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13 January 2026 at 22:38 #78489
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 retrospective damper on things. We had known one another for 60 years, having met on the Winchester excavations when she was an assistant in the finds shed and I was supervising on the site of the Saxon Minsters on Cathedral Green* That summer we were billeted in the same quarters in the disused army camp which was at that time being used to house the large body of multi-national volunteer diggers, and she made a somewhat dubious start by blacking out the entire camp and, I suspect, a good deal of the surrounding district. She had brought a kettle so that we could brew hot drinks in the evenings but, as it turned out, she didn’t know how to wire a plug, didn’t realise that the wires were differently coloured for a reason, and didn’t think to ask any of the rest of us for advice. She was clever, funny, and at that time a bit scatty, as well as being five years younger than me, but somehow we got along well. During recent years we only occasionally had the opportunity to meet face to face but I will miss her.
As for health, I’m happy to say that I’m pretty well, considering that at the age of 83 one must accept a certain degree of crumblitude. My spine is for once behaving remarkably well and the thrombocythaemia (look it up) remains well under control 13 years + since diagnosis. I’ve also, recently, been diagnosed with wet macular degeneration, but so far my eyesight is not affected and my latest check-up on Dec 15th showed everything stable and visual acuity pretty good, so fingers crossed.
Over the holiday period I watched Rear Window, an oldie which, I realised to my shame, I had never seen previously, and Oppenheimer. Generally speaking though, I have watched very little TV in recent months, although I keep recording things with the intention of watching later. Instead I have been on a major reading binge, both new purchases and books from my extensive library, some of which I haven’t read in many decades so that it was like re-encountering old acquaintances. Now I have purchased a Kindle, which I shall probably regret – all those temptingly cheap e-books available at a tap on the screen! I hope to get round soon to watching War Between Land and Sea on I-player; I gather it is visually impressive, if perhaps a little less so dramatically.
* re the Winchester Saxon minsters, the word is that finally – Finally – the definitive report on the Minsters is due to see the light of print this year; I had begun to think that I wouldn’t survive to see the day. The site was only one, though arguably the most significant, of the several sites excavated during the eight extended summer digging seasons from 1964 – -1971 (my involvement was 1965-69), but for various reasons the final reports have been scandalously slow to appear.
31 December 2025 at 21:08 #78455The pub seems to be the most appropriate place to raise a glass and wish everyone on the forum a A Happy New Year and all the best for 2026, wherever you are and whatever your circumstances.
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 🙂
20 November 2025 at 20:46 #78341If 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.
2 June 2025 at 17:48 #77817Late again, but I didn’t get to watch it until yesterday afternoon, and then I felt I needed a re-watch before commenting.
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, though, that it even 65 minutes wasn’t enough time for the amount of material crammed into it, and I agree with @whohar to the extent that the various narrative threads didn’t seem particularly well balanced.
In fact there were two stories here, connected but distinct, and it seemed to me that the one given greater weight was that of the preservation and restoration of Poppy, rather than the confrontation and defeat of the Rani and Omega which one would have expected to be the dominant narrative. As regards the latter, the monster Omega, as a monster, was quite impressive, and the reaction of the Rani, from the moment she saw that giant claw emerging from the opening portal and it began to dawn on her that for all her planning she was never going to be able to use that body for her experiment, was a joy to behold, as was Mrs Flood’s opportunistic grabbing of the time ring and making a rapid exit from the scene. Like some others, though, I think I would have preferred that Omega had retained more of his original humanoid appearance, just as I would have preferred Sutekh in Empire of Death to have borne a closer resemblance to his earlier alien self in Pyramids of Mars. Personally I would also happily have dispensed with the pyrotechnics and scenes of mayhem in favour of a more extended old style confrontation and battle of wits between Omega and the Doctor, but as things were I saw nothing particularly un-Doctorish in the way the latter seized on how the power of the Vindicator could be used to drive Omega back into the netherworld. The Vindicator wasn’t designed as a weapon, after all, and the Doctor didn’t use it to kill Omega.
The bone beasts were a cause of much speculation, but in the end I’m not convinced that there was much point to them, other than that they looked cool and were the pretext for the spectacular battle scenes. On the other hand they did serve as an indicator of the weakening of the boundary between the wish world and the underverse because in Wish World they were insubstantial, like holograms, and now they had sufficient substance to be smashed by fire power.
