Forum Replies Created
-
AuthorPosts
-
30 January 2013 at 23:12 #2189
@phaseshift sorry about the weird (bad weird, not good weird – good weird always being a GOOD THING)
@jimthefish LOL 🙂
Look at the link @craig has just posted – it will make you smile…
30 January 2013 at 23:08 #2185@craig – oh no those are great! Maybe post in Fan Creativity too?
I particularly like her rendition of the third and tenth Doctors, because those drawings somehow capture the personality of Pertwee and Tennant’s Doctors particularly well, in a certain mood anyway (twinkly/ naughty for Three and a bit mardy for Ten) Ha ha – love it!
30 January 2013 at 22:34 #2173Welcome back @phaseshift to the Who sofa! We’ve sworn a lot whilst you’ve been away…
Of course, I mean sworn undying fealty to the Whoniverse a lot, not actually “spent time seeding the blog with on-purpose-obscenities”
🙂
30 January 2013 at 22:07 #2169As there is a nice picture of Neil Gaiman’s mug above here, I want to say that I hope the code to the TARDIS’ old control room in The Doctor’s Wife “crimson, eleven, delight petrichor”, which our presently absent moderator @phaseshift did such a good job de-coding way back when (“the blood of the Doctor will bring new life and renewal”) comes back and has continued significance.
It seems to me that it is ripe to, what with the death and rising again sacrificial God themes of Easter, and the situating of the Doctor’s death around Easter last season and now the upcoming significance of Easter (and eggs) this season.
30 January 2013 at 22:00 #2165@jimthefish – I had to go and look at the Telegraph comments after you said that!
Some Telegraph readers live in a dimension quite opposite to my own.
Quoth someone there:
As long as they do not introduce more homosexuality and cross species lesbianism into the show
and there was me thinking as long as we get more of Jenny and Vastra and a return of Captain Jack for the 50th! 🙂
30 January 2013 at 17:20 #2147could our impossible woman have been scattered through the timerverse by some sort of Tardis mishap? Bad Wolf in humonoid form?
@rob – yes indeed – and that TARDIS mishap could have been the exploding TARDIS could it not? If Oswin’s scattering in time/ space was a result of “Big Bang 2” that would be great, because it would mean that Moffat was tying it all together rather than just moving on and leavin loose threads behind.
Personally, I’m convinced we will return to “Big Bang 2″ plot-wise because of the”Silence Will Fall” hissing voice in the TARDIS as River got stuck in its time-loopy explosion, particularly given that the theme of “”The Silence” is not over yet.
Rebooting the universe is some pretty big mojo and I wonder whether hubris is involved…
28 January 2013 at 21:42 #2059Lots of great Time Lord society / Time Lords “incoming alert” posts.
I am not convinced that the kind of full-on reset that comrades @jimthefish and @bluesqueakpip are suggesting will happen.
I can go with the idea of the Doctor dying and being reborn with a new set of regenerations. I can even buy “amnesia Doctor” for a while – a mad man in a box with no memory of who he used to be.
But, wiping his memory/ the universe’s memory clean completely and permanently for a full re-boot? I don’t know – that’s a big mythography / merchandise stream to jettison (as new fans won’t plug into the Doctor’s history if he can’t remember it himself).
I felt so sorry for Omega in The Three Doctors as a child – abandoned and trapped in the singularity, without corporeality.
Hmmn – what if the Doctor is the “Alpha” (beginning) to Omega’s the “end”?
Perhaps Gallifrey doesn’t escape from the Time Lock, but the Doctor and River’s children founds a new Gallifrey. The weight of responsibility for the universe is lifted from the Doctor’s shoulders, and he can go back to being a wandering iconoclast?
Cue future fun with New New Gallifrey?
28 January 2013 at 21:25 #2055@jimthefish those are lovely – very “old skool” feel to them!
I do adore the fan creativity thread.
I might have to blow a rasberry tho’ – not at you I hasten to add – just to see whether our phase-shifted moderator @phaseshift shows up to tick me off 🙂
27 January 2013 at 17:32 #2005Dammit – I can’t resist… Hmmn well this has exercised my mind. You say that River in The Impossible Astronaut knew how it would all play out, including Tesselecta Doctor.
I’m not so sure. River tries to shoot the astronaut and then when her shots have no effect she murmurs “Of course not” but to herself – she’s not putting on a show for the others here. So the first time it plays out, I don’t think she knows for sure that the astronaut is her. She knows she is in the Stormcage for killing the Doctor, but she doesn’t know how it happened.
In The Wedding of River Song this dialogue, about River not being able to remember the murder, indicates that in “Version 1 of the Doctor’s Death” River had no memory of herself in the suit:
River: I tried to fight it but I can’t. It’s too strong.
The Doctor: I know. It’s okay. This is where I die. This is a fixed point. This must happen—this always happens. Don’t worry. You won’t even remember this. Look over there.River: It’s me. How can I be there?
