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@Bluesqueakpip- it is indeed and thank you, that would be great. I was actually working myself up to ask you since you’d mentioned that you did it a while ago 😉

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@Shazzbot: Right! I’ll have pitcher of margaritas please- and one glass! Not exactly weeping, just feeling a bit shakey.

@scaryb: thank you! you can uncross them now. Think it went ok… its weird doing exams on a computer, I kept getting worried about the structure, having to remind myself they’re not marked in quite the same way as assessments. Used lots of examples, so that was good…

@Bluesqueakpip- that was fantastic advice- very true yet I had never heard it before. Than you for reminding me to take the time at the beginning to select which questions to answer.

Now I can start on my creative writing module that started five days ago…

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@DestinyRose- don’t apologise, that’s what this space is for (both the sofa and the site as a whole) 🙂

@everyone else: ok, got exam this afternoon at half two, so please spare me a thought between half two and half five.

(Unless any of you have mastered telepathy, in which case, spare a thought for relics and iconoclasm, cabinets of curiosities, and the evolution of museums, books and the ethics of display and ownership. thank you!)

Had to stop revising yesterday afternoon because hours of screen glare was threatening a headache. (not from this site, though, @craig!)

Probably be in the Rose and Crown later, weeping in the corner….

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@chickenelly- sounds more like dyspraxia to me… there is a tendency to lump all the ‘dys’s under ‘dyslexia’ which irritated me when I was younger, because  I read very well (I am however very clumsy, so dyspraxia suits me far better…)

@Bluesqueakpip- yes, I love my kindle for that. I’m increasingly worried that when my current one breaks/wears out I won’t be able to get a new one with grey background and a keyboard.

@Craig- the website looks great now. I usually hate it when things change, but I like this. 😉

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Agents of SHIELD: I like it but I think I might be giving it a bit of a free pass because my boyfriend is (probably-mixed feelings) facing surgery and then three months of almost complete immobility- and he really likes it, and it doesn’t seem like it’s going to be one of the more dense, complex, really need to remember all the details from previous episodes (or as he put it, it’s goldfish-friendly so far).

I’m not sure about the casting- which is one of Whedon’s strong points, normally, makes me wonder how much control he’s had- he usually re-uses more actors, I’ve been playing ‘fantasy Whedon stable of actors casting’. Skye is good, but the role feels written for Dashku- does she really need to be that young? Nothing whatsoever wrong with ‘the Cavalry’

Nice Firefly touch when they’re running/driving onto the bus. And calling it a bus. And I think the Rising Tide plot arc could be interesting. I’m concerned that the Coulson mystery will end up a massive disappointment. They’ve hyped it up quite a bit, and I really am intrigued to know what could be so bad he could never know.

I am a bit concerned they won’t have time to really establish the show.  the first season is rarely the best season in my experience, for one thing actors tend to grow into their roles, and I like scripts that can reference a shared history with the audience.

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This episode might have it’s flaws but it has some of the best moments- the opening, when Amy is talking to her baby about its father, very old etc. I will admit that for a second I was thinking no, don’t you dare at the idea that the Doctor would turn out to be the father after all. I’m not a member of the Doctor Who is asexual society, but I’m very much in the Rory Williams appreciation society, and this episode has one of his great moments. ‘where. Is. My. Wife.’ ‘Would you like me to repeat the question?’ @craig, I also like to think it was Rory.

River- some people tried of her storyline, but you can’t fault the acting here. From the reaction to realising she had just inadvertently made kinky flirting conversation to her father, to having to refuse to turn up for Demons Run. I liked the Doctor’s anger when she turns up at the end, mixed with disappointment, supplies all the information I think you need to know about his developing feelings towards her without needing to spell it out.

Jenny and Vestra introduced perfectly, and the perfect pre-watershed sex joke. And Stax! I actually like him better here, than later. I assume he was revived but came back a little damaged? I see the point of that, but I would like to see him restored to this at some point.

I still hold that it is Rory who is The Good Man, and it even seemed backed up here. ‘Good men don’t need rules… ask yourself why I have so many’. At this point I honestly thought that it would in fact be Rory who River kills, perhaps because he went dark after what happened to his wife and child. I’m glad they didn’t go that way, but also a little disappointed. But mostly glad.

