Forum Replies Created
-
AuthorPosts
-
15 December 2018 at 10:14 #66650
@ichabod I’m a fan of the Netflixs Marvel TV shows, and one thing I like about episodes mades specifically for the platform is the irregular run times. It’s not usually more than a few minutes, but it feels as though if they felt an episode had to be 53 minutes, it’s 53 minutes, if they felt this particular episode was a 46 minute story, they did it in 46 minutes.
Not practical for broadcast TV, of course it’s not. But I do wonder if they’ve ever considered a ‘Director’s cut’ style of thing. Of course those often involve several minutes of film time that was quite rightly cut, but I do often feel watching Doctor Who that some really quite important scenes have been shot and cut or dropped entirely.
14 December 2018 at 07:48 #66629@magickirin I see where you’re coming from with Graham not moving on – but I disagree. At the beginning he decided to travel with The Doctor while standing in his now empty flat talking to Grace in his head. So yes, there is a degree of avoidance, of not wanting to stay in the place where he spent, it appears, the happiest but much too short time in his life.
But a part of this decision was to spend time with his often sulky and a little passive aggressive step-grandson, with who he has never had a completely comfortable relationship with. On the one hand, Ryan is an enduring link with his dead wife. But he’s quite an awkward one. I remember a line in a J.D. Salanger short story where the adolescent protagonist notes the awkwardness of living with his step father with the discovery that they are both in love with the same person (his dead mother).
Graham works hard on his relationship with Ryan. He talks of his own grief to try and help Ryan talk about his. To an extent he’s more focused on Ryan dealing with his grief than he is on his own. But there are little touches. Realising he has to stay sitting on the bus, giving his ‘good man’ speech to a man he knows has to die, these things hit home to him particularly because he wasn’t able to save Grace. He can’t get past the one mistake the Solatrict made with Grace – missing her love for Ryan, and he has to let her go.
Then in this episode, Tim Shaw is back, and his own grief rises right up to the surface. He wants revenge, he snaps at Ryan. But all the work he’s done on his relationship with Ryan pays off. And by choosing to travel through time and space with him, rather than get on with life in his lonely flat he’s managed to hold on to what was so important about Grace.
His first instinct is that Grace would want him to kill Tim Shaw. Hard to say, in terms of wanting to be avenged, but she didn’t seem a very vengeful person. He wanted to kill Tim Shaw, for taking this wonderful woman away from him. The Doctor saying no had very little influence on him. All this is consistent with the love and grief he feels. But Ryan knew Grace wouldn’t want him to do it, as much if not more for his own sake, and additionally, Ryan didn’t want him to do it.
As you say, Graham hadn’t had a significant relationship before Grace. He might never have felt loved, except by parents. This episode saw Graham find out that he was still loved. The episode before earned him a ‘grandad’, but now he’s told – by a nineteen year old – ‘I love you’. And this is the love he gets by being a good man. ‘You never thought I was good enough for your grandma’, that probably hurt because he shared those doubts.
Most – or at least, many – people probably would try to kill Tim Shaw in those circumstances. But a big part of the Ryan-Graham arc is about Ryan coming to see what Grace saw in Graham. He’s better than that.
@ichabod I might need to rewatch but I don’t think the ‘don’t kill him’ was about not killing him in self defence. She let him have a gun. She didn’t want Graham to hunt him down and kill him for revenge. Graham went back to get Tim Shaw for a particular motive. It wasn’t to prevent him doing more harm, it wasn’t even punishment for all his crimes so far. It was personal vengeance. The Doctor since the reboot has been caught between guilt over all the people who have died ‘because of my mercy’ and guilt over turning people into soldiers. Her behaviour over this is actually one of the most consistent elements of characterisation.
13 December 2018 at 08:46 #66585@ichabod that’s a good point, and after all, in his final season, 12 was a professor. And what did we call people with that job at Polytechnics before they got turned into universities? Lecturers.
I think sex/gender is affecting how some people respond to theDoctor. I’ve seen her accused of ‘hectoring’ a grieving father (for telling his blind daughter there was a monster in the woods then leaving her alone for days not knowing what happened to him.) As though any other version of the Doctor would have just patted him on the back, said ‘ah, well, grief is a tricky thing. When you feel really ready how about going back and looking after her.’ And as though, had 13 taken this approach, people wouldn’t have been saying ‘the Doctor has no authority or strong principles’.
