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30 October 2018 at 23:16 #65250
@bluesqueakpip – and others
No doubt I will regret diving into this debate, and there is a small and not at all admirable part of me which whispers, ‘Why not just sit back and let things fall as they may? I probably won’t be around long enough to reap the worst of the whirlwind.’
Few, even among the most fervid of remainers, would argue that the EU is not a flawed institution, but nothing in all the myriad words and heated arguments I have seen since the referendum has convinced me that we would be better off outside it. Within it the UK has in many ways been in a privileged position, as for the example in the matter of the rebate and being able to opt out of the eurozone and the Schengen agreement. As a member we have, in my opinion, had far more clout politically and economically than we could ever have outside it in the world as it is today, and whether we have used that influence for good or ill so far has been up to us and our government. In economic terms alone, membership of the EU has brought valuable investment in industry and infrastructure after years of decline as a result of mismanagement and resistance to change and innovation, culminating in the ravages wrought by the Thatcher government, which barely took into account the needs of the communities affected.
As for regaining sovereignty, in or out of the EU we never lost it. It was bitterly ironic (in the looser sense of that adjective) that, when the Supreme Court ruled that parliament had the right to have the final say on any Brexit deal with the EU, newspapers such as The Daily Mail and the Express, whose editorial line had always been Europhobic and strident in proclaiming the need to ‘reclaim sovereignty’, produced screeching headlines accusing the court of being ‘Enemies of the People’. But the ruling was correct, since sovereignty has been vested in parliament ever since James II was kicked out in 1688 and still is, whatever the recently assumed presidential pretensions of Prime Ministers and their governments.
The question of EU regulations, which has got some people’s knickers in a twist, has been muddied by years of nonsense and misleading or downright lying reports in the anti EU press. Boris Johnson, for example, has cheerfully admitted that when he was Brussels correspondent for the Telegraph he made up stories out of the whole cloth on that score, and he had previously been sacked from The Times for his ‘inventive’ approach to reporting.
There will inevitably be some people who find regulations governing the environment or standards in manufacturing industry or food inconvenient, but on balance it is has been for the general good and the wider the range of agreed standards the better. With regard to food standards in particular, even if the details may sometimes seem pernickety, it is surely better that members within a trading bloc and trading partners outside it understand exactly what is in the foodstuffs being traded and how they have been produced. This didn’t even originate with the EU. Ten years before the UK joined the EEC there was the WHO Codex Alimentarius, the index of internationally agreed food standards. My father was on the committee concerned with standards in the chocolate confectionary industry and, whilst sometimes exasperated by the tedious wrangling involved he was, when the time came, fully in support of the ideals of what became the EU.
For better or worse, and independent of the EU, economic globalism is a fact of the modern world and, in or out of the EU, the UK or its constituent nations will have to deal with it. National isolationism on the other hand threatens to lead back into a very dark past. As I see it, the only people who really stand to gain from Brexit are those leaders of the ‘leave’ contingent who see it as an opportunity to bring about a low regulation, low tax, dog-eat-dog free-for-all from which they can profit.
As for the future of the UK, my first thought on reading the headlines the morning after the referendum was, ‘That’s it then and the UK is fucked; Scotland will have yet another good reason to leave the Union and will if it possibly can; and it’s back to square one with Northern Ireland and the Good Friday agreement. I’m English but have lived in both Edinburgh and Belfast, and I have no words 🙁
30 October 2018 at 20:38 #65229Moving the discussi0n of Halloween here, since it doesn’t have much to do with music beyond the Strictly Come Dancing connection.
Halloween, the eve of the Christian festival of All Saints/All Souls/All Hallows, has long been marked in many parts of Western Europe, and emigrants from there took it with them to the US where the associated customs developed in their own way, to be exported eventually back to the places of origin. I guess that the idea of ‘Trick or Treat’ originated with Mischief Night, moved back to a date which made more sense in the context and evolving into a more domesticated form.
Halloween itself seems to have been one of many pre Christian seasonal festivals which were co-opted into the Western Church calendar in adapted form. The date of the festival of All Saints was, I think, actually moved in the 9th century CE to coincide with Samhain and its equivalents. Samhain, in Ireland and Gaelic speaking Scotland, and probably also in pre-Roman Britain and Gaul, was a late autumn festival marking a significant point in the turn of the year and the farming cycle; a liminal time in which it was believed the spirits of the dead and of the unseen supernatural world could cross into the world of the living. In Mexico a similar festival among the indigenous people was adopted and adapted as the Day of the Dead.
So no, it is a tradition far older than the USA, even if the associated customs vary.
29 October 2018 at 21:37 #65157is halloween a thing in britain, too?
Increasingly so over the past three or four decades, with the importation of customs such as elaborate dressing up, usually in something spookily appropriate, and the practice of trick-or-treat. Not so much when I was growing up in the 1940s and 50s, although we did sometimes have parties in a room decorated appropriately, with traditional games such as bobbing for apples and the telling of ghost stories in the dark, the sole illumination being a torch (flashlight) uplighting the narrator. At intervals during the telling of the tale, props would be passed around to be handled, such as links of raw sausages for intestines and peeled grapes for eyeballs.
Far more important in our calendar was the celebration of November 5th, with fireworks and a bonfire with a home made effigy of Guy Fawkes on top, sausages roasted on the bonfire, potatoes baked in the embers of the bonfire and eaten with salt and butter and, for those of us from the northern counties of England, parkin (a kind of gingerbread made with oatmeal) and home-made treacle toffee, known as ‘plot toffee’.
In Yorkshire there used to be (possibly still is) a custom known as mischief night , but this was associated with the evening of November 4th, not Halloween. Children would disguise themselves, traditionally by cross-dressing, and go round playing pranks on the neighbours. There was a similar tradition in Northern Ireland when I lived there in the early 70s.