The slower paced story of Poppy was intriguing and quite moving, but left me undecided as to what we were intended to make of it and its resolution. Throughout the first six episodes we were left in no doubt that Belinda wanted to return to Earth on the same day as she left, but there was not even a hint as to why and no mention of a child or of her home circumstances other than her work as a nurse, and when she glimpsed the strange child in The Story and the Engine she didn’t identify it as Poppy or that it looked like Poppy as she might have been expected to do if Poppy were her child, and later she couldn’t remember giving birth, which seems unlikely, even if the circumstances in wish world were altered. Early on, in her first adventure with the Doctor, she was even prepared to consider abandoning her old life on Earth and marrying cyborg Alan if it would stop the robot war. So was it just RTD teasing us by withholding information so he could spring the surprise at the end, or was something else going on. Was Poppy indeed created in the wish world, using the Doctor’s memory of Poppy in Space Babies, and did that stimulate such a strong desire for her to be real in both him and Belinda that later, when reminded of her, he was prepared to sacrifice regeneration power in order to adjust the world to a reality in which she existed. If so, the altered scenes of a past which we were shown, in which Belinda did talk about her child, could be the past adjusted accordingly.
* And why should that bother me at all? It’s Doctor Who 😉
31 May 2025 at 10:31 #77750I 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; not only would that have been structurally and dramatically more satisfactory, but for me, having the Doctor’s belief sustained until the last, and the Rani having to work quite hard to snap him out of it, made the idea that his doubt was crucial to the success of the plan somehow less convincing. Presumably the opposite was intended; the strength of his belief was supposed to indicate the power of his eventual disbelief, and I’ve just been having problems suspending my disbelief 😈
31 May 2025 at 09:39 #77748My 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 doubts of an old and much travelled Time Lord were indeed the added ingredient necessary to both shatter the illusion of the wish world *and* break through to the underverse, but I like to think that this might be a cover story, that the power web woven by the vindicator was enough in itself to achieve her ends,and she just wanted to arrange matters so that the only other known surviving Time Lord was present to witness her triumph.
Alternative explanations for the stalking skeletons:
a) They were bony guards protecting the bone palace
b) They had no real purpose at all and were just a conceit of Conrad’s, whose inner child was still fascinated by dinosaur skeletons.
30 May 2025 at 13:02 #77745I 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 palace, and the fact that it is parked in mid air has precedent, cf. the eleventh Doctors Tardis when he was brooding over his losses. Given that the Wish World is designed ultimately to fail, the fact that the bony and insubstantial dinosaurs (VR?) are such an anomaly may be the point; a way of testing peoples acceptance of the illusion and at the same time prompting doubts and questions.
29 May 2025 at 23:43 #77740I would happily bigenerate if my alter ego didn’t inherit my arthritic spine 🙂
29 May 2025 at 23:40 #77739Many 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.
😀 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 up with songs on the subject
29 May 2025 at 23:26 #77737Sorry! another double post and again I don’t know how it happened or how to correct it
29 May 2025 at 23:24 #77735unless 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 were devoted entirely to pure and high-minded living, and would have sicced the Division on the likes of Delta Tau Chi 😀
29 May 2025 at 23:24 #77734unless 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 were devoted entirely to pure and high-minded living, and would have sicced the Division on the likes of Delta Tau Chi 😀
29 May 2025 at 21:54 #77729Interesting. 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 late on an excavation near a body of water, maddened by what felt like millions of biting midges in my hair until I was ready to rip my scalp off.
29 May 2025 at 21:43 #77728I 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 they doing meddling in ancient Greece in the first place, when such things were supposed to be strictly verboten?
All idle musing anyway, because I very much doubt it ever occurred to the writers that they needed any rationale.
29 May 2025 at 13:26 #77723@ps1l0v3y0u @blenkinsopthebrave
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 have been ‘My battle is in there, saving my daughter’. So is the gold box a kind of stasis cube, preserving reality while chaos reigns all round?
29 May 2025 at 13:02 #77721On 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.
28 May 2025 at 23:58 #77712Sorry about the double post, I’ve no idea how that happened and I logged out before I realised, so too late to delete one of them.
28 May 2025 at 23:54 #77710You’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 palace. She is in close up, looking towards us and then turning to her right. Then the scene cuts directly to that of her with Poppy in the gold box.
On second examination I realise that I somewhat compressed and simplified the scene with the safe/container. The setting appears to be some kind of workshop, with people in the background who appear to be operating welding equipment. The man in body armour alongside the box is actually running towards us, and behind him is another person who looks to be examining the box, On the other side of the box is someone else kneeling, possibly doing something to it. I think I probably misread the display on the box; it could equally read Z.A.A1 rather than Z.A.π1. No sign of Ω, though I did look carefully.
The reason for the hospital visit was nothing very serious, thanks, just a check up to see whether some minor surgery was warranted and to book me in for same – in and out in half an hour with almost no waiting, but the local hospital, about four miles from where I live, is a University teaching hospital and they are generally very efficient in my experience.