This season is seen as particularly close to the bone, partly I think because of a return to the older historical format – because the historical format is more human based. I’ve listened to Who episodes on the radio where Tom Baker Doc and Leela meet Bodiccia. Understandably Leela wants to join her. So this isn’t unprecedented. And I think it makes a nice change from ‘Victorian London but with Cybermen’ ‘Victorian London with a weird parasitic worm’ ‘Victorian London with The Great Intelligence’. I liked those episodes. But the change is nice. The problem with putting alien consciousnesses at the root of the conflict is, however much humans are involved, it makes the problem appear external. It makes humans collaborators, often dupes, but not the source of the problem. The Doctor protecting us from external threats.
And yet… What about Harriett Jones? Didn’t she get a bit of a lecture? And then taken down by a line that I could see echoing around the UK right now: ‘Doesn’t she look tired?’
12 December 2018 at 07:52 #6654712 December 2018 at 07:50 #66546So, while waiting for the New Years Day episode (and dreading the approaching Who-less year that will follow. And hoping the BBC/Netflixs keep the old episodes on their platforms for the duration) I’ve been thinking a lot about Ryan.
Graham was, rightly, for many people the stand out character and people have noted how his relationship with Ryan was the emotional heart of this series. Ryan as a character has attracted more criticism. Not here, so much, but he has.
And I’ve read a lot of criticism of his character falling mostly into two camps: that the actor was wooden, and that dyspraxia was mentioned but hardly featured.
This amuses me because the actors expression and tone of voice were, for me, always convincing. And yes I have noticed moments when his delivery of lines seemed a little miss timed. That happens to me, because I’m dyspraxic, and sometimes translating my thoughts into words comes off a little awkwardly.
Other than that, ‘we haven’t really seen Ryan overcome his dyspraxia’ (yes I’m mostly talking about The Other Place and Facebook). Well, no, if by ‘overcome’ they mean magically re-wire his brain. It’s a permanent neurological condition. Yes we have, if by ‘overcome’ you mean see someone who starts out a bit prickly, self-conscious, and defensive become more confident in their abilities and worth.
Two things were guaranteed, that if he had mentioned his condition more than the three times he did, the cry would be ‘why hit us over the head with it every episode’. And that all the additional times his dyspraxia did feature but without being named would go over many people’s heads if they don’t have direct experience with it. His garbled memory of Rosa Parks, his interaction with the girl in It Takes You Away, and his innovative thinking in the Spiders episode along with his idea of essentially (unknowingly) replicating The Doctor’s eventual solution in the Time War.
Now of course, this is Doctor Who. Maybe the Doctor could ‘magically rewire his brain’. But that would be a terrible path for the show to take.
11 December 2018 at 10:05 #66486@cumquat I can only apologise (and thus compound the wrong) but, like @idiotsavon, I can only say, I try, but I fail. For example, while I flexed my fingers over my laptop with the purpose of pouring out a torrent of abuse in response to your posting, I have all but lost control of my fingers which insist on asking you:
Really five Basset Hounds? What are their little names?
Now, if you inform me that that was just a joke, and you own no pets, or, worse still, cats, I think we could potentially get a decent flame war going here. Ball’s in your court.
10 December 2018 at 13:12 #66429@bluesqueakpip yes that was interesting from Yaz. Graham, quite reasonably, struggled. Ryan felt right away his gran wouldn’t have wanted that, especially not for Graham. Meanwhile Yaz was seriously making that calculation. This series the character development quite understandably focused on the two people who had just lost someone they loved. It’s also shown us the people Yaz loves/is constantly infuriated by. She’s usually the one the Doctor picks to be with her, and the Doctor has walked away from an atrocity to protect her timeline.I think it could be interesting to see how this turns out.
9 December 2018 at 20:54 #66401@bluesqueakpip absolutely. I really think her objection in the first episode was about the human (can’t remember his name – Colin?) who tried to kill Tim Shaw, it was more for his sake, the effect that killing another being has on a person.