28 October 2018 at 22:25 #65091Definitely not one for arachnophobes, especially now that they can be made to appear so realistic. We’ve come a long way since Planet of the Spiders. Like @pedant, I was particularly glad to see how the plot took into account the physiology of spiders, and the fact that there is a limit to the size which the metabolism of an insect or arthropod can sustain. The joke about the spider in the bath, with the suggestion that it was coming up through the drain pipe was a bit of a tease, but it made me smile. The poor things fall in, of course, and then can’t climb out and need rescuing. I strongly disapprove of people who turn the taps on and flush them away.
The episode carried quite a burden of political, economic and environmental messages, but overall it was quite deftly done, and Chibnall got in several very pointed digs including; ‘What is wrong with you people? Why can’t you do what normal people do? Get a gun, shoot things, like a normal, civilised person’. How often have I read things to that effect when gun control is the subject of trans-Atlantic debate. The real monsters once again were human in origin: this time created inadvertently by human greed and the short sighted pursuit of profit. The unfortunate spiders were just the unforeseen by-product, doing what spiders do as far as they could in the circumstances.
Shades of Doomwatch, for those of us in the UK old enough to remember it.
Within the spider plot we see the personal lives and relationships of Graham, Ryan and Yaz explored and developed further and to good effect. But most impressive of all was the sensitive way in which Graham’s grief was portrayed. His holding her coat to his face to catch her scent, and the way in which he sensed her presence in their house rang particularly true. ‘The thing about grief, it needs time’; and so it does, and something with which to occupy oneself. And how better than in the space and time offered by the Tardis?
Team Tardis; yes, because that is how I have been thinking of them for the past week.
27 October 2018 at 20:20 #65043I’ve just realised what my issue with the coda was.
Yes, it did have a flavour of ‘Now, children, sit up and pay attention’.
On first viewing I was inclined to excuse it on the grounds that you stated; that it was information necessary for most young viewers, and perhaps some older ones unaware of the historical details, and that it was justified by the overall importance of the events addressed in the episode. On second viewing, when there had been more time to digest the episode as a whole, the jarring effect was less easy to overlook. The same information could surely have been conveyed by much subtler means, with equal economy.
Like @geoffers I have at times had the feeling that Chibnall is harking back to BG Who, though I think even in that context this blatant piece of exposition would have seemed clumsy.
25 October 2018 at 23:30 #64989That was a very interesting take on the episode and thank you for drawing it to our attention. It is a point of view which I can understand but which is very personal and does not, I think, take into account the intention of those who created the show, to educate as well as entertain, or the basic premise that the past determines the future, not the other way around. In today’s political climate the matters which Rosa addressed could hardly be more relevant, especially for those who never learnt, or who are in danger of forgetting, the lessons of the past.
@juniperfish is right. This episode, whatever artistic flaws we may perceive, went far beyond the didactic/educational/preachy in creating a space in which both those of us who were alive to witness these events and those for whom it is in the historical past can examine or re-examine the events portrayed and consider the repercussions and how far we have progressed or regressed since then. Given the amount of discussion which it has generated over the past few days on both sides of the pond and among people of all ages, there can scarcely be any episode of Doctor Who which has had more impact.
25 October 2018 at 21:27 #64977Many thanks for the update. It looks as if you are coping extremely well so far, and all power to you. If you have a sweet tooth and biscuits are your default snack I can understand how hard it is to adjust, and our prolonged rabbiting on the subject elsewhere cannot have helped, so apologies on that score.
Disturbance of sleep patterns is a bugger to deal with and I can empathise. One way and another it seems to be an increasingly common problem. As regards getting to sleep, I have found that working on the computer last thing at night is not a good idea, and reading something undemanding for 20 – 30 mins in bed sometimes works. Staying asleep is a different problem. In consequence of having drawn the short straw in the genetic lottery and inheriting two copies of an unhelpful recessive gene I am supposed to maintain a high fluid intake including, ideally, around 1 litre before retiring. And I don’t thing I need to spell out the implications of that. All I can say is that, up to a point, one does adjust.
Thank you for dealing so (relatively) patiently with ignorant comments on the EU. I was tempted to respond, but when someone so patently ill informed on the structure and workings of the EU presumes to accuse people who live here, are politically engaged, likely to be adversely affected by the consequences of Brexit and far more knowledgeable in all aspects of the matters in question of being ‘low information’, my response is well beyond the bounds of civil discourse. 😡
24 October 2018 at 20:53 #64915@thane16 (puro)
I always hesitate to comment on the music in Doctor Who, having had no formal musical education worth mentioning and being all too aware that I have largely failed to remedy the deficit. What Rosa Parks’ theme brought immediately to my mind, though, was Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man. Whether that was the intention I have no idea, but it would seem highly appropriate.
24 October 2018 at 20:38 #64913@Kevinwho @Margaret-Blaine @troygorsline
Complaints that the character and motivation of Krasko weren’t explored in any detail are, I think, beside the point because, as Darth Valaryn suggests, the real monster of the episode is racism itself. Krasko is not all that important beyond the fact that, in the context, his interference is the reason that the Doctor and her team become actively involved in Rosa Parks’ protest rather than remaining passive observers, and what we see is all that his function within the plot requires. He was given enough personality and background to avoid him seeming a two-dimensional cypher, and that was sufficient.
If the Doctor were to encounter him again in a future episode, there remains plenty of scope for the writers to explore him, his background and his purposes further.
