@purofilion   Well, that’s me, really — an old chestnut?  Could be; you never know . . . so grrr away if it suits you.  What I mean is, I think that everything is basically energy in some (temporary and always changing) form, and that energy is also — numinous?  Luminal?  Numismatic?  Ah, not supernatural (since everything that is, is natur…[Read more]

@purofilion   Oh, it’s a thing, all right.  That ship has incontrovertibly sailed, IMO.

And yes, of course, one can flee from terrible memories and everything that brings them up again.  But even if Danny were sort of hiding out at Coal Hill School, for the purpose of giving the poor man some dimension an army mate could have tracked him down an…[Read more]

@purofilion   Yep, *you* are responsible for the Ring of Bleble”, and don’t you forget it!  I just borrowed it for a joke . . . I like the sound of it so much!  Yes on the orphanage background — which could have been made more real and significant if he’d gotten news of the orphanage, welcome or not, and been given a moment to react (the or…[Read more]

@DoctorFoo  I think maybe the writers aren’t fully aware of the effects in S8 of having a suddenly very amped-up level of acting from their leads, so they didn’t realize that they really needed to also amp-up the writing for Danny, since he had to be more than a mere spear-carrier to be accepted as a legitimately strong influence on both Clara…[Read more]

@gamergirlavatar — India!!  Tenerife!!  What next, Iceland?  All this globe-trotting is new-ish, isn’t it?  The Beeb must have loosened the purse strings significantly.  The upside is — exotic backgrounds probably means *more alien settings* in S9.  Great!  I’m ready.

Meantime I sulkily entertain myself with trying to work out a story that s…[Read more]

@Schmitty91B   “Cross”?  “Irritable”  “grumpy”  “grouchy”  “tetchy”  — lots; too many, probably.  We used to say someone who was grouchy was “a crosspatch” but I haven’t heard that word in years, and I may never have heard it outside my own family.

Here’s something rather charming:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBmiG64tNLw

My favorit…[Read more]

@purofilion  Oh, yes, that casserole thing got old after a while, but they didn’t push it very hard, thank gods.

I just noticed — the”Script Editor” on the first two series of “Vera” is listed as “Elaine Collins”.  That’s Capaldi’s wife, isn’t it — I read somewhere that she’s an actor who works on the production end of things too.

@lisa —  Well, the tree thingies might have persuaded Anabel to join them so that she could help them tune their broadcast “ideas” better to Maebh, the more receptive sister.  Maebh, in her broadcast to the world, doesn’t ask the tree thing to return her sister, but asks her sister to come home, which her sister does.  Maebh is certainly “s…[Read more]

@purofilion  Oh, yes, thanks!  I am slowly working my way through MM, partly for the scenery, partly for the weirdly stylized stories and the rather massive body count (who will die how this time?).  It has its charms, but a little goes a long way — and there’s such a *lot* of it!  I did come across that episode, and liked it.  But that must be a…[Read more]

Are we sure that the Nethersphere *has* died?  Last word that I recall is CyberDanny (or maybe the original stored Danny, before he or a copy of him was downloaded into the armor for DiH) telling Clara that the Nethersphere “is dying”, at the time that the Afghan boy is returned to earth — or, a download of his mind in a cloned body?  What is h…[Read more]

@lisa  Thanks.

@janetteB  Oh, right, I see.  Yes, there are certainly some loose ends.

@lisa  I generally draw a blank when it comes to River Song, mainly because she was so time-hoppy that I could never figure out what the hell she was doing or trying to do — so I sort of stopped paying attention.  I recall her as pleasingly bold and tough, and I should have liked her — strong feminist overtones, and I liked her parents — but I…[Read more]

@JanetteB  Yes, I *do* complain about Danny’s shallowness; I think if was a huge waste to leave him as pretty much nothing but, er, “top layer”, as it were, when it would have taken so little to give him some reality-weight in the story.  That was an authorial mistake, and I think it cost them later, in terms of viewers being able to credit C…[Read more]

@Spider —  Well, you (and our eternal sidekick, Autocorrect) have definitely made my evening with a “Laser bean” scanning the area . . . Ah, the image . . . When not filled with rage and dread for various and sundry excellent reasons, I do love living in the modern era!  Who knew that new tech would be the source of so much verbal slapstick?  …[Read more]

@JimTheFish  I found the Time Lords on Gallifrey utterly ridiculous, frankly, and forgot them as quickly as I could; I hope they stay gone for a loooooong time.  Bunch of pompous, puffed-up popinjays!  Of course the Doctor took off, makes perfect sense.  I’ve always had a problem wondering why the heck he wants so badly to go back, the rest of the…[Read more]

Fortitude’s done, and I’m annoyed to find that I guessed way to early who really killed that Pettigrew person and why, and meanwhile it looks as if there’s a second season planned, and why people kept going crazy and killing each other (all in exactly the same way, very peculiar).  Wanted surprises, got — no surprises.  And torture, too, of c…[Read more]

They’re running DW on BBCA, mixing up episodes from SmithDoc’s era in what seems to be a random order — I caught “Let’s Kill Hitler” followed by “The Girl Who Waited”, and before that something else that I can’t remember the name of, but it was little River being kidnapped by a mean lady in an eyepatch.  More tomorrow — it’s every night for a…[Read more]

@bluesqueakpip  Quite right; that is a failing of mine — falling into the comfortable illusion of being back at college, bullshitting about Big Stuff without a lot of forethought behind one’s statements — so apologies, and I’ll try to avoid that in future.  Here’s what I should have said:

“For many people, myself included, nobody’s been able…[Read more]

@lisa  — just came across some interview remarks with Steven Moffatt.  According to him, the Doctor is not a hero; he’s “a man who sometimes acts as a hero”, so that seems to be his definition.

On the other hand, in the same interview SM says that part of the Doctor’s non-hero identity is that he doesn’t go *looking for trouble*, which is, a…[Read more]