The Doctor: That’s you from the future. Serving time for a murder you probably can’t remember. My murder.
River: Why would you do that? Make me watch?
The Doctor: So that you know this is inevitable. And you are forgiven. Always and completely forgiven.
The thing is, because River is clever, she found a way to re-write time, so that the second time around she does not shoot the Doctor, she freezes time instead and then he has to go on a quest to undo that freeze (which is causing the universe to collapse) and in doing so he works out the Tesselecta Doctor solution.
So, the second time it happens, then the-River-shooting-the-Doctor remembers it all and promises the Doctor she will go to the Stormcage for him, to cover up his faked death.
27 January 2013 at 14:55 #1985@scaryb – I am also up to my eyeballs in work 🙁
But, as the Doctor says in Let’s Kill Hitler “You should always waste time when you don’t have any…”
Just had to pop back onto the sofa to profer requested jammy dodgers, as per Emergency Protocol 11 – perhaps with hot toddy?
<mmmn that’s better – oops, hope I didn’t eat them all myself – shakes packet 🙂 >
27 January 2013 at 14:46 #1983Re-watched this episode yesterday.
I still love it. In fact, I think it deepens now we know more of the pieces of the puzzle than we did on first watch.
In particular I contemplated the loneliness and bravery of River, travelling with her parents and her husband on this adventure at points in their time-streams when only she knew what they all meant to each other. Moreover (we know now) she was forced to witness the murder of the Doctor by “the impossible astronaut”, strongly suspecting that it might be herself in the suit, given that she knew she was in the Stormcage for killing the Doctor (even if, in that time-stream, she didn’t remember the particulars). Again, she unable to share the burden of her knowledge with anyone.
Props to Kingston for carrying all that in her performance, so that it works both as a mystery and as a now-we-know delivery.
I did notice something – when Amy was reading about the Doctor’s adventures in history in the red book at the start, it mentioned that the “mysterious Doctor” was borne aloft in his escape from the Tower of London by a “shining sphere” not by a blue box. The make-shift TARDIS which, we now now, the Doctor and IDRIS built in The Doctor’s Wife resembled a shining sphere.
This happily feeds into the resurrection of the “two Doctors” theory once again and links this Idris TARDIS perhaps to the Lodger TARDIS/ abandoned Silent-inhabited TARDIS…
Mr. Hyde (or perhaps Ganger) Doctor alert! <adjusts blue and red bow-ties with hauteur>
26 January 2013 at 15:57 #1957This is a message from Moffat to Dr. Who fans on Tumblr, but I’m sure he’s talking to us too:
“We hope to fuel your mad ideas yet more, with some more of our mad ideas…”
http://doctorwho.tumblr.com/post/19912114889/dear-tumblr-moffat-knows-what-youre-doing-and
Contemporary sci-fic/ fantasy genre television fiction is essentially a conversation of mad ideas between writers/ the totality of the show’s creatives (because actors, directors and editors contribute to the finished creative work) and their creative fans.
Welcome to the conversation!
25 January 2013 at 20:00 #1939@craig – I echo @scaryb – thanks for the link.
@bluesqueakpip Undoubtedly significant! Those egg references from the five “blockbuster” episodes were going to go somewhere…
To go back to @phaseshift‘s idea that Clara is a computer virus created by the Doctor, @blenkinsopthebrave and I were wondering whether she might be a “patch” for fixing whatever code error crept in during the Big Bang reboot. Perhaps she is an “Easter egg” in computer terms, a hidden piece of coding whose purpose is discoverable by those who can decrypt the puzzle and reveal the “egg”,
25 January 2013 at 19:49 #1937Well who can resist the post notification ” @SallySparrow on the sofa ” ! 🙂
Hello @SallySparrow ! Yes @craig our Overlord is definitely awesome.
We need a Fish Tank and an Aviary next as spaces I think – still makes me smile how many fish and bird themed noms de plume our corner of the Whoniverse has spawned…
24 January 2013 at 21:32 #1873@craig – yes I heard the Jame Naughtie item and it made me smile – definitely us! 🙂
Although, actually we wouldn’t bother with letters, we’d just mine the inner meanings of apparent discontinuities for spiraling clues to infinity…
23 January 2013 at 18:42 #1849@janetteb said, over in the Vincent and the Doctor thread…
Or, or, your last comment inspires another idea, maybe it is all the work of the Time Lords from beyond the time lock, manipulating those on the other side to destroy the Dr before they make their triumphant return. Though personally I would be sorry to see the Time Lords portrayed as evil. Snobbish, arrogant, inflexible yes but evil no. I see them more as “lawful good”, which makes them rather hard to live with.
I think we have already seen the Time Lords depicted as “evil”, in The End of Time (where Timothy Dalton played Rassilon). Deciding to become beings of pure consciousness at the expense of time itself, and all other beings in the universe, is pretty evil – it’s genocide of the universe basically – and it of course “justifies” the Doctor’s “genocide” of the Time Lords (although actually they are just locked in a Time Lock). The desperation of an endless time war with the Daleks pushed Time Lord society to a point where it was willing to consider a “final solution”.