There was a lot here that seems to have been just left to the side. The Clerics, the Headless Monks, the fat thin gay Anglican couple, there seemed to be a potential story there, the Papal Mainframe, just the war in general seemed full of interesting ideas. Were the gamma forests only introduced to explain River’s name? the idea that ‘doctor’ means warrior to whole civilisations, rather than healing. To me doctor means learning more than healing, but I probably have my head in the 18th/19th century more than is healthy.

But all this might have significance when it comes to the Hurt Doctor. How does ‘eleven’s’ denial of his right to the name tie in with all of this? He seems surprised in this episode, of all this bitterness and war associated with him, and it seems to relate to him specifically, the Doctor who makes people run with his reputation.

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@phaseshift– ah, I didn’t mean the characters seemed similar as such. Just that Steel could manage that kind of dialogue without driving me, shuddering, away from my laptop. (Similar thing with Blake’s Seven for an example of an obnoxious character (Avon) not being obnoxious to watch.  (In fact I liked him. ‘I was aiming for his head’) This is why I don’t think Colin Baker can lay all the blame on scripts and unfinished character arch’s.)

The watch club sounds like a splendid idea. I like, of a weekend, having something to watch, and it’s nice to have people to share it with.

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@bluesqueakpip– that’s interesting, because Davison’s doctor did say something along the lines of ‘I think I’ll regenerate… it feels different’. I wasn’t sure if this was just creating uncertainty, or pointing out that the Doctor isn’t always sure if he’ll come back- or maybe it was an indication that he was about to come back ‘wrong’.

Maybe part of the problem is (on the very little information I have) Davison’s seems like he was one of the ‘nicest’ Doctors. And the Colin Baker personality… well, just wasn’t cricket.

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@bluesqueakpip– I agree. In fact, I think the last half series, in CW, Hide, and a bit in TCH gave us a few doctorish characters to remind the audience that the doctor can take different forms but- I’m taking it as a promise- not, under his watch, a complete arsehole.

As for Clara, must have done her good. She went into the Doctors ‘scar’ with a couple more role models than just 11. And she will possibly be the first companion who, in some sense, has dealt with the transition as many times as the doctor.

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@jimthefish– MED-I-TATE

(Why did that Dalek remind me of my dentist…)

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mmm- new doctor unpleasant from the start- I have heard bad things about him, of course, and suspect this is why my parents stopped watching. (Interestingly, though, David McCallum, in something like his character from Sapphire and Steel (any chance of putting a story from S&S on the site?) could have spoken the same lines and still remained quite watchable. (He could have made an interesting doctor, I think.)) It’s probably partly direction and partly a question of charisma. Matt Smith could (has) play this kind of unpleasant watchably.

Other than that, feels like they actually toned River down at one point ‘… find something (firm) to hold on to.’

And ‘brave heart’!

It’s made me think, though. Moffat’s first companion witnessed regeneration is (surely) approaching. Amelia never met ten. He’s done the companion switchover quite well I think- as a kind of triple rebound (I think TNOTD supports my theory that his cloud-sulk in The Snowmen was a lot to do with River’s death. (I don’t see Clara as a romantic involvement, but he was sick of losing people he loved).  But Moffat got a clean break with the introduction of 11, and I think this episode reminds us how much is riding on this regeneration…

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mmm- how much are taxis? Then again, you’ll probably end up with the option of saving about £20 max , and at the end of the day you’ve got to put some value on a good nights sleep. Just don’t do what I once did from Manchester to London return: risk an unbelievably cheap coach service. Yes, you can get from t’north to that London for £1. In a bus that’s been retired from public transport. You’ll even get an upgrade to a proper coach, after being stranded on the moterway for three hours. (proper coach will also smell of wee).

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@Shazzbot– have you tried going into the station and asking ‘what is the cheapest fair I can get to London on this date’? You’ll end up going quite late at night or unforgivably early in the morning, but they often do have cheap fares.

other than that- re-nationalise the railways now! (They can’t get any worse…)

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woefully late again-

What I really loved about this was the chain of ethics?, morality? from the first person who takes them prisoner, who says they’re dead if they don’t give up all information, to the civilian he has to answer to, who says no, just execute, to the person he is talking to (sorry, I’m very bad at picking up names) who regrets even the red cloth ceremony thing. Each person in the chain is visibly appalled by the next.

