doctor says “Where’s the gravity coming from?” – a good question with no possible answer – which by analogy should indicate that the Space Shuttle and indeed the whole episode is fake.   (Even before that – they could breathe.   The Space Shuttle does NOT have a pressurised cargo hold, and in fact the Space Shuttle can only reach Earth orbit, NOT the Moon I’ll stop now before I cover the whole page with a list of the absurdities in this wretched episode.)

What is Ruby – as you said, unanswered in this ep.   And in the next (SPOILERS) it appears she was a perfectly ordinary person, unless I missed something.   (I’m sure I’ll be told if I did).   So all the pointers in various episodes to something mysterious going on were red herrings?

I have to agree with @blenkinsopthebrave, this season was – mixed.   Half the eps were good.

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@blenkinsopthebrave @ps1l0v3y0u

Well, old Who did sort of stray into fantasy with e.g. The Greatest Show in the Galaxy. As nuWho has done, such as Rings of Akhaten. I agree, it should try to stay on firm sci-fi ground, but it frequently strays.

The line between sci-fi and fantasy can get blurred. A favourite comparison/contrast of mine is between DNA’s Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Terry Pratchett’s Discworld. Hitch-Hiker is rock solid sci-fi, while Discworld is as fantasy as it gets, but both of them, in being suffused with comedy and satire, and in shining a light on our current reality, often end up remarkably similar in tone.

Time travel seems to be one of those themes that is conducive to fantasy, I think.

I notice that RTD seems to have taken a leaf out of Moff’s book with his companion. RTD’s first-run companions – Rose, Martha, Donna – were perfectly ordinary people. Moff’s companions were a little more exotic, and Clara was most certainly an extraordinary individual (notwithstanding Moff’s insistence she was perfectly ordinary). And Ruby resembles Clara in that regard.

 

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@ps1l0v3y0u

I agree about UNIT, I was never very happy about it as a dumping ground for old Companions. (And as a supposedly elite agency, one has to wonder what special skills a randomly-chosen person who happens to become an associate of the Doctor’s, is likely to have. I suppose one could argue that there’s something about some people that makes the Doctor more likely to have chosen them – like Martha, or Clara, or Bill – but then Clara and Bill never subsequently worked for UNIT, so that falls flat.)

I wasn’t around (at least, not watching Who) for the first iteration of Mel, but she’s not may favourite companion either.

Mrs Flood – if she had a mystery, it’s still unresolved. Presumably it will be revealed in some future episode.

It became rapidly apparent that we were going to need a humongous Reset button. But RTD’s was way too mystical/metaphorical for my liking. The opposite of Death is life, so killing Death restores everybody? Seriously? The opposite of an opposite isn’t always identical with the thing you started with. Some things are irreversible.

So unlike many seasons of many, many fictional series, where the opening episodes and the finales are impressive and they go flat in the middle – this one was pretty much the opposite.

 

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@janetteb    I haven’t read all the posts in this forum (but I will).    But this double-episode has so many details in it, I’m sure a re-watch (or several) will bring up all sorts of things I overlooked first time round.   Especially in the time window.

As seasons go, yes I’d rank this one as quite good.

 

 

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So in the first four minutes, RTD just killed *everybody*. Like, not just impersonal universe destruction like the Flux, but all the characters get turned to dust individually.

(10 minutes later) I was wrong, Sutech’s dust of death *is* destroying the whole universe. This is going to take one hell of a Reset button.
The ‘everybody’s dead’ reminds me of Red Dwarf Episode 1 –
LISTER: Where is everybody, Hol?
HOLLY: They’re dead, Dave.
LISTER: Who is?
HOLLY: Everybody, Dave. (and so on)

We do get an explanation of ’73 yards’ – it’s a perception filter (aka the Somebody Else’s Problem field?)

I have to admit, this whole story has got me intrigued, even though I understand very little of it.

I have to say the piles of dust remind me even more strongly of Episode 1 of Red Dwarf. As in:
LISTER: Oh, this is terrible. And why is it so dirty around here, Hol? What is this stuff?
(dips his finger in another pile and tastes it.)
HOLLY: That is Catering Officer Olaf Petersen.

 

Okay, I have to admit I did love the way they trapped Sutech, corny though it was.

And that was one hell of a Reset button.

Ruby’s encounter with Louise – I’m all intrigued to see how RTD handles this. Moff would have handled it brilliantly (IMO), let’s see how RTD does 🙂
Okay, he did all right.

So, happy ending after all. And Mrs Flood remains a mysterious character.

So, as final (double) episodes go, it was – middling.   Not terrible, not outstanding.

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Nice to see Rose(2) again.

The rest of the cast – looks a bit like fan service. Who have we got this time? – oh yes, Mel and Kate.
I would have liked to see an Osgood though.
The Vlinx just looks so Star Wars Disney. And Junior Genius Science Officer on his Segway – why?

But hey – Mrs Flood. Did all our speculation have some grounds? But all she’s doing is babysitting Ruby’s granny. Will she do more in part 2?

VHS tape – wouldn’t it have degraded over the years? Does anyone have a VHS machine that still works? (I suppose Unit would have, along with a teleprinter and a wirephoto machine and a gramophone turntable…)
I have to say, the whole time-window sequence didn’t make a lot of sense to me. Or maybe I’m too mentally lazy to figure it out.

The black tornado thing – naming all those heathen gods, I was waiting for Cthulhu to make an appearance. But actually, it looks more like Zuul.

Well the title was a bit misleading, nothing to indicate why Ruby should be a ‘legend’, nor anything to solve her mystery. Maybe the next episode will throw some light on it.

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@ps1l0v3y0u Well, I’d be okay with this episode if it wasn’t for the cringingly bad, bordering on parody, upgraded Halloween masks that the five villains wore. IF they’d just stayed in their ‘human’ disguises until the time came to inhabit another human (like the Slitheen or Family of Blood did), it would have been adequate and not inviting disbelief/absurdity. Did no-one in the production team burst out laughing and say ‘they look like sh*t’?

(As an aside, somehow when a naff alien monster is a puppet or a stuntie in a full suit, like the Meep or the Wrarth Warriors, or the goblins, I find that just acceptable. But those feather-headed actors were over the limit for me).

Even absent that, I wouldn’t call it a ‘romp’ though. I’m trying to think of an episode that would qualify as a ‘romp’. Last Christmas, possibly (sarcastic Santa and his elves, but the serious peril of the Dream Crabs meant it wasn’t a full ‘romp’). Possibly The Husbands of River Song. Robin of Sherwood? The Power of Three with its absurdly enigmatic cubes? The Bells of St John? Dr Mysterio?

I did freeze-frame the Scan, somehow the faces had been slightly perspective-distorted which made it a little difficult to identify some of them, and I couple I didn’t know.

