@winston The Wednesday night run of @midnight — an American panel show that pokes fun at the world via what’s turning up online, often with very blue humor — had a ball with this particular story.  The host, Chris Hardwick, is a vocal Whovian (he hosted/moderated the 2015 San Diego Comic Con panel with the Who leads) and he joked that he’s now w…[Read more]

Wow!  Spooky stuff there, @rob!  😀

@janetteB and @ichabod Thanks for the advice.  (hugs)  I’m sure things will come back in time.  Maybe around April…  😉

BBC APPROVED SPOILERS...

@thane15 and @ichabod — You’re right, of course, and I’m terribly sorry I didn’t make things clearer.  I put “better” in quotation marks for a reason.  😉  Of course he makes the right choices when he had the chance, because he is the Doctor and not a sociopath.  That takes a lot of courage and strength on his part because he doesn’t know the pot…[Read more]

@winston Thank you for your recommendation.  (writes it down)  I don’t turn up my nose at YA books even though I’m pushing 39 at this point.  Reading the 12 Doctors 12 Stories anthology was fascinating in that respect.  (Holly Black’s story for the Twelfth Doctor, “Lights Out”, is one of the best expanded universe stories about Twelve — and even…[Read more]

@conchobarre Thank you.  I doubt the show can pull it off, or whether they’d want to do something like that after a lot of people were apparently exhausted by the denouement of “The End of Time” 😉  But hopefully they’ll come up with something even better than that, we just don’t know what yet.  Fingers are crossed!

Let us know what you think @ichabod!  😉

I’ve been feeling rather blah of late.  My muse hasn’t felt like creating new poetry or anything in quite a while, and last year it was pretty prolific.  And perhaps it’s my autism, but trying to force myself to work on creative work everyday — which is what they always recommend as a way to punch th…[Read more]

@thane15:

So if he’d left children & civilians on G’frey die that would’ve been better? 

Well, in the sense that it would have been less grief for the Doctor in the long run, it would have been “better”.  Same with Ashildr — if he’d let her perish even though he could keep that from happening, it would have spared him much grief and guilt.  A…[Read more]

(sniff) Too true, @ichabod.  That’s why I wonder if some pattern, something greater than he put the memory of Pompeii in his head at that exact moment.  He’d been wondering since his regeneration why he had the face he did, and he’d been able to swallow sorrow and shame over deaths he might have been able to prevent before, and he was already b…[Read more]

(sigh)  I just tried to respond to both @thane15 and @ichabod in a post, but it didn’t go through.  Here’s a shorter version of what I wanted to say:

@thane15, regarding O’Donnell’s death, Bennett insists that had the Doctor been more forceful about having her stay behind and less interesting in “testing” his theory about the list, she would h…[Read more]

Hmmm…maybe zen study is for me?  🙂  I could use some light-dark balance… 😉

(mmm)  I’ve been reading a lot of comics/manga lately, which I enjoy a lot, but I haven’t found a really compelling novel to read in a while.  I was wondering if anyone here had a recommendation for an uplifting sci-fi/fantasy story to help me power through these tough times?  🙂

Also, on a lighter note on my part…in this episode, the Doctor says he left Gallifrey because he was scared, as opposed to bored.  But if that confession is indeed the truth, what was he scared of?  If it was the Hybrid prophecy — which it may or may not have been, since he never says he was scared of the Hybrid — doesn’t that suggest he did k…[Read more]

Well, @pedant, it wasn’t meant to be taken seriously from what I could tell.  It’s just that the thought of a bunch of panicking TL’s racing out into the desert with that thing makes me smile.  😉

Also @ichabod, I don’t see how the Doctor was turned from a sword to a plow through his ordeal in this story.  If anything it was the reverse.  He was already a plow when he decided to help Rigsy.  But when that didn’t help save him or Clara, and couldn’t get him out of the dial, he realized over the course of “Heaven Sent” that he needed to be…[Read more]

@thane15, I think the central tragedy of the Lady Me situation was that the Doctor had two bad choices — let her die and live with the knowledge of yet another life lost on his watch (and so soon after he got chewed out over O’Donnell, too), or save her the only way he could, which had the immortality “side effect”.  But perhaps it was…[Read more]

Or, inspired by suggestions I’ve read on this forum…

Perhaps Twelve’s last Christmas special will prove how loved he is by doing something like “Journey’s End” or “The End of Time”‘s denouement, where all of the key Moffat-era companions and recurring and/or beloved secondary characters come back, either to help him or to be there as he…[Read more]

Much as I love this episode, I do have an issue with it that carries over into those that follow:

Why didn’t anyone in the universe try to save the Doctor?

Why was there no Time Lord aware of his suffering with the courage to set him free?  Why was the dial left to moulder in the desert?

Where were all the people in the universe who love the…[Read more]

@ichabod I know how you feel about Twelve’s regeneration, and you make an interesting point about his getting a sort of one with the mind wipe.   It’s just that this Doctor hasn’t had his “day in the sun” yet.

He hasn’t ended a season in glory, even bittersweet glory.  Both Series 8 and 9 leave him abandoned, alone, and with no one even shaking h…[Read more]