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@whohar Thanks for that, that’s a fantastic resource! (And in PDF format too, makes it very easy to download).

As a complement, I’ll mention (though I’m sure you’re aware of) Chrissie’s transcripts at Chakoteya.net.

cr

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@cedarbranchtardis You can usually pick up old seasons of Dr Who on DVD on Ebay for a reasonable price – that’s how I watch the whole of Dr Who anyway. (I make sure any DVD player I buy is multizone so I can play any DVD’s from anywhere).

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@janetteb Wouldn’t you know it, my smug statement about no snakes was disproved in under a day. The news just featured an item about a yellow-lipped sea krait in the Auckland Zoo which apparently washed up on Takapuna Beach a year ago and has been carefully nursed back to health. I’m staggered, since the usual fate of any snake which manages to arrive in New Zealand is instant extinction at the hands of the authorities. I thought that was a legal requirement. But get this – the sea krait is a Protected Species! Apparently as an occasional visitor to our shores it qualifies as semi-native.

Okay, I can understand the rationale – any random snake which arrives in cargo might just find that the climate suits it and multiply, like so many introduced species. Whereas the sea kraits occasionally get here by themselves, obviously the climate doesn’t suit them or they would have spread by now, so there’s no danger in keeping this one alive in the zoo.

Still, surprised the heck out of me. Won’t worry me on my swims, although quite poisonous they’re timid and will swim away and unlikely to bite unless you grab it. Apparently there are quite a lot in the lagoon in Rarotonga but I’ve only ever seen a glimpse of one, disappearing as fast as it could, I’m more worried about stonefish.

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@ps1l0v3y0u @devilishrobby Whooo. This is all way over my head. 🙂 Yes I know I asked for it.

I read it all with interest but I have to admit, the concentration required to properly comprehend it is absent at the moment. I was aware that there were some inconsistencies in Who chronology but, I assumed, nothing too ruinous – then Chibz arrived and kicked the table over. Put it this way – I can just about handle River’s chronology. Or Clara in the Doctor’s timeline. That’s about my level of comprehension. 🙂 The Flux (amongst other things) just leaves me baffled.

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@ps1l0v3y0u I get a bit hazy on Doctor history. Was it Chibs who screwed around with the backstory or did someone in oldWho suggest that there had been a Doctor(s) before One?

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@janetteb I have to admit that my tolerance towards spiders is probably influenced by the fact that there are no deadly ones here and very, very few even poisonous ones. They’re less hazard than wasps.

Same goes for my tolerant attitude towards snakes – we don’t have any. Not even non-poisonous ones.

But yes the moralising was all over the place, a Chibs devotee might say ‘nuanced’ but IMO it was too heavy-handed for that. As Robertson said, building hotels on waste land was a win-win. But then his waste disposal company was taking short cuts to increase profitability and how much of that can be laid at the top boss’s door? It could have been an interesting point but then Robertson turned into a gung-ho trigger-happy gun nut.

Ah well, might watch another and it will NOT be Tsuranga Conundrum, what a surprise.

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I just re-watched Arachnids in the UK. Actually, I found it – not bad. Liked Yaz’s family, and I found the Doctor a lot less grating than previous occasions, I must have got used to her over three series. I wrote a blurb about it over on the episode thread, found I’d written the previous two posts, so I just deleted all the repeated bits and left in the few different comments. Probably just picking the episodes I half-way liked has made me more tolerant.

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Skipped Rosa again. Just started re-watching Arachnids in the UK. Well the American owns a golf course and a hotel with gold paint all over it and is ruthless about firing people and only the absence of a fake tan and a bad hairpiece distinguishes him from we-know-who.

I see the last two posts on this ep were both me. 🙂 So rather than repeat myself, I’ll just mention briefly the changes in my reaction to it this time round:

But surprisingly, when the Doctor delivered the gang home to Sheffield and said goodbye, I felt almost sorry for her. I must have got accustomed to her Yorkshire-lass schtick over three series. She was pathetically, almost indecently quick to accept Yaz’s invitation to tea, and typically (for this Doctor) brash to invite the others. I like Yaz, and I like her father, who instantly welcomes Yaz’s friends. And I like Yaz’s mum, who also happens to look sufficently like Yaz to be convincing – good casting.

But the Doctor keeps going off on weird embarrassing tangents like “Sisters. I used to have sisters.” (SINCE WHEN?) “I used to be a sister, in an aqua-hospital.” (SINCE WHEN? Doctors aren’t nurses and the Doctor was never female before so could never have been a sister). “Actually, turned out to be a training camp for the Quiston Calcium Assassins.” Chibs, if this sort of thing is supposed to establish the Doctor’s alien-ness, forget it. We *know* the Doctor’s an alien. This just makes her an awkward embarrassing one. I think he’s just trying to outdo fish fingers and custard. It’s probably an improvement (for me personally) that I’m going off on Chibs’ writing and not Whittaker’s acting choices. Oh, and the Moff’s Doctors used to name-drop very occasionally for comic effect, Chibs does it all the bloody time (Amelia Earhart) and it gets old very quickly.