By the way, I personally am perfectly happy if future writers/showrunners never mention the Chibnall era ever again. Like Dinosaurs on a Spaceship, it ‘happened’, we all survived, now can we please get on with Who?

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The ball is, surprisingly, adequately entertaining (normally, this period-drama stuff gives me a big yawn). Interesting that the Doctor is not the only dark-complexioned character present, nor does anyone seem to be taking any notice of his colour.

Another thing that nobody seems to be noticing is the son et lumiere display when one of the impostors changes bodies.

By the way, the astronomer de Lacaille is a correct reference (I Googled).

Gotta love Rogue’s ‘ship’. Rogue is vaguely reminiscent of Captain Jack Harkness, by the way. And I have never watched Bridgerton (or Downton Abbey), nor will I.

But it all falls apart when the Chuldur reveal themselves. They really are the most naff monsters ever. A watered-down Family of Blood with cringey Halloween masks. Worse than the Slitheen.

Oh, and the Doctor and Rogue seem to be deeply in love. I expect someone somewhere is fuming over their keyboard, but I honestly don’t care either way.

I do have to admit, just when I thought Emily and Ruby were going to have a gay flirtation, Emily turning into a Chuldur took me completely by surprise. That fact alone rescued this episode from Worst of Season to passable. As did Rogue rescuing Ruby from the trap at the cost of his own imprisonment. (Will he ever turn up again?)

(Didn’t they ought to collect the three trap corner gadgets in case they malfunction later and catch someone by accident?)

‘Don’t even know his real name.’ I sense a parallel with the stewardess in Midnight.

Now to see what everyone else thought.

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@ps1l0v3y0u   Oh yes, of course there are titles, just 2 1/2 minutes in.   Somehow I missed them.

The carnivorous megaslugs – I seem to recall there being a suggestion that they were created by the Dot / Matrix.   (I call it that because of the parallels with The Matrix, though obviously that was even more intensively in control of its humanoids).

I’m not so much in favour of the theory that the Dot / Matrix created the slugs.   It would require a whole next-level command of technology to do so.   And it doesn’t seem to have tried modifying any of the FineTimers.   So my theory is that the Slugs were an existing species in the Wild Wood, that somehow infiltrated the dome (or possibly the Matrix let them in).   But then, why were they eating the Finetimers in alphabetical order?   How did the Matrix control them?   I don’t think it did, or needed to.   We could see how slow they were, easily avoided by a human.   All the Matrix had to do was arrange for each Finetimer’s dot to make them avoid the Slugs – until their number was up, then steer them into one.   If, by pure random chance, the occasional Finetimer walked into a Slug before their appointed time, it really wouldn’t matter, it wouldn’t nullify the algorithm.

As to why the Matrix did it in alphabetical order? – possibly it was bored.   Remember Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged, who had decided to relieve the boredom of immortality by insulting every creature in the universe – in alphabetical order.

I thought the satire in this episode was extremely well done.    I have never had an account on Tiktok or Twitter, my Facebook account is dormant, I have participated in half-a-dozen Zoom meetings; I watch a lot of Youtube.   But still,  by osmosis, I have absorbed quite a lot of what ‘social media’ looks like, and I think the shallowness of ‘influencers’ is a legitimate target.    (As it happens, the Youboob algorithm keeps showing me videos of Tiktok ‘livestreamers’ doing stupid and offensive ‘stunts’ for clicks and reaping instant karma.   Shallow as they are, none of the Finetimers are as obnoxious as that, although they do reap a far worse fate.)

 

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Lindy – obviously, at first, a totally shallow and unlikeable character. But as the episode progressed she seemed to be growing a little bit of a spine. This is quite common, I think, in Doctor Who stories, as we learn more about a character they become more of a person. (PLease don’t ask me for examples though). So by half-way I was expecting Lindy to be saved at the end by Ricky, and for Ruby and the Doctor to save everyone, or at least all the survivors, as they almost always do. And then of course, RTD bushwhacks us with Lindy’s abject betrayal of Ricky, and the Finetimers bigoted rejection of the Doctor.

The only thing that makes this less emotionally shocking and bitter, is that the Finetimers – Lindy in particular, but the rest of them in general – thoroughly deserve their fate. Well, they chose it.

But I can’t think of another episode in NuWho where the Doctor has failed so completely (through no fault of his own).

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@ps1l0v3y0u     You said (on 25th May)    “I saw a transcription somewhere on the web but can I get it back???”

(See, I do read a lot of these threads!)

Might that have been on Chrissie’s transcripts site at  Chakoteya.net?   (It’s the only one I know of)

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May I say that I really don’t care if Lindy and Cooper and the whole five-second-attention-span TikTokTwitter menagerie get eaten alive by monsters.

Is this the ultimate in telecommuting? (Actually, no, Lindy did have to walk a short distance from her living-cubicle to her work-cubicle. I’m a little surprised she wasn’t plugged into the Matrix at home, but I guess the plot needed an office). Never mind, RTD has devastatingly echoed the shallowness of ‘social media’.

These monsters are right up there with the most horrific creations of Who. CGI well utilised.

And we’re 16 minutes in and still no title sequence, this is getting to be a habit with RTD isn’t it?

I was appalled when Lindy betrayed Ricky September to the Dot.

And somewhat morbidly satisfied when Lindy and the other Eloi sailed off down the river in their boat, all their skills will be as much use as an umbrella in a hurricane. As Chrissie noted**,  ‘..hopefully to fall down a waterfall or crash into a grille or vanish when it gets to the edge of the dome because it is a hologram or something. Because.’

(**At the end of her transcript on Chakoteya.net)

This episode was – disconcerting. And it – very loosely – echoes the future generation in H G Wells’ The Time Machine, with the ‘beautiful people’ (the Eloi) living in luxury sustained by the ‘sub-human’ Morlocks.

Another top-notch episode.

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@robink2567     Good point about the perception filter.   I’ve just realised that explains why 73 yard woman only terrorised people who Ruby had pointed her out to.   The rest just didn’t notice her (the woman) because of the filter.   I’m very slow sometimes.

I’ll take your word for it that young people (in Britain) would use metres rather than yards, I can’t judge as I live in New Zealand.   But I know that, for greater distances, it’s miles, as every road sign will confirm.   🙂

The perception filter being attached to Ruby’s Tardis key (and malfunctioning) – that works.    I wondered if 73 Yard woman was just a hologram generated by [something attached to] Ruby e.g. the perception filter.   And the filter would have been pre-programmed by the mystical forces of the broken fairy ring to target Roger ap H-bomb.

OR, she could be the Doctor, trapped by the mystical powers of the fairy ring and unable to do anything but watch (until his chance came to terrorise Roger ap H-bomb, which would be entirely consistent with his history of saving the Earth from itself).   But I don’t think the Doctor would deliberately cause a split between Ruby and her mother, so I think that theory is ruled out.

Probably all this has been exhaustively discussed in this thread, which I’ve only just skimmed through.