I found that story problematic for a number of reasons. Tennant’s Doctor was getting overwrought by that stage and (as I’ve said elsewhere) Sims doesn’t do it for me as the Master.
So yes, I feel certain that the Time Lords will reappear, most probably in the 50th Anniversary year as they are part of the Doctor’s “origin” story.
What I would have liked more exploration of re The End of Time was the Time Lords side of the story. The depiction of the Time Lord vote on Rassilon’s proposal was worthy of further narrative – whispered politicking in corridors on Gallifrey, the agonies of a few “moral” Time Lords who dared to campaign openly against Rassilon’s proposition and who were “disappeared”…
Something I do miss from past Who was a willingness to tackle political systems and choices in some of the stories over time – I’m thinking about Genesis of the Daleks. There are indeed instances of that in Nu Who, such as the future Earth-society (and sinister corporation) which created “the Flesh” or the Cat Nuns of New New Earth and their terrible experiments (both stories possibly linked) but, when storylines ran over several episodes, there was more room to deliberate world-systems before moving on.
23 January 2013 at 18:25 #1847@janetteb Yes I’m convinced the Time Lords are coming back. You’re right this should probably continue in the Season 7 Part 2 speculation – I’lll head there…
23 January 2013 at 18:22 #1845Hello @haveyoufedthefish you’ve made it over here! Extremely caffeinated or no 🙂 to join @blenkinsopthebrave‘s fourth wall crew.
This can also tie in with mine and @jimthefish ‘s “two Doctors” obsession, as perhaps the version of the Doctor who built the “Lodger TARDIS” is Ganger Doctor or Mr. Hyde to “our” Doctor’s Dr. Jekyll. I would love it if the villain of the piece (the “silence will fall” hissing voice) turned out to be the Doctor himself in “dark Doctor” form.
22 January 2013 at 20:39 #1823Just caught up with this, rather lovely, thread – I’m sure Richard Curtis would be moved and delighted that the episode has prompted shared moments of empathy, as above, as well as discussions about living with depression, or caring about people who do. I suspect it probably did so up and down the country after the episode first aired. The fact that Vincent and the Doctor created a space for discussions with children about the issue is particularly moving.
A moment which stays with me is Amy skipping up the stairs of the museum, singing “Oh, the long life of Vincent Van Gogh!” and the Doctor, just watching her, because he cherishes that she is young and hopeful, but he knows, he just knows, it won’t be that easy.
@phaseshift yes that slice of dialogue made me laugh too – the Doctor was being so fidgety and inappropriate and I really loved the way Smith played that 🙂
I’d agree with @jimthefish – bring on the guest writers, based on their sucess so far!
@jimthefish and @scaryb – regarding the glorious “two Doctors” theory… well, y’know, if this isn’t an actual thing. then it’s a bloody good idea, which should be an actual thing in the future 🙂
Imagine how creepy it could be – the Doctor, our Doctor, dematerialises from episode to episode in the TARDIS as usual, but in some episodes his behaviour is just… off. Eventually, to our horror, we realise two versions have been gadding about the universe, Dr Jekyll and Mr, Hyde style. Of course Hyde-Doctor has done some terrible things which poor Jekyll-Doctor gets blamed for and somehow has to try and fix….
Hmmn, this is sounding a lot like the big, actual, arc again….
I keep coming back to Demon’s Run. What has future-Doctor done which prompted that alliance; Papal Mainframe, spitting contempt of Kovarian and all? I mean, he gads about the universe saving people, planets, and occasionally the universe itself, but, apart from Time Lord genocide, what has he done that would convince a bunch of religious factions that he was a rogue “God” who needed to be defeated?
Apart from the Time Lord genocide… <cue dramatic music>
22 January 2013 at 20:12 #1821Whoa, the sofa was busy last night – love our sofa.
Why are all the best remaining blue police boxes in Scotland? I saw one myself in Edinburgh recently. It was serving as a tiny curry and coffee stand – good disguise – I know that was you, Doctor!
22 January 2013 at 12:28 #1819@craig – thankyou so much 🙂 <sighs with literary relief>
21 January 2013 at 21:08 #1797Swimming by here to give a quick “Praise Him!” to @craig again for the timely hosting (and all that diligent backing up too) 🙂
Sliding Doors huh? From trying to fix scripts to building interweb palaces of Who…
I have a teensy request (honestly, I am not a high maintenance sort of fish!). I missed the “edit” window on my Bond post in the Films thread and it has a typo (an unnecessary “our”) in the first sentence which, now I’ve spotted it, is bugging the nice clean lines out of that opener. If you have time, would you mind deleting it from the universe?