24 October 2018 at 20:16 #64912I don’t think that sounds very “restaurant-y” does it?
Not particularly, no. Brandy snaps are fairly easy to make and rolling them before they harden is the trickiest part. But if I were in a restaurant and brandy snaps were on the menu, whether with cream or strawberries or both, I would almost certainly order them. Unless profiteroles were also on offer, in which case I would be faced with a very difficult choice 🙂
As for a restaurant called the Ghost Monument, I’m not sure I would find that particularly inviting, though it might depend on whether or not the décor was off-puttingly gimmicky. The suggestion does remind me, though, of an evening when my colleagues and I were eating at a restaurant in York*. We were sitting near a large window, and after a while became conscious of the fact that every so often there was a crowd of people looking in at us. When we asked a waiter what was going on he told us that they were tourists on the regular ghost tours of the city, and that the building we were in was supposed to be haunted. Not that we noticed anything supernatural while we were there.
* We were employed by a national organisation and worked from home most of the time, but twice a year each regional team met for field trips to discuss particular problems and exchange views.
24 October 2018 at 10:39 #64898I’d be thinking of gingersnaps.
In which case we appear to be in accord, since ginger snaps are an alternative name for what I referred to as ginger nuts 🙂 Brandy snaps, which I think I mentioned in another post, and which don’t always contain brandy but do contain ginger, are another matter. Usually filled with whipped cream, but when I’m in the mood for biscuits (not very often these days) I prefer them without.
23 October 2018 at 22:24 #64879Whilst I was compiling the above ( I touch type fast but paradoxically write very slowly) I see that I was forestalled by others commenting on the planning of the protest. Coincidence or serendipity, but not plagiarism.
23 October 2018 at 22:13 #64877Yesterday I read a review of the episode and numerous comments (overwhelmingly laudatory) on a US site which is primarily political but which does occasionally feature references to Doctor Who. It seems that I was right in my recollection that Rosa Parks’ protest was planned beforehand, and according to one commenter, several people on the bus were part of that plan and there specifically to ensure that it was crowded. It would be good to think that the plan was discussed at the meeting where Ryan served coffee, except that he would then presumably have mentioned it the others and there would have been less tension in the plot. An incidental detail mentioned by a couple of commenters was the fact that there had been a previous incident which may have inspired the idea. A young girl had in similar circumstances refused to give up her seat, but since she was only fifteen and also pregnant it was thought best not to make her the cause celebre.
… you wee young things …
*cough, splutter* Some of us, perhaps, because we in this community encompass a wide range of ages, nationalities, shapes and sizes, but there are quite a few of us who have been round the block a few times 😉 I was 13 years old in December 1955 and, living in the UK, I cannot swear that I heard or read of Rosa Parks and the bus boycott at the time – in fact I’m pretty certain that I didn’t, but by the early to mid 1960s I certainly was aware of her and of the civil rights movement in the US and followed it quite closely, insofar as I was politically engaged at all in matters domestic or foreign.
The quote which you attributed to @miapatrick was mine, not that the attribution really matters. Because segregation and racial discrimination were never encoded in law in Britain, and never so ubiquitously overt or violently expressed as in some southern states of the USA, there has, I think, always been a tendency here to feel smug and to overlook the more low-level but nevertheless fairly widespread and pervasive racism here.
22 October 2018 at 11:56 #64790Sadly I don’t think The Civil Rights Movement can ever be over.
Certainly not yet, anyway, and in some respects it can seem as if things are slipping backwards. The current, blatantly partisan attempts in some States to remove black and latinx voters from the electoral rolls, on the slightest pretext or none, is on depressing sign, even viewed from this side of the pond. This episode could scarcely have been more timely.
22 October 2018 at 11:45 #64788The time displacement device appears to have been capable of sending people forward to the 85th century, from memory. If its ability to send people backwards is similar, then Krasko could have ended up around 6000 BCE.
That detail hadn’t fully registered yesterday evening but, despite my flippant comment above*, I was assuming that he would most probably arrive some time within human history or prehistory, and the chance that he would end up at a time and location where he was in a position to influence a crucial event would, in reality, be almost vanishingly small.
I’m not convinced that if he found himself in North America c.6000 BCE he would necessarily face xenophobia. One man, unarmed and outlandishly dressed might just as easily be seen as an object of curiosity, and his fate would then depend on how he responded. The initial reactions of various indigenous inhabitants to the arrival of European settlers was mixed, after all. Who knows, finding himself suddenly in a minority of one might teach the racist Krasko a sharp and salutary lesson.
* Note to self: on the internet no-one can see the position of your tongue, even if your cheek is bulging.
22 October 2018 at 11:18 #64786Happy birthday.
Reminders of the passage of the years aren’t necessarily welcome, but it’s still a good excuse for a celebration 😀
22 October 2018 at 00:03 #64777Picky picky! I wasn’t thinking *that* far back, and in any case I wasn’t expecting anyone to take me seriously 🙂
21 October 2018 at 23:30 #64773I didn’t say he would survive 🙂 The DNA of his carcase landing in the ooze could kick start a chain of evolution or, alternatively, if he landed a billion or so years later he might land on a critical insect, or give a significant therapod terminal indigestion. Or not. I tend to the belief that if there are time travellers and they have intervened in the past, then the intervention is a part of history and we are the result, so no change 😈
21 October 2018 at 23:00 #64768WhitDoc (I like it) is ready to take on that fight, not as that antithesis, the War Doctor, but, like Rosa as a grassroots resister, one small, important, action at a time.
You have expressed it perfectly. And just as small interventions by a time traveller could divert the course of history, we are shown, from the perspective of a time traveller, such as we in a sense are looking back, how small actions at the right time can have a huge impact down the line. Another valuable point made here was that, however significant that small action was, we still have a long way to go.
Your point about earth-bound racism as previously addressed in Doctor Who is interesting. These stories have previously, I think, always been set in the Britain where, even though racism has been endemic to some degree since the 17th century at least, chattel slavery on British soil was never recognised in common law and racism was never institutionalised in the way that it was under the ‘Jim Crow’ laws of the southern USA. This, I think, may have made us in the UK somewhat complacent, and this episode offers an important perspective
21 October 2018 at 22:09 #64758The console’s crystal thingy goes up and down;
According to the article in the Radio Times, it’s supposed to be a Time Crystal and a main power source. Not sure where that leaves the Eye of Harmony, but the Tardis has renewed herself and maybe there was a bit more involved than refurbishment and redecoration.
