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@nerys I’m going to have to do a mini-rewatch of all the Daniel Craig Bond films, since I’m quite hazy about them (in contrast to the Pierce Brosnan ones that I know quite well). The mention of an arc intrigues me. No Time to Die certainly linked back to Vesper Lynd who was in Casino Royale I think.

I didn’t find Malek particularly chilling, but yes bringing a child into it dramatically increased the threat level. But the villain I thought lacked menace was Blofeld. Just looked too mild. But – as it turned out – that wasn’t hugely significant since Bond promptly killed him. Oops.

(By the way, sorry for the nitpick, there were five Daniel Craig movies, Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace, Skyfall, Spectre and No Time to Die. And I only know that since I just tripped over it while looking up the timeline.)

I just googled ‘Get Out’ on Wikipedia and it certainly does sound – scary. I’m sure I’ve come across that brain-transplant idea somewhere recently but I can’t put my finger on it.

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I’m afraid my infrequent choice of movies is much more lowbrow than nerys’s. One I did just watch for the first time was the last* James Bond movie, <i>No Time to Die</i>. (I did say ‘last’ not ‘latest’, I know that’s ambiguous but they did kill Bond off at the end, so maybe it will be).
I thought it was well-made, one of the better Bonds in fact. The starting scene was quite un-Bond-ish, young girl in the wilderness with a killer after her. Then it switched to familiar Bond territory – they even brought back the classic Aston Martin DB5, with an upgrade to twin Miniguns, natch. The movie ran 23 minutes before the titles, which must be some sort of record. They included many ‘nods’ to classic Bond with such lines as ‘We’ve got all the time in the world’ (OHMSS).

I recall, at the time of its release, reading of some indignation that James Bond was now a black woman – obviously I totally misinterpreted that, James Bond is still Daniel Craig, just his number 007 has been reassigned. I have no problem with that, though Bond did. Didn’t find the new 007 particularly appealing though, a bit haughty. Similarly M and Q have changed, well that’s logically acceptable since those were titles rather than people. Miss Moneypenny has acquired a natural tan, which is odd since that’s a person’s name rather than title. Googling, I find that she actually became Naomie Harris as long ago as Skyfall, which just shows how unobservant I am.
But then, James Bond is the classic example of such changes.
There is of course a parallel / contrast to Doctor Who.

The various ‘Bond girls’, of which there were three not counting Moneypenny (can I call them that when two of them had no romantic relationship with Bond? I guess so, the movie series is known as ‘Bond’ after all) have all acquired serious combat skills in the modern style, most notably Bond’s escort in the casino who brings a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘dressed to kill.’

I found a curious anomaly in the standards of violence. Apparently you can kill as many people as you like so long as they don’t bleed (the film is rated R12). The classic traditional ‘gun-barrel’ opening shot, I noticed that after Bond shoots, the ‘wave of red’ running down the screen was absent. I didn’t think Bond opening up with Miniguns at his pursuers was anything out of the usual, probably some of them got hit but it’s not shown on screen, and it’s a battle anyway. What did shock me was the hit squad in the secret lab deliberately killing (off-screen) all the unarmed captive lab staff.
Even from the villains that makes me cringe.

Oh, and finally, Bond’s predicament at the end was tragic – infected with a targeted virus** linked to his girlfriend’s DNA and hence their daughter’s so if he ever touched them again they would die – that is just so painful. (** I think that’s probably unfeasible, but in sci-fi terms alarmingly credible).

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@nerys I share your feelings about 13. (I’m shortly about to experience them again, I’m almost up to there, only 5 Moffs to go. I’ll just skim the highlights of 13.)

@winston Eve of the Daleks was, in my recollection, far the best of 13.

Ah well, on to Empress of Mars which IMO was the weakest of Season 10, very Edgar Rice Burroughs, could almost have been a Chibnall episode…

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@winston It’s actually a ‘pook’, short for pukeko. Although they’re called ‘swamp hens’, they’re apparently not good eating, very tough (I wouldn’t know, I never tried, nobody does). There’s actually a recipe for cooking Pook – you put the pook in a pot along with a chunk of sandstone rock and boil it. When the rock starts to go soft and crumbly, you throw away the pook and eat the rock. 🙂

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@winston Yes, while the quality of the ‘swimming’ (mud-wading?) at Blockhouse Bay is just acceptable at best, the surroundings do make a big difference. Probably the best feature is the narrow high ridge on the southwest, which shelters it perfectly from the prevailing south-west winds. The second most common winds are north-easters, and it’s sheltered on that side too. And though there are a lot of houses around, the immediate vicinity of the bay is steep slopes covered in ‘bush.’

At least you have a creek, I don’t think I’d want to live anywhere that there wasn’t water nearby in some form. The wildlife we get in the bay is mostly oystercatchers, the inevitable seagulls, ducks, and occasionally pukeko on the grass (but not in the water). Pooks (‘swamp hens’) are a freshwater wading bird, though they’ve adapted to anywhere the ground is swampy or even a bit damp, such as the edges of motorways. I rather like them, they’re quirky-looking birds and quite at home in suburbia.

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@ps1l0v3y0u Well I think Moff is probably non-religious (like me), but I haven’t really seen any strong anti-Catholicism from him, other than maybe mild irreverence. If one was looking to bash the Catholic church one could find dozens of bigger skeletons in their closet than just old legends of ‘Pope Joan’.

If the priests in Bill’s bedroom were intrigued by her laundry basket that would indeed add a lot more point to the ‘You’re all going to Hell’ line. As it is, it still works as a sort of retaliation for them invading her bedroom, but not quite so well.

I seem to recall the reference to Obama was brief and uncontroversial. Yes Harold Saxon was Tony Blair all over, but the name ‘Blair’ was never ever mentioned. Has anybody ever mentioned Trump? Probably best not, if the Beeb doesn’t want death threats from MAGAs… (Though, did somebody say ‘orange’ at some time, and I don’t think it was a ref to William of Orange?)

I’m always a bit uneasy about referencing real historical figures – Hitler and Churchill being the most obvious examples, though maybe the sensitivity of that is decreased by the fact that everybody’s ‘done’ them. Other figures – particularly scientific/technical ones like Tesla and Edison (and howcome they never mentioned George Westinghouse??) bring out all my geeky nitpicking tendencies. If they ever do George Stephenson or I K Brunel they better get it right!

Of course there’s always the logic problem with recent times explaining how everybody doesn’t remember the events of the story – like the starship Titanic almost crashing on London. Moff ‘fixed’ his most recent version of the problem by having the Monks erase themselves from history when they departed – covering their tracks. That was quite neat, I thought. They had the technology.
Traditionally, sci-fi has got around that paradox by setting itself in ‘the future’ – so it hasn’t happened yet. But of course time marches on, and any near-future story that’s famous enough will get itself overtaken by the inexorable date – 1984 being the most notable example.

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@janetteb Well Piha is always swimmable (except for very rare occasions when it’s too rough, but often then one can take a dip at The Gap at the south end of the island). But there are always waves breaking so you have to like battling the waves. It can often be very breezy, too.
Blockhouse Bay is a nice sheltered little micro-beach, but only swimmable at high tides at the upper half of the tidal cycle. I never used to swim there but now I do quite often, since it only takes an hour out of my day (Piha takes at least three) and I’ve got the tide tables printed out and handy. Surprisingly few people swim there, probably because if you just head down to the beach at random the chances of the tide being high enough to swim are about 1 in 10. Inlets in big harbours like the Manukau will always be muddy because there isn’t enough wave action to sweep the mud away. Blockhouse Bay was apparently a muddy mangrove inlet until in the 30’s (?) a local group cleared the mangroves, and at some point the Council trucked in enough sand for a tiny beach. One advantage of the lack of wave action is that the sand stays put.