<hides under a fez with pernickety other self> I spend too long arm-wrestling the written word 🙂
21 January 2013 at 20:54 #1795Welcome new members to this genteel corner of the extended Whoniverse!
@scaryb points out that the collective crew of avatars on display look a bit well, scary 🙂 No one has actually hidden sobbing behind the sofa yet tho’ <has a quick peek>.
Who has ever played that game of “If the TARDIS materialised here right now, would you run for those doors without hesitation (deviation or repetition)?” I used to play it a lot as a child, almost certain that blue box would be there on the next street, just around the next corner…
20 January 2013 at 22:47 #1789@janetteb Good post
I many ways the earlier years of Who were more confident about the future of humanity than our current age and that is reflected in the stories. In 1963 people were still wary due to the war and development of atomic energy but by the end of the decade, Pertwee era, the moon landings were bathing science and scientists in a euphoric aura.
Yes absolutely – we are living in times less optimistic than the ’60s without a doubt. I do wonder what The Doctor might look like in another fifty years, should he survive. I’d love to jump in the TARDIS and take a look! Europe will, I suspect, have further declined as a “great power” in the world. Will US popular culture still dominate world markets? If not, there will be fewer trips to Manhattan for the Doc.
By then, he will have been a woman, sometimes. Perhaps he will have married two people at once, as we move towards an acceptance of polyamory.
A future show-runner will, after a couple of decades, revive the character of River Song in a new body. They will meet, not knowing at first who the other is, in an emotional scene which uses archive documentary footage recreate the Earth as-it-was, before the polar ice-caps melted. The TARDIS will still be blue. The Doctor will speak Mandarin…
20 January 2013 at 14:05 #1779Skyfall Meets the Time Vortex – Bond and Who: The Fiftieth Anniversaries
SPOILERS FOR SKYFALL
………………………………………………….
Isn’t it interesting that two of Britain’s biggest fictional character exports, James Bond and The Doctor, both reach their 50th anniversaries this year?As characters, they could not be more different. Or could they? Both are styled iconoclastic rule-breakers with their own fierce codes of morality; head and shoulders above most of their fellow agents/ Time Lords because of their creative individualism. That’s how the British like to see themselves; eccentric, honourable, brilliant rule-breakers with a strong sense of duty. National myths are often most visible in national fiction.
Skyfall is better than Quantum of Solace by an incalculable mile, but then Quantum was a truly turgid and lacklustre affair. Skyfall has been nominated for all the awards and it’s done extremely well at the box office too. I think the uneven but enduring franchise has finally realised that what carries a movie cannot be incredible stunts and stunning sultry women alone (although we expect them in Bond) but a half-decent script, a great director and some wholly decent actors.
Daniel Craig plays an older and more vulnerable Bond and it suits him. Judi Dench is allowed by this script to be a more complex character, ruthless, fond and mistaken. She does it beautifully. I can never resist Ralph Fiennes in anything. He brings his oft-played icy yet fragile majesty to this film. And Naomie Harris, as MoneyPenny, turns in the most actually seductive seduction scene with 007 I think I’ve ever seen. A flirtatious but tender exchange by Shanghai city lights which leaves more than it reveals to the imagination. I really like Ms. Harris.
The script trailed off in its latter half, unfortunately, although shots of the desolate loveliness of Scotland were almost worth it.
My major gripe was the character of Javier Bardem; not Bardem himself I hasten to add, who is an accomplished actor with a pantherian quality. No, I was deeply disappointed that the old trope of an effete and mentally unstable Bond villain (because “homosexuality is creepy, folks!”) could still, so lazily, be written in 2012. However, Bond’s response was a sign of changing times, because, far from being homophobic, it hinted at a bisexual past for 007.
Here, we can tie Bond and Who in their fiftieth years together again, because, in the half century since their inception, one of the most significant changes in British society has been the changing acceptance of homosexuality/ bisexuality; from Joe Orton’s adventures in cottaging at the cusp of decriminalisation, to a Conservative PM (however opportunistically) proposing to legislate for same-sex marriage.
These national narratives of ours, Ian Fleming’s James Bond, and Sydney Newman, Verity Lambert and others’ Doctor Who, reflect those changes. A bisexual Bond (however hinted at, off-camera and one-upon-a-time) and a Doctor with a lesbian lizard woman from the dawn of time and her Victorian maid wife as (occasional) TARDIS companions? Our most well-known fictional icons of Britishness have, along with the rest of British society, stepped some way out of the closet in time for the new century.
I have to say that Doctor Who has been doing it better, for longer, with thanks to Russell T. Davis, Moffat and the reboot. But then, when it comes to The Doctor vs Bond, the former has always been an infinitely preferable iteration of British fantasy masculinity; patrician and arrogant maybe, but endearingly shambolic, fiercely bright, and more concerned with a shared chat, a great day out and a cup of tea and biscuits than a license to kill. Some might say, given our colonial past, that both are highly idealised versions of British interactions with other nations! And so they are, but that I think, is a subject for another day.
