@pedant  What sort of show is “The City”?  What popped into my head was China Mieville’s novel “The City and the City” (prolly not).  Mieville is too convoluted for me in book form (I more or less quit at “The Scar”), but I’d love to see a smart screen presentation of his work.

@swordwhale  I watched a documentary about Pony Penning Day on Chi…[Read more]

@kevinwho  @chiana  Great bonkering Bonkers!  Love it.  If only . . . !  But, no chance.

Me, I’ll be quieting down here, I think, during this season anyway (unless it starts giving something more to chew on).  It’s pretty much what I expected from Chibnal, and the fact that I had some glitchy problem getting the spiders ep and everything since a…[Read more]

@troyorsline  I did wonder if Pting was Stitch

Gargoyle Stitch; or Stitch mutated into something even meaner that Stitch-at-the-start.  Definite resemblance.

@thane16  (Puro)  often political correctness is a term in the pejorative used to denigrate courtesy.

Yes, the evil Right has captured that phrase it and turned it into a pejorative, with great success.  Someone once asked author Ursula LeGuin, in an aggressive tone, whether she would describe herself as “politically correct”.  She answered, wit…[Read more]

The coda; yes.  Absolutely necessary for modern moderns who weren’t there, or anywhere near it in terms of time, to be reminded that this was one of many starts on a path that keeps branching both upward and downward toward a goal that may not be achievable in a hundred years or more (even lots more), but is nevertheless worth fighting for all…[Read more]

@miapatrick  You can always look back in time and find people who went against the grain in society regarding racism, sexism, homophobia etc, but these are always the exceptions. And it’s tempting and more pleasant to sit here in the 21st century and believe we’d be one of these people if we’d been born and brought up in the past, but it’s s…[Read more]

@thane16  Puro — Ah, thanks for that clip from Close Encounters — I can’t watch that end sequence (and its rich, playful score) without tears these days — it seems like some message from the past of a different planet, one still full of curiosity, good will, and the confidence *not* to meet a ET visitor with guns blazing.  That’s not us any m…[Read more]

@bluesqueakpip  while Yaz would have experienced socialprejudice in Alabama, the ‘Jim Crow’ laws largely didn’t apply to her.

Thanks for checking that out; Yas’s relative invisibiliy in general, in that setting, seemed odd.

@texasferrets   Of course they made sure to never show a single person who wasn’t a backwoods racist bigot.

Judging by the newsreel footage at the time of the Montgomery bus strike and the sit-ins, anyone in those hotbed-of-hatred cities who wasn’t a racist bigot mostly kept their mouths shut and helped if they saw a way to do that quietly, for…[Read more]

@swordwhale  Love the boots… I have lived in boots like that forever.

Aghh!  Just looking at those boots make makes my feet hurt . . . Ah, well, guess I’m still just a tenderfoot.

@mudlark  Thanks, ducks!  Went to lunch with my sister today at a pretty decent Italian place, then discovered by accident a French bakery etc. which looked pretty good — but we were full up.  But when I asked for an espresso, remembering where I live, I had a look at their “espresso machine” (“Yes, we have one, right there — you just push th…[Read more]

@pedant  Cross purposes; not a problem.

@pedant  Okay, I do not remember 12 being able to “leave at any time”.

In that case you did not pay sufficient attention, which is far enough. Moffat’s writing is unforgiving of those who don’t. But it was spelled out clearly, in text.

I just checked “Heaven Sent”, looking for the You Can Leave At Any Time clause, and of course got sucked i…[Read more]

@pedant  A dark, gloomy….custard cream dispenser.

Dash it all!  Now I want one of those.  Only, chocolate mousse for me, thanks.

@thane16  The colourised sequence reminded me of the interior of sclerotic bowel.

Er — yes.  I was trying to put my finger on it — uh, trying to come up with something visceral like that . .

@rob  LOL!…[Read more]

@pedant  As was repeatedly stated, he could have left at any time. So maybe add “stubborn” to “patient”.

Talking about the Confession Dial, you mean?  Okay, I do not remember 12 being able to “leave at any time”.  I remember that he could give up a certain secret and then be released (or not — it was by no means a fixed bargain).  Not the s…[Read more]

@miapatrick  someone turning up with a fully developed fantasy world in which they are, notably, a pacifist, gun hating alien, would get a referral to primary care at best.

In the real world, sure.  In a show like this, where anything goes — all they’d have to do is to get round those problems in a way that convinces viewers who aren’t all t…[Read more]

@pedant  There is literally nothing in canon that supports the idea that the Doctor would remain contained, and about 50 years worth that suggests the opposite.

The Doctor, fully in his right mind, was “contained” for four and a half billion years in the trap that was the Confession Dial.  I think that counts.  And I think the new female Do…[Read more]

@troygorsline  I found that Tardis interior very dark, gloomy, confusing, and cluttered-seeming.  Looked at it again, and I thought, this looks like the Tardis that 12 would have ended up with, while his Tardis interior would be much better suited to JoDoc.  All that gloom and smouldery orange just seems so divorced from the cheerful optimist wi…[Read more]

@arbutus  . . . the “test” was not to kill a defenceless victim, but to find a random human without help from among the population of an entire planet. Actually quite a hard thing to do, except that he cheated.

And flat out murdered several people who were not his target, and then mutilated them to take trophy teeth.  Tim Shaw doesn’t quali…[Read more]

@cathannabel  Gravitas comes with that male voice.  Even those of us most passionately enthusiastic about the gender switch have some adjusting to do

Indeed.

@bluesqueakpip  . . . convention of calling women by their first names – but that’s because of the historic subordination of women in our society. Women are called by their first names –…[Read more]