Vinette Robinson was just amazing.
She certainly was. Absolutely perfect in the role.
I hate that interior. For something that’s bigger on the inside it looks like you’d struggle to swing a cat in it
You said it. The original Tardis interior was small – possibly smaller than this – but there was nevertheless a sense of space. The feeling of this, with the looming crystalline arches hemming in the console and the dark walls seeming to crowd in around it, has an overwhelmingly claustrophobic effect (to me, anyway).
21 October 2018 at 21:36 #64755Bloody hell, I remember the old days, we had proper trolls back then
Indeed we did, and real rickety-rackety bridges for them to live under 😉
Back in the old days BG I was generally not so keen on the episodes with a historical setting because the errors, however minor, tended to bother me. Not here, although the narrative didn’t entirely accord with what I have read, which is that Rosa Parks’ protest was planned and could have taken place at any time the opportunity arose. Whether or not that is true doesn’t really matter, because either way it makes for a pretty powerful narrative and this episode did justice to it, I feel. The emphasis on the repercussions of even the smallest intervention in history was a welcome reminder, but I remain a trifle worried about what the baddy could still achieve from whatever time he was zapped back to, even if it was to the Jurassic or the primeval ooze. I seem to remember several short stories on that theme written way back in the 1950s and early 60s.
Insofar as I have any criticism, it is that the narrative did occasionally verge on the obviously didactic and there were a few hiccups in the script, but I’m not sure how far the former is a significant failing since so many viewers will, like Ryan, only know it as history. Even Ryan, for whom it had particular resonance, had to be faced with the reality of life in Alabama in the mid 1950s to fully understand.
I was glad to see that team work featured again, even more to so than in the previous episode, with the Doctor directing operations and everyone assigned their tasks, and it looks as if this is going to be one of the signatures of the coming season.
The Doctor as Banksy? It would make sense, but in which iteration? She hasn’t had any time on her own since her regeneration to fit all that in.
I feel the urge to watch it again, which must be a good sign
19 October 2018 at 20:29 #64685I think the Quakers “do power” better than almost anybody else … Their concept of “elders” as a rotational and time-limited function within the community has prevented the abuses of power so frequently found in other religious iterations favouring a permanent class of priests.
That, and the fact that women, from the 17th century beginnings, have been able to stand up and speak in Meetings for Worship, and were among the elders long before the idea of women priests was remotely acceptable in any of the principal denominations. In addition, there is the way business meetings are structured; all members eligible to participate, no chairman or decisions by majority vote, just a Clerk of the Meeting whose job it is to determine the consensus – the ‘feeling of the Meeting’. And it seems to work, with remarkably little friction or delay.
Thinking about it now, I wonder if exposure to this didn’t contribute to my early and still partially surviving naïve confidence as to my place in society
19 October 2018 at 20:01 #64684@ShinyMcShine
You don’t like what Chibnall has done so far, fair enough. Speaking for myself alone and on the evidence so far, I don’t think that he is as good a writer as Moffat, at least as far as Doctor Who is concerned, and I have some misgivings about the direction in which he appears to be taking the show. The one thing I would never accuse him of, however, is of being a sell-out hack who writes what he is told to write (by the suits at the BBC, I presume you mean). He cares about Doctor Who, he is a long-time fan, and I am absolutely sure that he writes what he wants to write according to his conception of it and its audience, which ranges from young children to antiques in their 70s like me, and if he chooses to pitch it more to the younger end of the range, that is his choice, and they are, after all, the audience which in the long run will determine whether it has a future.
It seems a bit defeatist to give up after only two episodes, and it’s not as if there haven’t been a few stinkers since the show’s revival. Most of us here will probably stick with it, even if some find it less satisfying than hitherto, because, as @miapatrick says (more or less), the one thing that is constant about Doctor Who is that it changes, and ultimately that is its strength.
19 October 2018 at 12:38 #64675An illogical inference. I’ll happily dunk ginger nuts any day, and chocolate digestives – though once has to be very quick about the latter, so that the chocolate is in a partially melted state but the underlying biscuit hasn’t disintegrated. For that matter, I’m also partial to dark chocolate coated ginger nuts, and brandy snaps, both of which are dunkable.
19 October 2018 at 11:23 #64672A dark, gloomy….custard cream dispenser
Given my views on custard creams, dark and gloomy is entirely appropriate for a dispenser of same 😈
Have you or anyone else here read the article devoted to the design of the Tardis in next week’s issue of Radio Times, or spotted my brief comment on same over on the Sofa? It offers a few details additional to what was said in the video, but I didn’t want to be too specific about some of these in case it counted as spoilery. I get the impression that there have been some shifts in the underlying concept, though how significant these will turn out to be isn’t entirely clear.
I’m in total agreement with you on the music. That is exactly how it struck me from the first and my response was/is gleeful. It makes me realise how much I loved Delia Derbyshire’s work and the radiophonic workshop. That isn’t to say I disliked Murray Gold’s scores, but sometimes his music seemed to me a bit overpowering – more suited to a cinema than a television set in the living room.
18 October 2018 at 20:48 #64645Her insistence on learning the facts about the planet and its history suggest that she’s more of a field researcher than a back-in-the-library type.
A kindred soul in that respect, but libraries have their uses once you come in out of the field. I wouldn’t trust anyone who published without references 😉
18 October 2018 at 20:23 #64640Next week’s Radio Times contains a piece on the new design of the Tardis, plus a double page spread covering the changes in design over the past 55 years. Without going into detail, the impression I get is that they may have ignored some established concepts such as the eye of harmony, and that the designer Arwel Jones did, as I suspected, intend to convey the idea of the Tardis-as-vestibule, since he talks of it as being like the wardrobe giving access to Narnia.