28 May 2025 at 23:54 #77711You’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 palace. She is in close up, looking towards us and then turning to her right. Then the scene cuts directly to that of her with Poppy in the gold box.
On second examination I realise that I somewhat compressed and simplified the scene with the safe/container. The setting appears to be some kind of workshop, with people in the background who appear to be operating welding equipment. The man in body armour alongside the box is actually running towards us, and behind him is another person who looks to be examining the box, On the other side of the box is someone else kneeling, possibly doing something to it. I think I probably misread the display on the box; it could equally read Z.A.A1 rather than Z.A.π1. No sign of Ω, though I did look carefully.
The reason for the hospital visit was nothing very serious, thanks, just a check up to see whether some minor surgery was warranted and to book me in for same – in and out in half an hour with almost no waiting, but the local hospital, about four miles from where I live, is a University teaching hospital and they are generally very efficient in my experience.
28 May 2025 at 22:54 #77708please tell me that this article is not serious
If in doubt, google The Onion 😉
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, but I have a feeling that it might not work so well with something as quirky and sui generis as Doctor Who. I suspect you would either end up with a bunch of writers, all of them passionate about the show, who would spend all their time arguing and debating and never producing anything coherent, or with a group who would work smoothly together and produce something slick and professional but homogenised, lacking whatever spark is necessary to make the show what it is or can be at best.
In ancient Rome, when successful generals were honoured with a Triumph, they had someone standing behind them and whispering to them as they rode in procession, to remind them that they were no more than mortal. In the same way the answer might be to have just one assistant or co-editor with sufficient authority to advise and rein in the show runner’s wilder ideas. But then what do I know? My experience is mostly in writing academic reports and papers, not in creative script writing.
28 May 2025 at 21:52 #77704Thanks 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) : ‘Omega. With his body I can construct a new Gallifrey’
(Note: Does Omega have any say in the matter? Anyway, I seem to remember that after his sojourn in a black hole his body wasn’t exactly in great shape, and it’s condition wouldn’t have been improved when the black hole was retro-engineered into a new star).
Accompanying visuals:
2. Interior of bone palace with shimmery energy (?) waves.
3. Blurry view of what looks like a very large furry paw emerging round the edge of a door
4: Same view with vertical rift alongside, revealing a very bright light
5: View from height of London, still apparently intact – or at least partially so, with tallest buildings including UNIT HQ still standing plus stalking giant skeletons.
6: Rani, still talking, in what looks like a conventional lab or control centre, not the bone palace
7: Scene of ongoing destructive mayhem with, in foreground, what looks something like a giant safe with display reading (as far as I could make it out) Z.A.π 1 . Man in helmet and body armour standing alongside.
Belinda: ‘My battle is here, saving my daughter’
Accompanying visuals
9: Close up of Bel, fully dressed (not in dressing gown as last seen), with out of focus grey haired woman (not Rani 1) in background
10: Bel holding Poppy, both fully dressed, in something like a lift compartment walled with textured gold octagonal panels.
11: Both Ranis in close up, looking concerned.
12: Seal of Rassilon in close up
13: High level view of London again, still apparently intact and with stalking skeletons, but with a vertical feature, like a narrow pillar of smoke or a somewhat wonky tornado funnel
14: Col. Ibrahim and Kate in close up, looking left
15: Close up of Ibrahim yelling or screaming
16: View from UNIT platform of exploding dino skeleton.
If this is of any use, feel free to speculate.
27 May 2025 at 22:51 #77677The 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 specifically masculine traits. It might also have clued her up as to the role of the Doctor’s companions, although that would probably have been of limited help, lumbered as she was with the ‘fam’. And don’t get me started on the subject of that disaster of a Tardis design and its restrictions with regard to group dynamics and interaction!
27 May 2025 at 22:29 #77675On 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.
Greetings Puro.
why does Ruby feel the need to see Conrad face to face? She isn’t hoping to “reform him” Is she?
If she’s half the women I think she is it is probably to tell him what she *really* thinks of him 😡 One could almost feel sorry for the poor lad, damaged as he is and with all his insecurities.
27 May 2025 at 22:17 #77674Poppy 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, and the universe’s reality has already adjusted to that going by “The Well” and “The Intergalactic Song Contest”.
True if we take what we have seen at face value, although the deaths of Poppy, Ruby and her companions was only implied. However, throughout this season and the last there have been repeated hints and clues that we have been dealing with alternative realities and alternative time lines, not to mention stories and the telling of stories which have been strong themes running through this seasons episodes in particular; stories which have the power to conjure worlds which never were and could never be, including the Grimm’s fairy tale opening sequence of this episode.