It would have destroyed Graham. The spellchecker on here wanted to change my misspelling to ‘distorted’ and I think it has a point. It was interesting seeing the conflict between him and Ryan there. Graham seemed quite sure Grace would want him to do it. Ryan disagreed. There are some levels there – Graham was her husband, but he only knew her for three years. Ryan knew her his entire life. But, ideally, you will outlive your grandparents (and parents. I’m the grandchild of people who outlived their son.) Her concern was for Graham. And, satisfyingly, so was Ryan’s. But in the end, all he could do was try to be a good man. Which meant not killing Tim Shaw, but shooting him in the foot rather than let him kill his grandson.
And I’m glad, I was prepared to see Graham die, more than I was to see him corrupted. He was a little corrupted, by grief and unexpectedly finding the cause of it, but Ryan pulled him back.
9 December 2018 at 19:36 #66397@psychossassin I would assume an auton doesn’t count as a life form? They’re non organic and automated by a disembodied consciousness.
9 December 2018 at 19:30 #66395@bluesqueakpip hope – and Grace. Never such a well named character. I’ve kept thinking, through this series, of this line ‘Justice is getting what you deserve. Mercy is not getting what you deserve. Grace is getting what you don’t deserve.’ You can give out justice, you can dispense mercy, or you can bestow grace.
9 December 2018 at 19:25 #66393It’s an arc, though, it’s an arc. Tim Shaw returns, and with him the idea of the consequences of actions. This series has focused on the consequences of actions in the past, this Doctor has been very aware of this – here we see her confronted with the consequences of her actions full stop, at any moment in time.
Graham and Ryan have passed the final test of family now. Graham, for once, losing his temper and sulking. And Ryan coasting right through it. ‘”grandad”‘ ‘I love you’ ‘I’m not saying it twice, don’t act like you didn’t hear me’.
And Graham still alive. But we do still have the New Years episode.
There is a lot to think about here. According to Tim Shaw everything he’s done since he left earth is her fault. She rightly says not to put that on her. Would killing Tim Shaw make you as bad as Tim Shaw? I think Graham was right essentially, no it doesn’t. But it does put you in the ball park. If the Doctor went around killing off everyone who seems dangerous to avoid future atrocities, where would that end? But the Doctor does go around trying to stop people from becoming morally corrupted. They care more about the mind/conscience/soul of the people in front of them than about potential consequences of their decisions.
I watched A Town Called Mercy recently, the Doctor ranting about doing justice to all the people who died because of his mercy. This is Thirteen’s first direct encounter of the victims of hers. But the Doctor, being The Doctor, can’t do different.
9 December 2018 at 11:25 #66382@arch I get what you say about Sci-Fi. As @bluesqueakpip has pointed out, it’s a very fairy tale take on sci-fi in this episode. Proper fairy tales, and the solitrect is of a particular take of fairies, that is, sometimes they’re evil, sometimes they’re just powerful and wistful, and want to play but don’t understand and are dangerous.
The show has, since the reboot been accused of having an agenda. Mostly ‘The Gay Agenda’. The current series has dealt more in detail with racism, I think. But it’s been a lot more nuanced than people seem to have realised. (The baddie, of sorts, in the second episode wasn’t white. The primary conflict in DOTP was between people of the same race but different religion/culture. There’s only really been one proper, completely evil character).
Kerblam, as people have pointed out, was surprisingly pro-corporation/wage slavery, or at least, surprisingly not as opposed to these things as people might have expected.
To me the high concept of this series is that the monsters are not just monsters.
9 December 2018 at 07:36 #66367@seeoswald I’d say that was hands down the best episode of the series. It’s even managed to somewhat impress some critics of the series, including two very different (can’t emphasise their difference enough) posters on this forum.
So it’s interesting that you say that because broadly the consensus seems to be that the series has improved in the second half. In my opinion Chibnal has a clear talent for picking writers, dare I say it, who deliver better scripts than his own. As he’s the show runner, this is encouraging.
When you say the direction was bad, what do you mean? What specifically struck you in the direction of this episode?
8 December 2018 at 15:41 #66348@bluesqueakpip thanks for posting this, rumours she was only doing one series were everywhere and I honestly think that would be a terrible outcome. Not just because I like what she’s doing as the Doctor.
7 December 2018 at 18:38 #66275@nerys – I think it might the the third time I’ve posted it on this site. I tend to have it primed and ready to go wherever I go to discuss this season. Feels a little sad that it’s needed.
We do indeed. Because we’re not on a ladder or staircase of progress, it’s more like an Escher picture. Or an escalator where the steps keep turning into a slope. Or at least it feels like it sometimes.
