@thane16 happy birthday! (thane17!)

That said, they were off to attend a coronation, rather than intending to get stuck into a witch trials/aliens plot. But dramatically, for the plot, the lack of costume makes sense. And potentially, since the Doctor is trying really hard at the moment not to get involved in history, the unplaceableness still could make sense.

regarding the clothes, I can think of a reason for the crew not to be in costume. This is a time period where clothes still very much denoted status. I can’t remember if laws still specifically decreed what clothes you were allowed to wear according to your class, but if they didn’t, they had until fairly recently. This group of people turning up…[Read more]

Lots of interesting. Once again this Doctor is much firmer – in theory at least – about not messing with timelines. I feel sure this will come up near the end of the series. However, it is such a great change, I feel we’ll need some explanation for why this sudden emphasis on it.

People have talked of hesitation, passivity, ineffectualness of th…[Read more]

@turntheclock most of the tension within the episode was based on religion rather than race. As for social morality look at this

sorry, pronoun slip in there at the top.

re: the system, The Doctor does have a history of holding the human race to a higher standard than artificial intelligence the human race has created. See Smile, for example. In that episode, does the fact they’ve forgotten killing so many people really make it all right? Possibly, partly because it was after all a problem in the programming, and…[Read more]

@janetteb is is a writ thing because it can be disrespectful – calling servants by their surnames, for example, or school boys – surname without title can be disrespectful. But when I was at a school which had formerly been all boys, the boys being called by surname and the girls by first name didn’t sit well with me. (It didn’t help that roughly…[Read more]

@lionheart564 that’s fine if it’s consistent. It’s the whole ‘Eccelson, Tennant, Smith, Capaldi, Jodie’ thing over here that grates.

@thane16 It’s endearing, it’s always ‘my team’ against the Chaser. The questions are really random as well, sometimes so easy it puts them off, sometimes genuinely hard, sometimes so confusingly worded it takes a minute to work out what they’re asking. And Walsh always looks really pleased when he knows the answer.

He’s been in Coronation Street,…[Read more]

@thane16 The Chase, it’s called. He’s still signed up for it, but they’re running through old episodes (one question recently was ‘what is the name of the Queen’s only great grandson’). It’s endearingly human, the contestants go up against an actual person, Walsh is pitched as being on the side of the contestants. I think there’s some malarky over…[Read more]

@idiotsavon@janetteb, Bradley Walsh is doing a fantastic job. I fully expected he was going to be an occasional character, like Wilf and Rory’s dad. I really like having a middle aged man actually a full time Tardis team member.

I really hope he gets an award for this, I really enjoyed his modest crowing on The Chase about having the best selling…[Read more]

@bluesqueakpip agree about the system. This seemed like a very complex and efficant entity trying to deal with human emotions, and crunching the numbers unfortunately doesn’t always work on us.

Reminds me a little of Smile, in a sense. In that case, the robots had no memory of what they’d done to the humans, but that wasn’t the whole of the…[Read more]

Hi @craig, sorry to bother you. Just got a private message from a fransico alice, much the same lines as the Harriatta ones, Also works at the United Nations and uses hotmail.

re: bots, it seemed to me that all the consciousness was in the system, not individual robots.

@lionheart564 I think this episode was very much about alienation. we see two people apparently in charge of ten thousand manual workers who don’t quite trust each other, or the system, which was set up before the requirement to employ 10% humans, is more or less self running and running the humans as well.

This system, though incredibly…[Read more]