What I was suggesting – which may of course be completely wrong – was that even the power of the Vindicator web, which the Rani said was equivalent to the power of a billion supernovae, would not be enough to destroy an underlying fundamental reality of the universe,* and that those who could see even partially through the illusion of Conrad’s wish world might be able to anchor us to that fundamental reality. The Doctor’s words as he was falling, ‘Poppy is real’, were certainly meant to carry significance and weight.
* Of course even one supernova could destroy the Earth, or at least life on Earth if it were near enough, but could even a billion supernovae alter reality, other than in the sense that in the singularities at the heart of the resulting black holes the known laws of physics wouldn’t necessarily apply?
26 May 2025 at 23:52 #77655I 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
26 May 2025 at 23:45 #77654@ps1l0v3y0u @janetteb @dentarthurdent
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 introduced in a more subtle way, and without the Master’s associated hissy fit and genocide of the Time Lords out of jealousy and pique. RTD’s introduction of the Time War was just as radical and it was absorbed into the continuity with no problem – as was Moffatt’s reworking of it. The same applies to the Division, which fits reasonably well into the known history of the Time Lords as long as it remained a reserve force to intervene in the affairs of the universe when absolutely necessary – and if the Doctor was once a part of such an organisation it helps explain his incurable impulse to intervene and help – but having it go completely off the rails and instigate the destruction of the universe is a step way to far.
It’s hard to judge Jodi Whittaker as the Doctor, not knowing what she might have made of the part with better writing and better direction, but I have a feeling that, excellent actor though she is, she was probably miscast, and if what I have read is correct, her problem was very much compounded by the fact that she didn’t have much prior knowledge of the show and was specifically instructed by Chibnell not to watch any of her predecessors in the part. When the character you are playing is a serially self-renewing alien who is supposed to remain essentially the same at core, however radically they may alter in appearance and personality, I don’t think that is the way to do it.
What we have seen of Jo Martin as the Fugitive suggests that she would be great as the Doctor, but probably better under a show runner other than Chibnall.
26 May 2025 at 22:29 #77653The 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 stable to allow the kind of breakthrough required to release Omega, but if you could replace just one very small part of it, e.g. the Earth, with a fragile and unstable construct which could be destroyed by doubt, then a breakthrough would be possible.
I confess that I have a slight problem with that. The kind of replacement of a pocket of reality envisaged in this plan appears to entail it’s destruction, but if such destruction is possible simply through the power of Desiderium, boosted by the power network woven by the Vindicator, why the need for even a temporary replacement at all? Just destroying reality on one insignificant planet would surely be enough in itself. Unless, of course, the intention was also to trap and destroy the Doctor. It seems to me rather more likely that the underlying reality is essentially indestructible by even the most powerful wish fulfilment, and all that could be achieved is an ephemeral overlay. On the other hand, of course, the underlying reality we are dealing with here is probably the alternate universe of mavity etc. so who knows?
Maybe this is a how the fate of the earth will be determined and the Rani and Omega foiled; by the persistence of an underlying reality, reinforced by Poppy and the army of the disabled and homeless who had no part in Conrad’s feeble Utopia and could therefore see through the illusion.
what was magic baby’s original name? Anyone catch that?
I think the mother said they wanted to call him Jonas, but the Rani said a more appropriate name would be Sturm und Drang (storm/attack and violence). Later, when he was installed in the bone palace, she said his name was Desiderium (Latin: that which is to be desired/wished) God of wishes, so a new born member of the Pantheon
25 May 2025 at 22:38 #77634After a second viewing I think I may have a better overall grasp of where this is going.
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 in which anything is possible, and to demonstrate this at one point he conjures a chair out of thin air. In the opening sequence with the woodcutter and his family the Rani is in similar fashion able, presumably by using the powers of the baby Desiderium (lit. That which is to be desired), to conjure people magically into flowers, and birds.
Conrad has been recruited precisely because he is dissatisfied with complex reality, so that he can use the same power of Desiderium to construct a world such as he wishes did exist, based apparently on a simplistic idea of the 1950s which some people seem to imagine was a golden age* and it reinforces my sense that Conrad is the result of a very unsatisfactory and thwarted childhood. The result of course, is very thin stuff and barely holding together, even with the ubiquitous posters exhorting people to avoid doubt and questioning, not to mention Conrad’s bland and insipidly soothing storytelling. His utopia has inevitably to be enforced with a Gestapo or Stasi-like system of informers and police enforcers.