The spinning mini Tardis surmounting the control unit was produced by a 3D printer
Apparently the design also includes one or two surprises yet to be revealed, but *SPOILERS*
18 October 2018 at 19:55 #64636It seems that we had the impulse to comment on the same subject at almost the same time, except that you virtuously migrated to the more appropriate location.
I’m not sure, though, what you mean by saying that white chocolate contains no cocoa. It’s more accurate to say that it contains only the fats extracted from the cocoa bean, known as cocoa butter, which is why it retains much of the texture and mouth-feel of chocolate but very little of the flavour.
18 October 2018 at 12:11 #64626*Continuing off-topic, but it happens that I have a spare moment while drinking yet another mug of tea.*
According to my father, who was an authority on the subject, white chocolate barely deserves the name at all. It consists of cocoa butter, milk solids, stabilisers and a *lot* of sugar, but none of those parts of the cocoa bean that make chocolate so delicious and moreish.
17 October 2018 at 21:14 #64603I’d never given it any thought, but now that you have drawn my attention to the matter I realise that I think of her automatically as Whittaker.
In an academic context I have been accustomed to refer to people, whether male or female, either by their title and surname or by their full name, so that comes naturally now. My father’s family were Quakers, and in those circles no titles were used and in formal circumstances people addressed each other by their full names, both forename and surname. On the other hand, in the archaeology department at Edinburgh University in the 1960s everyone, from the eminent professor down to the lowliest first year student, was referred to by their forename, something which shocked my brother, a medical student. But it was a very small department, which perhaps explains the informality.
It isn’t so very long ago that in most social circles the convention was that only intimate friends addressed one another by their first names, and then only when invited to do so, and otherwise to refer to anyone by their first name alone when speaking to them or to a third party was to imply that they were very much a social inferior. Manners and conventions have loosened, but it is undoubtedly troubling and significant that women in the public eye are so commonly referred to by their forenames or even their nicknames in the press and by all and sundry
17 October 2018 at 20:26 #64601Some comments I’ve seen have pointed out Jodie throwing bits of the other Doctors into her performance, but I have to admit, I’m not seeing that,
As you say, it has been stated that she deliberately didn’t watch any of her predecessors in the role, but perhaps the writing and direction may have influenced her performance in that respect.
There are what seem to be a few overt nods to them in the script. In ‘I hate empty pockets’ there was a hint of Capaldi, and her ‘I’m really smart’ echoed the tenth Doctor’s sharply emphasised ‘because I’m clever’ in, I think, Midnight. These are mere details, but where I see similarities in her Doctor it is to the marked physicality of Smith’s rendition and the hyperactivity of Tennant. There are some hints of what her personal stamp on the role may be, but it’s early days.
But that sudden collapse into ‘I’ve failed’ was definitely a bit odd
Given the circumstances it didn’t seem all that odd to me, though it clearly was significant. She had just regenerated and, while still discovering her new identity and integrating it with the old, she was pitched into a crisis. In short order she had manufactured a new sonic screwdriver/swiss-army-knife-without-the-knife, dealt with ‘Tim Shaw’ and adapted the unfamiliar technology of his transport pod to devise a locate-and-teleport device to take her to the Tardis, all of which had given her a boost of confidence, only to end up nearly killing herself and her new friends. That can only have shaken her, so it is not surprising that when they eventually arrived at the site of the ghost monument to find no sign of the Tardis where she had been led to expect it would materialise, leaving her and the three she had inadvertently taken with her apparently stranded on a lethal planet, she momentarily expressed uncharacteristic self doubt.
The biscuits you find delicious, to me taste chiefly of artificial flavourings and, other than that, are just blandly sweet. Each to their own taste, though, and I won’t argue with that.
@pedant A whole packet of oreos 😮
Says she who once long ago ate 12 cream donuts after being bet a bottle of Irish single malt whiskey that she couldn’t. The person who made the wager paid the debt of honour after pressure was applied by my other colleagues, so I suppose it was worth it. Soon after I had achieved this feat I felt somewhat unwell and had to rush to the lav and upchuck, and I have never since been able to face a cream donut. So I suppose a lesson was learned.
16 October 2018 at 21:40 #64579Did anybody else have a bit of a reaction to how often JoDoc uses the sonic?
Yes, it did rather bring to mind the War Doctor’s sarcastic comment in The Day of the Doctor. On the other hand, it was used mainly if not entirely for opening and closing doors and as a scanning and diagnostic tool, both uses which are now established as standard and which could be seen as justified in the circumstances.
16 October 2018 at 21:19 #64576That there is a custard cream. Absolutely useless in my opinion without a cup of tea,
I cling to a fading hope that some day before I finally pop me clogs there will be a Doctor who likes ginger nuts or chocolate digestives. Sadly, custard creams, with or without a cup of tea, appeal no more to my palate than do jammy dodgers, which is to say, not at all. 🙁
Yes, I too sometimes resort to subtitles in case I miss anything critical in the dialogue. Maybe it is a result of growing up in an era when most actors on TV worked chiefly in the theatre and were therefore accustomed to articulating clearly, and it is certainly the case that I have no such difficulty when watching repeats or DVDs of older TV dramas. Such clarity not have been entirely naturalistic, but then dialogue in drama is rarely if ever entirely naturalistic anyway, as may be demonstrated if you compare even the most ‘naturalistically’ rendered script with literal transcripts of unrehearsed speech or conversation.
As for the new Tardis design, even taking into account the explanation in the video, I find it the most difficult of any so far to adjust to. In fact I have liked all of the previous designs in their different ways, from the pared down functionality of the original, which bore a passing resemblance to the control board of a power station of the period, to the organic feel of the tenth Doctor’s Tardis and, perhaps my favourite of all, the civilised, almost classical feel during the twelfth Doctors time at the controls. The massive crystalline forms, the cluttered looking console and the eye-confusing business of the surrounding walls combine in an overall effect which strikes me as both overpowering and claustrophobic.
