@Purofilion  @Barnable   Thanks!  Good, good stuff . . .

My sister’s doing well.  The hospital is only a few blocks away, and I spent the afternoon there with her, cracking up each other and the nurses.  I think she’ll be going home in a day or two; then we start the re-orientation of her eating habits etc., and probably mine too since we two…[Read more]

@purofilion  By all means, please do — I’ve heard this composer’s name, but somehow associated him with 17th c France; odd.

Re your teacher’s comment, though, I think a lot of young kids have experienced a broken heart, just not in a romantic context (yet).  I’ve seen recent research concluding that young people, right up through their late t…[Read more]

@lisa  Yeah, on Layer-cake guy, he’s on Karn (I think) and disguised (?) as a Sister, so I think he’s revealed himself and is interrogating the real Sisters in a menacing way about the whereabouts of the Doctor — who may already have left them.  Apparently the Doctor really did have to go someplace else one way or another, because bad guys had a…[Read more]

@purofilion   I think he’s okay with running, but he started S8 with a deliberately funny run with his arms down and his hands flared out a little, which some people called “the penguin run”; Armando Iannuci, I think, had pointed out that Capaldi tends to come up with a comical run for a comedic character (there’s a clip from TToI, think, of…[Read more]

LENIN, damn it, not Lenine.

Oops — just checked, and “Now I’m ready” is on the trailer clip released Sept 10, I think, at about 0:18, and the background is not Karn (at least not what we see of Karn in the Prologue clip), but someplace unidentifiable because the entire background is obscured by a massive soviet poster featuring Lenine in heroic mode.  WTF?  Baffledom.

@purofilion   Sibelius! — I lived that music as a kid (I mean, a pre-pubescent kid), via my own little tinny-voiced phonograph in my room.  Sibelius was what I found (and Liszt, Rachmaninoff, Brahms, some Tchaikovsky, and others) that helped me to hang onto my own dark tones while the grown-up around me were all telling me that I was a happy li…[Read more]

@Lisa    I’m sticking with Davros. Because I think the Doctor is going to try
again to change history and it maybe likely to be something to do with changing Davros.
The sisters line ‘his servants seek you everywhere’ to me that probably means Daleks?

That one disguised as a Sister of Karn, but with a stratified face, says in a sinister tone, “…[Read more]

So much good stuff here — !  Happy to have it.  Now I’d like to request any funny/macabre music you’ve got handy — my sister, who lives nearby and is turning 60 in a few weeks, had a coronary event in the early hours of this morning.  She’s okay — in hospital, with a stent, probably going home tomorrow with a stent, meantime wise-cracking th…[Read more]

@janetteb  He goes off to meditate, but I doubt that he’s really going to do that; he’s going to think out loud, and we’re going to listen in, so we get some idea of how he’s come from that high-spiritied departure with Clara for new adventures at the end of Last Xmas to what looks like hiding, or healing, or whatever, *without* Clara, with the…[Read more]

@mudlark   “The pressure to conform” does show up as a problem with even our current examples of at least *trying* to be a Utopia, meaning Scandinavian countries.  If you read mystery novels from up there . . . also, of course, the failure to achieve this sort of “leveling”, since crime novels show you the elements of failure, exploitation, r…[Read more]

@arbutus  “Omelas” was exactly the story I was thinking of when I wrote that.

There’s been some evidence recently that polar bears have begun mating with northern browns (maybe grizzles?) producing blended offspring.  So maybe the great white bears have begun this genetic hiding thing in the face of pretty certain extinction of their present f…[Read more]

@purofilion  Sorry, my post above on S9 thread was for you (and also @lisa) except that I dropped an “o” out of your @!

@purfilion  Yes, the voice — that anchored-low, slightly husky, raw-honey voice, that’s something new from him, I also think (though I’ve heard it in some lower-key interviews, and possibly in that “You want my job” speech to Ollie from the end of TToI, when he drops the terrier snarl for a minute).  Even my sister, who goes for a completely d…[Read more]

@mudlark   The Bone Clock has acquired a very good reputation; thanks for reminding of my intention of reading it.

@purofilion   Yes, excellent: longer scenes and single takes give you breathing time.  I think if the actors are good enough, susceptible viewers breathe with them, which puts us right into the scene in an intimate way that feeds perception, rather than just the satisfaction of being entertained (though that, too, one hopes).  It’s like with re…[Read more]

@levram   So true; happiness isn’t a story.  For a story, you need drama; for drama, you need challenges, not contentment.  That’s why SF writers rarely write Utopias — they turn into travelogs: “This is how we do our agriculture, so that the right foods are produced in the right quantities by people happy to spend their days weeding, ha…[Read more]

@arbutus  On modern music — I have a theory that when “serious” music went academic, becoming all about structure and math and producing the weirdest pitches and runs possible, the actual creative impulse in composers migrated to other venues where people would still listen to it and be enthusiastic about it or meh: film and TV scores; popular…[Read more]

@mudlark  Thanks!  Just lost my grip there a bit, in the excitement — !

@bluesqueakpip  It’s the Portable CD Player of Rassilon.

Okay, it’s official: I love you.

I’m trying to ramp my expectations down so I can actually pay attention to what happens on the screen — I think it’s going to be a hell of a great season, which will of course terribly disappoint the people who get their jollies by complaining about whatever the episodes should have been instead of what they are (“criticism”, weird idea of).