The spider-haunted flat is definitely creepy. In fact the idea of a plague of giant spiders is good. Makes a change that they weren’t a laboratory experiment that escaped, but a bit more nuanced than that.

By the way, the scribbles the Doctor makes on the map are wrong – there’s only a blank space in the centre because she’s neglected to join up a number of pins. She’s as bad with a marker as Trump with a hurricane.

“I’ve heard you’re only running [for President] because you’ve hated Trump for decades.” No Chibs, that bit of misdirection won’t work, we know it’s Trump. I do rather like it when the gang wind him up – “They don’t need giant spiders. They’d just pop a tiny poisonous one on your pillow.” I like Jade, too. I must be feeling very tolerant tonight.

Overall, I don’t mind this ep. Robertson is a caricature but he’s the only really badly written character. All the others are well cast and sympathetic characters

Oh, the music – something clattering away in the background like a single-cylinder donkey engine – very distracting.

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@ps1l0v3y0u Did Clara’s Tardis have a stuck chameleon circuit too? I know that last sight we had of it, was as the diner, but that may have been just director’s shorthand to make it clear to us which Tardis it was (or, in-universe, because it hadn’t landed somewhere else yet so the chameleon circuit hadn’t operated to reconfigure itself).

Why bury it? Dunno, maybe the Vogons sorry Judoon could detect artron energy and earth masked it?

I can’t really follow your last paragraph, I’m too hazy about oldWho.

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@ps1l0v3y0u Umm yes, I thought the lighthouse was going to turn out to be Ruth’s Tardis. Can a Tardis disguise itself inside as well? I guess the writers wanted to have something to dig up. But an American Diner would have been too big to easily bury. But then, continuity-wise, an American Diner would have been just as ‘wrong’ as a police box.

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@janetteb I like big spiders. Possibly because the only poisonous spiders we get here are small and quite rare. We used to have a few Avondale spiders (immigrant Australian huntsman spiders) in our garden but I haven’t seen one for decades, which saddens me. But anyway…

The one with Jo Martin as Ruth Clayton (the Doctor) was Fugitive of the Judoon. Incidentally, strong reminiscences of Human Nature / Family of Blood though I guess it’s hard NOT to repeat previous story themes. I guess Ruth’s Tardis was made that way for the visual recognition by viewers and to hell with continuity.

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@dwnerdfrommars I don’t entirely blame you skipping all of Thirteen’s episodes. However there were some that weren’t too bad. I think the best was the third from last special, Eve of the Daleks. The Power of the Doctor was also okay, as I recall.

The special at the end of Season Chib 1 (aka Season 11), Resolution, was okay. As it happens it was the first Chib episode to feature a returning monster (Daleks) and also the first to use a DP, editor and director who had worked with Moffat, so tardis.fandom.com says. Maybe this is why it seemed better to me?

And Fugitive of the Judoon was okay, it featured a female Doctor (Ruth) who I liked. (At least partly because she was an improvement on Thirteen). And a villain who reminded me of Servalan (Blakes 7).

I think Praxeus could’ve been good except it had an environmental message that was too heavy-handed for me (and I’m a raving Greenie!)

And The Haunting of Villa Deodati was quite good, though it slandered Byron or maybe Shelley (I can’t recall which).

Series 13 – um. Village of the Angels I seem to recall was okay, mostly because of the angels, and also because it was the only episode of 13 that I could make any sense of.

And Eve of the Daleks and Power of the Doctor as previously mentioned.

That’s not a lot, is it?

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@pa1l0v3y0u Yes Rory grew to be a useful character. Initially he was a bit of a spare wheel. But he did improve vastly with time (even if he was an Auton?)
Danny always rather annoyed me, too intense, too controlling, too insecure. Absolutely the wrong boyfriend for a dominant character like Clara.

Best incidental character I think was Liz 10 (Sophie Okonedo). (Actually, I would have loved to see her as the Doctor).

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@ps1l0v3y0u Oh, and you mentioned the Lady Doctor. I have no problems with a lady doctor, or a black one, it’s perfectly explained by regeneration. My practical problem is that I just can’t see any trace of Doctor-ishness in Whittaker’s portrayal. Also, “fam”. And “I’m the Doctor. Sorting out fair play throughout the universe.” Aaaaaarrrgh! Not even Capaldi could have got away with that uniquely bathetic line. And the ‘fam’ was too many. ‘Two’s company, three’s a crowd’ and all that. Even Rory and Danny were a bit superfluous, having three companions taking turns to speak a la Charlie’s Angels managed to undercut much of the dramatic tension.