Another thing which I noted was that the police box is now, for the first time I think, represented as a kind of vestibule to the whole rather than as containing it, as if it were merely a portal to another dimension. Maybe that shift in concept shouldn’t bother me, but it does a little.
15 October 2018 at 20:44 #64531Yes, I received two separate notifications, as presumably did everyone else who was tagged, but no apology is needed. These things happen, and anything is better than losing a lengthy post entirely, which happened to me a few days ago.
The Timeless Child could be Jenny
Somehow I don’t think so. The Doctor felt that the Remnants were reading her mind, and clearly thought the reference was to her, even if she didn’t understand.
That the Doctor is an anomaly and a far from typical Time Lord has been emphasised from at least the time of the fourth Doctor until the present. He was the one who barely qualified for the Academy and who was taunted by Romana I for having graduated at a lower grade than she did, but who is driven to engage passionately with the universe in contrast to the normal, icily hands-off policy of his people; the misfit whose rashness, or perhaps his sense of inferiority, led him (or her) when young to a traumatic encounter with the Matrix and, ultimately to flight from Gallifrey, but who was nevertheless employed on occasion as an agent of the Time Lords. He/she was at the centre of the enigma of the Hybrid, so why should there not be further depths and mysteries to explore?
As for the Remnants – animated bandages, dish cloths, blankets or rags according to individual perception, the first thing that they brought to my mind on seeing them was the ghost entity in M R James’s ‘Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You My Lad’, which always gave me nightmares when I was young and impressionable.
15 October 2018 at 20:01 #64529Well, the saga of Puro and nurofen made me smile, at least, though it was a somewhat drastic way of learning the wisdom of reading the label and the instructions in the packet, even for over-the-counter drugs.
One thing puzzled me, though, because in the UK at least and I presume elsewhere, nurofen doesn’t contain aspirin. It is just a brand name for ibuprofen. Like aspirin, though, ibuprofen is an anti-inflammatory drug, and as with all NSAIDs, it is a gastro-irritant, so no more advisable for anyone with Crohn’s or any other gastro-intestinal disorder even though coated in a buffering agent.
15 October 2018 at 19:37 #64528It rained all day here, so there was no incentive to work in the garden and I seized on the excuse to indulge myself be re-watching the episode, as well as watching the BBC adaptation of The City and the City which I recorded months ago but had never got round to viewing.
First, though, I succumbed to a masochistic impulse and ventured BTL on Dan Martin’s blog in the Guardian, which at least kicked me out of my morning lethargy and generated a good head of steam. One of the commonest opinions offered by the legion of Usual Suspects was that the dialogue was clunky and there was too much ‘tell’ rather than ‘show’. While I concede that the dialogue did not have quite the wit and depth of Moffat at his best, I really cannot see that there was much to complain about, and it would have been difficult to avoid the ‘tell’ element, given that Graham, Ryan and Yaz had been flung without warning into a completely bewildering situation which inevitably required a good deal of rapid-fire explanation if it was to seem at all realistic. The only point at which I found this at all clumsy, though I didn’t comment on it yesterday evening, was in the way Desolation was explained – with the Doctor reading from the inscription on the floor. My own feeling is that it would have been better to have left it at least partially a mystery, while providing some hint that the Stenza were involved.
14 October 2018 at 22:26 #6448114 October 2018 at 21:31 #64475Although I have refrained from commenting on it until I had seen it in context, I agree about the costume. It seems too overtly gimmicky in the style of the 5th, 6th and 7th Doctors, rather than simply idiosyncratic, and I very much hope that they don’t stick with it throughout Whittaker’s time as the Doctor. I like the coat, though, and would happily wear it *
I agree with you, too, that it is still a bit difficult to see beyond the elements of Tennant and Smith in Whittaker’s rendition of the Doctor, though there were a few moments when I thought I perceived something else coming through, especially in that moment of self doubt before the Tardis materialised.
(I keep typing Whittaker as Whattaker. Is that significant? )
* What do you mean, ‘mutton dressed as lamb’?
14 October 2018 at 21:15 #64472True that there would be a survivable interval, but the probable after effects were, as you say, glossed over, with barely a hint of the medical intervention that would have been necessary. I suppose that we were intended to take that as read, but I confess it bothered me slightly.
14 October 2018 at 21:00 #64470Re Anecdote v. data. As an illustration; on this forum recently someone adduced the example of a smoker who had lived into her 90s without developing lung cancer (anecdote) as evidence against there being a link between cigarette smoking and cancer. Of course there are individuals who smoke and don’t develop lung cancer, just as there are people who develop lung cancer who have never smoked. But data gathered systematically over decades from many thousands of medical records and processed statistically shows that the correlation between cigarette smoking and people who develop lung cancer is very high indeed. Correlation does not in itself equal causation, because there may be other factors involved, but it is reason enough to investigate further, and so to identify the carcinogens in tobacco smoke and the tars deposited in the lungs
14 October 2018 at 20:41 #64466there was something in her reaction to it that caught my attention,
Yes, mine too; she was clearly both struck and puzzled by it. I suspect that it is something which refers to her in particular and not to Time Lords in general, and that will resonate through the episodes to come; a linking thread if not exactly a narrative arc.
14 October 2018 at 20:31 #64465That was fun, and I think I may have underestimated Chibnall. There was plenty to like; pace, further character development, running in corridors for the traditionally minded, the triumph of intellect and quick thinking over brute firepower and of teamwork over cut-throat competition and, yes, the reappearance of the Stenza from the first episode, so it both was and was not a stand-alone. The remnants’ whisper referring to the Doctor as the Timeless Child is particularly promising mystery thread to follow. Nor was it lacking in darker undertones, with the references to population ‘cleansing’ and genocide.
