@ps1l0v3y0u

It was actually the Moff who originally came up with the idea for the episode and suggested it to RTD a good many years ago, but they decided at the time that the budget wouldn’t stretch to realising the necessary FX. Maybe Asimov’s stories were an influence*, but I agree with @scaryB, that what they probably had in mind was a certain…[Read more]

@janetteB    re the no hugging: I knew of the policy regarding teachers and the like – not that I recall teachers ever hugging pupils when I was small, but it’s surely not taboo for parents and close relatives ?  Perhaps this was a society in which wealthy people mistook over indulgence in material things as the best way of demonstrating par…[Read more]

BBC APPROVED SPOILERS...

@whohar

Did anyone else get the vibes of Luke Skywalker fighting the drone with his helmet on in the Falcon?

I’ve just been reading through the comments again to refresh my memory and noticed this, which I’d forgotten.

Yes, when I saw Ricky fighting of the dot first time it immediately recalled the image of Luke Skywalker with a light sabre,…[Read more]

Susan Twist appears yet again in the cast list for next Saturday’s episode. Maybe all will be revealed in the two-part finale, or maybe it has been just a protracted tease, with no other significance.

Very late in arriving on the scene this week (life etc,…) but at least it has given me time to read and reflect on everyone’s reactions and theories.

For me this was another winner, third in a row, and RTD appears to be on a roll now and not pulling his punches. As it did with @juniperfish and Prof. Wilson in the link given us by @craig, this…[Read more]

@devilishrobby

All power to your convalescence, but I, too, advise taking things gradually 😉

I’m curious as to why you think that the witchy lady wasn’t an older version of Ruby, because that seemed to me to have been indicated fairly plainly. Granted that when the witchy lady first appeared she conveyed a very spooky vibe, but once it became…[Read more]

@whohar

Please tell me you’ve been chased from a temple by a giant boulder.

Hand on heart I assure you that I have never been chased by a giant boulder or run the gauntlet of a series of booby traps on any of the sites where I have worked – but then I have never tried to steal a valuable artefact from an ancient temple. That kind of thing tends t…[Read more]

@juniperfish

River’s immortal line from The Husbands of River Song, “I’m an archaeologist from the future, I dug you up”.

Yes, I remember grinning broadly at that line 😀   I would love to have had River’s sonic trowel, too, way back in my digging days. There is a lot to be said in favour of the trusty forged tang WHS 4 inch pointing trowels, (…[Read more]

@blenkinsopthebrave  @juniperfish

I have been twisting myself into a pretzel trying to get my head around the logic of Ruby being her own mother in the manner suggested, but any way I look at the paradox it seems to end in a completely closed loop with no beginning and no end – not even Ouroboros, because the ring has no head or tail.  If there w…[Read more]

@ps1l0v3y0u

Re the significance of Ruby’s DNA; across the entire population of the earth variations such as eye and skin colour or facial features are minor and insignificant in the human genome. As we now know, even the differences between modern humans and neanderthals were not such as to prevent successful interbreeding. (As an aside,…[Read more]

@ps1l0v3y0u  @janetteB

The problem with the idea that Ruby might be a Time Lord, whether the Doctor’s mother or his sister or any other relative is, as  I noted in an earlier post, that the visual projection of the Tardis analysis registered her under ‘species’ as ‘homo sapiens’ – and I did pause the recording and look carefully.  Before I ch…[Read more]

@juniperfish

This time, Ruby sees Old Witchy Ruby before the circle break and therefore knows (without knowing why) to stop the Doctor breaking the fairy circle, and this time the Doctor knows to tell Ruby not to read the circle’s messages out loud.

Yes, I think that the merging of the two timelines brought about a kind of recursion and that, on t…[Read more]

@devilishrobby

So sorry to hear of your heart attack; my commiserations and I hope that you make a complete recovery, and that soon. Such an event is very alarming and discombobulating but, if it’s any comfort or reassurance, I started having severe angina attacks 13 years ago and what I think in retrospect was a minor heart attack, but…[Read more]

@whohar  @juniperfish

I agree that the fact that they didn’t use ageing make up or prosthetics to age Ruby is probably deliberate and significant.  I have always looked a good deal younger than my age, or so I’ve repeatedly been and am still told,* but  I certainly looked somewhat older than that by the time I turned forty.

* It was highly an…[Read more]

@juniperfish

I too wear a plain gold band on the third finger of my right hand, but for different reasons again. It is in fact made from the gold of three wedding rings; those of my mother, my maternal grandmother and my grandmother’s mother who was born in 1841 and married in 1862, so it is a link across four generations of my family. The long…[Read more]

@juniperfish

I’m a bit haunted by the messages from the fairy circle which Ruby reads out. They are: “I miss you” and “Rest in peace, Mad Jack”. Surely no one misses fascist Prime Minister Roger Ap Gwillam.

Except that when Ruby reads out that message Roger ap Gwilliam is some twenty years in the future. In retrospect I interpreted this as ‘Remai…[Read more]

@blenkinsopthebrave

Apologies for not seeming to acknowledge that you raised the point about Ruby recognising the Susan Twist before I did. You  posted while I was writing the above.

That was very, very good; certainly one of the Who classics despite the absence of the Doctor for most of it – though of course the same is true of Blink and Turn Left. There was a twist, too, though not at the end.

The beginning, with the breaking of the circle, the disappearance of the Doctor and the appearance of the mysterious figure next to…[Read more]

@ps1l0v3y0u

Anyone checked out the name of the Welsh village for Thomasite Llareggyb meaning? I don’t have head for unlikely combination of consonants.

Llareggyb is the name of the village in Under Milk Wood, by Dylan Thomas (hence Thomasite, I presume. The y in Welsh is pronounced more like u. Try saying it backwards with the double L as in En…[Read more]