The last words of the Doctor as he was falling were, ‘I have a daughter. Poppy is real. Don’t you know what that means?’, and I have a feeling that maybe the denouement will revolve around the two babies: Poppy who is grounded in reality, can say ‘no’ to Conrad’s world, and is/was the captain of a crew of babies operating a space station, and the infant god Desiderium, the source of wish fulfilment who is as yet too immature to express wishes of his own – or is he?.
How Poppy could appear to Belinda in the alley outside the Barber’s shop in Lagos remains to be explained, as do the gigantic dinosaur skeletons stalking over London.
*Spoiler: It wasn’t.
25 May 2025 at 16:15 #77624Yes, 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 he said seems to be corroborated by later incidents in the Flux narrative and specifically by Awsok in Survivors of the Flux when she claims to be leader of the Division and when she says, ‘I’m the one who found you, brought you to Gallifrey and raised you. I’m Tecteun’. So could she also have been lying, and was it in collusion with the Master? She said that the Flux was engineered by her and the Division to destroy a universe which had been too much affected by the Doctor’s meddling, so were the two of them, not content with the destruction of the Time Lords, both part of a grand scheme to erase all evidence of the Doctor’s legacy? The whole Flux narrative is a tangled mess as it is 🙄
In Fugitive of the Judoon Ruth Doctor didn’t name the organisation for which she had worked and from which she was fleeing, but a series of clues from subsequent episodes seem to confirm that it was the Division, and in Once Upon a Time, when the 13th Doctor was apparently reliving a buried memory of leading a squad of Division operatives, there is an instant when she pauses in front of a reflection of herself, but the image she sees is Ruth Doctor. This seems to confirm the notion that Ruth Doctor was from an earlier, if forgotten period in her own direct line rather than from a branch line of bi-generated Doctors. As, for that matter, does an incident in The Story and the Engine.
25 May 2025 at 12:02 #77620The 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 incarnations of the known canon and completely unknown to them, which seems a bit of a stretch given how many other secrets of the Time Lords the Doctor has managed to ferret out.
25 May 2025 at 11:42 #77619At least one more viewing will be necessary before I can hope to sort out my thinking on this episode as a whole, but in the meantime, a few random observations.
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 sequence the Rani, in her guise as the fairy tale Evil Witch, turned the man (woodcutter?) and his wife into an owl and flowers respectively, which recalls the story of Blodeuwedd in the Mabinogion, central also to Alan Garner’s The Owl Service. Perhaps completely irrelevant, but given RTD’s nationality it might have been lurking at the back of his mind.
The kidnapped Baby, who is apparently key to Conrad’s ability to sustain his altered and to him more satisfying reality, is evidently channelling something very sinister. When we heard it chuckle it was the Giggle.
Poppy is real, grounded in reality and seemingly in opposition to the Baby. Her answer to everything is a cheerful ‘No’, causing repeated slips in the illusion, signified by the breakage of orange mugs.
The colour orange seems to be associated with the illusions of the Wish World, not only in the mugs which everyone seems to be using, but in the wheely bins labelled slips and used exclusively for the disposal of broken mugs. Why? People have noted in the past that the Doctor seems to wear a lot of orange coloured clothing. Is there any connection?
24 May 2025 at 21:26 #7759424 May 2025 at 21:21 #77593I’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 cutting of the hair represented the harvesting of the energy of the story being told. Once the story has been told and the teller released from the Barber’s chair the hair immediately regrows, because stories are constantly being created – at least in the minds of anyone with even a smidgin of imagination. The same applied when the Barber told his story but, as at this point he was a very unreliable narrator, he hacked at his long uncut dreadlocks randomly.
23 May 2025 at 21:02 #77576The 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 @blenkinsopthebrave that I would prefer that there were nothing special about Belinda. Otherwise brilliant! We’ll know in a few hours, so let us hope the reality doesn’t disappoint.
P.S. On the subject of Belinda, despite what I have just written I can see potential for timey wimey development in her relationship to Mundy Flynn (Boom) if anyone were prepared to expand on it.
20 May 2025 at 11:54 #77559Interesting 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’ as meaning ‘Let’s go to [your] home Gallifrey’. At the time she said it she didn’t seem to know anything about the planet other than the name, which he had just told her.
Bonkers theory 1: Mrs Flood/the Rani has been popping up in widely varying times in places so must have some form of time/space travel. If she needs the Doctor and his vindicator to get back to earth it is presumably because she has been experiencing the same difficulties as he has, the cause of the difficulty being the destruction of the Earth, but maybe it’s because the Vindicator is the only means of pinpointing a specific time just before the destruction for the purposes of carrying out her (evil?) plan. I’ve been assuming that she plays a part in the destruction, but maybe she wants to join forces with the Doctor to prevent it; her attitude towards him has all along been ambiguous. Saving the earth would either mean altering the course of history in a very big and obvious way, which is supposed to be the ultimate no no or, more probably, exiting the alternative universe they currently seem to be in (see Bonkers theory 6 which I think is highly likely).