I also liked the visual effect of the opening, whether intended or not, where the two puddles and the tracks ahead of the tardis made it looks as though they were walking towards a kind of abstract face.

I liked pretty much everything Peri said, but I did find the delivery annoying. (Baring in mind that an actor is at much the mercy of a director as a writer). In fact when she said ‘Doctor, look!’ and he said ‘What?’ the exchange reminded me of personal, present experience of being around someone you love very much, but does talk a lot. And I mean a lot.

I loved the non-chronological diary idea. Especially since Davison’s doctor seems to be more linked to AG doctors than most because of the ten-five sketch.

and I never mind a bit of fourth wall breaking. It looked deliberate, in acting and directing. But I wasn’t much bothered with Oswin doing it in AOTD either. It’s nice to be jolted a little, when you’re into a story.

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@Shazzbot– Didn’t House rid himself of his assistants and attempt to leave that space ‘outside the universe’ because the Doctor told him he was the last Time Lord? i.e., sexy was the last Tardis that would turn up there to feed him. This implies that this place wasn’t outside time.

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@Shazzbot– but yes that is a good point. If there are ever new time lords, then there probably should be ends to old time lords. (And this is probably the reasoning behind the ‘well, not so much immortal as very long lived’ Vampires.

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@Shazzbot– I think I have in the past said something like: What if the regeneration limit isn’t a physical limitation, but a mental one- that is, that there is a limit to how many times a time lord can regenerate into a different personality before there is a danger of damage/snapping. So they put the limit at 12, but it’s a rule, and possibly a good one. And again, length of life- is the a limit to how many memories you can have, how much in your head before it begins to hurt? (Even vampire stories often to have people go a bit funny after a millennium or so, or describe someone who is over 1000/2000 years old as ‘ancient’.

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@bluesqueakpip– I print! – can’t join up at all. Being sinistral  doesn’t help, though. (Or ambi-sinister as Pratchett once put it)

Re: Tardis scan- didn’t the doctor deliberately go to see the flesh because he wanted to find out more about it, going to what would have been presumably an earlier point in its history? The pregnant/not pregnant scan did interest me. How exactly is she showing as both? I suppose the ganger copy was made from a pregnant Amy and that could give a confused result- or were the positives a case of ‘reality bleeding through’?

I’d assume that the flesh is so good- in a stable state, and it’s reasonable to assume that by the time the Amy ganger was being made it was more stable- so as to fool a scan. Didn’t one of the gangers inherit her human versions heart condition?

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@bluesqueakpip– and yes I did mean confirmation. Vowels are tricky for me. I do try, honest!

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@bluesqueakpip–  I’m dyspraxic, which means although I can read very fluently, I find it very hard to pick up on spelling mistakes. What would have happened is I think I probably spelt the word with one n, but used the wrong vowel, and when the spellchecker suggested ‘cannon’ I didn’t register that it was the wrong word.  When I say I’m only as good as my spellcheck I mean it literally. It’s really interesting how these conditions affect (effect?) the brain, but very frustrating too. I 

 

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@bluesqueakpip– heh, I’m only as good as my spellchecker! (I still read your name as ‘Bluepipsqueak’ and my recently developed ability to write then/than correctly has made me more proud than (see?) is rational)

OK, that is less of a conformation then (!).  But still interesting.

I do think that part of the reason why McGunn is cannon and Cushing(?) isn’t is partly to do with the fact that McGunn is still around. And if anyone can work him back in properly, while undoing the Spookification of the Doctor  it’s Stephen ‘The Doctor Lies’ Moffat,

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@ardaraith– that’s interesting- did we have conformation, before The Eleventh Hour, that McGann’s doctor was cannon? I almost cheered when I saw his face, because I thought he was badly let down by the film, but soldiered on brilliantly.

(mind you, I am a massive Withinail & I film- though when I last watched it, I couldn’t help imagining Doctor Who with Grant/Withinail  as Doctor and McGann/Marlow(/&I) as companion, Bruce Robertson as showrunner- never again could anyone have called it a kid’s show!)