Setting aside the question of the Doctor and the other three surviving unprotected in space for even the second or two before they were scooped up, my only criticism, and not for the first time since I sometimes had the same problem with the eleventh Doctor, was the dialogue. There is little if anything wrong with my hearing, but perhaps my ageing brain has a problem processing words delivered at machine-gun velocity.
Not sure that I like the redesign of the Tardis interior; at first glance it seems visually very confusing, but given time I may get used to it. And for once nobody said, ‘It’s bigger on the inside’.
13 October 2018 at 14:26 #64432Thumbs up from me, and best of luck. I’m not signed up to YouTube – at least not yet – so can’t do the same there, but maybe I should think about it.
With you all the way on the subject of the NHS. My experience of it over the past few years has been amazing. And yes, they do take chest pains very seriously indeed. Trouble was, for months I didn’t, trying to kid myself it was just heartburn since I had suffered from a bout of oesophagitis not long previously, and my blood pressure had always been low which I mistakenly thought precluded heart problems. Once the attacks got so bad and persistent that I could kid myself no longer I scooted round to my GP (same day appointment) and was fast-tracked to the cardiac clinic and thence to the angioplasty unit, and since I had a stent installed in the circumflex cardiac artery I’ve been problem free. It was in the battery of blood tests they carried out then that they discovered I also had essential thrombocythaemia or, as the consultant cardiologist put it, ‘Did you know that you have funny blood?’
Courage, friend, it is possible to lose 10 kilos because I once just that, and I have heard of cases of Type 2 diabetes where weight loss and improved diet were enough in themselves to lower the blood sugar levels to the point where drugs were no longer necessary.
Normally I am not and never have been overweight, but there was a period when I did put on the kilos quite rapidly. Like you, I suffered from depression following the death of my mother; anxiety attacks, sleep disturbance, inability to focus and a general feeling of terminal mental and physical exhaustion, although not a loss of hope. Quite why I gained weight then is a bit of a mystery, except that it had been a very stressful and harrowing nine months when I was already under pressure from work. She had an aggressive and inoperable brain tumour, and though she was insistent that I did not give up work to care for her, I was organising and overseeing her live-in care, liaising with the medics and visiting her most evenings, eating at irregular hours, often late in the evening and, since there was no time to cook, relying on ready meals and the local chippy. In other words, a crap diet.
Afterwards I was off work for seven months, recovering with a bit of help from a clinical psychiatrist and a lot of self imposed therapy bashing hell out of the garden I was in process of creating. Despite the exercise I was still gaining weight, probably because too dependent on comfort foods, but once things were back to normal I lost it all again over a period of about nine months. What made the difference was, as you suggest, chiefly cooking for myself again so that I could control fat and sugar intake and was in control of portion sizes. It probably helped, though, that I don’t have much of a sweet tooth.
I don’t know if this confessional stuff is of any help or encouragement, but for what it’s worth my experience has a fair amount in common with yours and so I have some understanding of what you are facing and know that you can come through it.
12 October 2018 at 15:25 #64405@TempusFugit
It is understandable that you feel upset. Some of us here are old enough to have experienced the deaths of several of those we love – parents, other relatives, close friends – whether from cancer or other causes and sometimes in very distressing circumstances.
Like @cathannabel, though, I saw Graham’s situation differently. He has cancer but he is in remission and, although he may be living on borrowed time, it seems that he chose to use that time to live as full a life as possible, starting by marrying the nurse he fell in love with; and this is surely the more important message. Who knows, The Tardis, once the Doctor has succeeded in finding it, may contain or be able to manufacture the means of effecting a complete cure.
What is of far greater concern to him is the death of his wife, and even in the aftermath of this traumatic event he chooses to dwell on the wonderful person she was and on how she enriched his life, rather than on his own trauma. I have a suspicion that this may be important later on.
As for escapism, to paraphrase J R R Tolkien in response to criticism of his works of fantasy, it rather depends on what you are escaping from and to. Doctor Who is entertaining, it’s fun, it offers thrills and chills aplenty but, like all good fiction and drama, at its best it has always addressed real and important issues through the medium of adventures in historic, futuristic or fantastical contexts. In this case, as @bluesqueakpip says, the themes underpinning the episode were love and loss, and these have been an almost constant undercurrent since the renewal of the show 13 years ago. How could it be otherwise, whether we consider things from the Doctor’s point of view or from that of those whose lives he touches? During successive incarnations he/she has lived over 2000 years with the prospect of many more to come, and many of those years have been spent among comparatively ephemeral beings, knowing that he will outlive them all and sooner or later lose everyone who travels with him in the Tardis, just as they, if they survive, will see him move on and be lost to them.
12 October 2018 at 14:45 #64404It is possible that the Doctor, in mid regeneration and still a bit confused, thought that anything referred to by an acronym, even A&E*, sounded worryingly bureaucratic.
More probably, though, it was just an off-hand way of dismissing the suggestion without having to go into lengthy explanations. Apart from the fact that the doctor she said she was looking for wasn’t a medic, she would not want doctors examining her because it might lead to some awkward questions about her unusual physiology, as happened during the earlier regeneration which @bluesqueakpip referred to above.
Presumably, as @miapatrick suggested, she decided to have her ears pierced when she was looking for her new outfit. How she paid for all this is another matter. Maybe her new friends supplied the money, or maybe the 12th Doctor was carrying sufficient cash in his coat pocket 🙂
*Accident and Emergency, the British equivalent of ER
9 October 2018 at 00:03 #64297I’m not the only low-brow type to have noticed this little Freudian twist
True, but then, as the patient said to his psychiatrist after the latter started asking questions centred around his response to inkblot patterns; ‘What do you expect, if you insist on showing me all these feelthy pictures?’
‘ – who knows, there could be a large protection area around the Tardis’.