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@ps1l0v3y0u Well I skipped Woman who Fell to Earth this time round. I get uncomfortable when the interior of the Tardis goes up in flames for no apparent reason (as it did when Eleven arrived, also). But that was just a minor point. And cobbling up a Sonic Screwdriver with gas welding gear in a garage – seriously? The fact it looks like a Cybermen sex toy doesn’t help. Oh and the other thing, crashproof Doctors – Ten crashed through the roof of the building in The End of Time, and I was uncomfortable about that too.

And one thing that I don’t think has been remarked on before, but what a strange coincidence that the new Doctor who happens to crash in Sheffield has a strong Yorkshire accent. I don’t think that’s happened before (like, previous Doctors have had accents, but so far as I recall it hasn’t been determined by which bit of Terra they happened to arrive on, or Twelve would be speaking Cockney).

Ghost Monument we just mentioned.

Rosa – the one Who ep I’ve never watched and probably won’t. Klutzy dweeb Ryan in Alabama doesn’t look like it’s going to be fun. If he doesn’t manage to get hinmself lynched – well, he must have showed a lot more situational awareness than I’d give him credit for.

Arachnids – I actually quite liked Yaz’s family. I really couldn’t see why, later on, she spoke of them as if they were the family from hell. Maybe the plot demanded it. Anyway, the hypocrisy of shutting all the spiders away to suffocate slowly, then criticising Mr Not-actually-named-Trump for shooting the big one was not lost on me. Except – did he know where to shoot to kill a spider quickly, or did he just add some extra pain to its decease? What’s a spider’s nervous system like? My sympathies are all over the place on this one, mostly with the spiders. Might re-watch that.

Tsuranga Conundrum – all I remember is a ludicrous ‘monster’ and some pregnant guy. I’ll skip that.

Demons would have been quite a good ep of some other series. Most of the interest wasn’t with the Doctor or ‘fam’ (ugh!) and, as you say, it rehashed Testimony.

Kerblamazon – I seem to remember the villain had worthy aims of social justice but terrorist methods, talk about mixed messages. And he convinced the company to See The Light and give its workers – well, about a quarter of the minimum they’d get in any European country. Also, the Doctor suddenly losing half her IQ and gushing over how thrilled she was to get a parcel.

Witchfinders – mostly intriguing for the guy who played James camping it up, he was enjoying himself way too much. I’ll re-watch.

It Takes You Away was actually quite good, and a bit spooky. Possibly the best of the season. Def re-watch.

Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos (hey the title was the best thing about it) – huge build-up to the impregnable fortress which got defeated just like that, what a comedown. And Graham didn’t kill blue teeth boy which really cheesed me off, I can think of no justification for leaving such a nasty and dangerous specimen alive.

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Well I thought I’d finally give Thirteen a chance. Selected episodes only. Gave the intro a miss (not fond of blue teeth boy). Started The Ghost Monument and what’s the first scene? – Whitdoc being annoying and nagging some guy about how he should pilot his own ship. As is well known the Doctor can barely pilot the Tardis, and suddenly s/he’s an absolute expert on some unknown make of spaceship? And she continues to be annoying and talk too much throughout the rest of the episode. Ryan the dweeb is sulking, Whitdoc is playing at the insufferable jolly-pep-talk girl guide troop leader in between nagging. The best character in the episode is the villain (the race organiser). Psychic floating strangling rags, really? Of course acetylene is inflammable, anything from 3 to 83% in air IIRC, which is an extraordinarily wide range, but I’ve never heard of an ‘acetylene field’.

The alien planet is quite well done. The whole concept of the space race and the Tardis ‘ghost monument’ is good. Could’ve been quite a good episode with a bit of tidying up the script. Didn’t like the magic fairy grotto Tardis one bit.

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@winston Skyfall (James Bond) or Spyfall (Dr Who)? Think you meant Spyfall, but I’m guessing.
I just watched No Time to Die, the last James Bond (so far). In which he did. Die, that is. Probably. But you know what these fictional characters are like, 007’s almost as bad as the Doctor for regenerating…
No Time to Die is actually quite a good movie, as the James Bond franchise goes. The dilemma of finding out that he carries a virus specifically engineered to kill his girlfriend or his daughter (who he only just found out existed) if he ever so much as touches them is very moving. A bit like the Doctor’s dilemma in Hell Bent where he daren’t remember Clara. But unlike the Doctor, 007 has no Testimony to fix things for him. (Or does he? I guess the next movie will tell us).

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@ps1l0v3y0u Well I remember Spyfall as being, on the whole, one of the better episodes of the series (not that the standard was very high). BUT I seem to remember cringing when Noor Inayat Khan was brought into it, I get uneasy when real people** are represented (and inevitably misrepresented) in fiction. And the other thing I disliked was when the Doctor dropped the Master in it by pointing out his dark complexion to the nazis. That makes her somehow complicit in racism. I don’t think Twelve would have done that.

