@puroandson  @pedant   I have yet to start Rectify; I have a sort of visceral recoil reaction to American southern accents, believe it or not, cuz it always sounds like beastly Texas to me, and I’ll have no truck with that place that I can avoid.  But will turn to Rectify before long, given the enthusiasm here for it.

As for “Under Done”, what a…[Read more]

@jgalt7  I love the idea too, but I’m afraid I concur with the others as far as any such child being “the hybrid” (and in fact is River still just a human to begin with?).  Personally, I don’t think the Doctor having an unknown child of his own would work well — he’s sometimes a sort of fatherly presence to his companion, and people have enough o…[Read more]

@theconsultingdoctor   I don’t think Sherlock’s “memory palace” or “mind palace” and the Doctor’s internalized console room are the same concept, though.  I looked up “memory palace” because I recalled it as strictly a mental construct built as a locator of memories, originally an educational tool in Ancient Greece.  I don’t remember exactly ho…[Read more]

@blenkinsopthebrave  @janetteb  RED DWARF yes yes yes yes yes yes . . . what’s the keyboard symbol for “infinty”?

@missy — “. . . unlike Babylon 5”?  I tried B7 too, some time ago, and didn’t care for it; “dated” sounds right, but I can’t remember enough about it now to recall in what ways I found that too.

I don’t recall “the Shadows” — but I tend to blank out anything about spiders.

Something from BBC news, about what all the Doctors have to know how to work with — since the Doctor so seldom uses weapons:

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20160916-dont-blink-first-the-power-of-a-stare

The article made me think of them, and how Directors use this too, to convince us that the Doctor is *powerful* without making a physical threat.

Very nice!

@pedant  Thanks for the info about B5 — that’s some story . . .

@puroandson  I’ve always felt — well, since maturity, whenever that was (I hope) — that Americans of the US have a terrible problem with the whole idea of childhood.  Our culture is so youth-centered, with so many people fighting tooth, nail, and bank-account against every indication of middle age (let alone old age!), that we essentially pit o…[Read more]

@puroandson  Can’t tell you exactly what average grade school teacher pay is, but I know it’s not good.  Universities, better, but that depends on your title — profs still do pretty well most places; associates, graduate assistants, adjuncts of any kind, badly.  There’s a huge scandal at LIU right now, the Brooklyn campus (that’s Long Island Un…[Read more]

@puroandson  Gawd, sounds like Heaven (though not, obviously, for people doing the actual work, under far too much pressure).  At least your government is trying to upgrade curriculum, instead of demanding tests and evaluations all over the place but supplying nothing (or very little) useful in the way of curriculum updating and upgrading, let a…[Read more]

@mudlark  @puroandson  @pedant et al, great responses; thanks.  You’re all right, my “analysis” is an example of “overthinking” stuff from a start that was sketchy at best.  Well, that’s one way the Long Delay gets to me, I suppose.  I should be made of stuff both sterner and less cynical, perhaps.  Or I could blame US politics — currently more…[Read more]

@puroandson  I don’t recall him “serving up fodder for their reverence”?

I put that clumsily — I didn’t mean that the Doctor was deliberately putting on a show to impress, but rather that his actions would become the stuff of more legends about him as a hero.  He fulfills the role they expect of him — war hero, Time Lord, rebel who sides w…[Read more]

@mudlark  @pedant  Maybe because the Doctor himself doesn’t seem to grasp it until pretty late in the day — in “Heaven Sent”, I think, when he figures out that the hybrid secret is what his torturers are after, and who would that be other than the TLs.  I must be, you know, slow . . . well, maybe I am.  Thanks for prodding me to look back and thi…[Read more]

@puroandson  Son of Puro, Yes, “they’ll kill you” means what you ultimately said. It’s really hard to explain it so much for that kind of stops it being absorbed at the point it’s written.

Oh, absolutely — that’s why I’m still chewing these issues over many months later — I don’t think about it that way while I’m watching an episode, es…[Read more]

@winston   He won’t ask her to do anything he isn’t prepared to do himself. I love the 12th Doctor.

Yup.  My guy too.  “See me” becomes “I hear you”.  Long sigh of satisfaction.

@missy  I liked Bab-5 too, very much, and was sorry to see it go.  Thing about the columnist’s slightly bitter nostalgia for “original” Star Trek is that he’s objecting to increased commercialization of the show in more recent times (spin-offs, dolls (“action figures”, for boys, cuz gods forbid etc.), novelizations and books, more $ and polish i…[Read more]

@arbutus — I agree that the Donna Solution (! if we can call it that) was awful; on the other hand, look what an excellent stimulus it was to the beauty of “Hell Bent”, how many years later?  The Doctor tries to do a Donna, is rebuked in spades by Clara, and *bang* — right before our eyes, the character of the Doctor grows, because this time he…[Read more]

Thanks for all this good stuff, very helpful in perspective and backstory departments.

@pedant  so true about Moffat’s economy with words — I think much of the criticism of his plots as being too “convoluted” (usually linked to some resentful remark about “showing off how clever he is”) really boils down to “How dare he make me feel not as…[Read more]

Read this in the NYT today at the coffee shop, and suddenly I realized where I’ve been hearing this melancholy, slightly embittered and resentful tone lately.  You all will recognize it too — and look at the elements that the author cites as the causes of his discontent:

How…[Read more]