Bonkers theory 11: There certainly do seem to have been a good many meta elements in the current series so far.
Bonkers theory 14: I wish!
20 May 2025 at 11:11 #77558For decades people speculate about the return of two characters in particular to the show, then both turn up, one after the other (and one in duplicate) in the same episode – like London buses as one commenter observed in t’other place. It will be interesting to see what RTD does with the Rani, but I doubt it will be subtle.
It takes nerve, I think, to place an episode in the context of a light hearted, frivolous spectacle modelled on the European Song Contest and aired on the same evening as the ESC, then use that setting to tackle the serious and all-too-topical subjects of racial – or in this case species prejudice and bigotry, exploitation of colonies and peoples, environmental destruction in the name of profit, and terrorism, but it was done pretty successfully and indeed movingly at times.
For the third episode in a row we have an instance of someone who has been hurt setting out to hurt people, in this case on a galactic scale, but the Doctor isn’t having it; he’s been there after all. Countering wrong with another wrong is never justified and no excuses. We’ve seen him righteously angry before but never vindictive as far as I can remember, and it is to be hoped that the ice in his hearts melts soon, because vindictive doesn’t suit him at all.
It wasn’t entirely clear what Susan represented in her appearances. It seems most likely that she was an image rising from his subconscious at critical moments to give him the boot in the rear he needed. If it was telepathic communication, how did she know where he was and what he was doing? She did say ‘find me’, which suggests she may feature in one or more future episodes. Does anyone know if that is the case? Carol Ann Ford is two years older than me and if she has the stamina to resume the role in a more active fashion I’m full of admiration. Or perhaps she will regenerate.
P.S. I wouldn’t have taken Belinda for the kind of girl to be overtaken by giddy, gushing fan worship, but then what do I know? People are full of surprises.
P.P.S The ‘science’ elements in the episode were as usual somewhat hand-wavey at times, but everything more or less made sense in the context, so no complaints.
14 May 2025 at 22:38 #77500The 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 Abena’s mind – or perhaps conjured up by the power of the story engine, but either way it clearly indicates that she was the incarnation responsible for failing to rescue Abena from her father and, as you say, it is equally clear that Gatwa Doctor not only remembered Abena but also the bet and its consequences, so RTD is certainly not following Chib’s narrative to the letter. The Toymaker’s jigsaw would certainly be one way round the discrepancy. Or might we conjecture that the bigeneration had unblocked the memory wipe?
I see that I was also mistaken in thinking that Abena wasn’t present when the Barber was making his initial boastful claims about being the fons et origo of all story telling and of the gods including Anansi. She was there and heard him, but then by her own account she bore a major grudge against her father and the Barber had evidently seduced her with his promises of putting everything right.
13 May 2025 at 22:12 #77494Yes, 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 because she was pre memory wipe. If I have understood the significance of her appearance in this episode, she represents a memory flash on the part of Abena, having been the Doctor who refused to take her, Abena, travelling as a companion. None of the others, including Gatwa Doc would have been aware of her.
The matter of Ruth Doc’s Tardis still nags at me. Hartnell Doc took a faulty Tardis which was in for repair and at some point afterwards took it to 1960s Earth because his grand daughter thought it sounded fun.* The Tardis took the form of a Police Box as an appropriate disguise for the time period, but then the chameleon circuit malfunctioned. It stretches coincidence beyond reasonable credibility that Ruth Doc’s Tardis should have taken the same form – unless of course Hartnell Doc did just happen to pick on this same, by now antiquated jalopy to steal, and said jalopy had a tendency to default to the same form when on earth. I’d rather not bring bi-regeneration into the picture; it makes my head hurt and once is quite enough!
*which for the most part it was, but if I’d been given the choice of exploring all time and space it would have been no contest.
13 May 2025 at 21:18 #77493If 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, and the connexion enabled the stories to gain in complexity and power until they and the gods they told of took on a life of their own. He wasn’t prepared to accept the loss of control and subordinate status, but in defying the gods and planning revenge he lost his own power as a storyteller. As for Abena, yes she’s the daughter of Anansi and she had her own grudges, but the Barber had recruited her by lying about his intentions, and as far as I remember she wasn’t present when he was boasting to the Doctor about being an avatar of Anansi and the other gods.