** Real people who are recent history, I don’t really care about Julius Caesar or Mark Anthony or King Arthur.

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@devilishrobby Yes I know that. The Absorbaloff was pretty naff, but – for a Doctor-lite episode – I found it quite absorbing. I mentioned it because I seem to recall it got a lot of flak as ‘worst ep.’

Actually, I have another candidate for worst ep ever, Kill the Moon. On the one side, it broke every single rule of basic physics or mechanics it possibly could, starting with the Space Shuttle gliding(!) to a landing on the Moon and ending with the magic flying space dragon laying an egg as big as itself. And on the other, character, side, the Doctor buggers off and leaves it to Clara and Special Needs to (possibly) commit nuclear suicide because it’s ‘not his job to decide’ – since when? And even worse, it turns out that Special Needs naively childish anthropomorphic emotions were the ‘right’ choice. Ugh. The one bit of true-to-character was when Clara tore a huge strip off the Doctor at the end.

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@janetteb @ps1l0v3y0u I too missed the Baker years (both Bakers!) so I really can’t comment on them. (I’m very slowly nudging back into oldWho territory from the back end, so to speak, i.e. Seven’s last season.) Colin Baker does (from what little I’ve seen) appear to be an abrasive character, though he was okay in the Five-ish Doctors.

But on the subject of Worst Episode Ever (that I’ve seen, which effectively means NuWho) – Love and Monsters wasn’t that bad if you overlook the slightly cringey reference at the end. I think I’d nominate The Tsuranga Conundrum which I’m about to watch skip over in my sketchy voyage through Season 11. All I remember is two things – the naffest cutesy cartoon monster ever (they might have got away with it in Red Dwarf, it would fit right in) and the man who was pregnant, which probably sounded like a neat ‘what-if’ idea until they actually tried to implement it when it fell flat with a soggy splat. If there are any worse episodes than that they’ve mercifully faded from my memory.

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@winston I agree about the awfulness of the 6th Doctor’s outfit. I recall Seven complaining about the jumper with question marks on it – he didn’t know how lucky he was. (Well actually, he must have seen Six’s amazing technicolor dreamcoat so maybe he did know). Seven of course actually was/is a clown by disposition, but like all good comedians he knew when to play it straight and could be quite sinister when called for.

The next most awful outfit after 6’s must have been 13’s (Whittaker) by the way, that looked like a clown suit too. Or, those horizontal stripes across her chest and the long coat make her look like Heidi the Goat Girl from some cartoon fairy story. Though not remotely as bad as poor old Six, what were they thinking?

Incidentally, pineapple on pizza is great. I wish you many happy pizzas (Not too too many, mind, lest you start to look like Jabba the Hutt too 🙂

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@winston Good to hear you’re slowly recovering, though it must seem too slow. Hopefully you’ll be able to enjoy summer when it arrives. DON’T apologise for posting, I’m sure we don’t mind as long as Craig tolerates us all (and he’s usually remarkably tolerant 🙂

Our weather, since you mention it, has been poor for the last week. I had a swim a couple of weeks ago, water was just okay, that might have been my last for the season: since then the weather’s been poor, the tides have been useless and I’ve had gout. So a fine day might tempt me out to see if the water’s still okay, or it might not.

I’m about to fish out my Season 11(?) DVDs – that’s the first season of Whitdoc I think – and view a few selected episodes. See if they’ve improved in the interim. Also, old episodes of Danger Man, they got quite good towards the end of Season 2.

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@nerys Resuming the James Bond theme, I just watched Skyfall and Spectre. Skyfall was quite good (I gather it’s highly regarded amongst the Bond genre), though I do have to question his wisdom in taking M to a deserted house in the highlands without stocking up from Q’s gadget collection first. And I thought the new Moneypenny (Naomie Harris) was quite delightful, but I do have a slight continuity problem in that she’s suddenly brown. I can rationalise the changing M’s and Q’s in that they’re a position, not a person, but Moneypenny is very much a person, dammit. (But then, Bond…)

Spectre tried to outdo Skyfall and failed. It’s actually quite a good film, though I had a couple of problems – one was when Bond was chasing the Land Rovers down the mountain using a Britten-Norman Islander (where did he get that from) – 40 knot stall speed so IF the Land Rovers were going flat out on snow (but why would they?) he could stick behind them, but then he knocked the wings off, how could he ever control the direction to intercept them down slope? Never mind. And the other one was, escaping from the desert lair, he fires one shot at a gas tank and the entire building complex explodes. In fact that whole escape was just far too easy, one exploding wristwatch and he walks out of it with Madeleine. ‘With one bound, he was free’. It should have been far more difficult than that.