Blackadder is always good, I have the full set on DVD (of course), must re-watch some time.
The ‘Monks’ trilogy, yes, I too find it better on a second or third watch when the rough outline of the plot is in my mind – like, as you say, many of Moff’s scripts.

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@ps1l0v3y0u

Well that post of mine (immediately above yours) was written two years ago on my first pass through the series.

Extremis is the best of the three episodes, for me. I don’t see it as bashing the Catholic Church by the way, the Pope seemed to be quite a reasonable sincere man. The Doctor’s old ‘friend’ Pope Benedict IX now, was not in historical actuality a woman, but apparently had a fairly turbulent and controversial Popedom, so I don’t think Moff was slandering an Icon of the Church in that respect.

Maybe the Monks didn’t run their simulation past their takeover because they would become part of the simulation – some sort of infinite feedback loop might result.

‘Woke’? (ugh), I detest the word, like most abuses of the English language. What is it supposed to mean? Indeed, what does it mean? Seems to me it’s like, say, ‘left-wing’, it can be stretched to mean anything the speaker wants (a la Humpty Dumpty). I was in favour of half the things now labelled as ‘woke’ long before the term was invented, or even ‘PC’; the other half I find utterly absurd. One thing I absolutely deplore is reading too much into some minor aspect of a work or a comment and treating it as an indicator of the writers’ (or director’s, or actor’s) presumed character failings. That’s equivalent to witch-sniffing or reading chicken entrails. [/rant]

If indeed the original plan of Pyramid at the End of the World was to feature Trump, Corbyn and Kim Jong Il versus the pyramid, that would have been extremely ill-advised. It’s one thing to bring Richard Nixon into The Impossible Astronaut (and I notice they treated him fairly fairly sympathetically, which is fair enough, his sins are all public knowledge now) – but current leaders? No. Besides, what would they have been doing? Kim would have been trying to nuke the pyramid, Trump would have forgotten his esteem for Kim in his haste to surrender (‘negotiate a deal’) to the Monks, and Corbyn I suppose would have been trying ineffectually to mediate between them. Could have made a good episode of Capaldi’s previous show, but not, I think, Doctor Who.

As for the Lady Doctor – well yes, I would love to see a good one. Not Whittaker, miscast, mis-directed, mis-written and mis-costumed, I think that about covers it. I’m rapidly coming up on Chibs’ era and I’ll watch the better episodes and skip the more cringey ones, it’ll be interesting to see if my views on Thirteen have mellowed at the end of it. (I would’ve loved to see Sophie Okonedo (Liz 10) as a female Doctor. Or of course Jo Martin (the Doctor in Fugitive of the Judoon))

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Hi @winston Unlike @janetteb (Hi!) we’ve had a pretty warm summer, and it’s still holding up – generally mid-20’s (70’s in Fahrenheit), and the water is still nicely warm. Typically (when it’s not going bananas) the weather stays settled until Easter at least. These days I generally just go for a swim at our tiny local beach at Blockhouse Bay on the Manukau Harbour, it’s very well sheltered from the prevailing winds but it’s only good at high tide, further out is just soft mud. And even then, high tides vary (in about a two-week cycle) from 3.2 metres to 4.5 metres and it’s only any good at 4.0 metres or above – maybe 3.7 metres as a minimum. Below that, and you’re paddling in a foot of water over oozy mud which is rather disgusting. And of course the tides get an hour later every day, so high tides that happen too early or late in the day are no good either. Which is why I keep a copy of the tide tables handy. Given those limitations, it’s surprising how often I manage to fit in a little dip. Being retired helps hugely, of course. And of course I can always make the 50-minute drive out to Piha on the coast which I used to do ‘all the time’ until I discovered that Blockhouse Bay was, actually, usable.

There are still some roads closed (or ‘Residents Cars Only’) from the two storms last February which caused widespread slips. This summer has been completely unlike that one, fortunately. However, some of South Island is experiencing drought – the east side, Marlborough and Canterbury, on the lee side of the Southern Alps. Christchurch Port Hills just had a big fire. Seems like half the country is always having droughts and the other half is having floods.

Doctor Who – I just watched the Monks trilogy. All very watchable, Extremis was great – and I’ve only just fully comprehended that the entire episode (with the exception of the flashbacks to Missy’s execution) was a simulation and the Doctor, Bill and Nardole were not real. The scenario was quite reminiscent of The Power of Three in that the ‘enemy’ was studying us – but a lot more credible. The Monks needed that information to control us; the enemy in Power of Three just wanted to kill a third of Earth’s population in order to – what? – so why didn’t he just get on with it instead of creating billions of cubes? Back to the Monks – The Lie of The Land was very ‘1984’ with the Memory Police. Reminded me of more recent political developments with, ahem, Alternative Facts (and that’s about as political as I should get). But when they left, everyone just forgot them. I like the student’s explanation for the vacant statue plinth – “Er, we thought they were just like filming something here or something?” Shades of ‘Derren Brown’.

Next, the least impressive (IMO) episode of S10, Doctor Who does Edgar Rice Burroughs.

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@vickymallard @winston @ps1l0v3y0u I found this episode entertaining. The Doctor flirting with Jabe the tree person – (Rose noticed – “You two go and pollinate”) – I really liked her, it was tragic when she died heroically. The theme of the Earth ending made me feel a bit – uneasy. But there were a host of interesting characters to absorb.

Cassandra, now, as the last ‘pure’ human is really unattractive. Not only murderous and conceited but a bigot as well, I was delighetd when Rose gave her an earful.

Hey! – the Moxx says (as an aside) “Indubitably, this is the Bad Wolf scenario.” The very first mention of Bad Wolf. (It will have more significance later…)

Not having seen any Doctors beyond Jon Pertwee, and that decades ago, I thought Ecclestone was really good as Nine.

One of the better episodes in Season One, I reckon.

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@janetteb I think ‘old Who’ worked perfectly well in its time. Just as, say, Blakes 7 did (even though the cast reputedly were a little bit disconcerted when the sets wobbled if they leaned on them). At the time, that was just the standard of special effects and production values we were used to. We used our imaginations to ‘fill in the gaps’ (and a fair bit of imagination was necessary. B7’s assorted ‘guns’ were singularly unconvincing).
It’s only looking back from the vantage of modern production values, that old Who (and B7) suffer by comparison. And they don’t have the visual appeal to grab the attention of your friend’s daughter.

If Doctor Who hadn’t lasted such an incredibly long time, I don’t think we’d be making these comparisons.

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@vickymallard Well I was effectively a ‘new viewer’ with Rose, too. That is, I’d seen some episodes of Two and Three when they first aired, but after that I dropped out for many decades. So ‘Rose’ was a fresh start for me. I also had no idea the Nestene Consciousness had a past (until I looked it up a few days ago. I’d highly recommend the wiki at Tardis.fandom.com by the way, for almost any questions regarding episodes or characters).
At the risk of committing sacrilege and being ceremoniously excommunicated from this site, I don’t watch much of Old Who either. By the time ‘Rose’ was made, production values were fully adequate. With Old Who (and this goes for Blakes 7, another favourite of mine), scenes inside the Tardis were okay, scenes outside (usually in a quarry) were okay, but aliens and robots were sometimes painfully obviously just extras in suits.
I’ve watched the last few stories of Seven and while I like Seven (Sylvester McCoy) and Ace, the ‘aliens’ and FX does make it hard for someone used to modern production values to fully engage in the story. There is a certain level (and that includes sets and special effects) below which it’s hard to sustain a convincing belief in the story. At the opposite extreme, spectacular FX can’t save it if the story and characters aren’t interesting, which is a mistake modern scifi/superhero movies often make.