@craig and @phaseshift – if you thing this would be better as a blog post because it’s too long as a general post, by all means convert it…
20 January 2013 at 11:44 #1773@blenkinsopthebrave and @scaryb (on the Dr. Who Memories thread) – lovely posts about being there right at the start for the First Doctor.
I do hope the BBC is having the sense to research and record some such memories for the 50th Anniversary (“Growing up with the Doctor through the decades”).
I wish Matt Smith could read your post @Blenkinsop. I’m sure he’d be very moved – and I doubt it’s an accident that you see a flavour of the First in the Eleventh, given the threads of the storyline which seem to be shaping up (wherein the Doctor must contact all his past selves/ “re-set” himself and so go back to the start). Someone else mentioned that we have seen images of the First Doctor here and there during Eleven’s reign (I think briefly during the encounter with the sad Krafayis in Vincent and the Doctor) – so, no, not an accident…
19 January 2013 at 22:06 #1769@phaseshift – wow that’s a lot of Saturday Who!
Yes, this episode was magical and the lighting to go with, oh the lighting; the warm light in River’s hair as she flirted with her unknowing husband, by the TARDIS, the blue light of Amelia’s weed-filled garden, the harsh light in the corridor as River and the Dalek had their chilling confrontation; the greenish eerie light on the Doctor’s face as he strapped himself into the Pandorica.
I noticed that not only was the Doctor wearing appropriate wedding attire when he stepped from the TARDIS following Amy’s “something blue” speech, but he was wearing a red rose-bud which exactly matched the red rose-bud theme of the wedding (Amy had a paper garland of them in her hair and Rory had a real one in his button-hole). How could he have known that? Unless River had already told him?
It’s snowy here too and I’ve just watched Skyfall, the latest Bond – it is also the 50th Anniversary of Bond this year – actually another British character who has very successfully “regenerated” over time. Anyway – I’ll go and post about that in the more appropriate “films” thread at some point!
19 January 2013 at 20:32 #1765I love this episode. I know a lot of folk were disappointed because the big promise of the Alliance from The Pandorica Opens melted away, but this, the core of Team TARDIS (the Doctor, Rory, Amy and River) running around in and out of time paradoxes – satisfyingly zany and deeply emotional both.
I remain convinced this two-parter consists of pivotal episodes, mysteries from which will be returned to!
Why, when River said that the Doctor’s reboot would result in all of them waking up where they were “supposed to be” and not remembering, does River “wake up” on Earth at her parents’ wedding? Moreover, she clearly does remember, as she gives Amy her own blank TARDIS diary, which sets off Amy’s memory chain, which brings the Doctor back.
Surely the fact that River remembers, means she has somehow crossed from the universe-that-was to the new-universe-that-is, un-rebooted? Amy is rebooted, in that she has parents now and Rory is rebooted in that he becomes human again (rather than Auton-Rory) but River? River arrives in order to engineer her own conception (the second “big bang” of the episode as we find out at Demon’s Run).
Moreover, this River is already married to the Doctor (as their delightful exchange at the door of the TARDIS makes clear to us, now) so for this version of River who appears at Amy and Rory’s wedding, The Wedding of River Song has already happened…
Who really “made” River for the Doctor? Madame Kovarian and the Alliance, or the Doctor himself, up-time-stream?
NB – on my “soul” theme from The Faces of the Doctor thread, Eleven says in this episode that when the Alliance used Amy to clone Rory, they got “more than they bargained for” because they also got his “heart and soul”. More evidence for an ensouled universe in Moffat’s Eleventh Doctor imaginings.
Oooh – live re-watch – it’s the marvellous wedding speech coming up…
19 January 2013 at 12:12 #1721Now the dream outlives the dreamer and can never die. Once I was the puppet, now I pull the strings.”
My hopes for the return of the DreamLord are raised 🙂
This idea of dreams coming to life (and mirrroring) is interesting in the bigger Moffat arc, as the Doctor has been struggling for a long time with his mirror self – his mythic self, his own mythography.
Because he became “so big” he caused Kovarian (and persons unknown) to fear him so much that they regarded themselves as being in an “endless bitter war” with him (or his future self) and they stole baby Melody. His mythography, according to River’s speech at the end of A Good Man Goes to War is actually responsible for her “creation” as a weapon; his “own bespoke psychopath”.
And now, as I’ve said elsewhere, the Doctor is reacting (over reacting) to his over-blown mythic self (double?) by attempting to erase all traces of it/ him from the universe.
I don’t know how this ties in with the messed-up time-streams the eagle-eyed among you have spotted in The Snowmen, but it does seem that “realities”, or “dreams” and “realities”, are bleeding together – so it may indeed be the case (as @jimthefish and I were discussing in another time-stream on the board) that the Big Bang, the Doctor’s re-boot of the Universe, had a “code error” of some sort in it which has “jumbled up” time-streams.
Great spot on Cy Lent btw!