@fatmaninabox, @scaryb– I do love that theory also… apart from the snog in The Snowmen. Snogging a woman who turns out to be your mother in law is funny. Snogging a woman who turns out to be a scattered through time version of your daughter is something that might turn up on the Gallafrayan equivalent of the Jeremy Kyle show…

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really saw a lot of AG influences in here. (as in, influences on AG, I’m not that timey-whimey) Aside from parallels with TCH and hide, what I think is a reference to the Doctor being ‘old’ ‘It’s very old- maybe older’ (than him?) ‘you are not in our catalogue’ made me think of his recent erasing.

quite a lot of pun-sh humour- mostly revolving around ‘light’ ‘control’ ‘soup’.

Quite a lot of darkness. ‘I could have forgiven her… if she hadn’t enjoyed it so much’ (supposedly, people can’t be hypnotised to do things that are out of character.) ‘I wanted to see how it works, so I dismantled it.’ Holding an arm- of course, when you reassemble things there’s always a few bits left over…

I love that Ace called him professor. ‘Doctor’ has- I think- referred to a level of learning for longer than it has been associated with healing (in many 18th/19th century novels, a Dr is usually a Clergyman, Physicians are Mr. MD’s are a relatively recent thing) and this, for me, ties into this.

I loved the idea of evolution playing havoc with the cataloguing.  And change, generally. It did give a bit of an impression that this- evolution- or the rate of it was specific to earth. Or maybe this was his first field trip? And I love that the Doctor defeated him with talking. McCoy comes across as a Doctor who is so very pleased with himself for being as clever as he is, and I admit I like that. I like his relationship with Ace, very much with a bright but somewhat unstructured student, his pushing her and teasing her is a compliment, but doubtless very irritating.

I keep wondering why, in the 90’s, I watched Sapphire and Steel, and Blake’s 7, but not Doctor Who. I think McCoy’s could have been my Doctor. I can only conclude that my mother and sister liked S&S and B7, but it was because of my father that DW was ever on in the 80’s.

This did, also, make me all the more happy about an older Doctor. Even more than TTOWC. Smith managed a totally different dynamic to Tennant. But I would like, if Smith insists on leaving, to see something a little more dry, more deadpan, more less keen to break a sweat.

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@Shazzbot– but- Tricey was cute! And there was a nice moment between Rory and his dad. ‘you collect trowels, I collect medical supplies’. Other than that, it was a pretty disturbing mixture of child-friendly fun and dodgy innuendo.

@bluesqueakpip– I remember you suggesting that. And I think you were right. The ship computer was ridiculously helpful.

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@craignixon– yes, interesting, Kovarian should still be alive. In fact we haven’t seen the ‘endless bitter war’ that they were attempting to prevent, in a ‘Let’s Kill Hitler’ kind of way. Does the fact they tried to completely kill the Doctor, rather than just make him regenerate mean they knew it wasn’t Eleven? Or were they just making sure? Did they travel back to try and stop him, or were they working from some sort of prophesy? (And is the existence of River a game changer, even if not the game changer they were going for? Or was she inevitable?)

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@Shazzbot– glad you’re back 🙂

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@drtennant– if you’re struggling to post coherently from those devices, could you try posting from a computer? Your posts are almost impossible to read. Perhaps experiment with forming sentences, with punctuation and stuff? I say this as a dyspraxic who sometimes struggles with such things. There is a time and place for stream of consciousness writing, but its not really a forum. (well maybe a James Joyce forum, but not this one.)

I have trouble posting from my iphone too, so I don’t 😉

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oh god I’m scared to look, go on, what is it?

how is it spelt? seriously, I’m so bad at remembering spellings- terrible with Tennant. Like banana’s, I start off ok but forget how to stop) and I’m really liking Capaldi because it’s ‘Cap’ and ‘Aldi’. I get bread-mix from aldi. So I imagine a loaf of bread wearing a hat.

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@nick mmm too late? Sorry! 😉

Anyway, Capaldi is a great choice, I’m almost (almost) looking forward to the regeneration. (Can’t one of his regenerations be the ganger doctor? :() but I do hope any romance is River directed, not Clara directed.

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@nick– though of course in Vastra and Jenny’s marriage, interbreeding isn’t an issue… arguably, now that same sex marriages are going to be legal (damn I have to buy my sister another present…) the breeding angle is no longer a defining aspect of marriage.

At the same time, River’s story now strongly implies that Timelord DNA is very like human DNA that’s been mutated by exposure to the Tardis. Which I suppose is a separate issue.