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Further conjecture:    Why 73 yards? Did ’73’ have any significance as a number?
219 feet, 66.7 metres (as the episode told us). 66.7512 metres, to be precise. Actually, rounding, that’d be 66.8 metres.
But I can’t make anything of it. If it was 66.6 feet it would be the ‘mark of the beast’ or somesuch but it ain’t.
So I’m sure the ’73’ must mean something but I can’t guess what. It’s prime, but so are (mumble mumble) 23 other numbers under 100. So I dunno.
And (contra TranslatorCircuit) I can’t see any significance in using yards rather than metres either. Britain still uses miles and mph for large distances, metres and millimetres and feet and inches for short ones. Also, buying petrol in litres but the trip computer in my little Toyota Aygo rental proudly showed 56 miles per gallon. It’s somehow gloriously British to be using two incompatible systems at one and the same time.

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Well that was different.

First, no opening titles? Or did I just miss them? Is there any significance to this?

Second, no Doctor (for most of it). No offence to the Doctor, but the story was well enough written to keep my interest without him.

Third, what did we just watch? It was *good*, but completely baffling. Who was the woman? – future old Ruby frozen in time? Don’t know. And possibly more significant – *what* did she say to everyone that made them run away from Ruby in terror (except Roger ap H-bomb who just – resigned)? Why was his reaction different?

And of course there was a bloody huge Reset button at the end.

So many questions, so much unexplained. Normally the number of unexplained bits would really bother me (see my comments on Kill the Moon for just how much gratuitously breaking physical laws wholesale bugs me!), but somehow in this – more mystical – story, it didn’t matter.

Tough luck on Ruby, who had to live a solitary life – not without romance, but without any permanent attachments because the 73 yard woman was so distracting.    I have noticed (in retrospect) that 73 yard woman only gave the horror treatment to people who Ruby had pointed her out to.   She left Ruby’s other acquaintances and passing romances alone.

I’d rank this up with Boom.   A vast improvement on earlier episodes, and (I hope) promising for the rest of the season.

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@ps1l0v3y0u     Well, it’s my personal choice to avoid reading too much into a story, since I can get quite enough political insanity from watching the news, and I like my fiction to be escapist.   And also, I find such interpretations are frequently able to be skewed to suit the preferences/prejudices of the viewer.    (Having said that, I just  watched  ’73 yards’ and the similarities between Roger ap Gwilliam  and a certain orange idiot were unmistakeable (and I’m not talking about Bojo)).

I can’t see that October 5th has any great significance, and I think – in general – the screening dates of various Who episodes are too obscure to be a plot point.    Google tells me that on that date  ‘Dr No’ (the movie) was released, also Monty Python’s Flying Circus first aired.   Not sure if they had any significance, but since there were no references to ‘joined the choir invisible’ or ‘nobody expects…’, probably not.

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@ps1l0v3y0u     Well, I don’t think this is really the forum for political discussions, so I’ll keep my views to myself (not that I think they’d surprise anybody.)   You do have a good point, that the US and Europe was supporting Ukraine with military tech.   (Vastly to the benefit of the military/industrial complex, by the way.)    But a quite different circumstance, I think, from the situation in ‘Boom’, where there was no local population resisting.   That’s part of why I’m leery of reading too much ‘message’ (other than the vaguest generalisations) into specific sci-fi episodes.

I’m not sure of the significance of October 5th?

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@winston   I generally agree with you.   The Space Babies were ‘cute’ on overload  (I don’t like ‘cute’, did I mention?) and their voices were young teens.   And I think a couple of times the voice didn’t quite sync with the ‘baby’ who was speaking.   So the whole thing was rather unreal.

Also, how come babies were controlling a space station?    I suppose (in hindsight) that Jocelyn   (Nan-E) might have set everything up to give them the illusion of controlling things, just to keep them occupied.   Even though Jocelyn admitted that she really didn’t know how to control the station either.

And I found the monster really rather disgusting.

Mudlark (way back) said “I guess RTD just thought ‘talking babies running a space station would be a cute idea for an episode’, and wasn’t bothered about the rationale.”     I think, possibly similar to “What if the Moon was a giant egg?”

Never mind, next episode(s) are much better.

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@ps1l0v3y0u    If you’re referring to current political events (like, the US elections/Ukraine/Gaza) I sympathise, they can be very – distracting.   Though I find I can usually switch off my real-life awareness and just immerse myself in the story.   Whatever happens in Real Life (TM) in the next few weeks, or four years, ‘Boom’ and the Doctor and Ruby will be unchanged, it will still be the same story, frozen in time, when 2024 is just a bad and distant memory.

So I tend to be fairly oblivious to ‘messages’ in the text, and in particular, I’m opposed to taking specific ‘incidents’ and widening them into generalised moral imperatives.   In this specific instance, the Doctor realised he was standing on an Anglican Marine landmine (even though programmed by the Villengard Corporation) and the way to switch it off was for the Marines to surrender.      That was entirely pragmatic; whether Gandhi would/should have surrendered to Hitler has nothing to do with it (IMO).    On the other hand, that war is often pointless and usually bad, and benefits mainly the military/industrial complex that Eisenhower warned of in the 1950’s, that is a generalised message (and one I personally agree with).    But the world is complex.    Witness the Doctor’s attack on the pointless ‘faith’ that kept the Marines fighting and occasionally dieing for – nothing, yet he acknowledged at the end that ‘faith’ was a good and sustaining thing for Mundy and Splice in their personal circumstances.

 

 

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Okay, this is the verbose version.   You have been warned   🙂

Phones implanted in hands, that’s new. But then, we had hand mines (and don’t tell me that idea didn’t start off as a bad pun, which duly turned horrific in Moff’s fertile imagination) in The Witch’s Familiar. Speaking of mines…

Battlefield scenes seem to be a theme with Moff. He (and the Who producers) do them very well, though. Mines that migrate – with what we find out later of Villengard’s MO, I guess that would be a way to increase casualties. The apprehensive way the soldiers react to the threat of an ambulance tells us all we need to know about the way this war is being fought.

I have to applaud the deft way an information dump is handled – quite painlessy to the viewer – by the two soldiers talking to each other. Interrupted by one of them stepping on a mine and the other being terminated by the ‘Ambulance’ as uneconomic to save. An extension of the theme in Oxygen, and as echoed more faintly by RTD in Space Babies. In this episode, Moff gives it a cutting edge – “The Villengard Corporation would like to extend its deepest condolences on your upcoming loss. Thoughts and prayers.” (I know I quoted that before, but it’s so savage I couldn’t omit it). Vater seems almost resigned to his imminent termination – resistance is futile. Accountancy as a war crime. (This of course isn’t new, the first instance I can recall was in an early sci-fi by George Lucas, THX 1138, where the protagonist attempts to escape a Logans Run/Blakes 7 – like society in a stolen police car, and the pursuing android police are about to capture him when the budget limit for his pursuit is reached and they are forced to break off. In that case of course, the result was beneficial.)