@janetteb I was happy that Who had returned, though (since I’d dropped out decades before) I wasn’t missing it like you were. It was a promising new series to watch.
I couldn’t help noticing that both Martha and Donna’s mothers were the disapproving mother-in-law stereotype. Can’t help wondering if RTD had mother-in-law trouble 🙂
Whereas Jackie, of course, immediately fancied her chances with the Doctor. Camille Coduri was, as you say, excellent in the role. (Though Mickey probably thought she was the mother-in-law from hell).
Martha had a much bigger family, which tends to lessen their involvement. For some reason Yaz’s family, what little we saw of them, reminded me of Martha’s (but with a much less hostile mother).

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Just watched The Greatest Show in the Galaxy on DVD, with the seventh Doctor and Ace. I found it reasonably diverting, and since it was mostly about a circus the effects were adequate for the story, except for the moment when the Ragnarok gods try to shoot the Doctor with – little yellow pointers of light?

Apropos of nothing very much, I’ve resumed working my way through old episodes of Danger Man (the Patrick McGoohan secret agent series that preceded The Prisoner, roughly contemporaneous with the first Doctor) and some of them were very good. One thing I really liked at the time, and still do, was that foreigners spoke to each other in their native language. No condescending subtitles, no bad-English-with-a-fake-ethnic-accent, they did the viewer the compliment of assuming s/he could fill in the gaps from the context. A nice touch of authenticity, rarely imitated since.

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@winston Good luck! I’m not sure I can offer any advice, other than, list your requirements and intended usage as clearly as you can, (e.g. I guess you need plenty of ports to connect external drives etc to), and try to find a salesperson who seems to know what they’re talking about. And, I think the latest high-performance PC’s probably cost a premium, and a slightly slower model with ‘last year’s CPU’ will probably do everything you need for a lot less $$$. (Unless you’re heavily into gaming or video editing).

I really like a big monitor and a good keyboard. And a mechanical keyboard is just so much quicker and easier to use than a touchscreen. So I still drag a laptop around with me – not quite as good as my tower PC and its full keyboard, but almost. I did try a tablet for a while, but I found it just not as good, more like an oversized smartphone. (I wonder when, if ever, smartphones will acquire laptop-screen-sized holographic displays, or is that strictly sci-fi?)

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@vickymallard Finally 🙂 Yes ‘Rose’ is a good place to start. I would rabbit on about that’s where I started but I just said all that to Rewvian in the comment just above yours.

The mannequins were creepy. So was Plastic Mickey. And I agree it was a bit of a stretch that Rose didn’t recognise the strangeness, but I think that underlines the way Rose took Mickey for granted.
Billie Piper was an excellent casting choice, I knew nothing of her before (except I vaguely knew that she was some sort of teenie pop star, not my thing, Pink Floyd are my thing) but she had just the right personality to engage any viewer’s attention. And Mickey’s dullness and unadventurousness, along with Rose’s dull everyday life, were enough (in fantasy Doctor Who land) to explain her running off with the Doctor. It was a little bit rough on Mickey, but I forgave her instantly 🙂

The Doctor – just alien enough. “Are you from the North?” “Lots of planets have a north.”
Was this the first episode where RTD made a joke about Eccleston’s ears? I can’t remember if RTD used to joke about Ten’s appearance, Moffatt certainly used to joke about his Doctors’ features.

The alien – the Nestene Consciousness. Loved polluted environments, and could control or inhabit plastic. Apparently it sent its control signals from a huge antenna disguised as the London Eye.
[Nerd mode ON:] Strictly, that makes not a lot of sense. It shouldn’t need a transmitter that size. Unless the signals were ultra low frequency, but then how could the mannequins pick them up? I could be quite wrong here though, I stand to be corrected by anyone with radio knowledge.
As an aside, the giant Arecibo radio telescope dish in Goldeneye (James Bond) was even more absurd for controlling a satellite, but I love the movie anyway. [/Nerd mode]

In fact the Nestene Consciousness was – complicated. I never realised how complicated till I read its entry in Tardis.fandom.com – here’s the link: https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Nestene_Consciousness
I won’t even try to summarise it, I never realised how much background there was.

I think the episode succeeded, not so much because of the sci-fi element, but because of the human interplay between Rose and the Doctor (and also Jackie, and Mickey).

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@winston OK, I’ll keep it simple – carry on keeping your stuff on an external drive if you can. Or backing up to an external drive. It’s extremely unlikely that your PC will damage files on an external drive even if it (the PC) crashes with the drive connected. But if possible just make sure you have two copies of anything important in two separate places.
I’m sure you knew that 🙂

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@ps1l0v3y0u I absolutely agree 100% with everything you just said about ‘Blink’. 🙂

Do I have schizophrenia and I haven’t noticed, and you are just my alter ego posting and not telling me? (Hey, that could make the basis of a good sci-fi plot. Guy notices on-line posts from someone who shares opinions remarkably closely, tracks them down, and finds – it’s him. Probably the sort of psychological thriller the Beeb might have done in the sixties. If the Internet had existed then, of course).

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@ps1l0v3y0u @janetteb
Jamie Mathieson and ‘Bill’ did a commentary on the ‘Oxygen’ DVD and I’m fairly sure that’s where I heard him ranking his four.

His site Jamiemathieson.com https://www.jamiemathieson.com/doctor-who has a lot of material on his Who episodes, like first drafts, ‘Steven made me do it’ moments, it’s a rabbit-hole of fascinating titbits. I strongly recommend a visit.

Like the Tiny Tardis: “The mad thing was that no-one had done it before. In hindsight it seems obvious. The exterior has always been smaller on the outside. In this episode, we just keep going. The next part of the puzzle came from Steven. I’m sure I would have figured it out given time, but he’s just so damn quick. ‘I’ll go you one better.’ he said. ‘Clara carries the Tardis around in her bag for the whole episode.’ My smile froze. Of course she does Steven. And every time anyone compliments me on the idea I will have to hold my tongue and grind my teeth knowing you came up with the cherry on the cake. Damn your Bafta winning eyes.”

Anyway (he says, reluctantly dragging himself back out of the rabbit-hole), I didn’t see any ‘issue with Flatline’. I had a very minor quibble that railway tunnels don’t usually have hidden side tunnels, but the Channel Tunnel does, and the London Underground is full of them, so that quibble sorta falls flat. The other very minor quibble is, the train probably wouldn’t stop so quick, or get up speed quite so quickly, but that’s – again – so trivial I wouldn’t even mention it if you hadn’t mentioned ‘issues’.

When I say I’m ambivalent about ranking Jamie’s top three, I don’t mean that I doubt their quality, they’re all good, I just mean that I can’t really decide which is best.

I wouldn’t quite rate Mummy up with Blink, though. Simply because Blink not only has the most effective monsters ever (in terms of scariness vs effort required to film them), but also the perfect time-travel-paradox plot. And a rather sweet little romance. I think it’s an almost impossible ‘standard’ for any other episode to match.

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@janetteb @ps1l0v3y0u
I agree with you both (and Jamie Mathieson) that The Girl Who Died was far the weakest of the four. The top three I’m ambivalent about the ranking of – I have a distinct fondness for Flatline but Mummy is also excellent. Oxygen is grimmer and grittier and carries more ‘punch’ than either. So I’d say all three very good.