The other thing that intrigued me in retrospect, when I watched No Time to Die, (and I’d long since forgotten ‘Spectre’), the opening ‘home alone’ scene with young Madeleine Swann seemed quite un-Bond-movie like, and so the switch to adult Madeleine with Bond was an abrupt transition, but it was evident that she was the same girl, grown up, and had ‘somehow’ hooked up with Bond. Imagine my fascination then, when I saw Madeleine describing that whole scene with precision in ‘Spectre’, and realised No Time to Die was an exact follow-on from the end of Spectre. Continuity? In a Bond movie?

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@winston Well it’s great to hear your surgery was a success. But I’m sorry to hear that you’re still in pain. I had assumed they could give painkillers for it but I was forgetting that that seems to be an area where medical science isn’t yet perfect, no such thing as a 100% effective yet completely harmless painkiller. Hopefully the pain will diminish over the next few days.

I’m afraid I’m not very good at expressing sympathy. (Just like the 13th Doctor, come to think of it.) I’ll just wish you the best for your recovery.

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@winston I’ll just wish you the very best with your operation, and your six weeks’ enforced bed rest.

I have no idea if this will help, but when I had a heart valve repair about 15 years ago, I almost enjoyed the ‘holiday’. NOT the operation itself (which of course I have no recollection of whatever), but the week I spent in hospital afterwards. It was such a novel experience to be lying in bed, doing absolutely nothing, (which would normally make me feel quite guilty because I should be doing something constructive), with an absolutely cast-iron excuse to just relax and be totally lazy for once. I don’t know if you can lull yourself into that frame of mind but it might help.

One other thing, I took books and portable CD player and headphones – I found I never read the books, took too much mental effort, but the CD player I used almost full time. If one is trying to rest, and getting into the most comfortable position, sometimes listening to music is the most relaxing thing. I guess the current equivalent would be a MP3 player.

But anyway, best of luck with the operation.

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@ps1l0v3y0u That ‘browser history’ has been a running joke ever since The Eleventh Hour, when the Doc advised the helpful Jeff to delete his Internet history. I have to say, I know the feeling.

Twice Upon a Time was a big lightening-up from The Doctor Falls. In fact, as the Doctor said, “It isn’t an evil plan. I don’t know what to do when it isn’t an evil plan.” And the Doctor’s sole achievement was in rescuing the Brigadier and the unknown Toby Whithouse German from their fatal predicament. But I think that was just as well, trying to top The Doctor Falls would have been difficult and possibly too grim for a Christmas special. Anyway, I class it as a ‘B’ episode – good but not quite A-list. Which is okay.

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@ps1l0v3y0u From memory, I think Twelve rather hastily cut in before Bill could, err, bring One up to date with the 21st century…

Actually, checking the transcript, I was wrong, that was some time before Bill appeared. But there were several moments where I thought Bill was going to read the riot act to One. Evidently One’s travels had omitted to include visiting Earth in the late 20th century.

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@nerys Yes, the Doctor’s companion looks okay from the teaser. Can’t really tell until we see her in an episode. However, RTD is quite good a writing companions, so hopefully she’ll be good. I’m only up the The Power of the Doctor on DVD’s, I should see if my public library has later ones.

@winston @janetteb Yes Twelve’s victorian library look is my favourite too. But I don’t really see it as Victorian, the staircases and gallery give it a roomy, comfortable, timeless quality. Okay, maybe reminiscent of some of the better Victorian architecture, sans the cast-iron filigrees.
The new control room looks a bit too bare for my liking. (Though Nine’s coral/organic look was too cluttered, sorry Winston 🙂 I guess Twelve’s was the happy medium.

@ps1l0v3y0u Yes I loved the actual library from Journey to the Heart of the Tardis, I would have liked to see more of that.

I’m about to embark on Thirteen (a few selected episodes only). I said that a week ago and haven’t got to it yet. It comes to mind only because that control room makes me cringe. I think it looks like some weird alien sex toy for some bizarre giant alien species. 🙂

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@nerys @winston Well the Tardis interior certainly looks a lot better than 13’s era. Not as good as Twelve’s by a long shot (IMO!) but orders of magnitude better than the Crystal Grotto of Doom that 13 inhabited.

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@ps1l0v3y0u Well Jenny – that is, Georgia Moffett – was already in real life a Doctor’s daughter, just not Ten’s. (I think it was Five). I can’t see why her becoming a Doctor’s wife in real life should make a difference. Incidentally, no relation to Steven Moffat. Although she was also the daughter of Sandra Dickinson, Five’s real-life wife, who played Trillian in the TV version of Doug Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. A conspiracy theorist could have a high old time with this, I guess.

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@ps1l0v3y0u I think maybe it was just the writer and/or showrunner leaving an opening for future development that never actually materialised.

A bit like The Doctor’s Daughter (Jenny). That was just begging for a semi-regular part for Jenny. She’s still out there (along with Clara, Me, Bill and Heather)

I guess sometimes these threads just don’t work out or no story crops up that suits them.

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@ps1l0v3y0u I’ve tried that before and it didn’t seem to work. Maybe it will this time. I’ll know when I hit Submit.