Enter the Doctor, and at 5 minutes 50 into the episode he steps on a land mine, where he will be stuck for (most of) the rest of the episode. Roll credits. THe sound of the Skye Boat Song in the devastated burning landscape is magnificently incongruous. Ruby is a girl with remarkably pragmatic reactions – “Why hasn’t it set off already when you stepped on it?” I thought the rationale for the flashy lights on the mine was a little bit stretched – ‘look good in a showroom’ – but if that’s the worst nitpick I can raise then this episode is solid. Villengard ‘supplying all sides in all conflicts’ is nothing new – Maxim. Vickers. Browning. Oerlikon. And so on…

(At 10:12 there appears to be a curious glitch in the editing – aerial view of the crater, with the Doc on his mine facing us, Ruby climbing the path on the right behind him, but left foreground there appears to be a man standing, looking on. I can’t account for this.)

I don’t know if it’s a good idea for the Doc to tell Ruby that the curiously heavy thing (minor nitpick, it doesn’t look that heavy to me) she’s holding is actually a compressed dead body. I have to say her reaction (or lack of it) suggests a great deal of sang-froid. (6.7 kilograms – okay, that’s realistic, I could hold that in one hand). “Are you getting scared, because you’re just babbling now”. “Okay, it’s exactly 6.732217 kilograms. I was trying not to show off.” I’m loving this dialogue. Gatwa and Gibson are marvellous in this exchange. All they’re doing is talking, but it’s mesmerising.

And Moff still has room for some funny lines – “Blindness isn’t fatal.” “You literally just said that to a dead blind guy.”

Then Splice turns up and Ruby and the Doctor are desperately trying to hide from her, the fact that her father is dead. I find moments like this far more moving than actors standing around crying and sobbing. The actors hold it in and let the audience feel the emotions for them. Just like true tension consists of waiting for something to happen rather than violent action. And then Vater’s hologram activates and Splice rushes in (doesn’t she realise he’s a hologram and dead? Maybe holograms are so common they accompany phone calls, or something). And I think, with most writers, we would be fairly sure that this wasn’t going to blow the Doctor (and Ruby and Splice and all) up, but with Moff you can never be sure, after all, didn’t Blue Idiot Guy blow a big hole right through the middle of Bill? But maybe not this time.

But no sooner has Ruby managed to wrestle Splice away from the Doctor (and his landmine) than Mundy turns up, all protective and threatening to shoot the Doctor. In fact Mundy turns out to be stubbornly stupid, in the way that only a military mind trained in correct procedures can be (in my biassed opinion). And no sooner has the Doctor persuaded Mundy that making him drop Vater’s remains would blow up half the planet, than the Ambulance rolls into view, attracted by Mundy’s shots, and shoots its probes into the Doc. This is not his day. So Ruby has the brilliant idea of grabbing Mundy’s gun and firing shots to distract the Ambulance, and Mundy redeems herself by telling Ruby to shoot her in the arm (on a low setting, which is presumably why she didn’t blow the Doc’s arm off, nice consistency there) as only actual injuries will attract the Ambulance. Which Ruby is about to do when Canterbury turns up and shoots Ruby for real. The Moff is really piling on the chaos now.

The snow is a puzzle – obviously foreshadowing something, which we will presumably find at the end of the series. The Ambulance is as useless as ever – ‘432 seconds. Patient non-ordained. Treatment withheld.’ Not a very Christian approach to things, but then it’s a product of the Vilengard Corporation, not the Anglican marines. Canterbury seems to have come to his senses rather quicker than Mundy did, reconfigures the Ambulance to revive Ruby. But the mine is still counting down…

So, the Doctor, realising the Anglican marines are fighting only themselves, tells them to surrender. (It worked on the Mummy on the Orient Express). But this lot don’t have the authority to surrender. So the Doctor has to _prove_ to them that they’ve been fighting an illusion. He sends Vater as a digital signal through the Ambulance into the network. Canterbury is reprogramming the Ambulance when it backfires and kills him. And then a swarm of Ambulances roll up chanting menacingly ‘Thoughts and prayers’ and the Interface declares that Vater has been declared a virus and deleted. And the landmine announces a ten-second countdown. And then, of course, at the last second, the mine switches off as the Vater virus gets really mad and wipes the Vilengard algorithm. And then the Ambulance revives Ruby – presumably reverting to its default programming.

Nice closing shot of the spectacular skyscape, with the four survivors lined up, Splice and Mundy clutching their respective significant cylinders. No, whatever the Doctor says, Vater and Canterbury are dead, and no amount of AI holograms can bring them back. But maybe Splice and Mundy take whatever comfort they can. And I’m pleased we got a few seconds of pleasantness at the end to unwind.

This episode finally made buying Season 15 worth it. To echo previous comments, I’d rank it as second-level Moffat, but that still makes it very good. A lot of the elements are ones that Moffat has used before, but I don’t see that as a defect – given the volume of Moffat’s previous contributions (and, indeed, the sheer volume of Doctor Who stories to date) it must be almost impossible to generate an all-original, novel, yet coherent story. And Moffat manages to rearrange the elements in the kaleidoscope so the story feels new even if similarities to previous episodes cross our minds. This was a ‘bottle’ episode, but then many (if not most) of the best episodes have been ‘bottle’ episodes. Cut down to a few characters and their interactions, which Moff does supremely well.

 

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@ps1l0v3y0u    Be interesting to see your observations.

@janetteb    I’m flattered, but slightly abashed that my comments were so brief.   Yes, it’s a classic Who story in the Moffat genre.   I think I might re-watch tonight and see if I’m impelled to fill out my comments a bit.

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Now this is more like it. This one grabs you from the get-go, and it doesn’t let go. Don’t you just *know* that an ambulance is not going to be good news? “The Villengard Corporation would like to extend its deepest condolences on your upcoming loss. Thoughts and prayers”. The Moff’s irony has an edge on it that could cut steel.

These are, I guess, the same militaristic churchmen as in The Time of Angels.

And – that was intense. The Doctor just spent 40 minutes standing on a land mine trying to trick it into not going off. And the irony – that the soldiers were fighting nobody and being killed by their own defensive weapons – that was trademark Moff. Does that make the Vilengard Corporation more evil than Skynet?

That was definitely up to Moff’s standard. The interaction between the Doctor and Ruby was deftly handled (by the script and by the actors). And NO signs of anything having been Disneyised or cutesified in this episode.

And if my comments are brief, it’s because I was too mesmerised watching to stop and note anything down.

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Now this is definitely looking like an improvement. The Beatles impersonators are – good enough, I thought. They look and sound near enough to the originals that I could accept the illusion.

