Thanks, puro, and a happy new year to you also. And congratulations on the conducting gig.

My Christmas/New Year was quiet and pleasantly self indulgent – and for once the weather was good; cold but crisp and sunny. Sadly, shortly afterwards I received news of the death on Christmas Eve of one of my oldest friends , which put a…[Read more]

There is a year to wait until the resumption of service with the 2026 Christmas special:  may the time pass productively and may we all survive happily to view it 🙂

If you wish to know more about the background to Sutekh, look up Pyramids of Mars which is from the Tom Baker era. It’s well worth watching and can be found here on the home page. A condensed and edited version is also available.

With my critical faculties dialled back, if not totally suspended, I enjoyed the episode, despite some niggling doubts about narrative points which didn’t seem to fully add up from a logical point of view* . I did feel,…[Read more]

I think it would have been more powerful if RTD had structured the episode like Groundhog Day, and showing the Doctor gain an increasing awareness of where he was (and how he got there would also be nice). I think this would have given the episode more dramatic impact than what was, essentially, around 45 minutes of exposition.

I agree;…[Read more]

My understanding was that it was the Doctor’s doubts specifically that were required, as his doubts are somehow so powerful they can destroy the Wish World and the connection to the Underverse.

That is what the lady said, certainly, and it would be typically arrogant of  her  to assume that. Maybe she was telling the truth, and the doubt…[Read more]

 I wondered if the Bone Palace was the Rani’s Tardis. Also, I couldn’t figure out why those giant skeletons were present (for in-story reasons I mean*)

It seems strange to have something so anachronistic present in a world where doubt is an arrestable  offence.

The Rani’s Tardis does seem the most likely explanation for the bone palac…[Read more]

I would happily bigenerate if my alter ego didn’t inherit my arthritic spine 🙂

Many thanks for that; I hadn’t come across it before and it’s lovely.  And yes, midges are best contemplated from a distance, dancing in columns in the sun.

@scaryb

😀  Well midges are admittedly one of the few downsides of the Scottish countryside, so I should have realised that it was the Scots if anyone who would come u…[Read more]

unless they taught the Greeks how to write

Possible of course, if we assume that they were responsible for all systems of phonetic script in the eastern Mediterranean region and the naming of Hebrew letters as well, but I think that might involve some chronological juggling

As for the rest, if Time Lords had fraternities I’m sure they…[Read more]

unless they taught the Greeks how to write

Possible of course, if we assume that they were responsible for all systems of phonetic script in the eastern Mediterranean region and the naming of Hebrew letters as well, but I think that might involve some chronological juggling

As for the rest, if Time Lords had fraternities I’m sure they…[Read more]

Interesting. Are there any songs about midges? Midges in my experience are a million times more pestiferous than mosquitos, because mosquitos at least do you the courtesy of injecting anaesthetic when they bite even if the bites itch later, and  they don’t generally tend to attack in battalions. I have very unpleasant memories of working…[Read more]

I used to wonder sometimes how, when and why the Time Lords adopted the Greek alphabet – it clearly wasn’t for the purpose of writing. Maybe the TLs were behind the Athenian Golden Age of philosophy and proto-science, then some of them thought the system of writing cute and began using it as a kind of affectation. But if so, what were…[Read more]

As an afterthought I have just checked on the Secure Container Cube used to confine the Screech in Lucky Day, and it bears a distinct, though not exact similarity to the Giant container in the trailer. So container for the big O Ω ?

I also made a slight error in my transcription of what Belinda said, it should h…[Read more]

On reflection I think my first reading of the display was correct, except that I transcribed it wrongly, so it should have read,  in all Greek capitals,  Z.A.Π Ι –  Zeta Alpha Pi Iota. The Time Lords did at one time seem keen on using Greek letters (hence Omega Ω), so some kind of Gallifreyan secret organisation seems a distinct possibility.