(Bloody hell that’s before I open my bottle of wine. Apologies in advance everyone…)
7 December 2018 at 16:19 #66264@magickirin the original members (including @bluesqueakpip) can only be amused at someone using the word snowflake in that manner of insult here. This forum was created out of the dying embers of a comment thread for The Snowmen.
It was also created as a place to discuss Doctor Who – including disagreeing, strongly, about episodes and eras of Doctor Who without the toxicity that descends so often on the internet whenever this show is discussed.
Additionally (sorry everyone, I’m posting the link again) if you’ve seen every era of Doctor Who and payed even the slightest bit of attention, you’d know this:except that one time…
6 December 2018 at 16:20 #66238@bluesqueakpip @kevinwho – something to do with the ‘Timeless Child’, something buried in her memories?
6 December 2018 at 14:10 #66235@bluesqueakpip I completely agree, and I can see a good reason for this, because I can see a good reason why the number of regenerations was capped at 12. It could simply be a fact that huge and powerful as Time Lord brains are, the memory of so many personalities, with all their loves still locked inside you, carrying on all those emotions is a lot. Twelve might have been the first Time Lord to carry twelve personalities in his memories in addition to his own (including the War Doctor), and he did – Twelves responses to River and Missy show us that. You could argue cracks were showing, and that he was becoming dangerous.
An emotional clean slate was probably needed for her sanity, memories without the strong emotional connection. Which means emotionally Thirteen is the youngest doctor we’ve ever seen, One was, after all, presumably quite old before he stole the Tardis, or at least before he stole the two school teachers and started hanging around with humans.
5 December 2018 at 13:36 #66211@thane16 or to put it even more succinctly: wobbly-wobbly, timey-wimey… stuff.
5 December 2018 at 13:08 #66208Headache.
5 December 2018 at 13:08 #66207@swankycriminal I think the elder version remembers the previous meeting only when it happens again. Before that he’s forgotten it because it still lies in his future.
So, in Day of the Doctor, Eleven remembers meeting, well, Eleven, back when he was Ten only when he, Eleven, meets Ten.
And both Ten and Eleven remember meeting Ten and Eleven when they were the War Doctor, only when they meet the War Doctor. After they part, the memories fade for Ten. Otherwise, paradox etc. The latest generation can retain the memory – so Eleven can remember the events of Day of the Doctor, because none of it is in his future, only in his past.
Otherwise Nine, Ten, and Eleven would always have known of the events of Day of The Doctor. As River Song says, spoilers…
4 December 2018 at 09:40 #66151@ichabod I think the Doctor felt that one person could possibly stay but with so many both universes were in danger of collapsing, and it might be that she knew that if she was that one person it would continue to collapse because of her nature.
But Graham would only be with a copy of Grace. If you remember, in the Name Of The Doctor, when he says goodbye to River he points out that she is just a ghost, an electronic copy of River, not the real thing (even though she had the full consciousness) and it was time for her to go. (I think what seemed like a good idea when he had only just met her and only knew that she would become important to him and she had given her life to save him, felt like less of a good idea once he got to know her and love her). So the Doctor isn’t big on carrying on with ghosts once the real person has died.
That’s not how you deal with grief. How you deal with the grief is to keep the most dangerous person in the universe and your oldest friend in a box and eat takeaway with her 😉
Ultimately Graham’s love for Grace meant taking care of Ryan, and this copy wasn’t a good enough copy because it didn’t realise that, such an important part was left out. Which meant this universe wasn’t the right universe for someone like Graham to live in. Maybe it was good enough for Erik who was, with full acknowledgement of his grief, a rather more selfish person, but Erik had an actual child to take care of.
The fact it doesn’t work on the daughter makes me wonder if it simply doesn’t work with family members. We don’t know if the Grace copy would have worked with Ryan, but I suspect not. It is interesting it didn’t try with the Doctor, maybe they’ve lost too many people they loved? Who would you even pick to show her?
3 December 2018 at 09:13 #66122@paul in Europe between 75-85% of the people persecuted for witchcraft were women.
In Early Stuart drama, Witches are overwhelmingly portrayed as women.