12 May 2025 at 17:25 #77484There 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.
12 May 2025 at 17:08 #77483A strong episode, and one which well repaid an immediate second viewing.
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 places where, all over the world, people gather to gossip and exchange stories and where, in some cultures, professional story tellers still practice their craft. Story making and story telling is one of the things which define the human species; our brains are wired to see patterns and weave stories about those patterns, whether myths and legends of of capricious gods and heroes, scary accounts of ghosts and spirits, imaginative tales structured around past events and possible futures, the everyday stories we fashion to make sense of our own lives or, on a different level, scientific hypotheses to be tested.
It seems that the mysterious Barber, insofar as there is truth in his claims, originated as a griot or djeli – i.e. a traditional West African story teller and conserver of lore and wisdom, perhaps the very first of his kind if he is to be believed. He constructed a network or web to link all the stories and this web ultimately gave them greater power, so that the gods of the stories were able to free themselves and he, the storyteller, lost control of the narratives. Now, as he eventually confesses, he seeks revenge; to seize back control of that web and destroy the gods, When the Doctor likens him to a troll on the web it has a double meaning, but he is no longer a story teller, it seems. In fact, as the Doctor points out, he is a liar, which is not at all the same thing, and he must rely on others to power his engine with their stories. . Meanwhile the people in the barber’s shop are trapped like Sheherazade, condemned to find an endless succession of tales in order to preserve their lives. Omo lures the Doctor into the shop in the hope that he can save them because his, after all, is the ultimate endless story.
The episode featured some interesting imagery. When the Barber is talking of his origins his dreadlocks come loose and fly outward, resembling a spider’s legs, as he hacks at them wildly. When the Doctor and Belinda find their way out of the shop their path to the engine is a maze flanked by images and masks relating to stories, and the engine itself, a beating heart within a brain, opens into a tree like form, just as traditional stories are sometimes likened to a branching tree. What the spider represents is not entirely clear unless it it signifies the trap that the Barber has made of the nexus. At the end it is destroyed along with the web, so presumably it is not Anansi.
The gods whom the Barber mentions and even claims, falsely to represent, are Saga, the Norse goddess of story telling and wisdom who gave her name to a particular tradition of Icelandic narrative, Anansi and Loki, both trickster gods whose stories may be misleading, and Dionysus and Bastet, both gods associated with celebration and pleasure. The Doctor claims to know them and, significantly, it is clear that they are not at all the same as the Toymaker’s pantheon.
One slightly odd point; the Doctor tells Belinda that this is the first time he has been in this kind of body, which is why he feels so completely at home in the market in Lagos, but it is certainly not the first time he has been black, as is demonstrated by the brief appearance of Ruth Doctor.
10 May 2025 at 21:34 #77461All of that; and villains are usually more fascinating than heroes unless the hero has a sufficiently enigmatic or tortured back story.
10 May 2025 at 13:13 #77450We 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 set in an imagined future earth. Since RTD revived the show it has become an increasing challenge to ones ability to suspend disbelief. Are we to suppose that the Doctor and/or the Tardis have the ability to induce collective amnesia on the whole population, who presumably then invent more mundane reasons to explain the carnage? Conrad has evidently heard of cybermen, the Sycorax and even the Yetis in the underground who were well before his time – perhaps from Ruby who could have heard the stories from the Doctor, but he denies their existence even after his up close and personal encounter with the Shreek.
On the other hand there have been the hints that in last year’s season and this we are now dealing with alternate or altered realities, and if Conrad is more than just a twisted young man with a grudge, maybe it is a specific version of reality he is rejecting. He does say ‘your reality, Doctor’. Either way I doubt we have seen the last of him, which is good, because I agree with @whohar that the actor playing him is very much worth watching.
9 May 2025 at 16:55 #77442One tiny little nit pick: are there really any prisons or police lock-ups in the UK where the cells still have those barred, cage type doors? But I suppose it is a conveniently universal way of indicating that it is a prison cell, which is fair enough.
9 May 2025 at 16:44 #77441@whohar @ps1l0v3y0u
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 means of getting at the Doctor and/or UNIT, though by the time he has tracked her down she is back leading a relatively ordinary life. When he finally gets to see the Doctor again and teases him with the name of Belinda Chandra it is, I suspect, just as a way of saying, ‘I know something about you that you don’t know, tee hee’, but it results in him looking for and finding her – a compact little mini-loop.
I doubt whether we should invest too much significance in the 50p coin. I got the impression from the dialogue that the Doctor gave it to Conrad as a New Year good luck token and after that it served as a physical reminder of the encounter.