I’ll be reaching Chibs’ term shortly in my progression through Who, I think I’ll just watch a selected few, it will be interesting to see if I can find any that rate up with The Girl Who Died. I’m unsure about that, maybe his last Dalek one in the warehouse (Eve of the Daleks was it?). Won’t know till I re-watch.

The Girl Who Died – I can’t help wondering which came first, the script or the casting. “We’ve got the girl from Game of Thrones, now what do we do with her?”

The electric eels – I don’t think they’re found in British waters. And anyway I doubt they could generate the current to power an electromagnet that powerful. But every writer does that (which strictly speaking is no excuse, but if that’s the episode’s worst problem I can overlook it. OTOH I could give Kill The Moon one for free, and it would still grind my gears like a bad learner’s first lesson on a crash box).

The Benny Hill theme was actually relevant – ‘Yakity yak’ sounds like exactly the music track you’d put on a video clip to make the victim look ridiculous. And talking ‘Baby’ – that’s used in several other episodes, usually as a humorous device, so I can’t see anything much wrong with that.

Re the mistreatment (by the writers) of Companions, I think it’s inevitable. It’s a drama series, it needs deadly perils, we all know the Doctor’s not going to die (though Moff did try his best to shake that up), so guess who’s standing next in line? (I’m reminded of the old Xena series and how Gabfans used to predictably blame Xena when anything happened to her little friend Gabrielle *even when it was Gabby’s own silly fault*. Well, you hang around action heroes, you can expect a bit of collateral damage). Though I have to say, RTD and the Moff (and their various writers) did remarkably well in imbuing the Collateral Damage (sorry, Companion) with personality, to the point where I was sometimes more invested in the Companion’s fate than the Doctor’s.

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@ps1l0v3y0u That may be why I tend to overlook Oxygen – excellent though it is, it isn’t upbeat (except the ending). It starts with a truly sympathetic character and promptly kills her dead. Whereas Jamie’s other episodes, Mummy, Flatline, even The Girl Who Died are much lighter in tone (even if people are dying). But I did appreciate it much more on this re-watch, probably because I had the general skeleton of the plot in my brain so I had somewhere to place the plot developments, I was able to appreciate the precision of the details. Well that’s the best way I can describe it.

The Monks – I loved the premise of Extremis. But more of that later.

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@winston You have my sympathy. Losing a PC is always a bit traumatic (even though I usually have a spare laptop lying around). My desktop lives in a big ancient tower case with half a dozen drive slots of which four are currently occupied so I can easily swap drives with a screwdriver (drives are – relatively – cheap) but it’s always a bit of a hassle. As Janetteb says, hopefully the drive with your data will be okay, and certainly the external drives should be.

@janetteb As I said to Winston, reinstalls are always a bit of a pain. One handy dodge you might consider is to format your drive into several partitions, one or two of maybe 20GB each (get S/O to check the necessary size for a good O/S install) and the rest in one or more partitions for data. Then keep all your data stashed in one of the ‘data’ partitions. Then if your operating system goes down you can do a fresh install in a ‘OS’ partition without hazarding your data.

(That’s how I do updates too, I have automatic updates turned off, once a year or so I install the latest version of my OS into the spare ‘OS’ partition and set it to boot from that one. If for some reason the install is bad, I just revert to booting the old version. Either way, my data is safe where it is. Not sure if that strategy is practical in Windows though, your Second Officer can advise).

For some reason I tend to overlook Oxygen too. As I said in my comments, it grows on me – it’s precisely plotted, no sloppy bits. It’s often the case, in any episode with a complex plot, that I appreciate it more second time around when I have a rough outline of the events sketched in my brain.

Jamie Mathieson rated it his second best, after Mummy on the Orient Express, before Flatline and The Girl Who Died.

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Time I checked out getting the four (?) recent Ten(nant) episodes, I guess. Meanwhile I’m slowly idling through Twelve’s last series. Just re-watched Oxygen (and posted some random thoughts in that echo), like a good vintage wine it gets better every time I watch it.
(Do wines do that? I’m not a oenophile)

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Working through Series 10, bit by bit…

Oxygen – starts with a shock – two dead people spinning through space. I have to say the exterior space station shots are visually excellent, very convincing. And the fact that there is no sound in space is used to shocking effect as Ivan can’t hear Ellie being killed by the space-suited zombies right behind him. Jamie Mathieson unleashed a real corker here.

And the banter is fully up to Moff standards –
NARDOLE: Do you know what this is? Fluid link K57. Removed it from the Tardis the other night after your lecture.
BILL: What’s a fluid link?
NARDOLE: No idea. But the Tardis can’t go anywhere without it.
DOCTOR: Who told you that?
NARDOLE: You did.
DOCTOR: Exactly. (Tardis takes off)

“Oxygen is available for personal use only, at competitive prices. Any unlicensed oxygen will be automatically expelled to protect market value.” Jamie has really got the core values of the free market economy down pat here, hasn’t he? Puts The Rebel Flesh in the shade. And it sets up a heck of a good hazard to drive the plot.

“At current levels of exertion, you have two and a half thousand breaths available.” Oh yes, nothing like putting a counter on your breathing to ratchet the tension up another notch. I know we’ve seen this general scenario before in innumerable eps like 42 and Rebel Flesh and Under the Lake, now it’s Bill’s turn and this is far the most effective one.

Then Bill’s suit asks “Would you like to give feedback on your experience so far?” That is just so – typical.

Nardole is great in this one too. From his “Some of my best friends are bluish” to “It [killing everyone]’s how I’d do it” to where the Doctor says “Maybe get tired of carrying pesky humans around? Know the feeling?” and Nardole nods, he’s showing a talent for collecting dirty looks from everyone. But he is starting to become a serious character, not just comic relief.

And *of course* if you endow a space suit with a computer it will ask inane questions at inappropriate moments like “Would you like to give feedback on your experience so far.” Doug Adams was truly prophetic with the talking doors in the Heart of Gold. And “Please remain calm while your central nervous system is deactivated. Your life is in our hands.” Classic corporate-speak. This episode has me looking suspiciously at my laptop. Almost prefer the Daleks, at least they’re honest about ‘exterminate’.

So then Bill’s helmet malfunctions and she’s got to ‘breathe’ vacuum. It’s about this point I start to wonder if the writers have something against Bill, considering the perils she’s been exposed to. But thinking back, this seems to be about par for the course with Companions.

The nightmare space-walk is dealt with quite briefly. When Bill comes to, the deadly zombies are just a few yards away but not advancing – because the intervening section is new and not in the virtual maps yet, so the suits don’t know it’s there. That is an absolutely terrific detail. This episode has been so well crafted and put together, it is absolutely everything that Kill the Moon wasn’t.

And the Doctor’s best ever short speech:
“I’m the Doctor. I will do everything in my power to save all your lives. And when I do, you will spend the rest of them wondering who I was and why I helped you. If anyone’s offering a better deal, be my guest.”

Then Bill’s suit jams again, and the rest can’t pick her up to take her with them because the suit won’t let them because ‘Health & Safety’ forbids it. “Please do not interfere with the operation of this suit. Fines may be incurred.” Jamie’s really got the number of modern corporate culture, hasn’t he? (Now I’m mentally comparing this with ‘Kerblam’, Chibbers’ attack on commercialism, and this is like a surgical operation compared with a pub brawl).

And the Doctor has figured out that the lethal ‘malfunction’ is just the station control system ‘replacing’ the old inefficient crew with a new one. So he fixes it: “Hello, suits. Our deaths will be brave and brilliant and unafraid. But above all, suits, our deaths will be – expensive!” And the suits stop in their tracks. (Reminds me of the pursuit in George Lucas’ old movie THX 1138, where the hero is fleeing from the pursuing cops, he is just about to be captured by an android cop when the amount of damage he’s caused results in the pursuit budget being exceeded so it breaks off).