3 December 2018 at 07:35 #66120@tardigrade see this is why I actually like the use of frog form. I think the Doctor found it slightly endearing, and found it easier to feel warmer towards the Solitract when it wasn’t using the form of one of her friends (albeit a short friendship) the form that was being used to trap another of her friends, a form that completely screwed up by missing an important part of Grace’s personality. Instead, it kept her voice for the moment and used a form it picked up from her, frogs, because Grace liked frogs and it found that it did too. And from all the forms in the universe to choose from, it didn’t choose a humanoid form. It chose a form at least a human would be unlikely to, in the frog prince, the point of the form of a frog is that it’s slimy and repulsive.
2 December 2018 at 21:12 #66109@mudlark It’s looking at them closely thats the problem, something about the size of their bodies…
2 December 2018 at 19:53 #66101@jimthefish well just the one frog actually…
2 December 2018 at 19:34 #66098But aside from confirming what I always suspected about the bloody creatures, good episode. Looked amazing, great initial misdirection, and a baddie that isn’t really a baddie, just a dangerously lonely and powerful entity nearly blowing up the universe. It managed to both be a ‘the universe is in peril’ story and carry on the overall theme of this series focusing on people, and decisions, and grief.
And Ryan finally said Grandad, not too sentimentally but with a smile, knowing full well what it would mean to Graham.
2 December 2018 at 19:23 #66096Just wanted to say, always hated moths anyway. They’ve always creeped me out.
Really didn’t need an episode of flesh eating moths chasing people down dark corridors…
1 December 2018 at 11:30 #66078@thane16 experiences are great presents! a friend of ours bought my boyfriend one with birds of prey, and added me on to it (carer’s perk!), so we get to have falcons etc on our arms.
29 November 2018 at 07:16 #66027@thane16 happy birthday! (thane17!)
28 November 2018 at 09:35 #65987That 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.
28 November 2018 at 09:32 #65986regarding 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 in their strange clothes would be incredibly hard to place, and that would be very unusual. It meant people wouldn’t know how to read them, other than ‘not from around here’ or really understand anything about them until they started saying who they were.
At the same time, people would potentially under react to how strangely they were dressed because this, like most communities at a distance from London, would be rather isolated. Maybe people have started dressing in this odd way elsewhere. And people have a tendency, especially in Who (because it is rather convenient, and we need to leave space for the story) to blank out what they can’t understand or rationalise.
25 November 2018 at 20:17 #65919Lots 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 this Doctor. In this episode she started, for a moment, weak in a way. She watched a woman being killed, and failed to save her. Though she did dive in.
So we start off with a female baddie, bolstered up with a very camp James I as a bit of a male (and almost certainly, historically, not straight) baddie. And we also come back to the fact that it’s people. There are reasons. Not justifications, or really excuses, but reasons, and it’s not, despite the beliefs of the man and woman involved, a big tangible entity of evil.
A history episode that is quite sci-fi at the end. I feel people were expecting a slightly different focus here, and of course the episode did press its ‘pernicious, P.C. agenda’ of how, well, the witch trials were wrong. (I don’t personally see how all this pointing out the obvious (racism, bigotry, and killing women for ‘being witches’ are bad things) are overly P.C.)
Graham has a moment where he has to assume the role of the Doctor, in a sense. Happily gives her the hat. Thirteen makes I think the first direct comment on her sex change since the opening episode with understandable frustration.
‘You need assistance’ (assistants are now called companions, but that felt delibrate.)
‘If people are good they have nothing to fear?’ ‘Are you a good person?’ We’re getting back to the definite arc, or at least, theme. Along with ‘there’s more power here than kings and queens. There’s us, working together’.
And once again with have people filled with hate and fear hurting people, but thinking they’re doing the right thing.
23 November 2018 at 07:33 #65865@turntheclock most of the tension within the episode was based on religion rather than race. As for social morality look at this
22 November 2018 at 09:12 #65839sorry, pronoun slip in there at the top.
22 November 2018 at 09:11 #65838re: 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 because they’re a new consciousness. The system asked for help, that’s a good sign. It’s something designed to be very logical and efficient, there is a logic to killing one person to save many people, and it’s one a lot of humans indulge in.
If it’s even up for debate that we should, say, destroy a giant space wale, an unhatched dragon egg, or a huge under water serpent to avoid death to humans (and the doctor put these things up for debate) how harshly is he going to judge the system for thinking, if we kill this one person the person who wants to kill a lot of people because he thinks he cares about people might actually use this famed human empathy and not do it.
