@dwnerdfrommars

Wow, this got political (that’s okay)

Although The Winchester (pub) rather than The Sofa seems recently to have become a place for discussing general Who related topics, the description on the front page of the Forum, where it is listed under Topics, is

The latest pub on our pub crawl. A break from the sofa and Doctor Who. S…[Read more]

@dentarthurdent

Yes, the first-past-the-post system here is grossly unrepresentative and urgently needs to be reformed.  Happy though I am with the result this time round, it is absurd that a party with little more than a third of the vote should gain a landslide victory. In fact the only party whose share of the vote this time has been at all…[Read more]

I’ve also been following events in the USA fairly closely and am appalled by the fact that Trump has a realistic chance of being elected. The prospect of another Trump presidency is frankly terrifying, especially now that the Supreme Court has granted him, at least as he sees it, carte blanche to do whatever he wants without any legal…[Read more]

Beige is fine as far as I’m concerned; Attlee was hardly a charismatic figure, and look what his government achieved! For the moment I’m just relieved that the grown-ups are now in charge, and I certainly don’t expect miracles, given the disaster area that Starmer’s government have inherited. What worries me for the future is the extent to which…[Read more]

Many thanks  @whohar  @winston  @blenkinsopthebrave  @janetteB  for the good wishes.  The polling station for my area is only 15 minutes walk from where I live and is on my route into the city centre, so I voted on my way to do my weekly food shopping, Voting seemed pretty brisk for mid afternoon, with a steady stream of people coming in, but e…[Read more]

@ps1l0v3y0u  @juniperfish

To be a warning about Sutekh it would need to be DAFTJACKAL

Or even more to the point, MAD JACK 😉

@thane16

It took me a while to compose the above, and in the meantime you and others have been continuing the discussion and to some extent overtaken me. I will  read and catch up and give everything due consideration, but it is late here and I’m not sure my constitution can stand up to many more late nights.

@thane16

I do think that there won’t necessarily be a return to R’s mum. Pretty sure Rus would say it’s all tied up -theme over slavish addiction to plot.

I didn’t mean to imply that there would be a return to the subject of Ruby’s birth mother. That plot line has indeed been brought to an appropriate and satisfactory conclusion If Louise Mille…[Read more]

SPOILER, SPOILER, SPOILER...

@whohar

I think it’s a shame that the Death of any of the main characters is avoided as it tends to diminish the stakes.

Yes. After what RTD was saying in the build up to the episode I was fully convinced that someone we, the audience cared about was going to die – and I had the box of tissues to hand. When absolutely everyone and everything was d…[Read more]

@thane16

I think it was @bunface who suggested the possibility that the woman in the hooded cloak might not have been Ruby’s mother, and that chimes with the direction of my thinking over the past 24 hours or more. It’s a question of assumptions, led in our case by the way the observed facts were presented.

The Doctor, who was the only external…[Read more]

@blenkinsopthebrave

As  @ps1l0v3y0u  says, there is no answer; in fact nothing adds up in terms of the explanation offered. Who attaches a road sign to a lamp post on the premises of a pub, anyway? (For the record, I checked all the scenes in the Time Window where the lamp post is visible and, although the images aren’t exactly crystal clear, t…[Read more]

@miapatrick

… it was Ruby’s mother who he couldn’t see

Yes, now that you point it out. I suppose my mind was wandering down another path and interpreting ‘see’ in a much wider sense. But why, among all the other mothers who have abandoned their babies or given them up for adoption and whose children have since tried and failed to find them, was…[Read more]

Mrs Flood’s Snow Queen get up at the end suggests that she may play a bigger part in events in the Christmas episode, and given Moffat’s record in basing Christmas specials on what could loosely be termed fairy stories, maybe we should expect a Hans Andersen theme.

@miapatrick @cathannabel

He couldn’t see her, therefore he feared her, as a potential ‘rogue’ element that could sabotage his plan.

True, but in the population of Earth, let alone in the universe as a whole, how many people are mysteries to themselves and others, so why was it Ruby alone whom Sutekh couldn’t see?  Was it the additional fact that s…[Read more]

@blenkinsopthebrave

Well, here are a couple of reflections. I think we should change the subtitle of our forum to:

“Theories even more dramatically satisfying than what’s actually happening.”

Perhaps they should employ the members of this forum collectively as a kind of think tank to come up with scenarios for future Doctor Who episodes ;-)…[Read more]

After all the hype and advance publicity, with RTG telling us it would be devastating, heart rending and the most spectacular season finale ever, that was something of a disappointment to put it mildly. All the musical cues and clues led nowhere, it seems, and the mystery of Ruby and her parentage turned out to be nothing out of the ordinary, even…[Read more]

As preparation for tomorrow I’ve just been watching the remastered and edited version of Pyramid of Mars in Tales of the Tardis on iPlayer. As a feature length film and with a few updated tweaks it has greater impact, I think, even though the effect of the cliff hangers in the original 25 min episodes is lost.  I note that Prof. Scarman’s racist…[Read more]

@miapatrick

Mrs Flood is Susan, who had been chameleon arced till the Christmas episode.

Yessss!  Wonderful suggestion – it fits perfectly with what we know, and if I were given to betting I might even stake a modest sum on the likelihood of it turning out to be true.

@thane16

With two artificial hips and now a new knee I’m gradually turning into bionic woman. It’s exactly a year since I had the knee op, but I made what the surgeon and physio seemed to think was near miraculously rapid progress in recovering full use of the joint.  If only they could also do spine replacements.  Because of the loss of i…[Read more]