This episode gets even better on re-watching, when I can appreciate the precision of the plotting. Excellent cast, excellent drama. As a condemnation of the excesses of capitalism it leaves ‘Arachnids in the UK’ and ‘Kerblam’ feebly wallowing in its wake.

And Nardole rants about the contents of the Vault. Is there anyone left by this point who doesn’t think it’s Missy? And (if confirmation were needed) the ‘Next time’ trailer concludes with a half-second shot of Missy. Not technically a spoiler since the next ep actually begins with a cameo of her.

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@ps1l0v3y0u Interesting theory, but, with respect, I think it’s needlessly complicated. Much simpler if there are just two tardises. (And we know the Time Lords had a fleet of them. In fact, Type 40 suggests they had a very considerable number. So, plenty of Tardises to steal). Why would Clara and Ashildr/Me go back to Gallifrey? OK, if Clara got tired of immortal undeath, so the Timelords could put her back in Trap Street, but then where would that leave Ashildr/Me? I think she’d be more likely to just drop Clara off and vamoose pdq, given the history of the Time Lords treatment of other species. And the Tardis the original Doctor stole didn’t appear to look like a police box or a diner, so its chameleon circuit must have been unstuck or switched off at that point.

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@vickymallard Just responding to a few of your comments. The Master – I though he became a lot more interesting when Moffatt wrote him (as compared to Russell T Davies). Especially in one of his other incarnations and I won’t spoil by saying which one 🙂

I did like the green spiky people, specially the sarcastic female one. Sinead Keenan – sarcastic Irishwomen are great.

And the Timelords were impressive. Specially Rassilon (Timothy Dalton). I’m probably not spoiling too much if I say that Gallifrey was (as you surmise) locked away in a bubble of its own. (I’ve just remembered that – in Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – that the xenocidal inhabitants of the planet Krikkit and their lethal robots were locked away in a Slo-time envelope until the end of the Universe. Nothing is ever new, every idea in sci-fi has been thought of by someone else earlier).

The Doctor crashing through the ceiling was one of those awkward ‘reality’ moments where my skepticism peaked – how did the Doc aim so accurately, and howcome he wasn’t splatted like a pancake when he hit that hard stone floor? (And if the Vinvocci dropped Wilf off somewhere nearby howcome they didn’t do the same for the Doc?) That bothered me more than the bus in Planet of the Dead. Dramatic license, I guess.

There seemed to be some sort of link between The Master and Rassilon, sustained by the Gate. I don’t quite follow how it all worked.

I did groan when the Doctor, having survived all this, was undone by Wilf. I found the last 20 minutes a bit of an anticlimax, actually, though I can see why it was there, RTD saying au revoir to all his characters. But I could have done without Martha ending up with Mickey. I would have liked to see Jenny, the Doctor’s daughter, again though.

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@vickymallard Viewer’s varying tolerance for ‘errors’ always fascinates me. I will happily accept a time-travelling Tardis that can materialise anywhere it wants, but I get highly tetchy if the Space Shuttle lands on the Moon because (1) it was never designed to go beyond Earth orbit and (2) it’s actually a glider (if a rather brick-like one), that’s how it lands, and there’s no air on the Moon. (Don’t get me started on the rest of Kill the Moon :). I tend to give a free pass to anything that’s ‘alien tech’ (i.e. ‘magic’) but very little to physical impossibilities in mundane reality.

Other people obviously have their own limits on what they will accept and what ‘errors’ really bug them. For some people, it’s what is ‘in character’ or ‘out of character’ that matters most, never mind the nuts and bolts.

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@ps1l0v3y0u I think you’re complicating it. I think there were only ever two tardises involved – the Doctor’s Tardis (Sexy/Idris) that he stole originally and that stayed with him right through all the twists and turns of the series.
And the second Tardis that the Doctor stole in Hell Bent which was taken over by Clara and Me. I don’t know if it got stuck as an American Diner or they just hadn’t needed to change the exterior before the final shot of Hell Bent.

Was the American Diner in The Impossible Astronaut actually a Tardis? I thought it was just a bit of the local landscape.

@winston I agree, the tardis is a character in itself and could have its own show.

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@vickymallard Sorry, forgot to include you in my note to ps1l0v3y0u. It’s spoilery but I gave my account of what I understand of the Tardis in the Hell Bent thread.

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@ps1l0v3y0u Since you asked, this is what I know of stolen Tardises.
In the beginning, the Doctor stole his Type 40 Tardis. He was about to steal a different one when Clara (appearing from his timestream) told him “Don’t steal that one, steal this one. The navigation system’s knackered, but you’ll have much more fun” (The Name of the Doctor). It also had a faulty chameleon circuit. Now in The Doctor’s Wife the Tardis says:
IDRIS: And then you stole me. And I stole you.
DOCTOR: I borrowed you.
IDRIS: Borrowing implies the intention to return the thing that was taken. What makes you think I would ever give you back?
I thought that implied that the Tardis had ‘chosen’ the Doctor, but I don’t think it actually says that anywhere. Even if the Tardis did, I would just reinterpret that as influencing Clara-in-Doctor’s-timeline to steer the Doctor in that direction.
Thereafter the Doctor had just the one Tardis.

Now at the end of Face the Raven, the Doctor was teleported into his Confession Dial and the Tardis was abandoned. After the events of Heaven Sent, in Hell Bent, the Doctor ‘rescued’ Clara and they stole *another* tardis, which became the American Diner tardis later operated by Clara and Me. After the Doctor lost his memory Clara went back to collect the Doctor’s abandoned Tardis from London and transported it (either in the Diner, or Me flew the Diner and Clara flew the Doctor’s Tardis) to the desert for the Doctor to find at the end of the episode.

That’s as I see it, anyway.

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@ps1l0v3y0u This is spoiler territory so – if you don’t mind – I’ll answer this (as far as I can) in the ‘Hell Bent’ thread where it fits best.

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@vickymallard I really liked this one. And I too, liked that the giant fly aliens were not the enemy (and in fact, acted very honourably. I felt quite sorry for them).

Lady Christina was great (in my view). A sort of female James Bond (or Emma Peel?) I would have liked to see a lot more of her. Maybe not workable as a Companion, simply because she would have upstaged the Doctor without even trying, they would have had to have dumbed her down a lot and that would have upset me. But a recurrent ally/adversary, like River Song or Captain Jack, would have been fine. In a way it’s her bad luck that she appeared right at the end of RTD’s stint, because successive showrunners tend to not have used previous associates much.

As for how she appeared next door to the museum instead of on the roof when the alarm went off – this bit is essentially a ‘heist’ movie, they often play a bit loose with the nuts-and-bolts stuff. I’m often a bit obsessive about the practicality of things but this bit didn’t worry me unduly. Nor the fact that the bus didn’t pull over – heist movie 🙂

The Swarm absolutely gave me the creeps. Vicious little things.

The Doctor stole the Tardis? Yes, was that a ‘new’ fact in this episode? That was elaborated on considerably by Moffat with the 11th Doctor episodes. (Another take is that the Tardis ‘chose’ (influenced) the Doctor to steal it). I won’t say more because spoilers. But see The Name of the Doctor (“Don’t steal that one, steal this one. The navigation system’s knackered, but you’ll have much more fun”) and The Doctor’s Wife for more.
It appears that Tardises were controlled by Gallifrey authorities (maybe a bit like ‘company cars’) and presumably Timelords required authorisation to take one out. He stole another, much much later. I think it likely that the Doctor’s Tardis was under maintenance when he nicked it – hence the faults of the stuck Chameleon circuit, and its notoriously erratic navigation.