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@jimthefish– on the whole I think Moffat has tried to avoid the girlfriend-companion thing. Rose flirting with Captain Jack, Martha looking less mooney then she ever does in Blink, Ten swooning over MdP, Eleven arranging a romantic trip for Amy with her fiancé after she makes a lunge for him, River refusing to travel with Eleven full time.

River might quite like seeing her husband when he isn’t ‘insisting on the face of a ten year old boy’ (or something like that. Thinking about it, quite a nice snap back at all the initial responses to Smiths casting!)

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@nick @thommck– yes I think sentience is the thing. But perhaps also more acceptable between humanoids (what a human-centric term!) interspecies breeding has occurred in the human past, I think? We just happen to be the only humanoid species on earth at the moment.

It’s like Madam Vastra and Jenny- from one point of view its a relationship between an ape and a lizard. But it’s really a relationship between two sentient, up-right walking humanoids with opposable thumbs and verbal communication, who evolved on earth.

(Captain Jack doesn’t count. That’s because he lost count a long, long time ago. ;))

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@thommck– it is interesting that people are more bothered about a physically visible age gap than the fact he really is ancient.

And I agree both about River and Donna.

Catherine Tate, incidentally, was a wonderfully surprising casting result. I get the feeling that her original casting was one of those one-off someone quite well known things (see Kyle and I forget her name, eastenders and Bionic woman) but then they saw how much more potential she had. I wish Donna could come back 🙁

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@jimthefish– though to be fair the announcement show was pretty cringe-worthy. I think he was the only one presently connected to Who who even turned up- I’ve decided to think that the whole thing was more BBC than Who, really.

It would set a bit of a pattern if he is short term- Eccles was better known, Tennant and Smith (relatively) obscure.  All the fuss that surrounds the role might be more bearable if it’s what’s launching your career. On the other hand, taking on two roles that threaten to type-cast you- Tucker and the Doctor- might cancel each other out, so arguably he has less to lose.

Backlash is probably inevitable, I think Moffat will get most of the flack, though. ‘Go a brilliant actor but still managed to fuck it up’ ‘would have been perfect, if he’d had decent scripts/storylines/companions/dalek designs- people are already pretty much saying this and he hasn’t even started yet.

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@nick– while I’d say that when DW who created I highly doubt they would have cast a Peter Capaldi, I would also say that although I disagree with the arguments against casting a female doctor, I can not for a moment accept any arguments against casting a non-white doctor.

I really hope he kept the accent. It would underline the ‘Brittishness’ of the Doctor over the ‘Englishness’ of him. And I think that would be a good step. Rita in TGC was British. British is a much broader concept, not entirely logically, but my mothers Welsh so I prefer the term anyway. And no, it’s not logical to have him constantly regenerate with the accent of someone from a really quite small island on Earth, but regularly switch regional accents, unless we decide he’s picking them from his companions. Having an actor with a foreign surname in the role is, I think a step forward. I’d be depressed that it’s such a relatively small step, only I really do think he’ll be great, and it would be very hard to suggest he got the role for anything other than his acting abilities and ‘full anorak’ love of Who.

@scaryb– yes, true. 55 is hardly decrepit. So Smith was ‘too young’, Capaldi was ‘too old’. I liked watching that TB who, and noticing how little running about he did. Surely the frantic action scenes can be the companions job? Especially when Capaldi is following the Gallifrayan pin-ball that was Eleven. (Not because I don’t think 55 year olds can run. But I think older Doctor is a chance for a change of pace.) The way people have wittered on about his age makes me think a lot of people must shamefully neglect their poor parents.

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@scaryb– exactly, it carries a kind of assumption that ‘there are white people- and then all these other races’ and I’m starting to find it very disturbing.

On the other hand, I suppose the lack of rioting over the choice of someone with Italian-Irish ancestry, thus post-reformation Catholic stock, and a Scottish accent is evidence of progress in this country. I wish more history was taught frankly. If you could say to people: look how ridiculous your ancestors(/some quite near)’s prejudices seem? Now look at your own.

I think people liked being pleasantly surprised by Smith, but I think with DW backlash is inevitable. In that article,  almost universal acclaim for Moffat. Now he seems to be’ the man who is ruining Who’. But I bet his stock raises when the new show runner takes over. If I was him I’d be tempted to step back just to let someone else deal with that flack.

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@nick– that article is a wonderful find. So funny looking back. Really makes me wish I could have seen the faces of a lot of them when they watched TEH.