18 January 2013 at 19:24 #1675I wasn’t around for the First Doctor, so I’ve only seen him in YouTube clips really <true confession>.
I found this enthusiastic “Geek Crash Course” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7nkf0rDiJo
What amazed me is just how many young women companions he had – all in lovely black-and-white and that far away ’60s style. Where are they all now I wonder?
18 January 2013 at 18:38 #1669@sarahhawke I don’t know much about anime but Lelouche looks interesting!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_Geass in case anyone else is curious.
@scaryb and @sarahhawke
I always felt Moff could have explored the “whatever captures the image of an angel becomes and angel” trope more. It’s brilliant and scary.
Does it mean, for instance, that if you were foolish enough to take a photo of a Weeping Angel and upload it to your Facebook page, that the pic would gradually become animated and send all your FB friends into the past, one by one via webcam, in a snarky consumption of “what I had for breakfast” trivia?
Although the Statue of Liberty Angel was a great gag, it is the creepy and invasive; those things potentially transformative of the borders of the body, which really terrify – like Cronenberg’s The Fly.
18 January 2013 at 18:21 #1667Yay – I’m on the sofa after an epic journey through the snow by train.
Ha ha @phaseshift re the nesting comment. Thanks @jimthefish for posting – also a LOL moment for me 🙂
I love seeing the forest frosted in snow – each stark branch of winter lip-kissed by a moustache of white. The entire woods have “got milk”. But urgh it’s cold. Anyone in the current snow-path quaint enough to still have milk on their doorstep will probably find the flip-side – it’s “got wood”.
@scaryb It’s two fish rolled into one – so sometimes I disagree with myself 🙂
17 January 2013 at 19:39 #1621@phaseshift – Yes, we are talking about a magical “quality” rather than actual casting spells magic, of course… because some “wand” the sonic makes – it doesn’t even work on wood!
This “fairytale magic”, I absolutely agree, is inscribed visually in the Smith era (I also love it). The lighting crew alone should get awards – little Amelia’s ramshakle garden in the Eleventh Hour for instance; frosted blue and lonely and enticing.
The spiral staircase up to the TARDIS in The Snowmen was a perfect example of steampunk-ish whimsy, shot gloriously for “magical” effect. I also really liked, incidentally, the way in which the Doctor’s grief was actualised as a retreat up a perilous staircase; a clinging to the Earth in mourning, hiding at the top of a turret, in a flurry of snow as cold as the cold in his sorrowing hearts… magic 🙂
The question of “the soul” in Who is rather different. However, it is interesting that the Doctor perhaps most at ease with an “ensouled” vision of the universe, is also the one most bedecked in fairytale magic. I like to think that Eleven, after the devastation of the Time War and the slow trauma recovery of Nine and Ten, has come to believe, just a little bit, in miracles again. He mentions Rory’s auton-resurrection as a “miracle” in The Pandorica Opens.
17 January 2013 at 19:22 #1619@craig – you are a star! Possibly even a small supernova 🙂
Right, can we also have – a three dimensional chess board (like the alarming electrified game the Doctor was playing before he found decapitated Dorium), a jukebox and a, uhm, an unlimited supply of jammy dodgers?
Ok, kidding! <slopes under a rock and waits hopefully for biscuits :-)>
17 January 2013 at 18:11 #1587@phaseshift (@jimthefish and @craig) – thank you 🙂
May we have a picture link on the front page under “Current Topics” for this thread “The Faces of the Doctor” please <puleeeeeese with cherries ontop> ?
Otherwise no-one will ever find it and I love the idea of looking at a Doctor per month over the next eleven months of the 50th Anniversary year…
Your demanding multiple time-lines fish-friend…
17 January 2013 at 16:33 #1581Hi @sarahhawke – welcome to the blog! Your avatar looks a little bit scary too – who is it? 🙂
17 January 2013 at 16:31 #1579I am such a softie!
Thanks for being so 🙂 I promise not to make any more unreasonable demands (for a while!)
My posts on The Doctor and magic and @jimthefish ‘s too, have vanished, so I assume they will be re-posted in the soon-to-be “Faces of the Doctor” thread?
Yes – I could indeed turn my “great thoughts” 🙂 into a blog post, but not right now as I’m up to my ears in work deadlines – so maybe repost the discussion thread as is for now?
Many, many thanks to you and @phaseshift for dedication, work and sleepless nights (!)
17 January 2013 at 00:25 #1529<zaps here simultaneously from three other locations in The Doctor Who Forum multi-verse, thanks to strangely accurate teleport>
Curls up on the sofa, determined to stay up really late and catch the new episode of Supernatural via live-stream.
17 January 2013 at 00:06 #1525@phaseshift Cruelly separated from my other self – it’ll be Ten/ Rose all over again 🙂
17 January 2013 at 00:00 #1521Well, I watched the first episode of C4’s new drama Utopia last night <spoiler free mini-review>
If you have seen the episode, there is a thread for the discussion of it over on The Guardian http://www.thedoctorwhoforum.com/forums/topic/general-open-thread-tv-shows/
I wanted to like it – a bunch of geeks who met on the internet are our “heroes” 🙂
The coloring and visual tone of the show were arresting, but bad things (shot however beautifully) happening to people we hardly knew, made for a disjointed and emotionally premature spaghetti soap.
