@Juniperfish   The ‘mummy’ and other elements may be evocative of ancient Egypt and Egyptian mythology, but I am duty bound to point out that the symbols on the scroll which conjures the Foretold are cuneiform writing or facsimiles thereof, so Sumerian/Babylonian/Assyrian – make of that what you will 🙂

Poirot crossed with Hammer Horror indeed, but with added depth and layers.

I approached this one with caution, hoping that it would at least be rattling good fun but fearing the worst. In the event it offered a good deal more than just that and I was completely won over.

It looked gorgeous, of course, from the train interior and the costumes, to…[Read more]

@janetteB    Thanks for the compliment!   I had fun thinking it up 🙂

As regards the self-cloning part of my theory, the Doctor said the moon dragon was unique, which might mean only that he had never come across one before – in which case it could simply be very rare and the only one of its kind in this region of the universe. In either case,…[Read more]

@Thommck

 it could lay an extremely dense egg which then inflated to moon size.

 

Who’s to say the “Dragon” didn’t lay a small egg to which it instantly expanded due to the space vacuum environment

Two minds …. (well, more or less) 🙂

@Bluesqueakpip   Well, that’s a possibility if we assume that the egg itself consisted originally…[Read more]

I have been toying with ideas on how the moon-as-egg might be rationalised in a quasi-scientific way within the context of the Who universe. It probably goes against the rules of science fantasy, but for once I am in the mood for a bit of bonkers theorising.

So I will ignore what we know of the age of our moon and its composition and start fr…[Read more]

@BadWulf   Thanks very much for the link to the YouTube video; it sums up the problem beautifully.  Science fantasy is fine in its own way, but not when contaminated by the misuse of current scientific terms.  Anyone who understands the meaning of those terms is likely to have great difficulty in hanging on to the thread, wire or cable from whic…[Read more]

On the subject of Clara’s decision and her relationship with the Doctor I don’t think that I can add much to what has been said already.  This was the Doctor pushing her to achieve, in the way that Danny had already described to her, and when someone does that to you, you often feel resentful, even when you benefit.  Her anger  afterwards was a n…[Read more]

Real life has been getting in the way over the past couple of days, leaving me barely enough time to keep up with this thread, let alone post my own reactions, and most of the points arising from my thoughts on first viewing have already been raised and discussed at length.

My feelings about this episode are mixed.  I found the dramatic tension,…[Read more]

@badwulf    I realised on first waking this morning that through some mental aberration I had misnamed the author of ‘The Discovered Country’.  It is Ian R McCleod,  (of ‘The Light Ages’ and ‘The House of Storms’), not Ian McDonald (‘River of Gods’ etc.).  But the story is written in the historic present.  As I said, I have no problem with thi…[Read more]

@phaseshift   Maybe cold hands is the secret, as well as speed and handling it as little as possible, also not being heavy handed with the rolling out.  For most of the time that I was still living with my parents we had no fridge, so there was no question of chilling it that way.  On the other hand, neither did we have central heating, and all…[Read more]

@badwulf   The title of the story is ‘The Discovered Country’, and it is included in the latest ‘Years Best’ anthology (Gardner Dozois ed.).  According to the acknowledgements it was published first in Asimov’s Science Fiction in September last year.  It is, though, another one of McDonald’s narrated in the historic present. For my part I don’…[Read more]

@spider  @ idiotsavon  Re Missy’s ‘heaven’, I have, coincidentally just read a short story by Ian McDonald which featured a virtual heaven (‘Farside’), hugely elaborate and realistic, into which the ultra-rich could upload themselves. They had to die as part of the process, but once uploaded could continue to interact with the real w…[Read more]

@arbutus   Yes, I realise that we have to some extent been at cross purposes.  It’s just that I love words, and it saddens me when secondary and derivative usages supplant the primary meaning.  When we try to use the two meanings in the same context, though, it does cause problems.  To describe the argument in the Tardis as a dramatic passage in t…[Read more]

@phaseshift  I saw the first part of Cameron’s Conference Rap last night on HIGNFY and laughed myself silly!  It is even better in full, and if it has not already gone viral it deserves to.

On the subject of pastry, a agree that a basic shortcrust is really all that is necessary.  My mother used to make the lightest and flakiest shortcrust I ha…[Read more]

@arbutus @idiotsavon   I am pretty sure that the original creators of Doctor Who thought of it as drama; initially as drama with an educational purpose.   Sydney Newman who came up with the idea in the first place and played a large part in developing it was, at any rate, Head of Drama at the BBC at the time.

Comedy has always been regarded as a…[Read more]

@idiotsavon  @handles   As I understand it the term drama covers any work designed to be performed to an audience by actors, whether on stage or via the broadcast media, and includes tragedy, comedy and whatever lies in between.  The term itself derives from a Greek word, as do the terms comedy and tragedy ( @purofilion referred to classic…[Read more]

@bluesqueakpip     Re: the Skovox Blitzer – I don’t think there was to be a real sense of jepor… jeapor.. danger. As a few others have said: it wasn’t the focus of the story. It was simply the reason for the Doctor to come into Clara’s everyday life.

Well yes.  That was meant to be implicit in what I wrote, but since I could think of nothing to…[Read more]

@purofilion   Interesting that you describe the Skovox Blitzer as a clever and scary monster when the majority of us who have commented on it at thought otherwise.  I agree with @serahni that it could have been different if the monster had been the focus of the story; a robot soldier capable of destroying planets, whose apparent default was to ide…[Read more]

@arbutus     Yes, it was Matt Smith in The Lodger that I was thinking of in particular.  Matt’s Doctor in such situations seemed to have a puppyish desire to please, constantly undermined by his failure to understand human thinking and human customs and by an almost complete blindness to social cues.  Tom Baker’s Doctor was, as you say, …[Read more]

@juniperfish  You must have posted your comment concerning the Doctor’s remarks to Clara about her appearance around the time I started writing my post #32698 (which took a long time, owing to interruptions), otherwise I would have referenced it.  As I said, I think it is deliberate, if rather clumsy.  After all, he cannot really think that she…[Read more]