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@winston Bees I’m cautious about, though I do like lovely big hairy bumble bees. I like spiders (and in NZ there aren’t any really poisonous ones), we used to have lovely big ‘Avondale spiders’ (an immigrant Australian Huntsman) a couple of inches across, in our garden, sadly I haven’t seen one for decades. And I also like moths, the bigger the better. Hate wasps, that’s not a phobia, they’re just nasty things in every way. But I like praying mantises, savage killers that they are.

Toads and frogs are quaint and cute (we don’t have the poisonous Aussie cane toads here, just as well). I’d be fine with snakes, though a bit cautious of ones that might be poisonous, but we have no snakes at all in NZ. Probably just as well since I like walking barefoot everywhere. Oh, and I like mice.

And I quite agree most of these likes/phobias are arbitary. I have a mild phobia for giant wetas, which look like enormous grasshoppers – in theory I should love them, but I just find them somewhat gross and creepy.

Quite by coincidence David Attenborough’s Planet Earth III is on right now and some of those deep-sea creatures look – just *wrong*. Like the creatures trying to break through from the Dungeon Dimensions in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld. Or as if the Creator was off his face on magic mushrooms, acid *and* angel dust the day he knocked those out.

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@ps1l0v3y0u Yes, I would have loved to see more of McGann. I thought John Hurt did a great job as the War Doctor, but if things like (presumably) availability had worked out differently, I think McGann could have taken that part with the most minimal of adjustments and he would have been equally good. And yes I would have loved to see McGann and The Moment (Billie Piper) acting together.

Billie Piper is one of those actors that the camera loves. Even just leaning against a wall in the background, you can’t miss her. And as always, Moffat has some written delightful dialogue between them. “The Interface is hot!” “Well, I do my best.”

Withnail & I – I’ve never seen. But I think I’ll get it on DVD, it looks promising. McGann and Richard E Grant. I know I’ve seen Richard E Grant in something, probably Who? He was never the Master, was he? No, the Great Intelligence. See, I haven’t got Alzheimers, yet. 🙂

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@juniperfish Good one! Though I can’t help noticing Tom Lamont confuses Heaven Sent with Heaven’s Gate – which became famous as a disaster of a movie. And then there was the American cult that ended with them all committing mass suicide. What a mistake-a to make-a.

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@rewvian Somehow your comments (which have just appeared in my email) are dated 22 October 2022 in this thread. So about 6 or 8 posts up. Not sure what’s going on.
The Night of the Doctor (the complete 6-minute special) is on Youtube, see if this link works:

I think it was probably also on the Day of the Doctor DVD set (checks spreadsheet) – yes.

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@winston I love old slightly-run-down buildings. Some of the pleasantest nights I’ve had away from home have been in old run-down country pubs that I’ve booked into at the last minute when I ran out of time and daylight. Like the Tavistock Hotel in Waipukurau, one stormy Easter – ‘We do have a room but it’s above the bar and it’s disco night tonight’ ‘Never mind, it’ll do’. And their idea of ‘disco’ was Dire Straits and Pink Floyd – I was in heaven 🙂 Or old student flats like the one you describe – it’s a tribute to the residual strength of timber and nails that they never collapsed under the weight of wall-to-wall drunk students.

As it happens I like woodlice, I think they’re cute. Non-slimy, non-spiky, non-bitey, non-stingy and non-smelly. And fascinating the way they roll up into balls. But I admit rationality has nothing to do with our feelings towards creepy-crawlies, for example I like millipedes, don’t mind spiders, but centipedes give me the screaming hab-dabs. You know the scene in Dr No where someone puts a tarantula in James Bond’s bed? Well in the book that was a giant centipede, I don’t know why they changed it for the movie, that would really have freaked me out.

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Incidentally, the tiny house they were first shown into really exists – its 91a (you can actually read the number in the episode) Fairwater Grove West, Llandaff, Cardiff (you can see it in Streetview) and it’s a few houses down from Terry Nation’s birthplace at No 113, as mentioned in the commentary to the episode. (The commentary obviously didn’t give the addresses but – Google…)

The second house next to the cement factory (or is it a gasworks) I don’t know, I’m not that obsessive.

Just for completeness, the big house (Wester Drumlins from ‘Blink’) is Fields House in Fields Park Avenue, Newport.

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Bill using the Tardis for a removal van? That just feels a little bit wrong.

The Doctor is really weird in this one, I felt a little embarrassed for Bill. It’s like going out to dinner with a relative who turns out to be socially tone deaf.

The creepy noises in the kitchen turn out to be – the Doctor. Looking a bit like Boris Karloff in some lights. And there is no way I’d use an oil heater in an old timber building like that. And then the landlord mysteriously appears – almost as creepy as the Doctor.

Doesn’t David Suchet do mild-but-sinister well? I half expected the contract to be signed in blood 🙂 He is extraordinarily good as the Landlord. An amiable benevolent-looking old gentleman who is unsettlingly creepy under his benign exterior. And then he goes all Evil Villain bwahaha. And then, quite incredibly, he becomes a tragic if misguided character that we actually feel sorry for. Until he decides to carry on with his nefarious tenant-consuming scheme.

I keep wanting to call the house ‘Wester Drumlins’ for no good reason.
But it’s a lovely old house, I *love* old slightly dilapidated buildings, preferably wooden. (When I’m travelling, I much prefer downmarket pensions or hikers’ ‘refuges’ in little out-of-the-way villages. Though huge rooms in grand hotels, let at stupidly cheap off-season rates just to keep the place running, have their appeal too. I’m rambling.)
The standard haunted-house stuff is really very well done – creaks and bangs and slamming doors.

I like the relief in Paul’s voice when Bill tells him she prefers girls – “Oh. Oh, right! I was never in with a chance. Awesome!” That is just so true to life. He can relax and stop trying it on and doesn’t feel he’s missing a chance.

Eliza is creepy but one of the less successful ‘creatures’ in the series, visually. Her restoring all the flatmates to life was a nice touch, though a bit hard to credit the mechanics of it. But then they were alien woodlice with weird powers so I guess I can manage to believe it. But the ending came incredibly abruptly.

And the little coda with Nardole and the vault was sufficiently weird and intriguing to force me to watch the next episode! (I was going to anyway, of course)

So this was actually a pretty good episode. Nothing spectacular but well put together.

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@vickymallard @ps1l0v3y0u Well I was – slightly disappointed by The Next Doctor (which turned out not to be the next Doctor after all). Cybermen child labour in Victorian London just seemed a bit like the old Dickens/Christmas theme, Oliver Twist and all that. I thought Christmas Carol (okay that was openly Dickens-derived) was a better ‘take’ on that theme.

They teased us with a string of ‘not future companions’ in those post-Season 4 specials. I thought Rosita from Next Doctor would have made a fine Companion. And Lady Christina de Souza (Planet of the Dead), though she might have been almost too good, a veritable Emma Peel. She would have put the Doctor in the shade. That said, I would have absolutely loved to see her reappear from time to time, the way Captain Jack did.

Back to The Next Doctor. Rosita seemed to be devoted to Jackson Lake, though he seemed to be oblivious / take it for granted. Was that due to ongoing grief over missing his wife? There’s a very strong parallel situation to Martha and Ten, there!