I’m still pondering the question of what could have turned the child Conrad into the thoroughly unpleasant and exploitative adult he became. If the brief glimpse we saw of the exchange with his mother is meant to be typical, I can well imagine that she would have no patience with any enthusiastic interest he took in the mysterious man in the blue box, and that when he told Ruby that she had never been there for him he was touching on the truth, even if he lied about her being dead. If an obsessive interest in the Doctor had also led to him being teased and bullied at school the narcissistic injury might well have been severe enough for him to start blaming the Doctor for everything wrong with his life. Denial and revenge, as I speculated in the post above.
Presumably we haven’t seen the last of Conrad, and if Mrs Flood has released him in order to recruit him it casts a sinister light on her activities.. And come to think of it, what did she mean at the end of Lux when she said the show was for a limited run only, ending on May 25th?
7 May 2025 at 17:12 #774367 May 2025 at 17:04 #77435@dwnerdfrommars @blenkinsopthebrave
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 previous post, my money at the moment is on her being a harbinger of the Very Big Bad to come. Or perhaps she is just another tease to test our acceptance of what is real in the Whoniverse.
7 May 2025 at 16:53 #77434Knowing in advance that the writer was responsible for Kerblam and Praxis, I wasn’t particularly optimistic about this episode. And what about alien predators named Shreek … who shriek? But the Shreek were of course just the mcguffin in this story and in the event I enjoyed it, if enjoyed is the right word. In fact the more I have reflected on it the more I find to read into it, beyond the obvious subject of conspiracy theories and on-line influencers, and the more intriguing I find the character of Conrad.
Something is timey-wimily off, as the version of the Doctor who zaps Conrad has not yet met Belinda, and yet Conrad knows who she is.
Conrad (a radical connan?) is the guy who gave The Doctor Belinda’s name before the start of Robot Revolution. What does that mean? Belinda is a plant?
Probably nothing so complicated. He was introduced to Belinda when he encountered her and the Doctor on New Years Eve 2007, when he was a child. The fact that he teases the Doctor with this question all these years later is, though, one of the ‘tells’ which reveal that he knows perfectly well that the Doctor is a time traveller and that the original encounter made a big impression on him. He even kept the 50p coin the Doctor gave him, or else remembered it clearly enough to pretend that he had kept it when he met Ruby.
He is undoubtedly a very nasty piece of work, but it is interesting to speculate what turned him that way. As a child he ran back to his mother bursting to tell her about the blue box and the people he had just met, only to be slapped down for telling ‘another of your lies’, and spoiling her enjoyment of an evening out with what we may presume was her latest boyfriend. Was he a child with a rich and active imagination who kept being squashed, or was he always a deceitful liar? And what was his motivation in applying to join UNIT? Did he want to find out more about the mysterious Doctor, or was it always with the intention of undermining it so he could make a name for himself in the cybersphere?
Ultimately his behaviour seems to be rooted in denial and revenge. As he says in their encounter at the end, ‘…. I don’t accept your reality, Doctor, I reject it’. And that brings up a theme which seems to run through both last season and this. What exactly is the Doctor’s reality when we have seen it repeatedly questioned, beginning with The Wide Blue Yonder, when the Doctor invoked a superstition beyond the limit of the universe, where anything might be possible and all bets are off. In what reality do the gods of the pantheon exist? Are goblins real? Did Ruby really live an alternative life in 73 Yards. What was reality for the inhabitants of Fine Time in Dot and Bubble?
In Lux, the Doctor and Ruby cross and re-cross the boundary between the real world of 1952 and the creative world of 2D animated film, and when they encounter a group of fans of the show, it is the fans who are fictional …. or perhaps not. Perhaps everything will disappear down a meta rabbit hole, or perhaps everything is, after all, a long term game of the gods. As the Doctor tells Mr Pye, when trying to explain Lux, ‘… when these vast creatures deign to look down on us our entire reality is in danger’.
3 May 2025 at 21:07 #77387Yes, 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 hypothesis is that she is the Harbinger for the Really, Really Big Bad of the pantheon; or, alternatively, she is an arch manipulator, Time Lord or otherwise, pulling the Doctor’s strings in furtherance of some grand design in which the v(ortex)indicator plays a key part.
3 May 2025 at 20:51 #77386Thank 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 late afternoon to wobble downstairs and partake cautiously of mince pies and Christmas cake.
My neighbour is still frailer than she used to be but, judging by the sounds of merriment issuing from the flat below me, is enjoying a riotous social life with friends visiting at all hours. I’m OK, although my arthritic spine is being somewhat uncooperative. We’ve been enjoying some unseasonably hot weather lately (28 C -82F) on Thursday and I need to get to grips with the garden before it reverts completely to wilderness.
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