Well that was a better episode. Certainly – different. I thought the villain was a little bit naff, actually, but I’m being picky here – certainly a better villain than most of Chibs’. And the battle of music was original. I’m sure the episode was crammed with musical references that went right over my head.

The music itself, I didn’t find particularly good. I guess it was – adequate enough to carry the storyline. And the storyline was quite straightforward, just a series of skirmishes between the Doctor (and Ruby) and the Maestro. But I kept wishing for some really good music to appear (of course, ‘really good’ is so absolutely subjective even stating my opinion of that might start a minor war. Still, I think I’m going to listen to Strawberry Fields/Penny Lane/A Day in the Life after I’ve posted this. Yes I know it’s anachronistic by a couple of years, I don’t care).

Reading the various comments – I was surprised that somebody even bothered to object to the Maestro’s gender (non-gender?) status. The character was obviously as camp as a row of frilly pink tents – but that’s hardly new in the music scene. Besides which, as a non-human non-terrestrial (?) identity, why would it have a gender? The status of the actor is irrelevant as far as I’m concerned. Come to that, I have only – just this minute – realised that Ncuti Gatwa is gay (cf his interview in ‘Attitude’ referenced by Juniperfish). I must be slow on the uptake, but so far as I can tell it doesn’t show in his portrayal of the Doctor, therefore it doesn’t matter to me. (I accept that it may matter very much to him).
Tbh I thought RTD’s thinly-veiled comments on refugees and abortion in Space Babies were far more likely to cause eruptions in some circles, than a bit of ambiguous trans-gendering. Shows how much I know.

Anyway, definitely better than Space Babies. And the next ep is by the Moff. I hope it lives up to the anticipation.

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@janetteb   We seem to be fully in agreement on Tardis ranking.

I suppose this is technically a ‘first’ episode, I tend to think of it as ‘second’ since The Church on Ruby Road precedes it in the DVD set (though TCRR is numbered ‘0’ in the set).   Also, I found Space Babies a bit gross.

I’ll have to see if the next ep can re-engage my interest.

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@janetteb

“Exeter I thought. That is near Cornwall. I love Cornwall. What the hell. We’ll go to Cornwall.” I love that!

Generally, main road signage is quite good. Though, with respect, I wouldn’t choose a large Mercedes for the trip. On my trip I was lucky enough to score a Toyota Aygo X – dreadful styling, but extremely tight turning circle, good visibility forwards and a big screen for the backup camera. The rental company kept trying to persuade me to upgrade to an auto and I kept politely refusing. An excellent car for Cornish country lanes…

Public transport vs rental cars? Well, anywhere well out in the country, I’d always take a car. In big cities (or their suburbs), public transport, every time.

I rented from Paddington this last time, which turned out to be a mistake. Before departure, I had plotted a route out of London on Westway (A40) then a bit of the notorious M25, then through country lanes to Hastings. That worked fine. On the way back, I had plotted (with Streetview) the last bit of inward route which included some twiddly bits near Paddington to get to the hotel underground car park where the rental place was located. I just had large-scale road maps, not street maps. So I ended up on the A4 (Great West Road) not the A40 (Westway). There were bits of overpasses and stuff that seemed vaguely (misleadingly) familiar until I recognised the Natural History Museum around 4pm and realised I was on the wrong road altogether, some miles southeast of where I ought to be, at the start of the rush hour, with no street maps, no idea quite where I was, not sure which way I was facing and not even sure which direction was North, and I was getting desperate for a ‘comfort stop’ (in rush-hour traffic? Not happening!). Eventually I headed in (what I hoped was) north-west hoping to come across the A40 which (after a few meanders and loops and going round Shepherds Bush roundabout three times in the wrong lanes) I finally did. Made it into the underground car park at five to five after the most traumatic hour of my entire trip, by some miracle there was no-one behind me, nobody in sight, I yanked on the handbrake, raced into a corner and watered the London Metropole Hilton.

So that way exceeded any little misadventure I had in France, though the car was undamaged.

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On my first viewing (probably a good sign that I almost immediately want to burst into print…):

This is really weird wild and wacky – but in a good way. I like the conversation between Ruby and the Doctor, she asks entirely logical questions to which the answers are, of course, wildly abnormal.

And then they’re in dinosaur-land with some fairly serviceable CGI dinosaurs, and RTD has some fun with the old stepped-on-a-butterfly trope. I sense this is going to be a fairly light-hearted episode.

I have to say this iteration of the Tardis is a huge improvement on the last. (Still rates second compared with 12’s, though, IMO).

I’m not sure I care for the space station full of human babies driving around in wheelchairs and talking in (ADR’d) young-teen voices. It is kind of surreal but – coming on top of the goblins – it appears Who is regressing to young childrens’ level. Except – the situation soon becomes more serious, with the introduction of Jocelyn (Nan-E). Actually, I could read a heap of political allegories into the story at this point, which I resolutely refuse to do.

I like the way Ruby goes after the Bogeyman – she seems to be turning into a reincarnation of Ace. And then she gets dribbled on with bogeyman-stuff. Well it happened to Amy (The Beast Below). It happened to Clara (into the Dalek). Seems to be an occupational hazard for companions.

I’m ambivalent about this episode. Don’t love it, don’t hate it. Ncuti is fine as the Doctor, his enthusiasm is infectious and he has none of the annoying habits of his predecessor (I mean Jodie not Tennant). Ruby is, likewise, quite okay as a Companion. But this and the previous episode both seem to be aimed at a very young target audience, which is a bit disconcerting after Tennant’s three, in particular Wild Blue Yonder.

Side note: I really don’t care for the Doc’s sonic screwdriver.

I’ve just read through the comments in this thread and I agree with the bulk of the observations.

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Well, well. Doctor Who meets the Muppets.

The first quarter was definitely Christmassy, goodwill to all, with Doctor Who as a sort of Santa doing good deeds. All the (human) characters were believable and just nice, pleasant people.

Then we’re deep into Muppet territory with the goblins, or maybe it was more reminiscent of Labyrinth, though David Bowie was a far more personable Goblin King than Jabba the Hutt.

The Doctor singing his way out of danger, though – that’s a new one.

I’m fairly neutral about this episode – it didn’t really grab me, didn’t put me off. I could watch happily it again though I don’t really feel motivated to.

Ncuti Gatwa has enough personal magnetism to carry the role of Doctor. And Ruby seems adequate (we’ll see how she develops as a companion), though she doesn’t – so far – have the same level of individual character as (IMO!) Amy or Clara or even Rose 2 in Star Beast.   I notice Ruby did the standard walk-around-the-Tardis almost exactly as Rose (1) did two decades ago, I’m sure that was intentional.

So far so good, we’ll see how Episode 1 goes (The Church on Ruby Road was Episode 0, according to the DVD set).