I had my own theory about Danny/Orson, but I’ve long forgotten what it was.

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@janetteb I think it was Slartibartfast (what a name!) who called Arthur Dent Dentarthurdent. It was of course Doug Adams’ satirical take on Bond, James Bond.

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@janetteb The only way to get ps1l0v3y0u right is to copy & paste. Some of those characters in his name aren’t even on a terrestrial keyboard, at least they never work when I type them, I suspect he’s an alien. 🙂

Danny, Orson and that toy soldier caused me much headscratching trying to explain it. But I could never make it fit. I’d love to see a coherent theory of it.

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@ps1l0v3y0u I’d hate to misquote Moff, so I stuck the DVD in again and in the extra on Disc 5, ‘The Finale Falls’, at 0:41, Moff says “I thought oh my god those are cheap rubbish ones, I hope they never bring those ones back”. Or more fully, at 3:24, “I remember getting the very first Doctor Who magazine of any kind I’ve ever seen, and it had a picture of the original Mondassian cybermen, and I was horrified by them, I thought they just looked like balaclava men. I thought oh my god those are cheap rubbish ones, these are offensive to me, I hope they never bring those ones back.”
Peter Capaldi: “I’d always expressed an interest in seeing the Mondassian cybermen come back.”

Moff (I’m paraphrasing here): “Is there a way to make the Mondassian cybermen work for Peter Capaldi’s last stand … I was nervous of it but I’m really pleased with how it came out.”

I know you weren’t casting doubt on my comment, I checked back for my own benefit as much as anything, I have been known to recollect wrongly.

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@ps1l0v3y0u @janetteb I had the impression that Moff liked the original Mondassian Cybermen. I was wrong, according to a comment by him on the DVD extras for The Doctor Falls, he thought they were pretty naff. Apparently Peter Capaldi loved cybermen, which is why the Moff humoured him by incorporating cybermen (and not Daleks or Weeping Angels) in his final story. Needless to say Moff changed his view of them, as did I, when their origin from reconstructed humans was explored. Supremely creepy.

I recall the volcano scene from Dark Water, and a very powerful scene it was. And with a neat reversal when it turned out the Doc had seen it coming. But I don’t recall any scene like that in Last Christmas?

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@janetteb Entirely concur. The betrayal was more figurative than actual – by which I mean that it was not deliberate on the Doctor’s part, just a rash promise – which he did his utmost to keep in rescuing Bill. If he’d said “I can’t guarantee that” would Bill have gone with him anyway? – almost certainly. That doesn’t change Bill’s feeling, waiting years for him to rescue her.

I just watched Twice Upon a Time, by the way, and while that had – nostalgia on my part – for Twelve and Bill the avatar, it didn’t have nearly the same impact. Epilogue, as I said.

Well that’s it. Now I’m on to Chib’s reign (selected episodes only).

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@dwnerdfrommars That brief scene was a visual nod to the ‘butterfly effect’ – the concept that (originally) a butterfly flapping its wings could lead to a tornado some time later. This was coined by Edward Lorenz, a meteorologist who was trying to model the weather mathematically and found that, for some determinate systems, a minute change in initial conditions (butterfly) could lead to a wildly divergent result. (I find this fascinating but bizarre, mathematically).
This idea then morphed into the meme that stepping on a butterfly in the Jurassic could change the whole of history. It’s a sort of modern equivalent of the old fable ‘for want of a nail a kingdom was lost’. And for a practical example, suppose the assassin who killed Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914 thereby triggering World War 1 had missed? – the entire history of the 20th century would have been different.

It has absolutely nothing to do with quantum indeterminacy or quantum weirdness, by the way, it’s absolutely deterministic.

Incidentally, the inverse of it is the trope that reality is pretty resilient, disturb it and it works around the disturbance and fixes itself so things go on pretty much as before. I wish I could remember where I’ve seen that expressed. Something by Doug Adams? Doctor Who? Terry Pratchett even? Bugger, my memory’s shot. Anyway the expression of that trope is that, even if the assassin had missed Archduke Ferdinand, World War 1 would have started shortly thereafter anyway on some other pretext.

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I’ve just re-watched it. I don’t think I can add anything to what I said last time.

This time round, though, I can follow the plot precisely, and the way the time difference is handled now makes complete sense to me. I even get the precise timing of how Missy was able to kill the Master and he was able to kill her, almost simultaneously but moments and decades after. I do miss Missy.

Bill was a tragic figure, realising she was a Cyberman and nothing could be done to fix it. I think of all the companions she had the most tragic – and heroic – fate. I was so relieved, surprised and delighted when Heather reappeared to revive her. I know that possibility was always there, right from episode 1, I do love it when the storyteller tells us exactly what’s going to happen – and then with the passage of Time, we forget it until it happens. After the sadness of the episode, the sequence in the Tardis was just so pleasant.