We know from previous episodes, and have been shown, that there is a Tardis field within which people can survive in space in its/her vicinity, so my immediate assumption in that final scene was that the Tardis was close by.
Without the protection of a pressure suit, a human body exposed to the near vacuum of space would experience more than just suffocation and freezing, because the bodies of land based terrestrial beings are constructed to withstand a certain range of atmospheric pressure and maintain an equivalent internal pressure. The effects of that internal pressure on a body exposed suddenly to an absence of atmospheric pressure would be extremely nasty.
Your plight, having to wait for the DVD, is harrowing and I feel for you, though your situation off the west coast of Canada and the resources of the Blenkinsop cellar are surely enough to take at least the edge off your frustration.
Your plight also calls for my sympathy. Doctor Who episodes are not primarily constructed around commercial breaks because the BBC is not a commercial channel, but I imagine that now, when the show has a world-wide distribution, allowance is made for the fact that in some countries it will be shown with such breaks.
My experience of TV in the US is limited and not all that recent, so I may be mistaken, but the impression I got was that the commercial breaks were more frequent and more intrusive than in the UK, and also less subtle in content. On commercial channels in the UK there are on average three four-minute breaks in an hour long programme, plus one between programmes. Normally, if want to watch a programme on a commercial channel such as ITV, I record it to watch later, so that I can fast-forward through the ads and experience minimal interruption.
8 October 2018 at 22:53 #64296Back again, and delighted to see so many familiar names assembled once again, as well as some welcome newcomers *waves indiscriminately to all*. The wait has been long and tedious and it is good to have something new to get our teeth into.
A number of people here and elsewhere have commented on the death count, often to the effect that it was inappropriate, especially in a show which should above all appeal to children, the up-coming generation of viewers. But Doctor Who during its 55 year history has frequently and cumulatively involved a significant death count, not just in the tally of alien monsters but in what is now euphemistically termed ‘collateral damage’, and Moffat in particular was not shy in pointing out this darker side of the Doctor’s legacy.
What impressed me in this episode was none of the deaths, except perhaps that of the train driver whom we never met, was treated casually and we were given at least a glimpse of the lives and personalities of all of these minor characters before they met their fate. We were meant to feel that we had touched their lives, however briefly, and that all of them counted, and that is important. If people die, in fiction as in life, it should not be as cyphers, Their deaths, however remote from our own life, should not by shrugged aside as of no account. ‘Never ask for whom the bell tolls … ‘
@miapatrick @bendubz11 and @scaryb have already commented on the significance of Grace’s death which, on one level, reinforced the message of the earlier deaths, because we had come to know her better as a fully rounded and forceful character whose life and death had particular meaning and impact on at least two other principal characters. Viewed more objectively- or perhaps cynically – as a plot device, it served also as a tie to cement the bond between those three future companions/travellers with the Doctor.
The reviewer in the Indy wrote, in reference to Grace’s death and funeral, ‘ … a lump in the throat meditation on grown up love and visceral mortality is undoubtedly a first for the series’. At which I could only mutter crossly, ‘Then clearly you never watched or were not paying attention to the past four or more seasons’ 😡
Apart from that, and after I’ve had time for further reflection and a second viewing, there were a few points which I thought possibly comment-worthy.
‘Empty pockets. Oh, I hate empty pockets’, which struck me as pure Capaldi Doctor; as did, ‘Now please, get off this planet’, echoing his words when in vengeful mode in Hell Bent. Then, perhaps closing the circle, were almost her last words of the episode, ‘Moment of truth, then. Wish me luck. And goodbye. Deep breath’.
Otherwise, as I wrote in my post yesterday evening, Jodie evoked elements of Tennant and of Smith, but showed also what she has in her to become very much her own Doctor. As she said, and for me this sums up the essence of the whole concept of regeneration, ‘We can honour who we’ve been, and choose who we want to be next’.
7 October 2018 at 22:30 #64236Just remembered that spoons were involved in the creation of the new sonic screwdriver. ‘I’m the Doctor …. and this is my spoon’!
PS Apparently the Daily Mail has been spectacularly predictable.
Which is why, though I try to be broad minded and tolerant, I’m allergic to the DM and tend to feel the need to disinfect my computer if ever I have been unwary enough to click on a link to their web site. And BTL on Dan Martin’s recap, it seems that for everyone who expressed enthusiasm or at least guarded optimism, there seems to be another who had made up their mind, even before viewing this first episode, that it was going to be rubbish, and couldn’t wait to inform us that they were right. I never kept a tally, but what is the betting that some of these are the same as told us every week that Moffat was a terrible writer and that the show was going to the dogs.
7 October 2018 at 21:33 #64225Fried egg sandwich, uh oh! I’m not all that fussy, and some day, if I live long enough, perhaps the Doctor on regenerating will develop a craving for something I actually find palatable 🙁
7 October 2018 at 21:11 #64224Well, so far so good, and Jodi Whittaker certainly seems to have what it takes. Whether or not she turns out to be among my favourite Doctors, there is no doubt that she is the Doctor. In this episode she reminded me a little of Tennant and a little of Matt Smith, but it is a bit early to judge.
The story was perhaps a bit lightweight, some of the details may not bear too close an inspection, and the monster of the week was not particularly impressive or scary once you got past the visual effects, but the main focus was understandably on establishing the principle characters, and dealing as efficiently as possible with the Doctor’s post-regeneration disorientation without confusing potential viewers new to the show, and in that respect I think it succeeded.
A sonic screwdriver improvised from whatever was to hand in an admittedly fairly well-equipped workshop, with added Sheffield steel and without any assistance from the Tardis? what could be better? And sonic swiss army knife is a far better definition of its function 🙂
The look of the whole was as cinematic and polished as we were led to expect and we were told that the theme music would reference the original, which it certainly did, leaving me with a happy smile on my face.
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