Does make me think though, in a way it was actually a lot easier for Smith than it will be for Capaldi: almost everyone seems delighted with this casting, while Smith got a barrage of ‘oh he’s about twelve’ ‘ blar blar blar yoof audience’ ‘hur, he’s got stupid hair’, so expectations seem to have been in many cases very low. But Capaldi is expected to be fantastic, and while I’m 100% sure he will be, people seem to love to be disappointed.

One thing though- we do, actually- have someone from an ethnic minority cast as The Doctor. If we disregard the growing, and I think very unpleasant trend of referring to non-Caucasians as ‘ethnics’, one word, which seems to me in many cases to be something adopted by racists who think it’s just the use of no-go hot racist terms that decent people object to in them, and remember sensibly that everyone has an ethnicity, then, with an Irish mother, Italian father, growing up in Scotland, he couldn’t have been much more of an ethnic minority unless he really was an alien.

 

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I love the interplay between the Doctor and River. He seems (in my opinion as a straight woman) rather ungratefully reluctant at the prospect of what he knows is coming (I think we can fairly say know that ten knew, at her point of death, she would become his wife). Of course he comes to help her when she asked- but then again, has too, because she saves his life. There is also, I think, a particular chemistry between the two of them, which made me think at the time that he was almost certainly ‘her doctor’. (Previously River made comments about Ten’s youth, and being a ‘pretty boy’, but Moffat never intended to cast someone Smiths age, and eleven always did seem older.)

This is where we saw,  more closely, what the cracks were about- not so much ‘the nothing’ as ‘the never was’. But the use of the Angels in a plot which required them a) to kill people, not just shunt them back in time and b) be fooled into thinking they were being looked at is a little weak. Amy gets past the Angels by not opening her eyes, rather than not blinking, it’s an interesting inversion, but does it work? The growing malevolence of the Angels is another issue. At first they kill for food, but quite kindly (is there a link between the potential they feed off from their victims and Clara’s mother’s leaf?), now they just kill, not for eating, and play with their victims. Later on they’ve ‘progressed’ to battery farming. But were they more terrifying at first because they lacked this humanesque ‘evil’ and just did what they had evolved to do?

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Very happy about this. I wanted a (physically) older doctor, mostly because I do think there are only so many ways to play a younger one.

 

It’s interesting to think how it might be different. After all, the Doctor has been ‘old’ for a long time. And the younger Doctors didn’t really play him young. Tennant, towards the end, gave the impression of (to paraphrase ‘eight’ in Withinail and I) ‘the  frozen years melt(ing)’. And Smith never seemed young.

I’m assuming this Doctor will run about less. And any extended fight/action sequences- wasn’t that often what the companions were for? I would prefer this to rule out any romantic involvement between him and Clara (I’d like that ruled out anyway, and to be fair to Moffit, he does seem to have had a bit of a rule ‘no wags on the tardis (full time)- Ten’s interest in  MdP in GITM while Rose tries not to look too jealous in front of her actual boyfriend, Amy’s amorous impulse towards Eleven earning her a ‘Romantic’ trip to Venice with her fiancé, River declining to travel with the Doctor for more than the odd adventure), but I don’t for a moment think/want it to rule out any return of River.

There is, I admit, an almighty opportunity for youtube mash ups.

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watching both this evening, so very late here. Brief thoughts:

clearly ‘crimson horror’ referenced this near the beginning, nice to see it and see how AG who looks back into the past.

Ace’s takeaway comment- to be fair, takeaways did exist at the time. Though I don’t think (for many reasons) they did home deliveries.

This reminds me how random and surreal television of the time could be. I don’t have any memories of this episode, only sketchy ones of the Doctor and Ace, but a lot here does feel familiar, in a homely kind of way.

McCoy was fantastic. ‘I’m as human as you are’ ‘Yesss’.

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Interesting having trollers manefesto on the site though.

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@thekaled– ah, the world is so full of you. Nah-night.

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@thekaled– the (now edited) attack on SM wasn’t really justified though. I don’t think the identity of the next Doctor Who actor has been a secret till the moment of regeneration once in AG who- I don’t know about BG who- but the earlier announcement is not down to Moffit, this is the first regeneration on his watch.