As a final episode for the season, and for Moffat and Capaldi’s era, this was a masterpiece.

(I regard Twice Upon a Time as more of an epilogue).

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Hey, I like it!

(I trust the little Disney+ logo won’t be stuck in the corner of the screen the whole time)

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I see the last post on this was – me. But my brief comments below are slightly different this time so I’ll post them anyway.

A unique mixture of horror and comedy. The exchanges between the Doctor, Missy, Bill and Nardole are genuinely funny.
In fact the episode is shaping up to be a comedy classic right up to the point where Bill suddenly has a big hole where her heart used to be.

The scenes in the ward are best described as slow creeping horror, as we gradually realise what the medical procedures imply. I can’t remember the point at which I suspected the Cybermen, maybe not until the final reveal. Even though Razor used the magic word ‘upgraded’.

I do recall, having seen a photo of the original Mondassian cybermen in the past, thinking that was the lamest ‘monster’ suit ever, painfully obviously just extras in overalls. I couldn’t understand the Moff’s high regard for them. But now, having seen their development in this episode from ordinary surgical procedures, they are frighteningly convincing, absolutely logical, and the scariest Cybermen of all.

I didn’t suspect Razor of being the Master until his reveal, either. He was quite a sympathetic, if quirky, character – until he wasn’t.

I think the Moff has got the mechanics of black hole gravitational time dilation absolutely right, by the way. Though it took me quite a bit of reflection after first watching the episode to get it straight in my mind. It’s General Relativity, not Special, by the way. Or at least I think so. I assume the ship has powerful anti-grav shields that stop it being torn apart by tidal forces. Can’t help thinking shields would screw with the time dilation too, or maybe not, my brain boggles at this point, but it’s sci fi, what the hell.

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Me too! Might make it worth my while to catch up to date with Who… 🙂

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@nerys I actually like it better than Casino Royale. Possibly because I’m not a card player so the casino sequences in that didn’t really engage me. Possibly because Bond’s nice new Aston Martin didn’t do anything much except run off the road and roll. The opera sequence was good, by the way – loved the ingenious way Bond got the various Quantum conspirators to blow their cover.

I just read the Wikipedia page on QoS and it summarised the reviews which were – all over the shop. Which probably reflects the split between the acting/characters – who were good – and the editing – which was choppy. Sadly, there’s no commentary track, which could have clarified a lot. For example the first half of the opening car-chase scene was (I’m certain) one of the north Italian lakes between Garda and Maggiore (so now, in full compulsive-Geek mode, I’m condemned to driving round them all in Googlemaps Streetview to confirm it 🙂 The immediately-following downhill chase down the hairpins from the quarry was probably in the nearby Lombardy mountains, but topographically impossible (unless they elided a lengthy uphill chase in between). This did confuse me at the time.

I also geekily notice they skipped the invariable ‘gunbarrel’ shot after the titles – they put it in the end credits. Little director’s joke?

[Edit:] I was wrong, the quarries were almost certainly the Carrara marble quarries, which are 100 miles from the lakes and Siena is 70 miles further. Now I don’t mind them cutting from one location to another in reality, but ‘in-universe’ I’m disconcerted because they got from a lakeside to a mountaintop with just 18 seconds of car chase in between.

[Further edit:] Easy as pie really. Very first shot, north end of Lake Garda, looking southwest from Torbole, that cliff and mountain around Pregasina is unmistakeable. (I’ve driven down that road in a real car. SS45bis. Positively identified. It’s a narrow road for busy traffic, full of tunnels and galleries. And the road ‘to the quarry’ (not in reality) that Bond swerves onto is SP238 north of Campione. Interestingly, they removed the road signs at the junction (why would they do that?) They missed the most interesting bit, the knife-edge slot gorge/cave that the road shares with the stream that cut it – probably too narrow and tight to make interesting filming). That north Italian hill scenery is insane. Forgive me for geeking out, I’m a happy fulfilled geek for the moment.

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@nerys I just watched Quantum of Solace and wow! It’s bloody good! The action sequences were a bit disjointed but the character drama was top-notch. As you found, it gets better on subsequent viewings, particularly with the events of Casino Royale fresh in mind. It had some intriguing nuances – the ‘Bond girl’ hanging around the villain, the CIA in bed with the villain. Felix Leiter (as in Casino Royale) is a quite different actor from the loud gum-chewing Yank of Goldeneye.
I really liked Mathis, was sad that he got killed – and it was indirectly Bond’s fault for persuading him to go along. I think Camille was a great action heroine (and notably, a Bond girl that James Bond didn’t get to romance). Curious casting counterpoint to Goldeneye – Natalya Simonova (Russian, and one of my favourites) was played by an Italian (Isabella Scorupco), while Camille Montes (Hispanic) was played by Olga Kurylenko (Russian/Ukrainian, living in France).

I think I may have under-rated QoS previously since I was still not used to Daniel Craig as Bond. Now I am, and maybe appreciate it better.