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@nerys    I often find  Satellite View  (in Google Maps) is a lot better at showing tracks, than the regular map view.   Though it does depend a lot on the terrain.    And of course I’m talking about viewing it on a laptop with wifi Internet, which is probably a non-starter in the mountains  (unless you saved the screen previously).

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@winston I love large-scale maps e.g. the Ordnance Survey’s 1″ to the mile. In 2013 when I first ventured into France in recent decades, I got a huge Michelin atlas and photocopied all the relevant maps (about 20 of them), ditto for Italy and Switzerland. And that was how I navigated. In 2017 the rental had a GPS, stuck in French but that was okay, and I did use that for half a day going cross country. The rest of the time it spent muttering ‘Calcul une nouvelle itineraire’ as I sailed past its instructed turn. Unfortunately as I approached my final destination (Nice station) where I did want to use it, the voice switched itself off, which just left the on-screen display which zoomed in to the next intersection – this was not helpful in Nice traffic when one ideally needed to get in the correct lane several hundred yards in advance.
One other rental had GPS of which I managed to turn off the satnav function and put it in ‘mapping mode’, with the unexpected benefit that Mrs D was fascinated by it. Mrs D is not normally happy with winding roads and tends to say so vehemently, I was approaching the Colle Delle Finestre and its 47 hairpins with extreme trepidation, however when I pointed the GPS out to her she was so fascinated seeing each hairpin approach (which she duly warned me about) that she forgot to complain. Score a win for GPS in-car entertainment.
This most recent trip, I did pre-plan a route from the south London suburbs to Hastings through country lanes avoiding almost all towns and most main roads. Makes for interesting driving. Got lost in London though.

And a final comment on GPS – one of my favorite photos from my trip is of a blue sign which says ‘Unsuitable for motor vehicles 500 yds ahead’ and below it, in angry black and yellow, ‘IGNORE SAT NAV No Vehicle Access to Warleggan Village’ I sense the voice of experience speaking. You can see it for yourself, go to Pantersbridge crossroads in Cornwall and point north in Streetview. The Googlebot did actually go 500 yards up this road and it is possibly the narrowest lane in Cornwall.

By the way, OS maps can be viewed on-line at streetmap.co.uk, but they’re completely outdone by the French and Swiss, both of which have scrollable zoomable maps of the entire country (at geoportail.gouv.fr and map.geo.admin.ch ) and very impressive maps they are too when zoomed in. They’re identical with the paper hiking maps you can buy in shops in the relevant areas.

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@ps1l0v3y0u    You are correct about the A-Z.    But (I seem to recall) there was some earlier confusion with grabbing books off the stacks and trying the code on them (I need to re-watch to figure just what they were doing).   My suggested procedure would, I think, have been far the quickest in finding duplicates.    The A-Z would have been an exception, in that there might have been some uncertainty in how to list it  (unlike most books where title – author is unambiguous); I would have dealt with that by putting it on one side (along with any other ‘ambiguous’ volumes, I suspect they would only amount to 3 or 4 total) and just including them visually when stepping through Pile B.

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@ps1l0v3y0u     Sherlock and algorithms – I’d have to point out that my suggested method of comparing the books is last-century stuff.   Dating from the 80’s when everyone had a home computer running Basic and wrote little programs on it.   Probably the default these days would be to use a spreadsheet but – in 99% of applications – that’s absurd (and clunky) overkill when a text editor would suffice.

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@nerys    In hindsight, I should have phoned the Emergency Assistance number as soon as I was established in my hotel room at 1 a.m.   (They are 24-hour I think).   I expect they would have had a new car lined up by the time I finished breakfast.   But I was too tired to bother, and the subsequent confusion was all my fault   (they were far too polite to say so).

It was not so much a cheaper room, as a massive discount on an existing one.   Whether the rates and rules changed after midnight, or my reappearance convinced him I was genuine, or what, I don’t know, but I wasn’t going to question it.   It may also be a cultural thing – here in NZ we don’t have a ‘haggling’ tradition.   If the price is x dollars, I either pay it or not, it feels almost insulting to suggest the seller lower his price.   So by that time I was expecting to pay the 540 Euros (ouch!), the discount came as a complete but welcome surprise to me.

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@nerys  Umm. Well, in the hope that Craig will pardon the bandwidth… I picked it up from Valence TGV station, I had a Fiat 500 booked but they ‘upgraded’ me to a MG ZS. The 500 would have been ideal for narrow Alpine roads, the ZS less so. Some cars, I can tell precisely where they are on the road; others, I have some trouble accurately judging how close to obstacles it is, and the ZS was one of those. This was, paradoxically, not so much a problem on the high passes – where the road tends to have ‘soft edges’ and on single track places you slow down and crawl past the oncoming car. Such it was on the Col de la Cayolle. The problem arises down on the flat, where narrow two-lane roads have brick walls right at the edge of the carriageway. So I was approaching this nominally two-lane bridge (it had a white line down the centre) on a slight curve, with another car coming the other way, I thought I’d better keep well right and misjudged it, there was suddenly a shocking amount of violent banging and crashing and I found myself upside down. (The right-hand stone parapet wall – about 2 feet high – sloped down at the end making a perfect launching ramp. The car launched off that, across to hit the left-hand wall upside-down, and skidded to a stop perfectly parked in the left lane except facing the wrong way and – upside down. The other driver must have reacted promptly to avoid colliding head-on with me). So I undid my seat-belt, landing on the remains of the back window which was all over the inside of the roof, causing my only injuries, and crawled out through the driver’s window which was open. A very kind lady and her daughter from the adjacent house brought out a deckchair and sat me down. I insisted on crawling back inside to retrieve my camera, coat, suitcase etc. An ambulance arrived and the paramedic checked me over, said I seemed to be okay, but on conferring with a doctor strongly urged me to go to hospital and be checked over. A couple of young policemen questioned me – quite politely – breathalysed me and took a drug test (standard stuff).

So there I was, in the middle of nowhere, with no transport, and even if I managed to get to where I was booked that night (near Castellane) then next morning I’d be in the middle of a different nowhere with no wheels – so Nice sounded like the best bet (also, I was booked just 20km from Nice the following night). So I accepted their kind offer of an ambulance (so long as they brought my bags!) and they stuck a neck brace on me, strapped me down to a stretcher and off we went 60 miles to Nice. A long and winding road, by the time we reached the hospital I was busting. Me (to doctor, urgently): “I need to pee!” Doctor (doubtless used to American tourists): “No no, it’s free!” Me: “No, not ‘pay’, pee!” And that is verbatim. So they kept me in for about 8 hours, doing all manner of scans, X-rays and blood tests, I think they were a little disappointed to find nothing, gave me a tetanus shot and discharged me about 10pm – I suggested they might like to keep me in for observation, the doctor said ‘Why? There’s nothing wrong with you!’ I did ask the desk if they knew of any hotel that would be open at that hour, and they wrote down a hotel on the Promenade des Anglais (which sounded a bit swank to me, but still…)

