@zeyra

what is the average age here ? Just being curious

I’m not sure what the average is, but there are people here of all ages, from those in their teens like yourself, to a few like me who whose status is verging on the antique.  What ever our age, experience and other interests, what we all have in common is the love of Doctor Who and a d…[Read more]

@Missy

Hang in there!  If my experience is anything to go by the dry eye does clear up eventually.  The first eye to be done was much the worse affected and the syndrome lasted about six weeks. With the other eye it was, as I said, only a problem first thing when I woke in the morning.  Hypromelose, incidentally, is the active ingredient in th…[Read more]

@wolfweed @thane15

The resemblance between the Van Gogh painting and the opening scene on the planet does not seem all that close to me.  On the one hand the painting is full of swirling movement, from the swooping curve of the path into the foreground and back, to the wind rippled wheat and the wind-tossed crows, and the sky has the hazy, b…[Read more]

@Miapatrick

There is a vault. What is behind it is very important and needs protecting.

Yes, it seems from the hints we have been given so far that the Doctor is protecting whatever is in the cabinet in the vault from potential external attacks, and not guarding the earth from what is in the vault.  His first assumption in The Pilot, when the H…[Read more]

I meant to note, in passing, that the name of the ship ‘Erehwon’ – is the title of the book by Samuel Butler and the reverse of nowhere, which is in turn a more or less direct translation of the Greek word utopia.

@pedant

The same thought came immediately to my mind; vashta nerada

A cautionary tale for anyone who might have the hubris to attempt to build utopia, not to mention the potential drawbacks of depending too much on artificial intelligence (the Singularity ?).

I would have thought that this episode would satisfy the perpetual whingers who want…[Read more]

@Missy

Re the cataract surgery: I had problems with dry eye syndrome after the first eye was done – as you say, it felt sometimes as if I had grit in the eye, but on the advice of my local pharmacist I used hypromelose drops, which were very effective in alleviating the problem. With the second, right eye, there have been fewer after effects,…[Read more]

@smallgreenplant

*sigh* there’s a noob error…

Not to worry. Code occasionally appears in posts, sometimes for no obvious reason, but you have a chance to delete it. For the first four minutes or so you will see ‘edit’ top right, next to the post number, and if you click on that you can make corrections, whether it is intrusive code, typos or w…[Read more]

@smallgreenplant

Welcome 🙂  I was like you – lurked for ages before finally plucking up the nerve to dive in, but it has been well worth it, if somewhat time-consuming.

The bird on the desk does have something of the pigeon about it when I come to think of it; more turtle dove or collared dove, though, than the portly wood pigeons which…[Read more]

@TalkativeTraveller

As Missy says, welcome to the forum and we look forward to seeing you around and reading your views  As for getting to know the format, if you scroll down the Home page you will see listed all the various sites dedicated to the discussion of different topics, both Who related and other, with a brief explanation alongside.  Th…[Read more]

@Missy  Yup, cataract surgery.  The left eye was done at the beginning of January and the right eye at the end of February.  The implants are lenses which also correct for my astigmatism, so the results have astounding.  My distance vision is now crystal clear and pin sharp for the first time since I was in my early teens, and I no longer need spe…[Read more]

@CountScarlioni

Re the bird on the Doctor’s desk; if it is meant to be a raven it was modelled by somebody who had never looked at one.  The size appears about right as far as I could tell, and it appeared to have a heavy beak similar to that of a corvid, but the legs and the neck are much too long, the body insufficiently chunky, and the ov…[Read more]

@Morpho

We live and learn 🙂   I had no idea that those early versions of ‘An Unearthly Child’ had survived and have spent the last hour or so busily investigating. It is misleading to call them ‘pilots’ though, since they certainly are not in the sense we now use the term and I was somewhat confused at first by your reference to them as su…[Read more]

@Missy

PC breathing on a record (LP.)

Unless my brand-new eyes were deceiving me that was a 78 RPM gramophone record, not an LP – just a small incidental joke thrown in for those who can remember 78s and old-style gramophones, I think.

@Bluesqueakpip

The third of your possibilities is definitely the most likely in my opinion, and if so, maybe the Tardis herself then decided it was cool. As you point out, ever since that point it is the way she has translated whatever is the Gallifreyan term, whether or not the Gallifreyan term is itself an acronym.

@Whisht

Apologies for not responding earlier to your comment concerning The Ship Who Sang.  As I remember, in the latter novel the core of the ship and its pilot was the brain and nervous system of a human woman who had been born severely disabled but brought up from infancy as a cyborg and trained for this eventual role.  The ‘smart matter’ i…[Read more]

@pedant

On the subject of the Doctor’s forgetting and the effects of the neural block, I don’t think that we disagree quite as much as you seem to think we do.  If you look again at what I wrote above, I don’t dispute that he couldn’t *see* her or recall what she was like, even when face to face with her in the diner. He did remember, though,…[Read more]

@Redlemons

As far as I am aware he can revisit any time or place he has visited in the past, and even remain there for quite long periods, so long as he does not intervene directly in his own time line or try to alter anything which is a fixed moment, which would, of course create serious problems. He can even meet and interact with past…[Read more]