This is rather late in the day to be arriving at the party, so my reactions and observations are unlikely to add much of substance to what has been said already, but here goes, anyway.

Granted that the monster-of-the week was a bit rubbish, I agree that this was another good episode with a lot in it to savour.  To my mind the comic potential of…[Read more]

@arbutus  Re Abduction from the Seraglio: just in case you are attributing to me an expertise I do not possess, I am bound to confess that  my knowledge of music is patchy at best.  In this instance I recognised the piece as by Mozart and suspected that it might be significant, but I had to do a bit of searching to identify it.  Once the identif…[Read more]

@purofilion  P S  ‘Wetware’ is not of my coinage, so I cannot lay claim to originality in this instance.  It is, so I understand, a term sometimes used by IT geeks and I borrowed it 🙂

@purofilion   re the music:  I think your meaning was clear, so there was no need for the ‘sorry’.  If I gave you the impression that I had misunderstood, then it must have been my choice of words which was misleading, so if anyone should be apologising it is me.  What I meant to say was that, without any deliberate effort to do so, I ‘tune out’…[Read more]

@purofilion  I was very interested to read your observations on the difference the presence or absence of the music made to the overall dramatic impact.  As accompanying music has become more obtrusive and ubiquitous in television drama I seem to have developed a faculty for tuning it out, so that I am no longer consciously aware of it unles…[Read more]

@scaryb

….. he’s also dealing with the mega overload of information from the universe, that he needs to be able to select the relevant bits from to make the right pattern. (Much like dealing with the internet being wired straight into your head I’d imagine!)

I should really have made reference to this in my musings on the nature and size of the…[Read more]

Maybe I am just very easy to please, but so far I have enjoyed all the episodes this season, each in its own way and for different reasons, and this is no exception. I appreciated it even more on second viewing today since, although I grasped all the main points the first time, I was conscious that some details were slipping past me (I blame the…[Read more]

@drben  Exactly 🙂

@drben  @arbutus   In fact, assuming that time travel in the boring real universe were possible other than in the relativistic sense, even the shortest hop backward or forward in time would entail some pretty complex calculations to establish the exact spatial whereabouts of the destination. The earth is travelling at a pretty fast lick in orb…[Read more]

@arbutus   Yes indeed!  People who refuse to distinguish, or perhaps cannot distinguish opinion from fact and/or who seem to think that assertion equals argument are one of my bugbears too, and one of the reasons I find it increasingly unrewarding to read the comments on opinion pieces on sites such as the Guardian.  Maybe I expect too much of peo…[Read more]

Expletive deleted!  I have just lost two almost complete drafts of posts as a result of interruptions.  Maybe the third attempt will be successful.

The debate about whether or not the monsters are real has reminded me of the invisible monster in the film Forbidden Planet. The monster was real enough, because it had dangerous physical effects, b…[Read more]

@handles   Missy as a Sibyl?  That is a very interesting suggestion, especially as the only thing we know about her for certain from the advance publicity and cast lists is that her title is Guardian of the Nethersphere.  I’m not sure that the sibyls of the ancient Greek and Roman world could be described as psychics, though. They were prie…[Read more]

That was Moffat at his terrifying best and I pity any parents of young children trying to get their offspring off to sleep last night.  These days there isn’t much that scares me but it featured a recurrent nightmare which I had when I was aged three or four* and which I can still recall vividly: not a monster under the bed but the monster un…[Read more]

My vote would be for either Survival or The Greatest Show in the Galaxy since I have seen neither of these, whereas it is not long since I watched the other two on the Horror Channel.  Survival has cats, which is in its favour, but on balance I think I would plump for TGSitG.

@handles :  I don’t think that it is the Doctor doing the ‘saving’ – not directly, anyway, and probably not consciously.  On the basis of the very limited evidence available so far I am speculating that it is someone, or some entity who/which is very closely, perhaps psychically linked to him, whether Missy herself or some kind of intermediary be…[Read more]

Belated afterthought:  Did anyone see a possible connection between Capaldi-Doctor’s prowess with a spoon-as-fencing weapon and McCoy-Doctor’s expertise with the spoons-as-percussion instrument?

@brewski  Did you really think that, because a momentary rift in the spacetime continuum of the unreal universe allowed a sliver of boring mundanity to slip in, I hated the whole episode?  Please say it ain’t so!   Offhand I can’t recall a single episode, BG or AG, that I hated in its entirety and I almost always find something positive to like…[Read more]

@purofilion  Thank you for the welcome.  I am responding to you here rather than on the RoS thread, since we have veered a bit off topic.

Your reference to me as an ‘academic’ in your first paragraph suggests that I may have given people a somewhat inflated impression of my status.  I do have a doctorate, for what it is worth, but to me the ti…[Read more]

@pedant  How dare you, sir, doubt my word as a gentlewoman. Name your friends and it’s spoons at dawn!

I should make it clear, however, that the promise only holds good for this thread, but if I do pick nits in future I will try to restrict myself to gigantic nits, on the scale of the dinosaur in Deep Breath in relation to a normal T Rex.

I get the impression that I may have come across as a trifle blue/gold boringers in my first post 🙁   if so, my apologies, it was not my intention. @handles @brewski @purofilion  I certainly did not mean to make a big deal of the golden arrow. Where Doctor Who is concerned I am and always have been perfectly prepared and able to believe any numb…[Read more]