How do you tell an absolutely top class hotel? – you walk in at midnight, past the Lamborghini Countach on the footpath with cones and ropes around it, barefoot and dragging your luggage behind you, looking like you’ve just been in a car crash, walk up to the immaculate young man behind the desk and ask if they have any inexpensive rooms – and he doesn’t blink, he doesn’t sneer, he isn’t icily polite, he is genuinely understanding and sympathetic. Unfortunately, all their inexpensive rooms were taken, the cheapest they had was 540 Euros. (Gulp). So I thanked him and asked if there might be anywhere less expensive nearby, he suggested I could try the Ibis, half a kilometre away. The Ibis was a lot less swank and hence a lot less polite – ‘Have you any rooms?’ ‘Have you a reservation?’ ‘No’ ‘Then you don’t have a room.’ He did suggest I try the Magnon, but by the time I found that it was firmly shut. It wasn’t a cold night but it was starting to rain so I assessed my options. I could sleep in a bus shelter but they were mostly taken by ladies waiting for customers. Or, my credit card could afford 500+ Euros even if I couldn’t, so back to swank hotel it was. I approached the immaculate young man and said “I will take that room, if you still have it” and he said “Wait a minute, I’ll see what I can do” (tap tap tap on his keyboard) “The best I can do is 200 Euros.” I almost hugged him.

Next morning I rang the car rental Emergency Assistance number, they asked where was I (Nice) and where was the car (I didn’t know. Somewhere between the Col de la Cayolle and the Gorges de Daluis, probably, but I failed to mention that). So they said, wait and they’d call me back when they’d arranged a new rental. Well, they didn’t call back, and I kept pestering them, frustratedly battling with dodgy travelSIMs, my own phone company’s exorbitant global roamimg rates, Skype (intermittently working) and my difficulty understanding European English accents in a noisy environment, until the afternoon when they mentioned the Nice police had no knowledge of the car and the penny dropped and I finally realised they were looking for the wreck in Nice. (I think their procedures require them to ‘find’ the old car before they give you a new one). Luckily the sheaf of papers the hospital gave me on discharge mentioned the location of the ‘incident’, and within an hour of me telling them it they rang back with a rental car at Nice airport and offered to send me a taxi. I declined the taxi since for the last few hours I’d been watching trams going past with ‘Aeroport’ on them. And there was minimal delay at the rental desk, Emergency Assistance had arranged everything. The moral is, give them all the information requested and let them do their job.

After that, as I said much earlier, everything went without a scratch.

[Dentarthurdent @replies]

@janetteb @winston @nerys My recent travels (as I probably mentioned already) included two weeks driving an Opel Corsa around the Alps and two weeks of a dinky little Toyota Aygo in south of England country lanes, without putting so much as a scratch on either (for the first time ever). Boring. But as winston commented, all the best stories tend to involve some sort of disaster. Quite coincidentally, I was musing today on all my ‘best’ stories, and realised that every single one of them, without exception, was heralded by some untoward happening or minor disaster. For example the rental car that immediately preceded the Opel, which lasted less than 24 hours before I launched it off a low wall and landed on its roof, and the drama that followed – now *that’s* the story I’ll remember.

Fiction writers and news reporters know this of course. Was there ever a Who episode where nothing disastrous happened? Or as Mark Gatiss put it (in the DVD commentary for Sherlock Season 1), we’ll never see the weekend the Doctor went to Margate. (I assume Margate is the epitome of uneventful seaside towns).

Speaking of Sherlock, I have one quibble with the plotting: In The Blind Banker, all the books from two flats are delivered to Holmes’ flat and Holmes and Watson try to find any books which the two big piles have in common – with predictable confusion. BUT – Sherlock is highly computer literate. Surely it would be obvious to make two lists and write a quick’n’dirty little script to compare the two lists, that’s what computers are really good at? But wait, there’s an even quicker way. Just list all the books in one pile in a text editor, one per line, e.g.
Moby Dick Melville
Bourne Identity Ludlum
Sign of Four Doyle
da Vinci Code Brown
and so on, each title doesn’t have to be complete just so long as spelling is accurate. Then, pick up each book in Pile B in turn and type a keyword from its title into the editor’s search box and it will instantly light up if there is a match. No programming required!

[Dentarthurdent @replies]

@ps1l0v3y0u You may well be right about Rose (2). I had assumed that the final scene with 14 and the Noble family was a farewell, effectively losing track of him, the same way 10a was ‘lost’ with Rose(1) in another universe. But of course in Dr Who this is not a foregone conclusion, as we saw in these three episodes (and the preceding one), old characters come back all the time.
So that was a reckless assumption on my part.

I’ll soon find out, I’ve got the next season on order.

As for the Vlinx, it seems (from comments made in some of the DVD ‘extras’) that it is an all-new creature. Whether it will be linked back to some previous creature – we shall see.

The Vinvocci were fun. Much helped by Sinead whatever-her-name-is (Keenan, I googled) ‘s air of exasperated frustration. Wouldn’t mind seeing them back

[Dentarthurdent @replies]

@craig – sorry to bother you, but a ‘drnikhilmehta’ just did an elephant-sized dump of cancer spam in ‘Companions Past and Present’.   May I suggest amputation?

[Dentarthurdent @replies]

Just re-watched The Giggle. I notice I didn’t post anything on first watching, and this is because – as an episode – it was neither remarkably good nor awful (as far as I was concerned). The plot was well acted, with great CGI sets, but it seemed a pretty run-of-the-mill action episode otherwise – it just didn’t grab me. (Btw, I never saw the Toymaker in previous series).

It was a nice if slightly cloying happy-families send-off for Fourteen with Donna’s family – but how long was that going to last, since he hasn’t actually regenerated does that mean he’s now immortal? And there are TWO doctors at the same time in the same universe (the previous 10a was of course off with Rose(1) in a separate universe). Though multi Doctors is not a new thing so I suppose that’s OK.

I was disappointed to see so little of Rose(2), when she was introduced with a fanfare in The Star Beast. I would have liked to see her in Wild Blue Yonder (yes that was strictly a two-person ep, so it would have had to leave out Donna. It would have worked exactly as well. I’m not indulging in Donna-hatred here, I’ve got over that, but we’ve seen Donna in – what – ten episodes and Rose(2) only in one, plus a tiny cameo here.

The Vlinx – where did that come from? Is this some character from OldWho or from the comics or radio (which I know nothing about)? [Paranoia mode ON:] Is this due to some Disney requirement to have at least one alien monster in every episode? [/Paranoia] I’d better stop now, there are too many stupid rumours swilling around the Internet already. The reference to ‘social media’ Internet distortions and misrepresentations was painful but apposite, it’s only got worse over the last couple of years (and that’s as political as I’m going to get).

Doctor 15 – I like him on first acquaintance, he has an infectious personality. But why doesn’t he have any trousers?