I think what’s important is that this is a system designed by humans. In a similar way, the Industrial Revolution didn’t have to involve treating human beings badly, but humans were treated badly to maximise profits. And on occasions when the financial side did get genuinely precarious, that was frequently linked to the fact that, for example, the cotton-weaving industry was depending on slave labour abroad.
The worrying thing for me at the moment isn’t really the pass she gives the system. It’s the fact that, just as she isn’t doing anything about a race of aliens moving through the universe killing people for sport. She isn’t doing anything about the human root of the corporation (I assume the profits are going somewhere human) which made the decisions that lead to the situation in Kerblam! in the first place. At the end of the ganger episodes, we were left with a sense that people were going to go and fight for change. At the end of this we get a slightly wishy-washy promise to try and get a more people-lead co-operation in the future. But who made it automated in the first place?
So she’s right that it isn’t the system, it’s how the system is used. But this is how such systems are used, it’s why such systems are created. It almost makes me think more humans is pretty far from the solution.
21 November 2018 at 16:10 #65828@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 a third of the boys were called either James, John, or Andrew, roughly the same percentage of girls were called Rebecca, and there were several large family groups, so the logical solution was just say the extra word and use first name-surname).
TenDoc is perfect timing. Then… Smock?
I think some people did say ‘Matt’ etc, but overall, there is a bigger percentage using her first name than before. Ironically it was a conscious decision to call Bradly Walsh Walsh. He’s generally Bradley.
21 November 2018 at 11:42 #65826@lionheart564 that’s fine if it’s consistent. It’s the whole ‘Eccelson, Tennant, Smith, Capaldi, Jodie’ thing over here that grates.
21 November 2018 at 10:40 #65824@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, (I think soap acting is probably one of the hardest acting jobs, not much rehearsal time) and I think he’s worked with Chibnel before in Law and Order, but he’s been doing The Chase so long even British people didn’t realise he was quite a well regarded actor before. He’s one of these terribly British all rounders – used to play football, sings a bit, acts, presents a quiz – which isn’t such a thing nowadays.
I do hate people calling Whittaker ‘Jodi’, when it’s been surnames for the previous actors. I’m terrible at remembering and spelling names, though. I think I was making a point about first names usually being easier to spell with the recent run of Doctors, and while doing so, spelt her first name incorrectly. It’s why I usually use the numbers (or War Doctor for Hurt) when talking about Who.
21 November 2018 at 09:49 #65822@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 the sets of questions, personally.
21 November 2018 at 09:43 #65821@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 Christmas Album (physical disc sales, because youngsters mostly download, but still counted). Graham is a great character, and Walsh plays him perfectly.
20 November 2018 at 08:54 #65796@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 Doctor’s point. This was a new life form, working things out and making a mistake. The Doctor has a specific preference, it seems for the human race. Certainly holds them/us to a higher standard (as seen in the first episode). But we’re not the only life forms or the only perspective in the universe. And perhaps the most important thing about the system, is that it knew to ask for help. (And that ‘organics’ ought not to be slaughtered en mass, it did seem to recognise the difference between its own bots (which I’m pretty certain have no individual consciousness) and individual human beings.
19 November 2018 at 10:58 #65769Hi @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.
19 November 2018 at 08:29 #65767re: bots, it seemed to me that all the consciousness was in the system, not individual robots.
19 November 2018 at 08:27 #65766@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 sophisticated, also in some respects acted like a child, under developed if you like. The note asking for help reminded me of the episode with the giant wooden dolls, the idea of killing Charlies crush to show him the error of his ways was a dangerous mix of logic and naïvety. So in the end we had two people and one system that actually did care about people (though the system might also have been concerned about being shut down if it was blamed for the massacre) unable to communicate or work together until the Doctor turned up. More human (or human like) input was needed.
I agree that there is an illogic in insisting humans do tasks that are more effectively done by machines. Economic history has a long tradition of creating employment, thus jobs for humans, then creating technology that cuts down on the number of humans needed (see weaving). This combines with an offshoot of puritanical thought that work, as an end of itself is A Good Thing. The debate in this episode was about whether work is a right or a privilege. On both sides work seems to have remained a necessity, people are struggling for money, and I think that’s actually the side that needs to be debated.