You’ve prompted me to go back for another look. In scene 9, which directly follows scene 7 with the giant safe or secure container ( I seem to have missed out 8 in the reckoning), it isn’t actually clear who Belinda is speaking to, but there is no indication that it is the Rani and the setting does not seem to be the bone…[Read more]

You’ve prompted me to go back for another look. In scene 9, which directly follows scene 7 with the giant safe or secure container ( I seem to have missed out 8 in the reckoning), it isn’t actually clear who Belinda is speaking to, but there is no indication that it is the Rani and the setting does not seem to be the bone…[Read more]

please tell me that this article is not serious

If in doubt, google The Onion 😉

@janetteb

I proposed that it might be time to set up a kind of Writers Room rather than leaving the creative decisions entirely with one show runner

I can see your point, and I know that this method has produced many highly successful American shows,…[Read more]

Thanks for the trailer

This morning, having some time to spare while waiting to leave for a hospital appointment, I amused myself by going through the video the equivalent of frame by frame, with subtitles on so that I could link dialogue to images. This is what I noted.

1. Reprise of falling balcony with Doctor.

Rani. (OC)…

[Read more]

The theory that a Ladydoc shouldn’t in anyway ape a ‘blokedoc’ is not necessarily unsound.

Whittaker is far too good an actor to fall into that particular trap, I think. Watching a selection of her predecessors might at least have given her a better idea of who and what the Doctor is, without her feeling any need to adopt speci…[Read more]

On the subject of names, The Rani addressed the baby’s father as Herr Zufall which is certainly significant, since Zufall means chance/happenstance – entirely appropriate for the seventh son of a seventh son in a Black Forest fairy tale.

@thane16

Greetings Puro.

why does Ruby feel the need to see Conrad face to face? She isn’t h…

[Read more]

Poppy and the army can’t do anything if they’re dead, and they all just fell into giant purple portals with buildings collapsing onto them to boot. The whole Earth’s gone to dust, and they’re not going to have a TARDIS swooping in to scoop them up. We already know from previous episodes that Earth is dead-dead-dead post May 24 2025, an…

[Read more]

I well know that feeling of seeing a long and carefully thought out post disappear into the ether. The answer I’ve found is to copy everything before hitting submit; then, if it goes astray you can just paste and repost it

Throughout Chib’s tenure I tried when commenting to seize on anything positive and downplay the rest, but by the end I felt it was wasted effort – and it was often an effort. The Timeless Child concept does smack of a Cartnell type plan and I have no particular problem with it as such, if only it had been i…[Read more]

The whole point of the false world is that it can be destroyed by doubt… And the Doctor’s breakthrough doubt is powerful enough to break into the underverse where Omega is supposedly trapped.

Yes, the Rani made that very clear in her exposition to the Doctor. The reasoning seems straightforward enough: the universe is too robust and sta…[Read more]

Knowing that the Rani’s purpose is to resurrect Omega helps make sense of much of the episode. In The Three Doctors Omega was sustaining his existence by using the singularity at the heart of a black hole and the power of his own will to sustain an existence…[Read more]

Yes, the story of the Doctor’s origins as the Timeless Child was first related to her by the Master, as was the first mention of the Division by name, and if that were all, it might be possible to dismiss the whole thing as a lie; an invention on his part to get back at her and justify his genocidal actions. The problem is that everything…[Read more]

The problem with trying to fit Ruth Doc into the line of Doctors 1 to 13, at least for me, is that it means not only jettisoning the Timeless Child narrative – i.e. Awsok/Tecteun was lying through her teeth, but that the Division shenanigans were were contemporary with the lives of at least some of the in…[Read more]

Like @whohar my first thought, about ten minutes in, was of The Wedding of River Song (Husbands was the Christmas special) in that reality was being perverted.

In the introductory…[Read more]

As @scaryb says, all hail! In essentials you to have evidently acquired powers of foresight or prophesy.

 I’m also not clear about the hair thing – does the hair growing back indicate time passing in the real world? Why does the Barber cut his own hair as he’s revealing his own story?