I do like it that the Tardis didn’t feel it necessary do destroy its interior this time around. Does it only do that if a Doctor regenerates inside it? (Besides, with what the new set must have cost, it was never going to redecorate this early).

On the whole, this three-episode ‘series’ had two decent episodes and one (IMO) outstanding one – Wild Blue Yonder, so a step up from recent years. Be interesting (for me) to see where the next season goes (I’ve got the DVD set on order) – you all know how it went by now, I guess.

[Dentarthurdent @replies]

@janetteb   I conceived an instant dislike of Donna when she burst in on the Doctor who was (IIRC) in shock following the loss of Rose, and instantly started addressing him in accusatory terms as if he was guilty of some crime.   It took me quite a long time (you know what they say about first impressions) to soften in my feelings towards her.

I do agree that losing her memories was rough.   But then most of the Doctor’s companions came to a sad ending one way or another.

There was a considerable similarity between Donna’s case and Rose in Season 1 (when she absorbed the energy of the vortex), only in Rose’s case Nine took the energy from her and that caused him to regenerate.   And, come to think of it, Clara was faced with the same fate as Donna, besides being dead, only she switched it so that the Doctor was the one who forgot.

And the other almost universal feature of nuWho is that the Companion’s tragic ending is somehow softened in a subsequent episode.   Which I intellectually distrust but emotionally approve.    So yes, okay, I like that Donna got her memory back.

I think it’s a tribute to the skill of the writers that these similarities weren’t glaringly obvious (to me at least), they’ve only just occurred to me now that I’m calling them to mind.

[Dentarthurdent @replies]

What was the point of the Newton sketch? I thought that was the sort of thing Chibs did.

Donna just reminded me why I disliked her for a long time. Pours coffee in the Tardis console and now she’s blaming the Doctor for it. I would not hire such a liability. But fortunately (for me), my dislike has subsided to occasional minor irritation.

I’ll say right now, the blue ship – and especially its long corridor – was awesome (and that’s not a word I use lightly). Visually beautiful and nicely detailed. Notice the little indicator lights blinking in the cylinders as 14 and Donna drive past. Such a contrast to the rusty old robot. And it’s delightfully puzzling and mysterious as to what is going on.

(Who says the aliens would have used decimal counting? Eight or 16 (i.e. multiples of binary) are far more likely bases, or 12 (which is far better for arithmetic since it has factors of 2,3,4 and 6. We only use base-10 because of the pure chance that we happen to have four fingers + thumb).

But still, nice bridge and pilot’s console. The way the camera keeps moving slowly while looking at 14 and Donna gives a suggestion of [something] watching them – suitably spooky.

So when fake-14 and fake-Donna appear, it’s almost an anticlimax. But very well realised. It was a nice touch that they had to learn how reality works in this universe – for example, that his tie kept on existing after he took it off. I must admit to getting confused as to who was who – I cheated and read the transcript at intervals.

And though I said last time that much of the intrigue was lost once you know the punchline – I found the plot is still interesting, and the CGI is still absolutely breathtaking.

 

[Dentarthurdent @replies]

Although I’d forgotten much from my first viewing a couple of months ago, it’s interesting that the comments I wrote this time were often the same, almost word for word, to what i wrote then. Similar scenes evoking identical reaction, or subconscious memory of what I wrote? Anyway, I’ve edited out most of the word-for-word repetitions.

Okay, right from the start – Ten and Donna – it’s like RTD just pushed ‘Reset’ and the entire Chibz era disappeared. (Well, Moff too, I suppose, if I’m honest). But this feels very RTD. Director: Rachel Talalay. Yay! The old firm’s back! (See what I mean?)

In the years since Donna’s first unfortunate appearance (boy did I hate her for years for that!) I’ve gradually grown to accept her. I’m actually pleased to see that Donna’s settled down with her fella and they have an absolutely gorgeous daughter.

The Meep looks entirely Disney cute alien. It speaks perfect English for someone presumably out of range of the Tardis’ translation circuits. And the Wrarths also look exactly like bug-eyed Disney villains.

I do like the sonic screwdriver’s new function of generating a virtual screen. Not a new idea, may have been used on Who before for suit-generated displays, but very nicely realised. The Doctor’s exchange with UNIT’s new adviser – which is basically an info-dump – is just so much more natural and better staged than anything in 13’s era.

The Battle of Donna’s House is every bit as dramatic and exciting as Chibz’s cosmic destructionfests, which demonstrates bigger isn’t always better, there’s a law of diminishing returns. All this is a score of Wrarths attempting (apparently) to kill one Meep. And isn’t it odd that Shaun’s taxi didn’t suffer any damage from the close-range Wrarth gunfire? And the Doc quite rapidly deduces that the Wrarth aren’t the villains in this.

‘Activate the initialisers! Brandish the gravity stanchions. Calibrate the flight deck!’ Could it possibly be that RTD is gently taking the Mickey out of Chibz’s technobabble?

I have to say the way the dagger drive generates burning fissures through the streets, which then close up when the Doctor and Donna (and Rose) reverse the startup, looks very cartoonish.

The way the regeneration energy doesn’t kill Donna because she has shared it with her daughter Rose is ingenious, in Rose’s case very blatantly a metaphorical validation of ‘non-binary’ people (although that’s purely a coincidence of phrasing with no actual meaning), but I can live with that. I did gag a bit on the stuff about Donna and Rose just being able to let all the excess energy go because they weren’t male, come off it RTD, stop bringing gender wars into it. And the whole sequence is a bit Disney-fairytale, with its happy resolution.

I suspect that in ealier incarnations of Who (the Moff’s tenure, or even RTD’s prior tenure), Donna might have died from the regen energy. That she didn’t this time – is this a symptom of Who now being more ‘family-friendly’ or Disneyfied?

The new Tardis interior is a vast improvement on 13’s, though very bare and plain compared with Twelve’s. It’s huge, and gives plenty of space for the actors to do their thing, unlike the cramped interior of 13’s.

And I’m really disappointed that Rose didn’t get to see the interior – or accompany the Doctor on further adventures. I thought she was going to become a Companion. (I think she could certainly have fitted in to Wild Blue Yonder instead of Donna. Not better, not worse, but same role essentially. I only say ‘instead of’ rather than ‘as well as’ because WBY is very much a 2-piece play).

And we just *know* Donna is going to spill coffee on the console, don’t we? Donna never changes.

Overall, though it seemed to be aimed at young teens, I found this ep quite entertaining. And easy to follow the plot.

[Dentarthurdent @replies]

@janetteb I feel your pain 🙂 I’ve done that many times – written a screed and then clicked away for a moment and ‘lost’ the page, for example.
What I do now (if it’s going to be a long post) is write it in a text editor, then just copy & paste it into the forum edit box.

I just watched The Star Beast, by the way. Might post on that soon.

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