@mrswho was it really mentioned more than in passing?

I love certain parts of this, little things ‘do you know how annoying it is when my husband’s right?’ The Doctor trying to do smalltalk. Ryan’s shadow puppets. Graham, throughout this episode, was fantastic, and Ryan inching a little closer to that covered ‘grandad’ saying he didn’t like his father retiring to himself as Ryan’s ‘proper…[Read more]

@pedant loved the shadow puppets! Nicely done too, just there, in the background, easy to miss. Wish he’d done deformed rabbit, though, that’s my favourite.

@rob I agree with @bluesqueakpip that this is character development rather than a gender shift. I have always been a little concerned that certain changes to the character coming with the change of sex could seem to Say Things about differences between the sexes which I don’t personally think are true. And it’s hard to watch TV without a certain…[Read more]

@the25thdoctor I agree with @missy – and that’s kind of the point of the name.

@msrbahar did you read the second part of my comment? I’ll paste it here:

White people are the majority in the UK. But we have a lot of people, we have a lot of people who are not white, many of them are actors. This means that it is possible to chose an ethnicity for a part, and still chose the actor on the basis of their acting skills. The fact…[Read more]

@msrbahar First of all, Cole isn’t of African-American ethnicity, as far as I know the actor has no links with the USA whatsoever. And Gill’s character we’d usually say of asian ethnicity if we felt the need.

Secondly, thing is, those white doctors and companions, that people didn’t like, did people criticise their casting for being based on…[Read more]

@Lisa ‘You have a European union made up of countries that mostly don’t trust each other.’ well, yes, that’s rather the point. You realise how unusual it is for us, historically, not to be at war with France? One of the factors for the First World War was a network of alliances between European countries. Historically, attempts to maintain fr…[Read more]

@msrbahar: ‘you think they don’t discuss such matters in casting and production?’ we already know they do. We know this because they were very open about the fact they wanted to cast a BAME actor for Bill (which to some people translated as ‘she only got the role because she’s black’ as though this requirement cancelled out every other part of the…[Read more]

@Lisa we don’t elect our own civil servants.

When it comes to austerity, I’m much more concerned by the actions of the IMF than the EU…

@swordwhale ‘what is Puro?’ not what – who (appropriately!) thane16 is two people, mother and son. Puro is the mother. So if it ever seems as though @thane16 has two personalities, they are two separate people.

@ichabod: quite. ‘The road to the holocaust was paved, not with good intentions but indifference’ (I’m not sure who the quote is from but I have a feeling Sasaha Baron Cohen wrote his dissertation on it, or maybe coined it himself).

In fact the episode showed fairly few white people close up, and only four, I think, with speaking roles. So we…[Read more]

@swordwhale  ‘Duct tape, bungee cords and fence wire… oh yeah, and cable ties…’

took me a while to work out what you were responding to here…

@kevinwho I do think as a rule, it’s best to keep alternative scripts to the fanfic area. But regarding what you wrote, the fact you feel something like this is needed reminds me of times in writers workshops when people discussed the opening chapter of a novel by, every time a question was raised within it, asking what it was referring to, what…[Read more]

@mudlark I accidentally made ginger snaps once by not putting enough flour in the gingernuts. Blew my mind. (This was before Doctor Who was revived, to be fair).

@misterf55 on the chance you’re not deliberately trolling (though the insistence on ‘actress’ was a red flag): Doctor Who has always been used as a platform for voicing injustices. As has a lot of science fiction. It’s a very political genre. Now often writers do this by, say, examining colonial issues through people arriving at alien planets, or…[Read more]

Who hasn’t been hijacked. Have you ever thought about what the Daleks and Cybermen represent?

Just had a thought from reading facebook comments about ‘how can there still be racism so far into the future’. And to be fair, much of AG Who has strongly implied that specific racism between different ethnicities of humans could have died out (unless someone is blue…). The idea of a white supremicist from the future is deeply depressing in the…[Read more]

@cedarbranchtardis this is just like the fake memes where someone claims to have made some kind of a program absorb so many episodes of a television series than write something about it, only with troll comments on the series in this case.

@pedant Quite, Martha and Bill stood out a little, Bill possibly less than she really would have, Ryan is in genuine peril. It’s a stark difference. ( A black woman literally just had to change her seat on an airplane because a white man didn’t want to sit next to him. But at least the conversation is about how he ought to have been arrested,…[Read more]