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@ps1l0v3y0u Well I assumed the Mondassians were humanoid enough to be interchangeable. A bit like humans and Sebaceans in Farscape. As for Timeless Children, I’m afraid I’m unfamiliar with that. I’m afraid most of Chibs’ reign has failed to register on my consciousness, or been forgotten, at least partly involuntarily.

The President’s wife – I assumed the Moon in question wasn’t Earth’s moon, so any space bat nonsense would be irrelevant to that. (and I’m doing my best to let Kill the Moon episode mercifully fade from my consciousness too 🙂

I don’t think Moff had planned to stay on later than the end of S10 (from all accounts he was exhausted by then**) but if he had, I think it quite likely that Bill would have helped to rehabilitate Missy. Could a getting-rehabilitated Missy have lasted two seasons? Well yep. Intercut with other stories of course.

I was postulating that Bill’s Mum was the High Council timelady in Day of the Doctor. Is it conceivable that she was the President’s wife that the Doctor later stole? (Cheeky sod). Though I can barely recall her from the ep, so there may be reasons why that’s silly.

(**I’d still rather have an exhausted Moff than a gung-ho ZChib though).

I pronounce ‘ZCh’ as like the ‘s’ in ‘measure’ by the way. Or the Russian letter Ж

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@ps1l0v3y0u @nerys Interesting point about the High Council lady. Is it possible that Bill is an orphaned Time Lady? And the Doctor ‘stole the President’s wife’. Is the Moff hinting that Bill might be the Doctor’s (other) daughter? (But if so, shouldn’t she have regenerative powers? Maybe not, if they were a technological feature ‘granted’ by the Gallifrey powers, as an orphan she’d miss out on that. I guess…) Though in that case she would not have triggered the Mondassian human-people-detector in World Enough and Time (notice that the only others present were two Timelords, an android, and blue-trigger-happy-idiot. Ah well, it was a lovely theory while it lasted.

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@ps1l0v3y0u Well Bill did have only the one series to develop in. Some might say getting turned into a Cyberman was rather too much ‘development’ 🙂
Although the professor-student relationship can be entertaining when the Moff writes it, in small doses, it isn’t really what Doctor Who is about, at least for me. ‘Who’ is relatively lightweight episodic television.
And, just personally, I found the Missy subplot fascinating and could have used a lot more than the brief glimpses we got. This has as much to do with Michelle Gomez’ delivery and personality as the storyline itself.
As to why the Doctor’s doing this (‘adopting’ Bill), I’d hypothesise that he needs the companionship. Who was it who said the Doctor shouldn’t be alone, it wasn’t good for him. River?

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@nerys I really liked the first one, Goldeneye. Natalya Simonova is one of my favourite Bond heroines, and Robbie Coltrane as the Russian gangster is one of my favourite Bond allies. And the second, Tomorrow Never Dies, as I said, Jonathan Price as Elliot Carver is the best villain (IMO). And Michelle Yeoh was great as an action heroine in that, too. The other two – the World is Not Enough and Die Another Day – they fell off a bit. Die Another Day also suffered from a couple of bits of appallingly bad CGI, one the burning cargo plane coming to pieces, the other (far worse) where Bond’s ice rocket fell off an ice cliff and he magically ended up CGI-para-surfing towards the beach – they were just so bad I cringed.
For Your Eyes Only is one of the Roger Moore ones that I do like – partly because by then Roger Moore was getting old enough to fit the part a bit better, and partly (I know this is silly) because of the title song/sequence featuring Sheena Easton. Oh, and the screenplay was good too.
I recall The Living Daylights as enteraining, reminiscent of From Russia With Love in the plot, I think.
The low point of the Bond series for me was the later Sean Connery / early Roger Moore ones where the Bond suaveness degenerated to self-parody. Nothing wrong with spy comedy, just that it isn’t James Bond.

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@ps1l0v3y0u Well much of that I would agree with (having just watched it) though I found it all a bit Indiana Jones. (Or did I say Edgar Rice Burroughs? One or the other). I much preferred Cold War (and I did like David Warner’s character). I didn’t really notice any dreadful inconsistencies such as in Kill The Moon or even the (much-less-awful) Forest of the Night. It just didn’t really grab me. For me, personally, it was the weakest episode of the season.

So, on to the much more atmospheric Eaters of Light…

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@nerys Silva? Was he the guy with the private island? (Reminds me a bit of Blofeld’s ‘suicide garden’ in You Only Live Twice (the book version). As does Malek’s garden in No Time to Die, of course). He was good, as I recall. But I need to re-watch the arc.
My favourite arch-villain (straying from the Craig arc) is Jonathan Price as Murdoch – oops, I mean Elliot Carver, in Tomorrow Never Dies. He somehow has a flaky quality to him as if he’s on the edge of sanity and might lose it at any moment.

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