Agreed that the reveal show sounds a little tacky, and you can probably put that on him (baring in mind, though that since he is not controller of the BBC he isn’t complete controller of DW). And it would be nice not to  know until the actors first episode. But the mentality of calling for cancelation because you don’t like one thing that they’ve done, especially with who, which sees many different characters, many different show runners, and as a result, many different fans, seems rather small minded.

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@thekaled– no, it’s site for Doctor Who fans, which you obviously knew.

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@jimthefish– well one thing that annoys me nowadays is when people talk as though for a character to be ‘sympathetic’, it has to be good- as though we’re all perfect, kind, pleasant individuals and can’t possibly understand the point of view of anyone who does anything unpleasant.

I wouldn’t say in the Robertson book- ‘Joseph Knight’ we’re entirely on the slavers side- but neither are we instructed to despise him. And he is allowed to make some pertinent points ‘do you drink rum, drink coffee, eat sugar, etc?’

I think there is a point to be made that participating in atrocities is not always the result of psychopathic tendencies. In the case of Nazi death camps and slavery, there are elements of peoples ability to convince themselves that certain people aren’t really people, that even if what they are doing is regrettable, it’s necessary. The more we focus on certain events being nothing but a particular expression of evil, the more risk, I think, of sleepwalking into such situations again, or not acknowledging when such things do happen again.

 

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I’ve just read James Robertson’s first two novels, having picked up ‘The testament of Gideon Mack’ a while ago on a second hand book store.

His first two novels are historical, the first one 50% the second one entirely, and they are exactly the kind of historical novels I like- as a rule I prefer books written in the 18th and 19th century over novels that simply use an historical setting for very recognisably 20th or 21th century characters.

But what I think Roberson does is present characters with a point of view that initially seem alien to us, and use it to emphasis how there are no new problems. For example (this is only the mildest of spoilers) presenting a Scottish slaver and Jamaican plantation owner sympathetically is a very risky strategy- but he does it without for a second stepping away from how horrific the slave trade was- and without inserting modern times into the novel, brings out a parallel with modern exploitation of overseas labour.

But for all that he’s incredibly readable.

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It’s been interesting watching BG Who in the old format, and it’s made me think that some stories- like this one- really might have benefited from that. There is a great, sinister set up of the mystery during the first part of the episode, and some really good moments- when Amy has just pressed the forget button, then listens to the message she sent herself before doing so- it might have been nice to stew on that for a week before we discover what it was she chose to forget. And the moment when Liz X discovers that she has, for so very long, constantly been constantly uncovering the mystery then forgetting it again (reminded me a little of Memento) which might have been more effective if we had spent a little longer with her.

I get the feeling that a lot of rather dark issues got overshadowed with the discovery of the Starwhale, and end up glossed over. Especially the people being fed to the Whale. It’s good, though, as @Shazzbot points out, bit of a clue, that the whale won’t eat the children- but given the crime that the boy was fed to the whale for was, basically, using the lift rather than the stairs despite doing badly in his school work- you have to wonder what kind of crimes adults were, very literally, being sent down for. Were the kinds of people who might vote against continuing being weeded out? Had the Queen, by choosing over and over to forget, unwittingly rubber stamped policies she wouldn’t have approved of?  I can’t help thinking that if Rory had been there, some heads would have been banged together.

There is one nice, retrospectively Rory bit in it. Amy is attracted by the doctors kindness. Of course, by the second series, Rory is, in a fashion, both very old and very kind. The doctor himself seems to find his penchant for humans almost inexplicable, this episode shows that very nicely, with him moment of disgust for our species. I think this is where Rory was important. The way the Doctor keeps shouting at people that they could be ‘so much better’- Rory is.

And Amy is very good in this episode, despite making a major mistake. In fact I think having her make a bad decision was a good sign. She isn’t supposed to be perfect.

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@wolfweed– thank you! That’s exactly as I remembered it.

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@craig– I know! posh! (three for a tenner, me.)

Is ghost light McCoy? there is a chance I might have seen it. The one image I have of McCoy is him standing in some ruins, taking very manipulatively to someone bad, and swaying weirdly on his feet. (could be a false memory. Really liked it though.)

(I have also seen the McGann film, but mostly for the same reason I’ve watched many films: Withinail & I. He is a good actor, though, so I was glad when TEH visually referenced him.)

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@craig– the price of a cheap bottle of wine? You posh bugger. 😉

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