Utopia felt like a mash-up of Shameless, Fresh Meat and Pulp Fiction – stereotyped, awkward and shock-tastically violent.
It may settle into something threaded together by believable intimacies – I’ll stick with it for another episode and see.
16 January 2013 at 23:37 #1517Dear orange-fish @juniperfish – mwwwa ha ha <regenerates via spontaneous parthenogenesis into clone-duplicate>
16 January 2013 at 23:31 #1515Dear blue-fish @juniperfish who do you think the pseudo-TARDIS at the top of Craig’s house belongs to?
16 January 2013 at 23:29 #1513@craig – yes I second the above idea of @phaseshift‘s <flips four fins in supplication?>
Also – ahem – there are two threads for The Lodger?? One started by @craig with about 10 posts in it (which you arrive at via the picture on the front page) and one started by @phaseshift in which @phaseshift and @JanettB only have posted, which you can arrive in by clicking @janetteb‘s last post link on the right side of the blog?
I love parallel universes and was tempted to start having a conversation with my parallel universe self by conversing across the two spaces 🙂 <goes off to implement spacey wacey-ness>
15 January 2013 at 21:44 #1475@phaseshift and @rob and @jimthefish
Sorry if the discussion is not right for the “memory” thread. It’s about a memory (faulty or otherwise!) of the depiction of the Doctor in Old Who vs his depiction today – so it kind of fits!? Feel free to move elsewhere if you can come up with a suitable “elsewhere”.
@phaseshift I don’t know Davidson’s Mara stories – I was so distressed by the departure of Tom Baker that I confess I only watched Davidson sporadically, hence my need for the 50th Anniversary complete-as-can-be Who fantasy full box-set!
I take your point about the smattering of Eastern philosophies in some Old Who stories. Parallel universes and “other realities” are staples of sci-fi however and need not indicate a “spiritual” universe.
Like a lot of Who (of whichever flavour) you can cherry pick storylines and plot elements to pretty much demonstrate any argument because it has such a rich history. I’m not really sure if nu-Who is more “magical” than old really, but I don’t think the old series ever felt the need to run away from a more metaphysical approach to the universe.
Welllll – it’s Moffat’s Who in particular in which I’ve noticed a resurgence of “the soul” (I didn’t know Hartnell’s Doctor had mentioned “the soul” – thanks). It interests me in cultural context because, whilst organised religion in the UK has been losing adherents, there has been a surge of interest in “the spiritual” (as documented by contemporary scholars of spirituality and religion) including, but not limited to, new paganisms, a belief in some kind of connection with the dead, etc. And the “soul” was referred to very explicitly by Eleven in the Almost People two parter, as “evidence” of intelligent sentience, whereas “Science” (although not individual scientists) has not tended to apply that test.
I will keep my ears open for further Eleventh Doctor “soul pronouncements”!
15 January 2013 at 20:57 #1471@craig – thank you! <Yin Yang fish looks extra pleased in your honour>
@bluesqueakpip – that sounds fun, if it really does all link together!
I think this way is fine at the moment <thanks so much for everything @craig our Overlord>
The side-bar which tells you about recent posts is great for navigating. Nice pic for “On the Sofa” 🙂
15 January 2013 at 20:53 #1469Hi folks!
Wwell I’m happily on the sofa, currently with R4 in the background and work on my lap.
If you are one of our more post-shy members this is where you can drop in and say “hello” 🙂
Frequent posters welcome too!
I’m going to give C4’s Utopia a go at 10pm.
@scaryb – this is where we can hide from MPs’ salary increases (cheeky s****s) and other nasties lurking in the world out there in these brave new millenial times.
The Who monster most likely to have got me hiding behind the sofa in the old days? Morbius, definitely – I had nightmares about that claw!
15 January 2013 at 19:24 #1447Hi @craig <waves>
Can we just have one more thread – “On the Sofa”? A general drop in/ hang out space?
This would be a place people can just congregate to say “hello” to one another. If no one posts in it, we can get rid of it, but I have the sense it might be a comfortable spot – somewhere for us to “hang out” with one another, even if we are not burning to dissect something particular at the time?
Thanks (and pretty please?) @juniperfish
15 January 2013 at 00:29 #1433I’m still convinced we will revisit the Moff mysteries as yet unsolved, some of them apparent in this episode.
