@craig  Perhaps those who always threatened to never watch again have actually decided to never watch again.

Nope.  Positives led, but by page 4 it declines back into interminable “look how clever I am!” whining.  Yuck.

@bluesqueskpip  Where did Clara come from? She is a bootstrap paradox. 

Exactly.  And given that she’s a bootstrap parad…[Read more]

@bluesqueakpip  be funny if, at one point, we discover that the ‘Doctor Who Theme’ was, all along, some Gallifreyan punk rock riff that a very young Doctor used to play in his band.

Oh, yes, PLEASE!!!

Waiting for a couple of hours to read more here, as we get first look at 7 pm local time and it’s 6 now.

@whisht  Villains have schemes and plans.  Monsters are simply acting out their own nature.

Sounds like a good rule of thumb to me, though all sorts of other considerations would of course blur the distinctions into each other (like, a monster that has *become* a villain or once was a villain, and v.v., etc).

@winston  Nice to hear from a new member!  Gods know there’s lots to catch up on around here.

BBC APPROVED SPOILERS...

@phamlore  But the problem with the wings of Icarus is they will melt when they get too close to the Sun. And so I fear this will happen somehow to Clara. For she is not the Doctor and I think she is not a Time Lord.

Exactly.  She *was* the “Impossible Girl”, but that’s faded away; then she was the damn-near impossible companion to a damn-near i…[Read more]

@purofilion   “no socks or badgers until they were invented.”  That’s what I thought he said, too!  

and Or …the Doctor believes there’s a traitor on board and he wants people to think ‘ghosts’ -the Doctor lies to protect others, to protect a great secret….By saying ‘ghosts’ they (the crew) are all thinking exactly the same thing -like an earworm…[Read more]

@janetteb  they have seen three episodes thus far and are proclaiming that series 9 is so much better than series 8. Fans can be so fickle I fear the positive comments will not last.

Oh, I think this will be fine; the fans who hated S8 hated Clara as a Player, which she isn’t now, at least not nearly on the same scale; and they were bored and…[Read more]

@purofilion  This week has as much, if not more, speculation about various concepts and ideas -factual, mythological, philosophical, than last week. I didn’t think that was possible.

Yah, well . . . they are on one hell of a roll so far!
I can’t imagine anyone suggesting Moffat isn’t at his absolute best right now. I haven’t visited the Graun, t…[Read more]

@craig  There’s more here if you are interested, including some comments from Toby Whithouse (‘See Hear’ is a BBC deaf programme):

Oh, that’s lovely — thanks, Craig!

@bluesqueakpip  Ghosts do that. At least, they f@@k up electronics, so Toby Whithouse is entirely justified in riffing off that and making his ghosts able to interfere product…[Read more]

@mudlark  That they are threatening and potentially homicidal, despite one of them being an alien from Tivoli – the ultimate pacifist culture – is enough on its own to suggest that they are not manifestations of the souls of the dead they resemble. I don’t think that the Doctor was thinking very clearly here.

Oh, good — I didn’t spot that,…[Read more]

BBC APPROVED SPOILERS...

@janetteb  Right, thanks; I thought there was an Arthurian connection.  There certainly might be one with a “cauldron” that brings dead people back to “life” but without the power of speech: these undersea ghosts keep trying to speak, but don’t actually manage it, do they?  (I’m a bit handicapped here at the moment, since iTunes has messed up my…[Read more]

@cathannabel  The Returned! French spookiness of a very high quality indeed and featuring a drowned valley…

Yes!  How could I forget . . . really looking forward to that one.  Now, I’ve got to get some sleep, but just to have a little nightmare material to take with me, can somebody fill me in a bit on the Fisher King himself, in legend and stor…[Read more]

@jphamlore  Think of an older Lyell who may have been driven to despair and desperation, due to the death of his longtime companion, to finally explore past the safe limits investigating the artifact.

Hmm.  Then maybe the Doctor might be back here later, after Clara has — exited, however that comes about?  Just a possible similarity . . .…[Read more]

@cathannabel  And one of my top books ever (and one which relates to my actual research thus justifying me looking up stuff about it on a research day), W G Sebald’s Austerlitz, refers to the drowned village of Llanwddyn, submerged under the Vyrnwy reservoir.

I am a sucker for stories about that, too — do you know Reginald Hill’s “On Beulah He…[Read more]

@spider  And oh MY doesn’t Capaldi look very, VERY spooky as a ‘ghost’. I’ve got chills just thinking about that look.

Gawd, yes!  Creepy and a half.

The line that didn’t fit at all for me (and didn’t in the trailer either) was ‘I want to kiss it to death’.

It made sense at the time, but now I’m thinking — kiss *what* to death, exactly?  …[Read more]

@bluesqueakpip  he badly wants to believe that the people he’s lost aren’t gone, forever – but as a Time Lord, he’s been taught all his life that death is the end.  Maybe Moffat’s doing the same thing he did with religion in Who – moving us away from that dogmatic scientism: towards a more agnostic/neutral ‘honestly, folks? We really don’t know.’[Read more]

@lisa   I did wonder about that big snake . . . They were voting, though, it said.  Do collectives have individual votes?  Majority rule?

@purofilion  My own existential fear is actually the concept ‘eternity’. . . the knowledge that one could not stop living.  Even in death. Honestly, even writing this gives me the willies. I truly fear this concept. I find that by simply trying not to think about it helps. . . And yours?

I don’t know if this is an existential fear — probab…[Read more]