19 November 2018 at 07:02 #65761@janetteb background noise, yes! The adults were quite confused by me as a child, I appeared to be hard of hearing, but hearing tests didn’t really back that up. I’d just about got the hang of things in London, moved to Manchester, realised how much I’d been lip reading and how differently people move their lips in Manchester. Many jobs that people tend to look down on and dismiss as ‘menial’ and ‘low skilled’ are actually incredibly hard for me.
19 November 2018 at 07:02 #65762@janetteb background noise, yes! The adults were quite confused by me as a child, I appeared to be hard of hearing, but hearing tests didn’t really back that up. I’d just about got the hang of things in London, moved to Manchester, realised how much I’d been lip reading and how differently people move their lips in Manchester. Many jobs that people tend to look down on and dismiss as ‘menial’ and ‘low skilled’ are actually incredibly hard for me.
18 November 2018 at 20:49 #65728Really happy to see a reference to dyspraxia as a learning disability as well as a motor skills issue. I honestly struggled working behind a bar, I’d be terrible at a checkout.
Started as a clear critique of Amazon, but ended up being more than that. Both the system, and one of the human staff put unreasonable pressure on human employees. The effects of automation on humans was examined. (Of course this only really has to be a problem if we have to insist on people working full time just to survive. During the industrial revolution they dropped workers wages to more easily maintain the required man power.)
The big bad was someone willing to kill for his cause. And his cause wasn’t half bad, his methods were horrible, but his plan, forcibly modified by the doctor might well succeed to some extent.
Arc? How dangerous quite ordinary people are. How small things make big differences. There’s going to be something about the timeline.
13 November 2018 at 08:43 #65615@tardigrade I’m absolutely certain Graham will break our hearts. I don’t know though, I don’t think he’ll die of cancer, but this is the second time he’s spoken in defence of someone keeping something quite important from their family. I think at the very least he sees the time he has right now as a bonus, he sees the time he had with his wife as a bonus, and he’s very interested in making his time with Ryan count, and seeing his grandson (as he sees him at any rate) with friends who will look out with him.
@nerys, yes it was a very brief mention. But this was very much a story of two families. To put a Sikh family in the mix as well, they’d need to give those characters something to do as well, it might have over complicated the story. But it was very blink (or whatever the listening version of that is, hiccup?) so I can see why a lot of people missed it.
@ichabod yes and good point about the Doctor’s shared experience with Graham. It just seems so abrupt, having seen him move from confused, alarmed, intrigued, and grateful (Ten) to absolutely terrified, curious, increasingly attracted, and then in love (Eleven) to absolutely unambiguously married (Twelve) to… nothing. The ring falls of her finger, she has a companion who’s just lost his wife, and she remembers what that feels like. She’d know exactly why Graham wanted to join the Tardis, it’s a big part of why, I think, Twelve was lumbered with/helped by Nardole, why he wanted a connection with Bill, why he was happy, despite the risks, to keep Missy in a box and eat takeaways with her every now and then.
There are little hints, or at least things that can be interpreted as signs of this. Her air of loneliness when she drops the companions off. The fact the Tardis took so long to get them to the right place and time. Her attendance at the funeral. Maybe even the choice of the binding of hands was a subtle call back, something Moffat (especially River) fans can pick up on, that won’t annoy the Moffat/River haters. But much as I love the Ryan- Graham character archs, they seem a little disconnected from the Doctor, which logically, they shouldn’t be.
13 November 2018 at 08:22 #65614@tardigrade what’s depressing is the predictable volume of comments on this being a ‘PC version’ of what happened in India, propaganda etc, despite the light touch of how it was dealt with here. What’s been really hardening is the amount of comment’s I’ve seen across the internet from people saying they didn’t know about partition and now they’re interested in knowing more, or about their children asking questions about it. I’m a little sad at the apparent obscurity of this history, pleased that this episode is arousing interest.
And this I think is why it’s good to address these issues directly and not always through analogy. Though apparently even this was direct enough. I’m in the middle of an argument on Facebook (I know, my own fault) with someone who thinks this wasn’t a suitable Remembrance Day episode because some of the characters said hard things about the English, won’t have it that the war people are referring to is World War 2, doesn’t seem to understand that Remembrance day isn’t just for people who died in the World Wars, and clearly hasn’t grasped what the word ‘World’ is doing in these two names…
-
AuthorPosts