Amy is trapped in a time-loop in the TARDIS with a count-down. This mirrors the way in which River is trapped in a time-loop inside the exploding TARDIS later on in The Pandorica Opens/ The Big Bang. It also mirrors the count-down which Amy is forced to go through by the Weeping Angels during the Crash of the Byzantium. Pretty sure both count-downs are from Eleven… 10, 9, 8 etc…
The same entity probably trapped Amy and River in the TARDIS on each occasion – the one with the “silence will fall” hissing voice would be my guess. And “it” (my theory is perhaps that it’s The Valeyard) is responsible for the strange TARDIS at the top of Craig’s house and again in the bowels of the Kennedy space-centre / Silence lair.
These count-downs could link to a story where all the previous incarnations of the Doctor are “counted down from”.
If you are going to do a Valeyard story/ deal with the Valeyard and then give the Doctor a whole new bunch of regenerations going forward, the 50th seems like a good time to do it.
14 January 2013 at 23:36 #1431Ah yes, Pertwee gives a “science, not sorcery” speech in the Daemons, doesn’t he.
This really nice tribute fan video to Pertwee and his Unit years with Liz Shaw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yH3K8FNClM
I think captures the certain “man of science” characterisation which was always in the background then – the Brig refers to the Doc as “a scientist” and there’s a lot of chemistry and other equipment in the lab which you can see in the background on a regular basis.
But you’re right, Who was never an educational “hard science” show. Moreoever, the dandy (in flamboyant Bessie) and the Bond-flavoured action hero sides of Pertwee’s Doctor, as well as his characterisation as a scientist, are also in evidence in this vid.
Yes, it’s true that RTD was responsible for the creation of the Doctor as a “lonely God”, although not in a mystical sense but in a sole-survivor of an advanced technological civilisation sense, with exaggerated megalomania towards the end of Tennant’s reign. This theme has continued, as an undercurrent, under Moffat, perhaps most evidently in The God Complex (where the title puns on the Doctor’s own “God complex”).
I would be fascinated to delve into Time Lord society in present Who, should the Time Lords return (which I’m still firmly convinced they will). Gallifreyan society, what we saw of it in the past, was ornate and ceremonial, but there was no hint of a religious system (at least not in the TV show – I know the priestess-oracle Pythia was involved in the Loom novels in Time Lord pre-history). What might Time Lord religion look like? Or, how tempted might the Time Lords have been to set themselves up as Gods to be worshipped by “less advanced” cultures without time-travel tech?
It is clear that when watching a Matt Smith episode alongside Pertwee or Baker old YouTube clips, the fairytale sprinkled cosmic-dust (“magical”) qualities of the present flavour of the show are very apparent. No doubt the influence of Harry Potter is in the mix there somewhere!
Re the relationship between Romanticism and the Enlightenment – yes, it was complicated. In fact I’d say that, postmodernism nothwithstanding, that tension continues to define British culture today. The Olympics and Paralympics opening and closing ceremonies were a fascinating mix of references to the Enlightenment (Newton featured) and yet to magic (The Tempest was also chosen as a prominent theme, with Ian Mckellan as Prospero the sorcerer).
@rob Oh yes, Planet of the Spiders was one of my favourites too (in retrospect as I was too young to see it first time around). Metebelis Three and its blue crystals…
14 January 2013 at 01:07 #1407@jimthefish – nice follow-up.
It’s probably important to distinguish between the RTD-showrunner and Moffat-showrunner perspectives. RTD is a passionate atheist and although religion/ spirituality entered Nu Who under RTD, it was personified by the mad Dalek Emperor who styled himself a God. Moffat’s scripts-as-showrunner have been more inclined to mention the “soul” and it’s perhaps interesting to compare Rose’s possession by the Time Vortex/ TARDIS as “Bad Wolf”, when she became a kind of all-seeing super-being but the “soul” was not a prominent feature of the transference, with Idris in The Doctor’s Wife where the “soul” of the TARDIS was explicitly referenced and personified.
Many movements and periods of scepticism towards the Enlightenment concept of “science and reason as truth” have arisen since the 18thC – Romanticism can be understood as a “backlash” against Enlightenment (as well as the child of it) for instance.
I suppose you could argue that our present era has a number of different threads of scepticism towards science-as-truth. There is the scepticism which has been encouraged by the concerted and deliberate PR of the oil industry towards climate science, for example. There is also the (in my view more well founded) scepticism towards mechanistic perceptions of the body in the Western medical tradition which have maintained a mind/ body split and which have led to popular interest in “alternative medicine” as part of the search for a great wholism. Scientfic narrative is itself continuously evolving, with developments in understanding such as neuroplasticity (that the environment can affect the brain’s pathway developments) likewise undoing previous “truth foundations”.
The “science vs spirituality” debate is an artificial one in any case, I think, given that many scientists (such as Darwin) have been and are also religious/ spiritual.
I don’t see “mysticism” as a “bad thing”, where it concerns a sense of awe regarding the obviously mysterious wonderment of the universe.
The fact that contemporary Who is more overtly infused with a “magical” element isn’t a regrettable de-railing of the advancement of rationality, at least for me, but part, perhaps of a broader cultural “re-enchantment”.
-
AuthorPosts