While I’m trying to digest Wish World (stories again, featuring the Rani as the Wicked Witch) yes, a good point. My take, for what it is worth, is that the cu…[Read more]

The chief problem I have with your proposed scenario for the finale is that it’s an awful lot of material to cram into two episodes, and this is a series in which, as several people have observed, there have already been episodes which might have been better developed over more than 50 minutes. I agree also with @whisht and @blenkinsoptheb…[Read more]

Interesting lists to ponder.

Observations 2-4: I’m still not convinced that Belinda is anything other than she seems – unless she’s been chameleon arced almost her whole life. I suggested a possible explanation for her recognition of the Tardis in post 77377 in the discussion on The Well, and I took her ‘Then let’s go home to Gallifrey’…[Read more]

It takes nerve, I…[Read more]

The slight problem with this that I can see, is that Abena was talking out loud about this meeting with Doc 15, and his response indicated that he was aware of this event.

Yes, my memory was at fault here on this and one or two other points. Having had another look. I still think that the Fugitive Doctor we saw was meant to be an image in…[Read more]

Yes, Ruth Doctor. RTD has evidently accepted the Chibs retcon thus far. Whether he will run with it is another matter.

Based on the T C/Division/memory wipe narrative, Gatwa Doctor should remember meeting Ruth Doc and have accepted that she was a previous incarnation of himself, but have no recollection of actually being Ruth Doc…[Read more]

 If he’s the storyteller of the gods then why did he need to hold people hostage and force them to tell stories?

My reading, which of course may be well off the mark, is that he began, as he said, as a mortal – a griot telling stories. To connect the stories  he gathered from all over the world he constructed a web, the Nexus,…[Read more]

There was a similar kind of hyperbolic build up for Empire of Death which, to put it mildly, did not live up to the billing. Let’s hope that this finale does in fact provide a resolution for all the various threads and a neat conclusion to this and the last season, without being to wildly OTT.

The Doctor once said, ‘We are all stories in the end’, and on another occasion, ‘Stories are where memories go when they are forgotten’, and here the theme continues with a narrative about the power of stories. The setting, a barber’s shop, is representative of the kinds of…[Read more]

All of that; and villains are usually more fascinating than heroes unless the hero has a sufficiently enigmatic or tortured back story.

We have been watching this fictional show for 60 years about a population that never seems to remember the Doctor, or the carnage caused by the Daleks, the Cybermen, and umpteen others.

Yes indeed. It was just about plausible in the BG days when stories set on earth generally affected relatively small numbers of people or were…[Read more]

Yes, I think we have got the Doctor’s timeline sorted. Everything in the episode apart from the opening scene happens before the events in The Robot Revolution.  Seventeen years after the first encounter Conrad sees the Tardis and the Doctor for the second time, now accompanied by Ruby, and gets the idea of using her as a me…[Read more]

Thanks. I did wonder afterwards whether I should have gone with the Dusty Springfield cover, which is a better quality recording … and it’s Dusty Springfield!  But perhaps it was best to stick with the original.

Is Conrad the Master ?  If he is he must have regenerated as a child and been adopted by a human mother. His encounter with the Doctor and Belinda on New Years Eve 2007 suggests otherwise, though.  This doesn’t mean that he isn’t being co-opted by who or whatever Mrs Flood represents. As I said in a pr…[Read more]

Yes, the ongoing enigma of Mrs Flood. First the ubiquitous slightly nosey neighbour who knows more than she should, with a tendency now and again to break the fourth wall like a Greek Chorus, now she does seem to be doing a Susan Twist, popping up in different guises and in wildly different times and settings. My latest…[Read more]

Thank you. It certainly ranks as my worst Christmas ever, and that includes the one when I had measles (aged 6 – no vaccine available in them days), the one when I had chickenpox (aged 10), and the one where I was felled by a migraine on Christmas morning – although on the latter occasion I recovered sufficiently by…[Read more]