The CyberKing – how could that not be recorded in the history books? Same way all the other alien incursions manage to get missed/forgotten, I guess. I do have strong reservations about the ‘Tardis’ balloon. Not so much the chances of getting shot by a Cyberman, except at really close quarters, flying objects are notoriously difficult to hit (unless the Cybermen have super-good aim) and a bullet hit on a balloon just tends to go straight through with minimal immediate results. But balloons are totally unsuited to attacking anything, they go where the wind blows and a miss by a hundred yards is as bad as a miss by a mile. They’re fine for escaping, possibly okay for infiltrating a country so long as there’s no requirement for a precise landing site, but for a precision attack? – forget it. Quite impractical.

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@ps1l0v3y0u You’re geeking me out now. 🙂 Which episode was it started by Anthony Stevens and finished by Eric Saward? Writers can certainly ‘riff on their favourite obsessions’ so long as the result is entertaining for a general audience (obviously) and fits in with the ambiance of the series, I think.

I can assure you KTM was far worse than anything in the Flux, so far as science is concerned. That is to say, Flux was all sci-fi and probably physically impossible, but I can readily accept that, just as I accept that the Tardis can time travel. The more fantastic (i.e. removed from everyday physics) something is, the more readily I can accept it. The Flux’s main drawback (from my point of view) was that I found the plot confusing and galactic disasters tend to be far less satisfying than more focussed stories.

However, when an episode focuses on ‘real’ physics and mechanics as KTM did – the Space Shuttle, the Moon causing tides and so on – then it had better get those things right, or ‘explain’ why they differ from normal reality. KTM seemed to go out of its way to get everything gratuitously wrong.

Forest of the Night was maybe a bit more mystical so – although the outrageously fast plant growth and the bit of woo about the spirit of the Earth or whatever it was, caused me to raise an eyebrow, it didn’t raise my hackles like KTM did. Besides, the traffic lights in a forest were kinda cute 🙂

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What was dishonest about Thin Ice? If you’re going to go to the past at all, then you’re either going to have to ‘take it as it comes’ and treat it just as background, because you can’t turn every past ep into an in-depth social documentary.

Well, Kill the Moon was the absolute worst of NuWho (IMO). Worse than anything of Chibnall’s. With Forest of the Night a pale second for the season.

What made KTM so bad? Well, just about everything. Let me count the ways – and this is pure elementary physics –
the Space Shuttle could only reach low Earth orbit, it was never Moon-capable
the cargo hold on the Shuttle was never pressurised and was structurally incapable of that
there would be NO gravity inside it before it crashed into the Moon because –
it’s just a dirty great glider, it needs air to land – if it tried landing on the Moon, there would be a brand new crater
the Moon was allegedly increasing in mass, that’s straight violation of the law of conservation of matter
you could never have ‘high tide everywhere at once’ – more violation of conservation of matter
the Mexicans ‘didn’t find any minerals on the Moon’? Rock is *made* of minerals! That includes Moon rock
no way could the spiders be a ‘unicellular’ life form! Did the writers get carried away with their ‘bacteria’ analogy and a science dictionary?
when it hatched, the dragon flew away using wings – there’s no air in space
and its tail was ‘wagging’ with an acceleration of about 170,000 G – what’s it supposed to be made of?
the dragon left a same-sized egg in its place – law of conservation of matter violated *again* – how can a freshly-hatched ‘thing’ lay an egg as big as itself?
50 (?) h-bombs could never disintegrate the moon
And if they did, the bits would just continue in the same orbit, there would be NO relief to Earth. But if some pieces were slowed enough to spiral in to Earth then the damage previously caused by the wild tides would be as nothing to the devastation that resulted from the impact
And aside from that –
The Doctor, who feels protective towards Earth, just buggers off and leaves Clara and Courtney the menace to decide Earth’s fate and potentially commit suicide (suicide bombing?) Really? Is this in character? This is the Doctor who went through billions of years in Heaven Sent just to rescue Clara?
Clara decides to take a ‘vote’ of Earth – how would that work? (The side opposite the Moon doesn’t get to vote anyway). But we know exactly what would result from such a message – total shambles and confusion. Which didn’t matter anyway since Clara then completely ignored the result. (Where have we seen that recently?)
And just as the icing on the cake, there’s this nod-and-a-wink at the abortion ‘debate’.
And most trivial point, Courtney the Menace could never be President of the US because she wasn’t born in the USA.

I may have missed a couple of minor points there.
The one half-way okay thing about it was Clara’s incandescent rage with the Doctor at the end.
‘The Moon is an egg’ probably sounded like an intriguing concept, but it should have been dropped like a hot potato when the difficulties became apparent.

Forest of the Night was moderately bad but pales into insignificance beside KTM.

Thin Ice – I didn’t see any misrepresentation (so far as I know). Sutcliffe was a caricature and I’d aver – given what we know of the status of the very few black people in society around that time – that most gentry would have been at least polite to Bill. But I’ll certainly accept that many might have been prejudiced. BUT I am absolutely fairly ignorant of social matters in that period. (I don’t understand your Millwall reference btw, since my full extent of knowledge of soccer is that ‘Manchester United’ is probably a fair bet to answer any trivia questions with).

Shakespear Code I liked. Fires of Pompeii was okay. Vincent and the Doctor also, and I did like Bill Nighy’s cameo as the Curator. In fact it was an online comment about that the re-ignited my interest in NuWho. Eaters of Light was great though the monster was a slight let-down (always better when you can’t see them).

Let’s Kill Hitler was just fun. I didn’t have any qualms about that, and anyway, hasn’t the Third Reich been ‘done’ a thousand times by now? (And when I say a thousand I’m not exaggerating). I loved the Tesselecta though its premise seems a bit morally dubious, but also somewhat inadequate, wouldn’t it be better to go back and zap the baddies before they do their evil deeds? (Yes I know, time paradox).

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@winston By rights I should have probably reported it to Health & Safety, since the noise could interfere with communication, and the possibility of banging your head on the handrail when exiting the shaft and falling back down it was a definite hazard, noise or not. They would probably just have made it compulsory to wear a hard hat though, which was always a pain. So I didn’t.

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@mudlark Thanks! That’s quite a good rationalisation and I always like it if a loose end can be neatly tied up. That also takes care of the minor issue of where they got them (i.e. did they rent them? steal them? buy them?) and when did Bill learn to use a diving suit (I don’t think they’re just ‘put on and hop in the water’). Obviously Tardis suits would be quite user-friendly and wouldn’t need the hoses, lifelines and air compressor ‘up top’ and all the other clutter.

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@ps1l0v3y0u Okay. I don’t think we disagree on the circumstances of this one. Except you found the social background more of a distraction to the story than I did. I usually don’t want Who to get into contentious or ‘heavy’ moral questions.

For example, ‘Extremis’ – excellent episode IMO. I’m quite willing to debate the Vatican’s long history for good and bad on other forums, but preferably not on Who – and Extremis didn’t raise it, it just used it as background for sci-fi, which suits me fine. I could probably also mention Let’s Kill Hitler – how could it *not* deal with the entire theme of Nazism in the late 30’s? Well, it didn’t. It just used it as a backdrop, as thousands of other dramas have done. (I loved the Tesselact, by the way).

I actually don’t want Who to get heavily into difficult questions. I’m a rampant Greenie but the heavy-handed environmentalism in ‘Praxeus’ turns me right off what could otherwise have been a decent story.

The Ice Warriors – good in Cold War (which, again, just used the entire Cold War as background); but I always thought Ice Warriors were pretty lame and that Empress of Mars was one of the weakest episodes. Too Indiana Jones for my liking. I’m afraid we’ll just have to disagree on that one.

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@ps1l0v3y0u This was 1814, right? A year before Waterloo. The slave trade was banned in the British Empire in 1807. And slavery was never a legal thing in England. So – within the limits of the story – Bill was never in much danger in London simply because of her colour. That’s as far as I can tell from a quick Google, I’m open to correction on that.

I’m not sure what ‘important history’ you’re referring to. Climate change? (I’ve got no problem with the monster causing the freezes – for the purposes of science fiction). Industrial revolution? Slavery? Colour prejudice? They’re all historically important things but why should Doctor Who be obliged to deal with them in a 45-minute episode? Chibnall’s episodes tried dealing with socially relevant themes (me: groan) and look where that got him.

I know I ranted on about Sutcliffe’s steel mill but that was just me being trivially uber-geek. It didn’t spoil the story for me the way physics pulverises Kill the Moon. I think stories should fit the facts reasonably well, for their own credibility, but that doesn’t mean they have to go into a detailed examination of all the circumstances.

Um, the monster being in chains was another little glitch – how did Sutcliff’s predecessors ever chain it up? And the diving suit exploit was – improbable (I’d guess impossible), without a support crew on the surface. So the story was a bit loose in places. I just didn’t take it too seriously.

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Just re-watched Thin Ice.
This is what I wrote first time around (but don’t seem to have posted in this thread):
I have a slight problem with the scale of the monster (as shown on the Tardis map screen). It’s just too big to ‘hide’ in the Thames (how deep is the Thames at low tide anyway?) How could it ever turn round? Also (to anticipate developments later in the episode), how could a few humans per year be enough to sustain it, or furnish sufficient, um, fuel production? Problems of scale persisted right through the episode.

I’m quite liking Bill, this time round. The first time, I was suffering from Clara Withdrawal Syndrome, and no new companion could overcome that 🙂 But it’s an injustice to any companions to compare them, and invidious, I think.

The Doctor’s interrogation of the foreman at the yard is full of double entendres. But I particularly like the idea that the fortunes of Lord Sutcliff are founded on sh*t.

Um, if this is 1814, Sutcliff would have to own an ironworks, not a steel mill. (In 1814, steel was a limited-production specialty item, used only for swords and the like. Cast iron or wrought iron was the prime engineering metal. Railways did not really get going until 1825 or 1830, with iron (not steel) rails and locomotives. Large-scale mild steel production did not really get going until the Bessemer process c.1860. What held it back was not any lack of heat, but knowledge of the right chemical processes). So Sutcliff’s super (and super cheap) fuel would have helped cheap production of cast iron and wrought iron, but not steel. I think. [/Geek mode]

So, best watched for the backchat between the Doc and Bill, and don’t look too closely at the world-building.

[And this is my comments from my recent re-watching. Still banging on about the size of the monster, I see]

Minor geographical quibble. When the Tardis first materialises on the ice, with St Pauls in the background, that must be near Blackfriars Bridge. The Doctor moves it to a safer parking spot, presumably on the bridge. And the monster’s head is located directly underneath the Tardis. But the map in the Tardis shows its head as being located midway between Lambeth Bridge and Vauxhall Bridge, over a mile upstream. This is – troubling.

Um, and the adjacent ‘Freezeland Street.’ There is a Freezeland Way in Uxbridge, but the nearest Freezeland Street is in Bilston, near Birmingham. This is not good for my geeky soul.

I do like the street urchins. And the chitchat between the Doctor and Bill.

Bill and the Doctor appear to be remarkably lucky not to be eaten by the monster. And how did they surface again? Never mind, I’ll let that one pass.

‘The creature’s head is almost a mile away. I assume we’re at the other end.’ Well yes, a mile long would be a little more credible than the map in the Tardis which showed the creature to be nine miles long!

I see Lord Sutcliffe is a villain in the James Bond tradition – tell the hero all the details of your nefarious operation.

Altogether, not a bad episode. Not a great one, but entertaining enough.

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@mudlark @winston I had a slightly alarming subterranean experience. I visited a little old sewage pumping station, built in the 1920’s. Auckland City had done things properly, with a little control building at ground level, and little underground pump room maybe 20 feet below it. So as I entered the control building and switched all the lights on, I could see it was a nice little room with all mod cons – a flush toilet in one corner, a desk and chair, a handbasin, it even had hot water thanks to a Zip heater (a thing a bit like a whistling kettle, but cylindrical and fixed to the wall). You could live in there. In another corner was the shaft down to the pump room, about two feet square. So I clambered down this shaft, into a little room with two small eletric-motor-driven pumps, one of which was whirring away contentedly. As I took notes, I heard a faint moaning sound, which very slowly increased to a definite howl – impossible to tell where it was coming from, in such echoing surroundings it was everywhere at once. All I could think of was maybe one of the pump bearings was starting to sieze, which – conceivably – could lead to the pump shaft seal being destroyed and sewage squirting everywhere, not an attractive prospect. By now the howl was quite scarily loud. So I started back up the ladder as fast as I could, with the howl rising to a scream, banged my head on the handrail at the top but just managed not to fall back down the shaft, at which point the howl rapidly died down as the Zip heater (which I had inadvertently switched on along with the lights) switched itself off thermostatically.

[Dentarthurdent @replies]

@mudlark I share your nervousness at dark spooky places. (I’m not as bad as I was). But movie directors know, it’s not what you *can* see that’s frightening, it’s what you can’t. The noises in the future base at the end of time in ‘Listen’ for example, scare the daylights out of me.

As a University student I had a holiday job with the Ministry of Works. The Newmarket Viaduct (a long box-girder motorway viaduct) had developed cracks and they had installed strain gauges across a crack in a middle span, and once a week someone had to go and read them – guess who got the job? Each span was a concrete box 5 feet high, eight feet wide and 50 feet long, with a bulkhead (wall) across the end with an access hole about 21″ wide and 15″ high at the base of the wall, into the next box. So from under one end of the viaduct, I had to climb a ladder into the bottom of a box, then make my way crouching through seven or eight boxes and crawling through the access holes by the light of my torch to reach the strain gauges. Spooky?? (These days ‘Elf & Safety would have a field day, suppose I’d been taken ill or banged my head?)

[Dentarthurdent @replies]

@ps1l0v3y0u I was forbidden by my parents to watch Quatermass (the TV series). Too scary. As I recall, there were all these ‘dead’ alien things hanging on racks in a warehouse. Then one of them flopped off. That’s all I know.

[Dentarthurdent @replies]

@ps1l0v3y0u The Boneless always reminded me of the formless things from the Dungeon Dimensions in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, always trying to break through. So maybe that was their motive – they wanted to become ‘real’.

The Girl Who Waited was a classic. Tragic, but the enemy was – time itself. And it pitted Old Amy against Young Amy. Whose side would you take? (That was a rhetorical question, I don’t think there’s a right answer). And the Doctor lied like a bastard but – what else could he do?

(For some reason it reminded me of a short story, ‘All the Time in the World’ by – Asimov? No. Heinlein? No. Sheckley? No. Arthur C Clarke – I should have bloody known! About an art thief who was given a bracelet by an alien from the future, that would stop time, with instructions to use it to steal a list of specified art treasures. Which he did. And after his commission was discharged, the alien explained that they were rescuing artefacts from human civilisation, which had just ceased to exist because the planet was exploding. But he could keep the bracelet, it would last the rest of his life – however long he chose that to be. Clarke had an uncanny knack for disconcerting twists at the end of his stories.)

But anyway, I have no idea why Chibnall didn’t use any writers of previous Who episodes. Except, of course, himself. He didn’t use any previous directors either (at least, not in his first season, I checked). It’s almost as if he was determined to prove that he could make a season of Doctor Who ‘all his own work’ owing nothing to previous showrunners.

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